Al Gore's 24-Hour Broadcast To Convert Climate Skeptics

Gore promotes his “Climate Reality Project” in this video.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore plans to hit the climate crisis hard with a day of organized global action on Sept. 14.

The day of action aims to broadcast 24 straight hours of climate activism, encouraging others to get up and undertake climate mitigation efforts as well.

The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore's message.

The presentations will look at politically motivated climate skeptics and explore who funds the development and distribution of media content that denies the findings of thousands of climate scientists worldwide is real and accurate.

Learn more about Al Gore's 24-hour program at Climate Reality.

Paul Krugman 9/11 Blog Post Stokes Controversy

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman drew conservative outrage on Sunday when he wrote that the anniversary of 9/11 had become a marker of "shame" for the U.S.

Huffingtonpost: The New York Times columnist wrote a blog post called "The Years of Shame," in which he said that "what happened after 9/11" was "deeply shameful." Krugman castigated people like Rudy Giuliani and President Bush as "fake heroes" who exploited the attacks for their own personal, political or military gain. He also said that many in the media had "[lent] their support to the hijacking of the atrocity.

Krugman concluded, "the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And, in its heart, the nation knows it." He said he had turned off the comments on the post "for obvious reasons."

Conservative commentators quickly seized on Krugman's post. Blogger Michelle Malkin called him a "smug coward." Writer Glenn Reynolds called the post "an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man." A writer at the Big Journalism site called Krugman "vile."

However, some progressives defended Krugman. Blogger Glenn Greenwald vociferously backed the post on Twitter.

"Michael Moore & The Dixie Chicks were just as right back then as Krugman is today - but today the taboos (& their enforcers) are much weaker," he wrote.

And, on Crooks & Liars, Nicole Belle said that Krugman was simply telling the truth. "That day was the impetus for us to attack and invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks and posed no threat to us," she wrote. "To date, we've lost 4,752 allied service members in Iraq and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. How is this not a black mark of shame on the legacy of 9/11?"

Our Blogger friend Ted McLaughlin also wrote a thought provoking post at Jobsanger, "A Macabre American Holiday:"

The Courage Of United Flight 93 Passengers And Crew

by Michael Handley

The 40 passengers and crew who fought back against their hijackers aboard United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 performed a courageous act. The hijackers of Flight 93 intended to crash the plane in Washington DC, likely the Capitol Building or the White House, but never made it because of the determination and valor of the passengers and crew.

President Bill Clinton said at a ceremony dedicating the first phase of a memorial at the nation's newest national park near Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed, "With almost no time to decide, they gave the entire country an incalculable gift. They saved the capitol from attack. They saved God knows how many lives. They saved the terrorists from claiming the symbolic victory of smashing the center of American government. And they did it as citizens."

Ed Felt, my colleague at the Internet infrastructure start up software company BEA Systems, was one of the passengers on Flight 93 that day. Ed was traveling on Flight 93 from BEA's east coast office to the company's headquarters office in San Jose, CA - a flight other BEA employees, and I, frequented.  Ed was one of the top five software engineers at our billion-dollar start up company having just received a U.S. patent in August 2001 for software he designed for BEA.

Flight 93 became an American profile in courage on that day that claimed almost 5,000 lives, toppled buildings that stood like a twin Colossus on the New York shore, took down one side of the Pentagon, and ushered in two wars.

What made Flight 93 different was a decision reached somewhere over the skies of Western Pennsylvania, after passengers learned on cell phones that their hijackers planned to crash their Boeing 757 plane into a building as the fourth in a quartet of suicide attacks. Here is the story of Ed and the other 39 passengers and crew members of United Flight 93.

U.S. Endures Hottest Summer Since Dust Bowl Era

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and other skeptics of climate change will have to explain away yet more evidence contrasting their disbelief.

The U.S. has experienced its hottest summer in 75 years, according to USA Today and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. This latest summer season, with an average temperature of 74.5 degrees, has also been recorded as the second hottest ever. Only the Dust Bowl year of 1936, at 74.6 degrees, was warmer.

The middle south experienced the heat wave more than any other region, with Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico having their hottest year ever. Texas has also suffered through its driest summer since record keeping began in 1895, and the longest drought span, now by a slim margin, since the 1950s.