Keith Olbermann Canned. Again. (This Time By AlGore)

From the Daily Beast (seems a fitting name for the situation...)

It’s hard to know whom to root for in the coming legal showdown between Keith Olbermann and Al Gore, the former a widely reviled liberal polemicist who cannot hold a job in cable TV and the latter a failed presidential candidate who launched a cable network in 2005 seemingly just for the fun of running it into the ground.

The ground got a lot closer on Thursday when Gore canned Olbermann, at once his worst nightmare and his foundering Current TV’s last real shot at success. The former vice president and his partner Joel Hyatt put out a statement “to viewers” in the pre-weekend news hole of Friday afternoon accusing Olbermann of breach of contract, meaning they have no plans to pay out the $50 million they reportedly owe him. A source suggests the figure is actually much lower, and in any event, it includes an equity stake in a television network no one watches.


But the real punchline comes at the end of the third paragraph--wait for it, wait for it...

Well, not no one: Around 177,000 viewers tuned in to watch Olbermann’s 8 p.m. “Countdown” broadcast at Current on the nights he turned up to work to host it. (Gore and Hyatt accuse him of breach for refusing to anchor many nights, including such important ones as the Iowa caucuses.) By contrast, Olbermann was pulling in around a million viewers from his old perch at MSNBC, from which he departed acrimoniously just 14 months ago. According to a statement from Current, Olbermann will be replaced by prostitute-aficionado Eliot Spitzer, who was fired in July from CNN.

 Eliot (caught banging teenaged hooker while Governor of New York) Spitzer! Yeah, baby, yeah!

On the one hand it is great fun to see the wheels come off the Al Gore clown car. On the other hand, it's pretty sobering to realize just how close we came to having this man as President of the United States.

Al Gore And His High-School Physics Cookie Jar: The Sound Of Credibility Swirling The Drain

HT James Delingpole.

Lawdy, have muhcy. Missah Goah may have really stepped into it this time, as Anthony Watts at WattsUpWithThat presents a close analysis and attempt to replicate a 'scientific demonstration' presented as factual truth by the former Vice President.

Long story short--if the Gore presentation is not a fabrication, it is at the very least one of the sloppiest and un-credible jobs of presentation of science imaginable.

Since the world is being pressured to change absolutely everything about the way live is lived based upon Mr. Gore's assertions of science, it is up to him to provide credible evidence. He hasn't, and can't, because his hypothesis is simply not true.

Wonder if the folks who awarded him that Oscar will ever getting around to calling him and demanding it back?

Let Us Be Grateful For Small Blessings, Like The Fact That AlGore Never Became President

His recent rant at the Aspen Institute, as reported by HuffPo.




The mask of civility is slipping, the wheels are coming off. One feels for Tipper, to have endured this for so many years.

The Fraudulent Warmists Find Themselves Defrauded: WhoWouldaThunkIt?

A true AlGore moment, courtesy of the UK foundation Civitas.

The European carbon market has been temporarily closed after fears that it has been the victim of fraud. Having lost £7 million’s worth of carbon credits, there could be a polluter somewhere in Europe happily belching out their fumes knowing that they won’t be paying for it. This isn’t the first crisis to hit the scheme and the EU should now take a step back and assess if its climate change policies are the optimum way to curb emissions.

The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) simply does not work. The EU’s own Law Enforcement Agency has estimated that in 2009, €5 billion of revenue was lost through fraudulent activity and in some countries this accounted for 90% of market activity! While the market cost of carbon credits was €12.5, they were being sold for €1.

OldSouth shares this with you, snowed in here in the South, in a year when AlGore predicted that we would have to explain to young children what snow used to be...

OS will drink an extra cup of hot chocolate in his honor this evening.

By the way, where is old Al, our fellow Tennessean? And why isn't he screaming bloody murder about fraud in these markets he such a hand in creating? One would think his fax machine would be blanketing the world! Perhaps this scam was pulled on scammers, and he doesn't care to bring up the subject?

(OS would use the phrase 'Sound of crickets chirping', but they're all frozen just now.)

Let's ask Tipper, and see what she thinks. She might be able to locate him. Or not.

Hitler Learns Of The 10:10 Climate Video (You Know, The One That Depicts Children Exploding!)

OS considered posting that horrible piece of trash momentarily, but decided against including anything that totally gruesome on his bit of the digital real estate. The goal is to lift the culture, not pollute it.

But, he is all about having a belly-laugh at the expense of the clown circus currently in charge in Washington. This is just too funny...sometimes, only laughter will do.

Hitler Learns About the Climate 10:10 Video from Steve Hayward on Vimeo.

You Can 'Call Me Al': AlGore And His Massage Therapist

From ABC News--honest folks, ya jes' can't make this stuff up!

The dormant investigation into AlGore, winner of both The Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar, into the allegations of sexual assault upon a massage therapist in 2006, is rousing its sleepy self back to life, complete with preserved clothes and DNA samples, etc., etc., etc....

According to a 73-page "Confidential Special Report" made public by authorities on June 23, the "licensed massage therapist" stated she was summoned to a suite at the upscale Lucia Hotel at the request of a guest, where "during the course of this massage session Al Gore did sexually assault me in his room."

In a detailed statement given to police more than two years after the alleged incident the woman described her surprise at arriving for the VIP massage appointment to find Al Gore drinking beer and opening his arms in a hug saying "Call Me Al."

Ya'll gotta understand something about Tennessee, the state that birthed The Inventor Of The Internet: At about every third interstate exit, next to the truck stop, ya' gotcha one of them 'massage parlors', sporting names like 'Tokyo Massage'. In other words, massage of a sort is offered, but the possibility of something somewhat, shall we say, more exotic is promised as well. The line between the theraputic trade of someone who actually offers relief from muscle spasms in the arms and shoulders and The World's Oldest Profession is somewhat blurred in the mind of your average Tennessee male. It's in the water 'round heah.

So, what's a lonely former Vice-President to do, all alone in his hotel room, far away from the sensual delights of his Tipper? He's already invented the internet, won the Nobel Prize, won the Oscar, and made himself a kajillion bucks saving the world from itself.

What would Bill do at a moment like this? Or his buddy John E from NarthCarulinah?

Well, shoot-fahr! Let's order up some Buds and get ourselves one of them 'massages', jes' lahk back home! Always cheered Bill up, 'specially after a few days of trying to keep Hillary off the warpath.

Now, the visual image of a bloated, drunk and horny AlGore is almost too awful to contemplate, but since the alleged victim put it into play, and it's in the police report, well...(eeewwww!)...

Well, anyway, in honor of The Producer Of An Inconvenient Truth, The Winner Of Both The Nobel Prize And An Oscar, and the man who came within a few hundred hanging chads of become President of the United States, Paul Simon offers his delightful song: You Can Call Me Al. It's almost like Mr. Simon was time-travelling ahead some twenty-five years as he penned the lyrics...

AlGore And Tipper

It appears AlGore and Tipper have decided to go their separate ways after forty years of marriage, self-serving and self-righteous lecturing of the rest of us on exactly how we should live, what to drive, eat, watch, listen to, and of course, how to vote.

No bimbo on the horizon yet, but OldSouth can be patient.

AlGore is a Democrat politician. There is always a bimbo.

Wait for it...she's there somewhere in the shadows of his shadowy life.

Expect the book deals to be announced, the Oprah appearances to be booked, the TipperSympathy tours to schedule.

AlGore will find a way to blame the 'Deniers', the Teabaggers, i.e., anyone who disagrees with AlGore.

Just more hot air, as before:

Earth Day, Forty Years On: Seven Hundred Peer Reviewed Papers That Ummm... Disagree With AlGore

Lubos Moti is yet another informative blogger who is not a middle-aged guy living in Mom's basement. He offers us The Reference Frame, a most entertaining and informative read.

Today, in honor of Earth Day, he reminds us that it coincides with (drumroll, please), the birthday of one V. I. Lenin. In fact, the first Earth Day was celebrated on Lenin's 100th birthday.

Why, isn't that sweet!

In honor of the day, Moti offers a list of seven hundred publicly available, peer-reviewed articles that express serious doubts about human-sourced global warming. They are found listed on the Popular Technology site.

Hmmm, ya'll remember how we all get beaten up with the mantra: 'Global Warming is the consensus of the entire scientific community, and you are a polar-bear-murdering ingrate if you dare disagree!' Well, like almost all the drivel served up to us by the Left, it's not true.

Just to be fair, OS scrolled down the list, and picked one article at random, from The Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology.

The abstract concludes:

[begin quote]

The atmosphere may warm due to human activity, but if it does, the expected change is unlikely to be much more than 1 degree Celsius in the next 100 years. Even the climate models promoted by the IPCC do not suggest that catastrophic change is occurring. They suggest that increases in greenhouse gases are likely to give rise to a warmer and wetter climate in most places; in particular, warmer nights and warmer winters. Generally, higher latitudes would warm more than lower latitudes. This means milder winters and, coupled with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, it means a more robust biosphere with greater availability of forest, crops and vegetative ground cover. This is hardly a major threat. A more likely threat is policies that endanger economic progress. The negative effect of such policies would be far greater than any change caused by global warming. Rather than try to reduce innocuous carbon dioxide emissions, we would do better to focus on air pollution, especially those aspects that are known to damage human health.

[end quote]

The pdf of the complete paper is available at the cited link.

Well, just to be fair, maybe he's wrong. Or biased. And his peer reviewers and editors are biased. Only six-hundred-ninety-nine other articles to choose from that draw much the same conclusion, across a wide range of journals.

It has to be a conspiracy to discredit AlGore, the Winner of The Nobel Prize.


Or just maybe, he's blowing smoke...

The 'Denier': The Consequences Of Insane Ideas

AlGore recently emerged from his Man Cave in Nashville, ranting darkly about 'Deniers', people who don't agree with his view of Global Warming, and his very real set of 'solutions' to a perhaps not-so-real problem. If you are a 'Denier', you are ignorant, obstructionist, perhaps evil. The only other people about whom that fabricated word has ever been used are people who assert that the Holocaust never happened.  You know, 'Deniers'...

Now, about a new sort of 'Denier', that doesn't seem to trouble AlGore or anyone in the Obama Administration:

Clifton at Another Black Conservative (found to your right, and highly recommended) recently posted what seemed to be a strange news item: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quoted as claiming that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 did not occur, but were instead were propoganda fabrications.

So, OS thinks, naaahh, this can't possibly be an accurate account.

So he goes digging around, and yep, there it is.

Even CNN can't make this stuff up.

This assertion is just, well, insane. The product of a sick mind. OS, along with millions of others, saw these events take place. He had friends working in Manhattan that day, one of them at a nearby stock exchange. They assure him it happened. There were neighborhoods of Long Island, Queens, and New Jersey that suffered multiple deaths of loved ones. There were a lot of funerals. These events happened. The hole is still in the ground where the buildings stood. It's madness to even feel the need to write this paragraph, but these are the times in which we live.

Insane ideas, and insane people, attract followers. Lots of them, sometimes. Examples come to mind.
In the twentieth century, two prime candidates are Hitler and Stalin.

OS was beavering away last week, with the TV on low, looking for a ball game, when he tripped across a documentary on the Battle of Stalingrad. The details, in a way, don't matter. But the scope of the tragedy is worth remembering:

Various scholars have estimated the Axis suffered 850,000 casualties (killed, disabled, captured) among all branches of the German armed forces and its allies, many of them POWs who died in Soviet captivity between 1943 and 1955. 400,000 Germans, 120,000 Romanians, 120,000 Hungarians, and 120,000 Italians were killed, wounded or captured. Of the 91,000 German POWs taken at Stalingrad, 27,000 died within weeks and only 5,000 returned to Germany in 1955. The remainder of the POWs died in Soviet captivity.

Those were just the casualties for the Germans and their allies. In one manner or another, some 845,000 lives were sacrificed to Hitler's insane dream of empire. And that was just one battle in the whole bloody mess. Stalin, for his part, was willing to sacrifice innumerable soldiers and civilians, because by golly, it was the city named after him!

Insane ideas, and insane people, attract followers. Lots of them, sometimes.

Ahmadinejad is barking mad. And he sits on huge oil and gas reserves, unlike Hitler. Additionally, he is pushing full steam ahead on the development of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to a large part of the world. Hitler did not succeed at that, thanks to the RAF, and a sane Churchill, who recognized the danger and named it. But, he was on his way. He needed about another year or so.

So, what is the response of the United States government?  Well, the missile defense shield that would protect most of Europe has been removed.  Obama and Hilary keep yammering about 'sanctions' via the UN, in which China and the Russians have zero interest. A goodly portion of Iran is attempting to resist the madman, and the White House utters barely a word.  Mainly, the US government has decided that we should all just join hands, sing 'We Shall Overcome', smile a lot, borrow and spend kajillions more for health care and other follies, and essentially hope for the best. As for Israel...well, they're hung out to dry, and they know it.

This is how wars get started.

Meanwhile, back in Iran, the suppression of any and all who pose any possibility of dissent continues.
This account is just one of many, in this case a Christian minister imprisoned and tortured for performing baptisms.

OS writes this because he doesn't wish to see his children and grandchildren sacrificed at another Stalingrad at the behest of the 'Deniers' in the West, who deny that evil exists, and that evil people do indeed carry out their evil intentions.

Dr. AlGore of The University Of Tennessee? We Are Not Amused

Planet Gore reports on the reaction of folks who live closest to the University of Tennessee about their plan to award AlGore an honorary doctorate.

They are not amused!

It's a tiny example of the disconnect OS ruminated on in his previous post.

In Tennessee, UT is for many folks  a near-religious institution in their lives, an icon. If your kid gets to go to UT Knoxville, your family has achieved something, by golly.  If your kid gets to play football for UT, you are local demi-gods.

Even so, times are tight. Tuition is way up, state money is down, and the dream is becoming more distant for many families.

So, the faculty and board decide to give AlGore (who wants to gut everything that makes life good in Tennessee for the sake of his nutter GlobalWarming rants), an honorary doctorate!!!

What are they thinking?

The additional expense of security at the commencement will be huge. Those dollars could have a better home, people might say...

Of course, this could be a tit-for-tat, with a significant chunk of money headed for the UT endowment  from the Gore family. Of course, the announcements of the two events would be, shall we say, tastefully separated by time, so as to remain, well...tasteful. A follow-up building dedication may be in order, or perhaps a university presidency?

There's a move afoot in the Tennessee legislature that would specifically waive any academic requirement in order to serve as president of a state university. The sponsor cheerfully admits it's being done for an unnamed friend. AlGore, with his B.A., would certainly fit the description.

There's a search on for a new UT President.  They've had a run of bad fortune in the position, but that's another story. And here we have AlGore, with his bright and shiny doctorate, and his tarnished Nobel Prize.

Hmm....what are they thinking?

The disconnect is breathtaking.

A Thunderous Silence, Because The Truth Has Turned Out To Be Profoundly Inconvenient

The BBC interview with Phil Jones, the disgraced head of the climate science scam at East Anglia University, detailed  here and here,  is quite damning of the entire 'global warming' enterprise. Remember, the 'data' generated by East Anglia was used as the basis for billions upon billions of spending around the world. When confronted by Freedom of Information requests, Jones stonewalled. He knows in his heart that his work will not survive scrutiny. He seems to plea for sympathy at one point. OS finds it hard to work up any.

Planet Gore notes the profound lack of coverage of this inconvenient bit of truth in the mainstream US media outlets.

It's now a matter of time. One of them will realize that the silence will be much more damaging to their reputations and bottom lines than can be tolerated.

At that point, the dam will break. The ice, indeed, will melt around AlGore's feet.

Of course, each outlet will claim that (a.) they were wise to the scam all along, and (b.) that they had broken the story of the fraud.

Yadda, yadda.

Yadda.

In the meantime, OS wishes to share the 'Summary for Policymakers' of an extensive report by Joseph D'Aleo (co-founder of The Weather Channel), and Anthony Watts, a 25-year meteorology broadcast veteran. The full report, published 29 January 2010,  may be downloaded here, at the end of the linked article.

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-
century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

It's a 100+ page report, heavy on footnotes and charts.

No one had to force the information from them, and it is open to peer review, as it has been published.

Who you gonna believe?

Al Gore Speaks From Parnassus

His conclusion:  It's Worse Than We Thought

Silence about the bogus science.  Anyone who dares disagree is a 'denier'. Apocalyptic warnings that only massive government intervention can save us. The North Pole is melting away before our eyes, even though the ice cap is growing.  No word lately on the polar bears.

A browse through his blog is educational, to say the least.

Gotta get back to work.  Tennessee is snowed in.

Again.

Global Warming, Or, The Weather Station Next To The Waste Incinerator

Bit by bit, person by person, week by week.

The global warming scam is being exposed.  The Sunday Times reports:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution. In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. 

No debate allowed. The UN, and Al Gore had spoken.  Any who dared disagree were simply ignorant, backward, Luddites, not worthy of consideration. Obama ran his campaign on the assumption of global warming, and the promise to set all right.  Billions upon billions of dollars of government spending has already occurred, seeking a solution to a problem that likely never existed. Then there are the private sector costs incurred, due to legislation and regulation. The list goes on and on...

But, with doubts arising, and evidence of fraud surfacing, the IPCC invited outside review of its last report. The evidence points away from their conclusion.


Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, was one scholar invited to review the findings.  The Times reports:

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.


“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.


Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.


His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment. Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator. 

...a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

...a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

...a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

And we are expected to change everything about our lives, predicated on conclusions created by this kind of junk science.  And we are expected to be civil whilst this happens.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

The principal scientist upon whose 'research' the whole hysteria has been based admits he has perhaps lost the data, and that there has been no global warming since 1995.

And that it is likely the earth was warmer for a long period during medieval times.

Still others are chiming in.  Reputable scientists, who understand that truth matters, that numbers and words have meaning. 

And Al Gore's office, back in Nashville, has no comment to offer.

This country came within a whisker of electing Al Gore to the Presidency in 2000. Luckily, his home state would have none of it.

So, as OldSouth awaits the next round of snow here tonight in Tennessee, he breathes a temporary sigh of relief. The scammers won't go away easily. They'll think of some other way to hustle the taxpayer and wage war on the economy.

But, November is coming.  There is a public record of who did and did not drink the AlGore Koolaid.

This will be an interesting year.

Al Gore Roasting On An Open Fire

A wonderful turn of phrase! James Delingpole of the Guardian deserves the credit.

The whole global warming scam is coming off the rails, as he details here.

Even as Obama declares it to be 'accepted science' at his State of the Union rant last Wednesday.

Delingpole gloats. He has reason.

Time to empanel the grand juries here, yet?