(A message from Hillary Clinton.)

My fellow Americans, thank you for letting me take a few moments of your time to address the current situation.

There are some who would look at the comments posted about this week’s “Snide Remarks,” entitled “An Exclusive Interview with Indiana Jones,” and conclude that it’s unpopular. They would take all those negative comments to mean that a lot of regular readers simply did not enjoy this week’s installment.

I know that’s the conclusion the news media wants you to reach. They’ve been hammering it home over and over again. “Eric, forget it!” they say. “This column failed. You gave it a try, it didn’t work, and now it’s time to move on. You lost this one.”

Well, I say that’s a little premature. I don’t know about you, but where I’m from, we wait until ALL the votes have been cast before we reach a conclusion. I’d say Eric still has a very real chance of winning this one and declaring the Indiana Jones edition of “Snide Remarks” a success!

Has every “Snide Remarks” reader sounded off yet? No they have not. At the moment, only 34 comments have been submitted, and a full FIVE of those have been positive! How many regular “Snide Remarks” readers have not voted yet? Hundreds! Thousands, even! Who’s to say the vast majority of those won’t turn out in favor of the column? We don’t know until all the votes have been cast.

There were also some spam comments that showed up in the spam filter that Eric’s opponents are insisting should not be counted in his favor for the simple fact that they are spam and don’t have anything to do with the column. I say that’s undemocratic. Let ALL the votes be counted! The news media has already crowned the detractors as the victors here, so I know they don’t want the truth to come out. They’re afraid that if we count those spam votes, we’ll see what I already know: that most people LOVED the column and Eric has scored another success.

And consider this: Where people have liked the column, they have really, REALLY liked it. The victories, where they have occurred, have been by a substantial margin. That may be an important factor in the general election, when this column will go up against one of Dave Barry’s.

Frankly, I’m also disturbed by the sexist tone that a lot of the comments have taken. “Kinda lame.” “Not my thing.” “I didn’t laugh once.” Is nobody else appalled by this? Where’s the outrage here? If Eric were a woman and people had said these things, the news media would be hysterical with rage! As it is, since he’s a man, people can just say these hurtful things and nobody bats an eye. I thought we’d gotten past this kind of sexism in America, but I see it’s still alive and well.

In conclusion, let me summarize: Eric’s Indiana Jones edition of “Snide Remarks” is overwhelmingly popular and most people have loved it. In fact, it is the MOST POPULAR “SNIDE REMARKS” COLUMN EVER PUBLISHED! Thank you and goodnight!

On the treadmill at the gym today, watching CNN with the closed captioning enabled, and the “news story” (I use the term loosely) is about Barack Obama bowling. The caption says this:

“Obama used bawdy language to will the ball away from the gutter.”

My interest was piqued — until I realized it was body language, not bawdy language, that he was using, and that the closed-captioning transcriber had messed up. Darn! Bawdy language would have been much more interesting. Stupid homophones….

Remember Hillary Clinton’s TV ad that tried to scare people into voting for her by suggesting that she, and not Obama, would be best prepared if the White House phone rang at 3 a.m.? The commercial used stock footage of a little girl sleeping peacefully in bed — but it turns out the little girl, now a teenager, is an Obama supporter, and in fact was actively campaigning for him before Hillary’s commercial appeared.

HA!

Remember, people: If you don’t vote for Rudy Giuliani, EVERYONE WILL DIE!

What’s funny is that at first I thought this was a parody of over-the-top fear-mongering political ads. But nope! It really is such an ad. Stay classy, Rudy!

I’ve been thinking about the Westboro Baptist Church lawsuit, and how it reflects on the difference between something being “right” and something being “legal.”

The facts are these. Headed by Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., is an unaffiliated Christian congregation focusing on one specific doctrine: that God hates all forms of homosexuality and its practitioners, that all homosexuals will burn in hell, and that so will the people who tolerate them.

Phelps’ teachings cast a wide net with regard to that last point. Basically, if you’re not actively persecuting and preaching against gays, you are tolerating them and thus in danger of hellfire. Phelps teaches that the United States is a cursed nation because it allows homosexuality to exist unpunished, and that when soldiers die in Iraq, it’s God’s punishment for America.

Phelps and his 100-member congregation, composed almost entirely of his family members, are infamous for picketing at funerals. They first came to prominence when they marched at gay murder victim Matthew Shepard’s memorial service, carrying signs declaring that Shepard was at that moment burning in hell. In the last few years, they’ve started doing the same thing at soldiers’ funerals, declaring the soldiers also to be in hell — not because they were gay, but because they were fighting for a nation that tolerates homosexuality.

They also picketed the funerals of Coretta Scott King and Mr. Rogers. Yes, Mr. Rogers. I don’t recall the specific reasons, but it definitely related to homosexuality. Everything comes back to homosexuality with Fred Phelps. You’d hear more references to gay sex in one Phelps sermon than you would in watching 10 hours of gay porn. (That figure is approximate.)

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Last year, I wrote a “Snide Remarks” column about a Portland woman who had bought an ad in the ballot information booklet urging people to vote against the library levy — which is to say, she was in favor of closing down the county libraries.

A long-time devoted reader named Nathan has sent me the voter information booklet for Tucson’s upcoming ballot that has a woman who is even crazier. Proposition 200 has to do with water use. If passed, it would repeal the “residential environmental services fee.” I don’t know what it all means, and it doesn’t matter. The point is, here is what a woman named Raquel Baranow paid $500 to say about Proposition 200:

(Source: PDF file, page 15.)

Well said, crazy Bible-thumping, pot-growing Arizona woman!

Oh, this is rich.

On April 15, 1994, Dick Cheney was asked about the United States’ actions during the Gulf War three years earlier — specifically, whether we should have pressed on into Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein then, as some people had wanted or expected.

Here’s what Cheney said (transcript after the clip):

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Vice President Dick “Richard” Cheney’s visit to Brigham Young University’s commencement ceremony on Thursday passed smoothly and without incident, though there had been much controversy beforehand. The cantankerous, go-F-yourself-encouraging veep, known in some circles as Bush’s “attack dog,” came across as likable and pleasant in his address to graduates and their guests. He didn’t say anything controversial or political (I don’t think anyone expected him to; it wouldn’t be the right forum for that), and he even earned a couple of laughs.

You can hear his entire speech here. Note the places where he got the biggest applause: when he extended President Bush’s well wishes to the graduates, and when he mentioned BYU’s consistent ranking as No. 1 in the category of “stone-cold sober” colleges.

He cracked a few jokes at his own expense. He said that in his own college career, he nearly earned a doctorate, lacking only the dissertation. “I’ll get started as soon as I come up with a topic,” he said.

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I don’t watch much TV news, having learned years ago that most of it is unintentionally superficial and unintentionally funny. (I prefer to watch things that are superficial and funny on purpose.) I do catch clips online now and then, however, when something is brought to my attention that’s worth noting.

Keith Olbermann’s 10-minute commentary on his MSNBC program “Countdown” earlier this week, which you can watch here, fits that description. I enjoyed Olbermann’s sense of humor when he was an L.A. sportscaster in the 1980s, and I’ve recently been entertained by his constant harassment of Bill O’Reilly on “Countdown.”

But I never would have expected the level of gravitas and incisive commentary that he displays here. He reminds me of Edward R. Murrow (whose commentaries were dramatized in “Good Night and Good Luck”) in that it’s not enough to read the transcript of his remarks. You have to watch his face and hear his delivery to get the full effect of the scathing things he’s saying.

(By the way, you can watch the Bill Clinton interview from two days earlier, which Olbermann’s piece is partly a response to, here.)

Having watched the Olbermann clip without much introduction and having been stirred by it, I poked around the Interwebs to see how the conservative blogs were responding. I don’t read many political blogs of any denomination, so I had to do some Googling to find conservative ones.

The few I found that mentioned it at all were depressingly predictable: They harp on Olbermann’s manner and delivery and don’t even try to rebut the things he actually SAID.

“Watching this douche clumsily trying to channel his paranoid rage into lofty rhetoric has been one of the true joys of blogging these past few weeks.”

“It appears to me like it’s almost as if he feels he has to top himself with each new commentary. Be more outlandish … more daring … more critical.”

“I think Olbermann’s ‘Special Comment’ testifies eloquently to his and his fans’ ‘issues’ and requires little elaboration.”

I guess the reasoning is that if you’re writing a conservative blog for conservative readers, you don’t need to explain why Olbermann is so wrong. Your readers already KNOW why. So I wish someone would explain it to me, a more-liberal-than-conservative person who doesn’t read the political blogs every day and doesn’t know why Olbermann’s commentary is so off-base. He seemed to me to be making excellent points and to be making them exceptionally well. He’s actually SAYING something, which is more than any of the bloggers (that I could find) did in response to him.

P.S. I know liberal bloggers do the same thing: A conservative says something, they automatically mock and ridicule him without regard for what he actually said. It’s the major reason I don’t read political blogs, because both sides are equally jackassish about it. The Olbermann thing is what happens to be on my mind at the moment, that’s all.

Diligent, long-suffering readers of this blog will recall that one of the strengths of Al Gore’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” is a study he cites that supposedly demonstrates how the vast majority of scientists are in agreement about global warming, and that the debate should therefore be over.

The study was by Nancy Oreskes. According to Gore, she randomly chose 928 global warming-related articles published in science journals between 1993 and 2003 and found that ALL of them supported the majority view — i.e., Gore’s position, that global warming is real, bad and preventable.

I said in a previous blog entry that I have no choice but accept that study as legitimate. I don’t have access to all the science journals, nor the resources to duplicate the study. I said someone who did have the resources was probably already working on either refuting or supporting it.

And I was right! And it turns out Oreskes’ study — and thus Gore’s support of it in his film — was deeply flawed.

A reader named Keryn (I offer no comment on that spelling) pointed me toward an article by Iain Murray published in the National Review. Now, the National Review would sooner open an abortion clinic in its conference room than say anything positive about Al Gore, and much of what Murray says boils down to nothing more than “my scientists are better than Gore’s scientists.” But he does offer a key insight, found in item #24:

On the supposed “scientific consensusâ€?: Dr. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego, did not examine a “large random sampleâ€? of scientific articles. She got her search terms wrong and thought she was looking at all the articles when in fact she was looking at only 928 out of about 12,000 articles on “climate change.â€? Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in England, was unable to replicate her study. He says, “As I have stressed repeatedly, the whole data set includes only 13 abstracts (~1%) that explicitly endorse what Oreskes has called the ‘consensus view.’ In fact, the vast majority of abstracts does (sic) not mention anthropogenic climate change. Moreover — and despite attempts to deny this fact — a handful of abstracts actually questions the view that human activities are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years.’â€?

The way it went down was, Oreskes’ study was published Science Magazine on Dec. 3, 2004. In it, Oreskes said she had done an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database search for the keywords “climate change” and had come up with 928 abstracts published between 1993-2003, and that not one of them rejected the consensus position.

When Dr. Benny Peiser did the same search, however, he came up with some 12,000 papers, not 928. Confronted with this information, Oreskes confirmed she’d screwed up: She hadn’t searched for the keywords “climate change,” as her article said, but for “global climate change.” That search brings up only 1,247 documents. (Where she got the number 928, who knows.)

Seeing that Oreskes’ study was flawed from the get-go, Peiser did his own. He used the same keywords — “global climate change” — for 1993-2003 and came up with 1,247 documents, as just mentioned. Only 1,117 of those had abstracts (you know, the paragraph that summarizes the whole paper). He analyzed those 1,117 abstracts and found that only 13 explicitly endorse the consensus view; 322 implicitly accept it but focus on other aspects; 44 focus on natural factors of global climate change; and 34 reject or doubt the Al Gore view altogether. (Oh, and 470 of the 1,117 articles include the keywords “global,” “climate” and “change” but don’t actually have anything to do with the matter at hand.)

Science Magazine ran a brief correction a few weeks later, but refused to published Peiser’s more detailed study on the grounds that the information he was presenting was already widely disseminated on the Internet. (In other words: “Yeah, we screwed up when we ran Oreskes’ article. Quit rubbing it in.”)

Peiser recounts the whole thing, including his exchanges with Science Magazine, here. It’s good reading.

Several readers also brought to my attention an article from the Wall Street Journal that argues with some more of Gore’s points. This article also mentions the Oreskes/Peiser studies.

The inaccuracy of the Oreskes study hurts part of Gore’s case: the part where he says scientists all more or less agree with him. In truth, while there is a majority opinion (MOST scientists seem to be onboard with it), it’s far from being an overwhelming consensus. I suspect average non-scientist citizens will decide what to believe the same way they usually do: They’ll agree with Gore if they’re Democrats and disagree with him if they’re Republicans. Ta-da!

Final side note/tangent: Many conservative pundits, including my occasional employer Glenn Beck, insist on declaring Gore’s film a box-office failure and mocking him for it. They say this because they wish it to be so, not because the facts support it.

(Glenn Beck has compared the film to Hitler’s propaganda. I suppose it’s his job to stir up controversy by making extreme statements, thus ensuring more attention for himself. Hitler, I mean. Oh, and I guess Glenn, too.) (But I kid.)

The film has grossed $13.6 million to date, making it the fifth most successful documentary of all time. It will be in fourth place by the time it’s finished. (It needs just another $1.5 million to overtake “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” but probably won’t muster the $7 million it needs to kick “Bowling for Columbine” out of the No. 3 spot.)

Yes, $13.6 million is nothing compared to the top grossers of the day. But no reasonable person would compare a documentary to a wide-release Hollywood blockbuster. By any sane system of measurement, $13.6 million for a documentary is fantastic. You can argue with the movie’s facts, agenda or presentation, but on the matter of its box office, there IS a consensus and the debate IS over.