Academy Award winner and former Vice President Al Gore blasted the mainstream media’s coverage of global warming and climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels at a media ethics discussion on Tuesday.

He said there are many reasons why world leaders aren’t doing more about global warming, “but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly.

“They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen balance as bias,” he said. “I don’t think that any of the editors or reporters responsible for one of these stories saying, ‘It may be real, it may not be real,’ is unethical. But I think they made the wrong choice, and I think the consequences are severe.”

Read the fuill story from the Tennessean here.

President George W. Bush is encountering stiff resistance from the Pentagon brass to the prospect of expanding the Middle East conflict to Iran. After acquiescing to Bush’s ill-fated strategies on Afghanistan and Iraq, some senior U.S. commanders are contemplating resignations if Bush presses ahead with attacks on Iran. The revolt of the generals may reach as high as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace.

For the full story on why Bush may be getting weak knees on Iran, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on critical legislation this week that could give workers back their ability to freely and fairly form unions.

“All too often in this country, when workers decide to stand up for themselves and form a union, they’re met with threats, intimidation, and discrimination,” says Liz Cattaneo of the American Rights at Work non-profit organization.

She is urging people who favor giving workers a “fighting chance,” to contact their Representative in support of the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800), which would strengthen workers’ rights and hold anti-union employers accountable.

“Thankfully, we now have a Congress that could do something about this crisis,” Cattaneo said. “This is a historic opportunity to secure workers’ rights for generations to come-but we can’t celebrate yet. It’s going to be a very close vote.”

Conservative, anti-union forces are busy mobilizing against this legislation, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and more than a dozen other business groups. They are mounting a fierce campaign to stop the bill, inundating Congress with more than 10,000 e-mail messages and letters.

“In order to combat their well-funded efforts, we need to reach each and every member of Congress with letters from their constituents in support of the Employee Free Choice Act over the next few days,” Cattaneo said. “Too many families work harder and harder with less to show for it. While corporate executives net contracts securing themselves raises, benefits, and bonuses, workers haven’t had it so easy. America’s workers cannot afford to lose this opportunity.”

Learn more about the Employee Free Choice Act here.

To take action, go to this Website and sign up.

The Birder’s United bi-weekly online news letter touted LocustFork.Net as a “great Website for birders” on Tuesday, Feb. 27.

A Web site that may be of great interest to members of Birders United is LocustFork.net. The site covers a wide selection of issues of interest to birders including a news column and Weblog.

There is also a photography section. Note particularly the feature on the birds of Alabama. More than 71,000 people visit the site each month.

A Great Web Site for Birders

Thanks for the kudos…

If you are curious about the changes going on in American news gathering and delivery, from print newspapers to the Web, PBS Frontline is a good place to turn.

Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media’s reaction, in “News War,” a special four-part series.

Series Synopsis

News War Intro

Photo by Kenny Walters

This great blue heron was captured by Kenny Walters at East Lake Park in Birmingham, Alabama.

As of this morning, Feb. 26, participants had counted more than 10.5 million birds in the Great Backyard Birdcount and recorded 621 species on 75,699 checklists, far surpassing the previous record of 61,049 checklists, according to today’s press release from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society.

If you counted birds for the Great Backyard Birdcount during the Presidents’ Day weekend and haven’t turned your results in yet, the final day to post your results and photos online is Wednesday, Feb. 28.

http://gbbc.birdsource.org/gbbc

The first report on the final results will not be up until March 10, but you can explore the maps and tables of the preliminary results at:

http://gbbc.birdsource.org/gbbcApps/results

And don’t forget to check out the photo gallery here:

http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/gallery

Paul Green of the Audubon Society and Miyoko Chu of Cornel send a “big thank you for making this a memorable and record-breaking tenth anniversary year.”

“An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary that turned former vice president Al Gore’s power-point presentation on global warming into an engaging and entertaining film, won the Oscar Sunday night.

Oscars press

Former Vice President Al Gore wins Oscar

The best-documentary win was a triumph for Gore, who has kept a sense of humor about his loss in the 2000 election that was decided in George W. Bush’s favor by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, according to the Associated Press.

“I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America,” Gore says in the film, repeating a line he has used often.

Sunday, Gore used the Oscar win not to further his political career but to boost his campaign to find solutions for global warming and other environmental problems.

“My fellow Americans,” Gore said to laughter from the crowd. “People all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a political issue, it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started with the possible will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it.”

Earlier in the evening, Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio took the stage to unveil a series of efforts the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took to make this year’s awards more environmentally friendly.

Pressed by DiCaprio about any other major announcement he might like to make, the former vice president pulled out a statement.

“My fellow Americans, I’m going to take this opportunity right here and now, to formally announce my intentions to …” Gore said before the orchestra broke in and he walked off, arm-in-arm and laughing, with DiCaprio.

Backstage, Gore put speculation to rest, saying “I do not have plans to become a candidate for office again.”

We’ve written about the alternate universe we could be living in many times before – if only the 2000 election had turned out differently. There’s a blogger or two who may have touched on it, and maybe a columnist or two.

But it is interesting to see a smart New York magazine finally coming around to a point of view we’ve had since writing at Southerner.Net from New Orleans nearly four years ago.

According to David Remnick’s column in the current New Yorker, it is useful to reflect on “how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate.”

While the attacks of September 11, 2001, may not have been avoided, he concludes, “there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his.”

Can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say:

1. American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq?

2. The fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

3. Civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision.

4. Torture found no place or rationale?

In increasing numbers, poll results imply, Americans are disheartened by the real and existing Presidency, and no small number also feel regret that Gore – the winner in 2000 of the popular vote by more than half a million ballots, the almost certain winner of any reasonable or consistent count in the state of Florida – ended up the target of what it is not an exaggeration to call a judicial coup d’état.

The New Yorker on Al Gore

According to the Associated Press and other news organizations and oddsmakers, Gore’s film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar tonight for best documentary.

If the oddsmakers are right, it might also give a boost to the recruit Al Gore for President campaign.

We will be watching – and wish him well.