Several hundred years ago, an Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei, which sounds like something a Swiss shepherd might yodel, was found guilty of heresy and placed under house arrest for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun. Unfortunately for Signor Galilei, this contradicted Church doctrine that had long contended the earth was the center of the universe.

Today, polling shows that one in four Americans actually believe that the sun spins around the earth. But it’s not because the Church tells them falsehoods. Rather, it’s because they’re stupid and because they, like the knuckleheads who parrot the nonsense about man-made global warming, are convinced they are dealing with “settled science,” a term concocted by liberal nincompoops for the purpose of silencing logical skeptics.

What those who stand to profit from the billion dollars Obama wants to set aside for those engaged in the climate hoax never tell you is what would be so terrible about a little more warm air. Oh, I know that Al Gore fed us a bunch of bull about melting ice raising the ocean level 20 feet and drowning polar bears and loons in San Francisco, but nobody has seriously paid any attention to the buffoon since he announced he invented the Internet.

If the earth warmed up so that people on the Atlantic coast would stop freezing every winter and the English could once again grow grapes, I think those would be good things. But, then, I also thought it would be swell if the Pacific Ocean wiped out all the polar bears and also took out the coastal regions of California, Oregon and Washington, wiping out 90% of west coast progressives.

Speaking of Oregon, it seems that Trader Joe’s won’t be opening a store in Portland because, according to a group of louts calling themselves the Portland African American Leadership Forum, “the store would increase the desirability for non-oppressed minorities” to shop there.

Portland, in an attempt to bring some prosperity to the neighborhood, offered a two-acre parcel of empty land appraised at $2.3 million for $500,000 to encourage development. The project was to include two large anchor buildings and 10 retail shops. What’s more, the construction was to be done by a company owned by blacks.

But that was before the PAALF weighed in with their objections. And you can understand their position. After all, who wants to have those damn white shoppers contaminating the hood? You’ve got to keep things pristine for the local pimps, hos and drug dealers.

Before you get too depressed, I’m delighted to report that the United Auto Workers lost in its attempt to unionize the VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Part of the reason could be that a starting worker was already earning $19.50-an-hour, whereas their counterparts in Michigan start out at $15.50.

In fact, as historian Ron Radosh pointed out in a recent article, membership in the UAW has fallen from a high of 1.5 million to the current 400,000. In addition, Michigan, which back in the days of union boss Walter Reuther, was the most unionized state in the union, is now strictly right-to-work. The writing is clearly on the wall; at the rate at which people are finally waking up, industrial unions will soon join those damn polar bears on the endangered species list.

Founding Father James Madison once wrote: “In framing a government to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and next oblige it to control itself.”

But there’s the rub, as we’ve watched Barack Obama assume the very powers that Madison, Jefferson and Adams, tried so hard to keep out of the hands of some future power-mad tyrant whose role model, alas, wasn’t George Washington, but, rather, King George III.

Finally, when I heard the news that a few flakes were closing down the nation’s capital, I jumped to the happy conclusion that the media was finally catching on to the truth about the current regime and its traitorous enablers at the Justice Department, the EPA, Health & Human Resources and the IRS.

But, to my chagrin, it seems they were only referring to the latest snow storm.