CNN is reporting that a source close to Al Gore says that Gore would be interested in running for president, but that he believes that Hillary Clinton's machine is unstoppable at this point.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source involved in Gore's past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.
But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.
However, our sources over at Magic 8-Ball Telepathic Photography and Overnight Express, Ltd. (motto: We know where your package is going before you do) inform us that Al has different plans:
Michelle Malkin attempts - again - to address the real issue of the SCHIP expansion. So does Mark Steyn, so does Deacon at Powerline. So do Sister Toldjah, Wake up America, Flopping Aces, Wizbang, Clayton Cramer, Riehl World View and now me. The real question is how do you draw any lines these days? Nancy Pelosi called a family with something between $400,000 and $500,000 in real assets "the working poor". That reframes the discussion into bizarro-world. (And frankly, if I were one of the less well off people who own considerably less than that family, I would be livid that the system covers people like that - with no real cost to them.)
It is almost impossible to have a discussion on anything in a meaningful way any more. When the terms are being distorted this much, when words no longer have fixed meanings but vary in accordance with situations - and with who is defining them - it has reached an absurd place.
Last week I posted about the upcoming publication of a book that exonerates the Knights Templar order of heresy. The book has now been published and the Associate Press included a handy link to the Vatican's Secret Archive website. (Ed Note: How secret can they be is they have a website?) They have a page up about the Parchment of Chinon (the document recently rediscovered).
The document contains the absolution Pope Clement V gave to the Grand Master of the Temple, friar Jacques de Molay and to the other heads of the Order, after they had shown to be repented and asked to be forgiven by the Church; after the formal abjuration, which is compelling for all those who were even only suspected of heretical crimes, the leading members of the Templar Order are reinstated in the Catholic Communion and readmitted to receive the sacraments. The document, which belongs to the first phase of the trial against the Templars, when Pope Clement V was still convinced to be able to guarantee the survival of the military-religious order, meets the apostolic need to remove the shame of excommunication from the warrior friars, caused by their previous denial of Jesus Christ when tortured by the French Inquisitor.
It's a little more complicated than just a straight finding of innocence - there was a lot of political manuvuering going on between the Pope King Philip of France over what was to be done. The King eventually blackmailed Clement into essentially hiding the finding of innocence (of heresy at any rate) of the Knights.
As several contemporary sources confirm, the pope ascertained that Templars were involved in some serious forms of immorality and he planned a radical reform of the order to subsequently merge it into one body with the other important military-religious order of the Hospitallers. The Act of Chinon, which absolves the Templars, but does not discharge them, was the assumption required to carry out the reform, but it remained dead letter. The French monarchy reacted by triggering a true blackmail mechanism, which then urged Clement V to reach the ambiguous compromise ratified during the Council of Vienne in 1312: unable to oppose himself to the will of the King of France, Phillip the Fair, who imposed the elimination of the Templars, the pope removed the order from the reality of that period, without condemning or abolishing it, but isolating it in a sort of “hibernation”, thanks to a clever device of the canon law. After explicitly declaring that the trial did not prove the charge of heresy, Clement V suspended the Templar Order by means of a non definitive sentence, imposed by the necessity to avoid a serious danger to the Church that banned them, under penalty of excommunication, to use such name or their distinctive symbols.
Don't forget, Clement V was to be given a special place of honor in Dante's eighth circle of hell. (When Dante wrote The Inferno, Clement was already dead, but the journey Dante recounts in his masterpiece was supposed to have occurred several years before Clement's death.)
After weeks of deliberations, debate, chit chat and general foot-dragging the United Nations finally delivered a stinging rebuke to the military junta that rules Burma with a bloody iron fist. The UN told the leaders of the country that they were somewhat miffed at the junta and might not bring chocolate chip cookies to the next trade seminar. The military junta looked up from questioning dissidents to death long enough to express regret that the UN had distracted them. Then they refocused and continued the interrogations.
YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar's military junta said Friday that it "regrets" a UN Security Council statement rebuking the regime over its violent crackdown on peaceful protests, but vowed to cooperate with the world body.
In its first reaction to the UN statement, whose signatories included close ally China, the government also said it would press ahead with its own "road map" to democratic reform.
But it made no acknowledgement of the UN call for the release of political prisoners nor for the regime to engage in dialogue with detained pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
"Myanmar regrets that the statement by the chairman of the UN Security Council was announced on October 11, although the situation in the Union of Myanmar did not harm regional or international peace and security," state television reported.
"Maintaining good relations with countries in the region and around the world, as well as offering all cooperation with the United Nations, is the foreign policy of the Union of Myanmar," it added.
The junta will retaliate by only using the second best china at the next seminar which will cause great distress among UN representatives who are unused to such plebeian treatment.
That's easy. Because everyone else was. Scotland decided to hold their own festival to rival Pamplona's Running of the Bulls. Somehow, though, the Running of the Chickens just does not have quite the same ring to it.
Why did 3000 chickens cross the road? Because the lorry they were in crashed on one of Scotland's busiest motorways, that's why.
Thousands of runaway chickens brought traffic to a standstill after a transporter lorry crashed on a busy road near Glasgow.
The A80 heading towards Glasgow was shut for more than eight hours as the birds were rounded up by a specialist team drafted in by police.
The lorry carrying 3,000 live chickens jack-knifed near Castlecary at around 4.30am causing feathery mayhem for motorists travelling south and north.
The southbound carriageway was shut throughout the rush-hour, causing major tailbacks, with the M80 and M876 approach roads also closed.
The third photo at the link is absolutely hysterical. But the caption is all wrong. It should read: "You! Yes, you! behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!"
Lorie Byrd has a Townhall column up that gives a clear primer on how to lose elections. Read it and see if any of it sounds familiar.
1. Instead of taking positive action and doing the hard work necessary to elect strong conservative candidates in the primaries, whine about how the Republicans aren’t any better than the Democrats. It is sure as heck a lot easier to whine than to make phone calls, stuff envelopes and knock on doors for conservative candidates.
2. After a primary candidate is chosen (without any help from you), forget about how many more positions on issues you and the GOP candidate share, and forget how far left their Democratic opponent is, and instead work against the Republican in the general election (or withhold support from them) to “send a message.”
3. Instead of disagreeing in a civil manner over various issues with those in the party, get emotional and accuse those on your side of being mean doodyheads. (If anyone doubts this is going on, I will gladly share evidence of it with you, but will admit that generally a word worse than “doodyhead” is employed.)
4. Bask in the misery of another loss and instead of working to get conservative Republicans elected in 2010, try to pull as many others as possible into your negative state of being.
Number three is one that is really easy to fall into, BTW. Go over and read it all, though. Lorie makes a lot of sense. The media is holding early coronations for certeain familiar Democrats and publishing obituaries for the Republicans in an effort to cast a pall of inevitablity over 2008. Do you really want to do what the media is cheering for? Or would you rather fight?
Stories like this just plain infuriate me. Authorities were forced to kill a bear and her two cubs in Douglas County, Nevada because the bears repeatedly tore doors off houses to break in and steal food. They had been encouraged to do so by "Animal Lovers" who had been feeding the bears.
A mother bear and her two nine-month-old cubs were euthanized Tuesday, after breaking into several Douglas County homes.
The trio, who had been fed by Pine View residents, had graduated to tearing off front doors and breaking into garages, said Carl Lackey of the Nevada Department of Wildlife.
"They were a double safety threat at that point," he said. "A fed bear is a dead bear. They were pretty habituated."
Normally, the cubs are rehabilitated but these two were breaking into homes on their own. The mother bear was first caught in 2000, when she was raiding trash cans. She was given aversion training and released and hadn't been seen again until this year, Lackey said.
"We've been after her since June," he said.
Of the 80 bears caught in traps in the area, which includes, Reno, Carson Valley and Lake Tahoe, just eight have been euthanized. Two other bears raiding the River Pines residential area were caught, given aversion training and released this week, Lackey said.
The disneyfication of wildlife is taking an increasing toll on animals. People who insist of feeding wildlife out of some sort of misguided "love" for the animals should be penalized for that behavior. They are the ones who are ultimately at fault when things like this happen.
The New York Times has a report on exactly how difficult a time the Democrats are having with their increasingly unrealistic - and increasingly unpleasant - activist left wing. After all, when Barney Frank isn't gay enough to suit them, even conservative Republicans are floored by the message being sent.
Sometimes, though, the in-fighting can seem unreal, as with the recent fury directed by gay groups at Mr. Frank.
“Barney Frank is not gay enough?” asked Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, one of the most conservative members of the House .
Even Mr. Frank acknowledged the weirdness. “The likelihood that somebody is going to run against me in my district on the grounds that I have been insufficiently pro-gay is not very high on my list of concerns,” he said.
He has put gender identity protections in a separate bill that is not expected to be acted upon this year.
But many gay rights groups said they were truly angry and bewildered, especially because the compromise involves a bill unlikely to be signed by Mr. Bush. A coalition of some 280 groups sent Mr. Frank a letter urging him to include gender identity in the bill to be voted on soon. “What we are talking about is stripping out a part of our community for a symbolic vote, which in our opinion does not advance the struggle for civil rights for our people,” said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
“If the goal here is for the new majority to demonstrate that it is responding to a core constituency,” Mr. Foreman said, “passing a non-inclusive bill is not going to accomplish that.”
Some Republicans in the House have said they wished Mr. Frank had included the language on transgender and transsexual people because it would have made it easier for them to vote against the bill.
Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are being picketed in their homes (actually, the neighbors of the politicians bear the brunt of those protests). Any drift from what the left believes is the one true path of righteousness (as they define it) is punished swiftly and stridently by a battalion of frothing extremists. With friends like these…….
In a letter published in the Los Angeles Times, Representative Jane Harmon addresses her reasons for asking the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee to please withdraw the Armenian Genocide bill - despite her being a co-sponsor of the bill. Her reason: this is simply the wrong time to do this.
As one whose own family was decimated by the Holocaust, I respond very personally to charges that I would deny the existence of savage acts of inhumanity against a group of people because of ethnic, religious or racial differences — be they Jews, Darfurians, Rwandans or Armenians.
Yet that's exactly what I was accused of last week after I sent a letter to Rep. Tom Lantos, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urging him to withdrawHR 106, which I had co-sponsored earlier in the year. Some Armenian Americans, whose passion I appreciate, have misinterpreted my determination that the time is not right to vote on such a resolution as "denial" of the Armenian genocide. Nothing could be further from the truth.
No question: The debate raging in Washington over the Armenian genocide resolution is personal. Similar resolutions have passed the House twice — in 1975 and 1984 — and we are poised to pass another before Thanksgiving. Whether it will be brought to a vote in the Senate remains unclear.
I originally co-sponsored the resolution because I was convinced that the terrible crime against the Armenian people should be recognized and condemned. But after a visit in February to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Armenian Orthodox patriarch and colleagues of murdered Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I became convinced that passing this resolution again at this time would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.
Harmon actually has some suggestions for constructive pressures that could be brought onto Turkey instead of the destructive pressure of finger-pointing. Instead of pushing for the adoption of a word, why not ask Turkey to start reconciling with its own large Armenian population? Why not encourage Turkey to normalize relations with Armenia? Why not do something to help rather than hurt global relations?
I guess that would be too hard. Making a gesture is easier. (Oh, and won't this endear Harmon even more to the nutroots.)
Damian Thompson in today's Telegraph discusses Al Gore's Nobel win. As he points out, it will just be one more thing to swell the head of a habitual braggart and serial exaggerator. It will be an opportunity for Gore to exponentially increase his already gargantuan carbon footprint. Thompson enumerates some of his favorite Gorexaggerations.
He never claimed to have invented the internet; he said he "took the initiative in creating the internet", which is about a quarter true - he was among the first congressmen to support the invention.
In 1999, he boasted about having uncovered the most famous toxic waste site in America ("I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal"). Yes, but Love Canal was already notorious by the time Gore "found" it.
That's typical of his arrogance, says the non-partisan US politics website Skeleton Closet: "When he says the words 'little place', you can feel him struggling to contain his pleasure with his good deeds."
Gore struggles with his memory, too. "I certainly learnt a lot from 3,000 town hall meetings across …Tennessee over a 16-year period," he told National Public Radio. And so he would have, had he actually attended 187 town hall meetings a year, which is what it works out as: he might even have managed to hold his home state in 2000.
But my favourite Gore memory lapse is his account of being sung to sleep with the lullaby Look for the Union Label, written in 1975. How sweet: being sung to sleep by your parents at the age of 27.
Then there's his evasiveness on the subject of alleged ethical violations. He resorts to "legalisms", says Skeleton Closet: although he might technically be in the right, "he has such a tin ear for the way normal people talk that he sounds like a mafia don".
Read it all, it's pretty brutal.
Al Gore shares the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But it's not about the politics:
Peace Prize committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said a possible Gore presidential run was not his concern.
"I want this prize to have everyone … every human being, asking what they should do," Mjoes said. "What he (Gore) decides to do from here is his personal decision."
Mjoes reiterated repeatedly that the prize was not aimed at singling out the Bush administration and its position on global warming.
"A peace prize is never a criticism of anything. A peace prize is a positive message and support to all those champions of peace in the world."
The last American to win the prize or share it was former President Carter in 2002.
Want to bet Hillary Clinton is worried right now? Gore continues to say - not all that firmly - that he has no intentions of running for president. But he has been known to change his mind about things, hasn't he? And now he's on a mission:
"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level," Gore said in a statement e-mailed by his office 44 minutes after the prize was announced at 5 a.m. Eastern time.
Yeah, a lot of people have been saying it resembled a cult more than a scientific discipline. Oh well, he did it.
Foto Phun, Politics | Gaius Friday, 12 October , 2007 | 
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