Matthew Vadum's blog

Al Gore, who famously claimed to have invented the Internet, now denies –in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary— that he is in a position to make an immense fortune from global warming-mitigation efforts. Ian Wilhelm, a Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter, asked the private equity firm Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM) to respond to my latest post, The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering.

 

By now you've probably read about how Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection plan to drop $300 million on hard-hitting affective propaganda aimed at convincing the American viewing public to embrace the drastically reduced standard of living that carbon emission controls guarantee.

The first ad from the campaign, narrated by Oscar-nominated actor William H. Macy, shows footage of Americans taking action by storming the beaches at Normandy during World War II, marching for civil rights, and landing on the moon. Americans didn't wait to take action at these critical points in the nation's history, so "we can't wait for someone else to solve the global climate crisis. We need to act and we need to act now. Join us. Together we can solve the climate crisis..."

As a recovering journalist, it has always amazed me how little journalists, even those specializing in financial reporting, know about the basic principles of economics. Similarly, it has always fascinated me how otherwise reasonable reporters can be reduced to self-righteous anti-capitalist ideologues, spouting the kind of anti-market drivel that one might have heard at a Communist Party meeting in the 1930s.

Nowadays journalists routinely attack lenders who take a chance on the poor. Take the case of “‘Pay day’ loans exacerbate housing crisis,” an article by Nick Carey of Reuters. In it, Carey lectures his readers, identifying with certainty what is making the “housing crisis” worse. The culprit he identifies is the payday lending industry, a subset of the subprime sector so regularly vilified by liberals, including Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The revelation that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, the Social Justice League's caped crusader, has been involved in a prostitution ring will no doubt come as a shock to all those progressives who have faithfully –often fanatically– boosted him over the years. For years the boy wonder has prattled on about market abuses, both real and imagined, especially during his media-saturated tenure as New York’s attorney general from 1999 to 2006. For years journalists and pundits have hailed Spitzer as the protector of all things good. In a 2005 Time “Heroes & Icons” profile subtitled, “The Tireless Crusader,” John Bogle said Spitzer served with “energy, savvy and distinction” as state attorney general. In 2002 Time hailed him as “Crusader of the Year,” an event Spitzer notes in the bio of his gubernatorial website.

Question: What do you get when you help terrorists seek dirty bombs, give sanctuary to Hezbollah and Hamas, taunt America, and threaten war on U.S. ally Colombia?

Answer: Hugs and kisses from members of Congress like Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, academics like Cornel West, and Hollywood celebrities like Danny Glover - and a pass from the press.

And what's there not to love about Venezuela's Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez, who crushes dissenters, muzzles the media, and takes from "the rich" to give to "the poor"? With a Kennedy clan member as his spokesman, he even gives discounted home heating oil to the shivering masses of the U.S. oppressed by the capitalist system. ¡Viva la Revolucion!

Latin America's newly preeminent thug is, after all, the kind of anti-American buffoon that American leftists instinctively swoon over. Chavez fancies himself a revolutionary leader, protégé and presumptive successor to Cuba's Fidel Castro, who stepped down last month after nearly a half-century in power.

Supporters of Islamic totalitarianism are using courts to silence their critics and advance their agendas as the American mainstream media barely take notice.

Take the case of Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, the billionaire alleged funder of terrorism, and his dogged critic, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld. Their story has been chronicled here by the Moving Picture Institute. (Newsbusters' Pam Meister wrote about the sheikh's virtual book burning activities this summer. The sheikh defends himself at his own website.)

Those who believe in the civil right that the Second Amendment was created to protect were not surprised when the Supreme Court decided today to hear a case that challenges the District of Columbia's draconian gun laws, which are arguably the toughest in the nation.

The AP story on the decision correctly notes that the case "could produce the most in-depth examination of the constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms' in nearly 70 years."

D.C. law only permits those people who had handguns when the gun-prohibition law was enacted 31 years ago to keep them, creating a privileged class of D.C. residents who, unlike the rest of us, have the ability to defend themselves from the thugs who terrorize large portions of the city. The blatantly unconstitutional law hasn't worked, and The Onion rightly mocked D.C.'s skyrocketing violent crime rate in a satirical news story in 2003, D.C. Once Again Murder Capital, Mayor Brags.

As Islamic scholar Robert Spencer can tell you, the mainstream media has barely noticed that Google, the Internet search engine giant, is now deciding for its users which ideas are acceptable and which are not. It’s never been a secret that Google leans left and won’t tolerate ideas it doesn’t agree with. The company hired global warming profiteer Al Gore as senior advisor and has a history of purging content based on ideology. More evidence of the company’s thinly-veiled, warm and fuzzy politically correct authoritarianism keeps popping up.

Now Google Video has suppressed a video of a speech that Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), made at Dartmouth College. Spencer, whose family comes from the Muslim world, sees his work as “calling attention to the roots and goals of jihad violence.” He carefully explains his belief that “Islam is not a monolith,” and says that he has “never” characterized all Muslims “as terrorist or given to violence.”

Google de-listed several conservative e-zines and blogs from its news crawl last year, banned anti-MoveOn.org ads, and is complicit in state censorship in communist China.