Al Gore is looking awfully good right now. Josh Marshall thinks he has a shot at the presidency; Blog of the Moderate Left has an interesting ranking of potential candidates, and while he puts Gore at #5, he says this:

Last time around, I said, “I just don’t see Al running, and I really don’t see Al winning.” I think both of those statements may be wrong. He’s pure on the left, he’s got a film about global warming in the hopper, he seems to have found his passion for the issues again. Like Nixon in ’68, he’s tanned, he’s rested, he’s ready. And he’s the best-situated candidate to play Anti-Hillary in 2008. The only question is if he’ll run. So far he says no—but nobody will hold it against him if in, say, January of 2008, he tells us he feels he must run…for America.

I unreservedly cast my vote for Gore last time he ran (although I had a great many reservations about Lieberman), and I’d do it again. I’ve just seen the trailer for his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription…is more Al Gore. A president who actually cares about science, and pays attention to good science? Sign me up.

That nice guy Chris Clarke has written a paean to speaking one’s mind. It’s wonderfully not-nice.

My point: it is not civil to discuss things quietly and collegially while people are dying because they can’t afford medicine. It is not civil to speak in even, chuckling sardonicism as one beleaguered wild place after another is paved for profit. It is not civil to calmly raise logical arguments against torture, against kidnapping, against using nuclear weapons on civilians to show our resolve.

There’s also a bit in there about “Minnesota Nice liberals.” I should explain that when you first come to Minnesota, you discover that everyone is unflaggingly polite, they smile, they rarely utter a cross word, and even in the most dire situations they struggle to say something positive. It seems admirable at first, but after a while you discover it is a mask covering some of the meanest, most petty, passive-aggressive backbiting you’ll ever experience, as well as a way to justify some seriously screwed up opinions. I have actually heard a Minnesota WWII veteran tell me that Hitler’s Germany was a nice and tidy place, and that maybe he wasn’t all bad.

I’m all for outrage! Especially since lately there have been a few too many commenting whiners who are getting pissy because I think goose-stepping theocrats are evil, or that creationists are idiots, or that politicians who monitor our phone calls are tyrannical scumbags. If you’re complaining because I don’t compromise in damning these people, rather than complaining about what they do, the problem isn’t me: it’s your superficiality.

Take heart, everyone, the magic number today is 29%—less than one third of our American compatriots are insane or stupid!

Now we just have to worry that that 29% will become increasingly desperate and vicious, like cornered weasels.

I’ve been catching up with the blogs, and I’m seeing outrage over the revelation that the NSA has been carrying out wide-spectrum data mining of the American people…that it hasn’t just been surveillance of suspected terrorists. You know, if everyone would just read Gary Farber, you’d have known this five months ago. That’s how data mining works. Now people are trying to argue that we knew it all along, so it’s OK—but this is exactly what the administration has spent the last several months denying.

It’s not just the surveillance. It’s the lying. Well, the obtuseness, too.

Need something to talk about while I’m on the road? I think Atrios’s post on positive things for progressive bloggers to advocate (which is also echoed by Drum) is an excellent starting point. These are good things that set us apart from them; these are the kinds of ideas we should be talking about. Any right wing trolls want to oppose any of these proposals?

• Undo the bankruptcy bill enacted by this administration
• Repeal the estate tax repeal
• Increase the minimum wage and index it to the CPI
• Universal health care (obviously the devil is in the details on this one)
• Increase CAFE standards. Some other environment-related regulation
• Pro-reproductive rights, getting rid of abstinence-only education, improving education about and access to contraception including the morning after pill, and supporting choice. On the last one there’s probably some disagreement around the edges (parental notification, for example), but otherwise.
• Simplify and increase the progressivity of the tax code
• Kill faith-based funding. Certainly kill federal funding of anything that engages in religious discrimination.
• Reduce corporate giveaways
• Have Medicare run the Medicare drug plan
• Force companies to stop underfunding their pensions. Change corporate bankruptcy law to put workers and retirees at the head of the line with respect to their pensions.
• Leave the states alone on issues like medical marijuana. Generally move towards “more decriminalization” of drugs, though the details complicated there too.
• Paper ballots
• Improve access to daycare and other pro-family policies. Obiously details matter.
• Raise the cap on wages covered by FICA taxes.
• Marriage rights for all, which includes “gay marriage” and quicker transition to citizenship for the foreign spouses of citizens.

These are also good general values sorts of proposals.

• Torture is bad
• Imprisoning citizens without charges is bad
• Playing Calvinball with the Geneva Conventions and treaties generally is bad
• Imprisoning anyone indefinitely without charges is bad
• Stating that the president can break any law he wants any time “just because” is bad

I left out Atrios’ joking suggestion that we jail Goldstein. Who would take care of his kid?

The poor man is inundated with hateful email. People don’t like him, they’re angry at George Bush, they accuse him of being Bush’s lapdog (a charge he denies, but Digby provides the evidence—hatefully, no doubt), and he just can’t understand why (at least I can answer that one: it’s because he’s not very bright).

Cohen can whine all he wants about the fact that people don’t like him, but here’s the charge to which I must take strong exception:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

Oh, yeah—don’t be angry, you’ll lose! And please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch, Br’er Fox!

I despise George W. Bush, and I’m extremely angry at the direction the Republican party has taken my country. That, it seems to me, is the appropriate response; why would anyone with my best interests at heart suggest otherwise? We’re in the middle of a morass of a war that was started by those assholes on the basis of an error (charitably) or pure venality and stupidity (most likely), our people are dying, the Middle East has become more unstable, and what are we supposed to do? Nod pleasantly at the nice oilmen, sit back and enjoy our high fat diets and cable TV, and try to be placid? That’s insane. We should be angry. We should be fighting back. We should be standing up with veins throbbing at our temples, shouting at the tepid Democrats who want our votes that they damn well better wake up and oppose the status quo. Cohen himself says that “Institution after institution failed America—the presidency, Congress and the press”…and we’re not supposed to be furious about that? We’re not supposed to demand change?

As for the Vietnam War—I remember that. I remember the demonstrations and the college campuses lighting up with howls of protest. I remember the dead every night on the television news. That’s also a war the people wanted to stop, and we screamed at the top of our lungs until they heard us. We were so loud that Nixon had to promise “peace with honor” and to “end the war and win peace” to get elected. In the 60s and 70s, that vigorous opposition had even the Republicans admitting that they somehow had to end that wasteful war; have you noticed how quiet the campuses and city streets are now, and how no one in power is admitting their failures yet? The message of Vietnam is that we need to mobilize more anger and stir up more strenuous, vocal opposition.

It’s the lapdogs of the administration, the tools of the destructive status quo, whose job it is to quell the angry mob. Rise up and scream, people, ignore the lackeys of the Right who want you to be ashamed of righteous fury.

With charts and a zombie!