The Illinois Senate Republicans’ new leader John Curran told Capitol News Illinois the other day that there was nothing left to do on the abortion topic in Illinois. “The reality is, what else can we do here in Illinois?” Senator Curran said. “The laws of Illinois are more weighted towards guarantees of the rights to have an abortion than any other state in the nation. There's no further to go.”

Representative Tim Ozinga (R-Mokena) made the classic blunder of not focusing on one election at a time. But his flub does give us an excuse to look at a few fundraising issues. It’s been no secret that Ozinga wanted to be the next House Republican Leader. But he hasn’t really been involved in many House Republican races this year, and then, the day before election day, all of a sudden reported giving his own campaign fund a million dollars.

“Follow the science,” we are told, especially the junk science that climate alarmists invent. I recently debunked a piece of junk-climate science whose alarmism was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere. The junk science was titled “Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States,” and was produced by the Federal Reserve. The three authors claimed that warming could cut U.S. economic growth by up to a third in the next hundred years. However, statistical analysis I published in the paper “Temperature and U.S. Economic Growth: Comment on Colacito, Hoffmann, and Phan” showed their results were within the margin of error and that minor improvements and new data flip their result.

I recently read a thoroughly enjoyable piece by Mike Caulfield at Hapgood.US on the first use of “conspiracy theory” that he discovered in a letter from the English press, published in the New York Times on January 4, 1863. In a nutshell, the letter was a critical commentary on American intrigue relative to English aristocracy interests, and expressing disdain for America as a formidable foe, therefore anxious to see our ruin. This predates all other claims of the first use of “conspiracy theory,” and as Caulfield points out, “You’ll note too something that is almost too delicious: the first use of conspiracy theory is about a conspiracy said to involve the press.”