Adele Ferguson : Cain, Obama, D.B.Cooper make Adele's comment list

ITEM - Herman Cain has suspended his campaign for president following revelation of a 13 year friendship with a woman his wife wasn’t even aware he knew.

COMMENT - His sudden dip in the polls was not so much the result of a belief he engaged in inappropriate behavior with women other than his wife but the fact that he was revealing as his campaign progressed that he didn’t know diddley squat about foreign affairs which are in the president’s bailiwick.

ITEM - Critics pointed out that President Obama’s Thanksgiving message to Americans had no reference in it to God. Some newspapers ran instead the Thanksgiving message of Abraham Lincoln in which God is referred to seven times.

COMMENT - I suspect he’ll find reason to mention God a little more often from now on, the way he started daily wearing of an American flag lapel pin after first decrying such a display and was slammed for lack of patriotism by his constituents.

ITEM - A crowd of amateur sleuths gathered in Portland for a symposium on the 40th anniversary of the nation’s only unsolved hijacking, that of the man known as D.B. Cooper who leaped from a Boeing 727 jet on Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, with $200,000 in $20 bills somewhere over Southwest Washington. Despite numerous searches, no body was ever found but a bundle of $20 bills identified as part of the loot turned up on the shore of the Columbia River. Most in attendance believed he did not survive the jump.

COMMENT - Washington’s deep and almost impenetrable forests hide many secrets. I know of a case where a woman went for a walk in the woods from the Seabeck Conference Grounds and despite a vast search for many miles around the area, she was not found until many years later just off the trail, apparently frightened into the woods by a bear or some other animal.

ITEM - The U.S. patent on Lipitor held by Pfizer Inc. expired Nov. 30, allowing generic versions to go on sale. Some 8.7 million Americans take Lipitor for high cholesterol, the biggest selling prescription drug of all time, and one of the most expensive. The generic version will be called atorvastatin calcium, the chemical name of Lipitor, and will be much cheaper although many patients indicate they prefer to stay with the real thing.

COMMENT - I always wonder about those ads on TV and radio for various wonder drugs that sound so inviting until they tell you that if you suffer side effects, i.e., you turn blue or have an urge to burn the house down or kill the dog, see your doctor. Pfizer, by the way, hopes to keep selling Lipitor but charging the generic price.

ITEM - At the end of November, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic (relating to man’s impact on nature) global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

COMMENT - The real significance of the leaked emails, says author James Delingpole in the Wall Street Journal, is they show that major scientists who inform the International Panel on Climate Change, can’t be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. The leaker, who calls himself FOIA, wrote that nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions while nearly 16,000 children die every day from hunger and related causes. In other words, the scientists so eager to blame human beings for global warming, will lie and conspire to achieve it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)