What a contrast!

A couple weeks ago I wrote about The Funny Paper's insulting and dismissive "Monday Profile" on Randal O'Toole, who is the nation's leading critic of so-called "Smart Growth" transportation and land use policies. Without going over it again, suffice to say that I pointed out that when The Funny Paper does a Monday Profile on some advocate for liberal political causes, they do a fawning fluff piece.

Two days ago we got a great example of exactly what I was talking about. They did a profile on a Lewis & Clark economics professor who is going to save the world. He's going to "re-wire" the planet in order to fight global warming. He plans to completely shift the world's economy from fossil fuel based energy to "sustainable" energy sources.

Uh huh. Good luck with that. Just how will an econ prof from a second tier liberal arts school bring about such massive change on a global scale?

Well, he is going to organize global warming pep rallies on campuses all over the country. That ought to do it, right? He's got 1500 college and high school campuses to hold global warming "teach-ins" tomorrow, where presumably all the mush brained coeds will get their marching orders on what needs to be done to change the world how our megalomaniac Lewis & Clark econ prof thinks is necessary to save the world.

Now, I could go on and on about how idiotic this kind of warmed-over 1960's era activism is, and I could point out how ridiculous it is for publicly funded institutions to be pushing political agendas with our tax dollars, and I could point out how ironic it is that an economics professor would actually have so little understanding of economics that he thinks he could shift the global energy supply from fossil fuels to something else through government action.

But that is not my point in this post. My point here is to show how the Oregonian treats charlatans like this with absolute velvet kid gloves. Nary a critical word in the entire piece. Not a single opposing view on his cause - global warming. Not a single critic on any of the oh-so-ripe subjects above. Nothing.

Just a fawning fluff piece, to make us all realize how wonderful and caring he is.

Contrast that to the O'Toole piece, where they quoted Homer Williams calling him an "idiot," and had PSU's planning pundit Ethan Seltzer saying that nobody should listen to O'Toole, much less write about him.

Apparently The Funny Paper feels no compunction to marginalize an activist who advocates for things they believe in, no matter how Quixotic his quest, no matter how self-obsessed his motives.

So on the one hand you have Randal O'Toole, who just published a thick book with the data supporting his criticisms of Smart Growth, who has had a fellowship at Harvard, and writes for the pre-eminent free market think tank in the world.

With him, The Funny Paper swerves off the road to run him over, the entire piece dripping with sarcasm and dismissiveness.

On the other hand, you have a second tier econ prof who is now writing a memior (why would this guy have a memoir?) called "Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction. How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming."

Guess which guy gets lionized by The Funny Paper?