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I have an idea for a commercial. A teacher is speaking to a class of students about how the United States is in grave danger. She warns her young charges that spending is out of control, government has become too big, and bureaucrats have too much power. She lectures that the government has expanded far beyond its constraints which are laid out in the Constitution. She then asks the students if they will join the local Tea Party and fight to restore America to its founding principles. All the little tykes -- first or second graders -- raise their hands, except for two. The teacher reassures the dissenters that this is okay. "No pressure," she says. She then presses a red button on her desk. The two children explode in a red flash, splashing gore on the other horrified students. The apathetic teacher then starts assigning homework.

Political advertising at its finest, wouldn't you agree?

Actually, if I ever even suggested such a commercial for the Tea Party (let alone actually made one), I'd be rightly branded a sociopath. The media would devote wall-to-wall coverage to the commercial for six months. Think Progress would try to trace my funding back to the Koch brothers. The Southern Poverty Law Center would declare the Tea Party a hate group. Keith Olbermann would drive the point home by literally exploding on air.

But almost the exact same commercial was released by the 10:10 Global environmentalist group, murdered children and all. The only difference was that the homicidal teacher hit the detonate button after two children were reluctant to cut their carbon emissions. The four-minute piece went on to show several corporate workers, a soccer player, and a radio host played by Gillian Anderson (of X-Files fame) meeting the same grisly demise. The final shot refers viewers to 10:10's website while streaks of blood and Anderson's eyeballs gush down the screen.

It's perhaps the darkest, vilest, most disturbing political ad ever concocted. Incredibly, it was produced for 10:10 by Richard Curtis, the British comedy writer behind legendary shows like Blackadder and Mr. Bean. Curtis apparently believed that exploding children would be a real knee-slapper. The rest of the civilized world disagreed. Within hours of the video's release, frantic greenies were trying to yank it off YouTube as the conservative blogosphere reacted with disgust. Ed Morrissey called it "the dumbest most self-defeating campaign ad ever."

It's not like 10:10 Global is some fringe eco-terrorist group. They're a worldwide campaign funded by big-name donors like Sony and Kyocera. They've already extracted a promise from Britain's Conservative government to reduce its carbon output by 10% in one year. Hundreds of businesses, colleges, and schools have pledged to do the same. That makes 10:10 a big player on the environmentalist team.

And yet they managed to produce this splatterfilm dreck. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall during that meeting. Say Frank, you know what would make people like us more? Let's blow up children who disagree with us and then laugh about it. All this time I've been worried that climate hysterics were a savvy and well-organized intellectual machine. Take heart, doubters! If this ad is any indication, our opponents make up the most dithering collection of socially maladjusted morons ever assembled on the very planet they're trying to save.

As The American Spectator reported on Friday, 10:10 reacted to the controversy by claiming they'd "missed the mark" in their attempt at humor. In an e-mail to Mark Morano, the group noted that the commercial "was intended for a British audience." We Americans lacked the perceptive wit needed to truly understand their message. Apparently the same British sense of humor that produced Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, and The Thick of It has now been reduced to belly-laughing at exploding youngsters.

Except, of course, the Brits condemned 10:10's macabre skit with the same ferocity as their across-the-pond neighbors, particularly Telegraph columnist James Delingpole who popularized the story.

It's a shame Dr. Michael Crichton isn't around to see all this. Crichton, the author of countless brilliant techno-thriller novels and a scientific genius in his own right, gave a groundbreaking speech in 2003 in which he claimed environmentalism was a fundamentalist religion. (Crichton is one of those recalcitrants who would have been blown to bits in the 10:10 ad.) For environmentalists, Crichton claimed, there is an impending apocalypse and sustainability is the only way to achieve salvation.

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Demand for shark fin soup has pummeled hammerhead shark populations. And some of those sharks are taken from already decimated stocks, finds a new analysis that uses DNA to pinpoint the origins of hammerhead fins sold at market.

A team reported the findings online December 1 in Endangered Species Research. The approach could boost the case for protecting hammerheads and could be applied to other shark species, many of which are also threatened by the fin trade.

Twenty-one percent of hammerhead fins sampled from 11 Hong Kong markets were taken from sharks living in the western Atlantic Ocean, where the species is listed as endangered, the study found. “Finning” typically involves cutting off the fin and then throwing the shark back in the ocean where it sinks and dies.

Study coauthor Demian Chapman is about to remove the hook from an adult male night shark, another threatened shark species, having taken a small clip of its fin for DNA analysis.Image: D. Abercrombie“It’s a frontier mentality out there on the ocean,” says study coauthor Demian Chapman of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “Right now it is a big Wild West show. Anyone can go in and catch these species. It’s not managed and not monitored.”

Chapman and colleagues analyzed a particular stretch of DNA taken from 452 wild-caught scalloped hammerheads, Sphyrna lewini, from around the world. This DNA snippet is from the cells’ energy factories, the mitochondria, which are passed on only by mothers and so can reveal where animals spawn or where their nursery grounds are.

Female scalloped hammerheads appear to remain close to home, or go back home to give birth, the analysis suggests. And that home region is pretty well-defined. DNA from sharks living in the western Atlantic could be pegged to one of three distinct regions: a northern stock off the eastern United States and Gulf of Mexico, a central stock off Belize and Panama and a southern stock off Brazil.

Comparing DNA taken from 62 fins from markets in Hong Kong against this worldwide map enabled the researchers to pinpoint where the sharks had been captured.

Four days after being sworn-in, Wofford illustrated his presumed ineptness at his new job. Holding a press conference at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, perpetually threatened with closings by the Pentagon and repeatedly saved by fierce and well-publicized fights from Heinz, Wofford admitted to local reporters that essentially he had no news for them. The reporters, in turn, had to pull teeth from the professorial new senator to even get him to say that oh yes, and by the way, he was opposed to the closing of the Navy Yard.

Questioned later by phone about his Navy Yard appearance, Wofford blandly replied: "We have six months to get our message across."

Into this bleak picture for Democrats arrived two out-of-state and deeply unknown political gunslingers named James Carville and Paul Begala. The two had run Casey's successful campaign for governor in 1986. Their intent with the Wofford campaign, said Begala, was "to raise money and raise hell."

They did.

Suddenly, the ground underneath the Sure Thing Thornburgh candidacy began to shift, because of one issue: health care.

Harris Wofford, the long-ago adviser to a long-ago president, the sleepy liberal college president and "egghead" intellectual, began electrifying Pennsylvania voters by zeroing in on health care with all the zeal of a born-again crusader. Scorching the Bush administration, whose leader had not long earlier been possessed of an approval rating in the rarified political air of 90% after the success of the Gulf War, Wofford vowed to "clean up the corridors of power and turn Washington upside down." Accusations of corruption were leveled, with every perceived sin of the Reagan-Bush years laid at Thornburgh's feet, specifically including a charge that the Thornburgh-led Justice Department had played favorites in a prominent fraud case of the day.

The unlikely-star of a populist campaign, Wofford barnstormed Pennsylvania in a relentless attack on Washington "corruption" and its bungling of health care. "It's time to take care of the middle class" exhorted the liberal whose career had previously been identified with the poor.

To the astonishment of Pennsylvania political observers, Thornburgh's lead in the polls, which had begun with a 40% margin over Wofford began to vanish. On October 1, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and WTAE-TV poll showed that Thornburgh's lead over Wofford had shrunk to a stunning 12%. The health care pitch, tied to the issue of corruption in Washington, was hitting home. Energized, the state AFL-CIO swamped its 1 million Pennsylvania members with a get-out-the vote campaign.