"[Al] Gore said he believed the courts would prevent Trump from implementing some of his most extreme moves."

"I don’t think he’s going to be able to get away with that,' he said. 'I think we’re more resilient as a constitutional, representative democracy than a lot of people of fear.'"

From "Why Al Gore Is Shifting His Climate Activism Abroad/Given the Trump administration’s recent moves relating to climate, the former vice president is looking to the developing world for the next generation of climate activism" (NYT).

When Biden was President, "democracy" meant gracefully accepting the result of the election and working on winning the next election. But with Trump as President, "democracy" means stopping the duly elected President from doing what voters heard him promise he'd do.

I'm just asking for a stable definition of "democracy" to go along with the demand for our devotion to it. I agree with Gore that the courts have role to play. But it's a counter-majoritarian role. And we can argue about the scope of their role and whether they are doing too much or too little. We'll see how they do.

"A series of prominent Democrats were tested in a head-to-head ballot against Donald Trump."

By Emerson College Polling:

• Vice President Kamala Harris: 49% Trump, 43% Harris, 8% undecided
• Senator Bernie Sanders: 48% Trump, 42% Sanders, 10% undecided
• California Governor Gavin Newsom: 48% Trump, 40% Newsom, 12% undecided
• Former Vice President Al Gore: 47% Trump, 42% Gore, 11% undecided
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 48% Trump, 41% Clinton, 11% undecided
• Senator Elizabeth Warren: 49% Trump, 39% Warren, 13% undecided
• Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg: 49% Trump, 39% Buttigieg, 12% undecided
• Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: 46% Trump, 38% Shapiro, 16% undecided
• Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: 48% Trump, 38% Whitmer, 15% undecided

Meanwhile, Trump beats Joe Biden by only 46% to 43%, with 11% undecided. That is, Biden loses to Trump by only 3 percentage points. All those other possibilities are worse: Harris loses by 6, Bernie by 6, Newsom by 8, Gore by 5, Hillary by 7, Warren by 10, Buttigieg by 10, Shapiro by 8, and Whitmer by 10.

I like how the most surprising inclusion — Gore — does best.

Saddest exclusion: Kerry. If Gore is in, it's mean to leave out Kerry.

Most interesting effect on Trump: Shapiro. Trump is at 48 or 48 for everyone else, but slips to 46 for Shapiro. There's a lurch toward undecided.

"Is it too much to hope that a broad coalition across party lines could commit to defeating candidates who have made clear they don’t respect truth or elections?"

Asks Jennifer Rubin, in "We need a plan to deny the election deniers victory" (WaPo). 

But where's the line between "election denying" and fighting for a victory after initial returns indicate your candidate has lost?

In August 2020, Hillary Clinton made a strong argument for contesting election results...

... and we remember how hard Al Gore fought for a victory in 2000 before finally conceding. Should we denounce Hillary and Al as "election deniers"? 

Can we form "a broad coalition across party lines" about how much post-election fighting is acceptable? Is the term "election denying" helpful? I don't think so. To me, it's too emotional. It feels like an effort to borrow resonance from "Holocaust denier." (Rubin also uses the term "big lie" twice.) 

Labels shouldn't take the place of substantive argument. We should see that some contesting of election results is normal and desirable and that at some point we need a result and we shouldn't be dragging out the fight in a search for perfection. We need a winner, and we need a way to declare a winner and move on. Let's be rational about that.

The shared standard has to be something that we'd accept when our candidate is on the losing side. It can't be that Democrats ought to fight hard, but Republicans must stand down.

Orange man good?

Completely unretouched photo, straight out of my iPhone:

 

Did Trump forget to pack up all his makeup? 

There's something about orange. As I was searching my archive to figure out if my tag is "orange" or "orangeness," I ran across this post from the first year of my blog, from September 2004:

So John Kerry seems to have gotten one of those dark spray-on tans.... 'All the big Hollywood celebrities, especially the female celebrities, are getting an orange tan.'... Whenever presidential debate season comes around, the one thing you can count on pundits to talk about is the 1960 debate when Kennedy looked tanned and rested and Nixon looked pasty white. ... Why don't Kerry's people remember how Al Gore was ridiculed for looking way too orange in the first debate in 2000?... 'Gore looked positively repellent with his... garish orange makeup....'"

They all do orange. Orange is the happy vibrant color of love and warmth. It always was and it always will be, except for that little time when it wasn't — the time when it was Orange Man Bad in the Oval Office.  

If Barbara Lagoa is Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, it will forefront a subject that roiled the presidential election in 2000 — Elian Gonzalez.

I'm reading "Lagoa’s Role in Florida Will Be a Big Factor in Trump’s Supreme Court Pick/Judge Barbara Lagoa lacks some of the usual credentials of a Supreme Court justice, but her roots in the Cuban-American community could make her an attractive choice for President Trump" (NYT).

Ms. Lagoa represented a relative of a 5-year-old boy found off the Florida coast after his mother had drowned trying to cross over from Cuba. His name was Elián González. Federal agents would eventually seize Elián and return him to his father in Cuba, setting off political shock waves that arguably cost former Vice President Al Gore the 2000 presidential election when he lost Florida.

“After six months, countless briefs, a few all-nighters, two oral arguments and one midnight raid by armed commandos, we learned what it was like to lose,” Eliot Pedrosa, another lawyer on the team, said at a ceremony last year when Judge Lagoa joined the Florida Supreme Court. The experience of “watching armed federal agents use force to pre-empt process,” he said, was “seared into her soul.”...

The Cuban-American community admired her work on Elián’s case, taking issue with the federal government’s position that the boy’s father, Juan Miguel González, was his sole legal guardian and had the right to make the decision to have him returned to Cuba. Also playing a role was a young lawyer named Brett M. Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice himself, who represented the boy’s Miami relatives when they needed someone to work on a federal appeal....

Here's a March 10, 2000 NYT article that mentions Lagoa, "Federal Judge Fails to Rule On Fate of Cuban Youngster":

I love the sigh at 0:11...

Does anybody believe this man? Caught! https://t.co/WfnIqs6BsE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2020

ADDED: Remember how sighing got Al Gore in trouble debating George W. Bush in 2000? Paul Begala remembers (quoted in the NYT in September 2016):

Right away I picked up a problem about Gore during debate prep: a raw, unbridled contempt he had for Bush. It wasn’t the usual “my worthy adversary and I have different ideas.” He would sometimes sigh when I was talking, or frown, or roll his eyes. And his tone and language too — it all communicated that Gore thought Bush was an idiot. “You don’t deserve to be on stage with me” was Gore’s basic attitude.

So what we saw was after they did what they could at the prep stage. I am so eager to see how Biden — if he really is the Democratic nominee — deports himself at the debates with Trump. It would be quite something if he makes the Gore mistake and relies on sighing to let us know what he thinks of Trump.

AND: I created a "sighing" tag, and going back to add it to old posts, I discovered that I'd already remarked on Biden's sighing — and in the debate context. Of course, Biden was horrible in the debate he did in 2012 with Paul Ryan. The laughing, I remember well. But there was also sighing. From my simulblog of the event:

8:36: While Ryan is talking about Medicare helping his mother and grandmother, Biden sighs long and loud. Sighing! Remember when Gore got in no end of trouble for sighing? How can Biden not know that?!

"What about the Dingell Norwood bill?"

I'm reading a post by my son at Facebook:

Jennifer Rubin argues in the Washington Post that Biden’s opponents shouldn’t expect to take the lead by beating him in the primary debates. She gives historical examples, but see if you can find a flaw in her argument about the 2000 election:

"There are precious few instances in which a candidate’s debate performance destroyed his chances. President Gerald Ford’s infamous remark “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe . . . I don’t believe the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union" was the rare exception to the rule that a single answer can doom a candidates. Then-Vice President Al Gore’s sighing, eye-rolling and obvious disdain for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 general-election debates did him no favors, but it’s hard to conclude those debates were decisive in an election that was essentially a tie."

Here's how I responded to John over at Facebook:

It's maddening to hear that "it’s hard to conclude those debates were decisive in an election that was essentially a tie." If it is the case — and I think it is — that Gore ought to have won easily, then falling back to the tie position is a big difference. It's EASY to conclude the debates were decisive... or as we like to say around the house as shorthand for losing a debate "What about the Dingell Norwood bill?"

The Washington Post Super Bowl ad is a great ad for the product — journalism — but where can I get it — at The Washington Post?

There are ads that make you want to drink soda but don't make you want to drink the soda the ad is for. It may even drive you toward a competing brand....



Okay? So when The Washington Post offers this lofty paean to journalism at its most courageous and noble, I am touched...



... but it's with sadness and longing for something I don't believe I can ever have. And indeed, the ad itself exemplifies the problem because it puffs and deceives and lures and titillates. It deals in sentimentality and sensationalism. It's biased... in favor of itself — of course, like any ad. It has something to sell and it wants to bind us to the brand at an irrational level.

"There's someone to gather the facts, to bring you the story, no matter the costs. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide, Knowing keeps us free."  I love the ideal of journalism, and you don't have to help me deeply value it. You need to convince me that what you present in your paper is "the facts" and that reading it will help me "know."

It makes me think of that old quote from Mark Twain...

What gets us into trouble
is not what we don’t know
It’s what we know for sure
that just ain’t so

You may remember seeing that on screen in that Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," which gathered the facts and empowered us with knowledge about climate change.

And the great irony is that there is no substantive evidence that Mark Twain ever said that.

ADDED: About that Pepsi ad. I only vaguely saw it last night, but I'm watching it now on my computer screen. My vision is so poor that I had no idea that pudgy man in a beard was Steve Carell. But that ad has a race problem. Are people talking about that this morning?

A white woman orders a Coke and the white male waiter asks "Is Pepsi okay?" and Carell jumps up to berate him because he said "Is Pepsi okay?" in a bland, dull way. According to Carell, the waiter needs to  say "okay" differently. We are then shown 2 black pop stars — Lil Jon and Cardi B — and they say "okay" with intense enthusiasm. Carell then yells at the 2 white people, insisting that they express themselves in the style of Lil Jon and Cardi B.

I'm thinking, blackface.

The Pepsi ad also has a sexual harassment problem, and I guess we're not supposed to notice or care because the victim is a white male. Carell snaps his fingers, says "Let's role play," and instantly the young man is wearing nothing but his underpants. Even in the bad old days, was there ever an ad that sold a major product by showing a woman stripped down to her underwear at the snap of the fingers? That was sexual humiliation.

"The 1988 campaign was anything but kind and gentle. There was the racially charged Willie Horton ad, in which Bush attacked Michael Dukakis’s furlough program for Massachusetts prisoners."

"Bush’s opponents—and some of his friends—thought that he had cheapened himself in the bare-knuckled grasp of his young campaign manager, Lee Atwater. The opponents acted surprised, claimed they were disappointed in him, as if anyone ever got that far in the game without playing rough. (Al Gore had first gone after the furlough program, albeit without mentioning Horton, when running against Dukakis in the primaries.) Bush’s foes derided his résumé as a sort of gilded joke, reciting all the appointive offices he’d briefly held—U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Republican National Committee chairman, U.S. Special Representative to China, C.I.A. director—as if they were a string of presents meted out to some trust-fund boy who’d done nothing to earn them. In fact, Bush rose in the Party because of electoral, not appointive, politics. And he rose, curiously enough, by losing—twice, in Senate runs in a still-blue Texas, in 1964 and 1970.... Even when he tried to kick ass with the silver foot supposedly lodged in his mouth from birth, there remained an irreducible niceness to him, an appealing mixture of noblesse oblige, boy-next-door bonhomie, and parody-begging goofiness—'the vision thing.'... [K]inder and gentler was actually profound...."

From "The Irreducible Niceness of George H.W. Bush" by Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker.

Also in that article — a quote from Richard Nixon: "George is such a sweet guy."

"Tipper Gore's Diary" — a page from the January 1986 issue of Spin magazine.

This is something I hit on googling "joni mitchell lyrics peppermint" as I was blogging a magazine article about the loveliness of the Kate Spade retail store that contained the line "listening to Joni Mitchell and eating peppermints while we waited for customers." I had the feeling there was a Joni Mitchell song with the word "peppermints." I was wrong, but I love what I found looking for something that didn't exist:



In 1986, Al Gore was a Senator:

Gore was one of the Atari Democrats who were given this name due to their "passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the "greenhouse effect."... [H]e has been described as having been a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his days as a futurist Atari Democrat in the House. Before computers were comprehensible, let alone sexy, the poker-faced Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues."... Gore introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986....

At that time, his then-wife Tipper was on a Prince-triggered rampage against dirty lyrics:

In 1985, Tipper Gore co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC)... because Gore heard her then 11-year-old daughter Karenna playing "Darling Nikki" by Prince. The group's goal was to increase parental and consumer awareness of music that contained explicit content through voluntary labeling albums with Parental Advisory stickers... Gore explained that her purpose wasn't to put a "gag" on music, but to keep it safe for younger listeners by providing parents with information about the content of the songs. A number of individuals including Dee Snider of Twisted Sister,[21] Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, John Denver, Joey Ramone, and Frank Zappa criticized the group, arguing that it was a form of censorship....

What's John Denver doing on that list?!

Folk rock musician John Denver stated he was "strongly opposed to censorship of any kind in our society or anywhere else in the world", and that in his experience censors often misinterpret music, as was the case with his song "Rocky Mountain High"...

I presume that means the song was interpreted to refer to getting high on drugs.

When Denver came up to give his speech, many on the PMRC board expected him to side with them, thinking he would be offended by the lyrics as well...

He was offended by censorship (and agreed with the broad meaning of what counts as censorship).

Anyway, you can see why Spin magazine was making fun of Tipper Gore in 1986. Click the image of the article to enlarge it enough to read. There's some great stuff in there and a nice illustration by Sara Schwartz. I'll just leave you with the song title that made that article show up in my Google search, "Peppermint Stick" by The Elchords:



I'll leave it to you to decide whether that 1958 recording contains the line "Peppermint stick/Eat my dick."

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 2: The New Yorker.

The New Yorker, Disappointment....



(Click to enlarge.)

The New Yorker front page has an especially minimal look right now, and the headline on Franken — "Al Franken, Disappointment/The Democratic senator’s straight shooting contained other, darker secrets" — is accompanied by a harshly lit black and white photo (showing a tragic man so different from the smiling, breast-groping Franken we saw everywhere else). The key word is "disappointment." We had such hopes for you, Al, the New Yorker says.

The Roy Moore story is allowed to drop to the second row, paired with a story about a comedian who isn't Al Franken. And you have to go down to the third row — not pictured — to get the first mention of Trump, and that's in a story about the new café in the Tiffany store on 5th Avenue that's hard to access because it's next to Trump Tower.

Let's read "Al Franken, Disappointment." It's by Eric Lach, who's written about Al Franken in The New Yorker before, in "Can Al Franken Be a Funny Senator?" — a question that must have been intriguing last June, when it was published. That piece also contains obsolete material like:

Franken notes... how, during the Presidential campaign, Trump’s words—unfunny, offensive, untrue—didn’t hurt him with voters the way they would have hurt most politicians. It’s not a new observation, but the book begs the reader to consider that, while Trump was elected President even after the release of a recording in which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy,” Franken’s own Senate campaign worried about whether an old “Saturday Night Live” joke about Anne Frank—“I think a bad Hanukkah gift for Anne Frank would have been a drum set”—might be a real issue with voters.

The new article, which went up yesterday, is quite short. From the title, we expect it to express love for Al Franken, because you need a foundation of love before you can experience disappointment. "Disappointment" is the feeling a parent cites when giving a child a talking-to. Eric Lach begins with a discussion of Franken's penchant for "eviscerating"* witnesses at Senate hearing, then wonders how Franken would attack an apology as lame as the one Franken put out yesterday.

Franken, the comedian, had joked about his human flaws...

... “I only did cocaine so I could stay up late enough to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine,” Franken joked in his book—but if we acknowledge those flaws, and accept them, can’t we then go about the business of being good to one another? And yet for Franken, like Louis C.K. before him, it turns out that the public confessional routine was incomplete....

And that smile — which had seemed so "generous, winning, and wry" — became so "different" when he was mocking his easy access to the sleeping Leeann Tweeden.**

Lach moves on to Franken's second apology, the apology that "seemed to be trying to make amends*** for the first." It was too late to avert the "damage," Lach informs us, even as he nudges us to appreciate the second-apology junk about the need for a "national conversation":

“There’s more I want to say, but the first and most important thing—and if it’s the only thing you care to hear, that’s fine—is: I’m sorry.” In the “national conversation” about gender and power, the art of the male apology is still being perfected.

Did Franken say "national conversation" or are those scare quotes? I'd have to leave the New Yorker website to find out. That's pretty annoying. (And I've long been annoyed by the word "conversation" in political speech.)
_______________________

* "Eviscerating" is Franken's word, and in its nonfigurative original meaning, it is a violent intrusion on the body of another person — the tearing out of the internal organs. "I can’t help it,” Franken wrote. "I love getting these guys." Aggression, loved, enjoyed. I doubt if Franken was ever much good at physical fights with other men, but with the power of his elected office, he had the ability to "get these guys" and he exults in the pleasure. I mistrust everyone who seeks political power because I suspect they might have a psyche like that, but Franken delights in it — like a man smiling for the camera as he gropes for an incapacitated woman's breasts, something most men would only do furtively or not at all. The New Yorker author, in the first paragraph of the article, pats Franken on the back for his "show-business charisma and his passion for straight talk." (I wonder if Lach thought about how you could say the same thing about Trump's "grab them by the pussy" remark.)

** I was tempted to write "sleeping beauty," and it made me think of a New Yorker humor piece last week, by Blythe Roberson, "Disney Princes Reimagined as Feminist Allies." What about that prince that kisses Sleeping Beauty? She cannot consent. Here's how the humor was done just days before Franken's enjoyment of his access to a sleeping beauty:

Prince Phillip would never touch a woman without her consent. He knows that a woman in a magically induced coma cannot consent, even if she was flirting with him in the woods earlier, and even if they have been betrothed since birth. (He feels weird about the betrothed-since-birth thing, but doesn’t want to confront his conservative family about it, because it makes him uncomfortable.) Prince Phillip is horrified to hear that there are men in the kingdom who do not wait for a woman’s consent, and he issues a proclamation asking women to relive their traumas on social media, for the sake of “awareness.” He doesn’t talk to any of his bros about it because he knows that they are good dudes.

*** "Amends" sent me looking for Franken's old Stuart Smalley routines, and the one that popped up — "Um... I'd like to start the show... by making an amends" — had that other Al who got into sexual trouble, Al Gore. Speaking about disappointment, Stuart helps Gore talk about the disappointment of the 2000 election: [VIDEO DELETED]

Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.

"Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., is a fictional character appearing in the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine."

Jeremy Hillary Boob was originally named Jeremy Y. du Q. Adams, after Southern Methodist University professor Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams. The character of Jeremy was intended as a parody of public intellectuals and polymaths, most notably theatrical director and doctor, Jonathan Miller, whom story writer Lee Minoff had previously worked with. He is also alleged to have been inspired by Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne.

From 2016: "The Dallas Man Who Inspired Yellow Submarine's Jeremy Hillary Boob Has Died."

“What parents do to kids is awful,” [Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams] said in an interview with the Observer in June, 2015. Back in the '60s, he was going by Jeremy Y. du Q. Adams, which his friend Erich Segal, who invented the character, loved. The character’s name was originally Jeremy Y. du Boob before being changed to Jeremy Hillary Boob....

Apparently, "Hillary" is funnier than "Y. du Q."

"I agree with everything Jill Filipovic says about the barriers that society has created that keep women from responding appropriately to men who seek to harass or intimidate them."

Says a letter to the NYT editor about “Donald Trump Was a Creep. Too Bad Hillary Clinton Couldn’t Say That,” by Jill Filipovic (Sunday Review, Aug. 27). The letter-writer, George C. Thomas (of Warren, NJ) continues:

Missing from Ms. Filipovic’s account, however, is the inconvenient fact that for decades Hillary Clinton responded to allegations of sexual assault against her husband by denying those charges on his behalf and by vilifying the alleged victims.

I don’t know whether it’s ironic or pathetic (maybe it’s both) that Mrs. Clinton helped strengthen the barrier she confronted in the debate with Donald Trump.

Yes, that's true. I was just wondering aloud about whether Mrs. Clinton's book addresses this difficulty, not that I have the slightest hope that it does, but I'd love to hear what she'd say about this if she ever really did "let [her] guard down" (as she claims she is doing in the new book).

Another letter to the editor about the Filopovic piece, from Pamela Rothstein in Falmouth, Massachusetts, says:

My response now, as it was back then, focuses on the one action that could prevent such behavior in political debates: a clear, definitive directive that candidates remain at their chair or lectern when it is not their turn to speak. Period. No moving around. No stalking. No intimidating.

Ms. Filipovic says that the moderators did not instruct Mr. Trump to physically back off, arguing, “It would have been uncomfortable, and they would have faced accusations of bias.” It is time for debate organizers to step up and accept responsibility for preventing a repeat of such behavior.

Rothstein doesn't seem to realize that viewers look forward to seeing how the candidate moves around. We have an animal-level instinctive judgment that we like to get a chance to exercise. We got a lot out of the difference between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in this segment of a debate in 1992. We feel as though we're learning something about the candidate's humanity (or lack thereof). Do we have a real person or an uncanny-valley simulacrum?

If a candidate moves around the wrong way, he's hurting himself. In my all-time favorite debate clip, the candidate who moves into the other person's space — and apparently thinks his behavior is winning — makes a terrible impression (and the other guy scores brilliantly with a slight nod):

Chuck Berry on Belgian television in 1965.

I enjoyed watching this:



Then YouTube fed me this: Chuck Berry (and Little Richard) at the Bill Clinton inauguration (in 1993). Shots of Clinton and Gore in the audience are hilarious:

"It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled."

"It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’"

So Hillary admits that she couldn't think of what to do under pressure. She needs a pause button. Is that like a reset button? There's no such thing. I mean you can vandalize the hotel hot tub to get a plastic button to call whatever you want — the Make Me President button — but it doesn't work.



More from the leaked excerpts to the memoir we're not all going to buy when it comes out in a few weeks:

"I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off."

The writer assumes the reader will not immediately think: Bill Clinton!

"I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard," she wrote. 

The writer assumes the reader will not think: phallic symbol.

“I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”

If you present an endlessly smiling controlled face to the world and choose to say nothing, people won't know what you think, won't trust you, and — since you're asking to be our President — won't be able to rely on you to speak for us. If you're that afraid to come up with an apt response to someone who's being intimidating, how do you have what it takes to be President? You think if you said something, it might be bad, so best to say nothing?

Look how easy it was for George W. Bush to push back Al Gore's overbearing physical encroachment during a debate:



Perfect. That nod. Everyone laughed. Nobody thought Bush seemed unpresidentially peevish. I still laugh every time I play that clip. And I play it a lot.

UPDATE: I have more to say about "back up you creep" here.

"Second, we need to ban taxpayer-funded air travel to conferences."

"State legislatures could ban reimbursement for travel outside their states; Congress could require that no federal grant money be spent on air travel to conferences and similar events. A lot of academic conferences would fail, but that’s a small price to pay for saving the planet. And besides, it will encourage the development of Internet-based conference alternatives. A whole new industry might result: Green jobs!"

From a list of 4 climate-change proposals that Glenn Reynolds says ought to come first, from the elite, to show they really believe what they want ordinary people to believe.

And don't let these people buy their way out of the carbon sins, in the manner preened about by Al Gore, here:



"And what carbon emissions come from my trips... are offset. I live a carbon-free lifestyle, to the maximum extent possible."

Gore's idea of what is possible is so ludicrously crabbed that I don't know why he has any hope of solving any problems at all. He's already hit the maximum by buying carbon offsets?!! Well, he's got the money. And by the way, doesn't Al Gore make money from people buying carbon offsets??

Al Gore says: "I live a carbon-free lifestyle to the maximum extent possible."

When confronted by Jake Tapper over his hypocrisy, today on "State of the Union":



A carbon-free lifestyle?! It's an oxymoron. I love when a guy who has been scolding us for almost 2 decades about our ignorance of science says something so blatantly absurd. If he were "carbon-free," he would not exist as a living physical entity.

I know the claim is something like "carbon neutral." All his carbon emissions are, he claims, "offset." You'll just have to take his word for that and back off, climate deniers.

Here's an article in Scientific American, "Can People Really Have Carbon-Neutral Lives?/Learn how you can work toward having zero climate impact."

ADDED: Transcript:

"The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking... 'Couldn't you hear what Mother NATURE! was screaming at you?'"

Lots of Trump in that trailer for "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power." And, ironically, Al Gore seems to be trying to TALK! like Trump.

"And... I see the climate science skeptics within the scientific community as being similar to Shy Trump Supporters."

"The fact that a majority of scientists agree with climate science either means the evidence is one-sided or the social/economic pressures are high. And as we can plainly see, the cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist. While it is true that a scientist can become famous and make a big difference by bucking conventional wisdom and proving a new theory, anything short of total certainty would make that a suicide mission. And climate science doesn’t provide the option of total certainty.To put it another way, it would be easy for a physicist to buck the majority by showing that her math worked. Math is math. But if your science depends on human judgement to decide which measurements to include and which ones to 'tune,' you don’t have that option. Being a rebel theoretical physicist is relatively easy if your numbers add up. But being a rebel climate scientist is just plain stupid. So don’t expect to see many of the latter. Scientists can often be wrong, but rarely are they stupid."

From "The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science" by Scott Adams, who has surprised me by reopening his comments section. (I'd believed his notice that his comments were "temporarily" closed was a funny way to say they were permanently closed. (In the manner of "Is never good for you?"))

And while we're on the subject of climate change, here's an article on what Al Gore said about his meeting with Ivanka Trump.

"I appreciate the fact that she is very concerned about this." Gore... called it a "very intelligent exchange."

Ivanka Trump has singled out environmental regulation as her primary policy focus as an incoming first daughter, despite her father's past claims that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, in recent days said Trump's "default position" on the topic was that “most of it is a bunch of bunk.”

Gore also met with Trump:

“It was a sincere search for areas of common ground.... I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I'm just going to leave it at that.”

Gore was sent to Ivanka first, and then to Trump. Interesting theater. Gore must be tempted to make himself relevant again, and the Trumps must see a use for him. It's political theater, and Gore is a big ham, no? How can he resist the charm of the Ivanka-and-Donald routine?

Not much talk about the popular vote.

Is that odd? It looks as though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but there's little talk about that. I guess we Americans understand the Electoral College. I think it's obvious that if Trump had been going for the popular vote, he would have campaigned in California and New York. There were stores of potential votes that could have been opened up in many places. Clinton too could have drummed up more votes in states she couldn't win or in states she knew she'd win by a wide margin. The popular vote is a stray statistic relating to a game that wasn't played.

Do Americans understand that much better than we did in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote? Probably not. What was different in 2000 that generated so much talk about the popular vote was that the Electoral College vote was decided by such a narrow edge that it felt like a tie, and the popular vote seemed to point at the fairer outcome. I mean, it seemed that way if you were for Gore.

But the Electoral College is decisive this time, and that is how the Electoral College usually functions, sparing us the delay and anxiety of nationwide recounts.