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Tonight's editor: boatsie
Tonight's editor's pick is the GOTV series which has been running since last week and continues through this evening! Here are some highlights...
From Anthony Weiner: Remember, it's not just about Democrats and Republicans. It's about how middle class families are going to do better next year than they did this year. It's about whether we're going to leave programs like Social Security and Medicare stronger for our children. It's about whether we're going to protect health care and financial reform. Or whether Republicans will roll back everything we've worked for this past two years.
And make no mistake. They will. They've already pledged to repeal health care. And many top Republicans are talking about frightening plans like gambling your Social Security in the stock market.
Look, I live by a simple principle. You stand up for what you believe in.
Now is a time to stand up. If you help get people to the polls, it will be the most important thing you can do.
DailyKos readers spend a lot of time discussing specific issues. And the intelligence and enthusiasm you bring is a breath of fresh air to someone like me who has to deal with Washington hot air every day of the week.
But this Tuesday isn't about any one issue. It's about a single choice: will we be a country where middle class folks can succeed and get ahead, where those struggling to make it have a chance to reach the middle class? Or will we be a country where rich powerbrokers can buy their way no matter the cost to everyone else?
Time and time again all of you have stood up in defense of the right choice. Now I'm asking you to stand up again. And this time, it's for all the marbles.
Ignore the bleak predictions. Ignore the hype. Just roll up your sleeves and get down to work.
It won't be easy. But people in this country need someone to fight for them on November 2. They're counting on us.
From Al Franken Look, people are hurting. Millions of Americans are without jobs. Still struggling, still losing their homes, still anxious about the future.
But let's remember how we got here. The month Barack Obama was sworn in we lost 750,000 jobs in this country. With all due respect to the President, I think his analogy that the economy was a car in a ditch when he took office is just a little too static. Here's my analogy, which, in my opinion, is both more kinetic and, frankly, far more accurate.
When the President took office, not only had the car gone into a ditch, the car had flipped over and was rolling down a steep embankment. We, the American people, were in the back seat, and the Bush Administration had removed all the seat belts, so we were all flying around the interior of this car as it was rolling and flipping and careening down this steep embankment, headed to a 2,000 foot cliff. And at the bottom of that cliff were jagged rocks. And alligators.
Now, at noon on January 20th, 2009, as the car was careening toward the cliff, George W. Bush jumped out of the car.
President Obama somehow managed to dive in through the window, take the wheel and get control of the thing just inches before it went over the precipice. Then, he and Congress starting pushing this wreck back up the embankment. Now you can't push a car up an embankment as fast as it careens down the embankment, especially if some people are trying to push against you. But we got it going in the right direction. And slowly we've gotten ourselves up the embankment, out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the road.
There. That's what happened.
But you wouldn't know that from all these ads. All these smear ads, all these deliberately misleading ads – all of these ads that are paid for by organizations led by people like Karl Rove.
From Matt Taibbi: Common sense sounds great, but if you’re too freaking lazy to penetrate the mysteries of carbon dioxide—if you haven’t mastered the whole concept of breathing by the time you’re old enough to serve in the U.S. Congress—you’re not going to get the credit default swap, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation, the interest rate swap, etc. And understanding these instruments and how they were used (or misused) is the difference between perceiving how Wall Street made its money in the last decades as normal capitalist business and seeing the truth of what it often was instead, which was simple fraud and crime. It’s not an accident that Bachmann emerged in the summer of 2010 (right as she was forming the House of Tea Party Caucus) as one of the fiercest opponents of financial regulatory reform; her primary complaint with the deeply flawed reform bill sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank was that it would "end free checking accounts."
From Darcy Burner: We have been given something for which people have fought and died over the entire history of humankind. Handed it, gift-wrapped with a bow, to use as we see fit, the enduring trust of generations in our hands. We’ve been given the right to self-governance, founded on the idea that justice can exist only where government serves the people, rather than people being subservient to the government.
The currency of this realm is your vote. Treasure it. Understand its value. It is the manifestation of your share of the power – and the obligation – in our democracy.
From Russ Feingold: The political pundits have said that I am fighting for my political life, but they couldn’t be more wrong. This is a fight for Wisconsin and our future and people across Wisconsin have joined this fight because they understand the high stakes of this election.
We have more than 50 field offices across the state.
Yesterday alone, 2,500 volunteers knocked on over 100,000 doors and made over 150,000 phone calls.
Today we have more than 3,000 volunteer shifts scheduled.
Volunteers have knocked on about 300,000 doors in Wisconsin.
Volunteers have made 332,620 phone calls.
Combine those numbers with the fact that Wisconsin traditionally has one of the highest voter turnouts in the country and you can see that if we get our supporters to the polls we can win this fight.
From Chris Hayes: .... margins matter. Even if Republicans win the house and the Democrats maintain control of the Senate as nearly everyone is predicting, the margins in both houses will be incredibly important. Remember that Republicans accomplished a tremendous amount of damage by keeping Al Franken out of the Senate. That was just one senator. Remember that the most significant pieces of domestic legislation of this last congress -- health care, financial reform, the recovery act, all passed by razor thin margins. A few votes in the other direction and none of it happens. Just because control of the house might change, doesn't mean that the last vote on a important piece of legislation (immigration reform for instance) won't be just as important. When you go out to your polling place, you have a chance to be electing that last crucial vote.
WarrenS made a New Year's Resolution to write a letter advocating climate action every day. The result is over three hundred letters to congresspeople, newspapers, President Obama, and more. Warren has even had letters published in the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Learn Warren's letter writing technique here. Be sure to steal his stuff and visit his blog.
Month 11, Day 1: Evidence? We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Evidence!
Warren's latest letter addresses an L.A. Times article by Neela Banerjee regarding GOP plans to go after the Obama administration's environmental policies and the researchers who have offered evidence on global warming, whom they accuse of manipulating data.
When Republican congresspeople dismiss the scientific consensus on the role of carbon dioxide in global climate change, they selfishly sacrifice the long-term health of the country and the planet for the sake of immediate political expediency. Their readiness to declare that climate science is not "settled" demonstrates a distrust of expertise that runs counter to their ideological slant — and they’ve been equally ready to dismiss expert information in other areas — as in the run-up to the Iraq war, where the Bush administration and their enablers in the Republican caucus systematically cherry-picked intelligence to support their predetermined policy objectives. That debacle cost us the lives of thousands of soldiers, countless Iraqi civilians, and our country’s credibility in the eyes of the world. It’s time for climate deniers to listen to the experts: the evidence for human causes of global warming is far, far stronger than that for Iraqi WMDs.
Warren Senders
LET'S DO IT!
(All times Eastern!)
eKos diaries from 10/31/2010 |
Diary | Author | Time (Eastern) | Tags |
The Week in Editorial Cartoons - Republican Thuggery on Full Display, Part I | JekyllnHyde | 23:32:21 | Recommended, The Week in Editorial Cartoons, eKos, 2010 Elections, Republican Party |
Hurricane Tomas to Turn Towards Haiti: Tents & Cholera | FishOutofWater | 20:13:06 | Haiti, Hurricane Tomas, eKos, environment, weather |
A More Ancient World: The Forests of the Night, the Silence of the Sea (Warning - Many Photos) | matching mole | 19:42:38 | A More Ancient World, biodiversity, romantic literature, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
Indiana, hotbed of climate zombies | DWG | 17:18:03 | climate change, climate change denial, climate zombies, Baron Hill, Todd Young |
Gulf Watchers Sunday - NOAA, FDA Lower Standards So Gulf Seafood Will Pass - BP Catastrophe AUV #417 | Yasuragi | 11:04:21 | Oilpocalypse, BP, Deepwater Horizon, Macondo, Gulf of Mexico |
Slay some Vampires for Halloween ... and help defeat the Climate Zombie Invasion | A Siegel | 09:43:17 | ekos, electricity, climate zombies, energy, energy efficiency |
Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Trick or Vote 2010 edition) | Neon Vincent | 00:21:55 | Overnight News Digest, OND, science, space, environment |
Photocredits:
vote ...Get off your rat's ass and VOTE! By melfeasance
Put a star on real America by By CKoontz
I Masturbate and I Vote by C. Joontz
Environment & mental pollution & protection, Image Retouching, Taipei, Taiwan by Sunshine Junior
Floating stuff such plastic , paper, drinking iron & bronze products were threw by people to the sea somewhere in the world, and become the main issue of the water & ocean pollution all over the world. (continue reading)
Love Is Smoke Made with the Fume of Sighs ... The sun sets as smoke billows over the US Steel Edgar Thompson Works, in Braddock Pa By CJ Rodkey