Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist's version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations' climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists.  Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

Critics, writing in Britain's Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.

Presumably there will be a special election in Pennsylvania 12 to replace Murtha on May 18, which is primary day.  This is the only district in the nation that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008.  You might want to explain that as an affinity for Vietnam veterans.   The better explanation is that it is part of the Jacksonian belt that starts in southwest Pennsylvania and extends along the Appalachians and southwestward to Tennessee and Texas—an area where Barack Obama ran very poorly in both the primaries and the general election in 2008.  In any case, it voted only narrowly (51%-49%) for Kerry and favored McCain over Obama by an even narrower margin (49%-49%, a margin of 873 votes).

Danish special forces yesterday stormed a ship captured by armed Somali pirates and freed the 25 crew on board, marking the first time a warship has intervened during a hijacking in the troubled area.

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation.  These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Still, a press corps that periodically complained about George W. Bush's infrequent news conferences should not let Obama walk away from the practice unchallenged.  And some of its members have protested.  [CBS White House correspondent Chip] Reid raised the issue with Gibbs at a briefing last month, and Hearst columnist Helen Thomas said the president has "gone an obscenely long time, not holding one."

President Obama veered off script — and away from the facts — when he spoke about the stimulus bill today in Nashua, NH.

"Now, if you hear some of the critics, they'll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don't know if that's really worked, because we still have high unemployment," the president said.  "But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we've started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's 'third ice cap', and an 'Indian IPCC' to use 'climate science' to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism.  I am for climate science.  I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses . . . they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

"I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA)," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this morning at a press conference that there will be a vote in the Senate on Monday on a "jobs bill."  It would be a procedural vote to start debating the bill.

The problem is, nobody has yet written one down.  And reporters at Reid’s press conference, called to announce a new "jobs agenda," were given an impressive-looking packet with a cover sheet that reads "Democratic Jobs Agenda" with the sub-headline "Putting America Back to Work."

But underneath the cover page is 2.5 pages of bullet-point ideas with no specifics.