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You know how Fox Newsies are such champions of the First Amendment that they are always on the lookout for attempts to stifle diversity in the press? That zeal for free expression has flown out the window with the news that Al Jazeera English plans to expand in the United States. And whether out of fear or just because they love their hateration, Fox pundits are doing their best to make you think that Al Jazeera is nothing less than an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.

Yesterday, a Fox News contributor blatantly suggested that Al Jazeera was somehow (without bothering to give the details or evidence about how) connected with Muslim sleeper cells in Detroit. This morning, Michelle Malkin called the Qatar-based network “a half-billion dollar Trojan horse for Terror TV.” Host Steve Doocy thought it was not a matter of if, but how overtly the pro-Islam/anti-American agenda would be promoted.

As Malkin spoke, the screen conveniently split to show a photo of Al Gore, whose sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera is bringing about its expansion, standing under an Al Jazeera logo. (Just in case we had failed to associate Gore with these ENEMIES OF AMERICA!!!)

Malkin’s eyes bulged as she urged viewers to beware of the jihadism on its way to our shores under cover of objective reporting:

They’re hiring so-called investigative reporters now at all of these bureaus and they’re going to have an expansive reach into American homes. And I think it’s incumbent upon those of us who are very familiar with how Al Jazeera abroad has cheerleaded for terror that has taken American lives that they know who these people side with.

…Inevitably the mask will slip and we can all put on our shocked faces when it does.

Doocy added, "It’ll be interesting to see exactly when you turn it on, what it’ll feel like. I mean, will it feel like the Al Jazeera that you watch over in the Middle East or will it just be some homogenized thing that has a very subtle message?"

If you think there’s even a shred of honest concern being voiced here, then you must check out the anti-American screed Jon Stewart found from Rotana – the Saudi conglomerate connected to - you guessed it, Fox News.

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If you're Al Gore and you own 20 percent of Current TV, and Current TV is sold to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar's royal family, and Qatar's royal family also profits from oil trading, have you sold out the cause of global warming?

That's the question Howie Kurtz brought up on Reliable Sources this morning. I think it's a manufactured issue, but Dana Milbank begs to differ, saying "[H]e's been a big spokesman on global warming, a principled man and now he is this big, fat target." Continuing his rant, Milbank said Gore is "worth $300 million more than Mitt Romney and basically he's seen as a guy now who enriched himself, rather than advancing his cause -- opening up to the criticism of people like this global warming denier."

The Blaze writer Amy Holmes was predictably banal in her response, claiming Gore has "been telling the rest of the world to, you know, restrain and constrain our spending while he personally is becoming a wealthier man through, you know, his attack on Mother Nature."

What does that even mean? Does anyone think Al Gore bought Current TV in order to further his cause around global warming --so he could make a boatload of money on climate change? Really?

Finally, what does Mitt Romney's wealth have to do with it, anyway? Gore's wealth has come from sitting on the boards of Google and Apple after he left public office. He cashed in. Did anyone decide he was insincere about global warming because of those affiliations?

Gore and his partner Joel Hyatt bought a struggling cable network for $70 million in 2004. When Current was sold in 2013 for a price reported to be about $500 million, Gore's profit would be 20 percent of that sale price, less any financing that may have been obtained between 2004 and 2013. I have no idea what those financing arrangements might have been, but they either financed or else put their own funds in over the years in order to keep the doors open on what wasn't a particularly profitable enterprise.

For its part, Al Jazeera needed a channel with carriers. They have online traction, but were having difficulty finding cable carriers that would include their channel. By purchasing Current, they hoped to use Current's position as a channel already carried to build a news network competitive with CNN, which might explain why Time-Warner cable dropped Current the day the deal was announced.

I'm sure Comcast will follow suit, because when you own everything from cable to internet to pipeline to content creators, why bother with any voices you don't like?

At any rate, I'm having a great deal of difficulty connecting his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera with a sellout of his credibility on climate change. I also don't view him as the sole authority on the question, but he is one who has credibility simply because he has been passionate and has put his money where his mouth is.

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Al Gore steps up to pressure President Obama to take the lead on climate change. It starts tonight with a 24-hour broadcast from New York City:

The former vice-president and climate champion, Al Gore, has called onBarack Obama to seize the moment and use his re-election victory to push through bold action on climate change.

The president has faced rising public pressure in the wake of superstorm Sandy to deliver on his promise to act on global warming.But none of those calling on Obama to act carries the moral authority of Gore, who has devoted his post-political career to building a climate movement.

Now, Gore said, it is the president's turn. He urged Obama to immediately begin pushing for a carbon tax in negotiations over the"fiscal cliff" budget crisis.

The vice-president's intervention for a carbon tax could give critical support to an idea that has gained currency since the election – at least among Washington thinktanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute held an all-day seminar on the carbon tax on Tuesday.

"I think all who look at these circumstances should agree that president Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it," Gore told the Guardian in a telephone interview.

"He has the mandate. He has the opportunity, and he has the inherent ability to provide the leadership needed. I really hope that he will, and I will respectfully ask him to do exactly that."

Gore will ratchet up his own pressure on Wednesday evening when he hosts a 24-hour live online broadcast from New York city on the connections between climate change and extreme events such as Sandy.The Dirty Weather Report, produced by his Climate Reality Project, will kick off with footage from New Jersey's devastated shore and interviews with governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo. It begins at 8pm eastern time.

In terms of policy specifics, Gore said he wanted the White House and Congress to start an immediate push for a carbon tax. "It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time," he said. "One way is with a carbon tax."

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Watch George W. Bush debate Al Gore and claim his tax plan was really great for the middle class and didn't give high-earning taxpayers a break. Then watch Mitt Romney say the very same thing.

Indulge me here for a minute, because there are some common threads which have proven to be outright lies. How do they get away with them? Twisted logic, that's how.

Tax cuts won't add to the deficit. Here's how they get to say this nonsense with a straight face. Republicans do not believe tax cuts factor into the deficit at all. In other words, the deficit is purely a question of spending, and not of revenues. So reducing revenues doesn't increase the deficit because revenues aren't a factor. I did warn you it was twisted.

Republicans care about the deficit. No, no, Republicans don't care about the deficit, and Mitt Romney especially doesn't care about it. Look, he ran Bain Capital as an enterprise that used debt financing to pay millions and millions in profit to investors while leaving ordinary people out of a job and solid businesses bankrupt. So no, he doesn't care about deficits, and neither did Dubya.

Republicans really, really care about the middle class. That Dubya bit at the end of his little rant was so interesting. First he claims that high-income taxpayers will pay "more as a share of the total" than anyone else, as if that isn't already something happening. Then he makes the big case that a family of 4 earning $50,000 per year will walk out with $2,000 more in their pocket at the end of a year, while Gore's plan would only give them $145.

Mitt Romney's tax plan includes letting capital gains go untaxed. Who benefits most from that? Not the middle class taxpayer, who mostly has investments in tax-deferred instruments like IRAs and 401k plans. No, the beneficiary of untaxed capital gains would be people like Mitt Romney and his hedge fund buddies and investors.

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[h/t Angry Black Lady]

Because Republicans are known for their Orwellian ability to flip around generally accepted concepts into the complete opposite, it should surprise no one to discover that FightBigotry.com would be better known by a different name: EnergizeRepublicanWhiteMen.com. No one with half a brain actually believes that Barack Obama and Eric Holder are radical black power anti-white bigots, but that's what the newest SuperPac would like for you to believe.

ThinkProgress has the script if you're as repelled as I and don't want to actually watch it:

The Obama administration has injected race into the presidential campaign. Obama Attorney General Eric Holder recently said – with no argument from the president – that their white critics are motivated by race. Implying whites are too stupid to have honest disagreements with the president without being racist is in-and-of-itself racist against whites, reinforcing Mr. Obama’s disturbing pattern of tacitly defending black racism.
…

Obama’s attorney general said pursuing the New Black Panthers does a great disservice to whose “who risked all, for my people.” So it’s okay for his people to commit racial crimes? In 2009, President Obama defended his friend Henry Louis Gates after a racist altercation with police, telling a white officer he wouldn’t speak to him but would speak to his mama. Mr. Obama’s response? “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.”
…

Mr. President, you ran as the candidate of change. But one thing has not changed—your tacit defense of racism against white folks, despite receiving nearly half the white vote to win the presidency.

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Anyone who closely followed the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida remembers that one of the key reasons that George W. Bush "won" the state was the fact that thousands of black voters were falsely purged from the voter rolls in advance of the election, preventing those Floridians from voting, most of whom would've voted for Al Gore. In 2012, Republicans are looking at purging 180,000 Hispanics from the voting rolls. Is history repeating itself?

In 2000, more than 20,000 voters -- most of them African American -- were prevented from voting because they had names similar to convicted felons. People who had the full right to vote, most of whom had never been convicted of a serious crime, were prevented from voting by Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and the Republicans in Tallahassee. Most black voters in Florida, like elsewhere, voted for Al Gore. And considering the state went to George W. Bush by less than 550 votes, it's clear that the purge was a major factor in stealing the election for the governor's brother.

Now the Rick Scott administration -- which by any standard is thought to be less ethical than the Jeb Bush administration -- is preparing a voter purge list that could reach 180,000 strong. Since the purge list is specifically targeted at trying to stop undocumented immigrants from voting, the list will be almost completely Hispanic. And despite the fact that Cuban-American Floridians tend to vote Republican, the majority of Florida Hispanics are not of Cuban heritage. If the list is successfully completed, then, it's obvious that it will disproportionately target Democratic voters. Just like the Bush-Harris list from 2000.

The full universe of potentially ineligible voters that state elections officials plan to check for possible removal from the roles is about 180,000, a spokesman for the Division of Elections said Friday, reports David Royse of the News Service of Florida.

Elections spokesman Chris Cate told the News Service that in all, when matching voter rolls against newly available citizenship data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, officials found that number of possible matches, and began further investigating each one to see if they were likely to be wrongly registered to vote.

Officials reported earlier this week that they had forwarded the first batch of those names, about 2,600 to local supervisors of elections for further review and for each voter to be notified that they were on a list of people suspected of being illegally registered.

“Everyone of those individuals would be contacted by supervisors,” Cate said.

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This will be online. Any chance we can get it broadcast into the congressional offices? Probably not.

Starting on Wednesday, Gore will expound on climate change for 24 hours straight, with a one-hour presentation to be broadcast each hour in a different time zone. Gore’s organization will also commandeer the social media accounts of willing participants throughout the event, called "24 Hours of Reality.

"The presentations will feature "200 new slides arguing the connection between more extreme weather and climate change," an official from one of Gore’s partner organizations told Reuters.

"There will be a full-on assault on climate skeptics, exploring where they get their funding from.

"You might think that if slide shows and lectures from Al Gore could sway climate change deniers, they would have done so already. But there is evidence that some might need a refresher. Concern over climate change in the U.S. has dropped from 62 percent in 2007 to 48 percent today, according to opinion polls.

More information about Gore's campaign is online at the website of the Climate Reality Project.

Well, at least we're getting somewhere: Up until that nutcase domestic terrorist, James Lee, walked in and threatened to blow up the Discovery Channel, the standard response from folks on the right to acts of domestic terrorism -- which predominantly involve right-wing politics -- was to claim that these were simply the acts of nuts, and that the incendiary political rhetoric that inspired them had no role in their violent behavior whatsoever.

But once Lee went on his rampage, supposedly fueled by environmentalist rhetoric, that all went away: Why of course it was all Al Gore's fault.

Perhaps the amusing permutation of this came from the execrable Glenn Reynolds:

Filthy. Parasites. Disgusting, overbreeding candidates for sterilization and extermination. Possessed of false morals and a “breeding culture.”

Hitler talking about the Jews? Nope. This is Discovery Channel hostage-taker James Lee talking about ... human beings. Compared to Lee, Hitler was a piker, philosophically: Der Fuehrer only wanted to kill those he considered “subhuman.” Lee considered all humans to be subhuman.

Lee was a nut, an eco-freak who said he was inspired by Al Gore’s environmental scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” His badly written “manifesto” underscores his craziness. He hated “filthy human babies.”

But, of course, Lee’s not alone. Looking at the environmental literature, we find terms like those used above -- the currently stylish description is “eliminationist rhetoric” -- used widely, and plans for mass sterilization are fairly common.

Oh really? This is an extraordinary claim. Can Reynolds provide his readers with any examples of this kind of rhetoric from "the environmental literature," let alone any evidence that it's "used widely"?

Well, no. The best he can come up with is the completely discredited claims about John Holdren -- indeed, repeating the 'Lie of the Year' nominee as though it were fact, and then saying merely that Holdren "distanced" himself from the supposed beliefs -- plus some nutty chatter at Internet forums and the results of Google searches. He cites Al Gore specifically, but cannot present any examples wherein Gore might even half-suggest such anti-humanist sentiments as those used by Lee in his manifesto.

In fact, Reynolds' description of all this is breathtakingly dishonest, since the language of Lee's that he cites largely comes from this passage in Lee's manifesto:

Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

That rhetoric, particularly the "anchor baby" stuff, is not at all common among environmentalists, except perhaps for the tiny contingent of John Tanton fans out there. But it is extremely common on the right -- particularly among the nativists who have been populating the broadcasts at Fox News for the past several years, notably in recent months as they advocate for repealing the 14th Amendment.

It's clear that Lee's radicalism is an amalgam of right- and left-wing ideologies. But the violent behavior he exhibited has been far more common the right -- particularly on immigration issues -- than it has been on the left, for many years now.

Now, it's tempting to revert to Glenn Beck mode in dealing with this: to claim that they're all just nutcases, and that nothing anyone says should be held responsible for the violent acts of the mentally ill.

That's a cop-out.

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I must say that I was truly honored--humbled if you will--to have the former demi-term Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, contact me and ask me to write her speech for today's family-friendly event--the NRA annual convention in Charlotte, North Carolina [it must be all the nice things I've said about her. She even agreed to allow me to share with you an early copy. So here you go:

Palin Speech

Thanks you! Thank you!! I am proud to be here today in the Palmetto State! And I'm so honored to be speaking to you, the real Americans who make up the Natural Rifle Association!

There are some scary things going on here out there in this country of ours. The liberal elites, you know, and their allies in the lamestream media, they'll tell you that guns are dangerous. Ya know, its guns, and not their liberal ideas, like preparation of church and state, abortion and laws against drunk snowmobiling that've really caused inrest in our streets.

Well, I'm here to tell you they're wrong. Guns don't kill people. People kill guns. So I am so proud to be delivering this massage in front of an organization that predicted what the liberals would try and do, an organization that had the foreskin to warn us about how they'd destroy our great country.[wink]

Now I am not going to take too much of your time, because I have two more events tonight that will each pay me a cool 100K for winking and offering folksy platitudes about things I don't really understand--but let me single out a few examples of what I'm talkin 'bout.

Lately there have been attempts to take guns away from those the big government liberals call "suspected terrorists." That's right. Some of them have even called the NRA terrorists, which makes no sense--most NRA members are white!

The liberal elites whine about a "terrorist gap," which allowed the shootings to occur at Fort Hood, Fort Dix and allowed the Times Square attempted bomber to get a gun. They think that good Americans shotgunning beers at bars in Georgia and Virginia shouldnt be allowed to carry assault weapons, they empathize with polls that make it clear that a majority of Americans don't want TEC-9s in their faces when they drink their lattes at Starbucks, even though we all know that numbers are Communist. I mean listen to these liberal lies:

A majority of Americans oppose people carrying loaded guns openly in public. More feel unsafe than feel safer - and a third feel much less safe with that knowledge, according to a poll conducted for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence by respected polling firm Lake Research Partners.

The last thing I'll say on this is that, I mean seriously folks, how could an event where Oliver North is speaking after me be held by a group that supports arming terrorists? [wink, extend leg so calf is fully visible]

Then there's the oil-hating left. I mean, while we hear all this jibber-jabbering about the Gulf of Texaco spill, I'd like to ask, has anyone in the Obama Administration even tried threatening the oil with an ole six-shooter yet? Didn't think so.

I mean c'mon folks, it's not like our addiction to oil is endangering our national security, economy, health or environment here. Sure, I know former Vice President Al Gore pointed this out:

[...both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes--directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.

And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran's relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.

The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world's sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.

I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan--and even last week's attempted bombing in Times Square--to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.]

But you know how I know that the liberals are wrong on this once again? Because I saw where they said that pollution could even lead to cases of angina. And I may just be a humble woman from Wasilla, but I know the environment has nothing to do with a woman's lady parts.

OK, I am about half-way done with my speech. Which means I'm finished. As Rush Limbaugh would say satirically, you know, see ya later retards. [wash notes off hand; put new ones on; leave]

*Not following Cliff Schecter on Twitter could likely lead to the 7th sign of the apocalypse

**Full Disclosure: Cliff Schecter consults on issues surrounding gun safety and protecting the environment.