• Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum.
• Marc Morano of the Climate Depot.
• Rep. Peter DeFazio, U.S. Congressman (D-OR, 4th District).

• How the wealthy staged a coup d'etat?
• Are our legislators actually now working on Medicare part E - everybody?
• Is climate change just a big "left wing conspiracy" or will it end all life as we know it?
• Glass-Steagall.

• Speed of Sound, Coldplay.
• Imagine, John Lennon.
• Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
• Santa Got Lost In Texas, Jeff Carson.
• I Need to Know, Tom Petty.
• Lives in the Balance, Jackson Browne (video).
• Ivory Tower, Van Morrison.
• You can leave your hat on, Randy Newman.
• Diddly Squat, Heywood Banks.
• The Heat Is On, Glenn Frey (video).
• Peaceful World, John Mellencamp.
• Democracy, Leonard Cohen.

• NAFTA signed into law in the U.S. on December 8, 1993, by President Bill Clinton.
• John Lennon assassinated December 8, 1980.

"To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out."

"In the mid-1990s, when he was working to modernise Britain’s left-of-centre Labour party and make it fit for office, Tony Blair made a pact with the rich. As leader of “New Labour”, he championed aspiration; his party – once a scourge of the better-off – encouraged, even celebrated, money-making. In the years that followed Mr Blair’s 1997 landslide victory, London became a magnet for hot money, reassured by low tax rates and the famous edict of Peter Mandelson, the party’s chief strategist: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” "

"INHOFE: Hey, Kiran, if it was just me saying it’d be one thing, but all over the world they’re talking about this. And just this morning the meteorologists — one of the groups — has said that they’re changing their position. Listen, the UK Telegraph — this is worst scientific scandal of our generation. The Guardian, this is an activist paper, saying pretending this isn’t a real scandal isn’t going to make it go away"

The group to which Inhofe is referring — the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) — did indeed come out with a position this morning. It just happens to be a position which does nothing to validate Inhofe’s skepticism:

"The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2009 (January–October) is currently estimated at 0.44°C ± 0.11°C (0.79°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The current nominal ranking of 2009, which does not account for uncertainties in the annual averages, places it as the fifth-warmest year. The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989)."