For reasons almost anyone can guess at this point, except perhaps Congressman Henry Waxman, Lionel and I have invited Al Gore and his collaborators director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lawrence Bender to defend their Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. And nice guys that we are, we have been especially kind about it. We don’t sandbag people (well, almost never). As you will see in Poliwood Challenges Gore: Defend Your Oscar!, Lionel and I are giving Gore and his cohorts all their questions in advance. It’s the right thing to do, n’est-ce pas?

Now for this part you must be sitting down… so far no word from Gore!

Shocked? Well, we may or may not have been. Lord Monckton hasn’t gotten very far with his request for a debate either. But stay tuned. You never can tell. Meanwhile,, watch the video here. All Poliwoods here.

Since it’s clear the Internet (notably the blogosphere) exposed the dubious science of anthropogenic global warming, thankfully before we all went broke (or more broke than we already are), it’s time to turn to our next assignment – following the money.

Cui bono in this giant metastasizing scam? Yes, we already know that the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri may have some ill-gotten gains, not to mention a few scientists who may have flown first class to Bali and other such boondoggles, but they are indeed small potatoes. Big money was – or was intended to be – made with carbon exchanges set up in Europe and the USA. Fraud at the European exchange to the tune of one and half billion dollars is already under investigation by Scotland Yard. But that’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As far back as July 2009, the Science and Public Policy Institute published a broadside – Climate Money – alleging that 79 billion had already been spent on this unproven science. That’s an extraordinary sum, even if exaggerated by eighty or ninety percent. Who knows how much has been spent and who has benefited?

Well, we at Pajamas Media would like to know – and we imagine you would too. And speaking of the tip of that proverbial iceberg, this is not only about Al Gore. There are plenty of high rent dots to be connected here with much pertinent information to be revealed and names to be named. I am writing this post to solicit your help. Just as the blogosphere was so instrumental in dissecting the science, it can also help track the money. If you have knowledge or expertise in this area, please contact us at webmaster@pajamasmedia.com. We will forward this on to Charles Martin – our resident guru on all matters climatic – who will collate and report back. Thanks for your help.

Tuesday morning I will be interviewing for PJTV Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael B. Oren. The subject is Iran – and if there is any issue that can wipe our economic woes (or anything else) off the front pages or, more importantly, the top of Drudge, that is it. As that famous Eighties cartoon from the LA Weekly once had it, “Nuclear war?! … There goes my career!”

I have been doing my homework for the interview, checking with knowledgeable friends, surveying the papers for the latest information. The situation, always fluid, is at a dangerous point. According to the AFP:

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said on Saturday he doubted a deal to send some of Iran’s uranium abroad for enrichment was close, directly contradicting Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

The latest spat comes amid Western powers’ growing impatience with Iran over what they say is a failure to respond clearly to the enrichment proposal, amid suspicions the Islamic republic is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb.

“I don’t have the sense we are close to an agreement,” Gates told reporters in Ankara, the day after Mottaki said that Tehran was “serious” about sending some uranium abroad for enrichment and that a final deal was near.

I wonder how this dovetails with the startling report from Europe today referenced by Michael Ledeen:

“Iran has developed a nuclear warhead, according to an article in the German newspaper “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”. A foreigner alleged to have helped Iran towards developing nuclear weapons is from the former Soviet Union…The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already mentioned the employment of a foreigner in the nuclear programme.

If true, this is, as the saying goes, a game changer. If I were the Israelis, I would – to put it mildly – be disturbed. I’m disturbed as an American.

It also adds some urgency to the questions raised by Bret Stephens in his WSJ opinion piece of last week – Seven Myths About Iran. One of those myths – A [military] strike would rally Iranians to the side of the regime – is particularly pertinent with the “Green” democracy movement on the brink of staging one of its biggest demonstrations on February 11. The Islamic regime is apparently about to counter them as never before, bringing in thousands of their “Basij” thugs from the countryside. Our president has been frustratingly neutral – again to put it mildly – about the Iranian democracy movement, seemingly to induce Ahmadinejad, Khamenei & Company into some sort of nuclear deal. It’s as if Obama doesn’t believe – or perhaps doesn’t want to believe – what the Islamic regime clearly describes as their own messianic goals from their Khomeinist Shia philosophy.

I surely will be asking Ambassador Oren about this. He may not give me direct answers. He is a diplomat after all, with all that entails. But it will certainly be interesting to get his views, because Oren is no conventional diplomat, awarded for his generous campaign contributions with a coveted ambassadorship. He is a distinguished historian and the author of the superb Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Don’t hold it against him that he is a graduate of Columbia and Princeton. Or that his book won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been a judge in that award, but in another category.)

Kidding aside, I am obviously looking forward to this interview and, in the interactive spirit of Pajamas Media and the Internet, solicit your questions. I know this audience realizes how deeply important this issue is to all of us.

Today the United States House of Representative voted to increase the national debt limit to $14,294,000,000,000 by a 217-212 vote. All the “ayes” were Democrats, even after the election of Scott Brown.

What’s going on here? Was this a mass act of seppuku? Or perhaps they are lemmings, taking the plunge ensemble off some Alaskan cliff. Yes, I know lemmings don’t really do that, but still… Don’t these people have children and grandchildren? Don’t they have a clue what they are doing? Or is this just to placate LaPelosa or some fat cat union boss making 700K a year? I have got bad news for them, keep up this way and it doesn’t matter what you’re making. We’re all going off that cliff together.

Whether or not you believe the authenticity of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s quote of 1939 – “We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot” – the substance is true. The New Deal made the Depression worse – and we are doing it again, only with bigger numbers and more zeros. Furthermore, now the Chinese own us. We enact this nonsensical budget and we might as well give them the whole thing – the Statue of Liberty, McDonald’s and Apple Computer. No backsies. They can have Steve Jobs’ next iPad extravaganza in Shanghai. They build everything over there already anyway.

But unfortunately this is no joke. The passing of this budget is a straight out act of economic insanity. Everyone knows it. The 217 Democrats who passed it surely know it too. Only they are too corrupt to face it honestly. Shame on them. Shame on them. Shame on them.

I make my debut today as a director of music videos with this, er, sorta satiric cover of “You Talk Too Much“. It’s for our new PJTV “Post-American Bandstand.” A lot of good folks helped me with this including Zo Rachel, editor Justin Folk, music director Boris Zelkin and choreographer Frankie Anne… and, yes, the Pat Boone, who was great fun to work with. No ego, etc., etc. You can let me know if you think it’s any good. And, no, I’m not quitting my day job. (Hey, wait a minute. This is my day job.)

I had to laugh when I read (via Glenn) the Mother Jones report today “Negative Energy.” Saith MJ:

With the Senate cap-and-trade bill on ice for the foreseeable future, a key bloc of Democrats is agitating for a Climate Plan B: an existing energy policy bill they say would put the US on the path to a clean energy future. Make that a road to nowhere. The bill in question lacks any kind of cap on carbon, and contains so many concessions to the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries that one environmental group has dubbed it a “flashback to Bush energy policy.”

No cap on carbon?! Sacré bleu…. but wait – there’s more (carbon bashing, that is):

Talk of a climate about-face intensified as news outlets reported last week that senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman—who are working to assemble a cross-party coalition to support climate legislation in the Senate—are planning to scrap a cap on carbon altogether. Graham, who was already on the record condemning the House and Senate cap-and-trade bills, declared in an interview with the New York Times that “some massive cap-and-trade system that regulates carbon in a fashion that drives up energy costs” is “dead.”

Evidently Mother Jones hasn’t gotten the message. Since Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, NASAgate, TemperatureDataGate, etc., etc., with more to come, almost everyone is now concerned that there is no real proof that CO2 causes global warming (if there is indeed any of the latter). Even The Guardian is jumping ship, but not MJ. Oh, well, there have to be some nostalgics.

Indeed, Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard is apparently still on the anti-nuclear bandwagon, as if we were still in the era of Meryl Streep driving panicked from the reactor in Silkwood. But that film was 1983 and since then the nuclear energy industry has made vast improvements. Nuclear is now arguably among the safest and cleanest energies available. The French and the Japanese, as we all know, have had great success with it. But Mother Jones is about the past, isn’t it? It celebrates this MJ – not this MJ.

Now that we have reached the black comic post-portem stage of the John Edwards scandal with Andrew Young’s book out and pundits playing mop up, it’s time to address an interesting question: To what degree did John Edwards’ “leftism” affect his extraordinarily narcissistic behavior?

The quotes around leftism are, of course, deliberate because Edwards wasn’t a real leftist. He is the poster boy for a faux-leftism that permeates our culture. Nothing could be more obvious than that Edwards, who took the furthest left stance of the three Democratic presidential candidates in the last election, cared next to nothing for “the people” but excessively for himself, building the McMansion of McMansions, etc. And “stance” is the operative word here, because his positions always seemed adopted, not felt.

Is there a cause and effect relationship here? We do live in an era when the private behavior and lifestyles of liberal-left politician seem completely out of whack with their public pronouncements. Besides Edwards, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi come quickly to mind, but there are others. It’s doubtful Gore and Pelosi lived personal lives anywhere near as execrable as Edwards’ but there are parallels, especially in the area of personal enrichment (“green” or otherwise). And then there are liberals (or should I say faux-leftists) operating in the public sphere from George Soros to Ariana Huffington about who similar charges could and have been made. And then there’s Hollywood, the indigenous home of this kind of behavior.

Why has this happened? Well, it’s certainly not new. Back in the Thirties, New York was suffused by a kind of radical chic about Stalin’s Soviet Union. This was named “Penthouse Bolshevism” by journalist Eugene Lyons who was the UPI’s Moscow correspondent and had seen life the Soviet Union up close. When he returned, he was amazed at the naivete of Le Tout New York’s adoration of Stalin. Lyons wrote about this and ended up ostracized for a time. The more things change, etc.

People want to be seen as left, but not be left. Or at least have to live as left. This behavior seems more extreme now because there is more of it, an almost willed separation between what you say and what you do. The MSM has participated greatly in covering up this division, because they are frequently a part of it, profiting from this illusion-reality game whose aim is to fool the self as much as it is to fool others.

But it is breaking down. The Tea Party Movement, with its disdain for hypocrisy, is on the rise. But more importantly, there is a great contradiction (to use a marxist term) confronting us. Almost everyone realizes that socialist economics are ridiculous. They have never worked. That is more than ever the message of our times. So how do you take a position of faux-leftism when you can no longer advertise the faux part? You’re trumped.

So most likely no more John Edwardses, at least for now. We’ll have to find a new form of scalawag. That shouldn’t be hard, alas.

One of the most disturbing outgrowths of the global warming controversy over the last twenty or so years has been the increased politicization of science. Of course, this is far from the first time this has occurred, but it may be one of the most important, because we are at a particularly fragile moment in the global economy. Indeed, had it not been for the release of the Climategate emails and documents in November, the recent Copenhagen conference might have succeeded in reallocating billions, even trillions, of dollars, possibly leading to a form of global bankruptcy. Less than two months later, with the so-called science now unraveling on an almost daily basis, the whole thing seems close to insane. How could we have done it?

Well, how could we have done it?

Okay, I’ll take a pass at that – with the caveat that this is a very early narrative of a story that many will tell and examine in the future, undoubtedly in book form. In fact, it deserves several books.

But let’s start with the obvious. Most of us love Mother Earth. It’s a beautiful planet to live on with many extraordinary places and creatures “in’t.” Most of us want to preserve it. And for decades we have been trying to do so – liberals and conservatives in sometimes different ways – via governmental and non-governmental means. To greater or lesser degrees, some of these means worked – or at least improved things. Anyone who lives in Los Angeles, as I do, knows the benefits of air quality legislation. You can actually see the hills and your eyes don’t tear, as they once did, when you walk into the back yard.

As we know, while these things were going on, organizations were growing and forming in protection of the Earth, or what was perceived to be the protection of the Earth. Many of these groups would phone us or go door-to-door asking for money, which many of us, I among them, gave. We were all good servants of Gaia. No matter what our religion – or lack thereof – it was the right thing. The Earth was in jeopardy. We had to defend it. And these organizations continued growing. Being “green” became the normative behavior, in practically every aspect of our existence, from the school to the supermarket. We lived in a “recycling world.” (Yes, I know there were many environmental errors and misidentifications of endangered species, etc., but mistakes are the way of the world. Let’s pass over that for the moment.) Environmentalism had become for many a replacement religion rather than the simple common sense that it is.

Enter Al Gore. Recently having lost a highly-disputed election for the most important position in the world, he was ripe for a cause and became influenced by a small group of scientists who had deep and sincere beliefs in an impending catastrophe from CO2 caused Anthropogenic Global Warming. The most prominent of these scientists is James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is said to have a general dislike for industrial civilization and what it has wrought. Whether this is true or not or whether Gore knew it, I don’t know, but it doesn’t appear to have mattered. Gore – who had no scientific training and indeed had an exceptionally poor academic record in general – seized upon the information proferred by Hansen and the others, not questioning them, as far we know, for a second. (As you will see from this link, many, including director superiors, are questioning Hansen now.)

Pity Scientific American. Little did the magazine’s editors know when putting together their February issue that their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate”: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts, for some reason needing a FOIA to cough up data that should be public record in such a scientific endeavor. The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!

I knew J. D. Salinger. Well, not exactly, but I followed him around.

Those memories came flooding back to me when I heard a short time ago that the iconic (for once that word is applicable) author of The Catcher in the Rye had died. My encounters with Salinger happened when I was a Dartmouth student (1964). The already reclusive Salinger would appear on the campus occasionally, usually to make a stop at the Dartmouth Bookstore to stock up on books. (He lived some twenty miles off in the town of Cornish, N. H.)

When he was around, word would go out to the artier types at the college and we would slip over to the bookstore and, well, stalk the famous writer, I guess you could say. By then he had published Franny and Zooey, among other works, which we greatly admired. But many of us were puzzled that the majority of his purchases were mere mystery paperbacks – Dorothy Sayers was one of his favorites. Undergraduate snobs, we had expected Dostoevsky or Camus. (This was long before I was writing mysteries myself – or even considered it.)

Nevertheless, Salinger Fever increased among the bohos on the Dartmouth campus. This was before the college went co-ed and there wasn’t a lot of excitement up in Hanover N. H. A friend of mine even learned Salinger’s address from spotting it on a check at the bookstore cash register. He shared this find with the rest of our crowd. So one night another friend of mine named Ron Smith and I, after a few too many trips to the beer keg, drove up to Cornish on a snowy night in search of the great man. Though tipsy, we were pretty nervous because Salinger’s misanthropy was legendary. But we soldiered on, found the author’s house and knocked on the door. It was opened by a 21-year old “Cliffie,” who we had heard was Salinger’s wife or girlfriend. She stared at us as if we were a couple of kids, although we couldn’t have been more than a year or two younger than she was, and asked us what we were doing there. We told her we wanted to talk to Mr. Salinger. At that point we caught a glimpse of the author walking about in his boxer shorts. He looked terrified and signaled something to the young woman who, without another word, slammed the door in our faces and bolted it shut. I can remember feeling humiliated.

I can’t remember ever seeing J. D. Salinger again and that certainly was the last time I ever stalked anybody. Or even close.