Of course, they weren’t really Palin’s purchases — and that’s another Minneapolis connection in the Times story. Jeff Larson, the locally-bred Republican consultant whose FLS Connect GOP phone-solicitation firm has been in the news again lately, fronted Palin the $130,000 for her clothes. (The Republican National Committee paid him back.)

The occasion for retelling the story of Palin’s Minneapolis shopping spree is her new book, in which Palin has her own version.

The Times interviews Lisa Kline, the designer who dressed Palin and the members of her family for the 2008 GOP convention. An excerpt:

Neiman Marcus opened for Ms. Kline and her assistant at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, she said, and the two split up and spent a rushed 90 minutes or so gathering what they needed. Ms. Palin and her family were not there; nor was anyone from the campaign. Instead, the two stylists relied on a couple of salesclerks and a store manager.

“There was no conversation. There was no chitchat. It was just, ‘We need two pairs of pants in size yadada,’ ” Ms. Kline said. The purchases were rung up, but Ms. Kline was not asked for payment of any kind.

“Apparently it had been prearranged,” she said. …

Ms. Kline said she does not recall who asked her to expand her styling to the entire Palin family or who set up the appointment at Neiman Marcus, which later became so controversial because it undermined the candidate’s image as a populist.

The Burberry brand that Palin favors has had a bad rap back in Britain as having become too populist:

During the 1970s, the brand became popular with the British football casual cult, leading to it to being associated with chavs, hooligans and members of football firms by the 1990s. The brand became something of a national joke, particularly when actress Danniella Westbrook was photographed with her young daughter wearing matching Burberry outfits. South Wales police ran a drive against anti-social behaviour under the name Operation Burberry and Burberry admitted that “Burberry is now synonymous with Chavs and thugs.”

Palin will make a return visit to Minnesota on her book tour, with a stop at the Mall of America on Dec. 7. (But don’t go there dressed like a chav in your Burberrys, or the security guards’ll be on you.)

SuperFreakonomics and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Photos: HarperCollins, WDCpix

The early reviews for “SuperFreakonomics” have been harsh. The book, wrote Brad Johnson in The Guardian, is a “super freaking mess.” According to environmental journalist Joe Romm, it contains “many, many pieces of outright nonsense” and “major howlers.” In The New Republic, Brad Plumer attacked the book for “garden variety ignorance.” And all of those pans appeared before the book actually hit the shelves this week.

Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner didn’t face anything like this three years ago when they published “Freakonomics,” a surprise smash that sold 4 million copies. Unlike that book, which was based entirely on Levitt’s economic research from the University of Chicago, “SuperFreakonomics” is a guided tour of other peoples’ contrarian research and ideas. The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as “religious fervor,” and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel that attitudes toward their stances are getting brighter.

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

Ebell’s reference to “State of Fear” demonstrated just how meaningful “Freakonomics” could be to people who challenge conventional wisdom about climate change. The late author’s novel, published in 2004, cast as villains environmentalists and eco-terrorists who were perpetrating hoaxes to maintain their power. Coming after Crichton had made some well-publicized and much-maligned remarks skeptical of climate change science, the book was pilloried by environmentalists. It sold more than 1.5 million copies anyway.

In the years since, many climate change skeptics feel that the environmental movement has lost ground culturally and politically. A Pew Research poll released on Thursday found that the number of Americans who believed that man-made global warming was occurring, or that a hotter planet was a serious problem, had fallen precipitously. In April 2008, 71 percent of Americans said that global warming was happening, and 47 percent said it was man-made. In the new poll, only 57 percent of Americans said any global warming was happening, and 36 percent said it was man-made. Many skeptics are taking that poll as a sign that their message is getting through.

“There’s just so much … skepticism now,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Committee and one of the most prominent skeptics of climate change in Washington. In making the case that Americans are growing more skeptical, Dempsey said, “the Pew poll is one data point. This book is another data point.”

Levitt and Dubner have engaged their critics in the environmental movement, accusing them of “smears” for suggesting that the climate change chapter of “SuperFreakonomics” makes them “global warming denialists.”

“I think anyone who actually reads that chapter will come away with a better fact-based understanding of the actual issues surrounding global warming,” Levitt told TWI. “That said, I also think that partisans love to cherry-pick, regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on.”

Indeed, the climate change skeptics who are excited about “SuperFreakonomics” and the environmentalists who are criticizing the book are focusing on some of the same material. The controversial chapter opens with ironic quotes from Newsweek and New York Times articles from the 1970s that published frightening, if slapdash, research about “global cooling.” That phony scare is a favorite of climate change skeptics, who have attempted to bring it back from obscurity in books and in films like the just-released “Not Evil Just Wrong.”

“The man who came up with that theory, Stephen Snyder, is now one of the people scaring everyone about global warming,” said Martin Hertzberg. The retired meteorologist, who lives in Colorado, has been skeptical of man-made global warming for decades. He has converted the liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn to the belief that, as Cockburn quoted him saying, “the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” while getting into scraps with environmental journalists like George Monbiot.

“The idea of man-made global warming is fear-mongering and hysteria,” said Hertzberg. “There are a large number of know-nothing journalists and environmental lobbyists working hard on this, and they’re completely wrong. Al Gore is not a meteorologist. He knows nothing about science.”

Levitt and Dubner do not challenge all of Gore’s arguments about climate change science. What they do challenge is the idea that man’s use of carbon is speeding along a major catastrophe, and that something like cap-and-trade could be the answer. “It’s illogical,” they write, “to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.” Prominent skeptics told TWI that such an argument, from such high-placed experts is long overdue.

“They’re absolutely right,” said Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Look at the numbers. If every nation that has obligations under the Kyoto Protocols adopted the restrictions of Waxman-Markey [cap-and-trade legislation], you’d see a 7 percent drop in warming by 2100, about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”

While Levitt and Dubner do not actually argue that the planet is not getting warmer, some skeptics are hopeful that the book could direct people to studies that suggest that. “I think it is very important to question the [environmentalist] true believers,” said Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace. Now, as the chairman of Greenspirit Strategies, he does some work for energy companies and supports new nuclear power. “[It's important] as they display all the qualities of doomsday fanatics. There is ample reason to be skeptical, including the fact that the world has been warmer than today for most of the history of life, and the fact that CO2 has been much higher than today through most of the history of life.”

The controversial phrasing and criticism in “SuperFreakonomics” is in the book to make another point. Levitt and Dubner present research into geoengineering, a Gordian Knot solution to a warming planet that, for example, would replicate the effect that a massive eruption of volcano ash can have in making the planet cooler. It’s not a popular idea among some skeptics, who argue that bogus data is responsible for much of the global warming panic. One of those skeptics is Ross McKitrick, a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph whose research suggests that numbers suggesting a spike in global temperature are out of whack. He was hopeful that “SuperFreakonomics” could cut through the “groupthink and political correctness” and expose environmental journalists such as Joe Romm as dishonest activists who can’t accept criticism.

“He’s a former Clinton staffer who runs an attack blog funded by Soros money,” said McKitrick of Romm, whose ClimateProgress blog is a project of the Center for American Progress. “He’s only respected by people who approve of his inflammatory tactics and relentless politicization of the issue.”

Climate change skeptics are excited by the prospect of the general public reading Levitt and Dubner, but they’re expecting the authors to remain targets of an active and desperate green movement. “It will make people think and say, yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t make sense to do this,” said Ebell. “But that will just make the environmentalists even angrier.”

Phelim McAleer, the director of “Not Evil Just Wrong,” said his movie had begun to inspire protests and interruptions. His advice for the authors: Develop tough skin.

“Be prepared for it to get worse before it’s going to better,” said McEleer. “They don’t like questions, as Al Gore showed. Enviromentalist journalists are environmentalists, and they will always side with the environmental establishment. Don’t expect fairness from journalists.”

Egan makes a case for cooperatives’ roots out West:

The West is the native ground of co-ops. It’s in our collective DNA. People buy their tents, sleeping bags and bikes from the nation’s largest consumer co-op, REI, founded in Seattle in 1938, now with 3.5 million active members.

Egan notes that another Seattle-area co-op, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, serves even the most rock-ribbed conservative counties of Idaho. That organization and Minnesota’s HealthPartners are frequently cited models for how co-ops could cure the national health crisis.

But both were built on a concept of mutual assistance and democratic governance developed by grassroots, country cooperatives that Keillor describes in “Cooperative Commonwealth: Co-ops in Rural Minnesota, 1859–1939.”

The most familiar descendant of that era may be Land O’ Lakes, the dairy marketer that proved that Minnesota co-ops could go national, and even international. The less well known farmers’ mutual fire insurance organizations in Keillor’s book are ancestors of the health care co-op idea that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been pushing since June (and which Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now mulling):

Farmers had incentives to organize a polity of the overcharged, bypass the private insurance market, and purchase insurance from themselves in a mutual.

Mutuals were, simply, insurance companies owned and controlled by their policyholders. Some mutuals evolved into profit-maximizing companies and ceased being true, low-cost, policyholder-controlled companies. A farmers’ mutual, however, retained its cooperative, low-cost character.

The creators describe “False Witness” as a “behind the scenes look at the seedy, hairy, loathsome underbelly of the career of one of America’s most notorious right-wing nuts and demagogues!”

Collaborators include journalist Bill Prendergast, and artists Dan Olson, Danno Klownowski and Ken Avidor.

The book will be on shelves in several weeks.

Hamilton’s gripe about “The Democracy Index” — that its thin thesis is worthy of an op-ed but not a bound book — may be legit (I haven’t read it). And certainly Hamilton, one of the country’s top election lawyers, is a busy guy.

But at a moment when Minnesota Supreme Court justices are dealing with a volume of Franken-Coleman documents best measured in linear feet, it seems unseemly for an election lawyer-cum-book reviewer to complain about having to plow through a mere 142 pages (plus footnotes!).

In the main atrium of the downtown Minneapolis library, Norm Coleman beams at passersby — from the cover of ”Shared Vision: Norm Coleman and the Remarkable Revitalization of St. Paul.” The 2001 hagiography currently has pride of place in the Friends of the Library shop window. Price? Two dollars. Coleman quotes on miracles, persistence and good karma? Priceless.

The cover shows then-St. Paul Mayor Coleman in a dark suit with a flag pin on the lapel, in front of a blurred-out background that has to be the inside of the Xcel Center. Whether he’s looking sexier than any other U.S. Senator or a gold bust of Vladimir Putin, as one blogger later attested, is a matter of personal taste.

Here are the Coleman quotes, mostly from a last-chapter Q&A, with text bolded to emphasize ties to Coleman’s actions and strategy in contesting Al Franken’s 312-vote victory in the election for U.S. Senate:

On miracles:

David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said, “Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.” I believe in miracles. I’m a realist.

On persistence:

We would have come up with another idea [if people hadn't shown up for a concert on the Mississippi River]. We would have brought them down the next week for something else. You have to believe in the vision and stay with it. Individual things don’t always work out. If one door shuts, you walk around and try another one, until you find one that works.

On smoke and mirrors:

[The deal for a National Hockey League franchise] was so unlikely, you almost had to laugh. At times, we were bluffing. We put together an ownership group and submitted an application to the NHL — and we didn’t have a firm dollar commitment from anybody. We didn’t have the money for a deposit. We didn’t have a lead investor until the day we actually needed one. Along the way, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors, but we knew we had the right vision, we knew it would be good for St. Paul.

On karma:

Maybe it’s my 1960s “good karma” thing that still floats out there, but I believe that the arts appeal to the better angels in people.

The book’s listed editor, publisher and (from what I could tell) author is Tom Mason, a marketing exec who earlier served as Sen. Rudy Boschwitz’s press secretary and still does Q&As with people like Republican rainmaker Jeff Larson, a longtime Coleman associate and the former Senator’s Washington, D.C. landlord.

As with Franken’s description in the book of Limbaugh as “national precinct chairman for the Republican party,” his take on Specter’s place in the GOP seems prescient now.

The “hopeless” tag comes just before the Specter chapter, in a list of “fun” search-term phrases he entered into the Nexis internet database:

Gingrich AND grotesque     432 [stories]

Specter AND hopeless    452

Pat Robertson AND crazy OR nutty OR lunatic    677

Limbaugh AND fat    1,084

Buchanan AND racist    1,089

In his brief chapter “Arlen! Arlen! Arlen! and Other Thoughts on the ‘96 Election,” Franken mostly ridicules Specter’s bid for the top of the GOP ticket:

When I hear pundits handicap the ‘96 Republican race, I’m always surprised that they leave Arlen Specter out of the first tier of candidates.

He has so much going for him: he’s from a big state with a large number of delegates and electoral votes. He’s been a U.S. senator for fourteen years. He got a lot of name recognition from the Clarence Thomas hearings, where he attacked Anita Hill for making accusations about sexual harassment.

Speaking of the women’s vote, he’s pro-choice! And best of all, he’s Jewish, with access to a lot of pro-Israel money.

If I were Arlen Specter, I would assign a transition team right now.

But first things first, I guess. Planning his coronation at the Republican convention. I’ve been trying to envision it since Specter announced his candidacy, and I’ve decided it will look something like this:

First of all, lots of signs. But they won’t say “Specter.” Focus groups will show that the name “Specter” scares people. So the signs will read “Arlen.” And when Wyoming puts him over the top, there’ll be thousands of grassroots Republican loyalists who have worked years just for this moment, all chanting at the top of their lungs, “Arlen!” “Arlen!” “Arlen!”

The theme of the Arlen Convention, as it will come to be known, will be “The Big Tent.” Or perhaps, “The Huge Tent.” Or maybe, “The Extraordinarily Large Tent.” There’ll be a big Christian Coalition press conference on the eve of the convention, where Ralph Reed will back off from his threat to oppose any ticket with a pro-abortion nominee. Instead, Reed announces he’ll support any Republican ticket that doesn’t include a nominee who has actually performed an abortion.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. As I see it, there are two possible scenarios that could lead to an Arlen Convention. The first is a plane crash. A 747 carrying Dole, Gramm, Buchanan, and Alexander crashes … on top of Newt Gingrich and Colin Powell.

The second is a bus crash. It plays out kind of the same way.

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS ARLEN SPECTER THINKING?

REALLY. What is he thinking?

Forgetting he’s pro-choice in today’s Republican party. Forgetting that the women for whom that would be attractive mostly remember him as the man who accused Anita Hill of committing perjury. Forgetting that he’s humorless and pasty-looking. He’s Jewish!

See, I’ve been following the whole Colin Powell phenomenon, and it’s led me to one indisputable conclusion: The first Jew to be elected President of the United States will have to be a four-star general.

Protestors demonstrate the use of water boarding on volunteer/actor Maboud Ebrahim Zadeh in Washington. (WDCpix)

The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices for reaction to revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.

Steven Miles

On Monday, just as the nation’s interest in the torture issue was resurging, Miles’ 2006 book “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors” came out in paperback. The new, updated edition reworks the original subtitle (”Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror”), delves into whether psychologists used interrogations to perform coercive experiments and provides a handy guide for book groups.

Miles, a physician and University of Minnesota professor of bioethics, lauds the Obama administration for releasing four “torture memos” last week, but says that move alone is far from sufficient:

The decision [to release the memos] is another step to restoring international law and the United States’ role as a leader for civil society. However, the task is not done. We need a Truth Commission and an independent prosecutor.

The American Bar Association and state physician and psychologist licensing boards must investigate and sanction health professionals for misconduct. Such sanctions are necessary for us to criticize the health [professionals] of other nations that cooperate with torture and to resume our role in supporting those groups who dare to challenge torturing regimes.

Miles tells the Independent he’s currently focused on researching all the doctors from around the world who have been punished for assisting torture.

Douglas Johnson

Douglas Johnson, executive director at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), issued a statement Thursday (pdf) applauding President Obama’s stated openness to “investigations of those policymakers and lawyers who authorized torture.”

The Center issued an e-mail alert asking members to urge lawmakers to launch investigations, which includes this message:

It is clear to the world that the U.S. committed torture. It is equally clear that authorizing, ordering or perpetrating torture is illegal. At this point, we urgently need an investigation to determine who authorized and ordered torture. We do not need to strengthen our laws. We need to enforce them; in fact, we are required to as a matter of law. … Whether this is a politically convenient time is not part of the equation.

“Prosecutions tend to strengthen democratic regimes,” Johnson told MnIndy  Wednesday. But he said the center’s clients tend to be mixed on the issue, with some strongly in favor of prosecutions and others who say an apology is what’s needed.

Attitudes toward prosecutions can change during treatment, Johnson said, as victims’ sense of safety slowly returns. CVT’s clients, he said, are “filled with fear”:

The predominate purpose of torture is to create a climate of fear and a culture of fear. … It produces a sense of panic, a brittleness, that makes it difficult to accurately judge what political space is available [in which] to work.

The politics of torture in America is based on warped views. “I don’t think either the media or the people have a very good handle on it,” Johnson said.

We’re hearing a lot from Bush’s people’s perspective. … The question is not “Does torture work?” but “Work for what?” … The focus is on the interrogation chamber instead of the costs we’ve paid as a country.

Johnson offers three ways torture costs America, saying it endangers American personnel in the future, it gives enemies incentive to fight to the death, and it contributes to a drop in approval of the United States by our allies.

America’s turn to torture, in Johnson’s estimation, was the work of “amateurs and a lack of respect for the rule of law.” Referencing World War II, he noted that though the post-9/11 world is scary, “We’re not fighting two wars in Europe and Asia. We did that without resorting to torture.”

Kirk Anderson

That’s a point picked up by Kirk Anderson, a St. Paul-based political cartoonist.

“The Nuremburg trials helped to carve in stone some basic premises about the rule of law, like you don’t get to ignore it when things get rilly rilly bad, even in a national emergency, even if there’s a national emergency with NAZIS, fer krine out loud,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We have apparently forgotten those lessons, and even now spout the Germans’ legal and moral rationalizations. They were only following orders! Somebody higher up said it was okay!”

Late last year Anderson published “Banana Republic,” a book compiling the weekly cartoons he drew for the Star Tribune for more than two years from 2005 to 2007. In the strip, Anderson relentlessly excoriated the Bush administration for treating prisoners as poorly as does the stereotypically repressive regime that controls his fictional Latin American country of Amnesia.

Is Obama’s move “courageous,” as some have said? Anderson responded by e-mail:

I suppose it is. Pretty sad that when your country commits war crimes, it’s “courageous” not to sweep it under the rug. … I am a very cynical, pessimistic guy. But the last eight years, I’m repeatedly astounded that my cynicism is no match for the day-to-day morality of Washington movers and shakers. Just when I think all the scales have fallen from my eyes, I read the morning paper, and realize that more scales are falling into my cereal. …

Anderson isn’t shy about wishing for prosecutions up and down the chain of command:

Of course, the higher-ups must be tried, but we need not gloss over lower level torture bureaucrats. This isn’t a difficult case, the former president and vice president admitted they were accomplices to torture on national TV … . We don’t need a “truth commission” or a “fact-finding commission,” many or most of the facts are already known. We need perpetrators rotting in jail, so this doesn’t happen again. At least not for a good ten years or so. …

But also, we should not let ourselves off the hook. We are all complicit, we all had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Congress, the Democrats, the media, us citizens, we let it happen, and often facilitated it. Part of the reason any accountability is unlikely is that Democrats are complicit, so they’re not real anxious for any hearings either. …

Coleen Rowley

Photo: Jill Brady (The Vigil)

That sense of broader national complicity is on Rowley’s mind as well. She told MnIndy: “Torture cannot be ended by being swept under the rug. And we, the American people, have already been seen as complicit.”

The former FBI agent, one-time DFL congressional candidate and now peace and government-openness activist, has been all over the mediascape, from the New York Times to the Huffington Post, since the torture memos’ release.

Torture is wrong, illegal and it doesn’t work. … The FBI agents should be speaking out right now bc the FBI all along was not a part of it. They knew it was wrong from the start. They started a “war crimes” file. … but all that time they were keeping quiet.

So Rowley said she was encouraged to see an op-ed titled “My tortured decision” in Thursday’s New York Times by Ali Soufan — the former FBI agent who Rowley called on more than a year ago to tell the truth about CIA torture.

“That’s a big deal,” Rowley said. “He specifically counters the things Cheney is lying about in terms of [torture's] effectiveness.”

To Rowley’s way of thinking, Obama is confusing the issue by rejecting “retribution.”

“Retribution” is pejorative term for the penalty phase of the criminal justice system. … He’s jumping over the fact finding phase. The little people, some of them didn’t like this. They didn’t want to do it. There’s a mixture of reasons why lower-end people went along with it. Obama should not be skipping over that.

On the other hand, Rowley said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of excuses for Cheney.”

Rowley recommends what she calls a “two-tiered approach” — congressional committee hearings combined with a special prosecutor’s investigation.

She cites the 1970s congressional committee led by the late Sen. Frank Church as the last to effectively investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and recalls that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a member.

“There have been 11 commissions since the Bush Administration started on intelligence failures. No one cares about these stupid commissions,” Rowley said.

Still, she figures it’s worth a try: “It’s such a historical moment. I think you could get the stellar people who are beyond reproach.” Mondale and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are two she has in mind.

A Congressional committee should have purview only over non-criminal matters, Rowley said. Leave that to a special prosecutor, who in her view must be named by Attorney General Eric Holder, not Obama.

The president is not supposed to be doing it. Appoint [a special prosecutor] and do not even tell people who it is [for a while]. … If we had a good prosecutor, it couldn’t be reckless. It would take a long, long time.

Pawlenty’s debut on the social-media platform of the moment and an announcement of a retooling for Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign Web site had political wags a-twitter about what he’s running for — a third term as governor in 2010, the Republican nomination for president in 2012, or both.

Despite the striking, Soviet look of Pawlenty’s red-black Twitter page, his message window initially had a legibility problem due to a lack of clash: white type on a white background.

Another interesting aspect of the governor’s Twitter page: He labels himself “TPAW” for what seems like the first time in public. But he forsakes what could have been a brilliant Twitter handle (”@tpaw”) for the more proletarian “@pawlenty.”

G.W. Carver. Photo: NPS

When Peanut Corp. of America CEO Stewart Parnell took the Fifth this week instead of telling the House Committee on Energy and Commerce why he let salmonella-tainted peanut butter kill eight people (so far) and sicken thousands, the setting was ironic.

It was before another House committee (Ways and Means) in 1921 that the peanut’s greatest promoter, George Washington Carver, sprung onto the national scene with willing, winning, inventive testimony that helped propelled the lowly product of the South to prominence and many uses in the food industry. 

It was a different story on Wednesday: Parnell cemented his status as a pariah to the food industry and beyond with his repeated refusal to answer the committee’s questions about what he knew of his plants’ poisoned peanuts and the suffering his company has caused:

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, on the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer your question based on the protection afforded me under the United States Constitution.

Parnell’s appearance took place in a committee hearing room in Washington, D.C. So did Carver’s, 88 years earlier. But in every other way the scene this week couldn’t have been farther from Carver’s triumphant Jan. 21, 1921, debut on the national stage on behalf of the peanut.

One striking note: After demonstrating dozens of uses for the peanut, Carver made this now-portentous-sounding claim:

I do not know of a single case — that is, I mean [a] normal [person] — that complains because peanuts hurt them.

A transcript of his testimony appears in a 1991 book called “George Washington Carver: In His Own Words,” and all but two of 12 pages can be read online. Here are a few excerpts from his charming remarks (even in the face of racist digs):

Mr. CARVER: Mr. Chairman, I have been asked by the United Peanut Growers’ Association to tell you something about the possibility of the peanut … [T]he peanut comes in, I think, for one of the most remarkable crops … [I]t has possibilities that we are just beginning to find out.

This is the crushed cake … which may be used in all sorts of combinations — for flours and meals and breakfast foods and a great many things that I have not time to touch upon just now…. This is another confection. It is peanuts covered with chocolate. As I passed through Greensboro, S.C, I noticed in one of the stores that this was displayed on the market, and, as it is understood better, more of it is going to be made up into this form. Here is a breakfast food. I am very sorry that you can not taste this, so I will taste it for you. [Laughter] Now this is a combination and, by the way, one of the finest breakfast foods that you or anyone else has ever seen. It is a combination of the sweet potato and the peanut, and if you will pardon a little digression here I will state that the peanut and the sweet potato are twin brothers and cannot and should not be separated. They are two of the greatest products that God has ever given us.

Mr. [John Q.] TILSON [R-Conn.]: Do you want a watermelon to go along with that? …

Mr. CARVER: Here is the original salted peanut, for which there is an increasing demand, and here is a very fine peanut bar. The peanut bar is coming into prominence in a way that very few of us recognize, and the manufacturers of this peanut bar have learned that it is a very difficult matter to get a binder for it, something to stick it together. That is found in the sweet potato syrup. …

Now there is an entirely new thing in the way of combinations. It is a new thing for making ice cream … a very new product that is going to have considerable value. …

I wish to say here in all sincerity that America produces better peanuts than any other part of the world, as far as I have been able to test them out. …

Here is a bottle of milk that is extracted from peanuts. Now, it is absolutely impossible to tell that milk from cow’s milk in looks and general appearance. This is normal milk. …

Now here is a very attractive product — an instant coffee. … Here is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. … Now here is a very highly flavored sauce that imitates the Chinese sauce that enters into chop suey and the various Chinese confections that they are so very fond of. …

[T]he curds can be taken out and made into the various fancy cheeses the Neufchatel and Edam …

Mr. CAREW: Did you make all of these products yourself?

Mr. CARVER: Yes, sir. They are made there in the research laboratory. That is what the research laboratory is for. …

The sweet potato products now number 107 up to date. … The peanut products are going to beat the sweet-potato products by far. I have just begun with the peanut. So what is going to come of it why we do not know.

This is the very last thing. Now this is a pomade. That is, it is a face cream and will be attractive to the ladies …

Mr. GARNER: I understood you to say that the properties of the peanut combined with the properties of the sweet potato was a balanced ration, and that you could destroy all other vegetable life and continue to sustain the human race?

Mr. CARVER: Yes, sir. Because you can make up the necessary food elements there. … Then again if we think of how the peanut is used, it is the only thing that is universally used among civilized and uncivilized people, and all sorts of animals like it, and I do not know of a single case — that is, I mean normal — that complains because peanuts hurt them.

Born to slavery in Missouri near the end of the Civil War, George Washington Carver graduated from high school in Minneapolis — Minneapolis, Kan., that is.

He spent the better part of the 1890s studying at Iowa State University before accepting Booker T. Washington’s offer to head the agriculture department at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute.

One place to read more about his life, research, inventions and other pursuits is the Web site of the National Park Service’s George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Mo.