I’ve been maintaining blog-silence this month while I get this year’s Index of Leading Environmental Indicators in the can (bonus: this year’s edition will include a short film on DVD starring Yours Truly), but a couple of things compel me to pop my head above the parapet to comment.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an op-ed column (not available to non-subscribers so I’m skipping a link) from Bjorn Lomborg recounting how Al Gore had ducked out of a previously arranged interview with a Danish newspaper when he found out that Lomborg would be doing the interview. As chance would have it, I spent the afternoon with Lomborg just last week in Zurich going over questions he should ask Gore. (What were you doing in Zurich?--Ed. Lomborg and I were stuffing our Swiss bank accounts with all the ExxonMobil moolah they’ve been shoveling our way. . . Just kidding. I couldn’t resist the thought of NLT trolls heads exploding. Bjorn and I were speakers at a conference sponsored by this Swiss think tank.)* I’m not surprised Gore backed out; he is not very good at answering challenges to his extreme climate gore, so he ducks more debates than Jimmy Carter.

Word around Hollywood is that "An Inconvenient Truthiness" is a shoe-in for the Oscar for best documentary. Which leads me to wonder: rumors are going around Washington that Gore is quietly contacting key Democrats to sound them out about running. Might Gore use the Oscar microphone to announce his candidacy? Where can you have a bigger audience aside from American Idol? Think of how the Hollywood crowd would go nuts if Gore did it. It would also be a way of eclipsing Obamamania. I’d almost be willing to quote odds on this idea.

Meanwhile, Rich Karlgaard points to a possible problem for Gore: his involvement in whitewashing Apple’s options backdating problem. Now, this is one of those lovely "hoist-by-their-own-petard" situations, since the people who froth the most about this problem are Gore’s constituencies. Couldn’t happen to a more deservedly unctuous person.

Finally, is Al Gore actually a harbinger of a new ice age, or is he the Real Mr. Freeze of Batman comics? Several journalists have noted that everywhere Gore goes, he seems to bring record cold temperatures with him. There’s now even an entry about "the Gore Effect" in The Urban Dictionary (a kind of alternative Wikipedia), defined as "The well documented phenomenon that leads to very low, unseasonal temperatures, driving rain, hail, snow or all of the above whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming’."

Is here, Only Charles Kesler’s "After the Thumping" is available on-line, but there are some gems worth watching for (or, better yet, worth subscribing to the CRB for).

Father Neuhaus summarizes "the Technology Policy" of the new Wyoming Catholic College in the February FIRST THINGS: "The premise is that the most powerful piece of technology is the human brain, and it works best when engaged in reading, listening, conversation and prayer. Therefore: There will be no television sets on campus; classroom notes will be made the old-fashioned way; no private Internet access, and limited public access; no cell phones period. All these are replaced by books both great and good galore."

Father Neuhaus doesn’t endorse this approach himself, but he is intrigued by it. It’s close in some ways to my personal approach as a college teacher. I only very, very rarely will show a film; in class I never used power point or any other such electronic teaching tool; I never give an assignment that depends on drawing anything off the internet or web, and I tell students that they have no right to expect that I will answer their emails. I will admit the existence of and even talk about TV shows, movies, and maybe even blogs--demonstrating my personal media literacy (and in part my personal weakness or ADD), but only in the context of talking about books. I’m less tyrannical than WCC, by both necessity and choice, about what students should do on their own time, and, as I’ve said before, they’re probably better off with some selective TV and film viewing. But it’s important that they not confuse such pop culture, pop Cartesian recreation with their real education. (Their real education is what allows them to see the significance of their recreation.)

Now the WCC approach might be criticized for depriving students of the wisdom of blogs, Facebook, on-line papers and journals and such. But from the perspective of genuinely higher education all that stuff is at best harmlesss but time-sucking amusement. Higher education, as Tocqeville says, should be about what you can’t learn on the streets or on the screen in a high-tech democracy.

It will be interesting to see how WCC does on the assessment and accreditation front.

Jonah Goldberg points to the first of what Jed Babbin thinks will be many efforts by Obama’s Democratic opponents to find some chinks in his armor.

. . . Patsy Cline used to sing. And that is what we need, it seems to me. We need the equivalent of a smoker on our ticket in ’O8. "Say what?" you ask. Read Lawler’s posts below about Obama’s smoking and check the links, then read on.

I hadn’t even considered the marked contrast between the cool smoker Obama and Mitt Romney until Lawler brought it up in his post below. Consider that contrast for a moment . . . Oooouch! That would be bad for us, it seems. And it wouldn’t so much be an anti-Mormon thing as it is an anti-goody-too-shoes thing. That, of course plays into the stereo-type of Republicans as a bunch of uptight old guys with really bad wedgies. Romney would have to work very hard to prove that his own preferences against these doing these things himself do not reflect any kind of new-age temperance movement. But then, Lincoln didn’t smoke or drink and yet was able to thoroughly enjoy the company of those who did and, moreover, not make them feel embarrassed for their choices. I suppose Romney might, if he were very clever, be able to use the sentiment Obama could create against the Democrats: i.e., he could demonstrate that the positions Obama takes on the issues show a real and more devastating kind of intolerance to personal choice and that the Democratic party does more oppressively represent the soft-despotism of the finger-wagging old school. He would have to differentiate big from small vices. But he would have to be very clever to pull it off if he does not indulge in even the smallest of vices. If he got any traction at all here, the left would trot out their tired, old, but amazingly effective gun about sexual liberation and the perceived Republican backwardness on these issues. Not to mention their anti-science superstitions (to use their words).

Don’t we have any cooler, rougher seeming Republicans who could work this issue and carve this image right?

Giuliani seems better than Romney for the "coolness" factor at first glance. Speaking only about his general appeal and not his positions on the issues, I have always thought that I would prefer him to any of the other contenders. He is a tough guy who messed with the mob and talked tough to the terrorists after all. There is a kind of old-fashioned manly quality to his brusque New York ways. But his stated opinions on these moral questions and his own problems in that arena mean that he would have to more or less leave the charge of prudishness in the Republican party unanswered. His silence would leave the party susceptible to further charges of hypocrisy. I don’t think it’s a smart strategy for Republicans to try and sweep that issue under the rug if they mean to--as they must do--make gains among the young.

One of the most problematical of the many problematical expressions in the judicial attempts to interpret and apply the First Amendment religion clauses is the notion of "pervasive sectarianism," which the plurality in Mitchell v. Helms argued has a rather shameful provenance in anti-Catholic bigotry and, in any event, should not matter, so long as the government’s permissible purposes coincide with those of the recipients of government aid. Nevertheless, the notion of a "pervasively sectarian" entity--and the implication that it is unworthy as a recipient of otherwise reasonable government aid or contracts lives on, surfacing most recently in the decision handed down by a federal judge in Iowa finding Iowa’s contract the Prison Fellowship Ministries’ InnerChange Freedom unconstitutional (for briefs on the other side in the appeal go here).

Well, in a sense the shoe is now on the other foot. Colorado’s pro-life Democratic Governor Bill Ritter has announced that he will resume providing state funds to Planned Parenthood, so long as PP doesn’t use the money for promoting or providing abortion. Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput doesn’t think that PP can properly segregate its funds, implying in effect that PP exemplifies a kind of pervasive sectarianism.

Since I would assume that he’d eschew that language and analysis with regard to Catholic and other religious institutions, I wish he’d extend the courtesy to PP (leaving open the possibility, of course, that PP could fail to live up to its obligations). And I’d hope that PP and its allies would return the favor with respect to faith-based organizations that they may not happen to like.

Barack Obama, as everyone knows, was a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, teaching these courses. He should have a reasonably well thought out approach to the Constitution and to constitutional adjudication. Do we have any evidence of it anywhere, other than in these very political instances? I confess that I didn’t find anything particularly thought-provoking or, for that matter, surprising, given his general orientation.

I did a quick lexisnexis search a few days ago and didn’t find anything, but I’ll go over the Harvard Law Review more closely for his time at that august institution to see if if fact he made it into print (which he should have, given that he was President of the HLR).

O brave new world....