Appearing on Larry King Live last evening to honor the retiring host, former vice president Al Gore spoke publicly for the first time since the National Enquirer reported he was investigated for soliciting sex from a masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel.

It was all a misunderstanding. I was indeed staying at the Hotel Lucia that night.  Checking my e-mail on the lobby computer, I found an anonymous message, with attachments, claiming prominent climatologists I’d been working with had been fudging numbers.

Visibly disturbed, I printed the material and started for my suite to study it in private when the night manager asked if he could help.  In jest, I replied, yes, find someone skilled in massaging climate data and send that person to my room.

Later, someone knocked on my door.  It was the masseuse.  She told me she had never massaged data before, but she thought shiatsu and a light touch on the keyboard would do the trick.  When I explained the mix-up, she laughed.  We talked a bit, and she left.  End of story.

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You would think that a conference that features some of the world’s leading scientists talking about a hot-button issue like global warming would attract a bit of old media attention. The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, currently being held in Chicago, features distinguished scientists like the University of Colorado’s Dr. William Gray, Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, former astronaut and United States Senator Dr. Harrison Schmitt and the guy who broke the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre. But, while there are a number of bloggers here, while Pajamas Media is here, while the European press is here – including the BBC – and while I’m here, the MSM is nowhere to be found.

What are they so afraid of – that they might learn something? It’s not like everyone is singing in chorus. For example, on Sunday night Steve McIntyre told the fascinating story of how and why Michael Mann and his cohorts “hid the decline,” complete with the relevant e-mails and published charts that irrefutably show how Mann, Jones and the rest of the climategate gang consciously discarded relevant data and then tried to cover their actions up.

The mainstream media meme, with regards to hiding the decline, is that while that this revelation was regrettable, it does nothing to disprove the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming. Guess what? McIntyre agrees. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he’s not your “go to” guy with respect to carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. There are others who have that particular expertise. But, anyone who listens to McIntyre recount this story of scientific malpractice could not help but be deeply troubled and wonder: what else have they been hiding? (more…)

Recently, USA Today ran a story about Michael Mann, the lead author of the debunked “Hockey Stick” fable and principal actor in ClimateGate. Specifically, the paper bemoans the inevitable slowing of Mann’s ultra-important, (even “stimulus”-funded) research due to McCarthyites like us skeptics who refuse to just accept an economically harmful ideological agenda ostensibly grounded in what has turned out to be the biggest scientific scandal of our time.

This strange assist in the ongoing effort to rehabilitate the warmmongers offers a nice opportunity to mention an email I just found going through a massive document dump from NASA under the Freedom of Information Act. These 1,500 pages were apparently produced at the 11th hour seeking to forestall litigation we had signaled was coming for NASA’s refusal to come into compliance with the transparency statute.

We’re still suing for their refusal to turn over entire categories of information for which the taxpayer paid, and which are highly relevant to the unfolding scandals, which withholding was not changed by these documents. We just have to go over the documents first.

And among the gems we found was an admission that NASA (specifically, its Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS and its GISTEMP data) passes no one’s test for credibility. Rather, according to NASA, it’s worse than the “CRU” temperature data that was the central issue in ClimateGate. That is the temperature record which we now know was for all intents and purposes fabricated. (more…)

You need to give me some money.  And you need to do it right now.

Let’s be clear – this is an emergency.  The time for debate is over.  The time for action is now.  There is a clear consensus among experts in the field of law, like me, that you are legally obligated to give me some money.

Why?  Well, it’s a legal thing, and frankly you wouldn’t understand.  I’m a lawyer; I do understand these things.  You need to trust me.  Our futures – and our children’s futures (particularly my children’s) – depend on it.

Now, I reject any attempt to compare this important crusade to the advocacy of the anthropogenic global warming believers.  Sure, as the latest New York Times op-ed by Al Gore shows, there are some superficial similarities.  Yes, the global warming crowd tells you to believe the “experts” and here I’m telling you to do the same.  But “experts” do play an important role. (more…)

Imagine you’re a month-old political group that exists chiefly on Facebook. You’ve never mounted a protest of any size or significance. You’ve collected $500 in online donations. Your first meeting in the Seattle area generated less enthusiasm than a 2003 demonstration against a local latte tax.

Question: How much media coverage can you realistically expect?

A. A big story in your neighborhood shopper.

B. A little story in your metropolitan daily.

C. A 1,700-word feature story, three photos and an online chat session, all courtesy of the Washington Post. (more…)

We used to think of the British and European press as far more politicized than ours; after all, their newspapers freely chose up sides and when you picked up a Tory paper such as The Telegraph, a center-right paper like The Times, a center-left paper like The Independent, and a leftist paper like the Guardian, you pretty much knew what you were getting.

American newspapers, on the other hand, were “neutral” and “objective,” like The New York Times and the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francsico Chronicle.

Right.

So how to explain this minor paddling of the “objective” American media by the equally “objective” Columbia Journalism Review: (more…)

As a trial lawyer, I am jealous of Tom Friedman, that prophet of painfully conventional “wisdom” whose insights grace the ever dustier New York Times op-ed pages.  His latest column, “Global Weirding Is Here”, has managed to achieve what I only dream about as an attorney -– a self-proving argument.

Tom is, of course, an anthropological global-warming disciple and a lay Grand Inquisitor.

So, naturally, the uncooperative weather – you know, those giant snowstorms folks back east might have noticed – provide him with a quandary.  How does one reconcile his faith that the world is becoming one gigantic orchid hothouse with the fact that it seems to be colder all the time?

Well, you start by mocking the heretics – excuse me, the “deniers”: (more…)

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in a bit of a quandary. People have learned that global warming is a scam so they’re trying to reshuffle the deck chairs to see if that’ll save the Titanic.

Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes. The former head of IPCC has publicly said the organization risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act. The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC. The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in the need to address global warming.

So the IPCC is looking to redo how it fabricates gathers data. After all, there are billions of dollars at stake. Global Warming is a huge business. Nothing rings the scam register more than guilt gelt. The problem with the whole AGW pitch is it’s based on logical fallacies and computer models written on false assumptions, namely that CO2 is causing climate change. Be sure to watch the following clip, in which Lord Monckton eviscerates Al Gore and the other global-warming hoaxers who refuse to come out of their holes and fight like men:

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Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

I love to grab a weekend lunch at the fabulous Tomboy’s Burgers in Manhattan Beach, and when I’m there I always pick up one of the discarded LA Times front sections lying by the bottles of Tapitio hot sauce.  “Maybe this time,” I think as I munch fries, “I’ll find that they’ve clued in, that I can re-subscribe and once again walk out to my driveway and carry back a real paper each morning.”  But every single time I come away wondering when this great metropolitan newsroom became the newspaper equivalent of Jonestown.  I envy the guy holding its Kool-Aid concession — he’s going to be making a mint right up until they finally shutter the place forever.

So it was no surprise that I nearly spit out my mouthful of cheeseburger when I read Tim Rutten’s opinion piece about how the Citizens United decision will destroy our nation by interpreting the First Amendment to actually mean what it says.  There, on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial page, was one of the dying fishwrap’s premier columnists arguing furiously that it should be perfectly acceptable for the government to toss someone into jail for talking about a politician.

This week’s Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections is so strained in its reasoning and so removed from the realities of American life that it would be grotesquely comedic, were its implications not so dire. (more…)