Finally!

by folkbum

Proof that global warming is a hoax.

Charlie Sykes, WPRI spread outright lies about Al Gore, tomatoes ...

by folkbum

You expect to see sloppy smear work from the amateurs, the local puffbags who throw literally everything on the wall because, since they have no real reputations to protect, they don't care about the mess as long as something eventually sticks.

Charlie Sykes and WPRI are usually better than that. Not much better, mind you, because their selective manipulation of fact blurs the line between it and fiction: Sykes and WPRI are kind of like Demi Moore and the ghost of Patrick Swayze: Yes, they way they slobber all over each other is disgusting, but at least they started with some real clay. When the Bradleys are signing the paychecks, you gotta try to have a better reputation.

But it's hard. The falsehoods, in part because the slime-slingers have catapulted the outright fictions into the arena of civilized debate, hang there like salmonella'd tomatoes ripe for the picking, eating, and, well, depositing all over the floor.

Exhibit A, from C. Sykes under the imprimatur of WPRI: "Some environmentalists are blaming the recent tomato salmonella scare on global climate change." When you see the word "some" in a context like this, it should set off more alarms than Iron Man trying to get through TSA. Charlie's some? One:

The reaction to the rotten tomato story suggests that climate change alarmism is quickly changing from great-moral challenge-of-our-time to punch line. When a blog for “Discover” magazine reported the link between the bad tomatoes and global warming, the site was inundated with hundreds of derisive comments along the line of: “Are [you] F***ing kidding me!?! This is pure tripe. If you tree huggers had any sense of reality you would have learned NOT to blame every issue on global warming.”

Lucky for me, I have access to teh google. I was at first going to write that I didn't know what humanity ever did without teh google, but then I realized, yes, I do know. The answer is that humanity could apparently lie with impunity. Because Charlie Sykes must think that no one has teh google to look up this nutjob wacko global-warming-spouting freak: "Thomas M. Kostigen is The New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time, and a veteran journalist." Oh noes! A hippie freak! Run away!

I was interviewing a board member of Food and Water Watch for a feature I am writing, and he positioned the scare as an eco outbreak because with less space to farm, more droughts, and higher costs, GMOs are the logical choice for farmers who want quick crops from less land.

For the record the source of the tomato infection hasn’t been determined. [. . . T]he source of the E. coli in spinach turned out to be feces on the hoofs of wild boars that traipsed through spinach plants.

The source of tomato infections may turn out to be something as naturally errant as that. But with less room and climate change affecting crops, another outbreak is sure to come. GMO strands can only serve to exacerbate the spread.

That does not read to me like "blaming the recent tomato salmonella scare on global climate change." In fact, it sounds an awful lot like the opposite--that this guy is being as clear as possible that no one knows what caused the salmonella outbreak, and he certainly doesn't say warm weather caused mutant tomatoes intent on killing humans. To the extent that global warming is even mentioned in the post, it's the inarguable phrase "climate change affecting crops." Inarguable because evidence of a changing climate's effects (and our hippie friend Kostigen didn't even blame humans for the changes) have been observed in everything from the mighty wine grape to the humble potato. (Further, more searching of teh google turned up absolutely nothing else that associated salmonella-laden tomatoes with global warming--but I did find a different "Discover" blogger blaming Purell.)

But facts are pesky things, and Charlie Sykes doesn't care about them, especially when those facts are about Al Gore. He continues:

A Tennessee think tank reported that Al Gore’s home energy use surged more than 10%and that the apostle of conservation “burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.”

The lie is not that the Tennessee "think" tank said that. He's quoting them accurately. Here's the lie: Last year the "think" tank in question (the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has a street address in Nashville, which makes one thing in their name true) also released a report on Al Gore. Let's compare.

2007: In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.
2008: In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10% [. . .]. In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.

Now, I'm not a mathematician, but even I can tell that 213,200 is not 10% more than 221,000. In fact, I would say that it is less. (For further response from the Gores themselves, including information on how Gore cut his natural gas use by 90%, see here.) You see a lot of fools who cannot be bothered to check their sources, but generally not at WPRI. This is just plain embarrassing.

But we're not done!

Four dollar a gallon gasoline changed all that. When John McCain and President Bush came out in favor of lifting the moratoriums on drilling for the nation’s untapped billions of barrels of oil this week, congressional Democrats pulled out their usual talking points… only to find that they were channeling Jimmy Carter.

“We can’t drill our way of this problem,” they explained, as if we could instead tax, litigation, regulate, or demagogue our way out of spiraling energy costs.

Wait? Who said that we couldn't drill our way out of the problem? That's right--it was John H. Freakin' McCain:

[W]hen McCain was asked about offshore drilling during a campaign stop in Wisconsin, the presumptive Republican nominee noted that such resources would take years to develop, and that the U.S. should instead focus on alternative energy sources.

I don't know how they do it. How they live with themselves, how they can cash the checks. How they can get the image of Swayze and Moore out of their heads (sorry about that).

Sorry, Charlie. Hate to see you reduced to the level of your average smear merchant.

Inventions about the Internet

By Keith Schmitz

Check out the May 2008 Esquire and if you can get past the laddie mag pictures you will find an fascinating interview with Vint Cerf.

Who is Vint Cerf? He IS the person who invented the Internet. This fine old gent now works with the yong whippersnappers at Google, but back in 1980 he developed the programming language that led to MCIMail, the first commercial email system to be connected to the Internet.

Happy now? It isn't Al Gore.

Oh, by the way, when asked about Al Gore, Cerf said,

(Gore) had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill. It was very powerful. Housing starts went up, suburban boom happened, everything went mobile.

May it be added that all this driving led to the rise of the automobile industry with eventually employed 50% of the nation. Cerf goes on:

Al was attuned to the power of networking much more than any of his elective colleagues. His initiatives led directly to the commericalization of the Internet. He does deserve some credit.

So what do we do to say thanks? Make up some nonsense about Al Gore saying he invented the Internet. This fantasy has been attributed to Maureen Dowd at the liberal New Your Times.

But of course this post won't stop those of you from repeating this stupid cant over and over. Facts with some you don't seem to have that kind of spell.

What nation posses such a mass of pin heads who rather than lionizing or even just thanking someone with such foresight instead turns him into an object of ridicule based on a fabrication?

Certainly not in our politics, where now so-called gaffs are constructed from out of context comments or in Gore's case, a comment he never made at all.

Oh yeah I forgot. You are overtaxed, your guns will be taken away and you are being fooled about climate change by a handful of "scientists" on the payroll of the oil companies. So let's build a flaming bonfire and put Gore on it.

No wonder we can't move ahead in this hillbilly nation.

Al Gore's Press Conference in Palo Alto

By Keith Schmitz

My daughter and new son-in-law live in Palo Alto where Al Gore has an office. When word got out he was to be making an appearance, many places gave their employees the day off to come down and express their appreciation for Gore's honor. Here is Brian's blog from this afternoon:

After receiving the Tip from a friend the Kango Blogger news crew (3 people and one Digital SLR camera) traveled the 5 blocks to see if the tip was real.

With ~ 30+ news crews we figured that the former Vice President would soon be arriving. People from the community came out to catch a glimpse of Gore including some young children with signs.

For a few minutes we went down a hall labeled “Press” and were politely asked to leave.

But we heard a tip that he would be arriving on the other side of the building; this tip also proved true and we were able to catch a glimpse of Gore as we stepped out of his Mercedes sedan “Eco 10” (powered by bio-diesel)

The Vice President was very polite to the press, and to the locals who had come out to support him; he stayed briefly outside the Alliance for Climate Protection offices and shook the hands of the children and their parents and thanked them for their support.

The place was buzzing after Gore arrived; and we went down the hall to the press room, going to the back door entrance we were welcomed inside by the “Alliance for Climate Protection” staff (despite our lack of press badges), climbing some steps in the back of the room already crowded by 10-15 journalists) we waited for Al Gore to deliver his speech.

His spokesperson entered the room first saying that Mr. Gore would be coming in 2 minutes to give a short speech and that he would not be answering questions; when he arrived he was hailed by the sound of 60+ cameras snapping photo’s (which failed to cease throughout the five minute speech) and the glare of the lights.

First the former vice president acknowledged the Nobel Prize committee for selecting him the (shared) winner and announced that he would be donating the prize to combat the climate crisis; he also said that he would travel to accept the prize in person.

Then he spoke briefly about the continuing effects of global warming on the polar ice caps “polar scientists are now warning that at current rates the polar ice caps will be completely gone within 23 years” (or language very similar, this humble blogger is relying only on memory)

He then spoke from a place of his own passion delivering a call in the form of an African proverb

Gore said:

“There is an old African proverb, If you want to go fast; go alone, if you want to go far; go together we need to act both quickly and together if we are going to put an end to the climate crisis” (Again I quote from memory)

With that, he concluded the press conference and thanked everyone for coming.

As he walked out of the room he was met with shouts from the press “Mr. Vice President Do you plan to run for president after winning this award?… Mr Vice president!”

With that; he left the room and he went to a private meeting with members of the Alliance for Climate Protection.

His message was loud and clear it sends a strong message that this years’ Nobel Prize is awarded to Al Gore. The world’s most important institutions are recognizing the urgency of the problem that we all face, for my part; I hope that we are able to make the simple green choices that will make that difference.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore

by folkbum

That sound you hear is ten thousand right wingnut heads exploding.

It will be followed in a few days by the sound of ten thousand left wingnuts crying in agony when he still refuses to run for president.

(Seriously, though, congrats to Gore.)

McIlheran Watch: Gore-ing Ironically

by folkbum--UPDATED below!

There's an irony in the title of this Patrick McIlheran blog post from yesterday:

See where Al Gore's invention lands him?
John McAdams notes that Al Gore's book quotes Abraham Lincoln on how bad it is when people get really rich.

The trouble is, the quote's a fake. It started showing up in the 1880s, used by opponents of capitalism then. It has lingered on, a manufactured reality that fits so perfectly into the needs of liberal bloggers that Gore, apparently, couldn't resist.

The implication of the title is that Gore's "invention"--the internet--led Gore to include a fake quote from Lincoln. This is ironic in at least two ways: One, McIlheran apparently never got the memo that the "Al Gore claimed he invented the internet" story is as fake as the quote from Lincoln. (Snopes.com is the first place any savvy person will turn to check out anything found on the Internet, a savvy person once remarked.)

It's also ironic that McIlheran claims the quote "fits so perfectly into the needs of liberal bloggers." I am a liberal blogger, have been one for about as long as there have been liberal bloggers, and I have never seen the invented Lincoln quote before this week when it became a target of the Gore-haters. So I did some googling to see just how "perfectly" the quote fits. As of this morning, the search returns only 59 blog results, the first dozen or more of which are conservative bloggers complaining about Gore, and another ten or so are spamblogs.

And of the rest, none of them seem to be "popular" liberal blogs (i.e., it doesn't appear at Daily Kos--a separate site search confirms it--or Atrios or Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post and so on). Some of the bloggers who used the quote are themselves conservative or at least independent, and some were de-bunking it pre-Gore. In other words, the quote is so "perfect" for liberals bloggers that we pretty much never use it!

So here's McIlheran, taking Al Gore to task for using a fake Lincoln quote, himself making two huge errors of fact. Or, as he probably thinks of it, just another day at the office.
****To be slightly more fair, McIlheran was getting his info on the Gore book from John McAdams, who quotes at length from a review of the book in the Washington Post. McAdams says that Gore is "less than careful about getting his facts straight," which is kind of funny in its own right; Here's Eric Boehlert writing about that WaPo review:

On June 10, The Washington Post published an opinion column by Andrew Ferguson about Gore's new book. [. . .] Ferguson, an editor at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, disliked the book, waving it off as "a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation."

What was embarrassing for both Ferguson and the Post was that in the very first sentence of his column, Ferguson made a whopping error when he condescendingly observed that The Assault on Reason had no footnotes. (The book is such a mess, footnotes would have been of no use, he suggested.) The problem, according to Ferguson, is that without footnotes readers have no way of checking the sources for the many historical quotes Gore uses in the book, including one on Page 88 from Abraham Lincoln that Ferguson would "love to know where [Gore] found."

In fact, if Ferguson had simply bothered to look, every one of the nearly 300 quotes found in The Assault on Reason is accompanied by an endnote with complete sourcing information, including the quote on Page 88 that Ferguson focuses on. The endnotes consume 20 pages of the book.

McAdams then writes, "To ask the obvious question: if we can’t trust Gore to get easily checked historical facts right, how reliable is he on a technical issue like global warming?" I would rephrase: If we can't trust opinion columnists for the Washington Post and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to get their facts right about Al Gore, how can we trust them on anything?

UPDATE: I meant to add when I wrote this post this morning, but forgot, a link to Anonymous Liberal and A Tiny Revolution (twice!), who point out what would be obvious to McIlheran and McAdams if they actually had bothered to look at a copy of The Assault on Reason: Al Gore cites The Lincoln Encyclopedia for the quote, meaning he did not get it from liberal bloggers. Nyah.

The Al Gore's house papers

By Bert

All I can divulge at this point is that the story begins with a document accidentally left on Monday in a copy machine at the Kinkos on Farwell and State. The discovered document was immediately stuffed down the pant leg (a technique learned at liberal democrat officer training school) of a folkbum operative. And then ensued a series of furtive transfers of said document. The paper was finally transferred to me last night over a formica tabletop while concealed in a George Webb menu just before the bartime rush.

Here, released for the first time, only on Folkbum, is the content of that document:

Talking Points Central Command
"semper on message"

Week: 2/26-3/2

You are tasked for the entire week (think Weekly Deep Tunnel Awards for Friday)with communicating that Al Gore has a large house that uses electricity. Include in your message commentary about Al Gore’s weight (note: this does not remove prohibition against mentioning the physique of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Dennis Hastert, or Rush Limbaugh -- see memos dated 1/25/00, 4/25/85).

Talking up Al Gore’s house is a tactic that furthers these key strategies:

• Protects corporate profits at the expense of polar bears (note: do not mention polar bears)by sliming any effort to conserve energy without trying to deny all that science and stuff.
• Furthers the impression that the only elite aristocrats in this country are liberal democrats and intellectuals. To enhance effect of this tactic, also mention that Dick Cheney hunts and that Karl Rove serves hot dogs at his fundraisers. Finally, play Toby Keith or Martina McBride as your bumper music.
  
  As always, any updates will be transmitted through Drudge Report. That is all.

Monday Miscellaney

by folkbum

• Unsolicited plug: Guido G's Pizza, 13th and Morgan, 383-7776. Best. Pizza. Ever. Blows the chains out of the water.
  
  
• See why Ken Mobile is fast becoming one of the best new local bloggers.
  
  
• Speaking of Jessica McBride, one thing has confused me for some time about her WTMJ blog: When you click on this header----you get redirected to . . . Charlie Sykes's blog. There's probably something to that.
  
  
• Get your hands off me, you damn, dirty ape! (Or, more elliptically:

  McArthur Parker: Have you ever heard of "Planet of the Apes"?
  Troy McClure: The movie or the planet?
  McArthur Parker: The brand new multi-million dollar musical! And they want you to play . . . the human!
  Troy McClure: That's the part I was born to play, baby!)

  
  
• All snarkery aside, this seems to be a tremendous misapplication of justice:

  Julie Amero was a substitute teacher who found herself in a pickle while teaching a class of 12-year-old boys.
  
  The school computer in her classroom, which she had been told not to turn off under any circumstances, and which had no virus protection, spyware protection, and was running a 9-year-old operating system, started popping up porn ads. Not just one or two, but loads.
  
  When Julie tried to click them off by hitting the little X on the top corner, more popped up. And more.
  
  With the kids clamoring for a look, Julie tried to block the screen from them, but there were too many, so she ran out to the teachers' lounge and asked for help.

  And for being a victim of Windows 98, she could get 40 years in prison. There's plenty more to get you angry at the link. And it's not a joke.
  
  
• I know you've probably already seen the Conservapedia by now. If you haven't, you should take the time to get to know it before it is completely overrun with graffiti--it's hilarious enough now. (Here's some of the less funny parts.) But here's what gets me: On the main page, they claim to be at least in part a response to the "anti-conservative bias" on Wikipedia. Among their examples of Wikipedia's bias, they include things like "Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words" (particularly British spellings), and that biographical entries are often gossipy. Neither of those seem particularly biased against conservatives. I don't get it.
  
  
• Al Gore won an Oscar, unless things go wrong for him at the Supreme Court.
  
  
• Just a reminder: Atheists (if I may be so bold as to speak for all of us) are opposed to neither morality nor religion. The problem is forking over my tax dollars to pay for expressions of that religion. How is that hard to understand?
  
  
• Here's one for all you people who can't write three words in a row without slipping into some sort of "Democrats and al Qaeda share talking points" hoopdedoo.
  
  
• Stoller explains why the adulterating, drag-wearing, gay-rights-loving, pro-choice Rudy Giuliani might still win:

  Like a lot of us, [Josh Marshall] thinks that Republicans base their political judgment on issues, ie. gay rights, abortion, national defense, taxes, etc. He makes the same mistake that a lot of Democrats make, assuming that conservatives think the way that we do. They don't. They are authoritarians. Gay marriage, abortion, taxes, national security, none of it really matters to them. What they are looking for is an authoritarian to look like he's taking charge, and the way an authoritarian takes charge is to attack liberals and stomp on people who aren't like them. Giuliani did this in New York, so he's a rock star in Alabama.

Further Proof that Al Gore is Satan

by folkbum

Kidding, of course. But ActBlue has a promotion going on that may arouse your suspicions:

As someone fundraising for Democratic candidates, you're part of the Democratic wave that's sweeping our nation--and you've already helped raise over $7 million for our candidates!

We know you're capable of more in these crucial last months before the election, and we want to help you maximize your impact this fall.

That's why we'll be sending copies of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's phenomenal new book (and companion to his phenomenal movie) to everyone who raises a total of $600 from at least 6 donors by September 6th!

Are you with me? 600 from 6 donors by the 6th, and I get an Al Gore book!

Here's my ActBlue page, which is chock-full of good races and candidates to support, including the WI-08 CD, which remains one of Hotline's top thirty hot races this fall. Sure, it's fallen to number 30, but still . . .

One other thing to notice about that list of races: None of the top ten, only one of the top 15, and only four of the top 30 seats up for grabs are Democratic seats. Even of the top 50, only ten are currently held by Democrats. And, with it clear that more terror threats don't automatically boost Republicans ratings any more, I'm felling slightly more optimistic about our chances in November.

You can help by giving.

One More example of Hold 'em hokum

Al Gore gave a speech yesterday. He was joined by Republican Bob Barr in an event in which the two called for a special counsel to investigate potential violations of the law by the current administration. Al Gore knows something about independent investigators, as one dogged his boss for the better part of a decade.

Starting on the right foot, Hold 'em blogger Peter DiGaudio calls our former Vice President, who served a long and distinguished career in Congress prior, Algore and says he fell out of a tree to give his speech. Oh. It hurts. The laughter. It hurts. Then,

Algore is referring to, of course, the NSA wiretapping and electronic surveillance of suspected Al Qaeda operatives inside the U.S. while in contact with foreign terrorists. Of course, Algore conveniently neglects to mention the NSA's Echelon program, conducted under the Clinton administration, or the equally invasive Carnivore program, proposed by the FBI under Clinton. I will have more information on these two programs in a separate entry.

Let's do this slowly: Clinton never violated FISA under Echelon. George Tenet, whom the right grants sainthood for his work under Bush, said "We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department" when he testified before Congress in April 2000. That's a fine distinction, since Bush admits to bypassing FISA. Carnivore searches were all conducted with probable cause and warrants, at least as of 2000, before Bush took over. Who knows what's happened since. Peter would like to equate the warrantless wiretaps with two programs that were conducted with warrants. That's apples and cockroaches, man.

Peter then recounts some standard talking points, leading to

While we are at it: I am sick and tired of the MSM's deliberate mischaracterization of this as "domestic spying." It was not domestic spying; ordinary Americans were never in danger of having their privacy invaded by Big Brother, and no domestic phone calls were monitored.

Peter wrote this yesterday, before today's New York Times story (none of the authors has a book deal, so there goes the easy out). The gist:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. [. . .]

Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. [. . .] Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up. [. . . I]n bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

So yes, Peter. This was domestic spying, tracking down people and contacts in the US who were not agents of a foreign power or bent on any plot more sinister than than a thin crust with pepperoni.

Peter then, in his own words and those of boor Neal Boortz, offers rapid-fire lie after lie. There's the "Gorelick Wall" lie, in which he tries to pin 9/11 on a minor Clinton administration official; there's the "Buddhist temple/ 'No controling legal authority' " lie, in which he reminds us of one of the right's most sinister stories about Gore and ignores the results of a Republican-led investigation into the matter that cleared Gore. He ends with the "Aldrich Ames warrantless search" lie, which ignores the fact that physical searches were not illegal under FISA until 1995, after the Ames searches. Oh, wait, Peter (quoting Boortz) actually said that Clinton wiretapped Ames without a warrant. That, too, is a lie: "[T]he Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing electronic surveillance of Ames's office and residence"--or so said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in November 1994.

In the end, Peter declares that "The decline of this man into utter madness would be sad, if it weren't so doggone funny." It would certainly be funny, if any of it were true. I wish Peter allowed comments, so I could debunk there, and not here. Alas, his readers will probably keep believing the hokum.

Update: I could have just let Al Gore respond.