President Gore

This just in from the U.S. Supreme Court:

WASHINGTON—In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America.

The court, which called its original decision to halt manual recounts in Florida "a ruling made in haste," voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of the 2000 Democratic nominee.

Gore will serve as commander in chief from Dec. 10 to Jan. 20.

Wow, that could just make me cry. Like chopping up an Onion.

Cr-a-a-a-a-ck

Bad news for a nice planet:

Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about seven times the size of Manhattan is "hanging by a thread," the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.

The scientists watch one piece break off over the course of a day, then went to look at the damage:

"We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage," said Jim Elliott, according to the group's Web site.

"Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble -- it's like an explosion," he said.

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said, according to the Web site.

"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread -- we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

I've spent a lot of time in New York City lately. The idea of an ice mass equal to seven Manhattans breaking off is crazy-making to think about.

As usual these days, I'm with Al:

Confronted by Stahl with the fact some prominent people, including the nation’s vice president, are not convinced that global warming is man-made, Gore responds: "You're talking about Dick Cheney. I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat,” says Gore. "That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off," he tells Stahl.

Okay, maybe Al's wrong here.

It doesn't demean them enough.

Solution

Unlike "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" suffered by rightwingers, aversion to, dislike or outright hatred of George W. Bush Jr. is actually rational, because that man actually hates humanity. Why else would he:

- Veto a child health bill.

- Threaten to veto a bill outlawing torture by our American government.

- Be the sole impediment to progress in combating global ecological cataclysm.

How to beat back the bastards Presidents Cheney and Bush?

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) has a simple, effective, logical solution.

By the way, here's where you send the world a message.

Here's our fantasy President, bringing the house down.

More Balls?

That's the question the electorate has been asking about the Democrats ever since Clinton the 1st left office.

For some reason, they seem to be driving back into Cajoneville at the end of this week. Even The New York Times has noticed it.

To me the big news is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is not allowing that chamber to fully recess over the Thanksgiving holiday, in order to deprive President Cheney/Bush from making yet another assholic recess appointment.

Next in line is my district's Congressman, I'm proud to say, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who's just nailed a Bush State Department Inspector General, Howard Krongard, who has just perjured himself regarding his brother, Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, being on the Blackwater Board of Advisors. Since Blackwater is in deep doodoo from killing unarmed Iraqi civilians with impunity, and the Howard's job includes oversight of Blackwater, it sure looks like the now classic Bush/Cheney Corrupt Cronyism we've come to expect, albeit after a lull.

Operation Ass Save: Buzzy just bailed on Blackwater.

The lull dates back to the resignation of disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. A legal defense fund just happened to open up for Mr. Gonzales (will it scare up as much cash as Scooter's?) and maybe it had something to do with this:

New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici called Iglesias to see about getting indictments against state Democratic officials before the 2006 election. McKay said it's clear from testimony that Gonzales met with Domenici and other New Mexico Republicans -- and with the president -- about the fraud case there.

"It's apparent that he had a conversation with the president about David Iglesias and David Iglesias was fired six weeks later," he said. "There was real live investigation and the Republicans wanted the indictment out in time to help them in the election, and Iglesias said 'no' and they fired him.

"Now if all of that's true and the attorney general was aware of that when he fired David Iglesias, then he has some 'splainin' to do -- and probably in front of a grand jury."

The Democratic candidates are getting some traction at the end of this week. Hillary proved that hers is bigger in the Las Vegas debate (C'mon, lucky number seven!) even though Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is acting like such a gentleman, raising money off one of his supporters calling Clinton a "bitch" to his face, ha-ha-ha.

John Edwards marched with the WGA in Burbank, and even ex-Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is getting into the act, facing down the cowardly T. Boone Pickens, Texas corporate predator and Swift Boat funder.

More balls? Really?

How about Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA):

The Bush administration has taken historically unprecedented steps in its assertions of executive privilege and authority. For instance, the Vice President has fought over relatively modest requests to disclose information such as with whom he consulted when setting the Administration's energy policy. The Vice President's office, during a confrontation with the National Archives over executive branch records, even declared itself an entity outside of the executive branch with enhanced powers to resist the public's right to know about its actions.

These assertions of executive privilege have wide-ranging implications for both Congress' day-to-day oversight of the Bush administration and for efforts to hold the President and Vice President accountable.

That is why I introduced the Executive Branch Prosecutions Act. This legislation would suspend the statute of limitations for crimes committed while the president and vice president hold office. Federal law currently suspends the statute of limitations for crimes related to national security. That suspension should extend to any crime committed by the President or Vice President while in office.

Could it be an outbreak of sanity?

I mean, what could be saner than getting serious about impeaching Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney? "Events sure have changed the situation..."

Oh...and guess who's returning to be honored at the White House...?

Saint Al

Hear, hear:

OSLO, Oct. 12 — Former Vice President Al Gore, who emerged from his loss in the muddled 2000 presidential election to devote himself to his passion as an environmental crusader, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised both “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

The prize is a vindication for Mr. Gore, whose cautionary film about the consequences of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary, even as conservatives in the United States denounced it as alarmist and exaggerated.

“I will accept this award on behalf of all the people that have been working so long and so hard to try to get the message out about this planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., standing with his wife, Tipper, and four members of the United Nations climate panel. “I’m going back to work right now,” he said.

Good stuff, and it's nice that the headlines from his statement are all in the vein of, "Gore: Back to work on environment" and "Gore says prize must spur action."

The environment is the frontline of peace, as virtually all wars arise from a scarcity of one kind or another. There's political thought that the Iraq War is as much about water rights -- the Tigris and the Euphrates -- as it is about oil. As the world population expands, global destruction means water scarcity. And, of course, with oil being the most immediate prize in the conflict, we're fighting for the right to continue emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, essentially for the right to continue poisoning ourselves as we collapse the polar ice masses.

As for our acting President, Mr. Bush is damned to be fending off heartbroken mothers who despair that their husbands and sons have died for nothing:

Another person who criticized Bush to his face was Elaine Johnson of Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her son, Army specialist Darius Jennings, died with 15 others when their Chinook helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, Iraq, on Nov. 2, 2003.

In her meeting later that month, she says, she repeatedly pressed Bush for a rationale for the war. She says he failed to deliver a satisfactory answer.

"Miss Jones, you sound a little hostile,'" Bush said, according to Jones, who was an industrial quality inspector.

"Of course I feel hostile. My only son was killed and I can't get an answer," Jones, 44, says she replied.

Bush moved on to a different cluster of family members in the large meeting room at Fort Carson in Colorado. As Bush departed, Jones says, she tried again.

"Could you tell me what is the mission?" she called out. Bush didn't respond.

Couldn't respond. How can he tell her that her son died for his Oedipus Complex butrussed by the greed of his cronies.

Look, at some point we all have to face reality. The Supreme Court blocked any chance Gore might have had to secure the Presidency and we'll never get those critical eight years back. If, like me, you believe there's a reasonable chance 9/11 would have been foiled had Gore taken office (Bush eliminated the daily intelligence briefings Clinton had instituted and didn't listen to Richard Clarke et al; Gore certainly wouldn't have been that stupid), then America would never have gotten a lesson maybe it needed about the true difference with the Republican Party, Ralph Nader's assessment notwithstanding.

I don't think Gore is going to run. I'm not even sure it'd be a good idea if he decided to in time for New Hampshire. I've grown convinced by clear, bold, even refreshing appearances like this that Hilary Clinton is prepared to lead this country, and I'm not sure who else besides Al Gore really is. Whether I'd ultimately prefer her leadership or another prepared citizen, I can't say for sure yet. But at this point only Al could knock her off the Democratic pedestal and I'm not longer certain he'd be a lock. And I think all the Republicans are underestimating her and their peril, just as Dems underestimated the candidate and electoral team of George W. Bush. And they're starting to realize it -- the way they run against her in their debates, you can smell the fear.

So bravo, Al, and here's hoping you can stay above the fetid fray and somehow effectively lead our planet -- maybe starting with your influence on a new Democratic President -- through this turning point in our planetary history. Even if you succeed, there will be other times, decades or centuries ahead, where we again forget our way and new saviors will be required.

But for now it is your ball. Who else in history has ever won as Oscar (okay, the statuette didn't actually go to him), an Emmy (sure, shared) and a Nobel Peace Prize in one year?

Answer: No one else but Al Gore.

Now, Al, for the love of all that is holy, do whatever it is you have to do to finish the job.

Prepare Yourself

Having grown up in the late 20th Century, I've felt that American Exceptionalism myself, and the feeling that it was going to last forever. But now I hear that the 21st Century is all about BRIC -- Brazil, Russia, India, China. Steve Clemons has this:

A widespread view among elite Germans and the non-elite normal types I spoke to is that America is in fast decline -- sort of like Britain after World War II. I think that the impressions foreigners have of this decline is "overshooting reality" as there are many substantive realities about America's ability to deploy force and purpose in the world that remain formidable.

But conversation in some serious circles is turning to what Europe can do to help America stabilize in some position of "lesser global stature." There is also a sense that the nation that is filling much of America's previous geopolitical space is China and that Europe feels tension in its strong alliance with U.S. power in decline and its strategic distance from China clearly ascending.

Just fifteen years before I was born, America had gone over and saved Europe. Now in 2007 we have Europe pitying us?

While this site is nakedly partisan, one of the core reasons, if not the core reason itself, is that the Republican Party has potentially "ruined" America. At home it has undermined the notion of "the common good" and replaced it with "what good for the greedy is good for America"; militarily, for all our death-bringing technology it has laid bare our weaknesses to the world; and overseas it has proven to the world that the most atavistic, exploitative, unevolved American capitalist-imperialists actually do still exist, that they can get control of our most powerful political levers, and that they will kill or allow hundreds of thousands of innocents die to get their way.

Given that last one, why would Europe want to help America, except maybe to make sure we stay in our diminished corner from now on?

It's articles like Clemons' that makes me think the only person who can possibly reverse America's decline, among the current generation of senior U.S. political leadership, is Al Gore.

No one currently running for President comes prepacked with a comparable amount of international respect. No one currently running has shown remotely the amount of vision and translated it into real world action. No one currently running for President showed the level of courage over the decision to go into Iraq that Al Gore did back when the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove war machine was setting the country up like so many country fair rubes.

America in decline. We got the 20th Century, maybe China gets the 21st. It didn't have to be that way.

Ultimately the fault is not only in our leaders. We've gotten morally soft, and I don't mean in the way religious conservatives might espouse. We need to recommit to a Franklin Delano Roosevelt type morality, where we know we're all in it together, we act rationally to help rebuild our nation as a whole, not just those with big capital gains income, we have to change our ways.

Al Gore says that the American political will is a renewable resource. He may just have to drum it up himself, and so far he doesn't look interested.

In any case, the Democratic electoral dominance last November wasn't an end, it was only the very start. The Augean Stables of our government and media still need a good, strong flushing. Before it's too late.

Another Green World

Even with so much cultural dissonance like watching Simon Le Bon break into a global warming entreaty in the middle of a hard-rocking "Girls on Film" live in London, I have nothing but kind words for Live Earth.

If anyone still doesn't understand why Al Gore isn't running for President again, this is it. Performances on all seven (7) continents. Even Antarctica.

Now that's what I call on-message.

An event like this is such a great concert value, tons of great acts, and this time not a bunch of 60's holdovers.. The Police were the granddaddy act, and even they did a duet ("Message in a Bottle") with Kanye West, some of which worked very nicely, some of which was happily dissonant.

The first clip to pop-up on the Net was, funnily enough, Spinal Tap doing "Big Bottom"...along with every single bassist backstage at Wembley. I'm guessing this is the largest audience that the fake heavy metal band has ever played, and there it was...on message?

The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'
That's what I said
The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand
Or so I have read...

...Big bottom, big bottom
Talk about mud flaps, my girl's got 'em
Big bottom drive me out of my mind
How could I leave this behind?

Maybe a methane tie-in?

One of the finest pleasures of Live Earth is that Gore actually stuck it to everyone by pulling it off, and by everyone I mean the Republican leadership. Here we've got President Cheney and Vessel Bush killing off the Kyoto Treaty and then just a month ago sandbagging German Chancellor Angela Merkel's global environmental initiative.

Even better, Gore got it over on satanic Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-OK), a vociferous global-warming denier who treated Gore with an alarming lack of respect, even insult when Al came back to Capitol Hill to testify. Inhofe was so petty, so beholden to his oil-agarchy masters, so much of a fascist that he vowed to personally block Live Earth from using the U.S. Capitol as a venue.

Gore looked particularly pleased to announce that Inhofe had failed to keep Live Earth off Federal property:

"Some who don't understand what is now at stake tried to stop this event on the Mall," the former Democratic presidential candidate said in a thinly veiled hit on members of President George W. Bush's Republican party.

"But here we are," he said as an image of a bright Earth shined behind him. "And it wasn't the cavalry who came to our rescue, it was the American Indian."

Per Jackson Williams at HuffPost:

Gore took the concert denial in stride and quietly made arrangements with the Smithsonian, specifically their National Museum of the American Indian, to sponsor a Washington concert under their auspices, to take place on the Mall, just two blocks from the Capitol. The surprise announcement only came this week, just 24 hours before today's Live Earth concerts. Inhofe has no control over what takes place on the Mall, of course, but he could have - and no doubt would have - made a stink if he knew that the Smithsonian, a federal institution, was partnering with Gore to get around the roadblock he'd threatened...

...Oh, and just who are the headliners performing at this last minute added concert in D.C.? Why, none other than the superstar Couple of Country Music, Oklahoma native and favorite son Garth Brooks and his wife Tricia Yearwood...

Best served cold.

Finally, can I say how happy am to have James Hatfield in our army? He opened MetallicA's apocalyptic "Sandman" hollering:

"Are you out there?
(crowd roar)

"Make some noise if you give a shit!"
(ROAR)

And they vamped under him leading into the next song:

"Are you alive?"
(roar)

"Are you ALIVE?"
(ROAR)

"So tell me, how does it feel to be alive?"
(Crazy Roaring)

"Yeah! Me, too!"
(pandemonium)

Sound pro-Earth to me.

Oh, and if you want the goodness to continue past the final encore, sign up for saving your planet here.

Spot On

While public and Congressional outrage against the Stalinist shadow President Dick Cheney has yet to reach the proper peak, there is reason to be hopeful for the future, if only we don't allow Cheney to hijack it by causing war with Iran.

While I've watched Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) move up and down in these way-too-early Presidential Primary polls, I tend to forget his very admirable roots as a community activist, as well as how the Illinois electorate overwhelmingly voted him into the U.S. Senate thanks, one imagines, to his pleasing performance in state government.

These two new television spots, courtesy of TPMCafe, are hitting the airwaves in Iowa, home of the very first Primary contest (a caucus). They remind me why Obama is so attractive as a candidate in the first place.

The first features an Illinois Republican State Legislator speaking highly of Sen. Obama's ability to work fairly across the aisle. Nice work.

The other has different community activists as well as renown Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe praising Obama's selflessness when he could very easily have gone to Wall Street and made zillions...instead of helping regular folks who pay much, much worse.

I'm more than intrigued with Barack Obama as a Presidential candidate, although I have concerns about his closeness with Joe Lieberdouche and some of scattered neocon types. However, I am, like many people, enamored of him as a Vice Presidential candidate, say with Former Senator Edwards or, be still my heart, Former Vice President Gore.

Who knows, maybe it'll be a woman at the top of the ticket and Barack filling it out. And should they win, would we not, indeed, have earned the title, Land of the Free?

Two Guys

So far a couple of white Southern guys are my favorites to become our next U.S. President. One is actually running for the Democratic Party nomination, the other is not announced and maybe never announcing.

I find something to like in all of the Democratic candidates, and will vote for any of them over any of the Republican candidates, all of whom I find odious and repellent, with the exception of the very honest and (although I disagree with so many of his Libertarian positions) Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), someone I agree with wholeheartedly on the egregious folly of this Iraq War and all of the Patriot Act type civil liberty usurpations they snuck through with it.

While he continues to place #3 in the national polls, John Edwards has an edge in the early Iowa caucus. There are a number of things I like about Edwards. He's the only candidate consistently talking about poverty and what it's doing to our nationhood. As a thinking, acting individual, there is no doubt that he has grown these past four years, and I think he's still growing. And he's got the best wife of all the candidates, long may she live.

So what are his actual odds? Who knows -- Hillary has the national poll numbers, Obama has the star power. As to Edwards' strategy, The New York Times piece from Monday morning is a pretty good picture as far as I've come to understand it:

Mr. Edwards has shown a new eagerness to draw contrasts with his opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and health care, in no small part motivated by his struggle not to get lost in a field of big names. And he has gone from the boyish, easygoing one-time senator from North Carolina to a candidate displaying an urgently engaging manner as likely to seize as to charm an audience, an approach that appears to be particularly effective in the close-quarter meetings that fill his days here.

I don't find it a valid criticism that Sen. Edwards made his money as a trial lawyer. Even Republicans call up a trial lawyer the minute they feel they've been wronged by a major corporation. We've had an actor President, a profession where the main task is to make people believe the story being told, and a whole lot of people hold him in high esteem.

(Personally, I commend President Ronald Reagan for having ignored Rep. Richard Cheney and his band of moron ideologues and chosen to deal with Russian Premier Gorbachev during those fragile early days of glasnost and perestroika. Actual statesmanship.)

Edwards in his positions is fighting the power for national health insurance and impressing regular folks with his live appearances, going to small towns usually ignored by Democrats. He's not some trumped up phony, although he certainly will be selling between now and either his eventual win or elimination. I don't begrudge him that, either.

Then there's the rock star:

Mr. Gore is scheduled to address the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival as part of the windup leading to the Live Earth concerts on July 7, which are intended to raise awareness of the issue of climate change.

You might think that Mr. Gore and his campaign against global warming would find few friends in Cannes. The production, transport, sale and consumption of goods and services add a few sizes to anyone’s carbon footprint.

Yet Mr. Gore is being accorded rock star status at the festival, an event that in the past has been headlined by industry insiders. The embrace of Mr. Gore shows how “green” advertising has galvanized the marketing community.

It turns out the ultimate salesman is the former Vice President and 2000 Presidential popular vote winner, wildly successful in selling the very real threat of global warming to the populace of the world. It's all consumer driven sentiment -- we do want to save our world! -- so advertisers are responding. Of course, we'll see if they're really serious about being good corporate citizens in the long run, but there is no one but Al who made this happen.

Per England's The Guardian, "It has got to be Al Gore":

Other politicians and nations can pressure and preach - but top-down decision-making starts in the Oval Office.

Is that possible when climate change is just one "normal" issue among many, to be ceremonially weighed against US jobs or gas prices or Chinese imports? It's not. But that, with inevitable shades of emphasis, is where every extant presidential candidate stands. Too timid, too slow. Global warming is an utterly abnormal issue that needs a leader all of its own. Gore has fashioned himself as that leader. He can't just sit there and pontificate. He has to run. And, when he does, the rest of us have to put inconvenient illusions aside and listen.

The bloke's got a point.

And when I look at this, I get happy chills of projection...

Taibbi

Matt Taibbi, the most dead-on gonzo reporter working today, hits another homer in this week's Rolling Stone with, "Giuliani: Worse Than Bush". You can read to the end to get the whole "worse" part, but it's a damning portrait of an amoral political opportunist who cashes an an accelerated World Trade Center clean-up by flouting OSHA rules to get it done faster and ruining the health of the workers to do it:

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The article begins with a very odd and revealing moment on the campaign trail and also covers Rudy's dunce-hatting of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) at the first Republican Presidential debate. Not to be missed, if you really want to know why New Yorkers were glad when Mayor Giuliani finally -- after suspending the election of his successor on his own edict -- left the job.

I'm not sure what it will take to dislodge the current lazy mainstream media story that Rudy was the hero of 9/11 (read the article to learn more reasons why not), but meanwhile former Vice President Al Gore has a new book out about the fundamental cracks in our democratic discourse, The Assault on Reason, and the old lazy mainstream media story about him being, uh, too smart has again reared it's Medusa-like head. Per Paul McLeary at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Milbank gives us an account of a recent speech by Gore that reads almost like a parody of everything we read about the candidate back in '00.

Milbank said that during the speech, Gore "waxed esoteric," "waxed erudite," and "waxed informed," as if these might be bad things to have happen during a speech. Milbank then quotes several audience members who gush over how smart Gore is, concluding that "therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble." Can't be too smart, now, or else you'll look like an egghead, right?

G*ddamn America and its anti-intellectualism.

Remember what happened when we didn't go for smart?