I think (hope) he's just warming folks up for his real pick, Ms. P.

re: religion. I think so. Call it preparing the battlefield, putting the campaign and its surrogates on notice of what hellfire will fall on them when they challenge or ridicule Mr. Romney's faith. Including an army of independent allies of enough substance that they only have to mention the amount and post the storyboards, if not the actual ad, on youtube.

Where's my popcorn?

Chicago is about to discover Main Street America remembers how to use tar-and-feathers.

re: discount rate: think about goods we value and use today that we bought 100 years ago. Or things we’d purchase today that we expect will have significant value in 100 years. Consider that it took (just) 20-30 years for Lake Erie to be mostly cleaned up - and the Cuyahoga to stop burning. Ditto for the LA basin where the air leaving a modern car engine has long been cleaner than it was on entry. The Panama canal is being rebuilt, it may just make it to its 100 year anniversary. In a 100 years, the new one will likely be refit if not abandoned when technology and even less-expensive energy changes the rules again. It's important to be humble about what we see beyond our headlights. Especially when the next catastrophe happens and we find "if only we'd been more aggressive about growth more of the population would have survived because of ..." (plot death by wealth per type of disaster, natural and man-made).

re: better reporting. Editors should teach some basic economics documenting alongside the risk thermometer the implied "discount rate" the author has used to justify their recommendations. E.g. AGW must have a zero or even negative discount rate to justify the austerity and poverty demanded for the redemptive efforts. Yet most of these authors have little tolerance for preemptive warfare to remove a threat, where the discount rate is historically negative (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, ...Chavez). Where a non-zero (positive) discount rate suggests that we need not be too concerned with any investment we make today having an impact on those 3-4-5 generations removed.

re: Alar, Alarm, Alarum, the-sky-is-falling, repent!

A pity that editors of all these -zines don't require every story that highlights some risk have a couple of thermometers that have symbols on them indicating the probability of any given risk on a few important populations, including all-of-us, middle-class-U.S.-citizens, children and lastly those-claimed-to-be-most-at-risk, where the thermometer has gradations from the absolute certainty that we all will die, to deaths due to, say, an airplane falling on your head (about six a year, iirc). The editor doesn't have to put it on the same page - they could put all the analysis charts back with the legal notices and not harm the adrenaline hit they are dependent on for sales. They'd even get more advertising revenue since maybe a third would be interested in "the rest of the story" and flip to the back pages (similar to answers to puzzles). Granted, people will tire after a while when they discover few, if any risks, rise to the level of dying from a crashing airplane.