AP Photo/CareerBuilder.com

Budweiser’s Clydesdales, Coca-Cola’s polar bears and CareerBuilder.com’s chimpanzees have all achieved fame through Super Bowl commercials. If Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo were in charge of casting, however, the suit-and-tie-clad chimps would be in danger of losing their starring role. The zoo is campaigning to stop CareerBuilder from airing its scheduled commercial Sunday, claiming that the anthropomorphized portrayal of the endangered species will make viewers less concerned about wildlife conservation. The company has been featuring chimps in Super Bowl ads since 2005, but a new Duke University study has added fuel to the critics’ fire. The study’s leader, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology Brian Hare, is especially worried that Africans will be misled and attempt to capture and sell the wild primates to Westerners as pets. We’ll go out on a limb and say that television viewers around the world are highly evolved enough to recognize the entertainment value of a commercial without going bananas, unlike the researchers.

Photo by Paul B. Southerland, The Oklahoman

AP Photo

AP Photo

When is the exercise of religion on public property not an invitation to an injunction? When Indian culture is involved. The latest example among many is a Utah tribe’s snow dance to benefit ski resorts in Colorado. Seems the Great Spirit has been a bit stingy with the white stuff this year. Colorado isn’t the only state where snow dances have been held this year. While ski resorts are private property, the rites have also been held at a state park near Lake Tahoe. These are religious exercises. Oklahoma’s car tags carry a depiction of the “Sacred Rain Arrow,” a religious image. In the past few years, groundbreakings for Oklahoma projects involving public funds have included Indian religious rites. While neither Judaism nor Christianity originated on this continent, they have a long history here and are part of the culture. Why is it OK for one culture to be overtly religious in the public square but not another?

As he’s explained many times, Inhofe believes the earmark moratorium is a lot of hot air over a relatively small amount of money (2 percent to 3 percent of total federal spending). And besides, he argues, the legislative branch is constitutionally empowered to appropriate funds. So, no, he’s not concerned about being a lone wolf on earmarks.

Nor on other stuff, either. He was an early opponent to the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade bill and his stalwart crusade against anti-global warming measures has earned plenty of bile from advocates. No matter. One of Inhofe’s favorite stories is about how he jetted to last year’s big climate change conference in Denmark, basically parachuting into Copenhagen for a couple of hours to be a one-man band in opposition — surrounded by a sea of people who didn’t agree with him. You need a tough hide to play the role of a voice crying out in the wilderness. Inhofe’s most certainly is.

Interestingly, the administration also cites uncertainty surrounding the cause of the BP spill and the potential threat to thousands of Americans (presumably different thousands than the ones cited by Feldman) to argue drilling should remain halted. The White House said it would appeal Feldman’s ruling to the Fifth Circuit and then who knows, maybe the high court will be asked to decide whose interests are the most compelling and most in need of protecting.

Barton is an old hand and should’ve known better. He was trying to take issue with the concept and structure of a $20 billion fund for handling spill-related damage claims, to be paid into by BP. Barton said it looked like a White House “skakedown” — not the greatest word choice, to be sure. Yet, some people rightly worry about the White House ordering a private entity to do such a thing, arguing BP could address claims on its own and that there’s a court system to hash things out if claimants and the company can’t agree. Others note that as BP pays into the fund — $5 billion a year over the next four years — consumers ultimately could bear the cost in the form of higher prices.

Unfortunately for Barton, it sounded like he was siding with BP, and later he had to make one of those weasely Washington apologies — regret if anyone misconstrued his remarks. Lots of people did, proving the political lesson that if something over there is glowing white hot in broad daylight, don’t get near it, no matter how valid your argument might be.

But let’s be fair. If you say 50-plus inches of snow in Washington, D.C., breaking a record set at the turn of the century — that’s the 19th to the 20th century — means nothing, then don’t argue that one especially bad hurricane season, like 2005 (Katrina, Rita, Wilma), proves climate doom. Which is what a number of global warming prophets did. This year’s harsher winter and 2005′s hurricanes-on-steroids season are blips compared to real climate trends, measured in hundreds and thousands of years.

While we’re at it, another public debate no-no: Claiming everything that happens with the weather — hot, cold, rainy, dry, blizzards, no blizzards, hurricanes, no hurricanes — all prove human-caused global warming. You can come up with any hypothesis you want if you claim everything is evidence of it.

In the piece Kennedy recalled sledding as a child at his family’s Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va., but wistfully noted most Northern Virginia kids probably don’t even own a sled now. Meanwhile, he continued, the oil companies fund a deceitful campaign to depict man-made climate change as a fantasy.

“Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend’s extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change,” Freddoso writes. Kennedy told National Review Online cold-weather “anomalies” don’t disprove global warming: “It’s like if you hear that a person didn’t die from smoking, now you want to believe that smoking doesn’t cause cancer?”

Hmm. Sounds like a guy who can pay someone else shovel his walk for him.

As for Rolling Stone, Inhofe’s main beef with the article is he thinks he was ranked too low. “My first response was I should have been No. 1, not No. 7,” he told The Tulsa World. “I am serious about that. I have spent now literally years on this thing, and it has been a long, involved thing.” And he shows no sign of easing his foot off the gas pedal. Sorry.