Neither Beat W.; What Does THAT Say About America? October 28, 2013 (Well, one did beat him but didn’t get to serve.) Even so, both continue to make tremendous contributions. JOHN KERRY: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Here’s the video I referred to Friday: John Kerry and Al Gore speaking at the 10th Anniversary of the Center for American Progress. I know you’re busy. But if you want to be proud of your country, and to feel good about its leadership — but also to hear a sober assessment of what we’re doing to ourselves — I commend to you the first 20 minutes: our Secretary of State. AL GORE: “THERE WILL BE JOY IN PREVAILING” Former Vice President Gore follows at the 25-minute mark. If you’re pressed for time, start at the 52-minute mark and watch the 5 minutes to the end. (It’s the piece about the “well-informed citizenry” that contrasts so starkly with the Tea Party enthusiasts linked to Friday.) But you know what? We’re putting 90 million tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every day. We face likely global disaster — that we could mitigate if we stopped tuning out things like the first 27 minutes of this speech. So maybe listen to the whole thing while you’re folding laundry? (Not part of this speech is one of Gore’s long-standing prescriptions: “The single most important thing we could do is to put a price on the CO2 in our economy today: reduce the payroll tax on working people and make it up with a tax on CO2. Tax what we burn, not what we earn.”) # The fix to the web site didn’t work, so it will continue to be down from time to time and email delivery will continue to be ten to twenty hours delayed. I have the world’s worst web hosting provider.