Somethin's Shakin on Shakedown Street

It looks like some U.S. Senators have been catching up on the Soprano's of late. Check out this letter from Senators Rockefeller and Snowe. Geez, extortion anyone? The WSJ had a nice response in yesterday's edition. Here's an excerpt:

This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper...

Let's compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We'll grant that's a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case...

The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming--as it has--but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.

Nice work, Mr. and Madame Senator. Do show us your compassion and empathy for the common man by spanking that old, ugly, all-too-powerful, profit-generating, job-creating, commodity-producing corporate-conglomerate back down in statute where it belongs, subservient to the anti-capitalist, collectivist, stone-age-longing eco-interests; the ethanol-preaching, rent-seeking, agri-business subsidy whores; the ivory tower, grant-needing, alarmist court-intellectuals; and, of course, the immortal, incomparable, man-of-the-people, Al Gore. Doth, thou shalt never question the existence of the Man-Bear-Pig.