Americans for Prosperity’s Hot Air Tour visited Nashville today. The tour was supposed to launch their Hot Air balloon at Warner Park and then do a fly over of Al Gore’s mansion. In addition, they were going to give tethered hot air balloon rides. Unfortunately, the Goracle did stop the tethered rides but not the launch or fly over of his mansion.

Gore Tries to Ground Tour

As you know, on June 20th at 3pm Central time, we’re scheduled to hold our Hot Air Tour event in Nashville, during we we hope to launch a hot-air balloon and float over Al Gore’s house in an attempt to expose the high cost of global warming alarmism

A couple of days ago, a Gore spokeswoman ominously warned that they’d be working to block our event:

“We’re making inquiries” to see whether the balloon launch violates any local ordinances, (Gore spokeswoman Kalee) Kreider said.

Sure enough, just a few hours before our event was scheduled to kick off, the Nashville Parks and Recreation Department has been in touch, claiming that the permit they approved doesn’t allow us to launch our balloon from the city park where we’re holding our event — even though we told them repeatedly exactly what we planned to do.

Roy Wilson, the director of the Board of Parks and Recreation, has even reportedly told one of our staffers on the ground that Nashville police officers will be on hand and will physically restrain members of our crew if they attempt to launch the balloon. Glad to see that the police in Nashville have solved all the murders, rapes, assaults and robberies and can now concentrate on the real scourge facing the city: unpermitted hot-air balloon launches over Al Gore’s estate.

It seems pretty clear that Gore allies in Nashville / Davidson County Metro government are trying to spare their local Oscar winner more embarassment, following this week’s revelation by our friends at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research that Gore’s already-high personal energy use is up 10 percent over last year — to the point that he uses about 19 times as much energy as the typical American family.

Stay tuned… the Parks Department may be able to prevent us from launching our balloon from public parkland but our team is scrambling to find a privately owned spot in the Nashville area that we can use.

UPDATE 3:00 pm Eastern time: Roy Wilson at the Nashville Parks Department must not have liked our earlier post, since he just completely revoked our permit — even though his department’s own rules state that he can’t do that unless we break a law or one of the department’s rules, which we haven’t done and have no intention of doing. Then he hung up on our legal counsel.

In the meantime, good news to report — we’ve secured a private location for this afternoon’s event. We’ll be in a field at the corner of Sneed and Vaughn Roads — just about a mile and a half from the original event location. A Google Earth image of the new location is attached below — y’all join us if you’re in the neighborhood…

So nice to see the major producer of hot air bully his flabby muscles in Nashville. It did nothing but expose his hypocrisy.

Here’s a couple photos from the event. There should be video posted by tomorrow of the flyover of the Goracle’s mansion at the Cost of Hot Air site.

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