Wednesday digest

- Five months ago, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich co-authored an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal. Now, Giuliani is touting his own Contract With America in an obvious nod to the Republican Revolution of 1994. The prospect of these two teaming up on a GOP ticket will come as a comforting breath of fresh air to right-of-centre folks who have become disillusioned with the Bush White House, even if you need two hands to count the number of failed marriages between them.

- The Ontario government is going to impose an "eco-fee" of up to $45 on home electronics items like big screen TVs and desktop computers to offset the cost of recycling them. Instead of dinging consumers with what amounts to a tax, I'm sure that a way to provide incentives to an aspiring entrepreneur who could export outdated electronics to places like China and India, much like is done with discarded cell phones, could have been facilitated. However, innovation is not our strong suit.

- Is this not the sign of a terribly sick culture?

- Quiz time: Who recently said the following?

We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.

The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology.

A) Christopher Hitchens;

B) Liz Cheney;

c) Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil; or

d) Alexander Cockburn, columnist with The Nation, a magazine which bills itself as "America's oldest and most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis".

Answer here.