Welcome to your Friday open thread. Well, yesterday certainly was one of the strangest days I’ve ever seen in politics. I hope today is a little calmer. Plus, it’s Friday so it can’t be all bad.
A Fox News anchor asks about moon volcanoes and how they mean global warming isn’t happening. Luckily Bill Nye is there to set him straight.
Transcript:
JON SCOTT: Does it go, you know, anywhere close to the climate change debate that’s underway here on earth? I mean, you know, if the moon had —
BILL NYE: Well, it does for me.
SCOTT: — had erupting volcanoes, a few years, well, a few million years ago, however you want to put it —
NYE: No, billion.SCOTT: — you know, it’s not like we’ve been up there burning fossil fuels.
NYE: Uh, no, volcanoes are not connected to the burning of fossil fuels, it’s connected to mining, but the big thing for us, on my side of this thing, is the science is true, and so when you discover — the people who got really got involved in climate change, got involved in it often by studying Venus, the planet Venus. So the physics, the science that happens on Venus, is the same as the science that happens on the earth, the science that happens on the moon, in this case the geology the study of rocks, that happens on the moon, is the same science that happens on the earth. So when you say to yourself, well, I’m going to ignore all the evidence of climate change, you’re saying, I’m going to ignore the best ideas anybody’s ever had, that’s science. And so this is quite troubling to those of us on our side of it.
SCOTT: Why aren’t they erupting now?
NYE: Well the moon cooled off, that’s a great question. That’s a fabulous question. The moon is quite a bit smaller than the earth so it cools off faster.
Fox News obviously has trouble with the moon in general (how do the tides work?) but this one is a real head scratcher. Reading between the lines, is the anchor saying that global warming makes volcanoes erupt?
Have you heard about this Tea Party Republican freshman who doesn’t pay his child support?
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who has made the media rounds bashing President Obama on the national debt, is being sued for $117,437 in back child support he allegedly owes his ex-wife and their three children, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, according to divorce documents filed in court in December.
…
“I dispute that he owes the child support that she’s claiming or anywhere near that amount,” R. Steven Polachek said. “Joe Walsh hasn’t been a big-time wage-earner politician until recently — he’s had no more problems with child support than any other average guy.”
Walsh reportedly told his ex-wife that he was out of work or between jobs before he was elected to Congress in November and therefore couldn’t make child support payments. So his ex-wife said it was news to her when she learned that he made a sizable personal loan to his campaign.
“Joe personally loaned his campaign $35,000, which, given that he failed to make any child support payments to Laura because he ‘had no money’ is surprising,” Laura Walsh’s attorneys wrote in a motion filed in December. “Joe has paid himself back at least $14,200 for the loans he gave himself.”
Walsh has a job now that pays him almost $200,000/yr. Are you at all surprised that a deadbeat dad wants to turn the US into a deadbeat nation?