Draft Gore 2008 PAC

The new slide show is at TED. At 22:11 Al is asked "When you look at the leading candidates in your own party are doing now are you excited by their plans on global warming?"

Somewhere in the next two minutes Matt Stoller finds his wee little brass ring. Its all MB's fault, she let him post at It's Still the Ecomony, Stupid (a post I'm fond of is the link to Max Sawicky, in April, 2003, on what to do with Iraq's oil revenues -- we'll be coming back to that next week when we visit Susan Collins' latest idea.

MB and I will be writing in Al Gore's name on the ballot. The Maine 1st CD is wicked safe blue, so its not likely to reverse gravity, but its the only vote we feel represents us.

We'll write in John Edwards just below Al Gore.

Global warming is a problem of unprecedented magnitude and that's why we've launched the largest mobilization campaign ever. Actions by individuals like you will be the driving force behind this campaign and our ultimate victory. We're going to succeed, but I need your help today.

More than 850,000 people have already joined us, but if leaders in business and government are going to make stopping climate change a priority, we need you to urge your friends to get involved today: http://wecansolveit.org/invitealliance

We need to grow to 1,000,000 members by April so we can send a loud message that we want action now. That is why I need you to forward the email below to all of your friends and family right now and ask them to add their voice.

Thank you,

Al Gore

P.S. You can donate to our efforts here.

The Martin Agency is running We Can Solve It for the signature side. The donations and mailing list management functions are run by David Geller's What Counts.

It seems odd to me that in the climate change community, the effect on agriculture, and therefore human misery, in Black Africa, is front-and-center, yet in the civil rights community, the quest for social solidarity that transcends race ends at the waters' edge, and contemporary Africans are no more necessary than contemporary Inuits, or particulate and gases (other than greenhouse) on urban populations.

Lost in the clutter of browser tabs was Al Gore arrives in Geneva, which has the advantage of being in English. Enjoy!

I opened the papers today to find that Al Gore is in town, doing the "responsible, durable" at Banque Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch (LODH).

In Le Temps, in Radio Suisse Romande.

My co-workers, in from Norway, Germany, Catalonia, France, and Switzerland for Monday and Tuesday ask if Al Gore can still be nominated.

I answer "Yes, but there are some complications ..."

I will try and make the car show, it is wierd writing using a Swiss-German keyboard.

Origanlly posted on July 6, 2004. If we'd known then, what we know now, that MoveOn and SEIU wouldn't endorse Edwards, that Florida would be repeated in Ohio, that all those flashes, Dean (ok we knew that by February) Lamont, any of the specials, in fact, the entire '06 miracle, wouldn't throw as much light as the steady candles of the Catholic Workers or the American Friends Service Committee ... well, we might be changed by that knowledge.

North Korea and Iran are treated as a nuclear ensemble in the common-to-both-parties political lexicon. I'm going to try and seperate out the Iran part, and try and delineate that part of the JRE text that differs from the standard Axis-of-Evil text. New readers please keep in mind that I write about Iran from time to time, in a series called Return of the ... One True King. A link to the last part is here.

In his major primary piece on pre-emption and nukes, the only "justification" offered by the Bush/Cheney administration for its Iraq War with any theoretical legs, Edwards thoughtfully listed the Soviet-era warhead inventory management problem first.
60 percent of Russia's nuclear material remains unsecured. That country has 20,000 nuclear warheads and enough material to produce 60,000 more Hiroshima-size bombs. This is a good begining, 20,000 weapons and a fissiles inventory capable of 60,000 additional weapons is catagorically different from North Korea's hypothetical half-dozen, or Iran's centrifuges.

Edwards' first "post-Soviet" talking point is establishment of a new Global Nuclear Compact (GNC) to reinforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The implementation language is overtly multi-national and repeats the explicit mechanism of assistance for peaceful use in exchage for strict controls over waste and reprocessing of the Clinton/Gore administration. While not explicitly a UN or an existing Treaty Organization, "leading nations" and nuclear technology overlaps with the Permanent Members of the Security Council, which means France, the Federation of Independent States, and China, as well as Japan and Germany. Broadly, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' second "post-Soviet" talking point is a UN Security Council vehicle to make economic sanctions easier to apply when the requisit condiditions arise. The "carrot and stick" approach of the GNC institutionalized by the primary Treaty Organization. Again, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' third "post-Soviet" talking point is to triple the spending on securing the "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union", and to end development of two new weapons technologies -- "bunker buster" nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missiles. This is as anti-Bush/Cheney as one can imagine, and Tehran has no interest in "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union" finding any use in West Asia.

Edwards' fourth "post-Soviet" talking point is to strengthen our intelligence capability, and no sane person in Tehran or anywhere else wants to see another US military adventure based upon bad intelligence. This approach is inconsistent with the administrations punitive and criminal outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Edwards' fifth "post-Soviet" talking point is creating a high-level NPT role in the administration. Again, a position Tehran is more likely to appreciate than the current incoherence and outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Having less time than Professor Cole to write (I've a housefull of unruly post-vacation weasels to mind and lots of washing to attend to, not to mention paid work) my Edwards-and-Iran thinking is that he's wicked better than the BC04 war-rhetoriticans. Granted, the US-Iran war hasn't happened, yet, but the insane desire for war has been bubbling under the surface of both states since the fall of Reza Shah and Jimmy Carter, and it is only one accidental or one calculated act away. As Vice-President of the United State, John Edwards seems more unlikely than most to succumb to the lure of the ongoing phoney war with Iran, let alone let the fiction escape from its confines and consume whole armies and cities, as the phoney war with Iraq has. I will sleep better at night when he is Vice President.

Afternote: Since "breach of the NPT" gets so much attention in the Axis-of-Evil demonology, it is useful to read Article X of the NPT:

1. Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

Iran hasn't withdrawn from the NPT, but it seems that the current administrations in Washington and Tel Aviv would like it to do so.

link.

I'm not surprised to see that for Joe, neither the ground nor finance exist. We'd planned to hit every meat packing plant in Iowa, and Yucca Mountain activist in Nevada, and always take enough to beat the 15% floor and simply accumulate delegates. It can't make us better or smarter than he, he got the job and we got bumpkis, but its good to know how Joe sees the big picture.

It hosts johnedwards.com, so it matters.

Update: 12 hours later 70.42.42.155 is responsive.

This morning I clicked on this to listen to Bonior's postmortem -- I wanted to hear how Nevada came unglued after all the effort Edwards made over the past two-plus years for labor. It was the HERE half of UNITE HERE!, the hotel, restaurant and casino half, that refused to make an endorsement until after Iowa. The textile workers at UNITE wanted to endorse Edwards but the hospitality workers didn't.

The third segment of the show was Ralph Nader, who announced an exploratory the day John Edwards announced the suspension of his campaign.

I'm not ready to turn my face to the wall or do whatever it takes to become blissfully numb, and we've already been down the Gotta-Unite-Behind-the-Indian-in-High-Office road -- it has no peyote, no roadmen and no soul, and it's called Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

Al Gore is not running. Chris Dodd is not running. Dennis Kucinich is not running. John Edwards is not currently running.

Freedom is choice. Here's a link.

The six of them had this schtick -- run something to save Bill Clinton's ass. Dance with Gore without ever getting to the sticking point of will-you-must-you-draft-you. A waste. A diversion from the declared progressive(s) in the race.

And today the six DLC (the next gen) endorsed the guy who thought that Donald Rumsfeld was mainstream, along with the vast majority of the Bush nominees. h/t Lambert @ Corrente

IF mail from congressional candidate contains alignment reference to {Clinton | Obama} THEN exercise the unsubscribe {embedded link | mailbot address}.

Several yesterday. Probably more today.

Woke up thinking if Edwards had to drop out within four weeks of the first Party caucus to extract a promise from the Hero Twins, who claim they alone can make the trip to Xibalba and defeat the Lords of Death, to protect the hopeless, the downtrodden, the poor and the working poor, what did the Hero Twins promise to inflict upon the hopeless, the downtrodden, the poor and the working poor, if he stayed in a fifth week or a sixth week or longer?

Something worth reading is this.

via Indianz.com, this gem -- "If he wins the November election, Obama plans to appoint an Indian policy advisor at the White House".

So, he's going to rise to the level of Nixon, Haldeman and Erlichman, which is actually the gold standard, the high-water mark for the Federal-Tribal relationship, but he's too inexperienced to actually know what he's doing, and in all liklihood, he'll just promote Ross Swimmer. That plus an annual "Summit", which either means a do-nothing 400-and-some-plus-ONE media circus, or a USET+NCAI+IGA+ONE clubman's foursome that excludes Hawai'i, Alaska, and all the fucked-over-by-the-BIA, the fucked-over-by-corrupt-Chairs, the fucked-over-by-Abramoff, and all of the Urbans.

Edwards actually worked the Lumbee issue, which counts far more than the promise of symbolism and circuses. Edwards could cut to the chase and just say "I will invite Ms. Eloise Cobell to join my Administration as Secretary of the Interior. He could run that into the seam of dirt MB's mined since we set our sights on Saint John McCain, hitting Haliburton and the Petro-Oligarchy as casually as children chase crows out of the garden corn.

Cobell v Babbit began under Clinton, and the MMS mess wasn't invented by the RNC, they just improved on a pre-existing condition.

I missed my chance to phone back to South Carolina, 6pm plus a few PST is after 9:05 pm EST, when the calling window for voter ID and persuasion ends. The volunteer who called to vet me after registering at the website was smart and when she was walking me through the call and script and I mentioned I'd done GOTV, she switched to operative-speak, which made it a lot easier for me.

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Link to the video.

And if you use sendmail, or an operating system product that at any point in its licensing history, ever required a license from the Regents of the University of California, even if unknown to you, your email transits sendmail relays on Berkeley Unix hosts, which is what most ISPs actually use in operational practice, you're using the work products of two men who've been married for longer than I've known them, to each other.

Happy Everyday, Kirk and Eric!!!

Le Monde is front-paging a story -- Un climat très politique that has absolutely no coverage in the US media market -- on June 23rd, 1988, a climatologist, Dr. James Hanson, then, and now, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, was called before a Senate committee to give scientific testimony on what was then the hottest summer on record.

He was recalled on May 8th, 1989, and testified before a Senate committee headed by Senator Al Gore, who asked "Why have you contradicted your written testimony?" Dr. Hanson's reply, "Because I didn't write the last paragraph of this section. It was "added" to my statement."

Hanson had alerted Gore that his testimony had been falsified, faxing Gore the sections he knew had been falsified, allowing Gore the opportunity to ask Hanson if his testimony was in fact, his, or that of a political censor. And of course, the answer was there in plain sight.

Coverage: NPR ran a 20 minute audio interview segment on January 8th, five days after the Iowa caucus. Hanson is an Iowan. link. Good luck finding much else in the US media.

Author Mark Bowen's Censoring Science site has links to online booksellers where the book may be ordered.

Need something funny to brighten your stockmarket day? Try this gem from co2science.org:

GOPE3_DVD - The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues Video Set
Is carbon dioxide a harmful air pollutant, or is it an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer? Explore the positive side of the issue in two half-hour documentaries -- The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues - yours free today with a qualifying tax deductible donation of $20 plus shipping and handling. DVD burned in -R format, original release dates of 1992 and 1998.

Gee, is CO2 an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer? Instead I think I'll send $20 to the Edwards campaign link. Today is a good day to try.

The moment has come and gone for the Edwards campaign (John, Elizabeth, David Medina (PD), David Bonior (NCM), Joe Trippi, ...) to use a Nevada venue to make a distinguishing statement on Yucca Mountain. Oh well, perhaps they have considered and discarded the issue on its political merits.

The Reno Gazette-Journal ran a poll of likely voters (which isn't at all the same thing as likely presidential preference caucus participants, and as Nevada has never had an "early contest" primary, that difference is wicked significant, see MB's piece on the eve of Iowa on our experience in Maine and Iowa caucuses) eight weeks ago.

21% of the registered dems in the sample used the "very important" answer to the does Yucca Mountain determine your presidential preference.

That's more than the 15% needed simply to accumulate delegates. A candidate could drool on three cylinders, as Ron Paul does on the RNC side of the early contests, yet make the delegate accumulation threshold firing on only one cylinder, in Ron Paul's case, the Bi-Partisan Wars of 2003-2009. The Edwards campaign is easily firing on three out of four cylinders, its just missing fire on this, the fourth, which is the deciding issue for a fifth of all voting dems, and could, if used effectively, have disproportionate effect on Nevada's first early contest presidential preference caucus.

53% of the registered dems in the sample used the "important" answer to the does Yucca Mountain determine your presidential preference.

That's a lot more dems who will have to decide if their "most important" issue, perhaps something to do with symbolisms external to Nevada, really does trump Nevada's being used, since November, 1951, as the place where Washington carelessly scatters its atomic trash.

42% of the registered dems in the sample used the "strongly oppose" answer to the Yucca Mountain question.

40% of the registered dems in the sample used the "oppose" answer to the Yucca Mountain question.

The earned delegate count this far is 25 Obama, 24 Clinton, 18 Edwards, and at least one national polling firm announced it is dropping Edwards from the candidates listed questions.

Given a choice between a base of 21%, more if executed correctly, which should have been part of the Nevada field plan, plus anything in the three-way competition for "important" issues, and rasing $7,000,000, I'd go for base-plus.

When this is all over, I'd like to know why they passed on this one. I mailed Political Fiction with a "for Nevada" headnote to Trippi on the 15th, just in case they didn't have an Auntie Nukes message and plan at hand. Of course, who reads email?

On the bright (and glowing side), this issue will be around in the next cycle, and the cycle after that, and the cycle after that, and the cycle after that, and ...

Tomorrow is raise-the-bat-day for the Edwards campaign. We've given and if you're also so inclined, here's the link.

We're using cricket as the theme, as the MSM is covering the Edwards campaign like it covers the major cricket matches, which is to say, not very well.

If you have a favorite cricket image, stuff the URL in comments. If its not a bug, I may run it tomorrow. If it is a bug, I'll see if I can get one of Gracie's lizards to eat it. We go through a lot of crickets in a week.

Le Monde has this: Pour les Européens, la sécession de la Flandre reste de la politique-fiction

So what are the political fictions on this side of the pond?

How about Yucca Mountain? Its a wicked big issue in Clark County (Las Vegas), where most of the votes are, and sure everyone's nominally against the DOE's Repository, just how deeply this position is held by each candidate is a variable only those with Rad-Radar can be certain of.

Yucca isn't about commercial waste, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's rods in pools at the former site of Maine Yankee, at Vermont Yankee, at ... and of course the operating company for each commercial reactor will eventually have to build more storage pool if Yucca isn't built ... so stopping Yucca is how we stop commercial nuclear power, right? right??

No.

Kerry got it right in the last cycle. The stockpiles of fissiles -- weaponized and mated with delivery vehicles, weaponized and not yet mated with a delivery vehicle, and fissiles not yet weaponized, they are the greatest threat to the United States -- whether they are under the custody of the United States or the Russian Federation. Rust observes princes and their pretenses not a wit, and rust will not reason.

Yucca Mountain is about either pretending there is nothing wrong, that death comes not for thee and thee and we, and happy, confident nuclear engineers can power a two car garage indefinitely into a future where no one ever has to duck and cover, or closing down the grand madness of The Cold War, and taking with it the latent threat of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium remaining in economic circulation, rather than being vitrified and down-blended, respectively, until stone cold dead.

John has the opportunity to give the speech John Kerry should have four years ago, when Bush and Nunn and Turner went for the "lone nuke" thesis -- Saddam's mushroom, putting appearances where needed (for the American psyche) in Baghdad, Tehran, and where ever the young turk of the moment at Homeland Security wants some tarting up and is willing to reach for the gold.

John has the rare chance to give the speech that Helen Caldicot would sit still for and attend on every word, every nuance. The speech that would make it plain that we'd get under a thousand in his first term, and into the low hundreds in his second. The speech that would make plain that deterrence, even massive deterrence, does not need weapons, it needs only ... the ability to fabricate weapons, mate them to delivery systems, and retaliate. A speech that North America is a submarine, it is the survivable element of the triad, and therefore that no weapons are necessary to deter. Any who strike, will eventually be counter-struck, and that certainty, not any present weapon, let alone two vast heaps of aging weapons and one decaying command and control system, is sufficient to ensure the peace. A speech that we're safer without weapons, not because of the Soviets, but simply because of rust, and the things men and women do in fear and panic.

Nevada isn't about the Strip. It isn't about the Clark County housing market out-plunging the San Diego County housing market. Nevada is about the test site and all of its sequela. The long tail, that runs from lung cancer clusters in uranium miners in Dinétah to the down-winders in Saint George, all the way through the pit facilities in the weapons labs to the cheery nuclear nutmen who promise cheap, unlimited electrical power and carefully managed waste.

Nevada's a pretty sane place, the Strip and the overwrought newcomers who fill I-15 each weekend excepted. This evening Jonah asked me for a fire, so I burned some of the wood we picked up in Panaca.

The smell of ceder smoke has heightened my memory of place.

We read that Edwards' message doesn't resonate, and of course, it doesn't -- things aren't bad enough, the social distance between the people who live "in need" or "at risk" and those who don't, remains an unbridgeable chasm, and of course, the MSM "resonates" a very select range of messages.

AT&T terminated access lines to almost half a million residences in July, August and September. The trend for October, November and December is more terminations, not less. AT&T is not (yet) disclosing how many $50/mo price-point (aka "broad band") connections are in default each month, or in effect converting to $5/mo price point (aka "dial-up") connections.

The man who parks his car in front of the playground every day at 9am, and sits there, all day, and at 5pm moves his car to site #19, who hasn't been voted for years, won't be voted in the current cycle, because the Democratic Party doesn't vote his kind of people. Assisted housing wasn't voted by Portland Dems, and mobile home parks, public travel trailer and private "RV parks" aren't voted, and for sure the Dems don't vote work camps. Not worker camps -- that a UFW problem. Not the camps, because poverty -- clapped out cars and clapped out campers and clapped out trucks pulling clapped out trailers, all firing on three out of four cylinders on moving day, all having to pack up and move every 7 or 14 days, even if one day "out" before another 7 or 14 days "in" ... not to mention the tens of thousands of full-time or snow-bird retired couples and singles who manage to get their RVs or trailers to BLM "extended stay" no-pay camps in the desert each winter...

The color line is still intact, and it will remain so until there is no social chasm between those who shop at the thrift shops, the donation outlets, and eventually the food pantries, and those who's politics is limited to friends-don't-let-frineds-shop-WalMart, which is miles away from "don't let friends go broke and cry in unrelieved dispair". This line hasn't been broken in my lifetime, it was in my parent's lifetime. My mom's 80. She spent her teens in a travel trailer between Philly and LA, and in her time, both townies and campies voted, not just the more fortunate townies.

Nader's critique is that both parties are corporatist. Ours is too well off to truck with the poor.

Kevin's a janitor. Susie is working poor. We live in camps and have been on relief and off. Not many of us who blog write about poverty from experience.

I'll call and ask what they think of endorsing a candidate who has done nothing for them (Obama) over a candidate who has done more than something (Edwards), and who may have been a fool to have bothered.

They begged me to blog about them, and to ensure that ICANN didn't ignore them and ... if they'd have told me they'd go to bed with rightie on the first date, I'd have told them to go ahead ... without me.

On second thought, if the stewards I spoke with on the picket line on October 31st don't have what I consider to be the correct answer on January 11th, I'll encourage ICANN to schedule its next LA meeting at the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport, and Local 11 can play with tamborines, signs, bullhorns and 10 word chants until gravitational polarity is reversed. Or they can tell UH to take a hike.

This just dropped into my mailbox. It is about as #@$%! dumb as I ever hope to see.

3. In answer to your questions about why I didn't support former Senator John Edwards on the second ballot in Iowa: I have serious concerns about his connections to a Wall Street hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. While attacking others for accepting campaign money from Washington lobbyists, he is up to his ears in money from Wall Street special interests.

He made half a million dollars in a single year for attending a few meetings for Fortress and has invested a substantial part of his own personal wealth in the hedge fund whose portfolios are responsible for sub-prime predatory lending practices, Medicare privatization, and an entire range of corporate sharp dealings that are driving the middle class into poverty.

I sent the following back to info@kucinich.us:

I want you to know that I'm not satisfied with this statement.

First, there is the choice between uncommitted and other-committed for caucus attendees who chose to stand for Dennis during the first division, and who failed to obtain 15% in that caucus. It can't be a surprise to this cycle's staff that the 15% threshold would be achieved in very few of Iowa's nearly 2,000 caucuses, and so the 2nd choice plan has to have been thought through, and "uncommitted" evaluated and rejected for "other-committed", independent of determining the best "other" to instruct KuDem caucus leaders.

It appears that Dennis, and/or the campaign PD, and/or the Iowa CM, just grasped at a straw hours before the doors closed and the actual caucus contests began.

Second, Dennis has had the better part of a year to figure out how to advise his delegates, at the Convention next August, at the State Conventions over the next several months, and on the caucus floor on January whenever (now the 3rd and 19th), how to move for best effect when their pledge to Dennis is vacated, either by the respective processes of the events I just mentioned, or by Dennis himself. This is a core policy issue for the Campaign, just like the last cycle. There is no way we're going to accumulate enough delegates to win, let alone determine the winner in a brokered convention, and in most places (unlike Maine), even pick up state-level delegates. We shouldn't even be doing this if we don't know how we're going to lose to best effect.

It appears that Dennis, and/or the campaign PD, or who ever wrote this unfortunate piece of trash, was unaware that no later than August, if not a lot sooner, a delegates-to-other message would be needed, and therefore a to-other evaluation made.

Further, this isn't a Dennis-and-Dog-in-a-confessional issue, this is the presidential preference of thousands of progressives, in Iowa, Nevada, Washington, Maine, and the rest of the caucus contests, and at each following state party convention, where the presence and coherence of KuDems has a disproportionate consequence in the drafting of each state's Party Platform. In '04 we got important stuff into the MDP's platform, something we couldn't have done if we hadn't worked with a plan, if we just had a mercurial and remote candidate.

Finally, I personally don't share Dennis' evaluation of John Edwards' choices -- perhaps because of my spouse, but probably not.

What can the Campaign senior staff do, what can the candidate do, to correct the error made the afternoon of the 3rd?

Nevada is the next contest where the to-other moment is on calendar in the second round of a caucus. It is January 19th. You all have 10 days to recover the trust and the confidence of your Nevada caucus supporters, and your later caucus supporters and those who support the campaign and don't live in caucus states. Either make your case that John Edwards is the poorer choice for progressive policy and Democratic Party primary politics, or recant. What you've got so far is cum hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense that makes Dennis look like an idiot. I advise recanting. I advise recanting and doing so in a way that shows that Dennis listened to his supporters and considered the near-term and long-term policy and political issues and came to a better conclusion than the error of January 3rd.

My spouse and I organized the largest metro area caucus in Northern New England. We know how important it is to work correctly in real time during the stand-and-divide process, to barter with other sub-15's and identify undecideds who would stand with us if they got to be delegates or alternates to the subsequent County or State conventions, and we know that there is no tactical advantage for candidates like Dennis not to make the strategy of their alternate choice known generally in advance, though not necessarily the edge conditions where the proper tactical choices can affect the outcome of an individual caucus room. So I'm not advising utter bottomless transparency. I'm advising we don't experience profound surprise and dismay when an operational moment occurs in our campaigns -- as your supporters live with being KuDems and caucus-working and convention-working progressive Democratic Party activists long after Dennis goes back to commuting between Cleveland between Washington.

In solidarity, and in principled difference on the policy and politics of the "to-other" pledge issue,
Eric