I'm at my computer right now. It's in an upstairs office -- a converted bedroom -- in my home in Sacramento. I haven't been out of my house in a few days. I'm trapped by smoke drifting into the valley. I'm one of those "sensitive" to air pollution (I have mild asthma), so I'm pretty well stuck until our air clears.

In an interview scheduled to air Sunday, Jimmy Carter told George Stephanopoulos he wants Al Gore to run in 2008, but that he's worried Gore won't do it.

ABC's Political Radar blog quotes President Carter:

. . . . "If Al should decide to run -- which I'm afraid he won't -- I would support Al Gore."

The former Democratic President asserted Gore could accomplish much more in the White House than he ever could as a private citizen, saying to Stephanopoulos, "His burning issue now is global warming and preventing it.  He can do infinitely more to accomplish that goal as in the incumbent in the White House, than he can making even movies that get -- you know, that get Oscars."

The chief spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney, Steve Schmidt, left the United States Oct. 3 and won't return until Oct. 26, just as the investigation into who outed a covert CIA agent wraps up, RAW STORY has confirmed.

Schmidt has left for Iraq. A RAW STORY email sent to Schmidt's private White House address Tuesday yielded this reply: "I will be out of the country from October 3rd through October 26th and will have VERY limited email access. For assistance, please contact Jon Berrier at 202-XXX-XXXX. Thank you."

read the rest at Raw Story

We just picked him up. He spent a good half hour unloading swag he picked up from the medical schools and associations attending the conference and telling us about the cool NIH program he'd like to attend in a couple of years.

NOT SO COOL, he said, were all the military recruiters. A number of his fellow 9th graders gave these recruiters their names, addresses, phone numbers, much to his dismay and despite his efforts to talk some sense into them. I guess that 14-year-olds are now fair game.

According to the Kevin Alfred Strom of the neo-Nazi web publication National Vanguard, the sweet Aryan lass -- "a lovely White woman seated in a field of flowers. She has no Black arm around her. She is part of no multiracial "team." Her fair skin is softly shining in the lights as you get closer. She is the image of natural beauty, innocence, wholesomeness. You notice she bears the symbol of life on her simple White dress" -- is pictured on one of three highway billboards currently sponsored by this group nationwide.

I read somewhere on dKos yesterday that Al Franken, who broadcast his show from CPAC on Thursday and Friday, had had a "meltdown" and thrown a chair at Michael Medved.

Here's what really happened: Medved invited Franken to come be interviewed on his show, but kinda sorta forgot to tell him that Swift Boat Liars' John O'Neill would also be present.

Franken objected, telling Medved that if he'd known in advance that O'Neill would also appear, he would have had time to prepare.

SusanG helped recruit a crack team of data researchers/enterers and now the database has nearly 100 different people and 90 different organizations.

I've been Googling this for a while. During the 2004 campaign season, the "first gay president" meme wasn't limited only to Mr. G's speculation, nor was it limited to wink-wink-nudge-nudging about JK. Even Shrub got labeled as "the first gay president."

Here's what I've got so far:

[editor's note, by marisa] Fiat Lux corrected my attribution of the breakfast; it was sponsored by California Democratic Clubs.

Scanning Scam-O-Rama doesn't yield much new data for the average obsessive Kossack. What is different, however, is that it's written by a Republican lawyer. Ortiz writes in his (truly refreshing) profile:

For example, yesterday someone liberal there referred to "Bushwhackers," meaning the people in the Bush administration. A couple of the wingers then objected to this term, calling it personally insulting. They claimed that that particular thread was evidence of a "poisonous atmosphere."

Here's Shrub's "pro-choice rhetoric":

Hey, he said it! I heard him! That kind of thing is pure Rovian gold (if the left did that kinda thing).

He shoulda talked to Oklahoma senator James Inhofe. Inhofe would have set him straight: you don't go to war with the Army you want, you go to war with the war that Clinton wants!

More from yesterday's Muskogee (Oklahoma) Phoenix article, Inhofe says Clinton's cuts made Iraq mess below:

Bite us.

Signed, your long-term employer.

From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

This felt good, empowering. We were doing something. We were coming together! We were moving on! We were ACTIVISTS! So what the heck happened?