As IF Times

link Al Gore stands to gain about $70 million after selling Current TV to al-Jazeera – Washington Post.

I actually applaud Al Gore for making the wise business decision; he sold out.  Hmm, maybe that didn’t come out right.  Apart from his political career, Albert Gore is at heart a businessman and a very good one if you look at the record.  Despite an undistinguished political career, he wound up being invited to the boards of Google and Apple, both gigs that soothed the hurt of not being elected President.  I don’t think we can begrudge somebody who starts humbly and then and builds himself a business empire worth hundreds of millions.  Well that’s not true, Mitt Romney was begrudged.   If you acquire you wealth through fortuitous marriages like John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi, there’s much less stigma attached to your wealth,  there’s more dignity to it.

I’m sure it must have galled Al that he didn’t receive perpetual lifetime royalties  for inventing the Internet.   Despite this setback, he was still able to get into the film business, made an eco fantasy movie and received a Nobel prize for doing so.  Heck, if Michael Moore can make money off fantasy films, so can he.  But Nobel money only goes so far when you have expenses such as private planes, limos and beach houses to upkeep.  You can’t spread the gospel about wasting resources and global calamity in a dogsled living in a two-wide trailer.   A guy starts an enterprise which, from the beginning was predicated on a ridiculous premise, makes no money at it and then sells it off for $500 million dollars?  That’s sheer genius.

In the wake of this recent successful business coup, staffers at the soon to be renamed Current TV are bewildered at what they perceive as the blatant hypocrisy and mercenary actions taken by their fearless leader.  Selling eco sensitive Current TV to Al Jazeera is akin to selling  a veggie restaurant to KFC.  Dennis Miller said it best when he noted that Gore profited greatly from the prophet business.   Staffers should have gotten a clue that something was up when the Christmas bonus included some free gas cards and prayer mats.

Keen business school students should stay tuned for Al’s next great adventure.  We don’t know what calamity will soon befall all earthlings, but you can bet it will be lucrative.

link Al Gore: Scott Walker is ‘extreme,’ divisive – Patrick Gavin – POLITICO.com.

One of the biggest hits of the TV season surrounds the blood feud between two bitterly opposing factions.  As it happens, “The Hatfields vs The McCoys” is a good guess, but the better answer is the political right vs the political left in the U.S..  There is no dramatization or fictional story more compelling than the political feud occurring now between an obviously divided American public, at least according to the popular media.

Increasingly, the rhetoric and animosity has escalated to levels of derangement as partisans of the left increasingly show just how nakedly unhinged they really are.  The recent landmark recall elections in Wisconsin will be seen years from now as a pivotal moment in American history.  Unable to convince others of their tenuous positions and claims through laughable maneuvers and tactics over the past 2 years, the union backed left lost a landslide vote over entitlements, not to Scott Walker and the right as has been characterized, but to the long suffering taxpayers.

Some may remember back in 2011, the novel tactic of Wisconsin lawmakers running off and hiding in the next state to avoid voting on a motion they were sure to lose.  This is the equivalent of a 3 year old covering their eyes in order to have a bad thing go bye-bye.  Some may recognize the technique of aggregating union support nationwide for their cause as the equivalent of “everyone else is doing it”.  Finally, we get to the aftermath of the recall vote where a woman actually slaps the losing contestant, Tom Barrett over conceding an obvious loss.  Given the recent stories of cannibalism in the news, Barrett is lucky she didn’t bite him.

Amusingly, the high cretin of hyperbole, Al-the-world-is-ending-Gore chimes in with his thoughts on the issue, as if he and the facts were intimate friends.   If the left is going to make a credible case for anything,  they’ll at least have to get new spokespeople for their causes.  They can’t have Bill Clinton preach about integrity; they can’t have Michael Moore babble about the oppressed, they can’t have Nancy Pelosi cry crocodile tears about poverty and they can’t have Al Gore speak about…well… anything.

In a time when the harsh wave of reality is sweeping all nation states worldwide with respect to untenable debts and related entitlements, there are still those who cling to fantasy world views of what they deserve.  Upon reflection, perhaps this is not so much deranged as it is infantile.   The name calling, the petulant behaviour, the faux demonstrations.  As the grown-ups always say, ‘it’s all fun until someone loses an eye’.