This is old-hat, but I think it's worth re-addressing for the new election.  As always, the key battleground between the parties is in the definitions of certain buzzwords which are used to frame various arguments.

The biggest buzzword this millennium so far has been FREEDOM.
It's generally meant by GOP types to mean the freedom FROM entanglement/responsibility - that is, taxes - or any government obligation, really.  It's the sort of freedom a fighter plane has when it has the ability to disengage and fly away from an adversary and abandon them.  Freedom from environmental regulations, etc.

I saw this reference on TalkingPointsMemo and was surprised that nothing had yet arrived on DailyKos.  Here is the Link.  Here are my two allowed paragraphs...Here is the Link to the Washington Post. It will be in all the papers in the morning.

The question a few months ago was : who was the senator who was secretly putting a hold on the FOIA good government bill?
To my mind a 'secret hold' in congress is almost like a secret court.  It allows for a lack of accountability and a lot of bloviating and BS and/or cowardice and duplicity for politicians.   So Surely it was a Republican.  Well, the bill stalled for months. Kyle was finally fingered as the culprit.  See below, and here.

Jon Stewart has now had a 10-minute debate on his show with John Bolton.
He's held his own vs. Bolton, who has been straightfoward, if an intimidating presence.

It was probably the best piece of TV debate / journalism over the past 3 years.  You never see two people with such opposite points of view come into contact.

Dinesh Desouza went on Colbert's show to shill for his new book - "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11"  I had only barely heard of him before, but with this title I immediately thought he was a top-level Neocon shit-heel.  

Colbert ripped him to pieces mostly by taking his ridiculous, assinine comments, then bringing them to their logical conclusions,  and violently agreeing with the ridiculous partisan bullshit.  He didn't give Dinesh any wiggle-room at all, and of course it's hard to be an A*hole when you're not allowed to control the framing of the language and getting the last word in.  

I put this forward as something that's just plain nuts.  Rummy has had ludicrously poor judgement on almost everything and the press and congress had to virtually pry him out of the Pentagon with a crowbar. His bull-headed 'loyalty' probably cost Bush the Senate.  God forbid competence be taken into consideration.

A Bad Omen in Rumsfeld's Firing

By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, November 23, 2006
In the two weeks since the election, I have asked a wide assortment of Republican notables their opinion of the Rumsfeld sacking. Only one went on the record: Rep. Duncan Hunter, the House Armed Services Committee chairman. A rare undeviating supporter of Rumsfeld, Hunter told me that "it was a mistake for him to resign." The others, less supportive of Rumsfeld, said they were "appalled" -- the most common descriptive word -- by the president's performance.

We all remember the day last January when all of Iraq went to vote, waited in line at great personal risk and dipped their fingers in the purple ink. It was heralded as a first step in the right direction.  But there was never another step.. Just slow entropy in Iraq until we have the defacto Civil war we have now.

Perhaps the most important thing of the many that Bush was determined to overlook was that Iraq was a manufactured country created after WWI, and that without either a military dictatorship or worse, it would collapse back into the clusters of tribes that had lived there for hundreds of years.
More below the fold.

I've never seen anything like this.

Have a look.

http://www.youtube.com/...

Ford seems earnest and irked and willing to stand up for himself, if a little too gentle.  Corker seems weasily - but I know that he's the GOP man who supports Bush, so it's impossible for me to take him seriously. As usual the press works overtime to be 'nonpartisan' regardless of who is right or wrong.  Wouldn't want to offend any lying, conniving politicians and their precious misled followers, would they?  They need the audience to sell breakfast cereal tomorrow and the day after , truth be damned.

And so it goes...

I continue to be undecided on Iraq.  I'm know I'm not an expert and even the experts are fiercely partisan and contradictory.  That said, I want to write a little on how I frame the question.  I want to be a peacenik, but the picture is very complicated and I may be straying off the DailyKos reservation with this entry. Bear with me.

1: 50,000+ have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war.  This is awful.
The only part of the story that complicates the picture is .. that many thousands of Iraqis were being killed by Saddam, either directly or more likely through sanctions-related shortages of medical supplies and food over the previous decade.  Does an infant-mortality death count as much as someone shot at a checkpoint?  One is a quiet tragedy while the other is a loud tragedy which causes  chaos and destroys society.    More below the fold.

The current plan floated by the democrats is to cut loan rates for students and raise the minimum wage.

God know we need both of these things.  The first is one of the few foundations of civilization we still barely cling to and the second is desperately needed as the minimum wage has stagnated for decades.

The GOP Ideological weasels are going to say.. Where's the money going to come from? - as if their boondoggles have been cost-free.(!) The Democrats have to be explicit.  We're going to TAX THE RICH.  Say those exact words.  We've acted ashamed of this position for a while now, and nobody votes for a mealy-mouthed bunch of wusses.  No shame! Fight Fight Fight!  Otherwise we're collapsing into feudalist society with robber-barrons.  We need PRIDE and NOISE and DIRECT WORDS to make our case.  Don't puss-out, dems.

Michael Graham is a Right Wing talk show host, and after being fired in Saint Louis last year for hateful speech against Muslims he has landed up here in Blue Boston. The SOB is talented - his eloquence and gift for gab are formidable and I feel for him the way I do about the South Park guys - It's a tragedy that they're playing for the wrong team.

He spent the day defending the ridiculous proposed gay marriage ban..  His argument: It's a Democracy!  If you want to marry, get a majority!, until then, we don't want to be coerced into accepting your unholy unions.

Well, the argument is complete bullshit. It's a ploy for Bush to throw a bone to his dim-witted base, and a club to intimidate and badger the judiciary..  And it's a thin veil for rank bigotry..  Kos'ers probably already agree, but here's my explanation.  (below the fold).

As with everyone who put their time and hope into the Kerry campaign, our defeat put me in a state of shock for a day or two.  I worked in Florida for a few weeks near West Palm and everyone I spoke to was pro-Kerry.  There was an ominous feeling in that there were no Bush troops canvassing anywhere nearby - had they given up on these districts and concentrated farther north? Their methods seemed lightyears ahead of ours - they didn't have to spend all the time and gas to knock on doors..  They were working through the mega-churches.  There might have also been some fraud, it's hard to know.  

And I didn't even love Kerry very much.  I just heard Bush's voice and knew he was lying, and that his tax-cuts were a virtual rape on the finances of the country.  So now instead of a functioning budget, we have a ponzi-scheme which we'll desperately try to hold together to avoid utter disaster.  But.. Maybe this was necessary.  See Below.

Thank God the masses have finally woken up from the GOP's hypnotic trance. But many are just trying to find other Republican leaders..  Everyone is running away from Mr. 29% as they can see the Smirky's vultures circling, but we need them to move back to our side of the aisle and not longing to vote for McCain.

How do we do that? I live in the NorthEast, so it's hard for me to know what plays in Peoria.  There are some that will keep tilting at windmills and imaginary welfare queens and want to hate homosexuals until their last day on earth.  Ignore them. Fight to change the hearts and minds of the others. Here are some ideas. They're obvious, but I'm new to diaries so bear with me.  See Below.

After five grueling years the tone has finally changed. The right-wing talking heads have turned from lovingly debating the lovable foibles our great leader to raking him over the coals and spitting bile in his direction all day long. It feels great. The damn has burst. Logic is restored and The Great Smirking SOB is reaping the whirlwind. At a family gathering where I and my Limbaugh-lemming cousin usually pass eachother in wary silence, I felt no need to argue and kvetch as the pole numbers made my point for me. A Poll for you. :)

In regards to Georgia10's notes on GOP budget cuts for Vets' mental illness.

Our friends across the aisle believe (or pretend to believe) that free will is the dominant force in society and all human interaction.  So the successful deserve reward and the rest can be ignored.

A mental instability, either schizophrenia or depression or any brain malady clearly contradicts their notion of our precious ability to make decisions, and through those decisions, to then be held fully responsibility for our actions.  

More below the fold.