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For those of you out there old enough to remember The Band, I've been humming "Look Out Cleveland" to myself since yesterday. Maybe it can be the song of the day on the KE '04 press bus.

The lyrics:

Look out Cleveland, the storm is comin' through,
And it's runnin' right up on you-oo-oo
Look out Houston, they're be thunder on the hill,
Bye, bye baby [substitute Bush/Cheney] dontcha lie so still.

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light  bulb?

The Answer is TEN:

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed
   
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed
   
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb
   
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either: "For changing the light bulb or for darkness"
   

 5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Haliburton for the new light bulb
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a stepladder under the banner "Light Bulb Change Accomplished"
 7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally "in the dark"
 8. One to viciously smear #7
 9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has  had a strong light bulb-changing policy all along
10. And finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

LINK From AMERICAblog.com Wednesday, September 29, 2004
ZOGBY: Bush in SERIOUS trouble with young male voters
by John in DC - 9/29/2004 12:18:37 PM

President Pinocchio is going down.

Most political pundits believe that the final month of the 2004 presidential campaign will center around the war in Iraq. If so, then young men are likely to cast a vote of "no confidence" in George W. Bush. These are the findings of a new Zogby/Williams Identity poll conducted by Zogby Interactive from September 3 through September 7, 2004. The interactive survey was conducted online among 850 males between the ages of eighteen and thirty years old.

The survey reveals that 60 percent disagree with the statement that George W. Bush made the right decision to go war with Iraq. (Only 40 percent think Bush made the correct decision.) These attitudes remain firmly held when other aspects of the war are probed. For example, 63 percent disagree with the claim that Bush made the right decision to go to war, even if the intelligence data were flawed. Strong opposition to the war among the nation's young men has created a crisis of confidence in the president's leadership: 59 percent believe President Bush misled the American people from the beginning about the need to go to war with Iraq.

These negative assessments of the Commander-in-Chief are held by all major racial and income groups among the young men surveyed.

am forwarding the following because I found it exceptionally powerful. I hope you all agree.

Subject: Fw: A few words from Garrison Keilor
>
> We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
>
> Something has gone seriously haywire with the
> Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic
> Main Street
> businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried
> profligacy and waste, were devoted to their
> communities and supported the sort of prosperity that
> raises all ships.
>
> They were good-hearted people who vanquished the
> gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid
> Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and
> Prohibitionists, the antipapist anti-foreigner
> element.
>
> The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine
> American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable
> people to vote
> Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate,
> produced the Interstate Highway System, decli ned to
> rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave
> us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly)
> American arts and
> letters flourished and higher education burgeoned and
> there was a degree of plain decency in the country.
> Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's.
> Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a
> Christian obligation toward the poor.
>
> In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the
> party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of
> Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and
> became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade
> Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a
> gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media
> by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
> flag-waving of  Ronald Reagan who, while flew bombers
> in World War II, took a pass and made t raining in Long
> Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger
> pigeon, purged by a legion of angry  white men who
> rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship
> is another term for date rape," says Grover Norquist,
> the Sid Vicious of the GOP.  "I don't want to abolish
> government. I simply want to reduce it to the size
> where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in
> the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and
> government is his daddy.
>
> The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified
> into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and
> corporat shills, faith-based economists,
> fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of
> convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat
> boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
> nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes,
> sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, agg ressive dorks,
> Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
> Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New
> Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us,
> Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a
> dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of
> information and of secular institutions, whose
> philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts
> trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest
> of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
>
> Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in
> the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough!
> Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive
> scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write
> legislation to alleviate the suffering of
> billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the
> moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour?
> Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier
> than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of
> Divine Grace.
>
> Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection
> on a platform of tragedy-- the single greatest failure
> of national defense in our history, the attacks of
> 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation
> into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the
> White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the
> country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to
> generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead
> us into a box canyon of debt that will render
> government impotent, even as we engage in a war
> against a small country that was undertaken for the
> president's personal satisfaction but sold to the
> American public on the basis of brazen misinformation,
> a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous
> transfer of we alth taking place in this country,
> flowing upward, and the deception is working
> beautifully.
>  
> The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of
> the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic
> in the history of humanity has survived this.
>
> The election of 2004 will say something about what
> happens to ours. The omens are not good.
>
> Our beloved land has been fogged with fear, the
> greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence,
> distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and
> alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the
> opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can
> appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the
> Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies,
> bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the
> press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
>
> There is a stink d rifting through this election year.
> It isn't the
> Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No,
> it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the
> end of innocence, or a turning point in our history,
> or a cosmic occurrence; it was an event, a lapse of
> security. And patriotism  shouldn't prevent people
> from asking hard questions of the man who was
> supposedley in charge of security at the time.
>
> Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along
> Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local,
> hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the
> morning paper under their arms, I think of that
> non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit
> those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the
> capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and
> proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in
> his second term.
>
> This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us
> Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated
> Unitarians,
> whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to
> telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will
> wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage
> of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center
> and bodies being carried out and they will lie about
> their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
>
> The Union is what needs defending this year.
> Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the
> Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
> spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii
> has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts
> for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and
> claimed the right to know what books we read and to
> dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut
> ; the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the
> constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the
> corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell
> with anybody who opposes them.
>
> This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by
> angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to
> our grandchildren-- in better shape than however we
> found it. We have a long way to go and we're not
> getting any younger.
>
> Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved
> for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so  I
> have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's
> a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to
> life than winning.

Subject: Michael Moore speaks out!

Put Away Your Hankies...a Message from Michael Moore

MichaleMoore.com
Monday 20 September 2004

Dear Friends,
Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I h ave to come
there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK?
Bush IS
a goner -- IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop
shaking
like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The
Republicans
are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, "Oh, it's all over! We are
finished! Bush can't win! Waaaaaa!"

Hell no. It's never over for them until the last ballot is shredded.
They
are never finished -- they just keeping moving forward like sharks that
never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

They are relentless and that is why we secretly admire them -- they just
simply never, ever give up. Only 30% of the country calls itself
"Republican," yet the Republicans own it all -- the White House, both
houses
of Congress, the Supreme Court and the majority of the governorships.
How do
you think they've been able to pull that off considering they are a
minorit y? It's because they eat you and me and every other liberal for
breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the
planet.

Look at us -- what a bunch of crybabies. Bush gets a bounce after his
convention and you would have thought the Germans had run through Poland
again. The Bushies are coming, the Bushies are coming! Yes, they caught
Kerry asleep on the Swift Boat thing. Yes, they found the frequency in
Dan
Rather and ran with it. Suddenly it's like, "THE END IS NEAR! THE SKY IS
FALLING!"

No, it is not. If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate
Kerry
is and how he can't win... Dammit, of COURSE he's a lousy candidate --
he's
a Democrat, for heavens sake! That party is so pathetic, they even lose
the
elections they win! What were you expecting, Bruce Springsteen heading
up
the ticket? Bruce would make a helluva president, but guys like him
don't
run -- and neither do you or I. People l ike Kerry run.

Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass
campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those
phony
swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president --
Kerry
is. So quit complaining and work with what we have. Oprah just gave 300
women a... Pontiac! Did you see any of them frowning and moaning and
screaming, "Oh God, NOT a friggin' Pontiac!" Of course not, they were
happy.
The Pontiacs all had four wheels, an engine and a gas pedal. You want
more
than that, well, I can't help you. I had a Pontiac once and it lasted a
good
year. And it was a VERY good year.

My friends, it is time for a reality check.

1. The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On
Friday,
one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both
tied.
There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling
"likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the
past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the
first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in
THIS
election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone
as
their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young
people.
Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as
pollster John Zogby revealed last week

. You are being
snookered
if you believe any of these polls.

2. Kerry has brought in the Clinton A-team. Instead of shunning Clinton
(as
Gore did), Kerry has decided to not make that mistake.

3. Traveling around the country, as I've been doing, I gotta tell ya,
there
is a hell of a lot of unrest out there. Much of it is not being captured
by
the mainstre am press. But it is simmering and it is real. Do not let
those
well-produced Bush rallies of angry white people scare you. Turn off the
TV!
(Except Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers -- everything else is just a
sugar-coated lie).

4. Conventional wisdom says if the election is decided on "9/11" (the
fear
of terrorism), Bush wins. But if it is decided on the job we are doing
in
Iraq, then Bush loses. And folks, that "job," you might have noticed,
has
descended into the third level of a hell we used to call Vietnam. There
is
no way out. It is a full-blown mess of a quagmire and the body bags will
sadly only mount higher. Regardless of what Kerry meant by his original
war
vote, he ain't the one who sent those kids to their deaths -- and Mr.
and
Mrs. Middle America knows it. Had Bush bothered to show up when he was
in
the "service" he might have somewhat of a clue as to how to recognize an
immoral war that cannot be "wo n." All he has delivered to Iraq was that
plasticized turkey last Thanksgiving. It is this failure of monumental
proportions that is going to cook his goose come this November.

So, do not despair. All is not over. Far from it. The Bush people need
you
to believe that it is over. They need you to slump back into your easy
chair
and feel that sick pain in your gut as you contemplate another four
years of
George W. Bush. They need you to wish we had a candidate who didn't
windsurf
and who was just as smart as we were when WE knew Bush was lying about
WMD
and Saddam planning 9/11. It's like Karl Rove is hypnotizing you --
"Kerry
voted for the war...Kerry voted for the war...Kerrrrrryyy vooootted
fooooor
theeee warrrrrrrrrr..."

Yes...Yes...Yesssss....He did! HE DID! No sense in fighting now...what I
need is sleep...sleeep...sleeeeeeppppp...

WAKE UP! The majority are with us! More than half of all Americans are
pro -choice, want stronger environmental laws, are appalled that assault
weapons are back on the street -- and 54% now believe the war is wrong.
YOU
DON'T EVEN HAVE TO CONVINCE THEM OF ANY OF THIS -- YOU JUST HAVE TO GIVE
THEM A RAY OF HOPE AND A RIDE TO THE POLLS. CAN YOU DO THAT? WILL YOU DO
THAT?

Just for me, please? Buck up. The country is almost back in our hands.
Not
another negative word until Nov. 3rd! Then you can bitch all you want
about
how you wish Kerry was still that long-haired kid who once had the
courage
to stand up for something. Personally, I think that kid is still inside
him.
Instead of the wailing and gnashing of your teeth, why not hold out a
hand
to him and help the inner soldier/protester come out and defeat the
forces
of evil we now so desperately face. Do we have any other choice?

Yours,

Michael Moore