EVEN BY TRIAL LAWYER STANDARDS, EDWARDS A REAL SLEAZEBAG

The good news: DNA testing has confirmed that John Edwards is not the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby.

The bad news: The father is Bill Clinton.

Ha ha — just kidding! It’s almost impossible to get pregnant by having the type of sex Bill Clinton prefers.

Also, by now, everyone has heard the news that Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, has refused to grant a paternity test.

I wonder if Edwards knew that when he was making his chesty offer to take a paternity test? Edwards gushed to ABC’s Bob Woodruff: “I would welcome participating in a paternity test, be happy to participate in one … happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen.”

As Edwards knows, our paternity laws were written by Gloria Steinem, so if the mother doesn’t want a paternity test, it can’t happen. So when Woodruff asked if he was going to actually take the paternity test soon, Edwards quickly noted, “I’m only one side of the test.”

With Rielle in on the scam, Edwards could boldly demand a paternity test and then self-righteously defend his mistress’s decision to refuse a paternity test. How dare you gainsay this woman’s right to her privacy! Because if there’s one person who’s gone the extra mile to keep Hunter from becoming a public figure, it’s John Edwards.

Edwards is closely following the Kennedy model of responding to charges of misconduct. First, admit only as much as can be currently proved. Second, get the other party to block any further investigation. I guess he really is “Kennedy-esque”!

For example, when the cops found DNA on the murdered body of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn., the Kennedy suspect, Michael Skakel, suddenly remembered he had been up in a tree that night masturbating! (Talk about a tree-hugger.) You can see how something like that could slip your mind.

After Teddy Kennedy plunged his car off the Chappaquiddick Bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne in it and then failed to report the accident for nine hours, Kennedy admitted he had driven off the bridge — but said he was in a state of shock for the next nine hours, preventing him from reporting the submerged car with a woman trapped in it.

Indeed, Kennedy was so disoriented he was barely able to dream up a highly unlikely alibi.

The historical parallel to Edwards’ pincer move with Rielle Hunter is that Kennedy ostentatiously demanded a full investigation –- while the Kopechne family stoutly objected to an autopsy of their daughter.

According to Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up by Leo Damore, the evidence suggested that Kopechne died gasping for breath in the car while Teddy Kennedy was busy trying to convince various people to say that they were driving his car.

There were lots of houses nearby with lights on, but Kennedy avoided them after he escaped from the car, so he could sneak back to his hotel undetected and begin establishing an alibi. Evidently, Kennedy is better than Edwards at sneaking into and out of hotels.

If Mary Jo had suffocated, then she had been alive for hours after the car plunged into the water. But an autopsy was required to determine whether Kopechne had drowned or suffocated.

Both the coroner and the diver who retrieved Mary Jo’s body from the car believed Mary Jo had suffocated, not drowned. The diver found her body contorted in the back of the submerged car as if she had been trying to press her face into the last air pocket in the car. The coroner concluded there wasn’t enough water in Mary Jo’s body to indicate a drowning.

But for the first time in Massachusetts history, no autopsy was performed in a possible manslaughter case. Mary Jo was buried within about an hour of her body being pulled out of the channel under the Chappaquiddick Bridge.

Naturally, Kennedy wanted a thorough investigation — to clear his name! — but the Kopechnes absolutely refused to consent to an autopsy of their daughter. What more could he do? The Kopechnes’ lawyer, Joseph Flanagan, refused to say who was paying him to fight the autopsy.

Similarly, Edwards aggressively offered to take a paternity test, knowing that the New Age hippie chick who still thinks she’s going to marry him would not hurt him by allowing a paternity test. Edwards certainly is adept at reading stupid women, or as his campaign called them, “the base.”

Democrats are always claiming to have the Kennedy magic, but, once again, another Kennedy-wannabe falls short. To be a real Kennedy, John, you have to kill her.

Gore Shoots for the Moon, Wants to Get There With Wind

Within ten years, Al Gore wants America to “produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources…” He compared his challenge to that of John F. Kennedy’s pledge to go to the moon in ten years, (which made me wonder about the carbon footprint created in the 1960s just to get off the planet.)

The main focus of Gore’s campaign is, of course, the reduction of carbon dioxide production. The answer to that problem lies not in wind and solar, but nuclear power.

In America, nuclear reactors avoid “almost 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year…” Worldwide, “nuclear energy avoids on average the emission of more than 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.” Odd that Gore didn’t mention this. Nuclear generated power creates no carbon dioxide emissions. The “carbon footprint” for nuke plants is found in the construction, which all power plants, even wind and solar, create.

According to the Department of Energy, there are “104 fully licensed nuclear power reactors in the United States, though only 103 are now operational.” These plants currently provide 20% of America’s electricity, despite decades of anti-nuclear propaganda and reams of regulations. Some of these reactors have been operating since 1969. Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 1 came online in 1996. Construction of Watts Bar 1 started in 1973 and took 23 years at a cost of over $9 billion. It was the last nuclear reactor to come online in the United States. Construction of nuclear power plants around the world has not stopped.

With their penchant for looking to foreign countries for examples of what America should be doing, it amazes me that the left has failed to see the success of nuclear power in France. From CBS News:

Nearly 80 percent of the country’s electricity comes from 58 nuclear power plants, crammed into a country the size of Texas. Pierre Gadonniex, the head “Electricite de France,” the country’s national utility says it all began with a French obsession for energy independence.

“In France, we have nearly no coal. We have no oil. So clearly, nuclear appeared to be the best way,” Gadonniex explains. “And 30 years later, it appears to be a very smart decision.”

Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.

With “the cleanest air in the industrialized world” and enough energy to supply power to three other countries, France is a shining example of the benefits of nuclear power. We could have similar benefits here in America but for the environmental movement’s use of fear to turn nuclear power into a villainous solution.

The main villain in power production in America however, isn’t nuclear. It’s coal fired plants. The green movement would love to see the elimination of these sites, which produce 50% of America’s power. Everywhere a coal-fired plant is proposed for construction, there is an environmental group there to stand in the way.

But there is good news on this front also.

A research team at the Univ. of Wyoming’s Soft Material Laboratory has developed a simple, low-cost adsorption process, referred to as Carbon Filter Process, which can capture CO2 and mercury from fluegas generated by coalfired power plants.

CO2 and other pollutants are retained on a porous carbonaceous sorbent at ambient temperature and pressure. This is because such CO2-philic carbonaceous materials are selective to CO2 with respect to nitrogen, especially at lower pressures. After it has been saturated with CO2, the sorbent releases CO2 upon heating to approximately 100°C (e.g., with steam). The sorbent is also known to be effective in removing residual mercury from fluegas.

The process (for which a patent is pending) requires neither expensive materials nor fluegas compression or refrigeration. Hence, it can be efficiently integrated with an existing or grassroots power plant.

This “Carbon Filtration Process” removes an estimated 90% of that nasty carbon dioxide from the power plant’s emissions. Then, as a bonus, we can use the trapped CO2 to get more oil and methane:

Although a typical destination of the captured CO2 is commonly envisioned to be some form of passive geologic storage or other storage type, this work is also motivated by a vision of utilizing the captured CO2 to displace valuable oil and coal-bed methane stranded in mature reservoirs, as illustrated in Figure 1, before storing it permanently in spent reservoirs. Such a CO2-driven displacement is referred to as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and enhanced coal-bed methane recovery (ECBMR). The advantage of CO2-EOR over a conventional water displacement is that, generally, CO2 is miscible with oil, which leads to a much higher oil recovery. The conventional coal-bed methane recovery calls for the release of massive quantities of environmentally objectionable water, to reduce the reservoir pressure that traps methane in coal seams. A CO2-ECBMR alternative is attractive because it can produce more methane in an environmentally sensitive manner, without much of the groundwater byproduct. Both CO2-EOR and CO2-ECBMR are examples of producing oil and methane energy that is not only “green” but also more plentiful and cost-effective.

Odd that Gore didn’t mention this either.

What Gore has mentioned before is investing in alternative sources of “green” energy, particularly ones he is invested in already. In fact, Newsbusters notes that he has started including a sales pitch in his now famous impending doom slideshow:

This occurred as pictures of such products appeared on the screen with names of the companies involved (video available here, relevant section begins at minute 15:00, h/t NBer Sick-and-Tired):

There are a lot of great investments you can make. If you are investing in tar sands, or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these so I’ll have a disclaimer there. But geo-thermal concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency, and conservation.

As Gore spoke these words, pictures of electric cars, windmills and solar panels appeared in multiple slides on the screen with company names at the bottom such as Amyris (biofuels), Altra (biofuels), Bloom Energy (solid oxide fuel cells), Mascoma (cellulosic biofuels), GreatPoint Energy (catalytic gasification), Miasole (solar cells), Ausra (utility scale solar panels), GEM (battery operated cars), Smart (electric cars), and AltaRock Energy (geothermal power).

It’s enough to make me wonder if Gore is really focused on reducing carbon dioxide, or on making a buck. But then I wonder if this has ever been about lowering carbon dioxide levels.

Won’t someone shoot this gas bag – or better, have him committed.

Goracle – Hey, I’m Still Relevant Here! Hello?

Our Pal Al

There are lots of things Surrendie loves: some good brie, French bread, a nice Bordeaux, pre-emptive surrender. One of his others is when a port-sider decides to extend their 15 minutes with some sort of craziness, such as with Cindy Sheehan, Wes Clark, and now, Al Gore. Though, Surrendie is conflicted, as he has never really liked Al, since he smells vaguely of oil and ozone, and refuses to share his food

Former Vice President Al Gore, seeking to shake up an energy debate that is focused mostly on drilling, challenged the United States to shift its entire electricity sector to carbon-free wind, solar and geothermal power within 10 years, and use that power to fuel a new fleet of electric vehicles.

The goal is the most ambitious energy plan by a major U.S. political figure – and one many energy experts say is unrealistic. Gore insists the only real obstacle is the reluctance of America’s leaders to seek bold solutions to high energy prices and global warming. He likened his challenge to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to put a man on the moon.

“Hey, someone pay attention to me! I was the Emperor of the Moon on Futurama, after all! This Obama guy is a flash in the pan!”

You can read his entire speech over at the DotEartblog at the NY Times, where they probably wet their panties, and do not understand that the United States doesn’t really have that many areas that can be tapped in to for geothermal power, and the return on power for solar and wind is low, and requires massive tracts of clear cut land. They are nice as supplemental, but, unrealistic for complete.

Meanwhile, there is a wee bit of a problem regarding Al’s consensus theory (beyond the fact that consensus is not science, of course), and which McQ covered a bit earlier

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

Uh oh. There’s that word the Goracle hates: debate. Because, damnitall! anthropogenic climate change is real, it is killing us, and, hey, have you thought about buying carbon credits from the company where I am on the board of directors?

Is it any wonder Gore decided not to run for president? Otherwise, well, he would have to debate his wild assed ideas.

See tons more at Memeorandum.

Heh heh: There’s video over at Michelle Malkin’s regarding the Goracles climahypocrisy.