In the darkness last night, I awoke to a violent rainstorm. In my dreams, the drumming sounded ominous. Drops the size of tablespoons were falling, instead of the usual pattering cascade.
I walked to the window, and between the buildings, the sky flashed with outbreaks of lightning. Not lightning that branches down to the earth like a upended tree, but strange scribbles of lightning high in the air.
And then it all ended, suddenly.
Sometimes I have the feeling that earth is trying to purge itself with deluges of water.
Everyone seems to be opining that this election is most momentous of our lifetimes. It's the thrill of razor thin margins, and fluctuating polls. The constantly invoked specter of terrorism, the grim realities of an erupting Iraq, the energetic lies that the Bush administration continues to perpetuate, and the whispered references to Armageddon.
But the very fate of the earth may hang in the balance.
President Bush has chosen to entirely ignore the warnings about global warming. For a decade, right wing industry experts have exerted a relentless campaign to discredit what most climate scientists know to be true, that emissions from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are changing the very equations on which life depends.
A new report on the Arctic commissioned by eight nations and conducted by over 300 scientists says we are "now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth. Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun."
Arctic Perils Seen in Warming
The State Department, which reviewed the report, declined to comment.
On PBS, Bill Moyers delivered a searing indictment of Bush's misleadership. Moyers alone seems to have both the moral authority and the sheer courage to lay it on the line.
But for once, New York Times columnist Kristof comes close.
Taking Bush At His Word
We can change course. There's still time.

I got my chance to see John Kerry in Rochester, MN. I rode down with two friends, Jeanne Qwan and Catherine Johnson.
There were buttons for sale at the Convention Center and one said "JFK". But after my first close-up glimpse of the candidate, if I had to draw a parallel, with Kerry, it would be Lincoln. Did Lincoln have palpable charisma? Was he the kind of buddy you'd want to have a beer with?
Not exactly.
What Lincoln had was a powerful moral compass. Lincoln understood that America had come to a turning point. He had the gravitas, a kind of steady courage, to part the red sea that was the Civil War, and lead America through it.

"He was acute rather than profound; and I am inclined to think that those who were nearest him during the last years of his life were impressed by the swiftness and the correctness of his intuitions, rather than by the originality or profundity of his reasoning."--Noah Brooks, Washington reporter and frequent White House visitor

I saw a John Kerry who is fully aware of the immense difficulties in front of him. Yet it doesn't phase him. He exudes immense confidence and energy. He looked youthful, and vigorous. He talked of rolling up his sleeves. In a humorous anecdote, he told of listening to Bush's repeated whine during the debate about hard work, and told us "I'd be happy to relieve you of all that, Mr. President."
Of all the tributes before he spoke, the most genuine came from one of his stepsons, who told us, how, after their father died, they were intensely opposed to this usurper who'd come courting their Mom.
It wasn't easy, but he won their trust. He was tough, his stepson said, and he listened.
Kerry is a port in a storm. He's calm as granite. He knows exactly what's in front of him, and he is not afraid.
In his presence, you get the feeling of the soldier he was, and understand why so many veterans have flocked to his side.
With great warmth, he told us of moment on the campaign trail where he turned around during a speech and heard someone call to him from the audience "I've got your back. Senator".
This is someone whose taken incredible fire, who's subject to the most vicious smear campaign in recent years, and it doesn't seem to concern him.
Why?
He understands the great danger we're in, not just from the terrorists outside our borders, but from those that would terrorize us from within.
"America, I've got your back." he said.
There's a great darkness around him, and in the shadows, millions of faces, both hopeful and anxious. He stands in the light. He focuses on his task. Alone in the spotlight, he shines.

Wolves as a metaphor for terrorism?
Bush used untruths, misleading statements and outright lies about the war in Iraq. And got away with it.
So, he's doing it again in attacks on John Kerry.
He told us repeatedly there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said us Iraq had a fleet of unmanned aircraft "for missions targeting the United States". "Iraq" he claimed "has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases..."
False. False. False.
Those are just the bald faced lies. Then there's also a barrage of insinuations, misleading statements, phony intelligence, dubious science.
Who would believe this guy?
How could anyone possibly want him as President?
The Republicans have so filled the heads of Americans with fiction that 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD or a major program for developing them.
75% of Bush supporters believe Iraq was involved with Al Qaeda. 55% assume that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission.
Wrong, wrong wrong.
Take those beliefs, mix them with some footage of prowling wolves, and what do you get? An American public terrified of wolves with nuclear arms who will eat their babies.
When Cheney said that if Kerry was elected it would put the United States at risk of another terrorist attack, most commentators were appalled. But repetition breeds insensibility.
Kerry, on the other hand, suffers from an apparent overdose of sincerity. He stuck by his support of the president's Iraq attack, he won't stick to his prepared scripts.
Two men, a President who is inarticulate and impatient, unable to grasp complex issues, but who is tightly managed to appear resolute and powerful. The contender: articulate, extraordinarily principled, and capable, who burbles extemporaneously and can't seem to get enough traction.
Wolves are an apt metaphor, but not in the way the ads would intend.
Wolves in sheep's clothing. Foxes guarding the henhouse.
A village unprepared when the real wolf showed up.
In every possible way Bush has failed to perceive or confront the real threats that face us.
He ignored the warnings about Al Queda leading up to 9/11. He attacked the wrong country. He failed to stop the looting in Iraq, failed to restore the infrastructure, disbanded the army, was unprepared for insurgency. He's been diffident on homeland security, waffled on implementing the 9/11 commission's recommendations, and allowed the automatic weapons ban to expire.
This is the guy who says he'll make you safe?
On the other hand...
A real life action movie story that the press isn't telling you is how John Kerry went after a criminal network of CIA supported financiers who were funneling money to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and Osama Bin Laden. With ties to, who else? The Bush administration.
The Case That Kerry Cracked.
Yeats warned us when evil spirals "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
Some of the best do have passionate intensity. Others are just well organized, well read, and well prepared.

Last night I went to an Artists for Kerry rally, hosted by Garrison Keillor. The evening started out with a haunting mandolin solo, and ended with a poem by Hafiz.
"If the world does not turn to your whims these few days,
Cosmic cycles are preparing to change, don't despair, walk on."
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, as the government was packing up gun ships and outfitting soldiers, Colman Barks and Robert Bly were frantically translating Persian poets. In a letter Barks sent to President Bush while the bombers were being outfitted, he offered an army of culture seekers, good will ambassadors, 60's hippies, painters and jugglers. Flooding the country with well meaning tourists, he suggested, would be better than body bags in convincing the Middle East that we weren't infidels.
After the bombers, the toppled statues, the tanks, the banners, we've only succeeded in catastrophe.
Anti-Americanism Runs High

With ten days to the election, the Minnesota ACT office is humming with activity.
This warren of little inter-connected rooms, littered with empty coffee cups, is command central for my sense of hope these days. Teams of canvassers are trained in to the background clatter of keystrokes. A graphic artist works on ID cards for scores of incoming staff. There's Hispanics and Somali's, Green/Blue Alliance, Human Rights Coalition people and Moms Opposing Bush.
The African American team is on the phone recruiting church space. Two volunteer coordinators are recruiting Election Day massage therapists. They've come up with a slogan for their flyer. "The future of Democracy is in Your Hands." An image of cupped hands holding a swirling earth appeals to one, but not the other. "It should really be America" grumbles the more literal minded designer.
If the world does not turn to your whims, do not despair.
Bush's vision, drilled daily into the public mind with lectern pounding lectures, is that it's U.S. against the rest of the world. Everyone else must be Americanized so we can be safe. Kerry strives to rattle his sabers even more vigorously than Bush, as if suburban moms aren't sufficiently terrified and titillated. This bunker mentality only leads to increased conflict and militarism.
Much can be resolved by diplomacy, intelligence, negotiation, international cooperation. It turns out that the tedium of reading reports, holding summits, talking to one's enemies, is more dangerous, difficult, and uncertain, but it's the route of peace.
Three things would greatly reduce the threat of terror. One is to divest from Saudi Arabia, pull our bases out, and condemn the corrupt royal regime. The second is to reduce our dependence on oil; immediately, through voluntary conservation and relying more existing alternative fuels, and by developing sustainable alternatives. The third is to put our moral authority behind the Middle East Peace process and stand behind Sharon in his plan to return the Gaza strip.
The world is in our hands, all of our hands. We are in the world's hands.

To the first twenty people who ask, and e-mail me their address, this timely sticker from Buffalo Nickel.

You must be a liberal newspaper because only a liberal newspaper would soul search, critique itself and entertain doubt about whether it had a bias.
Political Bias at the Times? Two Counter-Arguments
Do you see Fox or the New York Post or the Washington Times worrying about having a conservative bias? No, they put out a banner claiming to be fair and balanced, and go on pursuing their chosen political agenda.
It's not enough to be objective or strive for balance in the current climate. Conservative critics would be happy to claim that water had a liberal bias, if it meant that would move things in their direction. A man is considered as black if he has one drop of African blood- but in order to be considered white, he has to be lily white. Remember that old saw, 'politically correct'. The right aren't looking for fairness or balance, or the 'truth'- if it doesn't suit their agenda.
They will push the whole paradigm until 'liberal' is a synonym for 'radical', instead of a description of the outlook of fifty or more per cent of the American public.
Americans, I think, are naive, and way too trusting, when it comes to what's happening to the media.
On August 23, 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed the Powell Memorandum to its national membership of leading executives, businesses, and trade associations.
The Powell Memorandum was the first drumbeat signaling what the right calls the 'culture wars'. In the 70's, when liberal critics were denouncing the growing power of big business, big business struck back. Amongst other recommendations, The Powell Memorandum advised conservatives to buy up media outlets, and start up think tanks to fund journalists and writers that were amenable to their views.

"For two decades, since the installation of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the radical right has run a tightly coordinated campaign to seal its hold on the organs of power, ranging from the highest law courts to the largest corporations, from the White House to Capitol Hill, from television tubes to editorial pages, and across college campuses.
They have constructed a well-paid activist apparatus of idea merchants and marketeers -- scholars, writers, journalists, publishers, and critics. They have intimidated the mainstream media, and filled the vacuum with editors, columnists, talk-show hosts, and pundits who have turned conservatism into a career tool. They have waged a culture war to reduce the rich social heritage of liberalism to a pejorative."

The Powell Manifesto: How a Prominent Lawyers Attack Memo Changed America.
How many major media companies are owned by ultra-conservatives and how does that affect their reporting? What does it mean for freedom of the press? Should someone like the Sinclair Broadcasting Group be allowed to broadcast a faux "documentary" on the eve of the elections, and evade federal requirements of equal time by calling it news? What does it mean for the concept of an independent press when a media company, like Sinclair, looking for favorable decisions by government officials, gives overwhelming financial support to one candidate, then chooses to broadcast a program damaging to his opponent? What happens to democracy if the "information" that the public gets is cherry-picked by the media's owners, as seen in the news room memos that were collected by the producers of the documentary "OutFoxed"?
Those are the questions we ought to be investigating.
If the Times is, indeed, liberal in it's outlook, it may end up as one of the few beacons of light in a sea of media that have no loyalty to the ethics of journalism, or the concepts of objectivity, or the need for balance.

My astute neighbor, (the boy next door), with whom I watched the latest debate, noted that the contenders had on the same outfit: blue suits, white shirts and even the same gold flecks on their red tie. (Kerry's was a little darker).
Scary.
Meanwhile the commentators praised the clear choices that the candidates offered the voter.
Say what?
Here's what we get. Two men studying the same studies of what will appeal to the voters.
Some butterflies camouflage themselves to look like toxic species because it's one way to prevent themselves from being eaten.
Other species camouflage themselves as compassionate to attract undecided females.
And then there's the macho butterflies, ("I will track them down and kill them") which battle on both fronts- to keep from being gobbled up by talk show hosts, as well as attract the Nascar undecideds.
We all have our wishes.
Here's a few of mine. What I wish Kerry would say...
(When being called the most liberal senator...)
"I'm proud to be a liberal. Americans are the most tolerant and generous and open hearted people in the world. We have worked together to create this incredible, multicultural, open minded society and I will do my best to insure the public that it stays that way. It's a tribute to the decent good heartedness of liberal Americans that you, Mr. Bush, have to pretend to be compassionate."
"I will defend the environment from the of unregulated greed of corporations. One in every six women of childbearing age has elevated levels of mercury in her system, creating the risk of severe neurological and developmental problems in her future children. The Bush administration has delayed court-ordered regulation of this poison in it's efforts (among others) to undermine our environmental and public health protections."
"I will withdraw our troops from Iraq and give the decision making power over the fate of Iraq back to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible while doing our best to ensue their safety."
"Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. I will withdraw our military forces and support from Saudi Arabia and ask that other countries cease supporting this corrupt regime."
"What's this I hear? You're going to borrow money from the retirement plan for civil servants to keep the federal government afloat for the next few weeks so you don't have the embarrassment of asking Congress again to raise the debt ceiling right before the election? Maybe we could start up a new label, the 'spend, spend, spend without end' conservatives."
If wishes were butterflies, we'd all wear gold flecks on our ties.
And finally, the "Switch Horses or Drown Award" goes to Bush's hometown newspaper, The Lonestar Iconoclast, which has decided to endorse John Kerry for President.
Read all about it.

Just because you wear grown-up clothes and pepper in your hair, it doesn't make you a grown-up.
"While chronological age is progressive, emotional age is a layering of maturity over earlier coping styles." says psychiatrist Judith Sills.
Here's a quick emotional intelligence quiz.
When faced with conflict, what's your usual response?
1) If I don't get what I want, I often feel upset or pout about it
2) When I want something, I go out and get it.
3) If I don't do anything, the problem will go away.
4) Conflict can be resolved through communication and compromise.
We've seen Bush exhibit one and two. The right would like you to believe that Kerry is stuck at number three.
New York Times columnistDavid Brooks calls the conflict between Bush and Kerry's foreign policies one between two values, freedom and internationalism. A neutral word choice would have given us individualism and internationalism. Instead we get Bush's emotion laden word "freedom."
Maturity comes with the recognition that personal freedom, our own rights, can infringe the rights of another.
"When Bush talks about the world he hopes to create, he talks first about spreading freedom." Brooks says. "What he's really talking about is a decentralized world. Individuals would be free to live as they chose, in their own nations, carving out their own destinies."
Saddam Hussein would happily agree to that.
In a free for all society, the biggest guy gets to make the rules. If you happen to be the biggest guy, you have all the freedom.
Democracy, on the other hand, depends on the rule of law. It is rule, not by the sword, or by an elite, but by consensus.
Answer number four.
"Internationalism" (which Brooks opposes to freedom) is the concept of democracy applied to nations. When Kerry said, in the first Presidential debate, "We have to pass the global test", he meant that we take our grievances to a congress of the world's nations. If it is just, we can trust that the world will recognize our cause.
Bush rejects international law. The Kyoto treaty, the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice.
In doing so, he encourages terrorists and other rogue nations.
International economic sanctions and inspections have proven to be successful in containing Saddam's nuclear ambitions. The U.N. peacekeeping force was able to resolve conflicts in Eastern Europe, and Somalia, and is working in Sudan, Iran and Korea.
Kerry is arguing for the use of diplomacy, before force, and the use of international consensus, over the playground logic of might equals right.
Bush would impose democracy on the Middle East, and impose a Christian conservative agenda on America.
That's the so-called freedom of the right wing. It doesn't mean freedom of religion, the separation of church and state. Or individual freedom, the right marry whomever one chooses. Or freedom of speech, the right to protest. Or freedom of choice, couples making their own moral decisions about their future.
Compromise, in the Bush vocabulary, equals weakness.
Freedom and responsibility, Albert Camus, wrote, are bound together.

What I find the most frightening about the current administration is the misinformation, disinformation and outright lies they use to manipulate the American public.
There's little doubt now that the Bush Administration used our fear after 9/11 to terrorize us into Iraq. The invasion was planned as soon as they entered the White House over three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS news on 60 minutes.
"Weapons of mass destruction", the administration's catch phrase of terror-mongering, is likely to be invoked again in the debate tommorrow.
The psychological tactic in play here is, if you meet with objection, keep repeating your message, and don't give an inch. This is what store clerks and telephone marketers rely on in dealing with "difficult customers". The Bush team is hoping to stonewall it's way into the next four years.
Paul Krugman gives us a pre-emptive list of lies we might expect to hear in tommorrow's debate.
Eight Lies You'll Hear
Along with the lies, we can expect more Freudian slips.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." George W. Bush, Aug. 5, 2004
The Administration's "terror alert" tactics have mercifully fallen by the wayside, thanks to an increasingly skeptical public.
On the Today show last month, Bush said, about the often-invoked war on terror, "I don't think you can win it." The United States, he said, can "create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world". This rare glimpse of the bureauocrat within the flight suit spawned a massive control effort among the Bush handlers and hawks to make up for the Commander in Chief's fall from message.
Are they so nervous about the naked Bush that they would rig him up with a wireless transmitter?
Bush's Mystery Bulge
Although the Bush team continues to rely on the darkest cast of a war on terror as a between good and evil to get re-elected, the rhetoric may be wearing thin.
"It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life,'' says Kerry in this week's New York Times Magazine. It's best to skim the first five pages of bending-over-backwards Bush boot-licking, but you will find out more in this article about Kerry's forward-looking philosophy to contain the threats we face.
Kerry's Undeclared War
Despite his own terror slip, the Bush campaign is already trying to spin the quotes in this article in the hopes of making Kerry look "weak" on terror. But Kerry's ideas will resonate with many Americans, for whom it's beginning to sink in that the war in Iraq is a complete failure and a new approach is needed. This is a post-debate public that has seen Kerry's calm presence and thoughtful demeanor, in the face of Bush's peevish bullheadedness.
Osama is counting on inflaming our terror to recruit more young Arabs to the cause. Bush and Cheney are counting on inflaming our terror for their re-election.
Now the question is....will the people continue to swallow the lies?

I respect Republicans. My father was a Republican. He once said, rather humorously, he would vote for a Republican even if it was a poodle.
He said it when Ronald Reagan was up for re-election. As a free-thinker and a secular humanist, he wasn't enthusiastic about the increasing influence of fundamentalists on the Grand Old Party.
The old Republican guard thought of themselves as the party of Lincoln, for whom my father had the greatest admiration. He also admired Teddy Roosevelt and, like others of his generation who fought in WW II, Eisenhower.
He startled me by saying to me one time that all men are not created equal. It's the law, he said, our Constitution, that makes us equal.
I was born in the fifties. I was a child in the sixties.
The civil rights movement casts the longest shadow in my life. Kennedy picked up Lincoln's torch and passed it to the Democrats in the early sixties. Whatever his sins, despite social chaos and the Southern contingent, when the moment arrived to stand up for the Constitution, Kennedy did. He answered Martin Luther King's challenge.
I was in fourth grade when Kennedy was killed. Too young then to understand it all, it is Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch who stands for Kennedy in my memory.
My mother, who practised radical kindness, who was strict about bedtime and set limits on television, pulled us out of bed and parked us in front of the TV one night, to watch "To Kill a Mockingbird" on CBS's Saturday night movie. The lesson of Harper Lee's luminous classic is, whatever the personal dangers, even when the opposition comes from your friends and neighbors- when it comes to justice, it's simple- you do as Spike Lee might say, "the right thing".
I had a moment of hope during the exchange between Edwards and Cheney, that the congeniality of those comments about Cheney's daughter might put a rest to the issue of gay marriage which has been used to "energize" the Republican base. It's despicable, in my opinion, to court the worst instincts of the most prejudiced and ignorant to win an election.
History fell squarely on the side of African Americans in the sixties. It is falling on the side of gays, today. What is marriage, if not to ask the blessing of God on the union of people who love one another?
But that's not the only burning civil rights issue facing us. The issue of voting rights is back just like in the sixties. Some unscrupulous Republicans supporters are doing everything they can to prevent black voters from going to polls.
Unbelievable? Yes. But it's happening. Because black voters tend to vote Democratic.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (which is released in DVD this week) is a "must see", if only for the vivid segment showing how the African American vote was disenfranchised in the last election.
Once again this year, partisan Florida election officials came up with a list of so-called "felons", thousands of whom turn out to be legitimate African American voters. Black civil rights workers doing voter registration have been harassed in Florida, leaflets with misinformation have appeared in minority communities in Louisiana, American Indians in South Dakota were been turned away from the polls after being asked to show ID's when none are required.
Bob Herbert, of the New York Times, has written most extensively about it. This week the Times has a searing editorial on the subject.
The Poll Tax, Updated
I've been volunteering forAmerica Coming Together, which is doing voter registration in African American, immigrant, Latino and working class communities, and among young people.
Only 52% of eligible adults voted in the last election.
Michael Moore is in trouble with Michigan prosecutors for bribing slackers with briefs. He's handing out clean underwear, in the hopes that he can get the skateboard generation to change more often (every third day- turn them inside out, he advises) and change bigger things.
Every vote counts.

Here's a litany of what's we've lost since 9/11. We came across this act of outrage last August near Backus, MN.

Thomas Friedman has written a blistering editorial on how Bush administration's energy policy supports terrorism.
The Battle of the Pump
I hope the Kerry campaign is listening.
In the 70's, after the anti-war movement, we could see more was at stake in that cultural upheaval than tie-die and free love. It was my first year of college at Simon's Rock.
Simon's Rock is an 'early' college, a mecca for creative misfits; students who were brilliant and bored, rebels and artists.
One of my friends rigged up a radio station and broadcast from his dorm room, another dreamed of an organic farm. There was a motorcycle babe, and her roomate who designed ethereal costumes for our theatre in a barn.
What was most exciting to us was the idea of energy independence.
The OPEC embargo, now known as the 'world oil shock', in October of 1973, had served as our wake-up call. A coalition of Arab countries, during the Yom Kippur war, citing many of the same resentments and discontents percolating in the Middle East today, decided to hold out on us. Oil prices instantly quadrupled.
The United States responded to the oil crisis with gas rationing. It deeply impressed me, because I'd just started to drive. You could only buy gas on even or odd days according to arcane equations involving your license plates, leap years, and how many days there were in the month. A paperback or your knitting was kept in the glove compartment. At the gas station, lines were long.
Our struggles with Iraq war have deep roots. Hard-liners in the Pentagon at that time drew the conclusion then that the U.S. needed to exert military control in Middle East, and began writing secret memorandums and building military bases.
The Thirty Year Itch
The hippies in the farmhouses of Western Massachusetts, on the other hand, were dreaming of spinning electricity from the wind and sun. They drew up plans for houses insulated by earth, with stones used as flooring, coming up with concepts like passive heating and renewable energy. All kinds of wild new ideas began to circulate in journals and magazines illustrated with pen and ink cartoons.
When best and brightest minds of my generation looked into the future, sustainability was the magic word, the alpha and omega of lasting peace, the key to our cities.
It was clear to us, then, that the supply of oil was finite, and could easily be dominated by the most powerful nations.
The End of Oil
What breaks my heart, sometimes, is that, thirty years and several wars later, after untold violence, blood spilled, tundra swans suffocated in oil slicks, after suicide bombers, be-headings and car bombings, later, we are just starting to get it.
If we'd put that $119 billion into alternative energy, on the day after 9/11, how much different the world would be. If we'd put it into alternative energy, in 1973, there might not have been any 9/11.
Energy from the sun and wind. Cars that drive on leftover oil from McDonald's french fries.
Multiply the cost of the Iraq war by thirty years and tell me I'm a dreamer.
After Baghdad was bombed, there was a Bill Moyers special on the Kyoto Treaty. He was talking to a circle of women from India and Africa, in various flowing tribal garments. A poignant moment for me was when one took the microphone, looked into the camera and begged us, the First World, to develop alternative energy. They didn't have the resources to do it, she said. They could barely feed people. But she saw their governments heading down our path, whose environmental policies and economic consequences have reaped such terrible harvest.
Every village in the world could have it's own wind generator. Every house could have a solar panel.
Imagine.

Seven hundred thousand doors in Minnesota. That's what ACT (America Coming Together) figures it needs to turn out enough voters to put Minnesota electoral votes safely in the blue state stack.
I've knocked on about a hundred.
At that rate, it would take me 3 years.
Luckily, I'm not alone. Volunteers are flocking in from all over the Twin Cities.
I had gotten to the point where I felt, I can't sit on the sidelines, and twiddle. I can't keep preaching to the choir.
I had an old German violin, in a green velvet case. It had belonged to my mother, who passed it on to me. Like any beginner on the violin, the sounds coming out of my instrument were not unlike like a tom cat shrieking in a windstorm.
Lies and deception, especially, were getting to me. My gut would start to twist reading conservative commentators in the New York Times. Every time I got on the freeway, I'd find myself muscled aside by another tax-free Dodge Ram pickup.
The bullies and the hard liners, and the my!me!mine! people were everywhere, it seemed.
I had been excited about my playing my mother's violin, attempting to stroke my caterwauls into velvet peals, when it hit me. Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
In A.D. 64, it turns out the Emperor Nero couldn't have fiddled while Rome burned. because the violin wasn't invented until the 1500's. But never mind. That image was my wake up call.
I signed up online. I liked America Coming Together, which is a progressive organization, not directly affiliated with the Kerry campaign, doing canvassing and get-out-the-vote actions. I got my assignment, a block or two in a black and Hmong neighborhood near the Minnesota capital, and my partner, a grass roots organizer named Betty in a staw hat with a huge flower in the front. She was one of those women who'd wear purple to an undertaker's convention. Tough as a dandelion root, a heart bigger than her handbag. We set out with our clipboard and our scripts.
We were coached to ask two questions. What issues are important to you? If the election was tomorrow, who would you vote for? If they were for Kerry, or leaning that way, we'd find out if they were registered, and encourage them to vote.
The people, it turned out, have a lot to say.
That day I managed to do three registrations, my personal record. One was a elderly couple. Another was a woman who'd moved in to care for her mother. She was upset with Randy Kelly, our Democratic St. Paul mayor who was stumping for Bush.
Another 50-something dad, hosting a block barbecue in his driveway, took several minutes away from his friends to talk to me. He was concerned about his sons, who were draft age.
That experience gave me a high. I'd had beginner's luck. Since then, I've stumbled down crooked steps, been baffled by people's lack of doorbells, had a few Bush supporters give me the brush off, but all in all, my experiences have been encouraging.
My canvassing buddy last weekend was there with her fired-up twenty year old son, who'd recruited five kids from the local community college in addition to his mom. We were assigned a working class white neighborhood, and I had a lot of "not- homes", so I finished my packet fairly quickly, while she was lingered on the first block. In three consecutive houses, the person she talked to had been recently laid off.
Voter registration is dramatically up in swing states.
As Deadlines Hit, Rolls of Voters Show Big Surge
Much of the gains are in areas with minority and low income populations.
That cheers me up immensely.
Hope is in the numbers.
That's 700,000 doors in Minnesota.

When the scripts and spin doctors are taken away and each man stands alone, to be judged only on his own merits, the people finally have a chance to see what kind of person they are dealing with. John Kerry was outstanding. He was firm, he was gutsy, he was polite but forceful. Bush clearly planned to take the offense, was knocked off balance and put on the defensive. He was flustered, and furious. So much for body language.
What Kerry did tonight, is show that he can be presidential. He also did the American public a favor by laying out real issues out on the table, hard questions for the public to face, and that the Administration to answer.
Yet his ending address was direct, warm, sincere, and heartfelt. He bantered with Bush about his daughters. The difference I saw tonight between the candidates is maturity. That difference is experience.
Americans feel very uneasy that we were mislead into a strategically unwise war in Iraq, and yet, at the same time, we have to follow through and secure peace there. President Bush doesn't seem to have that reality at hand. He continues to conflate the issues of 9/11 and Iraq. His whole argument for his presidency is riding on that. When Kerry called him on it, he was pressed to say he knows the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, yet continued to talk as if weapons of mass destruction had been in Iraq, and as if that issue had anything to do with Al Queda.
Kerry steered the conversation like a swift boat into the difficult territories: nuclear proliferation, what to do about Korea, Iran- Russia- Sudan, whether our military is overextended- issues the American public has yet to hear aired in the hothouse climate of entertainment where gossips and disinformation pass for news.
I think this debate gives Americans a clear picture of the candidates and sheds any doubt John Kerry is prepared and capable of taking on the job. He is both forceful and reasoned, and knows how to deal within the new world order.
Kerry's most powerful quote was when he addressed the issue of flip flopping. "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong. It's another to ... then learn new facts and take those new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right. "
Bush, for all his flip flopping rhetoric, has had to do some of that. The tough guy stance continues, but he's also had to go back to the U.N. and ask for help. He's learned something about alliances and not offending your allies.
Kerry, on the other hand, is stuck with the awkward position of having to argue his way out of Bush's mistakes. We broke it, we bought it. That's the bad news. Bush's most potent attack on Kerry, apparently, is that Kerry supported him.
But Kerry showed us tonight that he has the mettle to stay the course in Iraq, pick up the pieces and get us back on track in the world as a leader with principles who can be counted on in the rough. That gets my vote.
If you liked what Kerry had to say, here's an opportunity to do your part and let the media know.
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