I steer clear of cable news, much the way I try to avoid toxic fumes or rabid dogs.  But Jon Stewart's recent anthology of clips featuring the idio-punditocracy's use of "card" to describe every tactic by either campaign – culminating, of course, with McCain's playing of the "race card," helped me realize something.

The "race card" has virtually nothing to do with defining Obama and everything to do with McCain defining himself.

You may have seen today's NYT article titled "Gore Wants U.S. to Abandon Fossil Fuels by 2018."  Obama has already hailed Gore's speech, which was delivered at a D.C. energy conference; no doubt the cable news shows are already asqueak with the outraged cries of Lilliputians and the dismissive laughter of pundits who make Homer Simpson look like a geophysicist. That's why I don't watch cable news.

Gore's prescription is typically powerful and bears his characteristic mix of gravity and optimism.  But what really struck me was a quote in which Gore pithily connects our ecological, economic and security problems in one tidy formula.  See below the fold.

Pardon me if this is diaried elsewhere; I did a search and didn't see it.

I called Sen. Boxer's office yesterday to urge her to vote no.  Today she e-mailed constituents outlining her opposition and providing links to video and a transcript.  A few highlights:

An expanded version of this diary is cross-posted at Very Hot Jews.

This year, as ever, a lot of us will participate in a ritual that celebrates freedom. And as always, we'll be asked to consider the ways in which we're still somehow enslaved – to our obsessions, our emotional baggage, our chemical dependencies and other bad habits.

Like every year, we'll be enjoined to recall our people's past sufferings and – at least at our table – to consider how we are obligated to witness and, if possible, alleviate the sufferings of Jews and non-Jews alike, everywhere in the world.

We'll parse the symbolic importance of the items on our seder plates, and the youngest child (ever more precocious and performance-oriented) will charmingly enunciate the four questions about why this night is different from all others.

But I've got a question of my own (I can't help it – I'm the youngest sibling myself): How will this year be different from all others?

Cross-posted at VeryHotJews

Dude.

A ton of ink has been spilled, already, on your stupid zipper moment: How law-and-order types are invariably heavy-breathing hypocrites. How you've set the cause of government reform back 20 years. How powerful men can't keep it in their pants. How you're roadkill in the Justice Department's illegal wiretap war on Democrats.

There are so many valid (and stupid) points to be chewed upon, and the mighty termites of the fourth estate are masticating busily as we speak.

But if we may, we'd like to ask a question that no one seems to have considered.

You paid HOW MUCH?

A message from the Union of Concerned Plutocrats

Dear "Citizens,"

It’s come to our attention that many of you are considering casting your vote for the Negro, or even – Heaven help us –Mc the female.  This must not occur.  Since our efforts to manipulate election technology have been bungled by our incompetent henchmen, we have no alternative but to press the point in starker terms.

Vote for John McCain or we will detonate the sun.

Dear Hillary,

This is a painful letter to write.

We've known each other a long time, and I like to think that we've meant something to each other.  But we've both changed over the years, and we just don't see things the same way anymore.  

It's not you.  It's me.  

Well, that's not entirely true.  The fact is, there's someone else.  

Cross-posted at Very Hot Jews

OK, campers — time for today's thought exercise.

Pretend, just for a moment, that the President of your country is a total douchebag. A smirking bigot who milks religious prejudice for political gain. An anti-Semitic, homophobic jerkwad who treats indisputable scientific and historical facts as, at best, untested hypotheses. A tyrannical hyena who fecklessly utters terrifying threats against sovereign nations. A power-mongering shitheel who's gutpunched a modern country until it staggered backward in the direction of the Middle Ages.

I know, I know. But try to picture it. Stretch that long imagination of yours!

Cross-posted (you should pardon the expression) at Very Hot Jews

Of all the many kinds of abuse and addiction now available — because America is the greatest country in the world — Jews are most predisposed to prescription pill abuse. This is in part because we tend to view physicians as deities and will greedily swallow any bolus that comes in a little amber RX bottle.

We're also likely to gulp down sleeping pills, because we worry a lot and the wee hours tend to be when the little anxiety factory we call the brain starts mass-producing visions of loved ones dying in flaming wrecks or hangnails turning into metastatic cancer.

Not that we Yids are alone.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain are toast, and Iraq is the toaster.  We know this, though the hoary old political experts — who think of themselves as heartland pulse-takers — are still in the dark.  

Before things go any further, I want to be very clear: I oppose the hanging of George W. Bush.

True, the man has shown himself to be a menace to the entire globe, a shambling sociopath incapable of uttering the truth or acknowledging another's pain, an unrecovered addict with messianic delusions who spread death and pestilence wheree'er he stepped. He has drunkenly piloted the ship of state toward the rocks, and because of him we are likely doomed.

But he should be tried by an international court and, if convicted, sent to prison for the remainder of his uncontemplative life.  That's how we do things in the civilized world.

Hence my concern about the recent New Orleans tribunal, taking place as it did in a waterlogged former brothel — with evidence permitted only from left-wing blogs, lesbian poets and "conscious" rappers.  And hence my distaste at the verdict: Bush and his cohorts, Cheney and Rove, must hang before the Super Bowl.

Well, guess what, Republican party?  This is your Monica moment.

I think it would be a lovely thing if the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress this November, and I imagine you agree.

But what can we do to affect the outcome, beyond voting?

We can raise money ourselves.

The Republican Party Is the Party of Death.

There, I said it.

They promised us a culture of life, of course.  Remember that?  It turns out they don't talk about life except in code.  "Life," wink wink, means anti-abortion.  "Life," nudge nudge, means anti-evolution, anti-birth control, anti-music, anti-movies, anti-games, except games of death, of course.  "Life" means pro-death penalty.