The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at WSJ written by the editor, James Taranto.
Salt River Tubing
“Brian Hartline of Bellevue finally gave up Saturday trying to salvage a Super Bowl dream that became a nightmare,” the Seattle Times reports from Glendale, Ariz.:
Hartline, 39, and a buddy had purchased a pair of tickets to Sunday’s big game between the Seahawks and New England Patriots for $1,750 apiece from a private broker on eBay. But things headed south when Hartline, an assistant football coach at Issaquah High School and a program manager for a computer-software company, flew here Wednesday to pick up what he’d paid for.
The broker, claiming an unprecedented shortage in the secondary Super Bowl market, kept stalling before finally admitting Friday he had no tickets. Hartline and his friend looked into buying new tickets Saturday, but gave up after seeing them priced at $10,000 and higher online.
“This was definitely a bucket list item for me, so it’s terrible,” said Hartline, who decided Saturday to drive to Las Vegas instead and watch the game on TV.
We sympathize, but don’t they have TV in Arizona?
Global Warming McCarthyism (from 1.30 BOTW)
Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, spoke in Aspen, Colo., where she issued the following warning about global warming: “If we fail to act, Aspen’s climate could be a lot like that of Amarillo, Texas, by 2100.”
At the Weekly Standard, Jeryl Bier takes a look at what that would mean:
For the climate of Aspen to resemble that of Amarillo, a temperature swing of 15 degrees and a 13-foot drop in annual snowfall would need to take place over the next 85 years. Even the most catastrophic models of global temperature change in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not predict a temperature increase of 15 degrees.
We should also note that McCarthy’s predicted snowfall decline (actually 13 feet, 4 inches) is from 179 inches to 19 inches, or more than 89%. An appeal to the authority of “science” is enough to make some people believe anything, no matter how preposterous.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
