Save this piece by Steve Hayward of The Weekly Standard, in which he lays out the unraveling of the climate change alarmism movement after years and years of boosterism from media outlets who were cheerleading rather than reporting. So why have governments ignored serious questions about the science and proposed interventions by government? JLF’s Roy Cordato explains.

Meantime, here in North Carolina, John Garrou, co-chairman of the state’s Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change, has suggested the General Assembly appoint a new group to continue working on a global warming policy for the state. JLF’s Roy Cordato reacts to the suggestion in this interview.

Personal popularity is certainly helpful to a politician’s career, but policy positions DO matter. As Gallup illustrates, there is growing disapproval of President Obama’s performance in office.

The government of New South Wales in Australia feels that not enough housing is being built by private interests, so it is proposing to compulsorily take land from individuals to meet the demand.

Government bureaucrats say they need 25,000 homes per year to be built, but only 14,000 are being built. Thus the proposal to seize land. The proposal has a self-fulfilling prophecy nature to it. Since the city’s long-range plan predicts a certain amount of growth, then, by God, they have to prepare for it:

While the proposal is likely to be contentious, developer groups say it is the only practical way to meet the housing construction targets contained in the principal planning document for Sydney, the Metropolitan Strategy.

Here’s an idea: If people desire housing, then the market will provide it. Simple as that. Don’t take people’s land just to meet the growth projections you put on paper while flipping a bureaucratic coin.

The article ends with the sound of private property disappearing for the benefit of the collective:

“Developers are taking the risk … these landowners are not taking risk. Government has decided for the good of the city, for the good of the community, development must occur.

”The rationale behind the authority and the compulsory acquisition provision is community benefit.

”It’s the same as acquiring land for a road or a railway.”

Give a pat on the back to Carter Community Charter School in Durham. Its students — all minority kids, according to the story — are achieving. State Reps. Paul Luebke (D-Durham) and Winkie Wilkins (D-Person) toured the school yesterday. North Carolina has arbitrarily capped charters at 100. For years now, charter advocates, including the Locke Foundation and the group that hosted the Durham tour, have been making the case for raising or lifting the cap.

From comments in the Herald-Sun, they seem impressed. Yet, Rep. Luebke tempered his praise by saying the school’s success “doesn’t for me answer the question of whether there ought to be an expansion in the number of” charter schools.

Rep. Luebke has a point. But the same can be said of a successful traditional public school. The important takeaway is that we should model successful operations to give more kids the opportunity to learn and excel. If they fail, they’re gone. The rules on public charters ensure that those with consistently low performance are shut down. There are no such rules for consistently low performing traditional public schools. They receive more money, more teachers, more assistance, more time. Meanwhile, the kids are trapped. No one model will serve all kids and their needs. Parents deserve to choose the model that works for them. If that’s a traditional public school, fine. If that’s a public charter school, fine. If that’s a private school, fine. If that’s homeschooling, fine. But they deserve to make their own decision.

So what would happen if North Carolina’s tough charter school standards were applied to all public schools? An analysis by JLF’s Terry Stoops shows that more than 150 would be shut down. Stoops discusses the double standard in this brief interview.

Former Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers has just been sentenced to 37 months in prison in a bribery scandal.

Interestingly, she’s the wife of hard-left Democrat Rep. John Conyers, who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the panel that overseas federal prisons.

A fascinating policy debate is brewing. Some enterprising businessmen want to open an internet cafe in Apex. Town leaders want time to determine whether the business is, in essence, video poker — which is illegal in this state — and what kind of impact the business might have on the area.

The town is doing the right thing by investigating this thorougly. That said, reasonable people can clearly see it is silly for state government to deem that one form of gambling — video poker — is bad, but another form of gambling — the state-run lottery – is helping the children.

UNC Chapel Hill prides itself on taking a leadership role in addressing social and environmental issues. But UNC now finds itself not as champion of a cause, but as target. The case involves a Sierra Club-led anti-coal student group. I recently reported on the group’s push to get the university to quickly stop burning coal at UNC Chapel Hill’s cogeneration plant. The group believes coal is killing the planet.

Now comes word that the anti-coal effort against UNC is escalating. A person associated with the group has asked the Chapel Hill town council to join the cause against UNC and the council seems receptive. The Herald-Sun story also says the plan is to petition the Orange County commissioners and Carrborro officials. So, UNC may find itself in the political crosshairs of local government.

State Board of Education member Kathy Taft has died, following a terrible assault in Raleigh. Please keep her family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.

The mainstream media and lefty blogs had egg on their faces yesterday after publishing what they thought was a huge scoop that revealed Sarah Palin’s hypocrisy on health care. Palin said recently in a speech in Calgary that her family went across the border to Canada for health care. Here’s what she said:

The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic?”

Here’s The Washington Post jumping to conclusions:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a fierce opponent of Democratic health-care reform efforts who has said America under President Obama is headed toward socialism, told a Canadian audience her family used to go to Canada to get medical care when she was growing up.

Here’s the Huffington Post:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care — admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada’s single-payer system.

But here’s the problem. Sarah was six years old when the incident took place, and Canada did not yet have its vaunted single-payer health care system. Oops.

Some media implied that the family made a 15-hour trip from the Anchorage area for the privilege of obtaining socialist health care in Canada. Oops again. At the time it happened here family was living in Skagway, which is only about 60 miles south of Whitehorse, in the Yukon.

The media go to great lengths to portray Palin as a dim bulb, but isn’t it amazing that they think that at six years old she could dictate her parents’ health care choices.

The notion that this incident represented a political decision by the young Sarah is equally ludicrous, and shows how deranged the lefty media is when it comes to the former Alaska governor.

Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that the Obama administration coordinated with enviro wackos and the Soros-funded Center for American Progress on how to combat a Spanish study showing that “green jobs” are 1) very, very expensive, and 2) cost more than two conventional jobs for each job created:

The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).

The report from Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos — which was the subject of a George Will column in the Washington Post on June 25, 2009 — showed each “green job” that had been added by Spain’s aggressive wind energy program cost Spain nearly $800,000 and resulted in the loss of 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.