Emailing Al Gore

This is a follow-up to an earlier entry I made re a letter to Al. In the generic letter that I received from him, there was no phone number, no email address...Jesus, we're talking AL GORE here, ferchrissake, didn't he take some credit for the Internet?

I kinda like old Al, warts and all. But have you noticed that the websites of the Big and Powerful never actually list an email address? No, you have to fill in little boxes and hit send. Cute. At any rate, in the case of Mr. Gore, a diligent search of the net has netted zero in terms of ANY contact information for Al.

Mythbusting history

Ever since 9/11, the radio shows on "This American Life" have been, in the majority, pretty dark. To my mind, this show and "Democracy Now" ( http://democracynow.org/streampage.pl ) pick up where people like IF Stone and Ed Murrow left off. And glory be, they are all archived and online.

This particular show is one of many that blows the sleepy dust off of important events, check it out.

From: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
2/14
Episode 232

"It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars.

Prologue. Ira talks with a Lance Corporal from the Marines' Eighth Communication Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, about what his superiors told him about Iraq at his pre-deployment briefing to go overseas. (7 minutes)

Act One. Jarhead. Anthony Swofford reads an excerpt from his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, about his experience fighting in the first Gulf War, in 1991, as a Marine sniper. (20 minutes)

Act Two. What's the Truth Good For, Anyway? For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord. But in the late eighties, a group of Israeli historians gained access to most of the government documents from the war and started writing a truer, less flattering version of the story -- that in some cases, the Palestinians were forced out, or scared away, and then not allowed to return. Ira discusses the real history -- and its impact on the Israeli public -- with some of the men who uncovered it: Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947 -1949, and Tom Segev, who wrote 1949, The First Israelis. He also talks to BZ Goldberg, one of the filmmakers behind the Emmy-winning documentary about Israeli and Palestinian kids, called Promises. (20 minutes)

Act Three. Jar Jar Head. John Hodgman tries to tell the real version of a war movie that's already been written, filmed and released on DVD -- Star Wars. "