The American Spectator

Frank Rich is on vacation.

New York Times

How did we miss this? A reviewer of Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism cries the crocodile’s tears for gloved ladies with parasols, men with pork chop sideburns, and God knows what other delusions he longs for in his fantasy of the good old days:

One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything. The modern conservative movement promotes radical transformation while ignoring classical conservative ideas-for example, Edmund Burke’s respect for established institutions and custom, for continuity with tradition and for incremental change.

(September 29, 2009)

The Great Books Series

Author Stan Cox continues his war against the air-conditioner from his outpost in Salina, Kansas, where nobody objects to his body odor, halitosis, or general untidiness, as long as he stays in his basement and keeps the windows closed:

Some of the ills that follow in the wake of air-conditioning-resource waste, climate change, ozone depletion, and disorientation of the human mind and body-call for cures more complex than simply producing more energy-efficient devices or atmosphere-friendly refrigerants. Air-conditioning has also been an important tool in creating a society shot through with unsustainable trends: settlements of large human populations in fragile environments; an imbalance between indoor and outdoor life, buildings designed for dependence on high energy output; suburbanization, “mansionization,” and the over-sized car and commuter cultures; recklessly accelerated production and consumption; enhanced military power; and even the political shocks that have hit this country in recent decades. None of those trends will be reversed overnight.

(From Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World by Stan Cox, The New Press, 255 pages, $24.95)

The Progressive

In the Gulf it is the corporations against the birds, and birder Matthew Rothschild can do nothing:

So ever since the BP oil spill began, I’ve been sickened by the hideous photos of pelicans, cormorants, and gannets, covered with oil. One of the first I saw was at the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, about eight miles from the Louisiana coast, where a brown pelican was found dead.

Later I watched as rescuers hosed down some oil-slicked birds, but only 20 percent of them could be saved.

The brown pelican, once almost extinct because hunters shot it for its creamy plume in the nineteenth century and DDT destroyed its eggs in the twentieth, may find itself once again on the endangered species list.

And now it looks like the entire coastal wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and perhaps Florida are going to be destroyed.