Al Gore

In 1998, we learned that Al and Tipper Gore made $353 in deductible charitable contributions against income of $198,000 the previous year. In the decade from 1998-2007, Joe and Jill Biden averaged $369 per year in such reported contributions. Bill and Hillary Clinton were infamous for taking charitable contributions for used underwear.

The aforementioned facts are generally not known by people who don't closely follow the news, because not much was made of them. But from the point of view of ABC News, particularly the hatchet men disguised as investigative reporters Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross, Mitt and Ann Romney have a much bigger problem than the Gores, Bidens, and Clintons: They, and particularly Mitt through Bain Capital (dubious, as we'll see), have given too much money to a particular charity. Because the reporters apparently want readers and viewers to see this as something underhanded, they describe charity as "sending" instead of "giving":

Current TV isn’t just largely unwatched in America. Mimi Turner at The Hollywood Reporter notes its horrible ratings in the United Kingdom are causing BSkyB to drop them. “Co-founder and CEO Joel Hyatt has launched an astonishing attack on the Rupert Murdoch-backed pay TV platform, accusing it of shutting down the channel in an act politically motivated by News Corporation.” It sounded just like Al Gore when Current TV got the ax in Italy.

“Sky is shutting down an intelligent alternative to mass market programming,” said Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current Media. In Britain, the land of the liberal BBC and just recently, PBS UK? Hyatt continued his Murdoch-bashing: “By doing so, Sky is once again discriminating in favor of the networks it owns and the points of view News Corporation agrees with.”

Occupy Wall Street attacks income inequality and the richest 1 percent, adopting as its slogan ''we are the 99 percent.'' In October, its protesters staged a ''millionaires march' 'in New York City, parading to the homes of wealthy citizens such as Rupert Murdoch and David Koch. But only some riches bother the Occupiers, who have ignored the massive wealth of celebrities in their own ranks.

The top 25 richest celebrities supporting Occupy Wall Street, according to the website Celebrity Net Worth, possess a combined net worth just over $4 billion.

After Politico hysterically named Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson its "Energy Policy Maker of the Year" Tuesday evening, NewsBusters sought the opinion of James Inhofe (R-Ok.), the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

As readers would expect, this led to a lengthy discussion about the global warming myth, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, ClimateGate, and a host of related subjects guaranteed to inform and entertain skeptics across the fruited plain (audio follows with transcript):

Almost exactly two years since damning email messages were released from Great Britain's University of East Anglia showing a pattern of deception and collusion between scientists involved in spreading the global warming myth, a new batch of such correspondence has emerged that seems destined to get as little press coverage as the original ClimateGate scandal did in November 2009.

James Delingpole reported in Britain's Telegraph Tuesday:

Joining PBS host Charlie Rose as a questioner tonight at the Washington Post debate is Post reporter Karen Tumulty, who wrote for Time magazine for  quite a while. On the Post website, she promised "No gimmicks, no gotchas, just a discussion that is as serious as the issues that Americans are dealing with on a daily basis."

But Tumulty has a history of uncorking some liberal hosannas, hailing Obama's "conspicuous candor" and lauding Al Gore's documentary as the work of "a laptop-wielding ninja whose PowerPoint could rescue the planet from the forces of greed and indifference."  But Newt Gingrich was the "pompous thug of late-night cable." Last December, Tumulty was clearly in a "gotcha" mode with former Sen. Rick Santorum, describing him as a "notorious" fire-breather on social issues:

Nobel laureate Al Gore claimed on Friday that scientists involved in advancing the theory of global warming wouldn't do it just for the money.

Without recognizing the hypocrisy, he also told FearLess Cottage consumer advocate Alex Bogusky that scientists espousing a skeptical view of his money-making theory are exclusively doing so for their own financial benefit (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The media must really believe Rick Perry can defeat their beloved President Obama for they are coming at the Texas governor with guns blazing.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen likened Perry to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy because of his disbelief in manmade global warming:

Unemployment is at 9.1 percent, housing and stock prices are plummeting, national debt is exploding, and Medicare is going bankrupt.

Yet MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews' greatest fear is a president that doesn't believe in evolution or climate change (video follows with transcript and commentary):

All last week, global warming-obsessed media were rife with reports about record-breaking heat.

Problem is, according to the National Climatic Data Center, and marvelously reported by the Hockey Schtick Sunday, almost no temperature records were actually broken:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday mocked news outlets hyping the heat wave gripping much of the nation by reporting the heat index rather than the actual temperatures.

On Friday's "Real Time," host Bill Maher proved Limbaugh's point by falsely telling his audience, "It was 123 in Minnesota" (video follows with transcript and commentary, vulgarity alert):

Bill Maher on Friday once again got caught in his own hypocrisy.

As HBO's "Real Time" host waxed philosophic about socialism and "shared sacrifice" for the good of the country, Reason TV's Nick Gillespie stumped the sometimes comedian by asking if he would give up his cars or his television show to reduce his carbon footprint (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In April 2009, climate realist Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was invited to testify before Congress about global warming alongside Nobel laureate Al Gore.

The following video of a debate that happened in Australia Tuesday will perfectly demonstrate why Monckton, after he had arrived at Reagan International Airport in Washington, D.C., was informed that House Democrats refused his appearance at the hearing:

After Entertainment Weekly graciously gave grades of B+ to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and A- to former Vice President Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' EW's John Young has bestowed a much different treatment on his review of the new Sarah Palin political documentary, 'The Undefeated.'

The conservative documentary, which successfully opened last weekend in limited release, was given a snarky review under the headline "Sarah Palin's 'The Undefeated': We saw it so you don't have to!".

Nobel laureate Al Gore must be noticing the public's continued lack of concern for his money making myth about carbon dioxide destroying the planet.

On Tuesday, he announced a new campaign and worldwide event to re-energize global warming hysteria:

Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.

As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.

Foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead wrote a fabulous piece in "The American Interest" Friday that should be must-reading for those on both sides of the global warming debate - especially members of the Al Gore-loving media.

In "The Failure of Al Gore," the registered Democrat and Obama supporter listed the reasons why the former Vice President has actually been a terrible leader for the green movement, and why a "fawning establishment press" have aided and abetted his disgrace:

Chris Matthews on Wednesday made it clear that like Al Gore, he believes the media should only be telling one side of the story when it comes to manmade global warming.

Such came out in the middle of a discussion about Gore's new article in Rolling Stone magazine when the "Hardball" host told his guests, "I hate that so-called evenhanded so-called objective journalism" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A frothing Chris Matthews on Wednesday excoriated Rush Limbaugh as "evil" for spreading "lies" about global warming.

The Hardball host highlighted a new Rolling Stone article by Al Gore that chides Barack Obama for not doing enough on climate change.

Matthews, however, chose to attack Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: "These people are evil in what they're doing. I'm not saying their souls are evil, but what they're doing is really, really wrong and it's not the President." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

During a fluffy human interest story on Wednesday's NBC Today about a man in Holland who built a full-size replica of the biblical Noah's Ark, correspondent Janet Shamlian turned serious for a moment, wondering: "But how realistic is this Dutchman's dream of doom? Because of global warming, the concept of a flood happening here is not unheard of." [Audio available here]

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For years America's media have been enthralled by anything that supports the theory that carbon dioxide is warming the planet leading to an imminent cataclysm if governments don't regulate this partially man-made gas.

By contrast, reports that might undermine CO2's importance in global warming, like the following released Tuesday by the AAS Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico, predicting a sharp decrease in solar activity in coming years, typically get either little attention or are downplayed:

When the folks at CBS shooed Katie Couric out the door, one could almost hear the harrumph with which Scott Pelley was reinstalling the Old Regime of Ed Murrow. Unlike Couric, Pelley wasn’t debuting with celebrity interviews and updates on Tom Cruise’s baby. CBS is going back to biased Dan Rather basics, treating Couric’s tenure as little more than a palate cleanser.

With Couric off the news grid in pursuit of cloning Oprah Winfrey’s success in feel-your-pain afternoon chat, who will be the public face of soft and marshmallowy News Lite? Coincidentally, NBC’s Meredith Vieira retired from NBC’s “Today” and NBC was contractually obligated to promote long-time morning news reader Ann Curry. How light is Ann? Last October, while narrating a story on how Russia implausibly unveiled a new set of inflatable weapons designed to fool spy satelittes, Curry added her own touch: “Wish all weapons were like that.”