So here we are, the end of the primary season. Clearly, everyone has been paying attention to the top primary race in the country....the PA-05 primary. (I hear there are a couple of people running for some office that gets a White House too.) I thought I'd take a moment to run through some of the reasons why Rick Vilello is the best choice for the people of the Fifth District. Follow me below the fold for the details.
Don's candidacy has sparked a fire amongst the unions here in LA-06. While they've worked with political candidates before, I've never seen them this excited about a candidate. If you like the idea of adding to the Democratic majority in the House with someone who will be there with us on the economic issues we all care about, then donate.
I also had the opportunity to interview Don. The interview is below the jump!
David Brooks seems not to have heard the same Obama speech "on the economic stresses facing American workers" that I did.
In Brooks' telling, Obama in Pittsburgh on Monday delivered a demagogic protectionist "speech about nothing" that failed to describe how "pervasive forces are shaping the lives of voters and how government should respond." Brooks complains that there was "one clause" devoted to technological change (the #1 factor in manufacturing job loss, according to Brooks) and 45 sentences devoted to trade deals (a marginal factor).
President Bush ignored the advice of Democratic leaders and sent the Colombia free trade agreement to Congress on April 7. Bush’s action was designed to force lawmakers to vote the pact up or down within 90 days.
Bush is pushing a 600-page trade agreement that, among other things, would give Colombia duty-free access to the US market for most of its goods and require Colombia to remove tariffs on US exports. It also would give US companies incentives to move offshore and expose basic environmental, health, zoning and other laws to attack in foreign tribunals. If that isn’t bad enough, Colombia’s government has been linked to paramilitary death squads that assassinate trade union activists.
According to the New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will change its rules so as to block the requirement of a vote on the free trade agreement with Colombia.
Pelosi says the House will vote on the rules change policy Thursday, effectively putting off a vote on a free trade agreement that is a key priority of the Bush administration.
''The president took his action. I will take mine tomorrow,'' Pelosi said.
George Bush today sent a proposal to Congress to create yet another "free" trade agreement -- this time with Colombia, a country where more than 2,200 trade unionists have been assassinated since 1991.
During an appearance at the White House, Bush said he signed a letter giving Congress 90 working days to vote on the agreement.
The cynical and counter-democratic nature of marketing has done a great disservice to the Republic in this election cycle, as it always seems to. "Change" versus "Experience" has become Coke versus Pepsi, just with particular consumers of each sniping at other in the blogosphere over which tastes better, becoming conditioned to a myopia where no other ideas, much less beverages, exist outside this dialectic.
Coke and Pepsi pretty much taste the same, yet if Coke's formula contained the cure for cancer, you would think they might incorporate that into their millions of dollars worth of brand communications.
The shit of it is, somebody damn well should be promising the cure for cancer, at least figuratively, insofar as its figurative Bushian cells and their money-driven cronyist orthodoxy have infested the country and too much of the globe.
I'm posting this as the fluffy bunny tale end of the diary I posted several hours ago but didn't have room for to include all I wanted so cut short. Please consider this a complementary companion diary to my earlier one:
The debate over the need to revisit the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) before the March 4 primaries was welcome, but Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still short on the specifics needed to deliver on Americans’ demand for real change to failed globalization policy.
Obama started more than 20 points behind Clinton in Ohio and nearly caught up to her with his call to renegotiate NAFTA. But Obama’s momentum appeared to drop off when Canadian officials leaked that Obama’s top economic adviser reportedly had given Canadian diplomats assurances that the criticisms were not aimed at Canada.
Americans ought to wonder why the conservative prime minister of Canada chose to become involved in the Democratic primary in the US—particularly when there are reports that a Clinton aide gave similar assurances to Canadian officials. Anyway, Canada is not the problem with NAFTA. If anything, Canada’s labor and environmental standards are stronger than those of the United States. Mexico is the trade partner that refuses to play by the rules. It has labor and environmental standards but won’t enforce them.
Today, for nearly three hours, America's massive national security apparatus ground to a halt. Yes, for nearly three freaking (have you ever heard anyone say freaking?) hours, terrorists could go about their business, unhindered, unmolested, and untortured.
How could John Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence have allowed such a bone-headed move? And congress, were they asleep at the switch? What about the news media How many people who are reading this have any idea that only lady luck saved them from the haters of freedom today.
My fingers are shaking so badly that I can barely type. The sordid truth, the whole sordid truth, and nothing but the sordid truth, after the jump.
Ohio is being bombarded with another Obama attack on Hillary. I suspect he will do this for the remaining states Primaries as well, like he did with Universal Health Care for all mailer to Californians. This is a mass mailer claiming Hillary said "NAFTA was a boon for our economy". As you will see, and also note, Hillary never claimed to be pro NAFTA and Hillary has been campaigning for fair trade and was one of the very first to advise she would close the Corporate Loop Holes that are actually paying and incentive to shipping American jobs overseaas, but the paper that Obama is using for a quote clearly states it was their wording and haven't even found a quote from Hillary to suggest it.
I posted a diary way back during the Winter Solstice on how the chocolate trade is made possible through the use of child slave labor. After seeing the posting from Meteor Blades this morning on the Front Page, I figured, perhaps it’s time for part Deux, what you can do.
So, join me on the flip and just in case you need a refresher, you can read
The Irony of Valentine's Day is that so much of what we give as gifts are awash in pain and suffering. It does not have to be that way.
THE TOPICS: In this diary I'll talk about possible gifts for your Valentines as well as alternatives, providing much alternative and further reading at your discretion. Among the topics included are:
♥ Flowers
♥ Non-Sweets
♥ Chocolate
♥ Coffee
♥ Doing Without
♥ Dinner & a Show
♥ Jewelry
♥ Wine
♥ How to find "Love" and support kossoks too
Part of how I ended up at dKos was finding out how Republican the grocery store Safeway was. I already despised Wal-Mart (and more with each new thing I discovered about them) but was still to discover just how neck-deep in Neo-Con they are.
Essentially, I didn't want another damn dollar of mine going to support Bushco keeping them in power. As Dr. Phil would say:
If there is one issue that we can be 100% sure that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are both dancing cheek to cheek with the big transnational corporations, that is the NAFTA model of corporate wealth agreements.
For those of you who still labor under the misapprehension that NAFTA is a trade agreement, what NAFTA is, is an agreement to remove the power of sovereign nations to control flows of financial assets across their boundaries. Trade provisions in NAFTA are simply sweeteners to buy off support needed to get the surrender of national sovereignty through the political systems of the US and the other party to the agreement (hereafter to be referred to as "the sucker of the second part".)
Now, we can be 100% sure that both Senators Clinton and Obama are 100% behind this kind of surrender of national sovereignty, because extending the NAFTA model to Peru came up for a vote in the Senate this year, and they both voteddeclared their support for extending the NAFTA model to Peru.
So what is a Buckeye who opposes NAFTA-model corporate wealth agreements to do? Its simple: Vote Edwards Against NAFTA and For Party Unity.
Russ Feingold wants the D's running for President to do something more than just talk the talk.
"Talking about experience and idealism is so much conversation for Wisconsin people," says Feingold, a three-term U.S. senator. "We'd like to hear something about what they're going to do. It's amazing to me that this campaign has gotten as far as it has without getting down to specifics. But Wisconsin voters expect more from the candidates than the slogans."
There was a time when "fair trade" meant something quite different from the way it is being used by the current crop of presidential hopefuls. What used to be a rallying cry for those recognizing that current trade policy puts producers and workers in developing and underdeveloped nations at a severe disadvantage has now become code for protection of American industry at the expense of billions of poor around the world.
.... 
If there is one issue that we can be 100% sure that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are both dancing cheek to cheek with the big transnational corporations, that is the NAFTA model of corporate wealth agreements.
