Nothing

The Queen has taken to answering "nothing" if I catch her doing something she's not supposed to. It's not an answer to "what are you doing" or "what happened?". It's an answer to yes or no questions such as "Are you all right?" or "Is DeBoy OK?" or "Did you hit DeBoy?" And she smiles while she says it.

It's cute in a 3-year-old. It's not so cute in Kentucky lawmakers. One of our State representatives, Jim Gooch, is for some inexplicable reason the chair of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee. I say inexplicable because he is by far the most rampant anti-environmentalist in recent memory. For years he has refused to hear any bill that would help clean up Kentucky or call any corporate entity to accountability. His latest? Global warming is a hoax. Yes, you heard it here first, folks. It's just a scam cooked up by Hollywood types (Al Gore? Hollywood type?) to scare people. His evidence for this bald statement came from 2 non-scientists, one of whom is in the employ of a company funded by ExxonMobil. The other one is a British Lord who was once a journalist as well as an aide to Margaret Thatcher. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Gooch also claimed that scientists wouldn't come to Kentucky. Hello, have you heard of the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville? Plenty of scientist types over there, I've met them myself. And it's a shorter drive from Frankfort (where our erstwhile government offices reside) to either Louisville or Lexington than it is for me to go to the grocery store. Here's the entire article about this debacle in the Lexington paper (and a poll about global warming). If you're a Kentuckian, or even if you're not, you can read more about the hearing at KFTC's blog: http://www.kftc.org/blog and link from there to various media reports, including KET video of the hearing.

And Jim Gooch is the kind of person who would wonder out loud why the rest of the nation thinks Kentucky is backwards. Duh. Here's hoping that our new Governor (and the people said Amen) can get the Kentucky House off their collective behinds to elect a new Ag and Natural Resources before Kentucky turns into one giant smoking sludge pond.