Environmentalists From The United States

"[Y]ou have to understand that therapeutic cloning is a very nascent technology that's not ready for use in humans. But knowing that it will not . . . provided our scientists are allowed to go ahead with the research, it really shouldn't take that long before they're ready for humans. However, knowing that there is a better technology out there than just using embryonic stemcells, he as a doctor feels, given the immune rejection problem for people with spinal cord injuries, he's not going to go ahead, as he had planned to. There was a plan to actually use embryonic stem cells as soon as it would be allowed by the FDA. He is not going to do that until therapeutic cloning gets to the point where it could be applied to humans. And I just want to make one other very quick comment and that is in England, just a month ago, Dr. Ann Bishop, who works with the tissue engineering corporation over there, was able to take mouse embryonic stem cells that derived . . . had been made obviously therapeutic cloning, and they turned those cells into tissue that is applied to the lungs, to deficient cell types or cell tissues in the lungs, and said, have already reported, I guess it's public knowledge, that they feel they are now ready to do it in humans, so the idea that it would be decades before you could get to human application, I think that is one example I'm giving you right now of the fact that that's not true. I can give you another example. Doctor Oswald Stewart, of the Reeve Research Center, UC Irvine has said that you could probably get to the use of therapeutic cloning in humans within about three to five years. So I absolutely dispute the time line that's been put up before."

"I work with Dr. John McDonald at Washington University in St. Louis, and he is a very knowledgeable researcher on (Inaudible) stem cells, and a few years ago he said to me that in order to cure my particular condition, which is demyelination of nerves in a very small area of the spinal cord, right at the second cervical vertebrae, that if you imagine the rubber coating around a wire that allows conductivity of electricity, the same thing as with nerves, myelin is like that rubber coating. It's a fatty substance that if it comes off of the nerves, then signals do not go from the brain down to the spinal cord as required. However, it is possible, and he's demonstrated this as graphic(?) as possible, to re-myelinate. Now, a few years ago, he said, we would be willing to inject human embryonic stem cells into you and hope for the best. But hoping for the best is a very dangerous proposition for people with spinal cord injuries because our spinal cord injury affects every organ in the body, and the most serious side effect is that it severely compromises the immune system, so spinal cords patients, particularly with high level injuries like mine, are prone first to pneumonia, which I've had at least five times since my injury, many patients often die from that. Also, it compromises the cardiovascular system, compromises the digestive tract, the ... your whole bowel-bladder-sexual function, skin integrity and also bone density, so that osteoporosis becomes a very ... a very critical factor. So literally he said to me that the immunosuppression that would be required just to inject 30million human embryonic stem cells from an anonymous donor might kill me. And now, he would be unwilling as a doctor, because of the ethics involved that a doctor is ethically bound to give his patients the best possible treatment, he would not inject me with embryonic stemcells unless we go the other route, which is therapeutic cloning- taking an egg, removing the nucleus, taking DNA from my skin and deriving stem cells from that, which would be injected in a manner that would probably not be rejected by my immune system. So my future, and others would agree, many scientists would agree, my future, in terms of being able to recover will depend on some way of delivering stem cells without compromising my immune system and therapeutic cloning, which would use my DNA is the best hope."

"If nucleus transplantation, aka therapeutic cloning, is banned, it will be a tremendous setback for science, and it will be indefinitely ... it will indefinitely prolong the suffering of hundreds of millions around the world, who are afflicted with wide variety of diseases and disabilities."

"[N]ever in the history of science have we been given such a gift of being able to use cells that can become any tissue or cell type in the body for the purpose of healing. I think that if you do not have the combination of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells, you are going to be condemning a lot of people to unnecessary and death. If I look around at what else is going on, for years just in the spinal cord community, there has been research on growth factors and Schwann cells, and there have been efforts to stop protein inhibitor, but they have not yet shown the same promise that the embryonic stem cells do, and at the moment, in two places, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California at Irvine, researchers have been conducting very successful experiments using human embryonic stem cells in animal models in both the acute and chronic phases and getting recovery. Of course, they are going to have to move to the higher animal forms before humans, but the promise is absolutely extraordinary, and I cannot think of any other kind of therapy that would be as effective and as promising as this is. And when I read articles or hear people say that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is dubious, I am very disturbed, because the only reason they get to say that is because the NIH has not been allowed to spend a single dollar on embryonic stem cell research. They have a budget now of $25 billion, and yet, because of lack of guidelines and because of the restrictions that have been imposed on the NIH so far, not one human embryonic stem cell project has been federally funded. That is why you are seeing such slow progress. And if we continue that way, I am going to be in this wheelchair for a long time that I do not need to be, and others like me."

"[A] scientist at Washington University, Dr. John McDonald, whom I have been working with says that there is no way he would inject stem cells without being able to use my own DNA for safety reasons. So without the ability to use my own DNA, without that somatic cell transfer, I am out of luck. The other thing is to please remember that therapeutic cloning, nucleus transplantation, is done with unfertilized eggs. You keep referring to destroying an embryo. I think that destroying an embryo is what happens when the leftovers from fertility clinics are thrown out. We can agree that they go to the garbage routinely. But to say that an unfertilized egg has the same status, I believe is incorrect, and I think that this is the line of research that holds so much promise and can also get us around the ethical quandary that we keep putting ourselves in. We are talking about an unfertilized egg that will never leave the lab, that will never be implanted in a womb, and that can be regulated. And it is crucial for research."

"I need to object, and that is that, Senator, you insist on separating therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells. However, in my own case, I require re-myelination of nerves. That means replacing the conductive coat of fat, myelin, that allows electricity to come down, currents from the brain to the central nervous system for function. At the moment, only embryonic stem cells have the potential to do that, and experiments are being done now in larger animals demonstrating that."

"[J]ust on a daily basis, the Government is saying to people that, yes, there is a threat of terror, but fly and go to the theater and live your life and take that risk, because every day, you hear about fighter escorts having to take some airplane back to the airport because there was another bomb threat. People are boarding airplanes, passing security checkpoints, and then found to be carrying dangerous material - but still we go on. So yes, you take a risk that somebody somewhere could get involved in creating a human out of reproductive cloning, but it is not at all likely, and to be afraid of pursuing therapeutic cloning is really going to be reprehensible, because you cannot use embryonic stem cells for therapy without being able to use therapeutic cloning — it will not work."

"If you believe in the slippery slope here, it means that our entire society is perched on the slippery slope. It means that regulation has no value whatsoever, and that is not true. Now, there are always consequences. We allow 16-year-olds to get driver's licenses, and a lot of them have accidents - but do we rescind the permission to drive a car at 16? No."

"Today, human trials to defeat Parkinson's are underway in Sweden. In Israel, macrophages, scavenger cells that eat debris in the body, are being used to repair the damaged spinal cord within 2 weeks of injury. The first human subject was a 19-year-old girl from Colorado. Last week, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom passed legislation permitting research on cloned human embryos for the second time. Those are not rogue nations behaving irresponsibly. They are allies, no less moral than we are."

"Today, 100 million Americans suffer from serious or currently incurable diseases. Fifty-four million Americans are disabled. Our Government is supposed to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Beyond that, we have a moral responsibility to help others. Time is absolutely critical. If the Government forces scientists' attempt to make adult stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells, they might waste 5 years or more and fail. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands will have died. Why do we need therapeutic cloning? As a layman, several important reasons come to mind. One, implantation of human embryonic stem cells is not safe unless they contain the patient's own DNA. Two, efforts, to repair central nervous system disorders may need to recapitulate the process of fetal development, and that could only be accomplished by human embryonic stem cells. Three, therapeutic cloning is done without fertilizing an egg. It can be strictly regulated. If we also enforce an absolute ban on reproductive cloning, we will not slide down the dreaded slippery slope into moral and ethical chaos. Any powerful new technology comes with the possibility for abuse. But when we decide that the benefit to society is worth the risk, we take every possible precaution and go forward. The unfertilized eggs that will be used for nucleus transplantation will never leave the laboratory and will never be implanted in a womb. But if we do not make this research legal, if we do not use Government funding and oversight, it will happen privately, dangerous, unregulated and uncontrolled. And our country is about to lose its preeminence in science and medicine. We took a giant step backward in the 1970's when the NIH was not allowed to fund its in vitro research until an advisory commission could be formed to consider the issue. In the meantime, there was rapid progress in England, and the first test tube baby was born in 1978. For purely political reasons, we did not succeed and so far, 177,000 children have been conceived in 400 facilities around the country."

"For the record, I am a C-2 ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, which means that I am paralyzed from the shoulders down and unable to breathe on my own. For the last 7 years, I have not been able to eat, wash, go to the bathroom, or get dressed by myself. Some people are able to accept living with a severe disability. I am not one of them, and that is why I have a keen interest in research and am deeply disturbed by unreasonable attempts to block scientific progress. The fact that the House of Representatives banned cloning last year without careful deliberation makes the Senate debate a matter of great urgency."

"The prosperity that we've enjoyed in the 90's has spawned a new breed of individuals who have amassed tremendous fortunes at a very young age. Many of them have reaped the rewards of a stock market that seems to have no upper limit. Others have moved swiftly into the fast lane of the information superhighway, and achieved a net worth in the billions long before their 40th birthday. Often they literally don't know what to do with that much money. Unfortunately, philanthropy is not something many of them perceive as an important responsibility of the wealthy. While of course there are a number of notable exceptions, too many of these young billionaires become obsessed with privacy and are more likely to build half a dozen homes in different parts of the world than to give back to society. In the early years of this century, the notion of what it meant to be a "gentleman" informed the actions of the very rich - the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and the like. They too built "cottages" in Newport, and enjoyed their yachts. But they also created foundations, endowed universities, built hospitals and libraries, and donated land for public use. I don't think it's a wild stretch of the imagination to believe that if they knew that 300 million dollars would cure paralysis in 5 years instead of 15, they would have reached for their checkbooks. But we must not wallow in nostalgia for the Gilded Age, when in fact, there is so much potential in the present. Ten corporations could each give 30 million dollars without any undue hardship. When people ask me what are my hopes and dreams for the new Millennium, my answer is I hope technology will not diminish genuine human contact and compassion. I still believe that when people really make the effort to understand each other, the possibilities are limitless. The solutions to the problems we will face in the 21st century --- such as overpopulation, the environment, education, and disease --- will only be achieved by every one of us doing our part. We must appeal to the government, the private sector, venture capitalists, corporations of all sizes, and every individual who can only afford to give 5 dollars to help further the cause. You in the media can lead the way by creating awareness and affecting public opinion. In the last hundred years, we invented the automobile, the airplane, and weapons of mass destruction. We journeyed to the moon and built shiny new cities throughout the country. We concerned ourselves with material success, convenience, and a higher standard of living. Now it's time for America to take care of its own. The life expectancy for Americans has practically doubled over the course of this century. Now it is our responsibility to ensure that from cradle to grave, these years are ones of quality and productivity, not pain and suffering. The time is now, at the dawn of a new Millennium."

"Sitting in a chair for more than 4 years now has given me plenty of time to think about many of the distorted and irrational values in our society. For example, all the researchers now agree that the damaged spinal cord can and will be repaired. But, they caution, recovery will only benefit the fittest. This means that the patient must exercise diligently to prevent muscle atrophy, and the loss of bone density and cardiovascular capacity. Special equipment ranging from electrodes that stimulate muscle groups, tilt tables that allow people to stand and bear weight, exercise bicycles, and treadmill therapy, which enables even a quadriplegic to walk while suspended in a harness, are all available. When the cure comes and signals from the brain once again reach the body, individuals who have kept in shape will be able to be rehabilitated relatively quickly and will no longer need payments from their insurance company. But no company will pay for this proactive therapy which would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. So most spinal cord injury victims simply deteriorate while they continue to fight for basic quality of life coverage. Meanwhile, the CEOs of many insurance companies are making salaries in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars a year. How much profit is reasonable and justifiable? The same distortion of values is evident in entertainment, sports, and politics. Why do studios pay some of their biggest stars 20 million dollars a picture? Does even the most gifted athlete deserve 91 million dollars over 7 years to swing a bat and catch a baseball? Why is it that so many of our elected officials end up in office primarily because they have been able to outspend their opponents? At the other end of the spectrum, why has the NIH since its inception in 1940 had to plead incessantly for enough money to battle every disease in the encyclopedia?"

"History will surely judge America's decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, to be sure, but not one who posed an imminent danger to us. It is a decision that could have been made only at a moment in time when reason was playing a sharply diminished role in our national deliberations."

"When the election was finally decided, I, like many reporters I knew, hoped to never write another political story as long we lived. We were sick of politics. But one day the next January, I had an idea for a fun piece about how the vice-presidential candidacy of a Jew, Joe Lieberman, had made the world safer for ethnic humor. To take one example, Al Gore had joked on David Letterman’s show that their ticket would be there for the American people "24/6"—a reference to Lieberman’s observance of the Jewish Sabbath"

"[George W. Bush] was having lunch with a good friend of mine in 1999 and talking about running for president. he said, "I don't know if I'll run, but if I do, I'll win." My friend, who is a Democrat, thought it was the usual political bragging and said, "why do you say that? Every candidate says that." W turned to him and said, "Because I know exactly who I am and Al Gore has no idea who he is." You know something? W nailed it."

"But as Al Gore says, if denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, despair ain’t just a tire in the trunk."

"Algore has conferred upon himself the biggest ticket of his life in the Nobel Prize. Nothing says "I'm smart" quite like an award from a bunch of socialist Swedes, in the community that Algore runs around in. Much the same way as the Nobel Prize gave credence to Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitism and Yasser Arafat's peace campaign, Algore now has that same credibility for the religion of global warming. In my mind, in a fair and honest world, the recipient of this award — the reason for this award being awarded, manmade global warming — should debunk it, because the Nobel committee has lost all credibility long before they gave this award to Algore and the United Nations. Sadly, this will probably, in the minds of the ignorant and those who pay scant attention, lend convenience to the whole phony hoax that is manmade global warming."

"the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith."

"Parson Al winning the Nobel Peace Prize was as predictable as his Oscar for Best Documentary, and represents the final debasement of a once-prestigious award."

"Mr. Gore lost the presidency, but in the dignity and grace with which he gave up his legal fight, he united America. Then, faced with what to do with the rest of his life, he took up a personal crusade to combat climate change, even though the odds were stacked against him, his soapbox was small, his audiences were measured in hundreds, and his critics were legion. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore stuck with it and over time has played a central role in building a global consensus for action on this issue."

"Like him or not, he has turned his efforts to an important cause, under historical and political circumstances that would have tempted many people to drown themselves in drink or move to Bhutan. It's interesting about the Nobel Peace Prize — unlike the quirky and PC-conscious prize for Literature, or the quasi-Nobel "medal" in economics — that its list of winners holds up very, very well under historical scrutiny. There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and de Klerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time. So: might this award make Gore sound even more righteous? Maybe, but who cares. He has earned it. A lot of other people have the big head on much flimsier grounds."

"The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to former vice president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in December 2007 is a clear sign that global warming activism has forced the issue to the front of the international agenda. From Step It Up marches to international treaties, the climate change movement continues to reinvent itself. Scientists have been vindicated. Activists are energized. As Al Gore said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, "The future is knocking at our door right now. ... The next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: 'What were you thinking; why didn't you act?' Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?' "We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it, and say together: 'We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."""

"nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one. We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above."

"I want to congratulate our former Vice President Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize today. No other person has worked harder or done more to draw much needed attention to the crisis of global climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our planet. Future generations will thank him for his work to save our way of life. But the fight is far from over. His example should motivate each one of us to commit ourselves to doing everything we can in our own lives to save our precious planet."

"Al Gore has been warning and educating us about the dangers of climate change for decades. He saw this coming before others in public life and never stopped pushing for action to save our planet, even in the face of public indifference and attacks from those determined to defend the indefensible. His tireless advocacy and his Academy Award-winning film have inspired countless people around the world to join the fight against climate change. I am thrilled by this well-deserved recognition and am grateful to the Nobel Committee for awarding the Peace Prize to him and to those doing ground-breaking work at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

"The interior of the earth is extremely hot - several million degrees."

"In some areas of Poland, children are regularly taken underground into deep mines to gain some respite from the buildup of gases and pollution of all sorts in the air. One can almost imagine their teachers emerging tentatively from the mine, carrying canaries to warn the children when it’s no longer safe for them to stay above the ground."

"The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy."

"Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets — through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas."

"The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made."

"In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience.""

"At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole. While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious."

"It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack."

"For the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason — the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power — remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault."

"Not only is Al Gore committed to the New Democrats' corporate agenda, but on social issues other than abortion he is to the right of President Clinton. Counting on fear to whip the left wing of the party into line, he basically ignores it and has not made any gestures to co-opt the Nader vote. Instead he merely demonizes the Naderites as spoilers...Both Gore and Lieberman are pandering to religious and moral conservatives, again ignoring the secularists and social liberals who are the backbone of the party. Neither of them ever met a civil liberty he liked. I am chilled by their demagogic attacks on popular culture. Gore's talk of "cultural pollution" reminds me of Nazi rhetoric."

"Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000..."

"This is a time of great opportunity for our country. Our economy is the envy of the world. Living standards are rising — and the gap between the rich and the poor is closing for the first time in 20 years. America is a powerful engine for the global economy, because we have met our responsibility to balance our budget, to begin paying down our debt, and to embrace our role in supporting free markets and economic growth among all nations."

"Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing. Ironically, President Bush's response to the terrorist attack of September 11 was, in effect, to further distort America's political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger Iraq was capable of posing."

"September 11 had a profound impact on all of us. But after initially responding in an entirely appropriate way, the administration began to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism to create a political case for attacking Iraq. Despite the absence of proof, Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with al-Qaeda and to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated with bringing war to the terrorists, even though it really meant diverting attention and resources from those who actually attacked us. When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation and invited us to "imagine" a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon, he was referring to terrorists who actually had no connection to Iraq. But because our nation had been subjected to the horrors of 9/11, when our president said "imagine with me this new fear," it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process that might otherwise have led people to ask, "Wait a minute, Mr. President, where's your evidence?""

"Social scientists have found that when confronted with either an enormous threat or a huge reward, people tend to focus on the magnitude of the consequence and ignore the probability."

"It is well documented that humans are especially fearful of threats that can be easily pictured or imagined. For example, one study found that people are willing to spend significantly more for flight insurance that covers "death by terrorism" than for flight insurance that covers "death by any cause." Now, logically, flight insurance for death by any cause would cover terrorism in addition to a number of other potential problems. But something about the buzzword terrorism creates a vivid impression that generates excessive fear."

"Television's quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages. Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician."

"This is an opportunity for bipartisanship and transcendence, an opportunity to find our better selves and in rising to meet this challenge, create a better brighter future — a future worthy of the generations who come after us and who have a right to be able to depend on us."

"For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all payroll taxes — including those for social security and unemployment compensation — and the replacement of that revenue in the form of pollution taxes — principally on CO2. The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more pollution. Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an "externality." This absurd label means, in essence: we don't need to keep track of this stuff so let's pretend it doesn't exist. And sure enough, when it's not recognized in the marketplace, it does make it much easier for government, business, and all the rest of us to pretend that it doesn't exist. But what we're pretending doesn't exist is the stuff that is destroying the habitability of the planet."

"It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick."

"Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth's atmosphere."

"In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president. I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability… So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands."