I know this diary may not be well received here but I think it's time to chill out on our Hillary attacks. While her comments about white voters can only be described as assholish, wrong headed and somewhat racist I think it is pretty clear that she knows she has no shot at winning. Her arguments are about demographics and her speaches since Tuesday night have been about her vision for America and how we must beat McCain. In the last two days she has said that she would work FOR the nominee more times than I have heard her say it all year.

IMO she is trying to make sure she can raise enough money to get her campaign out of debt and pay herself back the $11,400,000. This isn't one of those silly diaries saying that we should pay her debt, this is a diary saying we should chill out and let her leave the race gracefully.

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I have grown more alarmed each day as I watch the hateful rhetoric escalate between the two candidate camps on the internet. Both sides have been attacking the other with such vitriol that I fear we are about to damage our party beyond repair. Whether it's hatred toward "hilbots" or "Obama cultists" doesn't matter, both sides are equally responsible when it comes to the left side of the blogasphere. And if it continues, both sides may be equally responsible for a McCain win.

For the most part we simply disagree on who is the best candidate and who would be the best President. That is all. On the vast majority of issues we all agree, with only slight differences within those issues. But the thing that we all agree on whole-heartedly is that a Republican in the White-House would be catastrophic for our country.

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What the fuck is going on around here. This is a site I used to be proud of. It's a site that I told every Democrat I knew about. It was a site where extremely bright people could come and work towar getting rid of the GOP and develop great ideas to make our country better.

No more. I don't tell people to check out the site because I am embarrassed by the people here. It has become Freerepublic, Redstate and Instapundit rolled into one. People will say the most vile things about candidates they oppose and then a bunch of their like minded haters will jump right in.

Even people who have been here forever, who have shown that they are rational and willing to fight the GOP any way they can have been taken over.

Right now, near the top of the rec list, is a diary that claims Bill Clinton attacked the other Dem candidates as Swiftboaters. It has generated 500 comments, the vast majority of which are livid at the comparrison.

The only problem? Clinton never said it.  (Full text below the fold) Read what he said and ask yourself, why would the media claim that that is what he said?

Because that is what they do. It's something that all of us have complained about. It's what I have been fighting against for well over a decade. It's why new media is as big as it is.

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For quite a while we've been hearing the argument that the Democrats were for war with Iraq back in 98 because the signed the 98 Iraq Liberation Act.pdf You see the argument on winger blogs like Redstate, The Weakly Standard and all over wingnut radio. Just this morning I saw it used in a letter to the editor in the LA Times. Of course, as usual, it is a disingenuous argument. Each and every one of them leave this part out:

SEC. 8. RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.
Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or otherwise
speak to the use of United States Armed Forces (except as provided
in section 4(a)(2)) in carrying out this Act.
Approved October 31, 1998

That's a pretty relevant section, no? Why do you suppose they would leave that out?

The brain trust of Redstate is at it again It seems that Harry Reid is now Osama Bin Laden. Being the pathetic little boy that Erick is he has morphed Reid and Bin Laden into a "funny" picture. The little Erick has a few choice words for Senator Reid. Note this graf from Erick's pathetic screed:

Harry Reid has declared the war lost. My only publishable thought on this matter is that this war is winnable and Harry Reid must not want to win. He has, in one sentence, given a propaganda victory to Al Qaeda that they themselves could not orchestrate. Reid has betrayed the American troops and betrayed the cause of freedom.

What's still missing from the little boys screed? Yup. A call for his readers, all six of them, to join up so that we have a better chance of winning. That, of course, will never happen because he knows that the vast majority of his six readers are the epitome of ChickenHawks. The only thing that idiots like little Erick have left is their mock outrage.

"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens,"

That is a quote from the former chief of the Voting Rights Section at Justice. It's in an amazing McClatchy article called U. S. ATTORNEYS Campaign against alleged voter fraud fuels political tempest that each and every one of us should read and forward to everyone we know. It boils down the entire scandal into one easy to read article.

Baby Hewy is at it again. For the past two days the so called Christian has been lying about Kerry to his listeners and doing everything he can to make the troops think Kerry slammed them.

So I called his show and his screener wouldn't let me on. I told her I wanted to make the point that if the GOP ran government half as well as they run their propaganda machine then our country would be in great shape. In less than 6 hours they took one line from Kerry and made it a national story. When Katrina hit it took them 3 days to even begin to get help to New Orleans.

The screener hung up on me.

I wrote a diary earlier today asking for suggestions about what to ask the GOPropagandist from The Path to 9/11 on the Michael Medved show. I just deleted it to write this which I will also delete if people think that I am breaking the rules.  But what happened right before I got on was just plain stupid and so counter-productive that I had to comment.

Some guy from Pheonix, IIRC, got on and asked for a lot of time. That was his first mistake. A rookie one but a mistake none the less. Then he started asking beligerant questions in a rapid fire manner. You come off as a little nutty when you do that and people stop taking you seriously. But then he did something so stupid that I almost puked.

He said to the guest "I hope you die."

Christ on a bisquitt, how fucking lame can you get.

I listened to my daily dose of Hannity, 10 mins. In that time he played a tape that he says shows that the 9/11 Documentary, Docudrama, drama's part where Clinton refused to take Bin Laden out was essectially correct. According to him these comments from President Clinton are similar to the scene with Berger hanging up on the CIA.

But even more interesting than what Hannity claims is what he is essentially saying. What little Sean says is that Clinton should have murdered 200 women and children.

(Clinton) ...Now I had one other option. I could have bombed or sent more missiles in. As far as we knew he never went back to his training camp. So the only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children. ...

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If you've made your way around Blogistan today you have seen Michael Barone's idiotic screed today in which he spews:

...We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes....

Knowing Michael Medved as I do I had my fingure poised on my cell phone to call in as soon as he brought it up. I was not disapointed. But the caller right after me was very disapointed, in Medved that is.

I was listening to Mr. Bill a little while ago and he said something that reminded me of a point that Jay Elias made a few weeks ago. Mr. Bill was going on about how he was having a hard time making up his mind about what he was going to do come November. Now I only listened for about 15 minutes so I am extrapolating what his point was from what I heard but I think I got the jist of it.

Mr. Bill said that he couldn't vote for the Democrats because we are a party without "solutions." When he talked about the GOP he brought up Iraq and said something about it "not going the way they wanted it too."

This was Jay's point from a few weeks ago. It's not that the GOP is doing anything wrong, in their minds, it is that they are just victims of circumstances beyond their control. And when you distill their arguments down in all areas they all comes back to that.

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Yes, another I/P diary that will most likely end up in a flame fest. But as I have watched these diaries devolve into flame fests over my time here at dKos there has crystalized in my mind an inconvenient truth.

This site is populated by very like minded people. We all generally agree that war should be avoided, that all people should live in freedom and peace and as a general rule abhor violence and war. Yet even so we get in extremely ugly arguments when it comes to Israel and Palestine.

Which brings me to Gilas Svirsky's UN Speach. I have exerpted this in the past but will copy the whole thing below the fold.

This was diaried yesterday but as I read more of the comments in the thread today my disgust with those little assholes reached a boiling point. This is what comedy is for them.

 

Time to pull out of Wisconsin
By: crosspatch · Section: Diaries

From the diaries...

There were 28 shootings this past weekend in Milwaukee.  After 175 years of occupation, we are seemingly unable to extract ourselves from the quagmire that apparently is Wisconsin.  I say it is time America cut its losses and pulled out of Wisconsin NOW.  We currently have over 7000 Army National Guard troops based there yet there seems to be no end to the carnage.

Please join me in writing to Rep. Jack Murtha to get this terrible situation the attention it deserves.  15 in Haditha is nothing compared to the horrors perpetrated month after month after month after month in Wisconsin. It's time we brought our people home.

haha, get it? Read a few of their back slapping comments on the flip.

It appears that the GOP congress is finally getting it regarding wire tapping and aggressive searches. Via The Stakeholder I found this Roll Call Article about House Republicans "growing uneasy with the increasingly aggressive tactics being employed by the Justice Department..." It appears that they are beginning to understand our outrage.

Or are they?

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Last night Meteor Blades wrote a great post called Should Iran Be Stopped? ... In it he quoted Newt comparing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. The comparrison was no surprise to me because I had been listening to Hewy Hewitt earlier in the day and Hitler came up in every third sentance. Having listened to Talk Radio for well over a decade I knew that this was going to be a major talking point because Hewy is consistantly the go too guy for GOP talking points.

So I headed over to Hewy's blog and read this post.

March 7, 1936/April 11, 2006
by Hugh Hewitt
April 11, 2006 04:44 PM EST

March 7, 1936 is the day Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, and the date genearlly believed to have been, in retrospect, the ideal time to have stopped Hitler's march towards the war that followed.

Britain and France did nothing, and the war came...

One of my favorite musicians died yesterday.

Ali Farka Touré, the self-taught Malian guitarist and songwriter who merged West African traditions with the blues and carried his music to a worldwide audience, winning two Grammy Awards, died in his sleep on Monday at his farm in the village of Niafunke in northwestern Mali, the Ministry of Culture of Mali announced.

One of his Grammy's was for "Talking Timbuktu" in which he collaberated with a Santa Monica local and legendary guitarist, Ry Cooder. The album is still one of my favorite all time albums. The layers of souund were hypnotic and no matter where you played it it just fit right in.

As we get farther and farther into the scandals of the day there is one question that keeps popping up in my mind. Is this country, under GOP leadership, becoming a totalitarian state? It's hard to say no especially after reading this article about a new law sitting on Ohio Gov. Taft's desk.

Jump or go to jail.