At noon on Wednesday, Gordon Smith will finally get a challenger for his seat in 2008.  Steve Novick will be announcing his candidacy in Portland at the ILWU Local 8's hall at noon, and then will be off for another announcement at 3:30pm in Eugene at the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza.

I know there's been a lot of excitement about DeFazio running, and there's no question that he would be a great candidate.  But I think Steve Novick deserves a good long look from the netroots--especially considering he's the only one currently in the race.  I think Steve says why he is running best on his website:

I'm running because while George Bush has been taking our country to hell, Senator Gordon Smith had his hand on the handbasket every step of the way.  I'm running because Gordon Smith represents government of the rich, by the powerful, and for the special interests, and I believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people.

To Senator Harry Reid and all Senate Democrats:

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina still haunts this nation and will continue to haunt all of America for the foreseeable future.  We have watched as thousands of American citizens died at the hands of a horrendous hurricane.  We then watched as thousands more died at the hands of an incompetent and ineffectual government response.  There is no doubt today that the response by our government to this disaster was an absolute travesty and greatly compounded the damage that Hurricane Katrina wrought.

Back in the day, the old Iron Blog was a great place to have a political debate.  Larime Taylor ran the site and each week--barring any complications--two bloggers typically of differing ideologies would battle it out over a topic chosen by The Chairman.  They were weeklong battles involving an opening and closing statement, as well as two posts in the middle primarily intended to shore up their arguments and poke holes in the arguments of their opponent.  The format was fun and I spent time there both as an observer and commenter, as well as a judge for some of the battles.  I made some good online friends at the forum, from both ends of the political spectrum.  The site worked surprisingly well at bringing together people of differing political ideologies and creating friends and a solid dialogue.

I don't believe anyone has posted this in a diary yet, so I thought I would throw it out there.

The Washington State Democratic Party is actually asking for feedback from us regular folk about who we think should be the next chairman of the DNC.  Carl over at the Washington State Political Report has the story.

This is welcome news for those of us here in Washington.  It's nice to have a state party that is responsive to the people who actually make up the party.  This doesn't surprise me, though--the party seemed solid and attuned to its members when I worked for them during the election.

How bad is Iraq? At this point, I don't see any other option than pulling out. I hate to say that, but I'm getting to the point that I simply cannot see any way that we will make things better in the country. I believe it will only get worse the longer we are there. That has been the trend so far and nothing I have read indicates it will get better, even with elections held in January.

I don't even see how those elections can be held and be considered legitimate. Marshal Law has been imposed in Iraq for 60 days, which means it will be in effect up until just a few weeks before the elections. How the hell do you hold a legitimate election a few weeks after having been under Marshal Law for two months? How does one campaign during that time? How will anyone know who they are voting for?

But more disturbing to me is this post over at Empire Notes. The U.S. did not just violate the Geneva Conventions in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. We are doing it as a matter of policy right now in the fighting in Fallujah.

The short of it is that we are violating the Geneva Convetion in the following ways:

I did some searching and didn't see a diary on this article at all, so hopefully I'm not reproducing something.

Salon has an article up at the moment from Kevin Criss, who is a 21 year old African American. According to him, Kerry is heading for a blowout win next Tuesday due to the black and youth vote. Personally, this is the kind of thinking I have been guiltily indulging in over the last week or so.  I'm starting to become confident that Kerry is going to destroy Bush, both in the popular and electoral college vote.  Maybe this is too much wishful thinking, but I don't think it is.

According to Criss, the black vote and youth vote is going to be huge this year.  He starts out talking about Eminem's song "Mosh" and claims that the black and youth vote are going to likely double from 2000 and that they will swing a lot of states toward Kerry.  A key quote:

We're in the final stretch now, folks.  Accordingly, Kerry has gone on the offensive and is clearing the way for a final huge push.  However, this isn't just about the actions of his own campaign--it's about the actions of all of us.  Despite what some of us here hoped earlier on--that this would be a blowout election--it is appearing that it will be down to the wire.  Not only do we need Kerry to be at his best these last few weeks--giving great speeches, going on the offensive and nailing the debates--but we need to be at our best, as well.  This doesn't just mean contributing to great discussion here on Kos and elsewhere, it means getting off our asses and winning this election.

It's time for those of us (me included) who have not been volunteering to change that.  There are myriad opportunities for us to make a difference and we have to take advantage of them.  The direction our country takes in November is up to us and our willingness to fight to save America from an increasingly frightening political and social future.

So act!  Want to change the country?  Want to change the world?  Then take action.  At the very least, write some letters to the editor.  Better yet, how about you write some letters to voters urging them to take action in November?  I know there are plenty of former Deaniacs around here--I'm one myself--so you should know how this goes.  Act4Victory has swing state addresses for voters that they have identified through their massive GOTV effort, so sign up and handwrite some letters.  This simple action could produce a vote and we all know how crucial every vote is.

I'm sick and tired of being told that businesses simply can't afford to pay workers decent wages and still make a profit. I'm sick and tired of workers being sacrificed to increase "shareholder value" or pad the pockets of CEOs. I'm so goddamn sick and tired of corporations shitting on workers in the pursuit of a couple of extra dollars profit.

About two weeks ago, it was announced that Fred Meyer would be outsourcing their cleaning crew work. Basically, every store has an overnight cleaning crew consisting of a few people who clean the store and prepare it for the next day. In many cases, these people have worked for the company for years. They're good workers and they do a fine job.

As of September 12, it appears most of them will be fired. It sucks. I work with these guys and I find this disgusting. What's worse is the way they found out about this. No boss bothered to come around, sit them down and explain the situation. No, they found out through a goddamn newspaper article. The cleaning crew workers read about their future termination in the newspaper. No one from the company bothered to tell them beforehand.

I received my Washington State Primary ballot today in the mail.  Is there any Washington kossacks here who would like to help me out with my decisions?  I'm in the 17th District.  I already know that I'm voting Patty Murray--duh--and Brian Baird for my Rep.  But I'm still not sure on Governor.  I lean toward Gregoire--and I'm pretty sure she's going to win it anyway--but Sims seems interesting, too.  I'm intrigued by his tax plan, though the no taxes on businesses leaves me a bit leery.  Also, any opinions on the Attorney General race?  Senn or Sidran?  Why?

I'm going with Waadevig for State Senator in the 17th.  For State Rep (Position 1) I'm not sure if I should go Ferrell or Campbell.  I know Ferrell's name more, but that doesn't mean she's the better candidate.  And hey, if anyone wants to throw out an opinion on County Commissioner (Harris or Hagensen--yeah, yeah, I know I'm getting obscure now) then that would be great.

I'm going to do some research on my own, of course, but any opinions here from locals would be greatly appreciated.  You can talk issues, electability or both--whatever you think is relevant.  Thanks!

Louisiana Representative Rodney Alexander may have tried to screw over the Democratic party when he switched to the Republican party  earlier this month at the ballot deadline, but a judge in Louisiana isn't having any of it.

According to CNN, sign up for the ballot will be reopened, meaning that a new Democratic challenger can get on the ballot.  From the article:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday that July saw a gain of a mere 32,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. This was far below the predictions of various experts, including the Bush administration. In response to this news, Republican pollster David Winston had a cute quote about why the American public shouldn't doubt Bush's effectiveness based on July's numbers: "It's like if you have a baseball player like Barry Bonds and he goes 0 for 4 one day and you decide to trade him, as opposed to looking at the totality of his performance for the entire season."

I agree with David. I think it's only fair that Bush be judged on the entirety of his record, not just on a single month of data. So I looked over some various economic information (much of it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and came up with some interesting conclusions on my blog.  I'll repost them here:

One of the greatest wildcards in the future of United States politics is the world oil supply.  Simply put, America has long since hit the peak of oil production and is now in decline.  World oil production will hit that same peak before long.  At some point in the future, we will run out of oil and the impact of that will likely be both pervasive and severe.  Our lives will change, particularly here in America.  As recent gas prices have shown us, cheap oil prices are quickly disappearing.  As prices sky rocket and as we eventually run out of the fuel, our economy, society and the political landscape will be altered drastically.  What's not known is just how they will be changed.

Aaron Naparstek tries to give us some idea of just what kind of changes might occur in a magnificent, lengthy article I recently read in my local paper, The Oregonian.  It is not available online, but an almost identical article recently published in the New York Press is available here.

Let's start by laying some basic groundwork.  From the New York Press article:

I'm not sure how it is that Reagan's death sent me into a depression on Monday morning, but it did.  It's not that I mourn for Reagan.  As I wrote in my previous post [on my blog], I really have little opinion of him.  I was too young to follow his presidency and I had no attachment to the man, so his death has meant little to me.  I was much more troubled reading about the three Oregonians who recently died in Iraq, cut down in their youth fighting an unnecessary war.

I was reading an article syndicated in The Oregonian, however, and I just started to become depressed.  Perhaps I am too set in my views, but I feel as if this country is collapsing under the weight of self-interest and fear.  I see politicians driving us to war under pretense, pushing ever forward out of ideology and a desire for better approval ratings rather than for the desire to help people.  I see, in Reagan, the beginning of a war on those in poverty that has carried over to today as social stratification becomes ever greater.  The rich are becoming immensely richer will the poor and the middle class are fighting harder every day just to scrape by in this country.

I recently read This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff.  It's a memoir of his childhood and it's a magnificent book.  There is a passage late in the memoir that details Tobias and a friend stealing gas from a local family by siphoning it out of their car.  This family is poor, just barely getting by.  After being caught, Tobias and his friend, Chuck, are forced to return the gas and apologize to the family.  From page 245 and 246 of this edition of the novel:

Remember back in 2000 when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris teamed up to purge thousands of names from the Florida voter roll?  Remember how it turned out many of those names were African-Americans, who voted 93% for Gore?  Remember how thousands of those names were people who should not have been purged from the rolls--who were not convicted felons at all?  In other words, remember how Jeb Bush fixed the election in Florida in 2000?

Yeah, well, he's doing it again.

From an editorial in the Thursday edition of The Oregonian:

How much you want to bet that umbrella ends up in Gitmo?

(Promoted from the diaries. Make sure you click through to read the full post -- kos)

So now that Bush's campaign is lying about the Washington Post reporters that put together the article on Bush's negative and false advertising and calling them liars, will they come right out and call the Bush campaign a bunch of liars like they should have in the first place?

Bush's campaign released this statement on Monday rebutting the Washington Post article.  It's absolutely brilliant.  What the campaign does here is they take multiple assertions from the article and meticulously show through a series of quotes and references how the Washington Post was exactly right in calling the statements misleading.

Some examples I particularly like:

There are some voices out there who seem to be advancing the notion that certain Americans are being disingenuous with their outrage over the Abu Ghraib torture scandal because they did not express an equivalent outrage over Saddam Hussein's similar tyrannical behavior.  It is hypocritical, they seem to argue, to complain so vociferously about Abu Ghraib when they did not complain as loudly about Saddam.

Let me just say, this is a bullshit argument.

As U.S. citizens, we have every right to be outspoken and outraged about the way American troops have tortured prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.  Indeed, we should be sickened.  We should be disgusted.  We should be enraged.  As American citizens, we have an obligation to watch and scrutinize our government and to express a greater outrage over the transgressions of our government than another country's government.  After all, our government is a reflection of us and we, ultimately, hold much of the responsibility for its actions.

Goddamn it:

The government rejected over-the-counter sales of morning-after birth control on Thursday because of concern about young teenagers' use of the pills. But regulators left open the possibility they will reconsider.

The Food and Drug Administration was under intense political pressure from both sides on whether to lift the prescription requirement for emergency contraception. Conservatives argued doing so could encourage unsafe sex. Proponents said easier access to the pills could prevent thousands of abortions -- and the FDA's own scientific advisers had overwhelmingly backed the change