27 Minutes To Save The World

Watch Al Gore's climate speech, challenging the U.S. to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the next 10 years.

Or read the transcript at wecansolveit.org

Al Gore Endorses Gay Marriage

wikipedia
Good for Al. But now we know that he's definitely not running for President, because in 2008 at least, gay marriage is the third rail of American politics. Of all the major Presidential candidates, only the spouse of one -- the courageous Elizabeth Edwards -- favors gay marriage.

As Al says,

"I think that gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women, to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage," Gore said. "And I don’t understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage to allow it by gays and lesbians. Shouldn’t we be promoting that kind of faithfulness and loyalty to one’s partner regardless of sexual orientation?

Al Gore Endorses Gay Marriage (video)

Huffington Post: Al Gore Endorses the Freedom to Marry

2007 Is Second Warmest Year Ever

The climate crisis continues unabated. "The Arctic is screaming" says climate scientist Mark Serreze. The Bush Administration position at the climate talks is: Hurry up and wait. Wait until January 20, 2009. Bush will do nothing. He is the greatest do nothing in the history of do nothings. What has he done to stop global warming? Nothing.

And I'd like to give a shout out to the five morons on the Supreme Court who seven years ago today gave us the Master of Disaster George W. Bush as President, over the vote-winner, now Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. Thank you very fucking much for seven years of the plague of Shrub, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, Injustice Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy (four appointed by Ronald Raygun, one by Buckfush41). Equal protection, my ass. Equal protection for rich malevolent assholes.

ClimateProgress: NASA: 2007 Second Warmest Year Ever, with Record Warmth Likely by 2010

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of its natural El Niño — La Niña cycle.

… barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.

[]

The six warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 15 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1988.

DailyMail: World told to act now on climate change as 'Arctic is screaming'

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, a senior US scientist.

Edited to add, oh, and by the way, American scientists told the American Geophysical Union meeting this week that there may be NO ARCTIC ICE by 2013. That's six years, folks. Wave goodbye to the polar bears.

Michael Moore Bags a Wolf

Michael Moore today on Wolf Blitzer's CNN show:



P.S., Michael Moore, I still haven't forgiven you for supporting Ralph Nader.

To Do List: Be An Activist

De-Authorize the War Now. Sign Bill Richardson's petition to Congress to de-authorize the war before the summer break.

Save the free and open internet. Use the button on the right to send your story to the FCC. The comment period ends June 15th, so don't delay.

Write to Al Gore, if you want him to run for President. Or if you don't. The address of his Nashville office is 2100 W End Ave, Nashville, TN 37203. Sign the petition to draft Al. Check out pictures of the solar panels on the roof of his house here (he had to petition to change the zoning laws to install them!)

Use the Sudan Divestment Task Force's Screening Tool to learn if any of your investments are in the Sudan.

Stop Big Media. Use the links on the right to contact the FCC to protect local media, promote diversity, and stop Rupert Murdoch from taking over the information delivery highway.

So Appropriate on "Paris Hilton Goes Back to Court" Day

Media crews and the paparazzi wait outside hotel heiress Paris Hilton's home, in the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles, June 7, 2007. (Gus Ruelas/Reuters)
I just turned on the TV to check the weather report and cable news channels have gone Paris Hilton mad. Why didn't I think of dropping my law day job, getting a little plastic surgery, and going on TV? I could be on MSNBCNNBCSBC right now fawning breathlessly over this non-story. Will Paris get to court on time? Will she get sent back to -- horrors -- jail? Meanwhile, the G-8 Summit addressing global warming and the fate of the planet is being ignored. The Iraq Clusterfuck is being ignored; how could this be, what happened to journalism?

Paul Krugman's column today is essentially the obituary for journalism. You know what I say: Journalism is dead; long live the corporate media. The corporate infotainment, bread-and-circus media is the cockroach that will survive us all.

NYTimes: Paul Krugman, Lies, Sighs and Politics (TimesSelect wall; also here and here.)

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Stop Voter Fraud

FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky wrote a law review article while he was a staff lawyer at the Justice Department supporting a photo identification program for voters in Georgia.
Photo Credit: By Charlotte B. Teagle -- Atlanta Journal-constitution

Stop the Republicans from putting one of their number one vote-challenging whores on the Federal Election Commision. Hans von Spakovsky is the guy who masterminded the 2000 Florida "felon" purge that prevented tens of thousands of legitimate, mostly African-American Florida voters from casting their ballots for Al Gore. He has been nominated to a four-year term on the Federal Elections Commision by the Chimperor, and there is a hearing on the nomination on June 13, 2007 by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. Please call your senator if they are on the list below; if he makes it through committee, all senators must be contacted.

dailykos: Keep Yer Vote Thievin' Hans Off (the FEC): Action Alert!

Hans Von Spakovsky will appear before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration on June 13, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. for his confirmation hearing. []

Democrats
Dianne Feinstein (CA) - (202) 224-3841
Robert Byrd (WV) - (202) 224-3954
Daniel Inouye (HI) - (202) 224-3934
Christopher Dodd (CT) - (202) 224-2823
Charles Schumer (NY) - (202) 224-6542
Richard Durbin (IL) - (202) 224-2152
Ben Nelson (NE) - (202) 224-6551
Harry Reid (NV) - (202) 224-3542
Patty Murray (WA) - (202) 224-2621
Mark Pryor (AR) - (202) 224-2353

Republicans
Robert Bennett (UT) - (202) 224-5444
Mitch McConnell (KY) - (202) 224-2541
Thad Cochran (MS) - (202) 224-5054
Trent Lott (MS) - (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX) - (202) 224-5922
Saxby Chambliss (GA) - (202) 224-3521
Chuck Hagel (NE) - (202) 224-4224
Lamar Alexander (TN) - (202) 224-4944

McClatchy: Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting

WASHINGTON - During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.

Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.

"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.

He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots.

WaPo: Official's Article on Voting Law Spurs Outcry

GoBama

Al Gore on The Daily Show last night:

Part 1


Part 2



Obama on criticisms from McCain & Romney:

GoBama

That's my ideal ticket: Gore-Obama. Experience + charisma. The politics of hope. All that good stuff. Here's another GoBama supporter:

Jim Sleeper, TPMCafe: Gore, Obama, And A Coalition Against The Politics of Fear

P.S., Al Gore is on The Daily Show tonight. Run, Al, run.

Another Reason To Love Al Gore

His messy office makes me feel better about my office. Except that triple screen monitor. That is way cool.

hat tip to BoingBoing; photo in Time magazine.

'Family Guy -- The World is Beautiful with Gore as President'

From the YouTube poster's description:

Fox ran a train on their loyal Republican audience last night with scathing episodes of The Simpson and Family Guy. In this Family Guy episode, Death allows Peter to go back in time, but when he returns to the present he discovers he is married to Molly Ringwald and Lois is married to Quagmire. An alternate version of the world is presented in which Al Gore is president,...Basically, it's paradise on earth. Enjoy the fantasy.

hat tip to Down with Tyranny

The Challenge of the Super-Duper Friends

Hillary, Obama, Edwards and Gore use their superpowers to thwart the administration's [attempted] conquest of the universe. SuperDuperFriends website.

Tuesday Was a Rotten Anniversary

And I missed it. Tuesday marked the sixth anniversary of the most dishonest Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott: Bush v. Gore.

Lawyers, Guns and Money: A Rotten Anniversary

Today, I am sad to remind everyone, is the sixth anniversary of the grotesque and consequential Bush v. Gore decision, which was delivered in all its steaming feculence by five activist judges who substituted their own political fantasies for the rule of law and rendered a decision that flew in the face of tradition and popular will.

[]...every December 12, we ought to remember the names of the dishonest hacks who buggered the Constitution on behalf of George W. Bush.

And those five were:

Anthony Kennedy
Sandra Day O’Connor
William Rehnquist
Antonin Scalia
Clarence Thomas

They gave us 9/11, the Iraq War, unconstitutional eavesdropping, shit (oh, sorry, e coli) in our vegetables, energy policy by oil comanies, and all the other crap we've been subjected to by the incompetent, corrupt, cronyist Bushco.

Friday Round-Up, December 8, 2006

An empty pushchair amid the wreckage in West London. Photo sent in by Ian Carter. (bbc)
Great interview with President Al Gore in GQ. I really hope he runs. Remember Al? Against the war from the get-go? Smartest guy in the room? If somebody's got to mop up the Chimperor's excesses, I nominate Al.

The BBC has an article on how we are polluting the oceans with plastic. I'm moving from a 'recycle everything' mindset to a 'don't buy plastic if you don't need to' one. I do get odd looks in the grocery store when I spill my veggies out onto the conveyor belt without plastic bags, but so what.

Global warming news: Tornado strikes London yesterday, injuring 6 people and damaging up to 150 homes. Could have something to do with all this warm weather.

Go read Krugman: At the official link, or here, or here. As a person who screamed at her TV from 9/12/01 on at the fawning media coverage of C+ Augustus, the biggest catastrophe in U.S. history, it's nice to hear someone praise our side in the corporate media.

Tom Friedman, billionaire, has run out of Friedmans. Now he says, set a date and get out. A little late, Tommy boy. Who cares. He was wrong from the start. Why should we listen to any of these fools?

Sunil Gulati putting coal in my stocking: Jurgen Klinsmann issued a statement yesterday saying he is withdrawing his name from consideration as USMNT coach, after six months of talks. And Bob Bradley has been named interim coach. A good round-up of the sports press take here.

Flooded with Disinformation

Richard Perry/The New York Times

In June, a road was washed out in Roscoe, by the Beaverkill River in the Catskill region.

NYTimes: Our Towns
TimesSelect After 3 Floods, Trying to Brace for No. 4 (TimesSelect wall)

Here’s what’s at stake: The Delaware River is the longest nondammed river east of the Mississippi, extending 330 miles from the Catskills to the mouth of the Delaware Bay. Nearly 15 million people — about 5 percent of the nation’s population — rely on it and 216 tributaries for drinking water and industrial uses. New York City gets half of its water from three reservoirs on the Delaware, and countless towns from here to the Atlantic exist because the river does.

From 1955 to 1996, there were no major floods. Now, it seems, there’s one every year. The Delaware River Basin Commission, which manages the river system, has begun a flood mitigation study, but on Thursday you could hear the frustration in the voice of every resident who spoke.

“I hear the word rain, and I hear a four-letter word,” said Joan Homovich, a retired teacher, who estimates her basement has flooded 10 times since 2003 and now obsessively goes online studying water releases from the reservoirs on the river. “When I thought about this rain I couldn’t eat.”

Part of the difficulty is a blizzard of conflicting agendas.

New York City, which controls the reservoirs, wants to be assured of drinking water for more than eight million people. Upstate residents want the city to also use the reservoirs to manage river flows and minimize flooding. Fishermen and environmentalists want to protect fisheries and limit man-made disruptions on the river. Towns want to be able to dredge and clean out streams to improve water flows that would prevent flooding.

[]

Residents want the agency to release water and lower the reservoir levels, creating a void that could trap rainfall that could otherwise cause flooding. The agency says its options are limited because the reservoirs are not built for flood control. But for the first time it has said it would make efforts in that direction.

Residents say the city is already failing to deliver. (The agency says reservoirs are now at 100.5 percent of capacity. Normal is 70 percent.)

[]

This year in the Catskills is among the wettest on record, but who knows what to read into a few years of wet weather. Freak of nature? Global warming? Thirty-year rainfall cycle? Act of God?

No one knows, and there are acts of nature that are beyond the machinations of man.

But despite the weaselly words with which the NYTimes ends its piece on the floods in the Catskills, these types of floods are predicted by the science of climate change. I heard Al Gore describe this type of weather scenario in An Inconvenient Truth.

Al Gore, transcript (unofficial), An Inconvenient Truth

What is often unnoticed the fact that global warming causes more precipitation but more of it coming in one time big storm events because the evaporation off the ocean puts all the moisture up there when storm conditions trigger the downpour before it falls down.

[]

The places where people live were chosen because of the climate pattern that had been pretty much the same on Earth since the end of the last ice age. Here on [my] farm, patterns are changing. It seems gradual in the course of a human lifetime but in the course of time as defined by this river, it's happening very, very quickly.

Mary Matalin Has Sucked James Carville's Brain Out

I have evidence to prove this.

Yesterday, Carville called for Democrats to replace Howard Dean, the man who engineered their House and Senate triumphs, with Harold Ford. Harold, who just lost to a real right wing nutjob in Tennessee. Insane, no?

Here's the icing on the cake. In 2000, Carville proposed that Al Gore should choose as his running mate......Zell Miller.

See, Mary Matalin has clearly sucked his brains out. No question.

Go away, James Carville. Your useful life is over.

It Was 108 in Central Massachusetts Last Wednesday

Yeah, that's my excuse for missing all these stories:

National Tennis Center to be named after foremother Billie Jean King.

The Iraqi blogger Riverbend describes the exodus from Baghdad, and why it's happening.

Tom Friedman has run out of six month segments (Friedmans), and even he now says we must 'disengage' from the civil war we created in Iraq. Better late than never.

Hillary Clinton, finger in the wind, ripped Donald Rumsfield a new one in a Senate Hearing. Five years too late, baby. It was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Brent Wilkes, Duke Cunningham's benefactor, told the New York Times how he funneled bribes to Republican Congressman to get government contracts.

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites marched in Baghdad chanting 'death to Israel.' I love to see democracy flowering in the middle east. Great job by the Cheney Administration.

In a new book, our former ambassador to Croatia says Bush didn't know there were two different sects (Shia and Sunni) in Iraq before the invasion. I'm shocked. At this point it would be news to learn that Bush understands anything.

Two nuclear power plants in Sweden shut down after almost melting down. As we said after Three Mile Island, We All Live In Pennsylvania. We all live in Sweden.

There's a parody making fun of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth on YouTube. Guess who made it? A PR firm that works for Exxon Mobil.

Mel Gibson, drunk as a skunk, goes on a tirade about Jews. You know, when I get drunk I don't go on racist tirades. I might say 'men can be such pigs', but that's because I believe that. You think Mel is really sorry? Neither do I.

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and The Poodle, Tony Blair, had a big press conference announcing a new initiative to combat global warming. Its centerpiece? Voluntary cooperation by industry. That should do the trick. It's been working so well so far.

Daryn Kagan to leave CNN to start a blog. Hah! Nobody leaves a job to start a blog. She's getting shitcanned. Her blog is supposed to be inspirational. I'd be inspired if she started posting dirt on former boyfriend Rush Limpaugh. Daryn?

And here's a story I missed two weeks ago. The US rushed a shipment of laser-guided missiles to Israel after the Israel-Lebanon war started. Maybe that's why we're having a hard time getting Lebanon to talk to us about a cease fire.

Global Warming Pops Up Again

In Sports Illustrated, of all places:

Peter King: Monday Morning QB

Factoid That May Interest Only Me

This should interest all of us.

In my town, Montclair, N.J., we had a once-in-a-generation wind, hail and rain storm last week, uprooting 120-year-old oaks all over our neighborhood. One of those monsters crushed the car of the pitcher on the summer softball team I coach. A neighbor told me it was the worst weather event he's seen in 52 years in the town.

Wherever you are, have you noticed the weird weather patterns in the last few months? Unending, intense rain. High winds. It was in the midst of a 12th day of measurable rain in a 14-day period that I saw An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore movie about global warming.

This is the most apolitical piece of advice I could ever give you, because I realize Al Gore is not popular with all of you. And I really don't care very much about Gore weaving details of his personal life into the global-warming lecture. But you should see this movie and judge the facts for yourself. What's happening out here is no isolated occurrence. It's going to keep happening and it's going to get worse. Facts are facts. And we all need to do something about this phenomenon of the Earth heating up and the polar ice caps melting. This is not exactly the venue to warn the world about global warming, but all you football junkies readying for your fantasy drafts should do one real-world thing in the next couple of weeks: take two hours to see this movie. I'm not saying you'll be glad you did, because it's going to slap you around mentally a bit. But it's something you need to see. You don't want to wake up in 15 years with the Earth permanently damaged and huge portions of the Earth's surface under water, forever.

Is The Media Ready to Cover Politics Substantively?

Paul Krugman asks, will America get fooled again? When he says 'we', he means the public and the press. I say, the public voted for Gore in 2000, despite the relentless drubbing he took in the corporate press, including the New York Times. This article really should be aimed squarely for the media. Will the media cover the issues? Or is PR and image everything? Will the media once again cover Karl Rove photo ops as substance, when they are merely showtime?

Paul Krugman, NYTimes: A Test of Our Character (TimesSelect wall)

the concluding grafs:

Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates' clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest).

I won't join the sudden surge of speculation about whether "An Inconvenient Truth" will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we — by which I mean both the public and the press — ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

The full article, from Ed Strong.

Pay No Attention To That Science In the Corner!

Thus spake President Dumbass:

ThinkProgress: Bush ‘Doubts’ He’ll See Gore Movie; Wants To ‘Set Aside’ Global Warming Science

QUESTION: Will you see Al Gore’s new movie?

(LAUGHTER)

BUSH: Doubt it.

(LAUGHTER)

But I will say this about the environmental debate: that my answer to the energy question also is an answer to how you deal with, you know, the greenhouse gas issue. And that is new technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars, which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment.

And in my judgment, we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects, and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and, at the same time, protect the environment.

And then he got into his motorcade of 10 MPG limousines and SUVs and drove off to his next dog-and-pony show.