The slang term for rendering your laptop or cell phone inoperable is “bricking it.” Turning hundreds or thousands of dollars of electronics into an inert, brick-like state, which may cost a good chunk of change to fix — so much so that buying a new device might be the best bet.

That’s also a risk with the coal-powered uber-expensive Tesla electric car, according to Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

* * * * *

Tesla Motors is a public company that’s valued at over $3.5 billion and has received $465 million in US government loans, all on the back of the promise that it can deliver a real world, all-electric car to the mainstream market. Yet today, in my opinion, Tesla seems to be knowingly selling cars that can turn into bricks without any financial protection for the customer.

Until there’s a fundamental change in Tesla’s technology, it would seem the only other option for Tesla is to help its customers insure against this problem. As consumers become aware that a Tesla is possibly just a long trip, a bad extension cord, or an accidental unplugging away from disaster, how many will choose to gamble $40,000 on that not happening? Would you?

Back in 2009, CNN reported that “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it.” If the Jalopnik report is true, that’s yet more proof, as Rob Long wrote last month, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

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As Hugh Hewitt would say, Jim Geraghty proves to be indispensable once again, pulling up quotes from the memory hole of a decade ago:

“If drilling [in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] were approved today, it would be ten years before oil arrived in refineries.” — Sierra Magazine, January-February issue, 2002.

Similarly, while we’ve all seen the CNBC interview with then-candidate Barack Obama back in June of 2008 when he signed off on high energy prices as long as they rose “gradually,” he was also concurrently giving interviews in which he condemned them as a cudgel against the Democrats’ nemesis, as Investor’s Business Daily notes:

When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.

Already, pump prices are higher than they’ve been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.

President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.

“Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic,” Gibbs said Sunday. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

“Progress” isn’t exactly how Obama described the country’s energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” which was “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”

“For the well-off in this country,” Obama said in May 2008, “high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they’re a huge problem, bordering on a crisis.”

In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be “one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced” and that gas prices “are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses.”

While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama’s policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.

Obama, in fact, has made it clear for years that he has no real interest in boosting domestic production.

Which brings us to David Harsanyi’s latest piece in Real Clear Politics. David asks, “Aren’t High Gas Prices What Democrats Want?”

According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home — and much more oil around the world.

Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high — more than $105 a barrel — after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.

Given the fungibility of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we’ll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home — drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.

Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won’t stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it’s doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we’ll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.

Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants.

“Yeah, but they don’t like to admit it in an election year,” the Professor replies. I think it depends on who you ask.

Related: The chaps at JammieWearingFools spot $4.49 a gallon gas in New York City; could $5.00 a gallon gas be next? (Warning: auto-play video on that second link.)

Do I hear six dollars a gallon? Why yes, I do!

More: “Orwell wept.”

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“Left’s Attempt At Their Own ClimateGate Based on Forged Document?”, as pondered by Ace of Spades:

Megan McArdle was, to my knowledge, the first to raise red flags over the authenticity of documents from the Heartland Institute, supposedly showing them acting all evil and stuff about the climate.

Most of the documents are real and are fairly bland. But one memo is in dispute. This memo, by McArdle’s reading, seems written not from the point of view of a climate change skeptic — who would naturally see himself as the good guy — but from the point of view of a climate change zealot impersonating a climate change skeptic — and is thus written, oddly, as if the person doing the writing believes himself to be a bad guy.

(My own take: I skipped this because I think the Likely Forged Document itself is pretty bland, too. If this is an attempt at a takedown, it seems pretty subtle to me. But subsequent events seem to show that Megan McArdle was likely right and my lack of interest was likely wrong.)

5. The worldview is different. In my experience, climate skeptics see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting for truth and justice against the powerful, and nearly monolithic, forces of the establishment. They are David, to the climate scientists’ Goliaths. This is basically what the authenticated documents sound like.The memo, by contrast, uses more negative language about the efforts it’s describing, while trying to sound like they think it’s positive. It’s like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.

Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.

McArdle’s theory is that the real information (bland stuff about donors) was in fact obtained by some lefty, but it wasn’t juicy enough. So someone faked up a Memo, basically a digest of the information in the other documents (or through Google), but wrote about that information in the most negative way possible, in order to juice up a pretty weak leak.

Stacy McCain adds, “In Apologizing for Global Warming Hoax, Peter Gleick Blames His Victims”:

The Heartland Institute was victimized by global warming fanatics who published stolen documents and at least one forged document in their attempts to portray the Institute as dishonest.

One of the central figures in this criminal hoax was Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, who uses the Huffington Post to offer an excuse:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

“It’s not my fault!” The end justify the means: The alleged evil of their opponents excuses any shoddy smear Gleick and his allies may perpetrate against them. And despite their admitted amorality, they wonder why we doubt their claims to “science”?

If it turns out that Gleick had a 2012 RatherGate moment, it wouldn’t be the first time that radical environmentalism has cooked the books, as we’ll discuss on the following page.

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“Grandpa … What are Those Towers?”, blogger Cjunk asks at Small Dead Animals:

“They are eco-ruins, Sarah.”

“What’s an eco-ruin Grandpa?”

Well my little darling, let me tell you a story:

I don’t think I’ll mind Eco-ruins. It will be fun to point them out on hikes with kids and explain what it was like back in the late 1900′s. “The best part kids, is that they thought they were smarter than everyone else. They would get so mad if anyone said different. Look at their big schemes now. Every time you pay the government, just remember that its to pay for these rusting monuments.”

In the meantime though, as Robert Bryce writes at City Journal, “It’s time to stop wasting land and resources in the name of environmentalism,” and “Get Dense.”

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Di-Gel won’t cure them, as Steve Hayward writes at Power Line:

Meanwhile, the Times notes in its lead story that rising gasoline prices may present a political problem for Obama.  Now this is a curious story, for several reasons.  First, Obama, like all right-thinking greenies, want gasoline prices to be higher, though, to be sure, they want high prices brought about by a government tax rather than the marketplace.  High gas prices are no fun if it means more profits for private oil companies.  Obama admitted this directly when asked about high gas prices in 2008, when he said he didn’t have a problem with them, only that he “would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”  Well, prices have crept up gradually since they collapsed back to about $2 a gallon in 2008.  So what’s his problem?

Similarly, what’s the Times’ problem? Like Tom Brokaw of NBC and the Washington Post, the New York Times begged the CEO of the Office of the President Elect back in late 2008 for higher gas prices; why should they be concerned about the one campaign promise he’s actually kept?

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Back in the fall of 2010, James Taranto coined the phrase “Green Supremacists” to describe a particularly eliminationist-obsessed subset of radical environmentalists:

What kind of people blow up children?

White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.

Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.

There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.

You can see the 10:10 video embedded above, and earlier examples of green supremacists rounded up here. But Kate at Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog really puts the mindset behind it into context via a recent quote from a German environmentalist, who’s apparently taking Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” book title just a little too literally. As Kate writes, “Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!”

• Adolf Hitler to Heinrich Himmler, 1942; – “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world.”
• Petra Döll, German climate scientist, February 2012 – “Klimaskeptiker sind wie Viren”.

But hey, no pressure to conform, right?

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Near the end of his life, Osama Bin Laden gave up on his chosen profession, and advised his relatives to enter the 21st century, Walter Russell Mead writes:

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

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“Navy names littoral combat ship after Gabrielle Giffords,” the Chicago Tribune reports:

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next Independence variant littoral combat ship will be named after Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head last January when a gunman opened fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store.

Six others, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, [and George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge John M. Roll, whom the Tribune either forgot to mention, or doesn't want to include because it clutters the narrative -- Ed] were killed in the shooting and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.

Mabus said the ship’s sponsor will be Roxanna Green, Taylor-Green’s mother. In naval tradition, a ship’s sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Giffords was presented with an artist’s rendering of what will be the USS Gabrielle Giffords at a Pentagon ceremony Friday afternoon.

You can see an illustration of the ship here. Curiously, it isn’t powered by windmills, nor does the Tribune seemed too upset about the potentially inflammatory rhetoric tacit in the ship’s ultimate purpose.

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“Do Aliens Go Invisible by ‘Going Green,’” the Discovery Channel asks for reasons unknown, other than perhaps it being a slow news day:

Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder has come upon a novel solution to the failure of astronomical observations to solve the Fermi Paradox. He proposes: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” (This is a takeoff on Arthur C. Clarke’s posit: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)

In other words, smart aliens have “gone green” and generate no waste products that we could detect. They therefore blend into the galaxy. Therefore, “artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable,” writes Schroeder.

Our response is in video form at the top of the post.

Beyond that rebuttal, the Discovery Channel doesn’t appear to be any hurry to do their part to accelerate this process by discontinuing their cable TV channel and deactivating their Web server, but it is a reminder of the end game of radical environmentalism: putting the toothpaste of western civilization and technological progress back into the tube and returning mankind to a primitive pre-industrial state.

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democrat Governor, appears to be particularly eager to help.

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Just a reminder that South Park’s “Smug Alert!” episode was a warning, not a user’s guide.

Related: “‘An Inconsistent Truth’ Debunks Gore’s Global Warming Hysteria.”

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“The Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to become the world’s most visited newspaper website, according to online tracking service Comscore,” the BBC claims. “The biggest increase in readers has been in the US — so how did this very British institution do it?”

There is something compellingly simple about MailOnline. No fancy site navigation, picture carousels or slideshows – just a front page with stories and pictures. Thousands of them.

The New York Times claims it is still the world’s most popular newspaper website, because the Mail figures include visits to sister sites.

But let that not detract from the British newspaper’s achievement in going from nowhere to 45.3 million unique visitors a month in just five years. What is its secret?

1. Celebrity news

MailOnline’s success in the United States has been partly built, most pundits agree, on celebrity gossip. It is a very different beast from its more strait-laced print sister, even though it shares a lot of content with it.

Celebrity journalist and author Jo Piazza believes it is much imitated by rival US-based gossip sites.

Speaking in frank terms, she says: “Until we started seeing this influx of gossip websites here in the United States, the media was very ass-kissy towards celebrities, whereas the Daily Mail has never done that.

Just as an aside, this has long been one of the greatest failings of the Los Angeles Times. It has Hollywood right in its backyard, and yet, perhaps because it’s so “ass-kissy towards celebrities” (when it isn’t really ass-kissy towards politicians), it can’t get out of its own way and run amok covering the endless Hieronymus Bosch tableaux outstretched before them, that’s begging for them to report on it, in a fun, breezy way.

In a way, the problem is even worse at its northeastern cousin, as William McGowan noted in his landmark 2010 deconstruction of the New York Times’ myriad woes, Gray Lady Down:

“The entire social and moral compass of the paper,” as the former Times art critic Hilton Kramer later said, was altered to conform to a liberal ethos infused with “the emancipatory ideologies of the 1960’s” and drawing no distinction between “media-induced notoriety and significant issues of public life.” The Times took on more and more lightness of being. It became preoccupied with pop-culture trivia and über urban trends, reported on with moral relativism and without intellectual rigor.

The change was met by disaffection and derision within the paper’s newsroom. Grace Gluek, who ran the culture desk for a while as replacement editor, was one of the disaffected, and famously once asked, “Who do I have to f*** to get out of this job?” Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the Daily News, said the new cultural pages reminded him of a middle-aged woman learning how to disco: “She put on a miniskirt and her varicose veins are showing.” Gerry Gold, a staff reporter, commented, “We do all these pieces on pop icons as if they are important artistes. In fact they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them.”

That last sentence dovetails well with the other reason why the London Daily Mail is blowing the doors off the Times, which not surprisingly, the BBC can’t fully articulate, because it’s one of their own institutional weaknesses: It’s having fun. As Mark Steyn said, nearly six years ago:

In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O’Sullivan put it, “They neither offend nor delight” – as a matter of policy. Yes, they’re broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they’re missing the point here. They don’t realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don’t believe you can now.

Of course, it’s often the case that generating the appearance of having fun requires an enormous amount of hard work (just ask Fred Astaire, who sweated blood to make his dance routines appear effortless). But readers can sense a paper with an institutional sense of playfulness, versus one that’s attempting to Very Seriously Talk Down To Them From High Atop The Mountains. Which has long been the message from the Times, particularly since Pinch transformed it from a fairly reliable (Duranty aside) straightforward news source into such a personality-driven paper, one of the leitmotifs of McGowan’s book. And the sense that readers get from those personalities is that:

• Krugman hates everybody, particularly Occupy Wall Street, since they’re too stupid to realize how they got played by one of the ultimate One Percenters.
• Friedman wants to turn America into totalitarian China, as long as he gets to keep his mansion.
• Pinch blames all of modern America’s shortcomings on his generation’s failures. And we really must all consume less for the environment. But in the meantime, damn, that new Dylan CD sure sounds fantastic on the CL600′s sound system while cruising over to the Hamptons, doesn’t it?
• MoDo really needs a drink and a smoke. And maybe a kicky new pair of Manolo Blahniks.

In contrast, the New York Post is having loads of fun with its over-the-top-headlines. Matt Drudge brings a similar tone to his coverage. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto at least is having fun rounding up the biggest stories of the day, and deflating the pretensions of the “progressive” elite. Here at PJM, Steve Green, Roger Kimball, the mysterious Zombie, and Roger Simon, our Maximum Pajamahadeen, among others here, bring a welcome sense of humor to the grim news of the day. (As does Glenn Reynolds, who single-handedly seems to crank out more links daily than all of Pinch’s bloated enterprise.)

Oh, and one other reason why the Daily Mail is winning the newspaper war: it is willing to deflate the religious beliefs held most dear by the management and editorial bullpen of the New York Times.

As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when Robert Altman’s nimble, low-budget, no-name cast adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel M*A*S*H overtook Mike Nichols’ leaden, spare-no-expense all-star version of Joseph Heller’s similarly-themed Catch-22 at the box office in 1970, Altman hung a sign in his office that said “CAUGHT-22.” The increasingly far left worldview that pervades the New York Times’ offices as badly as it does Mayor Bloomberg’s, has transformed it into a paper that’s full of Catch-22s, a newspaper far more concerned with ideological purity than actually reporting news that people want to read in a lively fashion. If the Daily Mail really has overtaken the Gray Lady’s Web traffic, all I’m left to ponder is, what took them so long?

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Ah, the joys of venture socialism. “Barack Obama is a Terrible Fund Manager, and a Rotten Tech VC,” Rob Long writes at Ricochet:

First, he lost $500 million on a failed, foolish, and almost corrupt investment in Solyndra, the high-flying and high-overhead solar panel maker, run by some of his financial backers.  Talk about crony capitalism.

Now, he’s lost another $100 million on something called Ener1.  From Heritage’s excellent blog, The Foundry, a post by Lachlan Markay — and if you’re not bookmarking him, you should be:

After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.

But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.

Read the whole thing. As Rob writes, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

I’m not sure if the president wouldn’t view that as a feature. We know at least one of his most prominent early supporters does.

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“President Obama leaves event promoting clean energy in a motorcade of 22 fossil-fueled vehicles:”

On January 26, 2012, President Obama visited a Las Vegas UPS plant. Stimulus subsidy for said UPS plant to purchase natural-gas-powered trucks: 5.6 million dollars. Stimulus subsidy for North Las Vegas green energy plant that laid off 200 workers yesterday: 5.9 million dollars. Using taxpayer dollars to leave an event promoting clean-energy vehicles in a motorcade of twenty-two fossil-fueled vehicles: Priceless.

It’s time to end all energy subsidizes, and let average Americans, like the President does, select the fuel they want, free of government interference.

For Obama, it’s just like a weekend jaunt at Martha’s Vineyard. Still though, they got out of the driveway at least; clearly the Oba-cade is making progress with its driver’s lessons. Recall this post from May of last year:

What goes around…

Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”

…Goes aground:

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When you stare into the TV ratings abyss, the abyss doesn’t stare back at you — because it’s already changed the channel:

Countdown is the highest-rated show on Current by far. On Dec. 15, the program averaged 52,000 viewers among news’ target demographic of viewers ages 25-54. The network’s two-hour post-Iowa GOP debate analysis on the same night had 4,000 viewers in the demo, while the 2 a.m. rebroadcast of Countdown pulled in 11,000.

As Tim Groseclose writes at Ricochet, “Only 52,000 viewers?  And it’s the highest-rated show on Current ‘by far’?”

Which is something to keep in mind as “Rift Between Olbermann and Current TV Deepens: ‘Everybody Is Replaceable,’” The Wrap reports:

Keith Olbermann returned to the airwaves Wednesday night, but the rift between the bad boy anchor and his superiors at Current TV has not dissipated a day after he refused to lead the network’s coverage of the Iowa caucus, TheWrap has learned.

The newsman has tapped high-powered lawyer Patricia Glaser to “determine his rights” in his five-year contract, an individual close to him told TheWrap.

Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.

“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”

Several years ago at the original incarnation of the Libertas film blog, there was a post that used the phrase “Assholing your way out of show business,” which is what happens when an actor or actress’s ego gets so big and their treatment of everyone on the set becomes so painful to deal with, he or she becomes too toxic for most directors to work with, no matter what the actual performance looks like on screen. Having gone through ESPN, Fox Sports, MSNBC and now lowly Current TV, where does Olbermann go next? (Allahpundit suggests that CNN might be desperate enough to hire him, but would they really do so knowing how much baggage he brings to the gig?)

Related: Elsewhere in the world of old media, “Newspaper shares plunged 27% in 2011:”

If you take the increase in News Corp.’s stock price out of the mix, the average plunge in newspaper share value last year was 30.1%. This compares with a 5.5% increase in the Dow Jones average of 30 industrial stocks and the flat performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which gained a meager 0.04% after a year of dramatic market swings.

Minus the $45 billion market capitalization of News Corp., the total value of the shares of the 10 other publishers at year’s end was a bit over $10 billion, or less than three-quarters of the $13.9 billion that Gannett alone was worth at the end of 2005, the year the industry set a record for the most advertising sales in history.

Well, it’s not like the newspaper industry has a Nobel Prize-winning economist it can turn to, to help them navigate today’s treacherous business conditions.

Oh wait.

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Bay Area radio evangelist Harold Camping was properly excoriated throughout both the legacy media and the Blogosphere last year for his prediction that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. But not surprisingly, the MSM never mentioned their own obsession with doomsday predictions.

Ever since it debuted with “Earth Day” in 1970, spokesmen for the environmental movement, ranging from scientists to pop stars to journalists to politicians have made a series of ludicrous forecasts, usually along the lines of we only have X years to save the earth/the environment/the oceans, all mankind, etc.

The natural state of television news is what Mark Steyn has dubbed “present-tense culture,” particularly when it comes to advancing “liberalism,” so it’s not going to look back on any failure of its in-house ideology. And newspapers have a similar aversion to retrospection. So it’s only with the rise of talk radio and the conservative Blogosphere that any of environmentalism’s Chicken Littles have been called on their campy, Camping-esque sky-is-falling rhetoric.

Back in 2009, I Hate the Media rounded up a variety of crazy Earth Day quotes from 1970. And we’ve already had lots of fun with this headline in the March 20, 2000 edition of the London Independent:

But perhaps the all-time showstopper is a January 2007 headline from The Canadian, which dubs itself “Canada’s new socially progressive and cross-cultural national newspaper.” I’m kind of surprised the paper bothers to put out a new edition each day; I think I’d be tempted to recreate the last scene from On the Beach if I actually believed this headline (link safe; goes to Anthony Watts of the Watts Up With That, a rational environmental-themed blog):

And since we seem to have survived that eco-apocalypse (along with all of the ones that preceded it), I’m pretty sure we’ll survive the rest of 2012, not the least of which because we’ve invented…trousers:

(H/T: Rand Simberg.)

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We’ve discussed the “Cold Civil War” around these parts a few times — and even did a slightly too convoluted video on the topic as well. At the Bookworm Room blog, guest contributor Charles Martel speculates on the phase to come afterwards: “The Coming ‘Soft Dark Ages:’”

We were discussing the dark ages, which not only were characterized by the disintegration of the Roman political order, but also the loss of an immense store of practical technological knowledge: agricultural practices and implements; construction techniques—it would take until the 19th century for Europeans to match the Romans’ road-building prowess—war machines; distribution and warehousing; science; art (which in Roman times was the realm of artisans, not self-absorbed “transgressive” pricks).

I said that I think we are headed for a “soft dark ages.” That took him aback. “How are we headed there,” he asked, “and how would they be ‘soft’?”

I answered his last question first. They would be “soft” because unlike what happened in Roman times, we have the ability to store gigantic amounts of information in small spaces. One person can carry around encyclopedic knowledge on a flash drive. Multiply him by the millions, and you have a vast repository of recoverable knowledge that is private, widely dispersed, and replicated many times over. No matter how determined or persistent this era’s barbarians—Marxists, Muslims, Democrats, unionists, academicians—they simply would not be able to track down and destroy all modern technological knowledge.

But beyond furtive individual efforts at hiding and protecting the knowledge we would need to create a New America or a New West, there would be vaster, more organized, more collective efforts to protect knowledge until better days. I suggested to Bob three institutions or concepts that would become the next dark ages’ hallmarks: The new castle fortress; the new monastic life; and the new Europe.

Read the whole thing, which dovetails rather nicely both with some of the topics that were explored in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and with this cartoon found by Don Surber:

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As Steve Barton writes at Newsalert, “Go to the 10:05 marker in the video: Rachel Maddow says she’s ‘someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.’”

It’s just a quip from her little red joke book — I think — but add to Maddow’s expression of her worldview, table-pounding Lawrence O’Donnell who said “I am a socialist,” and “I live to the extreme left,” on the air last year at MSNBC.

Back in 2007, the New York Times dubbed MSNBC “a liberal version of Fox News;” a description that network executive Phil Griffin tacitly concurred with, saying that network finding its ideology “happened naturally,” which it would express overtly in its progressive-themed “Lean Forward” campaign last year (which as critics noted, has an echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward slogan as well.)

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “commies love concrete,” which, if she isn’t kidding, might help to explain Maddow’s otherwise incongruous love of mid-century dam building efforts now eschewed by the rest of today’s environmentally correct far left, including those who staff her employer, General Electric.

But hey, give credit for Maddow and O’Donnell for not biting their Mao Tse-tungs and coming clean on some level about their far left ideology. In its own socialistic way, it makes for a refreshing change from most old media news outfits. At CBS, for years, Walter Cronkite uttered “That’s the way it is” before signing off, his Solomonic vow towards objectivity, before retiring to host fundraisers for an organization devoted to bringing about one-world government. His successor, Dan Rather, clothed his own claims to objectivity inside such goofy Ratherisms as “I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. [Ideologically,] I don’t know what that makes me.” Before being forced out over Ra^therGate and retiring to host programs on HD-Net, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, who produced a spate of anti-Bush movies in the naughts, professed to voting for Obama in 2008, and ran the ‘Truther” “documentary” Loose Change on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not to mention Rather hosting fundraisers in recent years for far left The Nation magazine.

Of course, perhaps the most objective response to MSNBC’s far left collective ideology came from a rather unlikely source:

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

There are no journalists on MSNBC’s nighttime lineup? No kidding, Reverend Bacon, no kidding.

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A picture is worth a thousand words — and a thousand miles of existing commercial pipelines. Why is the Keystone XL pipeline vexing our poor overtaxed — and over taxing — president’s brain so much at Christmastime? At Power Line, Steve Hayward writes:

Now, this came to mind in connection with a graphic of another campaign and potential rout, this time of Emperor Napoleon’s President Obama’s stubborn opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.  I had looked at official Department of Energy sources some months ago looking for maps of existing pipelines in the U.S., and although I found  a few, I discovered that after 9/11, detailed pipeline maps, at least from U.S. government sources, were now hard to come by.  But courtesy PennWell, and flagged for us by SmallDeadAnimals and Glenn Reynolds, behold the graphic that ought to cause Obama to retreat before his poll numbers on this issue track the temperature trend of Napoleon’s Grand Armee:

John Mauldin (registration required), offers several more are different levels of detail, displayed here.  The first is just natural gas pipelines, about which Mauldin comments: “To say it looks worse than your grandmother’s varicose veins is no exaggeration. It is hard to find a state that does not have a natural gas pipeline. Without them the US would simply come to a grinding halt.”

In other words: wedge issues — they’re not just for Democrats anymore.

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An Investor’s Business Daily editorial explores the real story behind the 100-watt light-bulb ban:

Earlier this month, Republicans suspended the law until October by denying funds for its implementation as part of a massive spending bill. For Democrats, this move was another sign of how out of touch the GOP is.

But look who else is complaining. As Politico reported, “big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania (are) fuming.” Allegedly these companies are mad because they invested lots of money getting ready for the new rules.

Fact is, they were pushing for the ban all along.

In 2007, Philips urged an incandescent ban as a way to force the market toward high-efficiency bulbs, complaining that without such laws, “purchase price and functional performance often take precedence over environmental concern.” [Why it's as if the notion that all businesses are reflexively right-wing is a folk-Marxist trope or something -- Ed.]

That same year, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, which represents companies making 95% of bulbs sold in the U.S., told a Senate panel that a ban was needed “to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products.”

You can believe if you want these companies only had Mother Earth in mind with this ban. But more likely they saw it as a chance to fatten their bottom lines. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to outlaw a low-margin, 60-cent product when you’re trying to hawk a high-margin $3 alternative?

This would hardly be the first time big business teamed up with big government to enhance profits through competition-crushing regulations. Timothy Carney’s book, “The Big Ripoff,” detailed many cases where businesses “profit from big government policies that rip off consumers.”

And speaking of GE, or at least one of its most visible subsidiaries (which has also been obsessed over turning off light bulbs and jacking up consumer energy costs from time to time), as Ron Futrell writes at Big Journalism, “To Brian Williams and NBC; ever heard of Fast and Furious and Solyndra? I’m here to tell you, those two have slipped by you, of late. Actually, nobody believes they have ‘slipped by’ you. You are intentionally not reporting these two stories.”

Related: “Omission Watch: Nets, AP, Major Papers Skip Biden Saying Taliban ‘Not Our Enemy.’” It’s a big memory hole; it takes a lot of unreported news to fill it.

More: “In San Francisco the lights flickered out on Monday at the Steelers-49ers game when much of the nation was watching. The comparison to North Korea may be unfair (and too delicious to pass up), but there is a larger point to be made.”

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Will Collier today:

December 12, 2011:

Gallup: In U.S., Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level.

December 13, 2011:

AP: NTSB recommends ban on driver cell phone use.

Glenn Reynolds today:

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