HollywoodIdiocy.com

While the “useful idiots” in Hollywood seem poised to honor former VP Al Gore with a Best Documentary Oscar for his science fiction film, An Inconvenient Truth, Cato Institute environmentalist Patrick J. Michaels has posted a column which eviscerates the film’s plethora of fictional “scientific facts.” Not that lying is a barrier to winning a documentary, these days, as Michael Moore proved a few years ago with Bowling for Columbine.

Among the highlights of falsehoods, Gore’s film claims that global warming could melt most of the ice in Greenland, raising the ocean’s water level by “20 feet” by the year 2100. That’s dramatically at odds, even with the panic-stricken U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who estimate the ocean’s water-levels to rise only by eight to 17 inches, not 20 feet.

Michaels’ column is full of other facts that completely render Gore’s film irrelevant in a discussion of facts - even facts touted by the most virulent global warming fanatics. Yet Hollywood is prepared tonight to embrace it and honor it more dearly than a Catholic Bible.

Guess it just goes to prove the old truism: there’s no fixing stupid.

Even as Al Gore plans his little “global warming WeFest,” dragging plenty of “useful idiot” celebrities along with him, a new report by real climate scientists report results from a 50-year study of Antarctica, the world’s southern-most continent, indicate it’s all bull.

According to a report on EurekAlert.org, “A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models … a similar finding from last summer by the same research group showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.”

The lead scientist behind the report is David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.

Prof. Bromwich goes to great lengths in trying to justify that global warming still works, even though all evidence in Antarctica denies such a “reality.” Yet in this case, facts speak louder than a conference in Paris… the factual basis for a global warming hypothesis is looking like a person taking too many diet supplements… it’s getting smaller every day.

The backlash against Katie Couric probably began when her biggest scoop of her first show was “the first official photos of TomKat’s daughter, Suri.” Sensing the former Today host was turning the news broadcast into Entertainment Tonight, people began tuning out the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and tuning in more-serious news broadcasts, like ABC’s World News Tonight with Charles Gibson and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Heck, some have even migrated to Fox News and reruns of Friends, according to the latest numbers on the Drudge Report, which monitors such things.

Many in the media are trying to make Couric’s gender the issue behind her low ratings, including her CBS bosses. I disagree. It’s too easy for out-of-touch network execs to blame “backwards” middle Americans, who they assume “aren’t comfortable with a female anchor.”

Bull. Between Fox News and CNN, folks have enjoyed and watched female anchors for a long time now. Greta Van Sustren and Catherine Crier are successful examples, as well as - to a lesser extent - Nancy Grace. The big difference between Couric and them is that they took their newscasts seriously from day one.

While Couric has made successful efforts to lend gravitas to her news broadcasts since then, it seems not to be making an impact with the average viewer; her numbers are now lower than “Broadway Dan” Rather’s darkest days, when he was at his least credible.

How much longer will CBS tolerate the failed Couric anchorship? She’s less than a year into a five-year deal, so it all depends on how much they want her out, which right now, they don’t.

But if CBS does eventually change anchors, here’s hoping they go LESS Hollywood next time, and more Washington Press Corps. Because if they keep going in this direction, by the time Katie Couric is relegated to selling Orlando rental property, we’ll be seeing CBS promote the heck out of the CBS Evening News with Sean Penn… Or Jon Stewart. Which would, of course, be idiocy.

Then again, Penn’s been “in the field” as a journalist more than Couric has; and Stewart has more credibility.

According to online media reports, Sacha Baron Cohen has received the green light to make a sequel to his subversive, politically-incorrect comedy, Borat. However, the tentatively-titled Borat 2 won’t be zooming into theaters in 2007, since the comic is hard at work on his next film, already in production, which focuses on his gay Austrian fashonista character, Bruno. Universal owns the rights to the Bruno movie while Fox/NewsCorp holds the Borat rights.

The big question is this. When filming Borat, Baron Cohen’s work and characters were known by only a small portion of US households who watched Da Ali G Show on HBO. Now, in the wake of the first movie’s huge popularity and box office success, the real question becomes whether the proposed Borat 2 will be another guerrilla-film-making experience, or whether a second film will be forced to move to a more traditional “scripted comedy” style of film making, since it’s doubtful that Baron Cohen can fool people as easily now that his face and the character’s name are well-known.

Considering that Baron Cohen and Fox are still facing fraud lawsuits over the first film, it’s hard to say which way they franchise will go, although a fully scripted and acted comedy would certainly reduce the shock-n-awe appeal of the first film. The difference in approach could make the two films seem as different from each other as The Blair Witch Projects “discovered footage, maybe this is real” approach, and “Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows” lame casted drama sequel, that never pretended to be anything but a standard teen horror flick.

Whatever happens, Baron Cohen may want to invest in some disaster kits to deal with possible reactions when any new “victims” find out they’ve been “Borat-ed.”

While it’s been a publishing phenomenon, the seven-book Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling will come to an end on July 21, 2007, with the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The book is the long-planned capper to the series, and will contain the deaths of two major characters, according to Rowling.

Rowling stirred media speculation as early as last summer when she said she now understands what drove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to attempt to kill off his popular hero, Sherlock Holmes - namely, to prevent others from coming along years later and adding to the canon.

Of course, in the fantasy world of Harry Potter, even if she wrote an ending in which, say, Valdemort was victorious and left Harry, Ron and Hermoinie dead as doorknobs, that wouldn’t necessarily prevent another author coming along and reviving the characters - and the series - years from now. In fantasy, anything’s possible.

However, the identity of the killed-off characters remains under wraps, and even after it gets published, it’s likely the folks making the movie series will want to keep the roar down to a minimum, so as not to destroy interest in the final two movie installments.

Book sellers claim they have to discount the Potter series so deeply under the pressures of customer demand, they never make money on the series anymore. If that’s so, perhaps there is more money in printing and selling professional business cards than there is in Harry Potter.

According to several reports online, a video of Paris Hilton and her sister, Nikki, was posted on YouTube.com this week. The video, which didn’t display a date when it was taken or specify the location of the video that was shot, appears to show Paris and Nikki uttering the “N-word,” as well as making comments that could most tastefully be described as “anti-Semitic.”

Of course, the Hilton sisters have never made a movie expressing their religious views, as Mel Gibson did, so it’s unlikely the bubble-headed pair will pay much of a price for their outspokenness. Their hard-working lawyers have already had the video pulled from YouTube.com and other video-sharing Web sites.

Of course, the video may be a cruel hoax.

However, it wouldn’t be the first time that a celebrity who keeps up public appearances projecting one type of image, gets caught uttering objectionable stuff that’s contrary to that public image. Of course, considering Paris is best known for a bootleg porn video and uttering phrases like, “that’s hot,” to hard-working middle Americans she can’t stand and doesn’t like, I guess there’s not much of a public image standard for her to maintain.

Perhaps Paris, Nikki and Mel can all go into business card printing, where they can share their Neanderthal views with each other over lunch break, and no one will give a rat’s patoot!