This morning on the Today show, former vice president Al Gore claimed that "our democracy has been hacked."
"There are some things I miss about it, yes," said Gore, in response to a question about whether he misses politics. "And I continue to speak out on issues. But one of the themes of this book, Matt, is that our democracy has been hacked. That's a computer term, of course, that implies control of the way our political system works has been taken over. In this case, by big money, corporations designated as persons, anonymous donors. And big money is having a corrupting influence and it is degrading the quality of our democracy."
Lawrence Haas, a former communications director to Al Gore, explains that if Barack Obama chooses Chuck Hagel to be his secretary of defense, it would show a certain comfort with his views:
After the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Al Gore blamed the president's poor performance on the altitude of Denver, the city that hosted that match.
Former Vice President Al Gore, reacting to the debate:
"Obama arrived in Denver at 2 p.m. today — just a few hours before the debate started," Gore said on his network, Current. "Romney did his debate prep in Denver. When you go to 5,000 feet, and you only have a few hours to adjust, I don't know..."
"The president had an off night," a pundit on the liberal network said.
Former vice president Al Gore previews the "new version of the slideshow" on climate change in an interview with TakePart.com. "[E]very night on the news now, practically, is like a nature hike through the book of Revelations," Gore says in the excerpt released this morning.
Friends of former vice president Al Gore tell the New York Times that he "is mostly at peace these days with losing the presidency in 2000." The observation comes a dozen years after Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to President George W. Bush.
The other night on Current TV, former vice president Al Gore said to the host of Countdown with Keith Olbermann that America needs to work toward the “reinvigoration of democracy.”
“We need to have an American spring,” Gore said. “You know, the Arab Spring—the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet—but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.”
The way Alyssa Kent described the work of her school’s environmental group, Campus Greens, was almost quaint. “We’re building a garden, and we’re going to supply the lettuce that we grow to the school cafeteria,” said Kent, a junior at Wells College in Aurora, New York. “And we’re about to start a clean up. It’s just, like, a garbage pick-up.”
At last night's opening of the 2011 Power Shift conference in Washington, an annual gathering of student environmental activists sponsored by the Sierra Club, former Vice President Al Gore ginned up the crowd of college students by noting how many more floods there were around the world in the last year. This, Gore said, was a clear example of how global warming and climate change is affecting our world. He brought up the Nashville floods as one such instance: