i would be humbly surprised & flattered to be compared to moses. moses was one of the great leaders of the old testament. he led his people out of the bondage & slavery of pharaoh.
where is the lose in being painted as moses. obama is not claiming to be him, the mccain campaign is. best of all, the mccain ad puts their candidate in the unattractive position of playing demigod.
a very good case can be made, by analogy, with the bush administration being the modern version of the egyptian king/emperor/god. the bush/cheney administration has, after all, placed themselves not only above the law, (constitution) but seem to have declared that they are the law.
something along the lines of, "i don't think i'm moses, but i do feel like i'm running against pharaoh," might work.
for some reason, the american press seems to ignore the profoundly unamerican concept of letting the generals determine united states foreign policy which is at the heart of john mccain's candidacy. in giving generals & "conditions on the ground" primacy in determining how & why american blood & treasure are expended, mr mccain is advocating something very different from our constitutional democracy which holds that the people elect the president & the president orders the generals. moreover, ceding foreign policy to conditions on the ground is also subjugating the will of the citizens of the united states to the caprices of foreign insurgents & militias.
from today's boston globe Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war something to consider beyond the political machinations of election '08, the actual effects of militarily resolving our problems.
BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.
For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?
"The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."
in deference to a candidate who has not resorted to talking down to us, can we at least stop using baby talk like, "flip flop" & "flip flopper?"
i know we cannot expect the cool sophisticates of the media to stop, it's a guilty pleasure for them, like fart jokes - anderson cooper for one, can't wait to report the first charges of obama having "cooties." still, we should be able to discipline ourselves to the point of not using the language of preschoolers in a sandbox.
the question has to asked; mrs clinton, how many suits do you own? every night as the networks spin through pictures from the campaigns, i see another 6 or 8 new jackets. what is the story? it would appear that mrs clinton owns no less than 5 dozen different pant suits, or at least jackets.
she has a half dozen of every color, she has pastels & flamboyant near flourescents. she is seen wearing a variety of tweeds. some of these jackets have piping, some have epaulets, some have traditional flat collars & some have a modified count chockula look.
let's forget, for the moment, that any male candidate who showed up in a shocking pink, killer bee yellow & black, or electric blue suit would be sent back to the car lot or comedy club he came from, let's just try to figure out the acreage of her closet.
i saw this youtube up at firedoglake. from the state of the black union in new orleans. interestingly enough, barack obama didn't make the event, but hillary clinton did.
in the midst of a lot of policy talk, dick gregory brings down the house with this -
i thought dennis kucinich had the best plan; a national, not for profit, single payer plan - medicare for everyone. covers everyone, cuts over 30% off of our health care expenditures, (that didn't go to health care anyway) easy to understand & efficient. a lot of people have told me "it'll never happen," or that the clinton, or edwards, or obama plans are some sort of gateway to single payer. okay, maybe so.
the questions i have for the candidates remaining are this:
if your plan is submitted & is rejected, will you pledge to resubmit an health care plan every year until you get one passed? does universal health care mean enough to you that you will actually push it, not propose something & forget it - "hey i tried" is not going to get it for a lot of folks.
i just voted in the primary here in tucson. i live in midtown in raul grijalva's district. that's maybe the safest democratic district in the state. safe enough for him to vote against funding the iraq occupation. safe enough for him to sign on for impeachment. safe enough for him to eschew the "colbert bump" & not let steve play with his moustache.
this is not an advocacy piece, we should be past influencing anybody else's vote at this late date, this is just an election day snapshot. use this diary as an open thread to post your own polling place observations.
there seems to be a palpable excitement here. i typically walk right up & grab a ballot, pretty much the same whether it is a primary or general election; presidential, or off year. today i actually had to get into a line - not huge, mind you, but at least 10 people ahead of me.
a woman is married to a man who absolutely loves corned beef hash, eats it morning, noon & night. one day she mistakenly buys some dog food & cooks it up. before she realizes her mistake, he has eaten it up with nary a comment.
"hmmm," she thinks, "i can save a lot of money replacing his hash with dog food." & that is exactly what she does. she begins buying cases of dog food. one day the grocer asks her, "what kind of dog do you own? must be a big one."
she looks around furtively & whispers to him, "just between the two of us, i don't own a dog, this is for my husband."
the grocer is shocked. "no, no, no! you can't feed him dog food, it might kill him!"
the woman dismisses him with a slight wave, "it's okay," she whispers, "he doesn't know & he loves the stuff."
ooohweee.
dday is in vegas observing the festivities. he went to a bill clinton event & an obama rally.
He also said that he claimed he was in his hotel in Vegas last night, and a bunch of members of the Culinary Worker's union came up to him and said that they weren't going to listen to their union and they would caucus for Hillary. Which is fine. Then, he claimed, a shift supervisor or someone in a position of authority came up and said, "If you do that I'm going to change your schedule so you can't be there to caucus tomorrow." It's a pretty amazing allegation (a union boss is going to threaten and intimidate the voting rights of workers in front of a former President?), and Todd from MyDD and myself have some calls in to Hillary's press people to get some clarification. There's no way to really independently verify it, but it strains credibility to believe that it went down the way President Clinton said.
some of you might be curious as to what it looks like to be right the first time on matters of life & death & national integrity.
Vote "NO'' On Iraq War Resolution US, Statement by Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), October 3, 2002 here you will find representative kucinich's point by point refutation of the iraq war resolution that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, tarnished our national reputation & will likely cost you & your progeny trillions of dollars.
a couple of highlights:
But the key issue here that the American people need to know is that U.N. inspection teams identified and destroyed nearly all such weapons. A lead inspector, Scott Ritter, said that he believes that nearly all other weapons not found were destroyed in the Gulf War. Furthermore, according to a published report in The Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency, yes, the Central Intelligence Agency, has no up-to-date accurate report on Iraq's capabilities of weapons of mass destruction.
interesting, he actually considered contrar.y evidence
contrasting the two parties candidates, you'd have to feel good about being a democrat.
while i think john edwards probably looked & sounded fresher & may have marginally "won" the democratic side, hillary came across as more human than she has of late, obama didn't do anything to really stem his momentum & bill richardson, well, he's still the only one who has balanced a budget.
the larger story, to me, is what a rat's nest the republicans are presenting to the nation. freaking food fight, only the food had already been digested & passed through the digestive system.
watching the republicans made me think of an old richard brautigan poem titled, "they way she sees it" which went something like, "i'm so glad he's not my old man."
I HAD TO run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go.
What if I ran into bloggers?
Ever since the total, irretrievable collapse of the Internet in a chaos of viruses, worms, spam, terrorism and busts by the FBI anti-porn squad, that archaic species of human had become a bigger street menace than mimes, Jehovah's Witnesses, or panhandlers ever were.
how this managed to escape rjones & penquinsong is beyond me.
from huffpost this tasty bit of speechery delivered today at san francisco state university. dude is pissed, he's gone past his "fuckin' jail" for bushco that he famously advocated on bill maher's show.
While I'm not a proponent of the Death Penalty, existing law provides that the likes of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice, if found guilty, could have hoods thrown over their heads, their hands bound, facing a 12-man rifle corps executing death by firing squad. And our cowardly democratically dominated House and Senate can barely find one voice willing to propose so much as an impeachment. That one voice of a true American. That one voice of Congressman Dennis Kucinich. This is not going to be a sound bite. Not if I can help it. I'm torn. I'm torn between the conventional wisdom of what we all keep being told is electibility and the idealism that perhaps alone can live up to the challenges of our generation.
a bit of self indulgence here. i have my own opinion on where i stand politically as compared to this site's founder, but i have been curious as to if there is, and what, the community's consensus might be.
often (& quite unfairly) markos has been painted by some comment or diary posted here & he has explained that folks here have minds of their own, that he established a forum that is largely self policing, but flourishes primarily because it is (within some bounds) a free thought zone. he rejects the concept of himself as "our leader."
his new position at newsweek puts him a little, (who am i kidding? a lot, like expect his smiling face regularly on your television.) more in the spotlight. this site probably will get extra scrutiny as well.
anyway, with apologies to meta jesus & for my own curiosity & perhaps a few others, this poll:
this isn't going to be a long diary, i'll probably pull it in a bit, but chris matthews is interviewing himself through his wife right now. all to sell his new book. he is sitting in the guest chair batting his lashes & doing an infomercial for himself. this certainly isn't hardball. it feels soft & squishy, like a baggie full of, i don't know, something soft & squishy.
gack! you've been warned.
matthews thinks he is somebody entirely different than the bush/cheney ass suck he has played for the last six years. amazing.
some producer at msnbc thought this was a good idea? incredible.
chris, look - i'll buy the book, just get off of my t.v.. put shuster or gregory on for a month. peddle your crappy book on shows i don't watch, too.
there is fresh speculation, from various right-wing american pundits, that perhaps you've been reading leftist blogs - perhaps even writing on them. this gives me a little different take on the concept of what a "lurker" is. apparently you like to read chomsky, me too. some will use this information to degrade anything mr chomsky has to say. it's an old device, of course. i remember when the communist party endorsed civil rights in the 50s & 60s here in the united states, it was used to tar anyone who fought for equal rights as a communist. i'll let noam speak to you himself.
anyway, if there is a chance that you've been logging on here, let me tell you a thing or two. others here will undoubtedly have a few choice words to pass on.
hey, republicans (especially mitt romney)- you can play too.
a few weeks ago on "now," the david brancaccio half hour show on pbs, the lead in was this statistic:
In America, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners make about the same money per year collectively as the millions of Americans in the bottom fifty percent combined.
in other words, the highest paid 300,000 made as much as the lowest 150,000,000. my question: is this fair? is this a good thing for the nation? if not, what would you do about changing these numbers? i am especially interested in mr romney's answer as he is the most likely candidate to fall into the top .001 & perhaps he thinks the disparity is a good thin, or should be widened.
