In 1988, the longtime head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) gave an explosive performance in front of the U.S. Congress’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee, during which he claimed that America and the world were on the brink of disaster. The earth’s surface temperature, Professor James Hansen contended, was rising in concert with carbon dioxide emissions, and the consequences would be increased drought, rising oceans, and an average rise in global temperature of ten degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. If the United States government did not act now, it would be sanctioning catastrophe, he warned. With this testimony, invited by the committee’s chair, Senator Al Gore, Hansen effectively started the modern climate-change movement.

Professor Hansen came across as a scientifically minded Inspector Poirot, assembling the family in the library to explain how the murderer among them had hidden his crime. But within ten years, he had morphed into the hapless Inspector Clouseau. His own NASA weather satellites — the most accurate barometers of global temperature — showed that, despite his eschatological forecast, the Earth had warmed very little.

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Get ready for the next Solyndra. Sure, you’ve heard those words before. Over the past few months, several companies that had federal backing — Beacon Power, Range Fuels, and Ener1 — all failed. And another one is almost surely on the way. Here’s my prediction: Within 18 months, A123 Systems, the battery maker that got a $249 million grant from the Department of Energy, will be bankrupt.

My prediction doesn’t have anything to do with the explosion that occurred on Wednesday at a GM laboratory near Detroit, sending one worker to the hospital. The explosion occurred while the worker was testing a battery made by A123. That news came on the heels of the announcement last month that A123 would have to spend $55 million to replace defective battery packs it sold to Fisker Automotive, the car company that is using a U.S. government loan to make high-performance $100,000 vehicles in Finland. But predicting A123’s failure doesn’t depend on the latest news, or require any special analytical skills or inside market knowledge. It requires only a quick look at the company’s financials.

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One need not support formal term limits to recognize the existence of informal ones, and the tightening polls in the Indiana Senate Republican primary suggest voters there may be starting to think Senator Richard Lugar has been in Washington long enough.

The conventional wisdom has been that the six-term incumbent Lugar is a safer general-election bet than his opponent, state treasurer Richard Mourdock. But the primary has heretofore shown Lugar to be out of touch with Hoosiers, an institutionalized Capitol Hiller who for a spell was ruled ineligible to vote in his own primary after a local board determined he hadn’t owned a home in Indiana in three decades. Though a subsequent ruling allowed Lugar to claim a family farm as a residence, the die is cast. Lugar has become a carpetbagger in his own state.

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A few weeks ago, I went out to North Dakota, to look into the oil boom. Do you know about that? The boom, I mean — not my trip. North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country: 3.1 percent. Some people wonder who the unemployed are: There are “Help Wanted” signs everywhere.

Anyway, I have a piece on North Dakota in the current issue — the current issue of National Review. “Booming North Dakota,” it’s called: “What it’s like, what it means.” I hope you will enjoy this piece.

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‘Choice” is the word. It’s meant to stop all conversation and all debate. It’s designed to avoid directly addressing topics people don’t really want to talk about. Things such as life, death, children, balance; and the ultimate question: Who am I?

But we girls — and the men caught in the web of relational and political confusion — may just be fed up with such an insulting manipulation.

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Eric Holder rode in on the stench of Marc Rich and will ride out on the stench of Al Sharpton. He’s spent the three-plus years in between branding Americans as “cowards” on race matters; investigating the CIA; coddling CAIR and the New Black Panthers; green-lighting voter fraud; swaddling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Bill of Rights; and converting the Justice Department into a full-employment program for the Lawyer Left and its Gitmo boutique. But now he’s hit the big time.

This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder — sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan. The Sharpton record was succinctly catalogued on the Corner by Victor Davis Hanson: inciting murderous riots; slandering Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals; libeling a state prosecutor in the course of championing Tawana Brawley’s fabrication of a racial “hate crime.” Yet there was Holder, ladling cringe-making praise on Sharpton for “your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill.”

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In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the “war on women,” the Republican theocrats’ confiscation of your contraceptives, or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences. This week’s bit of ham-handed misdirection was “the Buffett Rule,” a not-so-disguised capital-gains-tax hike designed to ensure that Warren Buffett pays as much tax as his secretary. If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I’d be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night. But instead every other American “millionaire” will be subject to the new rule — because, as President Obama said this week, it “will help us close our deficit.”

Wow! Who knew it was that easy?

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North Korea’s missile, launched last night, reached a height of 93 miles, soaring for just one minute before breaking apart and falling into the Yellow Sea. The Obama administration’s policy of outreach toward North Korea has suffered roughly the same fate.

Earlier this year, some commentators enthusiastically greeted the “Leap Day agreement,” in which American food aid was exchanged for North Korea’s halting its nuclear program. One former South Korean ambassador hailed it as “the first major step forward taken by the two countries since President Obama came into office” and insisted that the deal “says a lot about the way the Kim Jong Un regime is going to operate.” Of course, last night’s launch says much more about the way the new leader will operate. Meet the new boss, evil and manipulative as the old boss.

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In President Obama’s latest class-war, tax-the-rich gambit, he has stooped to a new low with misleading and out-of-context quotes from Ronald Reagan. Apparently, the president is now trying to use the Gipper for cover while he attacks Mitt Romney with the so-called Buffett Rule.

In an address this past week, Obama cited a couple of Reagan speeches from June 1985, in which the former president quoted a letter from a wealthy executive who grumbled that he paid less in taxes than secretaries or bus drivers. Obviously, Obama was trying to draw a parallel with Warren Buffett’s complaint that his tax rate is lower than his secretary’s, and to the resulting Buffett Rule, a proposed 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires. With a tongue-in-cheek flourish, Obama referred to Reagan as “that wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior.”

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South Plainfield, N.J. — Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who’s riding high in the opinion polls, is considered a leading contender for the GOP’s vice-presidential nomination. His town-hall meeting here on Thursday afternoon, held at a local gymnasium, shows why his national political stock is rising — and why Garden State Republicans have mixed feelings about his potential departure.

The event begins with cinematic flair. The lights dim, the 400-member-plus audience hushes, and a screen at the front of the room begins to crackle. Pulsating orchestral music plays as Christie narrates his gubernatorial record. The flickering images, which wash across the faces of the elderly crowd, are reminiscent of the title sequence of The Sopranos. A gritty New Jersey, filmed through sepia and black-and-white tones, comes into view. Broken windows, snarling legislators, and down-and-out cities form a montage. But through all the grime, slowly and steadily, strolls one man. He’s a warrior, a hero, and an outsider.

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