Debbye Turner Bell

On Thursday's The Early Show, CBS hosted a guest who implicated climate change as one of the factors contributing to many weather disasters in 2011, and he ended up warning of more droughts in the future. After asserting that 2011 was an unusually active year for natural disasters, Dr. M. Sanjayan of the Nature Conservancy including climate change in the list of influences:

CBS's Early Show on Monday found yet another excuse to report on Occupy Wall Street, spotlighting the diehard protesters who stayed in Zuccotti Park during a winter storm. While correspondent Debbye Turner Bell noted the $3.4 million spent on police overtime in New York City and the complaints from businesses near the demonstrators' campsite, she didn't play one sound bite from the opposition.

Turner Bell first highlighted the "freezing temperatures and record-breaking October snow" over the past weekend in the Northeast and added, "And that does raise the question of how committed are these Occupy Wall Street protesters? But there's another question: can local city governments afford to pay the price tag that goes along with expressing this basic American right?"

Diabetic or not, you might want to have a dose of insulin handy while watching this morning's video clip. The Early Show's review of the past year was one sicky-sweet adoration—in overtly religious terms—of Barack Obama.

Harry Smith set the tone with his opening comments:

"Politics, and patriotism and the presidency: it is the place where the secular and the religious merge. One of the sacraments of our national religion is the inauguration.  So it was that as many as two million pilgrims made their way to Washington and the Mall to witness this most sacred event."

Back to the studio for the personal testimonies of the emotional Early Show crew . . .

On the November 14 Saturday Early Show on CBS, as substitute co-anchor Debbye Turner Bell hosted Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh for a discussion of Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be released book, Going Rogue: An American Life, Turner Bell suggested that there was "a little bit of revisionist history" in the book -- a book which, according to her, is "already stirring controversy." She also contended that one of Palin’s quotes praising her husband Todd’s good looks "doesn’t sound very presidential," and suggested that Palin showed "naivete" by complaining about vicious attacks made against her early on in the campaign by some liberals.

For his part, Hirsh agreed with Turner Bell’s suggestion about "revisionist history," and called it "somewhat disturbing" that Palin responded to some of the criticism against her, calling it a "streak of vindictiveness toward her political enemies."

Is it newsworthy when an animal urinates on a member of the press?

The good folks at CBS News must think so.

On Thursday, CBSNews.com not only created a video clip of Debbye Turner Bell getting splashed in the eye by a beaver on that morning's "Early Show," but someone actually posted it at the website's "Recommended" videos section (embedded below the fold):