French citizen and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt held captive for six years by Marxist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas, along with fourteen other hostages, were rescued last night by Colombian military personnel posing as aid workers.

ABC NEWS:

Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said army troops infiltrated the FARC rebels, who were holding the hostages as part of their long-running guerrilla war and terror campaign against the state.

The infiltrators convinced local FARC militants that they’d been ordered to fly the hostages to another location, Santos said. The hostages were loaded aboard a helicopter and the militants, realizing they were outwitted and surrounded, gave up without a fight.

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Guardian:

Military spies tricked the Marxist rebels into handing over their most valuable captives to disguised military helicopters without a shot being fired, said the government. Betancourt, called her rescue “absolutely impeccable” and said she and 14 other hostages had no idea they were being rescued until they were airborne. “They got us out grandly,” she told Colombian army radio. ..

(Betancourt) said the hostages who were being marched toward the helicopter thought they were part of an international hostage deal but when they saw the pilots dressed like guerrillas their hopes were dashed.

“They tied our hands and feet,” Betancourt said. “It wasn’t until the hostages were aboard the helicopter and that the pilots subdued the rebel commanders that they realised they had indeed found freedom. “We are with the army, you are free,” the pilots told the hostages, Betancourt recalled.

The elaborate sting would “go into history for its audacity and effectiveness”, said Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister.

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Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

The San Antonio Business Journal reports that Premiere Radio extended Rush Limbaugh’s contract, but says “financial terms were not released.”

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But the Radio Equalizer leaks the stupefying amount of Rush Limbaugh’s signing bonus.

A key industry source confirms speculation that Limbaugh has signed a stunning mega contract renewal deal with Premiere Radio Networks and parent company Clear Channel Communications.

Said to be Limbaugh’s most lucrative deal ever by far, the new agreement runs through 2016 and includes a previously unheard-of nine figure signing bonus. For those of you in Rio Linda, that means more than $100 million, upfront.

With that kind of bread, will he purchase Rio Linda outright?

Beyond infuriating the left, that staggering sum is sure to reinforce the widespread industry belief that talk represents one of broadcast radio’s only remaining bright spots. …

Expect Rush’s massive renewal deal to spark a fresh round of hand- wringing from the left, where their own “progressive” talk radio format remains stalled.

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Media Bistro confirms, and adds details:

Rush Limbaugh’s new mega deal that keeps him on the radio until 2016. Rush is also the subject of the New York Times Magazine cover story set for this Sunday’s paper.

Drudge writes of the reported $400 million deal, which would pay him an estimated $38 million a year, “Earnings now pace him ahead of the annual salaries for network news anchors: Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer — combined!”

Kind of puts Rush Limbaugh in a new perspective, doesn’t it, liberals? Why, with that kind of money Rush could fund his own presidential campaign. He could buy the ground Bill Clinton is standing on, and have him torn down.

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To help Rush celebrate, here’s Pink Floyd performing my personal favorite of theirs: Money.

6:13 video

Filmmaker Paul Budline questions Obama’s patriotism in this short video on his association with, the now comfortably ensconced in liberal establishment of Chicago, 1960s radicals Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers.

1:24 video

Via Tigerhawk.

Harry Reid, despite originating from and representing Nevada in the Senate (a state whose history is based upon minerals and mining), has gone all moonbat, and won himself a place in YouTube’s list of “Most Watched” videos, bleating absurdities about coal and oil “making us sick” and “ruining the earth.”

0:35 video

Well, mining coal in deep mines and breathing in coal dust can make you sick. It killed my grandfather back in the 1930s. But claims that coal is making anybody other than deep miners sick is a claim based on what we call statistics. Statistics are produced by sophisters, calculators, and economists, and liberals always have statistics by the boxcar load ready and waiting to prove whatever they happen to want to prove. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Coal has been used in domestic heating and in industrial production since Elizabethan times. Burning coal undoubtedly produced cleaner air in places like London than the wood fires used previously.

They discovered anthracite coal in Pennsylvania early in the 19th century, and Benjamin Franklin’s stove adapted with grates was found perfect for its use. By mid-century, railroads and canal boats were carrying coal to all major American cities. They found oil, also in Pennsylvania, in the mid-19th century, and we’ve been using that ever since, too.

Generations of Americans and Europeans have lived and died using coal and oil, and the Earth remains, far from ruined.

I don’t feel particularly sick. How about you?

The truth is that no economically practical alternatives exist, and politicians cannot magic new forms of energy into existence. What they can do is jump on to the bandwagons of fashionable do-gooder causes and disseminate misinformation and sow unnecessary fear as a means of bamboozling the gullible public into surrendering more powers and more tax monies to them.

It’s this kind of politics that ought to make you sick.

Loon Decoy, Nova Scotia

One of my liberal college classmates was recently ranting about the terrible growth of Inequality over the whole post-Reagan period of the ascendancy of Conservatism in American politics, which roughly coincided, interestingly enough, with most of our own real, post-age-30, adulthoods.

Another classmate effectively rebutted those assertions of declining middle-class economic well-being by pointing out how much had changed with respect to lifestyle and expectations in America during that time, as well as over our own lifetimes. We approaching-age-60 adults can remember not only a world with no personal computers, no cell phones, and no multiple family automobiles. We can remember the time of no televisions, no air conditioners, party-line telephones, and a lot of people owning no automobile at all.

One can see the dramatic impact on human life of the economic growth produced by the free economy just by looking at antique artifacts of everyday life. Those charming collectible pieces of folk art being sold at auction for high prices to serve in future as decorative art not so terribly long ago were practical tools.

Take the charming, somewhat primitive, stark and streamlined decoy above, found in Nova Scotia, going on the block at a Guyette & Schmidt Auction later this month. Someone will be proudly displaying it soon in his living room or den but, less than a century ago, it was bobbing in some cove or inlet along the shore as a hunter was trying to shoot… a loon.

The common loon, Gavia immer, is protected today, and most people would find the idea of shooting one of these iconic symbols of the Northern wilderness sacrilegious and the idea of cooking and eating one even less appealing.

Loons are pretty much the lowest evolutionary form of waterfowl, the most primitive and the boniest, featuring the toughest flesh and the fishiest taste. No one would eat loon if he could get coot or even merganser.

Loons were so renowned for their lack of gustatory appeal that a whole genre of loon recipes taking roughly the following form are traditional jokes.

PLANKED LOON
Catch a Loon Duck. (Black Lake Loon’s are best). Pluck and clean. Boil well. With sharp knife, split duck down the belly. Splay it on a well soaked hardwood plank. Nail it good and wire it securely. Place upright on plank in front of hot coals on outdoor fireplace. Cook well for about two hours. When done, throw that fishy duck away, and eat the plank!

But, in the old days, people really did hunt loons in order to eat them. There would be periods of the year when the more migratory waterfowl were not present and available in the North Country. Ducks and geese would have flown South, but you could still find loons.

Even in Nova Scotia, I expect it’s been a long, long time since anybody was reduced to dining on loon.

Barnegat, NJ public schools were recently locked down after someone sighted a ninja in the woods.

You can’t be too careful.

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Hat tip to Tom Helm.

Brett Stephens, in the Wall Street journal, explains once again that Global Warming isn’t science. It’s religion, and religion of the nasty, grovelling on the ground, flagellating pilgrims, sacrificing babies to idols variety at that.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”). …

Let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific “consensus” warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to “patriarchal” science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you’re inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature’s great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, “morbid-minded” religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.