Obama said some rural Americans are bitter.  About all this job loss and jobs not coming back.  Who wouldn't be?  

Senator McCain may have flip-flopped for obvious political reasons on the mortgage mess, actually trying to propose a plan with solutions, albeit solutions that wouldn’t help many homeowners if he actually ever even supported the plan once he (God forbid) is President.  See McCain shifts aid to some mortgage holders," Michael Cooper, New York Times, April 11, 2008, at http://www.nytimes.com/...

One of McCain's problems is that the knee-jerk conservative right, his base as a GOP nominee, doesn't like him.  

The NYT knows people think they are liberal, but as their war coverage and other recent history shows, they seem just as much an establishmentarian neo-con tool as the rest of the "liberal media".  

My parents moved to Fairfield, subject of the front page diary on Ron Paul's top zipcodes to the left, from Mason City Iowa when they retired in 1998.  I grew up mainly in Mason City, born in Dubuque.  

A CNN poll shows, for the first time, that a majority of Americans think that sexual orientation cannot be changed.  

CNN Poll

Many still disagree of course.  Including of course those proverbial self-righteous but image-conscious conservatives out there, so common these days, who go around thinking and saying "I love my gay relatives, and I’m such a great person because I’m all nicey nice to gay people, but this is their choice, I know it’s a choice and therefore I can oppose gay rights without having any blood on my hands; they are the ones that chose a lifestyle where you don’t get rights."

Jerry's Dead.  Get a Job.  

Your revolution is over.  

Will the President fire Rumsfeld?  Probably not.  Why?  There are many possible answers.  If so, when?  Could be now, could be later.  Could be after 2008.  Would that be kind of pointless?  Sure.  

The following article

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

is on MSNBC and can be freeped at the bottom of the page where you rate articles.

The GOP is splitting on Iraq and Dems are finally coming together, and the American people are firmly now against the war.  But what is MSNBC's response?  A headline about how Dems fear anti-war talk will backfire.

Democrats have been handed an opportunity to explain in searingly relevant terms why the public must act to get Dems elected ASAP. Americans everywhere are groping for answers about this crisis and what to do about it. The time is ripe for the public to hear this message from as many Democrats as possible:

1. Having a swaggering cowboy as president doesn't protect America. What does protect us is having a president who has appointed competent, experienced professionals, and the long (boring) hours those hundreds of professionals put in to prepare for disaster.
   
2. Whatever anybody thinks of individual policy positions, Democrats have a proven record of appointing consciencious experienced professionals in these positions. Had a Dem been in office, a more competent FEMA could easily have saved thousands of lives. And (we need to emphasize this) Dems are passionate about rebuilding critical government agencies like FEMA by hiring competent professionals and giving them the resources to do their jobs.

Wasn't Grover Norquist famous for saying conservatives wanted government to be so small it could be drowned in a bathtub?

Here's our new talking point:

I won't write much now as I'm at work, but I feel like this is important:

There's no doubt in my mind that the RWCM will do whatever twisted, dishonest thing they can to save Bush even now, despite this obvious disaster on his part.  And that they will try to demonize anyone who tries to expose him.

They have every time we thought we had him down.

A Pew study was just released on public perceptions of the two parties when it comes to religious issues. All of us who want to help the dems be more effective at connecting with Americans going into 2006, and all who want to be more effective at countering the Republican lies and spin should read it. There is so much important stuff there. The report is available here:
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=254

The most important things I saw to take away from this are:

1. Just over half of Americans believe religious conservatives have too much influence on the Republicans. But, the same number believe secular liberals have too much influence on the Dems.

2. Only 29% believe the Dems are friendly toward religion. This number has dropped drastically over the last year, from 40% last August. People are buying the Republican lies about us making war on faith. I think this is a serious problem.

3. Two thirds of America believes that liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out of public life, while only 45% believe religious conservatives have gone too far in pushing their religion on us.

One of Chip Bok's cartoons from the last week- printed in today's Sacto Bee- makes it out like Casey supported the war and that a) Cindy doesn't care how he felt and b) his supposed support of the war means that she should support it (as if she has the responsibility to forget the facts and conform to any dead or living family member or soldier's misinformedness).  

As a new Californian, I am angry that Dianne Feinstein released a statement saying Dean should spend more time fundraising and less time making "outrageous" comments.  

Here is a reponse I got from OTB Games, a proud sponsor of Glenn Beck. Beck is the one who discussed wanting to kill Michael Moore on his radio show.  This is the original diary about the incident.  

We're living in extreme times.  I'll admit my bias here: I've never been the kind of liberal to pussyfoot around or to call a spade anything but a spade.  I've always had righteous anger and have known our side is damn right, even before everything got quite as crazy as it is now.  

All of that being said, I'm just so tired of liberals thinking we have to be nuanced and that any work or statement that reeks of black-and-white, sensationalist, or blunt commentary or imagery is somehow bad, inappropriate or counterproductive.  

Democrats have been understandably very optimistic about our chances for at least some gains in Congress and elsewhere in the 2006 election.  The Republican true colors are finally showing in ways even the RWCM (right wing corporate media, aka the American mass media, for you new Kossacks) can't completely explain away.   While most Kossacks aren't willing to get complacent per se, I think it will help us be savvy and motivated if we sensibly anticipate that the RWCM will try to do what they have successfully done for the last three election cycles.  Which is to take lots of bad news for the Republicans and distract people from it, respin it in favor of the Republicans, and/or demonize Dems enough so that they look even worse than the Republicans... all in time to secure a Republican victory at the polls.

The Oregon Supreme Court just ruled that the marriages last year are invalid. This is partially based on Measure 36, an Oregon Constitutional amendment recently passed by a coalition of religious fundamentalists, yokels and other lazy thinkers. The measure passed by a slim margin, but a majority vote's all it takes to amend the Oregon constitution.

So I was surprised by the ruling, but now I see the particular case was really not very strong.

But here's something I think illustrates how we might be able to argue successfully.

Imagine a coalition of Oregonians, through signature-gathering,  were to get a Constitutional amendment on the ballot creating a new benefit (like health care) for all non-interracial married couples in Oregon. Suppose it passed.

The case comes before the Oregon Supreme Court. Do they say the state can offer a benefit explicitly defined to be racist?  Or do they say there's no way to reconcile offering the benefit with the requirements of due process and equality under the law?

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