Inside the Beltway

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Party with Rich

Our most intriguing New Year's Eve invitation — "celebrate with Ivana Trump and Denise Rich" — came from Niche Media, publisher of Washington's Capitol File magazine.

We've not heard much from Mrs. Rich since the tumultuous close of Bill Clinton's dynasty, when on top of all of his other problems, the outgoing president handed a controversial pardon to her former husband, Marc Rich, the commodities trader who fled the United States in 1983 while being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion and other illegal activities.

Gore to 'spiral'

Former Vice President Al Gore could not have been pleased to read the end-of-the-year editorial on "global warming" this week in Investor's Business Daily.

"If 2007 was the Year of Al Gore, with his movie, Academy Award and Nobel Prize, 2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack," opines the newspaper. "The fissures started to show in 2007:

"Prominent French physicist Claude Allegre called Gore a crook and equates Gore's French followers with religious zealots. Weather Channel founder and meteorologist John Coleman said global warming is 'the greatest scam in history.' Gore continued to duck open invitations to debate his theory. More than 400 scientists disputed the global warming claims."

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told IBD that it will take several years for the climate change scare to finally die, but "the death spiral will begin at some point, and it looks like the spinning will start in '08."

Second coming

Our judges had a difficult time deciding which of "The Best Notable Quotables of 2007," published by the Media Research Center, to highlight because every succeeding press quote was more outrageous and/or humorous than the previous one.