Al Gore quotations

Dear Wayne

On the House floor last Friday, I introduced the Americans Making Power (AMP) Act, which would establish national standards for "net metering."

Setting national net metering standards will simplify consumer interconnection to the electric grid, which, over time, will bring down costs to consumers, increase private investment in renewable and alternative energy sources, and continue to diversify energy resources in the U.S. These pieces are all critical for American energy independence.

With the AMP Act, our clean energy revolution can start right at home. Small businesses, residences, schools, farms, churches -- any entity that generates electric energy could help build a clean energy economy and save money at the same time.

Right now, forty-three states, including Washington, have statewide net metering programs, each of varying quality and with separate standards. The AMP Act would create national baseline standards, but also allow enough flexibility for states to create more aggressive standards if they so choose.

I worked with a broad range of stakeholders to draft the language for the AMP Act. After much back and forth between all interested parties about the bill details, we ended up in a location where there was widespread agreement on the language. As a result, Puget Sound Energy has pledged their support for this legislation. This marks the first time a utility company has shown direct support for a national net metering policy.

For more information on net metering, please check out these resources:

Net Metering Fact Sheet

Best and Worst of State Net Metering Policies

Map of State Net Metering Policies

http://www.jayinslee.com/index.php

Reuters) - Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have decided to separate after 40 years of marriage, they announced on Tuesday.

U.S. | Politics | Green Business

The Gores, in an e-mail message confirmed by their office, said the decision was made "after a great deal of thought and discussion."

"This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration," they said. "We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further."

Al Gore, a Democrat, who was Bill Clinton's vice president for eight years, narrowly lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work against global climate change.

During the Democratic National Convention in 2000, the Gores exchanged a long, passionate kiss on stage that became famous

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6504LH20100601?type=domesticNews

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore?page=0,0

The Crisis Comes Ashore
Why the oil spill could change everything.

*
Al Gore

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”

However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes—directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.

And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.

The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.

I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan—and even last week’s attempted bombing in Times Square—to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.

Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial. Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as “mountaintop mining,” for instance, is not only defacing the landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.

The direct consequences of burning these vast and ever-growing amounts of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the atmosphere worldwide and the increased acidity of the oceans. (Although the world has yet to focus on ocean acidification, the problem is terrifying. Thirty million of the 90 million tons of CO2 being spilled each day end up in the oceans as carbonic acid, changing the pH level by more than at any time in the last many millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life in the ocean that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of osteoporosis—interfering with their ability to transform calcium carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life depends—that threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton at the base of the ocean food chain.)

(Click here to read Al Gore's "Antarctica Postcard" from December 26, 1988.)

http://blog.algore.com/2010/05/tennessee_flood_victims_need_y.html

Tennessee Flood Victims Need Your Help May 6, 2010 : 1:48 PM

With waters finally receding, those affected by the floods in Tennessee need your help now to begin repairing and rebuilding their lives. Thousands have seen their homes and businesses flooded. According to Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, "I think it’s safe to say that the damage we’re looking at will easily exceed $1 billion."

Thousands in the Nashville area need your help. The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has two funds you can support to directly help those affected by the floods:

Flood Relief - Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund

"In partnership with Davidson County's Office of Emergency Management, The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has activated its Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund to help to those affected by the May 1, 2010 floods. Donations of any size are welcome. Grants from the fund will support relief and restoration in the Davidson County area."

Give to Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund

Flood Relief - Tennessee Emergency Response Fund

"The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee responds in times of disaster to connect generosity with need and has activated the Tennessee Emergency Response Fund to support relief efforts throughout Middle Tennessee necessitated by the May 1, 2010 floods. Donations of any size are welcome. Grants from the fund will support relief and restoration in areas of Middle Tennessee affected by the floods."

Give to Tennessee Emergency Response Fund

http://blog.algore.com/2010/05/tennessee_flood_victims_need_y.html

Bill Clinton and Al Gore speak about health care

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/31/al-gore-urges-activists-t_n_273...

I'll be back in about ten days. Carry on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html?pagewanted=1

Op-Ed Contributor
We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

By AL GORE
Published: February 27, 2010

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.

Here's an interesting site.

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/

Dear Wayne,

The earthquake in Haiti has been catastrophic. More than three million people have been affected, and estimates are that over 50,000 have died. The human suffering is unimaginable.

That's why I'd like to pause from our usual conversation and ask for your help.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 85% of Haitians already living in desperate poverty. Now, with hospitals in ruin, dire shortages of even basic necessities like fresh water, and no way to find out whether family members are alive, the Haitian people urgently need our help.

A number of organizations are already engaged in critical relief efforts, and I urge you to support as many of them as you can. One of them, Oxfam America, has an emergency response team of more than 200 people already on the ground. The need for clean water and critical public health services is massive and immediate -- and our donations can help save lives.

Make a donation to Oxfam's earthquake relief effort in Haiti:

http://acp.climateprotect.org/oxfam

Or, for a list of other organizations to donate to and ways to make a difference, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/haitiearthquake_embed.

There are moments when we, as human beings, must come together as a global community and as stewards of each others' health and welfare. It is that sense of interconnectedness that brought each of us to the climate movement, and it is moments like this that bring out the best in us -- as individuals, as a nation, and as a movement.

Let's make sure the people of Haiti do not face this disaster alone. Thank you for taking action in the face of this tragedy.

Al Gore
Chairman
Alliance for Climate Protection

Al Gore in Copenhagen December 15th 2009

http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm206/WayneinWAState/daisy-girlLBJ.jp...

http://repoweramerica.org/wall/#/view/44235

The Goracle -- Al Gore, the Internet and the Future of American Politics
Jose Antonio Vargas
Technology and Innovations editor, Huffington Post

The advent of global warming, the dangers of declaring war on Iraq, the power and reach of the Internet. Is there another American political figure who's been so right, so prescient, about so many things -- and, in turn, so loathed by a consistent vocal opposition?

No, there's only one "Goracle."

All eyes will be on Al Gore this week, as he attends the last days of the U.N.-sponsored climate change summit in Copenhagen. In recent years, it's been impossible to divorce Gore from the environment, what with the Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize and the release of another book called Our Choice. "President of the planet," he's been hailed. "Alarmist" and "exaggerator," he's been mocked. But just as lasting and undeniable as his imprint in modern environmental history is Gore's early and sustained prophecy -- there's no other word for it -- for the inevitable impact of the Internet in our everyday lives. Starting with his years in the House of the Representatives and the Senate ("the Gore Bill" being just one of his achievements), and throughout his service in the Clinton administration (in developing what he called an "information superhighway"), the global warming crusader was also the government's biggest Internet advocate. Gore never said he created the Internet, though Vint Cerf, aka the "father of Internet," has said that Gore's "initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet." Cerf added: "So he really does deserve credit."

These days, his two long-time interests are crossing paths. The man (Gore) and the message (our climate crisis) has finally met the medium (the Web) that can effectively help spread the word around, from one social network to another. To hear skeptics such as former vice president candidate Sarah Palin tell it, the global warming debate is far from over. To Gore, however, there is no more debate -- just an opportunity for fact-driven, practical-minded individuals to mobilize around the cause.

"You know, Web 2.0, which may gave way to Web 3.0 -- social networks, basically -- holds the great promise of empowering enough individuals who share that broad public interest in an issue like global warming to organize and express themselves with sufficient intensity and focus to overcome the special interests. We're already seeing that begin to happen, and I'm encouraged by it," Gore told me recently inside the headquarters of Current TV, his Internet-meets-television outfit in San Francisco, located just a few blocks from the offices of Twitter.

It was the beginning of a three-hour interview for Rolling Stone -- the first half in San Francisco, the second half in his solar-paneled, geothermal system-powered home in Nashville. And Gore being Gore, we covered a wide range of topics. (The transcript of the interview is here.) He was more casual than I expected, with a loose face and a relaxed voice. ("Hi, I'm Al, very nice to meet you," he said.") Wooden, he is not. This is more the Gore as seen in his recent appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live: funny, a tad sarcastic and altogether animated. Twice, he walked over to a white board and, ever the lecturer, drew a diagram, illustrating what transparency in local government might look like. "The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of 'clicks-and-bricks' hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go," he said, blue pen in hand. At one point, he took off his leather two-toned belt to illustrate the changing of a political system -- no joke -- as tied to a ground-breaking study of open systems by Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist. Some people, especially politicians, talk in paragraphs, finding their way through soundbites, the digestible, quotable bits. This is not necessarily Gore. He talks in well thought-out, carefully considered chapters. Here are a few chosen bits, pared down:

Asked if government should fund journalism, as recommended by a recent study commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School, Gore, a former newspaperman and a frequent critic of the press, said: "I don't think so, I don't think so...I think those who propose government-funding for the support of newspapers are overlooking the essential number of the relationship between the press and the government. And you think about Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The first time some news organization that receives government support decides to be antagonistic toward the government. Whatever source of leverage the person in charge of the government has is a potential danger to the integrity of that news organization."

Asked if Internet access is a fundamental right for Americans and a basic necessity for kids -- just like water and electricity -- in order to be a part of a global, knowledge-based society, Gore said: "I think it should be, yes. But the process by which a new capacity graves into that circle labeled 'necessities,' well, it's not a simple process."

Asked if the Internet will eclipse television as the most influential source of information, following a report by Pew Internet last year which noted that more than 50 percent of Americans got their political news from the Internet, Gore said: "The Internet is on such an impressive upward trajectory that it will certainly play a much more prominent role in the 2012 election than it did in 2008. But that's not to predict that in only three years we will see Internet-based political communication eclipsed what's taking place in television."

That's a constant theme during the interviews: television versus the Internet. This is an issue he's been exploring for decades. In college, his thesis was on television's impact on the American presidency. Years later, while in Congress, he became the Hill's walking encyclopedia on all things Internet, reading up on the latest software and meeting with the earliest thinkers of the medium. Speaking at a Web 2.0 summit days after Obama won, he called the victory the Internet's "collectively intelligent" decision.

Television, Gore has said all along, has had a very negative impact on politics -- not just on the politicians who end up spending most of their time raising money to buy expensive 30-second TV ads (the irony of the Obama campaign was that the money raised online was used to buy TV time), but also on citizens who've tuned out politics and find no room to express their views in the top-down, one-way medium that is TV. "You know the average American now watches TV five hours a day," Gore told me. "The average American in an average American lifetime spends 17 uninterrupted years -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week --- watching TV. Seventeen years!"

And the struggle between the two mediums -- how they feed off each other but still remain independent of one another -- underlines what Gore calls "the transitionary period" that American politics is going through.

As a young "Atari Democrat" who headed the bipartisan Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future -- an in-house think-tank founded in 1976 -- Gore foresaw how a decentralized, more open, bottom-up network of computers (the Internet) will revolutionize the way we live, and participate in democracy. No political figure looms larger in Silicon Valley than Gore, who sits on the board of Apple and serves as senior adviser to Google. And he's such a techno-geek that a 3,000-word, heavily-footnoted article on Wikipedia is titled "Al Gore and information technology." Even young Web-savvy Republicans, taking lessons from Obama's winning online campaign strategy, sang Gore's praises at the Technology Summit hosted by Micheal Steele earlier this year. Andrew Rasiej, founder of the annual Personal Democracy Forum, the largest bipartisan gathering of online political thinkers, calls Gore "a godfather of this emerging movement."

Indeed, Gore is the "godfather" of the online political movement that's revolutionizing Washington -- and countries like Iran, China and Russia, where bloggers and tech-savvy citizens are rebelling against their regimes. "Look at what's happening beneath the surface in both China and Russia. In both countries, the broadcast media of television and radio, and the newspapers, are controlled. But in both countries, the attempt to control the Internet has largely, largely failed, because there are so many hacks that can work around the system -- first the digital elites, then others find ways to get the information," Gore said. "The political consciousness of the people, even in dictatorships, has been awakened by the Internet."

Here in the U.S., politics occurs on two levels. There's politics as framed by the mainstream media, reported (and largely) manipulated by the sometimes myopic, often horse race-driven, who's-up, who's-down, gotcha cable news culture. Then there's the politics that unfolding on the Web in real time, attracting online denizens of all ages, in disparate parts of the country. Save the Tea Party movement -- less a grassroots movement than an orchestrated play that's overwritten by the press -- this is the story of the GOP, as it ponders its future on little-known online hubs such as The Next Right. It's also the story of the Democrats, as the majority party in D.C. tries to re-awaken the online giant that Obama wielded so effectively last year -- 13 million e-mail addresses collected, nearly half a billion dollars raised just through the Web. There's a growing camp that believes that the Internet has greatly contributed to the ever-more partisan nature of politics. Gore, however, doesn't belong in that camp.

"When you went to the conservative blogs, you found the link to the liberal blogs. The common protocol is to embed links whether it's a liberal blog or a conservative blog. And what's happening is, we're still in this transitional phase -- it's a different transition, but it's still a transition era -- I think that the people who become the true believers and armor themselves with orthodoxy get the most attention. But I think beneath that there is a more powerful phenomenon where lots of people will come across a site that has one point of view and it's so easy to say, 'These people on the other side, just look for yourself at how stupid they are.' And you click on the link and a lot of them think, 'Actually, that doesn't sound stupid to me,'" Gore told me. "That takes the dialogue back and forth to the point where it begins to move toward a higher order, and the arguments become more sophisticated. And some of the most respected sites on both sides of the ideological divide find themselves responding to third or fourth counter-arguments and the debates become more sophisticated -- and both sides actually listen to the other and learn from each other."

He continued: "I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate. We are seeing the emergence of a digital democracy, an Internet-powered, self-organizing paradigm. That's the key for this. It's not a Democrat thing, it's a not Republican thing, it affects everyone."

Including Gore.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio...h_b_390892.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1b1067b2-dacd-11...?nclick_check=1

Time is up for short-term thinking in capitalism

By Al Gore and David Blood

Published: November 26 2009 20:53 | Last updated: November 26 2009 20:53

Why do investors and business leaders continue to focus on the short-term and ignore the fact that businesses that think long-term end up more competitive and profitable? Behavioural economists believe they have the answer: our brains are hard-wired to think short-term because evolution has rewarded serial short-term successes such as avoiding predators and other dangers that faced our ancestors. Their survival ensured our existence – but predisposed us to the same kind of short-term thinking. As a result, even though our world is very different from theirs, long-term decision-making remains the exception, not the rule.

The global financial crisis had its origins in short-term, unsustainable strategies and actions. Before the crisis and since, we (and others) have called for a more long-term and responsible form of capitalism – what we call “sustainable capitalism”. Yet despite our collective best efforts, one year on, the capital markets seem to be reverting to business as usual.

Winston Churchill said: “It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.” So what is now required? How do we change? In order to start developing sustainable capitalism, we need to reconsider the basic building blocks of commerce and markets: accounting, disclosure, incentives, regulation and responsibility.

Surely a broader accounting of economic activity will enhance economic policy and decision-making. We commend the work of Professor Joseph Stiglitz and the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress for recognising that while facts and figures are important – indeed critical to thoughtful decision-making – we have placed too great an emphasis on outdated modes of distilling economic value. The longer we defer the proper accounting for externalities such as global warming pollution, the greater the strain we place on our already fragile economies. For example, by ignoring the real risk-profile of high-carbon businesses, we are both allocating capital poorly and creating trillions of dollars of “subprime carbon assets”. If the most powerful force in the world is indeed “an idea whose time has come”, the most destructive force in capital markets may well be “an assumption whose time has suddenly elapsed”. Just as widespread assumptions about the value of bundled and securitised subprime mortgages collapsed when tested by reality (thereby detonating the first stage of the financial crisis), the current widespread assumption in markets that it is perfectly fine to dump 90m tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours – as if it is an open sewer – is also now colliding with reality. Though we cannot predict when this assumption will collapse, it is obvious that it will – and most likely within the time-span relevant to genuine long-term investors.

Disclosure and transparency are critical to the optimal allocation of capital. We strongly endorse both the Aspen Institute’s call for a more responsible approach to investment and business management, and the disclosure recommendations promulgated by the Committee for Economic Development in the Washington-based think-tank’s 2009 publication Rebuilding Corporate Leadership. We also strongly support initiatives such as the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project and the UN Global Compact, which are providing a forum for companies to communicate the risks and opportunities they see related to long-term sustainability challenges. These initiatives, coupled with investor initiatives such as the Principles for Responsible Investment and International Corporate Governance Network, support a better long-term allocation of capital. Collectively they will allow management teams the latitude to enact long-term strategies and provide investors with the tools to make better investment decisions. This, in turn, will create stronger and more sustainable economies.

Executive and Wall Street compensation needs to be better aligned with stakeholders and long-term objectives, but so does compensation of investors and asset owners. Specifically, if asset owners continue to review and reward their asset managers reflexively on a quarterly or annual basis, they should not be surprised to find their investors optimising returns within this time-frame – often at the expense of long-term value. People often do what they are paid to do. And if asset managers are compensated for maximising short-term value while saying they are focused on long-term value, they are fully capable of doing exactly that.

In truth, this approach to investing is not investing at all. It is trading, or – at its worst – gambling. These asset managers are betting that they can anticipate the behaviour of other short-term investors and move assets more quickly than the herd. Some managers are skilled at this. But this approach has not typically maximised value for investors or economies. This should change. Asset managers (and owners) should be evaluated and incentivised (compensated) using long-term metrics that measure – and reward – long-term performance.

In addition to regulation, which is quite rightly receiving scrutiny, investors and asset owners must take the initiative to be much more responsible owners. We must exercise our voting rights, work with global regulators to improve shareholder rights and responsibilities, and more aggressively hold company boards to the highest standards of governance and ethics. Trustees must also receive proper resources and training.

Albert Einstein famously remarked: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” To solve the still prevalent problems in capital markets, we need new thinking. We must re-examine old perceptions and re-evaluate obsolete assumptions. Many, including the present chief of staff in the White House, have said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Yet we are in danger of doing just that. We need to change urgently and should start by revisiting the fundamentals necessary for strong and functioning capital markets. We must act now to do what is required to build sustainable capitalism.

Al Gore is the former vice-president of the US and is now chairman of Generation Investment Management. David Blood is managing partner of Generation Investment Management

Gore as a surprise guest November 21th 2009 on Saturday Night Live

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/update-al-gore/117844...

Transcript of Al Gore being interviewed by Larry King that aired November 12th 2009

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0911/12/lkl.01.html

I watched Al Gore on the Daily Show and then on the Colbert Report just now. That was great!

Al Gore to be on Letterman show Tuesday November 3rd
NEW YORK, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has agreed to be a guest on "Late Show with David Letterman," CBS said Tuesday.

The author and environmental activist is expected to make his sixth appearance on the "Letterman" episode to be broadcast Nov. 3.

"Gore will release his new book about the climate crisis, 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,' on the same day as his 'Late Show' appearance," CBS said in a news release. "The 45th vice president of the United States, who served with President Bill Clinton for eight years, Gore has also authored the bestsellers 'Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,' 'An Inconvenient Truth' and 'The Assault on Reason.'"

Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won Academy Awards in 2007 for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song. Gore was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his environmental work.

He is the co-founder and chairman of the cable news channel, Current TV.
http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/TV/2009/10/27/Al-Gore-to-be-a-gues...

"Our Choice": Al Gore's New Book Follows On "Inconvenient Truth"

It looks like the release date is November 3rd 2009

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/24/our-choice-gore-book_n_178506.h...

Former Vice President and climate crisis crusader Al Gore will release a new book in March called Our Choice, which will lay out a "blueprint" for solving the climate crisis, according to a press release from the book's publisher.

"Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. Our Choice will answer that call," the release says.

Our Choice is a follow up to Gore's last book, An Inconvenient Truth.

Read the full release below:

EMMAUS, PA, and NEW YORK, NY, March 24, 2009--Today Vice President Gore announced that his next book, Our Choice, will be published by Rodale in the US and by other publishers internationally on November 3, 2009. Picking up where An Inconvenient Truth left off, Our Choice utilizes Mr. Gore's forty years of experience as a student, policymaker, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur and activist to comprehensively describe the real solutions to global warming. A co-recipient of the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 for his environmental work, Mr. Gore continues to make sense of the pressing issues we face and Our Choice will unquestionably inspire and rally those ready to fight for solutions that were deemed impossible only a short time ago.

Said Vice President Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth reached millions of people with the message that the climate crisis is threatening the future of human civilization and that it must and can be solved. Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. Our Choice will answer that call."

Since the publication of the New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Truth and the release of the Academy Award® winning film of the same title, Mr. Gore has led more than thirty "Solutions Summits" with top scientists, engineers and policy experts to examine every solution to the climate crisis in depth and detail. Our Choice draws on conclusions developed through those summits as well as on extensive independent research, describing how the bold choices necessary to save the earth's climate should also be the foundations of policies worldwide to create new jobs and stimulate sustainable economic progress.

As they did with An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Gore and Mrs. Tipper Gore will donate 100% of the proceeds of the book to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit, non-partisan group dedicated to spreading awareness about the climate crisis and how to solve it. Our Choice will feature 100% recycled paper, locally produced and sourced editions, low VOC inks, and will be carbon neutral.

"Rodale is honored to continue our relationship with Vice President Al Gore," said Rodale Inc. President and CEO Steven Pleshette Murphy. "We were proud to publish An Inconvenient Truth and very much look forward to bringing Our Choice to the growing audience of committed citizens who are seeking solutions to the climate change crisis. In the spirit of our longtime mission, we are dedicated to creating the greatest possible platform for Vice President Gore's work and message."

Former Vice President and climate crisis crusader Al Gore will release a new book in March called Our Choice, which will lay out a "blueprint" for solving the climate crisis, according to a press rele...
Former Vice President and climate crisis crusader Al Gore will release a new book in March called Our Choice, which will lay out a "blueprint" for solving the climate crisis, according to a press rele...
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Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/24/our-choice-gore-book_n_178506.h...

Stevens knew his own mind in Bush vs. Gore
Published: Oct. 4, 2009 at 9:45 AM

MICHAEL KIRKLAND

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Bush vs. Gore at 10 p.m., Dec. 12, 2000, it sent most major news outlets into a tailspin: They didn't have the slightest idea what it meant.

The 5-4 decision effectively ended the 2000 presidential race in George W. Bush's favor, ending the Florida recount sought by Vice President Al Gore, who hoped to overcome Bush's razor-thin lead in the state. But the decision was so confusing it was at least an hour-and-a-half before Republican stalwarts jumped into their cars, forming convoys around the streets of Capitol Hill, blowing their horns in triumph.

The narrow majority said in a "per curiam," or unsigned, opinion -- actually written largely behind the scenes by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy -- that the recount authorized by the Florida Supreme Court ruling allowing the recount violated the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution. Holding that the "individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States" except under a form set by a state legislature, the majority said the Florida court's ruling did not say who would recount the votes. Letting local entities do the recount, and letting local judges ensure its fairness, would result in a number of recount methods in individual counties, the ruling said.

"Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point," it said, "it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work."

But that work had to be done by the "safe harbor" date set by the state Legislature, Dec. 12 -- in other words, it had to be done in the two hours left on the day when the opinion was released.

Though the majority opinion caused confusion, Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the four vehement dissenters, was clear in his scorn for it.

"The Constitution assigns to the states the primary responsibility for determining the manner of selecting the presidential electors, ..." Stevens wrote. "When questions arise about the meaning of state laws, including election laws, it is our settled practice to accept the opinions of the highest courts of the states as providing the final answers. On rare occasions, however, either federal statutes or the Federal Constitution may require federal judicial intervention in state elections. This is not such an occasion."

Stevens maintained the " federal questions that ultimately emerged in this case are not substantial. "

"Admittedly, the use of differing sub-standards for determining voter intent in different counties employing similar voting systems may raise serious concerns," he said. "Those concerns are alleviated -- if not eliminated -- by the fact that a single impartial magistrate will ultimately adjudicate all objections arising from the recount process."

Stevens said, "Even assuming that aspects of the remedial scheme (the recount allowed by the Florida Supreme Court) might ultimately be found to violate the equal protection clause, I could not subscribe to the majority's disposition of the case. As the majority explicitly holds, once a state legislature determines to select electors through a popular vote, the right to have one's vote counted is of constitutional stature. As the majority further acknowledges, Florida law holds that all ballots that reveal the intent of the voter constitute valid votes. Recognizing these principles, the majority nonetheless orders the termination of the contest proceeding before all such votes have been tabulated. Under their own reasoning, the appropriate course of action would be to remand (send down to the lower court) to allow more specific procedures for implementing the Legislature's uniform general standard to be established."

Stevens kept his most powerful language for his final statement.

"What must underlie (the Bush) petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures," he added, "is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this (U.S. Supreme) Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

"I respectfully dissent."

If Stevens retires this term as speculated -- he has so far hired only one clerk, the normal complement for a retired justice -- his 34 years on the high court will push, but not match, the tenure of Justice William O. Douglas, the man he replaced in 1975. Douglas spent 36 years and 205 days on the court, the longest of any justice in history.

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush in 2000. Six years on, this is still a problem?

by Julian Pecquet

After spending 36 days in the fall of 2000 in thrall to politicians, pundits and the press, Americans probably thought they knew all about the hanging, dangling and pregnant chads that helped decide the presidential election.

Turns out, those chads only distracted attention from much more grievous breakdowns during the 2000 election.

At least that’s what longtime Florida political observer Lance deHaven-Smith believes. His most recent book, The Battle for Florida (University Press of Florida, 2005), looks at the twilight of democracy in Ancient Greece and draws disturbing parallels with the institutions in Florida and the nation during the 2000 election and up until today.

For the past 25 years, deHaven-Smith has been one of just a handful of observers of Florida’s elections and politics. And while most of his colleagues don’t go as far as he does in finding fault with Florida’s elected officials, none question his stature as respected researcher who can be counted on to provide the press with timely and pithy appraisals of just about any development in the colorful world of Florida politics.

For this book (his ninth), deHaven-Smith compiled legal documents, statistical analyses and public records, and flavored them with his interpretation of what it all means.

Despite having grown up in the South—deHaven-Smith lived between Florida and Georgia until his departure for graduate studies at Ohio State—his expertise in the Sunshine State’s election trends was greatly a matter of chance.

In 1981, the year he came down to teach at Florida Atlantic, the young political scientist was one of the nation’s top experts on a massive training program for poor people until one fell flick of a bureaucratic pen in Washington changed their life, and his.

“It eliminated my subject matter,” he says, laughing now. “I started studying Florida public opinion and politics. I had gone to Ohio State, which is a big school in voting research and public opinion research, but it was all at the national level.”

The other fortuity was that he came down to Florida in the first place.

“I had another job offer at Case Western in Cleveland,” he says, “and then I went down to interview—this was in Boca Raton. It was in February. They took me to breakfast at a hotel where we ate outside by the intracoastal canal. I mean, it was right in the middle of winter, Ohio weather was terrible, and there I was, outside. So, sign me up.”

There, he immersed himself in Florida politics, under the tutelage of the famed John DeGrove, a nationally recognized expert in growth management.

DeHaven-Smith moved on to FSU in 1994, where he headed the Reuben Askew School of Public Administration and Policy from 1995 to 1998.

Research in Review caught up with the professor while he was waiting for people to check out his book—and simultaneously sighing in relief that it’s hardly garnered any attention, yet.

“I think if it would have come out a year earlier, it would have,” he says. “I’m kind of glad it didn’t, though, because of all the right-wing critics.” —J.P.

RinR: One of the most interesting points you make in the book is that the focus on undervotes (ballots containing no vote for president)—the hanging, dimpled and otherwise pregnant chads—was misplaced. Instead, you explain that a study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which looked at all the ballots that were initially rejected on election night 2000, revealed a surprise: most of these uncounted votes were in fact discarded because they were over-votes, instances of two votes for president on one ballot. What do you think the NORC study tells us about the election?

LdHS: It’s an embarrassing outcome for George Bush because it showed that Gore had gotten more votes. Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000.

RinR: For your research, you merged this set of data with detailed profiles of Florida’s electoral precincts. What did you find?

LdHS: One of the things I found that hadn’t been reported anywhere is, if you look at where those votes occurred, they were in predominantly black precincts. And (when you look at) the history of black voting in Florida, these are people that have been disenfranchised, intimidated. In the history of the early 20th century, black votes would be thrown out on technicalities, like they would use an X instead of a check mark.
So you can understand why African Americans would be so careful, checking off Gore’s name on the list of candidates and also writing Gore’s name in the space for write-in votes. But because of the way the vote-counting machines work, this had the opposite effect: the machines threw out their ballots.

RinR: One of the reasons, you argue, that the most popular candidate ended up losing the election is because so many Americans favored partisan rhetoric over an unbiased search for truth during the recounts in 2000. How do you explain this?

LdHS: As far as I can tell, it’s the way societies work. One of the things we’ve learned with public opinion research, the most fundamental finding of public opinion research of the past 50 years is that the masses follow the elites.
Most people don’t have time to learn about all these things, and they look to a particular person that they trust. It may not be the president, it may be Jesse Jackson, you know, it could be Rush Limbaugh, it could be somebody who’s not in government, but they look at that person and defer to that person. It’s a normal thing. I don’t see that changing. It really is a matter of elites being willing to be committed to democracy and the rule of law and the rule of reason.

RinR: And this can be a problem because?

LdHS: Unfortunately, the history of democracy is that leadership philosophy is eroded as the competition between elites becomes more intense. That’s what happened with Athenian democracy; that’s what happened in the Roman Republic. So you look at our system today; you see our elites doing it, and you know we’re in big trouble. It’s in my lifetime that this has happened, that elites have begun to put winning ahead everything else, ahead of truth and country.
When Watergate was prosecuted, there were Republicans in Congress that were after Nixon. They thought what he was doing was unconscionable, and today that’s not the case. Today, Democrats stick with Democrats, and Republicans stick with Republicans. They don’t care what their party leaders have done. Just in my lifetime, I’ve seen this civic culture go from something that’s respectful of democracy to something that is manipulative of it. The problem is if you let this go uncorrected, the Democrats are going to do something worse later, and then the Republicans. It’s just an arms race almost, and it will just tend to degenerate.

RinR: How does the 2000 election fit into that view?

LdHS: I think my book is at times rather blunt about the illegalities I think that were committed and the political motives that ran rampant.
I wish I could say, “Well, we’ll leave it alone; we won’t look at it because it would shake people’s confidence in our society.” But I’m afraid the elite discourse—unless it’s corrected, unless elites start recognizing that they have a responsibility to maintain a democracy among themselves—we’re going to have a big problem.

RinR: So, what’s the overarching theme of The Battle for Florida?

LdHS: It really tells a simple story in some ways. It essentially says that the people responsible for administering the election had a conflict of interest and that they, in a variety of ways, prevented the recount from being conducted.
I go into explaining…why would it operate like this? One factor that drove it this way is essentially that the Republicans are on the losing side of a huge demographic trend in this state: an increasing minority population. And they know this—it’s not a secret. One reason there was administrative sabotage of the recount was because a number of steps had already been taken to try to lock in the Republican control of Florida in the face of these demographics that are running in the other direction. The other thing the book looks at, in addition to the long history leading up to this event, is also what came out afterwards, what was done, were problems corrected, what investigations were conducted? And the story there is, gee, there was really very little investigation, amazingly little, given the importance of the election and the controversy. Frankly, I would never have written this book had there been any careful investigation done afterwards. That was what shook me after the election, I was expecting people would go into it, find out what had happened and straighten out the problems so it wouldn’t happen again.

RinR: But Florida’s 2001 Election Reform Act has been described as a model for the nation. They banned the punch cards; they gave $6 million for voter education; and they’re requiring computer systems to let voters know, once they’re in the booth, if they’ve voted too many times or failed to cast a valid vote. Are you saying those changes are just cosmetic?

LdHS: They were worse than cosmetic. They focused on the technology, which was not the real problem. The problem was you just had partisans running the system at every level, even on the Supreme Court. It was everywhere. So if you wanted to correct this system, you’ve got to get that partisanship out of the process. And that was not done.
And the touch-screen system—it’s a terrible thing that’s being done with this technology, because you can’t double-check it. You have no paper trail on it.

RinR: Aren’t the new machines supposed to let you know if you didn’t cast a valid vote?

LdHS:: No, that’s one of the problems. It’s obviously not letting people know. There was a special election in the spring, where only one contest was on the ballot. I think it was the spring of 2004, in Palm Beach County where several hundred voters came…and turned in ballots that didn’t register a vote. [Robert] Wexler, a congressman there, sued to try to get the touch-screen machines either decertified or require a paper ballot because he said, “People aren’t going to come out for this one thing and not cast a vote.”
It shows that the machines have got a problem. But the state wouldn’t act.

RinR: There’s been a profusion of books and essays already written about the election. What do you bring to the table?

LdHS: For one thing, I study Florida politics and know the law. I’d been director of the local government commission several years earlier, which looks at all the local governments and how they’re staffed, how they’re organized, what their financing is.
I had also been the executive director of the cabinet reform commission in 1996. What both of those commissions ended up exposing was a fairly arcane, poorly understood cabinet system and inter-governmental system that is really how our elections are run, how our law-enforcement policies are implemented, road planning, things like that—things people don’t think that much about. So I knew about all that. I was in Tallahassee. I got to watch a lot of the election controversy itself. And I had the political science background on the demographic trends, the election trends. So I really had a unique combination of background experiences and subject matter expertise and then plain old luck in being … in the capital city of the state where it happened.

RinR: Throughout the book, you repeat that Florida’s election law—especially the rule that no vote “shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the vote”—is in fact much more straightforward than was made out during the controversy. So then, who do you fault the most for making it all seem so murky?

LdHS: I would say [then-Secretary of State] Katherine Harris in terms of murky—in terms of what the law intended and what it meant. There was a contradiction in the law. What it said was you have to get the recount done within a very short time, and it just wasn’t possible. But that’s not uncommon. You just have to interpret it with common sense.
Part of what was going on was the stakes were really high; the people involved were very inexperienced; Harris didn’t know [Attorney General Bob] Butterworth; they were not cordial. But if it had been a group of leaders who had been around for a while, they would have sat down and easily said, “Well, here’s a way to resolve this problem.” But that wasn’t the aim of the people involved. The aim was from the beginning to stop the recount. Yet if you looked at the law and if you looked at the case law, what Florida had consistently said was if you can count the votes, you must count the votes. You cannot penalize the voters for mistakes that the administrators make or that the law may make. You really have to give the voters the advantage.

RinR: Throughout The Battle for Florida, you claim the law was bent out of shape to satisfy partisan goals. Does that mean you think some of the actions by Florida’s elected officials merit a legal investigation?

LdHS: Yes, absolutely. To me, I think what this election teaches us is, first of all, we need to strengthen the penalties for election tampering and we need to return to an earlier understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” We’ve gotten to the point today where we’re looking for smoking guns all the time. And the truth is that these officials take an oath of office to uphold the constitution, and that oath is a broad requirement that they enforce the laws with good intentions.
But there wasn’t even a cursory investigation of the events, which points to another legal requirement…that we develop some kind of mechanism to investigate the government. We have the government investigating itself, and inevitably it’s unlikely you’re going to get much investigation. If you look at the last 40 years at government investigating itself, the only time we’ve gotten aggressive investigation is when one party controlled Congress and the other party controlled the executive branch. (During) Watergate, it was Democrats investigating a Republican; Iran-Contra, Democrats investigating a Republican; Monica Lewinsky, the Clinton impeachment, Republicans investigating a Democrat. There, you get some aggressiveness. But otherwise, you really have a system that’s not accountable because it won’t investigate itself. And if it investigates itself, it exonerates itself.

RinR: Isn’t that just human nature?

LdHS: Absolutely, and that’s what our institutions are designed to do: Take the human beings with all their best and worst and structure them in a way that we can produce a democratic, responsible government. We’ve come a long way. I mean, if you think about it, secret balloting is a relatively new invention. In Reconstruction, when blacks were first voting, they did it in public. You had a specific ballot that you took in for a particular candidate, and they knew who you were voting for.
It’s all part of the historical developmental process where we try to make our government more democratic, more responsive, more transparent. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

RinR: What about recount procedures? Have those been clarified?

LdHS: There are now specified standards. So let’s say we need to have a recount: You would now have standards that would be uniform across the state as opposed to under the law in 2000, (when) the election commissions at the local level were supposed to determine that.
But the reality was (in 2000) people were using rules of thumb. Now…the law specifies what the requirements are.

RinR: How do you think your political beliefs influence your views? You call yourself an independent, right?

LdHS: Certainly when I came to Tallahassee in 1994, I viewed myself as part of a professional leadership class in the state. There was a group of professional, ex-politicians – [Former Governor] Reubin Askew would have been one—of people who were knowledgeable and active and interested and not really partisan.
But state politics changed. When [Gov. Lawton] Chiles beat Jeb Bush by 60,000 votes, it was one of the closest elections up to that time. I remember Chiles saying that he had never experienced a campaign like that. Jeb Bush had brought in a Washington-style, highly effective, highly professional campaign and nearly beat him. Chiles was a legend in Florida, an incumbent governor, and he almost got beat. By 1998, Jeb Bush…went about really consolidating authority, and it became a very partisan system. And at that point, frankly, my political orientation quit mattering. What started mattering to me was having a democracy, having a government that was actually responsive. One of the things I would hear a lot is people would say, well, if the Democrats were in, they would do the same thing. And I thought about that, and…my conclusion…is “hell no, they wouldn’t.” I know the Democrats; I know Reuben Askew. That guy would have been an absolute maniac about being technically and legally and ethically straightforward and correct in the application of the law. If there had been a recount under his administration, he would have been bending over backwards to make sure it was right. (But) today, the belief in the truth, that there (even) is a truth, has pretty much vanished across the board. It’s not just Democrats; it’s not just Republicans. But it’s been replaced by cynicism.

RinR: Finally, I’d like to go back to the “big picture” theme of your book. You call for an unflinching search for truth in the tradition of the Ancient Greeks who questioned everything. But Socrates, the top truth-searcher of the day, was put to death for constantly prodding citizens to examine whether their convictions were grounded in a firm foundation of facts—suggesting he was “too democratic” to live in a Republic. Two thousand and some years later, what makes you think a majority of Americans—or anybody else, for that matter—want to stare their democratic shortcomings in the face?

LdHS: I’m not sure that they do.
After Socrates was executed, Plato, his student, went out to the countryside to buy a piece of land. He bought it from the family of a war hero named Academus. … And the academy today is called that by virtue of this decision. The reason Plato went out of town is, he realized the town people didn’t want to hear that their beliefs about the gods were myths, that their institutions were founded somewhat arbitrarily, that they didn’t know what they were talking about when they said they wanted justice. You’d like to hope that in the 21st century people would be mature enough, but I don’t know. This is a turning point potentially for us. If we don’t recognize the disorder, I don’t think we have many years left of democracy in the United States. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s not too late, even as we speak.

http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/winter2005/features/battlefield.html

David Horsey is the man

http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm206/WayneinWAState/Horsey090209.jpg