The Bell Curve:

Some migrant thoughts while surfing last week beyond health care and presidential pitches for the under-age vote on what is left of our print media:

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce makes news, it is unfailingly cheerful. But some of that cheer is being washed away in the wake of the chamber’s strong opposition to proposed climate change legislation. The latest of its members to withdraw from the national chamber is Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation, whose top executive could no longer be a party to the “obstructionist tactics” of what he called the chamber’s “extremist position on climate change.”

In a letter to the chamber made public by the corporation, Chief Executive Peter Darbee wrote that company employees “find it dismaying that the chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored.”

This view, which promises a rift in the chamber’s unified front on global warming, is also shared by the Public Service Company of New Mexico and Exelon Corp., the largest nuclear-power operator in America.

I called Richard Luehrs, who heads the Newport Harbor Area C, to find out whether the locals are going along with the national or the disaffected on this issue. He replied that nothing I was reading him had crossed his desk and that there were more pressing matters demanding his attention. So, locally, that leaves this particular ball in the lap of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who sees the world in two parts: those who buy global warming and want to do something about it, and everyone else, including Rohrabacher.

Quotes on the front page of the Pilot, which were attributed last week to Alexandria Coronado, president of the Orange County Board of Education, and Elizabeth Parker, longtime member of that board, spoke firmly but carried very different sticks. They were explaining a unanimous vote to oppose the statewide proclamation of Harvey Milk Day, in honor of the San Francisco city councilman who was assassinated by one of his associates.

Milk, who was openly gay, was canonized by a movie last year that followed his determined efforts to remove sexual orientation as a factor in public life, or any other activity open to all of our citizens.