Warning: major rant.

Yesterday morning after watching the Opening Ceremonies live from Beijing, I came here to discuss what I'd just experienced. No one was talking about it, which was understandable as Americans, for the sake of profit, were denied access to the live broadcast.

So I posted a quick diary to alert people to be sure to watch the Ceremony, for the message it carried (see below), crafted by China's visionary film maker Zhang Yi Mou. The diary scrolled quickly off the list, but not before a few cries of BOYCOTT (i.e. don't watch). This from Americans whose country gathered around its TVs to whop and cheer as their government poured fire and death on the people of Baghdad, laid waste to Irak, shredded the U.S. Constitution and plundered the U.S. Treasury,  all while lecturing China and others on democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law. Well excuse me while I tear my hair out.

I just watched the Olympic Opening Ceremony live on Radio-Canada and I am speechless. It was PERFECTION (it will be rebroadcast tonight in prime time on NBC). I have never seen anything like it in my entire life, and I've admired China's long artistic tradition since I discovered it in 1967, in my third year at McGill University.

Veteran journalist Roger Cohen has a must-read op-edthis morning in the NYT. He covered the war in Bosnia, from Sarajevo, and saw first-hand the carnage, while President Bill Clinton hemmed and hawed, just as he had done while the Rwandan genocide was unfolding. And he was in Bosnia after the war ended, the time-frame in which Mrs Clinton made her Tuzla stop-over. His assessment of her fabrication is the most scathing I've seen yet from anyone with first-hand knowledge. Read it for yourselves.

Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges

Here’s some news for Hillary Clinton: the Bosnian war was over in 1996.

The following letter from Senator Barack Obama to Bush appointees Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Henry Paulsen, Secretary of the Treasury, supposedly entrusted with guarding the integrity of the U.S. financial system, and sent off over one year ago was prophetic and beyond wise in its call to avert the catastrophe we are witnessing today. It's dated March 22, 2007.The letter has been up at TPMCafé for a couple of days but no one else, it seems, has picked up on it.

Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson,

There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures. Because regulators are partly responsible for creating the environment that is leading to rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market, I urge you immediately to convene a homeownership preservation summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge.

Bill Clinton was down in Mississipi yesterday, pushing the Obama-as-Hillary's-Veep meme hard, calling it an "unstoppable force" in the '08 election. Quotes and link after the flip.

Barack's website has just posted the number of calls made by supporters in the ten days leading up to the March 4th primaries.

We always knew this journey would be long and filled with obstacles, but together we have been able to do what no one ever imagined was possible.

In less than two weeks you helped make over 2 million calls to voters across America.

Thank you for being a part of this movement and making your voice heard.

Now, we need to look to Wyoming in the West and Mississippi in the South and send a clear message that the time for change in our country has come.

Thank you so much for all you do.

From the new talking points from the Clinton campaign on Hillary's "3 a.m" ad:

* There’s a big difference between giving a speech as a state senator and giving orders as Commander-in-Chief. Sen. Obama talks about these issues, but then goes missing in action.

More talking points below the fold...

(Paraphrasing) If you want to take the full measure of a man or woman vying for the highest office in the land, don't look at their well-scripted words/actions in the presidential campaign, look at their words/actions spoken/taken BEFORE they stood in the glare of that campaign.

All of us who care about the outcome of the 2008 presidential election in the U.S.A. have of course heard a lot about Obama's early and later history, most notably as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago, after completing Harvard Law. But I just came across the first of two diaries he posted here at Daily Kos on 30 September 2005, entitled Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party that illustrates why so many of the Clinton machine's lines of attack (and most notably the one that he lacks substance) against him have so dismally failed.

"Gore is wrong". That's right. I stole that line. Because it's true. Al Gore is wrong when he says that fighting Global Warming is a moral issue, not a political issue. It is the biggest political issue in the world today. More than any other, it cries out for a policitcal solution at the highest national and international level. Gore knows this. He can't NOT know it. He's gone as far as he can lobbying governement leaders and CEO's. It's time to lead, but he needs a movement to make his leadership unstoppable, and to maximize his unique and hard-earned credibility around the world. He's clearly waiting for that movement to happen, to come forward. And it is. It's happening. Even the media narrative on him is beginning to change. Now it's all a matter of timing and momentum. And here's why...

ACTION ITEM: Please go post your view on Gore's page at Current.com or send him your two cents, really!

Sigh. Look, I'll be brief. I come here this morning, just a peak 'cause I have other work, seriously, and oh my god, what do I find? Three Gore diaries on the rec' list, one urging Al to run, one offering in-depth analysis the latest poll data showing that Gore is more electable than Hillary against Giuliani, and one that states categorically as "breaking news" that Gore has ruled out a run completely.. Guess which one made my heart stop? Thankfully, having been on this roller-coaster for a while, I check out the comments and sure enough, Gore has said nothing of the kind , nothing new at all, and who really thinks he would break such a huge piece of news to the Europeans before his own people?

One problem that has been raised, and it's a very valid point, is how will Gore be able to shift gears from repeatedly insisting, these many months, that  "I have no intention", "I have no plans" to run for President to suddenly declaring he's in?  What can he say without losing all credibility and becoming a laughing stock on the evening news? That is what this diary will examine.

This will be a short, hit-and-run diary. People need to go to Current.com and view the three short videos Gore uploaded last night, one entitled Healthcare is a right,, one called Americans deserve more protection and the third entitled Get the troops home (H/T Lorikat). All Gorites and those with an open-mind, head over to Current.com and view the clips! Then sign up to the site so you can discuss them.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the Registration page on Current.com
Please register and join the discussion!

UPDATE 2 And here is the link at Current.com linking back to this diary!

UPDATE 3 As commenter anoodle reminds us, get over to Current.com and post a comment!

The conventional wisdom that Gore "won't run" spread almost immedately, starting on the night BEFORE the Nobel Prize announcement. Interestingly enough, that opening salvo came not from the usual suspects on the Right, but from the Hillary camp, via an emissary by the name of Dan Gerstein, on Thursday's night's broadcast of MSNBC's Hardball). But could the facts be more inconvenient, hence more threatening, to all those now pushing the status quo?  

Like most of you, my first thought this morning, when I opened my eyes, was "Did he win?" And I came straight here for the answer, only to find ecstatic confirmation in my first bleary glance at the Recommended list. Yes, friends, the dream is beginning to become true, thanks to him, and also thanks to all of you! This is a force 8 tremor on the political Richter scale. But until he announces, his "chances" of entering the race will be endlessly poo-poohed by every Beltway voice, from Right Wing pundits to establishment scribes claiming personal knowledge to unofficial spin easily traceable to the Hillary campaign (Dan Gerstein on Hardball last night, anyone?). But none of all that really matters.

You read that right. When. Why am I so certain? I have of course no inside knowledge. None. Yet I've been certain that he would get in ever since I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, a year and a half ago. And my certainty has only grown since then. Am I delusional? Hardly. I just use a different primary premise for my opinion. Disclaimer: I am not an American. I can't vote in your election, though I've followed your politics almost obsessively ever since watching the 2000 election debacle live on television (Canadians have a front-row seat when it comes to watching you). No, my friends. The timing of Gore's entry is not so much to do with Hillary, ballot deadlines or any Hamlet-like hesitations on Gore's part as it is about a meeting of world leaders on climate in Bali in Decemberand all the meetings that will follow in the coming years and that will ultimately decide the fate of humanity on this planet. (SEE UPDATE lower down).

I don't know about you but where I am, the weather is positively balmy. So warm in fact that this year's crop of McIntosh apples are two weeks ahead of schedule (and growers are worried it may turn to mush if the nights don't start turning cold soon) and local grape growers (for making wine, an unheard of occupation in these parts, when I was growing up) are reporting a bumper harvest of grapes. People bask in the warm sunshine, but you can hear it in conversations: the "new" weather (it's been trending this way, the last few years) is kind of unsettling, like some strange, still faint background noise that disturbs one at some subliminal level. You step outside your door in the morning and the thought crosses your mind: July in October, what the ...? Oh the trees are turning, sure (lots of huge maples around here) but the colours seem faded. Just like last year. And the year before that. Gee, the last time I really saw the mountains blazing was in the nineties. Early nineties even. Not enough cold nights, they say... Some mornings it's positively creepy. But it isn't happening only here. That's the really creepy part. And when you bother to look, what's going on elsewhere is downright hair-raising.

Al Gore was in Canada, this past week-end, to give his slideshow, to multiple standing ovations from standing-room-only crowds. Sidebar: We love him up here. This year he's been here a lot, notably twice at the Convention Centre in Montreal, where he spoke once before a sold-out audience at a $600-a-plate "Responsible Investment" luncheon, and once for free before a crush of students from Concordia University, in the company of renowned Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki.); twice in Toronto (once at the U of T, where advance sales of his slide-show crashed the computers, when 20,000 people all logged on at once, hoping to snap up tickets, and once at the Green Living Show, where he took the opportunity to trash the Conservative Government's Green Plan, calling it "a complete and total fraud... designed to mislead the Canadian people"). This past Saturday Gore pulled a twofer in Victoria, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The "inevitability" meme is beginning to set. Bill himself is being rolled out. Ordinarily this race would be all over but the counting. But the times we live in are anything but ordinary. In fact the urgency and magnitude of the challenge we and the rest of the world are facing call for leadership of historic proportions. I will argue that Hillary is not that leader. Though she is experienced, highly competent and immensely well-funded, she is the epitome of the hawkish, powerfully connected, corporate-funded Washington insider who are masterful only at the art of "politics as we know it". But most of all she lacks en epic narrative, one that taps directly into the Power of Myth. She is no visionary, nor are any of her rivals. And a vision of unprecedented breadth and power is what these parlous times are crying for. The era of business-as-usual, lesser-of-two-evils American leadership cannot continue. The stakes are simply too high.

Some mornings I wake up wanting to scream. Everything seems so... normal. Birds twittering in the trees outside. An early flock of Canada geese honking overhead. A paler shade of sun streaming in through the trees outside my wide bedroom window. A beautifully cool autumn day in the offing, but I still can't shake the feeling. I rise from my bed, splash water on my face, head for the kitchen for my morning coffee, stopping to pick up my morning paper at the front door on the way. I scan the front page, leaf through to the editorial pages, just for a sign that someone, ANYONE in those crowded rooms where headlines are made and people decide what gets on Page One GETS IT. The feeling changes to a slow burn. I turn on the radio, to my favourite morning show on Radio-Canada. Most mornings it's just chatter about politics, sports, the arts, interviews with famous peope, laughter, jokes. And then sometimes, like this morning, I get lucky. I catch a conversation in progress. How come this isn't front page news? the host is asking. I like the host. He gets it. Yeah it's strange, the person he's talking to is saying. I recognize him. It's the environment correspondent. And then he continues and that sense of dread I woke up with explodes into full-blown, impotent rage.