Sunday Scan

Who You Gonna Mourn To?

China, an atheist regime that forces "religion" into a state-run box and prosecutes practitioners of serious religion, has called for three days of mourning for the tens of thousands of victims of last week's devastating earthquake.

Who will the country mourn to? A vacuum? The spirit of Mao, who, decomposed as he is, does not offer much eternal hope?

The answer is in the heart of those that suffer, as this AP story reveals:

Dozens of students were buried in new graves dotting a green hillside overlooking the rubble, the small mounds of dirt failing to block the pungent smell of decay wafting from the ground. Most graves were unmarked, though several had wooden markers with names scribbled on them.

Zhou Bencen, 36, said he raced to the town's middle school after the earthquake, where relatives who arrived earlier had dug out the body of his 13-year-old daughter, Zhou Xiao, crushed on the first floor.

Zhou cradled his wife in his arms, holding her hand and stroking her back while she sobbed hysterically. "Oh God, oh God, why is life so bitter?"

Oh God, give them comfort. The state certainly can't.

Moral Relativism Alert!

Before straying too far from AP, let's turn our attention to a story filed by Terence Hunt earlier this morning about Prez Bush's address to assembled Arab leaders in Egypt. Hunt tells us:

Winding up a five-day trip to the region, Bush took a strikingly tougher tone with Arab nations than he did with Israel in a speech Thursday to the Knesset. Israel received effusive praise from the president while Arab nations heard a litany of U.S. criticisms mixed with some compliments.

Gosh. I wonder why the tone would be different.

One of the rules of thumb I teach my employees is that when your opposition is lying, distorting or just being ignorant, use their own words against them. That would apply with Hunt's story. Let's look at Hunt's reporting on what Bush said to the Arab leaders and see if there's a reason for the contrasting tones, shall we?

"Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail," Bush said ...

Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and are represented in government. On the other side, there's Mubarik, Assad and a host of other power-barons who have jailed or suppressed their opposition, and not one functioning democracy save the nascent one in Iraq and the crumbling one in Lebanon. Point Bush.

"America is deeply concerned about the plight of political prisoners in this region, as well as democratic activists who are intimidated or repressed, newspapers and civil society organizations that are shut down and dissidents whose voices are stifled ..."

Israel's' "political prisoners" are people who have carried out or planned violent attacks with real weapons against Israel. In the rest of the region, jails are full of people whose only weapon is the pen or the tongue. Freedom of speech in Israel, repression in all the Arab lands leads to point Bush.

"I call on all nations in this region to release their prisoners of conscience, open up their political debate and trust their people to chart their future ..."

Israel has no prisoners of conscience, just prisoners of action. It has an open political debate, and it trusts its future to its people. Anyone want to speak from the Arab side? Anyone? Anyone?

Point, game and match Bush.

On The Wrong Foot

The EU asked Interpol to look into the state of Islamist terror in Europe. Interpol found that it's bad and getting worse ... and it blamed England.

Britain's controversial foreign and military policy has made UK the hub of Islamic terrorism across Europe, and turned the country into a fertile ground for jihadist recruiters, a report by the EU warned.

The EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report revealed that British foreign policy presented critical dangers for all Europe: "The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have a large impact on the security environment of the EU." (Source)

So the problem isn't the EU's policy of appeasing radical Islamists who promote race hatred under the protection of the EU's tolerance laws? And it's not Islam itself and its long history of violent jihad, sharpened in recent years by the phenomena of international migration, the Internet and Saudi-funded radical education?

The EU study may be worlds off in its finger-pointing, but it's probably right about this: It predicts more terror attacks in Europe from a "rejuvenated" al-Qaeda.

Where are we fighting al-Qaeda? Well, we and the Brits are fighting them in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where aren't we fighting them? Europe.

Big News From The Nanosphere

Advances in nanotechnology appear poised to dramatically increase the efficiency of thin film solar cells. As in from a theoretical cap of 31% efficiency all the way up to 45% efficiency.

Put on your techie hat and read about it here.

Anthropomorphic Hucksterism

More indications that the global warming debate is anything but over:

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) will announce [Monday] that more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition rejecting claims of human-caused global warming. The purpose of OISM’s Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climate damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. (source, via ICECAP)

The OISM list doesn't focus on climatologists, so the Warmies will discount the announcement. But all have university degrees in science and over 9,000 of them have PhD's so we can postulate that they know the difference between good and bad research methods, and the difference between evidence and proof.

Meanwhile, as we look at ten years of global cooling having no effect whatsoever on the prognostications and pontifications of our electeds, Richard Rahn writes in WashTimes that global warming constitutes the greatest intelligence failure of our era, concluding:

You may wonder — if the data from the last decade show the Earth is not getting warmer, and the climate models have been making incorrect predictions — why are so many in the political and media classes continuing to shout about the dangers of global warming and insisting the "science" is settled when the opposite is true. (You may recall that Copernicus and Galileo had certain problems going against the conventional wisdom of their time.)

The reason people like Al Gore and many others are in denial is explained by cognitive dissonance. This occurs when evidence increasingly contradicts a strongly held belief. Rather than accept the new evidence and change their minds, some people will become even more insistent on the "truth" of the discredited belief, and attack those who present the new evidence — again an "intelligence" failure.

Finally, many people directly benefit from government funding global warming programs and care more about their own pocketbooks than the plight of the world's poor who are paying more for food. This is not an "intelligence" but an "integrity" failure.

This One's A Stand-Alone


SF Readies For Big Gay Bucks

While the 60-plus percent of us in CA who voted that marriage in our state is between a man and a woman are unhappy with this week's CA supreme court decision overturning our will, tourism officials in San Francisco are decidedly ... uh, gayer.

San Francisco's tourist industry is betting that gay marriage will lead to a boon in same-sex wedding and honeymoon packages.

Nationally, gay tourism amounts to a $60 billion-a-year industry. Thanks to Thursday's ruling by the state Supreme Court striking down the ban on same-sex marriage, California stands to become a destination spot for gay and lesbian couples from around the world who want to get hitched.

And San Francisco is hoping for the biggest slice of the wedding cake.

No sooner did the court decision come down than the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau fired off a release to the gay press, inviting couples to get married in the city where "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history continues to be made." (source)

If the ruling stands, gays from any state will be able to wed in California, unlike Massachusetts, which only lets its own gays marry.

Cue up quickly, my friends. A constitutional amendment is likely to cut your fun short soon enough. Had gays gone the legislative route, they very well might have secured the right to marry in California, but as long as they rely on courts stripping the majority of the sanctity of their vote, the majority will stand together against gay marriage -- because they support the sanctity of a democratic, free vote, not necessarily because they support the sanctity of marriage.

Gore: Laying A $300 Million Egg

I missed Al Gore on 60 Minutes. I miss just about everyone on 60 Minutes. Blood pressure, you know.

But I've looked over his new Web site, wecansolveit.org, viewed his ad ...


... and read what the NYT has to say about his new $300 million effort to recruit Warmie activists, which likens the campaign to the moon shot and the civil rights movement.

And I am vastly, momentously unimpressed.

First, the ad. According to Gorecrat Cathy Zoi, they want the ad to have the same "marketing success" of the "this is your brain on drugs" ad. I hope so too. The frying egg ad had a great visual impact but very little social impact, and drug use among teens grew through the years it aired. Too bad about that, but how great would it be if the Warmies blew $300 million and didn't move the public opinion needle one iota?

I don't think they will, for several reasons.

First, the ad is a milquetoast blah of a thing with nothing near the impact of the frying egg or the other ad Zoi cited, the anti-pollution ad with the tearful Native American. Both of those ads showed the problems graphically and we knew they were problems within our power to solve. Not true of wecansolveit. They didn't show the global warming problem at all (how could they?), and did nothing to convince skeptics that it's within our power to solve.

Second, $300 million isn't enough. The NYT quoted a public service advertising expert who said:

“I think the global warming project media budget should be 10 times as high. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi spend over a billion dollars each year to promote brand preference for soft drinks. In this light, the $100 million per year to change our lifestyles seems pretty small.”

I agree. How many times did Mr. Whipple have to squeeze the Charmin -- at thousands of dollars per squeeze -- to convince Americans that they really wanted a one-ply toilet paper? Besides, how much electricity will be burned to power all the TVs and transmitters needed to get the message across?

What is the carbon footprint of your campaign, Mr. Gore?

And most significantly, the ad is targeted towards folks whose opinions it won't change.

Ms. Zoi said the goal was to recruit people she described as “influentials.” She added: “These are people who talk to five times as many people a day as the typical person, who derive self-esteem from having new information.”

Influentials have already made up their minds about global warming ... that's the kind of people they are; that's what makes them influential. wecansolveit may give some influentials a new action mechanism, but it won't bring any new influentials to the party. They're already there.

The campaign says it wants to recruit 10 million activists, becoming a Warmie version of the Leftist political action site MoveOn.org. But they're spending $300 million to do it -- or $30 per target person. Given that their target person already fawns over Gore and is committed to "saving the planet" (egomaniacs!), why spend a penny getting them?

As dreadful and ill thought out I think this campaign is, it's troubling to realize that there's no chance for a $300 million campaign to recruit counter-Warmie activists into an action network to shout down the carbon crazies at wecandoit.org.

Who's going to start wedon'thavetodoit.org?

Quote Of The Day: Goring Gore Edition

"If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”
-- Weather Channel founder John Coleman

John Coleman founded the Weather Channel in 1982, and he's not at all happy with its current persona as evangelist for global warming hysteria, which reached a crescendo in December 2006, when the channel's climate expert, Heidi Cullen staked out ground worthy of the Inquisition: That weather-casters who had questioned that humans influence global warming should be decertified by the American Meteorological Society.

The quote above comes from a talk Coleman made at The Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change -- a hang-out for deniers whom Cullen would burn at the figurative stake, were it not for the figurative carbon emissions such an act would generate.

I'm not sure how one would show harm or prove standing, which of course you would have to do to keep the lawsuit from being thrown out of court. Here's one possible scenario, though: You are a tax-paying resident of a city or state that is purchasing carbon credits from one of Gore's minions, so the fact that you are unwillingly a part of the purchase may provide standing, and that a portion of your income taxes are paying for the credits may prove harm.

Alternatively, a local or state prosecutor looking to walk into a dangerous buzzsaw of publicity could certainly gain it by charging Gore and the Gorettes with fraud -- if said prosecutor could get a Grand Jury to go for it.

But let's leave the gore-y details to the lawyers who live and die by the details and just fantasize for a quiet moment about what fun it would be to watch this spectacle unfold.

....

Ah, that was nice.

Unfortunately, the pleasant thoughts of Al sweating as the klieg lights burn through fossil fuel by the motherload seams were dimmed by the fearsome thought that Gore could win the lawsuit, which would forever cement (no, not cement; it emits nasty greenhouse gases) ... forever ice his rule as the King of Global Warming Exploitation.

Is there no justice?

Hat-tip: Jim; Gore image: The Steel Deal

Sunday Scan

A Curious Endorsement

Ed Morrisey, skipper of Captain's Quarters has decided who he's going to vote for and has published an endorsement. It's Mitt Romney, and his thinking is much like mine, as I approach finality in my decision-making. (I need to decide by California's Feb. 5 primary unless I vote absentee.)

No one's the perfect conservative, but Mitt'll do. Check. Executive leadership and experience. Check. The guy we want if the economy turns south. Check.

What is telling, very, very telling, is that the war against Islamic jihadists and Iraq is not mentioned once in Morissey's endorsement. How could such a thoroughly exceptional an observer of our times make so monumental oversight?

In part, it's because when looking at McCain, Romney and Giuliani, there's strong confidence that any of them have the ability to faithfully and forcefully guide the mission.

And in part, it's because we have a general and senior staff in the field who are getting the job done, taking the pressure off the president.

And that is also, perhaps, the reason for Morrissey's oversight. With the war going well, one of the keenest observers of the war on terror simply forgot to mention it.

A Kennedy Endorsement

There's news today that Ted Kennedy has come out of his fog long enough to endorse Obama tomorrow. Could I care any less? Checking .... No.

But who can't take note, as I wrote last night, that Caroline Kennedy is endorsing Obama? That is golden; that has value; that has magic.

I still think of Caroline Kennedy as a little girl in a pretty coat standing by her mother as little John saluted. That image in our mind gives her a very special place in the American consciousness, as does how she has lived her life since: quietly and pretty darn normally.

So when this 40-year-old mother of teens who works in New York City's' schools writes of Obama in today's NYT ...

There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility. ...

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

... it is a powerful thing for Obama, indeed.

I was Boy Scout age when Kennedy was killed, so I admit that some youthful romanticism is affecting my thinking. That said, I still think this endorsement is huge, and may have just iced Obama as the Dem nominee.

And we were so hoping to be able to take on Hillary.

Throwing Stones At Greenhouses

In case your copy of the journal from the Institut für Mathematische Physik at Germany's Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina has been sitting around unread since last summer, here's what you're missing:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 °C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

A hat-tip Bubba who led me to the post by Van Helsing at Moonbattery, who comments, "Someone get this to Al Gore quickly, before he makes a fool of himself. Whoops, too late."

Russia Pumped Oil-for-Food For Bucks

Just when you thought the Oil-for-Food scandal was past its last outrage, just when you thought Putin's Russia couldn't get any more troubling, there's always another story that shouts, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!" And this new one, from Sky News, is a doozey:

A former Russian spymaster has said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500m (£252m) from the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Sergei Tretyakov says he helped Saddam Hussein's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the programme.

The scheme was set up to ease the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

It allowed Iraq to sell oil provided the bulk of the proceeds were used to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods and to pay war reparations.

However, a UN investigation has accused 2,200 companies from 40 countries of cheating the scheme out of some $1.8bn (about £908m).

The former spy, who defected to the US in 2000 as a double agent, said this allowed Russia to skim profits on the scheme.

Of the UN, Tretyakov says,

"It's an international spy nest. Inside the UN, we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information."

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing: Why do we pay to keep the UN alive when it's used against us, when it steals from and rapes those it is supposed to help, and when it's designed primarily to benefit our enemies?

Putin's New Man At NATO

And while we're on the subject of Putinville, let's pause to consider Vlad the Tiny's new appointment to represent Russia at NATO, Dmitri Rogozin. It's an appointment, says Andreus Umland at History News Network, that should be seen as "a slap in the face of the West."

The new NATO envoy is an infamous nationalist with manifold links to racist and antisemitic circles throughout his political career. From the beginning of his rise, Rogozin’s image has been that of a “protector” of ethnic Russians in and outside the Russian Federation, as well as of a rabidly anti-Western pan-Slavist. He was founder and co-founder of various nationalist groupings one of which openly demanded, among other things, to make homosexualism a criminal offense.

At a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Rogozin made Europe responsible for the horrors of Soviet communism - in as far as Marxism was imported to Russia from the West.

Just Putin's type, eh?

Bans And Lifting Bans

Spiegel has a couple interesting stories today on bans -- one on a busybody secularist ban that forces a change in many folks' lifestyle, all to aggrandize the Nanny State, and one a ban that's being lifted in order to squelch secularism -- an action that makes me nervous.

First, from Germany, the nation that brought us stern bauhaus avant guarde denizens, always with a cigarette dangling, there's this:

Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor, former minister of defense and co-publisher of the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, is being accused of breaking the law -- for violating Germany's new ban on smoking in public places.

Committed smokers Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki -- aged a lung-cancer-defying 89 and 88, respectively -- are being investigated by Hamburg public prosecutors under suspicion of breaking the smoking ban and endangering public health, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported Friday. The complaint was brought by the Wiesbaden Non-Smokers Initiative, an anti-smoking organization based in the town of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt.

If you're almost 90 and you want to light up, and you're the guest of honor at the event, shouldn't you be able to? Of course not!

The Nanny Staters saw in Schmidt a target to publicize campaign to control our lives, so he and Loki are now potentially common criminals, all in the name of people who know what's good for us (and not smoking is definitely good for us) telling us what to do.

Then, from Turkey, there's this:

Women at Turkish universities could soon show up in class wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, as the government moves towards lifting a ban on the practice.

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has its root in an Islamist religious movement, reached an agreement with an opposition nationalist party on Thursday to cooperate on legislation to lift the two decade-old ban.

"Agreement has been reached ... the issue of the head scarf was evaluated in terms of rights and freedoms," read a joint statement released by the AKP and the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The two parties control enough seats in parliament to end the ban with a vote that could be held as early as next week.

A lift on the ban would anger Turkey's secular elite, who view the wearing of head scarves as a political statement aimed at undermining the nation's secular principles.

Anyone following Turkish politics could see this coming. Fundamentally (bad choice of words?), my response should be "good," because government shouldn't be setting dress codes for schools. If a Muslim girl wants to wear a scarf, then why shouldn't she be able to?

But things are never simple in Turkey, or with Islam. The ban is more like a social dike, keeping all the harsh and restrictive tenants of Islam from overtaking the university. It's a symbol that there's a place where free thought is still allowed -- even as banning the scarves is a symbol that there's a place where free thought is not allowed.

Big picture: Turkey is on its way to losing its important symbolic role as the world's foremost secular Islamic nation. I fear that once scarves are allowed on campus, any girl trying to go to school without one will become the victim of Islamist thugs, and Islam will grab the nation's free spirit in its chilling, vice-like grip.

High Court: Gore Lied, People Cried

I missed this important bit of news:

The High Court in London recently ordered the British Government to correct nine of the 36 serious errors in Al Gore’s climate movie before innocent pupils were exposed to it.

Read more at Greenie Watch.

Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is also shown to malleable minds all across America -- but usually because a Greenie-Warmie indoctrination officer teacher has purchased the film with his or her own money.

If anyone knows of public funds being used to purchase the film, consider this: There's a very important lawsuit in the making that could protect students from the mistruths, exaggerations and hysteria of Gore's polemic.

$6,700-A-Minute Al

Al Gore profiteering off global warming? Perish the thought!

Of course he's busy creating hysteria to drive investment and government funding for the companies he's invested in (here, here). To further his obnoxiousness, now there's this:

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 ($6,700)a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.

The former American Vice-President was also accused of being "precious" at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.

Many of the audience at last month's Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. (Daily Mail)

Sources said guests were "twitching" during the speech and stopped listening to Al and talking among themselves.

Even guests who paid $100,000 to attend the event found themselves brushed off by Gore's bodyguards when they tried to approach the "precious" global warming grandstander.

Careful, Al, if you get any chillier, you may reverse global warming all by yourself.

Cartoon: Indystar

Al 'Midas' Gore II: WSJ Piles On

Following Forbes' skewering of the motivations of Al Gore, we get this today from WSJ's editorial board:

[L]ike the energy barons of an earlier age, Mr. Gore has the chance to achieve enormous wealth after being named last week as a new partner at the famously successful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. ... If Mr. Gore can develop market-based solutions to environmental challenges, we will cheer the well-deserved riches flowing his way. On the other hand, if he monetizes his Nobel Peace Prize by securing permanent government subsidies for nonmarket science projects, he'll have earned a different judgment.

There's no shortage of new capital pouring into alternative energy projects these days. According to the National Venture Capital Association, "clean tech" start-ups attracted more than $800 million in venture capital last quarter, a new record. What's not clear is whether these are fundamentally energy ventures or political ventures.

Gore is becoming the king of the alternative energy investors/venture capitalists. Which means, basically, he's the king of stuff nobody actually uses, to lift a nice phrase from Manhattan Institute thinker/engineer Peter Huber.

How do you make money off of something no one uses? You get the government to subsidize it, which is why the former Dem Veep/almost Prez Al Gore is really so important to the alternative energy biz.

It isn't his knowledge of the products; it's his influence in Washington and in 50 state capitals. If Al can't deliver the subsidies, his portfolio can't deliver returns. WSJ spells it out by looking at some of the companies Kleiner Perkins has invested in:

• Altra, an ethanol company. Ethanol is infeasible without taxpayer doles
• Mascoma, ditto
• Amyris Biotechnologies, biofuel developer. Biofuels get the same sort of subsidies as ethanol
• Miasole, solar manufacturer. Stands to gain from proposed federal subsidy for solar power
• Ausra, ditto
• Altarock Energy, ditto, except for geothermal energy

Get the picture? Gore explains it as, "What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Project and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally." Translated, "What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of Massive Government Subsidy I, Massive Government Subsidy II and Massive Government Subsidy III, and as we bilk the American taxpayer for these personal profits public-spirited subsidies, we'll be working to get the same internationally."

WSJ says Al will deserve every penny if even one of these technologies frees us from our current unhealthy energy scenario, but I'm not so kind. The bad ideas and outright scams in the alternative fuels biz are legion, the good products are few -- and the free market is fully capable of finding and building those few without the taxpayers underwriting Gore's nest-feathering.

Quote Of The Day: Al 'Midas' Gore Edition

"Money! Is that the real purpose of Gore’s many wild exaggerations in An Inconvenient Truth? I begin to think so." -- Richard Karlgaard

Karlgaard may be just beginning to think so; I've thought so ever since An Inconvenient Diatribe hit the shelves. Gore cannot really cash in on global warming unless we start addressing it through major investments; only then can his company, Generation Investment Management, begin to score big wins from its investments in eco-friendly businesses.

Gore's scam is simple, and Karlgaard explains it well in his Forbes piece:

[G]reenies like ... Gore want high carbon taxes. Right now! The idea is to hike taxes and regulations on carbon fuels to the point at which investor dollars and entrepreneurial sweat will pour into alternative energy investments. Right now.

Money! Is that the real purpose of Gore’s many wild exaggerations in An Inconvenient Truth? I begin to think so. Why else would Gore distort the truth by an order of magnitude?

Like so much of the environmental disaster biz, the scam is so transparent and the alternate truth is so obvious that to compensate we simply must re-cast P.T. Barnum's famous quote: "There's a thousand suckers born every minute."

Any less and the sucker quotient will be far too small to support the Greenie and Warmie movements.

Give Me A Break (From Global Warming)

clipped from hotair.com

This clip from John Stossel, courtesy of Hot Air, is a typically good Stossel dissection of a Big Foolishness.

It's a bit over 8 minutes long, but you don't have to watch the whole thing. In the first few minutes you'll see him interviewing terrified children who are convinced they will drown in global warming floods or die other horrible deaths because of mankind's irresponsibility over global warming.

Are these kids the Brown Shirts of a future enviro-fascist army? Watch them and it's hard to think otherwise.

Gore Derangement Syndrome?

Paul Krugman has named it: His NYT column today accuses the right of having Gore Derangement Syndrome, as if Al Gore is a complete innocent and the right is completely whacko.

Before we go any further into whether Krugman's got a point worth putting a hat on, I offer this into evidence:

We conservatives did not make this ranting Al Gore up. After his (Constitutional) loss to Bush (a loss Krugman dismisses as "his opponent somehow ended up in the White House," as if the Constitution did not exist), Gore did get very bizarre and angry for a while, saying things most undiplomatic, earning our dislike of him.

Krugman thinks we dismiss Gore because of some sort of embarrassment over Bush being elected:

Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

Of course, there is no stain. Even the NYT agrees that Gore could not have won Florida, and without Florida, hanging chads and all, there could not be a Gore presidency. Krugman is just playing the old political card of attempting to hang his side's greatest weakness on the other side. We know that anger over the 2000 election propelled Bush Derangement Syndrome into the stratosphere, and Krugman must minimize that insanity before he can move forward his thesis that the right is insane. Otherwise, he's just the pot calling the kettle black.

The year 2000 is very far behind for most everyone except Krugman and his fringy leftist buddies. We can find things that make us angry about Gore that are much more contemporary, and much more valid. Krugman can't because he, like Gore, is a Warmie fanatic who is unfettered by truths:

It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

Like Gore, he doesn't believe in free markets, which have proved their efficiency time and time again. And like Gore, he believes Florida can be underwater in 50 or 60 years, while the scientific consensus -- words I don't throw around as lightly as they do -- calls for an unnoticeable one foot rise in ocean levels over the next 100 years.

Since Krugman is a faithful Gore acolyte, accepting his hysteria as truth, anyone who questions the High Priest must be by definition insane. But we are not insane; we are practical. All we ask is that the hysteria be expunged, the truth be told, and the truth be measured against other truths, so we can spend money wisely, choosing intelligently between the multiple challenges humanity faces.

That's no good for Krugman and his avid, vapid readers. (Look at the memeorandum links to see how blindly the leftyblogs aped his inanity.) They need hysteria; they need demons and Saint Gore provides them.

Without Gore, environmentalism would by dying the death of a successful movement that has written the regulations that put it out of business. Without Gore, big government would have no reason to exist, other than Hillarycare, whose future is a bit tenuous.

But with Gore, we have a reason to stay rabid on the environment instead of reasonable, we have a reason to impose big government on little people willy-nilly for at least the next century or two. And if we raise a peep of protest, then we must be suffering from Gore Derangement Syndrome; we certainly can't have a point worth making.

I was tempted to nominate Krugman's column as one of the year's most ridiculous, but it's too much "Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can't hear you!" and not enough attempted reason to merit the nomination.

Sunday Scan

The OCRegister editorial page leads off today's scan with its editorial giving a cool reception to Al Gore's ignoble Nobel:

"Nearly every significant statement that Vice President Gore makes regarding climate science and climate policy is either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative or wrong," says CEI environmental policy expert Marlo Lewis. Otherwise, nice job Mr. Gore.

Global warming alarmism serves those opposing free-market economics and its fossil-fuel reliance and those seeking power and profit by gaming the system once they force rule changes. Neither motive is in most peoples' interests. The Kyoto Protocol, which would force nations to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, if enforced would reduce projected temperatures about one degree over 100 years while – and this is not exaggeration – dampening and devastating economies worldwide.

Gore got a much warmer reception in Palo Alto, where young and old alike believe his hype, says an also hyped up Merc News:

Mackenzie Pope, 12, ... was one of several kids who had the day off from school [what?!] and showed up with signs saying [to Gore] "Welcome to Palo Alto."

"I was walking my dog when I saw all the people here and so I went home to get them," she said, motioning to her mom, little sisters Bailey and Rylie, and a couple of friends. [Mackenzie, Bailey and Rylie -- how cloyingly No. Cal.]

The girls, like typical Palo Alto kids, were well-versed on the climate-change issue.

"They say in 20 years New York City is going to be half gone," said Mackenzie's friend, Charlotte Barry.

The alliance is a small organization Gore founded last year as a fundraising arm for his media campaign. Its office, at Hawthorne Avenue and High Street, once housed the Foundation for a Global Community, a descendant of Beyond War. And it's next door to POST, the Peninsula Open Space Trust.

"This spot has good karma," said POST Executive Director Audrey Rust. "We're sort of at ground zero, right here on High Street."

The Merc News, which is after all a news paper, somehow didn't feel compelled to correct little Charlotte's gorism.

Babs At The Money Trough

Wrapping up news from the Golden State, the LATimes reports that Bay Area Greenie Babs Boxer is swimming in dough from the very hooligans against The Sacred Earth Mother she has worked so hard to harm:

For years Barbara Boxer has campaigned, first for Congress, then for the U.S. Senate, as a progressive Democrat strong on ... the environment. ...

But now that she's chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, she's finding some new people who want to be her friend. And not in the MySpace kind of way.

Roll Call reports (sorry, it's a subscriber-access page) that Boxer, who assumed the committee chair with the 2006 Democratic takeover of the Senate, received through Aug. 30 about $41,000 from political action committees representing "energy, natural resources, construction and transportation industries."

But in the 2004 cycle, when she was last up for re-election, Boxer "reported $18,500 in total receipts from the energy and natural resources sector in all of 2003 and 2004, according to CQ MoneyLine ....

Politicians. Love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta pay 'em off.

Don't Worry About Islam

There's a complicated piece by Simon Jenkins in the Times of London spurred by the 29-page letter to the Pope from 138 imams and other Muslim high and mighty. Jenkins doesn't see Islam as the biggest threat to the West, rather:

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it.

It's easy to discount this out of hand because Jenkins slices too thin. Our fear isn't of the tiny groups of jihadists ... it's the consequences of even five or ten percent of Islam picking up the jihadist terror tool kit. Still, the piece isn't just liberal pap and multi-culti over-optimism. There's a lot of food for thought there, like:

It is ironic that defeat in the cold war should have led Russia to the exuberant self-confidence of Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, while victory has plunged the West into a loss of nerve. In both Washington and London are leaders who have so little confidence in democracy as to regard it as vulnerable to a few madmen, and who have so little respect for democracy’s freedoms as to suspend them at the bang of a bomb.

I believe the liberties that have been suspended have been carefully defined and limited so as to protect Americans and subject suspicious foreigners and battlefield enemies to the treatment that is needed and deserved. But how about this for a Sunday pondering: What if we fought the war on terror the way the Libs would have us fight it? Would we not still win?

Of course, to answer that, you also have to answer this: Would the extra American dead that might result from the Lib approach be worth the rigorous, hard-line protection of each letter of the Constitution, as applied by Lib judges?

Watch It, Canadians!

Canadian readers, watch out! Science Daily tells us that according to the journal Environmental Research, you might be one of the 25,000 Canadians pollution will kill this year! I love these studies that pore over medical records and death certificates and attempt to lay the blame at pollution, or global warming, or fast food, or whatever else the Lib media have their eyepieces focused on.

Here's the picture that accompanies the story. I kid you not. Look at that awful, life-nipping gunk! The caption reads:

Photo taken near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Industry in the foreground, pristine mountains in the background -- Canada is not immune to environmental problems. (Credit: Michele Hogan)

Help me find the industries in the photo that are cavalierly ignoring Canada's environmental laws and spewing toxins into drinking water and mother's milk. More easily, help me find manipulated statistics that look at cancer deaths and low birth-weight babies (as this one did) and attribute them to pollution instead of, oh, the luck of the draw or genetics or moms who smoke and booze.

Corn Fission?

Earlier in the week, Syrian flacks toured media hacks around an ag field and ag lab that they say were targeted by Israeli fighters ... why the Zionists would do that, who knows? After reporting the tour with almost a completely straight face, today the NYT joins those who understand what really was going on there:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state.

Central mystery? Not to everyone.

Who Defines 'Dying Well?'

Charlotte Allen, faced with minor breast cancer surgery -- seemingly an oxymoron, but not really -- was asked on three separate occasions whether she had a living will. A complicated form was stuffed into her mitt, asking her to ponder "a range of conditions under which I might like to have a Do Not Resuscitate order hung over my hospital bed, whether I would want to be denied "artificial" food and water under some circumstances, what I thought about being taken off a ventilator, and so forth."

Her conclusion, as very well relayed in her WaPo piece today:

In fact, when I contemplate the concept of "dying well," I can't avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means "dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die." Consider what's happened in recent years: The classic Hippocratic Oath and its prohibition against physicians giving people a "deadly drug" has collapsed with the growing acceptance of such notions as physician-assisted suicide, the "right to die," and even giving some very sick, disabled or demented people a little push over the edge, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands. People facing end-of-life decisions may well feel subtle pressure from the medical and bioethical establishments to make the choice that will save the most money, as well as spare their relatives and society at large the burden of their continued existence.

As the SCHIP plan catches the news and the Dems vow to override a prez veto, do you recall ever seeing someone raise the question of whether parents would be pressured to quickly dispatch sick babies once the feds start paying for their costly health care? Neither did I.

Start thinking about it.

Road to Rangoon

No, it's not a long-lost Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie; it's the UN's continuing dismal performance in its attempts to stop the Burmese junta from killing off every monk and protester in that poor country.

In this case, the road will lead UN chief Burma dude Ibrahim Gambari to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Japan, before "hoping" to return to Burma. Condi's response? Knock it off! Get back to Burma pronto and do something.

Good advice.

Nothing Noble About Nobel

"Action is necessary now," said the Nobel Peace Prize committee upon awarding Al Gore and the UN climate hacks the prize, "before climate change moves beyond man's control."

Climate change, as a global force of incomprehensible magnitude and complexity, has never been in man's control. There's evidence we can exacerbate it; but control it? No. That's ego -- incredible ego -- not science.

I'm listening to CNN now, and the commentator is saying that global warming has nothing to do with politics. Typical CNN. If we go the Nobel/Gore/UN route, it will have dire and massive political ramifications, as economies are derailed in the name of a few tenths of a percent of change in climate trends.

None of the climate change remedies comes without politics. There are subsidies and penalties, and there are massive attacks on market forces and blithe discountings of human needs and desires, all to be imposed by governmental authorities. Is that not politics; very bad politics?

By endorsing Gore, the representative of the hysteric fringe of the global warming movement, and the IPCC, the leading edge of the government mandate as sole solution arm of the movement, the Nobel Committee has done the second stupidest thing in its questionable existence.

Yes, it will something much greater than even the global warming religion to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize given to Yasser Arafat.

Ecos Chilly On Gore's Chilean Seabass Choice

Between the white rhino pate course and the bald eagle fricassee with wild rice ...

Al Gore, the world's most high profile green campaigner, was at the centre of an embarrassing row yesterday after the serving of a rare fish at his daughter's Beverly Hills wedding.

Just one week after Live Earth, his global musical spectacular [flop] to raise awareness of environmental issues, the former vice-president attended a rehearsal dinner for his daughter's marriage that featured Chilean sea bass. Sarah Gore, 28, a medical student, was married to the Los Angeles businessman Bill Lee at the Beverly Hills Hotel on July 14.

The night before the wedding, People magazine reported, the Gores were at a dinner for 75 at the nearby Crustacean restaurant where a six-course tasting menu included Chilean sea bass - also known as Patagonian toothfish.

The reaction was swift: writing in in the Australian Daily Telegraph, Rebecca Keeble of Humane Society International, a conservation pressure group, complained of the danger to the species from "from illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing activities".

She noted that "more than 50 per cent of toothfish traded is illegally caught, and includes juveniles vital to the ongoing toothfish population". She called on the US government to help crack down on illegal fishing by sanctioning Spain for allowing its nationals to fish illegally for the species in conservation areas.

And in the meantime, she acidly suggested, "Al Gore could choose something else to eat". Her attack on the former vice-president, and his implied hypocrisy, were rapidly picked up by bloggers around the world. (The Telegraph)

Well, not rapidly picked up by this particular vacationing blogger, but I pass it along nonetheless.

I would like the goods on that wedding ... I bet its carbon footprint was massive, but Al's not really one of us, you know. He's one of the ones that knows what's right for us, even though it's not right for him.

Kilimanjaro Rebuts Klimate King Gore

The Klimate King, Al Gore, likes to stand in front of images of Mt. Kilimanjaro and proclaim the global warming is behind its shrinking snowcap.

It's powerful imagery, because before and after photos exist. What he doesn't tell people -- probably because he didn't really research this stuff, he just compiled it -- is that the snows of Kilimanjaro were shrinking long before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and that the temperature at the top of the peak does this one really inconvenient thing: It never raises above freezing.

Here's a report on this inconvenience for the Klimate King's konsideration:

[M]ost scientists who study Kilimanjaro's glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano's poster-child status.

Yes, ice cover has shrunk by 90 percent, they say.

But no, the buildup of greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and factories is not to blame.

"Kilimanjaro is a grossly overused mis-example of the effects of climate change," said University of Washington climate scientist Philip Mote, co-author of an article in the July/August issue of American Scientist magazine.

In fact, Dr. Mote wishes Gore wouldn't hype Kilimanjaro because he fears it will discredit more valid global warming theories, which he ascribes to.

So if cruising in your Hummer isn't the cause, what is? Simple: Cyclical climate trends that have nothing to do with we mere humans:

On Kilimanjaro, ice loss seems to be driven by two factors: a lack of snowfall and sublimation, the same process that causes freezer burn by sucking moisture out of leftovers.

Researchers believe Kilimanjaro's glaciers formed about 11,000 years ago, when the region was undergoing a period of wet weather that allowed snow to accumulate. But even before the first Europeans reached the summit in 1889, the weather has been dry in Eastern Africa. There simply hasn't been enough snowfall to keep up with the loss of ice due to sublimation, [U. of Innsbruck glacier expert Georg] Kaser explained.

Sublimation, caused by exposure to sunlight and dry air, occurs when ice essentially skips the melting step and evaporates.

Kaser, who climbs Kilimanjaro twice a year to gather data, says the ice topography shows little evidence that melting is anything but a minor force. Jagged spires and cliffs made of ice up to 120 feet tall are not softened around the edges.

Will Gore revise his book with its next edition? Will he pull the slides from his PowerPoint?

I bet no. If he starts doing that kind of stuff, it will require a substantial rewriting and thinning of his tome and that would be ... inconvenient.

Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Wonderful work as always from Cox & Forkum.

Puh-leeeze, Al, Be A Man Of You Word

Electron Al Gore appears to be the rhetorical opposite of Fred Thompson.

Thompson coyly talks about how he's still making up his mind, testing the water, seeing if what he thinks is really there is really there, then he'll decide whether to run. He's like a naked woman at a party who hasn't decided whether she'll have sex or not.

Gore, on the other hand, is keeping his clothes on, politically speaking. Today, USA Today has several such quotes from him:

For months, Gore has said repeatedly that he probably won't run for office again, but wouldn't say that he would never run for office again. He reiterated that stance on Friday, but downplayed the possibility of another campaign.

"I don't want anyone to interpret that answer as throwing a little red meat out for speculation," Gore said. "I am just being candid. But I don't expect to get into this race. I have given the reasons why. I strongly prefer to serve in other ways." ...

"It may be easier to fix it from the outside," he said. "Again, I haven't ruled out for all time thinking about politics again. It's just that the way it works now, I don't think that the skills I have are the ones that are most likely to be rewarded within this system ..."

What skill is he lacking? He says he's just not a good enough spinner to be in politics today. Whatever in that clouded head of his keeps him out is fine with me, but let me agree with Al: He is not a good spinner.

It's not for lack of trying; it's just lack of skill.

Speaking to just this point is one of the more interesting reads I've bumped into this beautiful Sunday morning: Gore's New Testament of Liberal Gobbledygook by Thomas Mitchell of the big Vegas rag. Mitchell does the world a favor by reading Gore's Assault on Reason so we don't have to.

Here are some of the Thoughts Of Al, presented by Mitchell to spare you the 320-page drudgery:

• " ... hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake."
  
  
• He actually says -- despite the liberal editorial pages of most newspapers, the left-leaning broadcast and cable networks other than Fox -- that the administration has developed a "highly effective propaganda machine" to embed certain mythologies. ... "This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and 'reporters' -- call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis," Gore declares. "This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists."
  
  
• "Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society ..."

There you have 'em: Three examples of Gore trying his best to spin, but failing miserably because he's out of touch, suffering from incestuous amplification, and struggling with the hypocritical gaps between his professed beliefs, his personal history and his lifestyle.

His profession that he's not running just might be another case of inept spinning. But let's hope Al's finally found something he can be honest about.

hat-tip: memeorandum, Real Clear Politics
Art: Moonbattery

Electron Al At Work: Major Carbon Burn

Here's a picture of Al "Electron" Gore hard at work in his office just last month -- long after he was criticized for the massive carbon footprint laid down by his lifestyle.

While most of us get by with one or maybe two monitors of a somewhat standard size, Al's got three big-screen monitors burning up the juice because he's just got so much more to read than we do.

And note the flat-screen TV he's got his back to. Wouldn't a small radio perform the same function? If he's got to have a picture, he could go with a tube TV that uses far less electricity than a hi-def flat-screen.

Combine the flat-screen and the three monitors and you've entered the Big Foot zone of carbon footprints. Says the other CSM:

By 2009, when half of all new TV sales are expected to be extended- or high-definition digital sets with big screens, TV energy use will reach about 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year nationwide - about 50 percent higher than at present.

Next, note the windows. They appear to be fixed, unable to be opened, so it's up to the AC or the central heat to moderate the temperature in his office.

And then there's all that clutter -- papers, books, magazines, all produced by cutting down trees, running them through nasty chemical processes, and using a series of trucks, presses and offices full of electricity to convert them into reading material.

He could store the data in his computers instead ... but that would burn carbon too, especially with those three monster monitors.

Ah, the dilemmas of being a carbon purist! It's so much easier to just be a carbon hypocrite. Good call, Al.

(Thanks to Time for the photo; it's part of an interesting slide show on Gore's life that's got more than a bit of hero-worship dripping from it. You can view it here.)

Drive A Phoneymobile!

Want a definition of the apex of well-healed liberalism? How about Al Gore at the Marin Civic Center? That should do the trick.

And how did all these fine Warmie hysterics get to the event, where Gore was hawking his new book, The Something or Another That's All Wrong About This Or That. Here's how:

Yep. SUVs, minivans and assorted high-end sedans.

Talk about an assault on reason!

For more fun, including photos of truly dangerous "Gore/Obama 2008" people and a photo that makes Gore look like Dracula (a scroll-down treat), see the photo-carnage at Zombietime.

hat-tip: memeorandum

More Carbon Credit Fallacies

It's OK if rich people like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio burn through carbon like there's no tomorrow. After all, they're offsetting their global warming impacts by screaming "There's no tomorrow!" ... and they're buying carbon credits.

Many of those credits are purchased through programs that plant trees because trees are, you know, the lungs of the planet. Actually, they're more the kidneys if you go with the Greenie metaphore, since they're supposed to clean the air (like kidneys), not convert it to oxygen in the blood (like lungs). But who wants to support the Earth's Kidneys? Ick. But I digress.

There's just one little, teensy weensy problem with the tree-planting carbon credits Al, Leo and their herds of ilk are purchasing: They could, uh, make global warming worse, according to a new study published by the National Academy of Sciences. Reports Discovery Channel:

April 10, 2007 — Planting new trees in snow-covered northern regions may actually contribute to global warming as they have the counter-effect of tropical forests, according to a study out Monday.

While rainforests help cool the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing clouds that reflect sunlight, the dark canopy of Canadian, Scandinavian and Siberian forests catches sunrays that would be reflected back to space by the snow, the study said.

The study, published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that reforestation projects in the tropics would help mitigate global warming, but such projects would be "counterproductive" in high latitudes.

In mid-latitude locations like the United States and most of Europe, more trees would only create marginal benefits for climate change, the researchers said.

Oops. It looks like all those "let's plant a million trees!" efforts across America aren't going to give their supporters as many greenie credits for their green as they thought.

I've heard ugly rumors that the global warming debate is over. So can we debate a bit on this theme: Is human understanding of complex natural systems sufficient for us to glibly propose solutions, or do we run the risk of gumming up the works in the name of solutions?

I'll argue the latter.

He's Not A Scientist, But He Plays One In Films

One question, and one question only about the NYT's story today dressing down Al Gore for hyping up global warming hysteria:

Why didn't they run it before the Oscars?

The controversy regarding Gore's statements about the amount of ocean rise, the frequency of hurricanes and the level of blame to be placed on humans has been growing from much earlier in Gore's hype-history than the release of An Inconvenient Truth.

Check out this Canadian article from last June, that leads off with this quote:

"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

That's from a professor at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia's James Cook University. It ran in the Canadian Free Press; maybe the NYT missed that. But how could they miss the controversy over CNN's Glenn Beck's comment:

Now, what happened where this thing falls apart -- and it won't for most people who go to this movie -- is he then projects what's coming. Again, it's the projection that's the problem. See, when you take a little bit of truth and then you mix it with untruth, or your theory, that's where you get people to believe. You know? It's like Hitler. Hitler said a little bit of truth, and then he mixed in "and it's the Jews' fault." That's where things get a little troublesome, and that's exactly what's happening. Now, if Al Gore's projection is right about the CO₂ level going as high as he says it will, then the temperature here on planet Earth will be about 400,000 degrees. We'll be the sun; we'll be the frickin sun. But that's a huge "if."

That was in June 2006.

The NYT waited until hype had conquered all, Al had his Oscar and the malleable easy-believers were firmly in the Warmie camp before they broke ranks with this article.

Obviously, the motivation was to be the hard-hitting truth-teller they see themselves being. But by waiting so long to tell the obvious story, they've merely proven that they can be trusted to be at the head of the journalistic pack, then grandstand by breaking out of it.