Al Gore comes out in favor of gay marriage

Obama attacking Gore and Kerry?

It looks like Obama took an indirect swipe at both Al Gore and John Kerry. Obama supporters on DailyKos claimed it must have been a bogus quote from Hillary supporter Taylor Marsh. Except... ABC News then confirmed it too.

On Monday Obama suggested that Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore were divisive.

In an argument about his electability, Obama compared himself favorably with Sen. Hillary Clinton who is viewed negatively by nearly half the country. Obama is viewed far more favorably by independents and Republicans.

Then he said, per ABC News' Sunlen Miller, "I don't want to go into the next election starting off with half the country already not wanting to vote for Democrats. We've done that in 2004 and 2000. 47 percent of the country on one side, 47 percent of the country on the other . . . We don't need another one of those elections."

OK, there are so many ways in which what Obama said is simply demonstrably false. Digby destroys the Republican talking point that Al Gore was "too divisive" in 2000. His favorability ratings in 2000 were well over 50%. And the excuses that he didn't specifically mention Gore or Kerry by name?? C'mon people, who do you think was running at the top of our ticket in those two years? Was the "next election" he was talking about the state board of equalization race or something? It's pretty damn obvious he was making indirect swipes at Gore and Kerry.

And if he really wants to talk about "electability" based on favorability ratings, Big Tent Democrat points out that Obama would actually making the case... for John Edwards. Check out the latest favorability ratings via Rasmussen:

                Fav Unfav
Hillary Clinton  48   50
Barack Obama     43   51
John Edwards     49   42

And Molly Ivors minces no words at what the Obama campaign is doing.

Let me state the obvious: Dude, the people you are trying to appeal to are never going to vote for you. Despite what David Broder says, there's not really some mushy middle waiting to be addressed by you. If acting more like Republicans were really the key to victories, then why is Harry Reid not King of the Fucking Universe?

I'll tell you why: because it's a bullshit argument. People know that we're in a heap of trouble in this country. The planet is melting and our jobs are evaporating and we're in a stupid fucking war breaking young men we aren't bothering to help fix. It sucks. And sucking up to and adopting the framing of the people who brought us global warming and rewarded outsourcing and lied us into war and smeared vets who dare to speak out is pretty fucking useless, and no way to actually address any of these problems.

So, because of comments like this and other ones in recent days, even Markos is backing away from his previous decision to vote for Obama.

Not being blinded by candidate worship, it's easier to sniff out the bullshit. And you have to have your head stuck deep in the sand to deny that Obama is trying to close the deal by running to the Right of his opponents. And call me crazy, but that's not a trait I generally appreciate in Democrats, no matter how much it might set the punditocracy's hearts a flutter.

One of the things the Bush/Cheney team discovered after 2000 was that the "center" didn't really exist in this country anymore. It's mythical, propagated by the Beltway pundits who orgasm when they hear the word "compromise". People are either on one side or the other. Those who really aren't sure, are those that never bother to vote anyway. They're probably part of that 31% of Americans who don't even know Dick Cheney is the Vice President.

That's why they dropped the "compassionate conservative" pretense in 2004 and ran to the hard right, courting their base. Turn out the base and win, because that "center" no longer existed. Democrats who try to court that mythical center will generally lose. So please, Mr. Obama, drop the right-wing talking points and talk like a true progressive.

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize!

Not a huge surprise, but this morning, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the IPCC for their work on climate change and spreading awareness of it to the world.

The Rude Pundit has a good post on the impact of this.

When the books are written, in the long-term histories of this and other countries, Al Gore will be cherished and George Bush will be crushed like so much real manure on a fake ranch. Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize does in Bush's seeming obsession with his legacy. And that's due in no small part to the smallness of Bush's thinking compared to the expansiveness of Gore's.

....

Back in 2000, because we didn't riot in the streets and shut down the country in the wake of the presidential election debacle, the nation essentially abandoned Al Gore. And while Al Gore didn't totally abandon the nation, he turned his focus to the effort to demonstrate that real leadership need not emanate from the false mandate of a corrupted electoral process. In his crusade for action on climate change, Gore not only remade himself, but he remade the way in which people think about the world at large. Here was not just a cause confined to a specific continent (like African hunger) or a fight against a tyrant like Hitler to catalyze large portions of the population. Here was a way of thinking of the Earth as a whole, a way of seeing the interdependence of each country, of each population, and Gore has shifted a generation's view of itself as part of something larger.

The great failure of the United States to lead on this issue, to be the place where we create solutions that benefit the globe, keep economies humming, and raise humanity up in a way that might, truly, do more for peace than all the pre-emptive wars ever, rests squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush and his administration.

It's the difference between a man who traveled and studied the world by choice in his life and a man who has to be dragged to different countries like a particularly incontinent dog is dragged out to the sidewalk on a snowy day.

Gore's not gonna run. Give that up. To go from speaking out about melting icecaps to being asked what he thinks about, say, a flag-burning amendment would be a degradation of what he's worked for the last six years. And had that statewide recount in Florida happened and Gore had become president, Republicans would have simply worked night and day trying to destroy him, and his causes would have been washed away in a tide of worthless investigations of Buddhist monk phone calls and worse. And let's not even get into how Republicans would have exploded in berserk, ape-like rage over 9/11 if it had happened under a Gore presidency.

It's not that we're not worthy or that he's too good for us or any of that hyperbolic nonsense. We got the president we deserved, twice, and we realized too late that we didn't get the president we needed. As with so many things, our own temptation to that latent American selfishness has done us in.

But for you Gore 2008 supporters who are still holding out hope, here is why all the pundits are wrong about Gore not running for President. And already, Fox News and right-wing bloggers are attacking Al Gore for winning the prize.

And oh, what could have been....

Al Gore: Defending the Constitution

In an amazing January 2006 speech to the American Constitution Society, Al Gore gave a passionate defense of the Constitution, and railed against the Bush administration abuses on domestic spying. Keep in mind this was before a lot of the really dirty stuff even came out, with a complicit GOP Congress unwilling to do any oversight of the executive branch. For anyone who thinks Gore would be a single-issue candidate on the environment, should he choose to run, this video is a must-see.

Yes, it is an hour and five minutes long. It's well worth it.

Is there a Parallel Between Gore 2000 and Edwards 2008?

Vanity Fair's Evegina Peretz penned a great analysis of how the media contributed to the downfall of Gore's 2000 presidential run. She ultimately arrives to an interesting question: will the media manage to knockoff John Edwards' primary campaign in the same way that they managed to knockoff Gore's 2000 campaign?

Al Gore's electricity bill heats up blogosphere

The Vice President's yearly average power consumption came to 221,000-kWh. That's nearly $1,400/month.

The article states that this is about 20 times the amount of power the average American uses. Bear in mind, he has a 20 room house too. I hate it when people (you know who I'm talking about) try to make a whole bunch of something out of a whole bunch of nothing.