It's one of those things you're liable to hear whenever the rain starts pelting down: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." It's one of the few lines of Mark Twain's that just about everybody can quote. Two problems: first, it's not a Twain quote; second, it's not true.
The quote is actually from Charles Dudley Warner, who first deployed it in 1880 in the Hartford Courant, the newspaper he edited. The confusion over who said it probably stems from the fact that
My how times change. The boost that 9/11 gave the oily men in the White House was as short-lived as any post-Seinfeld sitcom starring Jason Alexander. It seems like only yesterday that Dickless Cheney was defending our latest Blood for Oil campaign by suggesting Americans essentially have a God-given right to our "way of life"--even if, no, ESPECIALLY if that means giving a petroleum-jelly-covered middle finger to Kyoto, worldwide imbalances in energy consumption and all the nasty diseases assoc