"While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Eugene V. Debs (1919)
Hilliary Clinton on Dalton Hatfield, the boy who sold his toys leverage the New York senator's campaign debt:
I'm also thinking of Dalton Hatfield, an 11-year-old boy from Kentucky, who sold his bike and sold his video games to raise money to support my campaign.
Now let me say that finally this evening, I want to read to you just briefly excerpts from a letter which I received. A letter which after all this is over, no one can take away from us. It reads as follows: 'Dear Senator Nixon, Since I'm only nineteen years of age, I can't vote in this Presidential Election but believe me if I could, you and General Eisenhower would certainly get my vote. My husband is in the Fleet Marines in Korea....Enclosed is a small check to help you with your campaign. Living on eighty five dollars a month, it is all I can afford at present but let me know what else I can do.' Folks, it's a check for ten dollars, and it's one that I will never cash.
While actual states of affairs in the world will not prevent the Clinton camp from continuing to refer to a "double digit win," they should nevertheless be honest and acknowledge that the two digits in question are separated by a decimal point.
The superdeligate arrangement is obviously antidemocratic, but there's also a problem with rebuilding the ship after it has set sail. A temporary fix could be to create the convention that the superdeligates (SDs), as a body, will always affirm the vote of the seated, popularly elected delegates. Here's how I see it happening. The national convention would change its bylaws so that the seated, elected delegates vote as a body first, and then the superdelegates vote as a body second. There would then be two incentives for the SDs to ratify the popularly-elected delegates' vote. First, the SDs would want to avoid an epic trainwreck that would cripple the party for a generation. Second, if the SDs as a body voted against the elected delegates, the SDs would be individually and collectively on the record opposing the popular will. This, of course, could lead to the abolition of SDs and an end to their individual political careers. Although unstable, conventional arrangements like this can work. Conventional rules guide the relationship between the Queen and the UK Parliament, the relationship between the Houses of Lords and Commons, and the relationship between the Westminster Parliament and the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh assemblies.
Hillary Clinton's "Profiles in Courage" moment came and went with the Senate resoulution authorizing the Iraq War. Clinton chose capitulation over courage and disassociated herself from those who knew the truth and sought to prevent the war. This was a definitive moral failure far more serious than any committed by her husband. It should disqualify her from any national office--let alone the presidency.
In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy the fnords were the nonsense words everybody was conditioned not to see but that elicited preconscious fear and foreclosed rational thought when they appeared...and they appear all the time everywhere. "Seeing the fnords" meant getting hip to propaganda systems and management of consent techniques hiding in plain sight. Thanks to mcjoan, Paul Krugman, and The Guardian, I'm seeing fnords. They lead from Iraq into Iran, and they're hiding in plain sight.
The United States has lost the war in Iraq. Whether it be six months from now or five years, the outcome will be exactly the same. A remnant of US forces will hastily abandon Baghdad's Green Zone, and an Iranian satelite state will take systematic revenge on its Suni minority. An unstable Middle East will become more unstable by an order of magnitude. For the Bush administration, however, this is not a foreign policy problem, a military problem, or even a national security problem. It is a domestic, political problem to be managed through the techniques of modern public relations. From the perspective of longterm management of public opinion, a shortterm escalation of the conflict in Iraq makes sense. The "surge" is not intended to stem the violence in Iraq and it will not. The real aim of the "surge" is to shorten the GOP's years in the political wilderness. Find out how below the fold.
When United States forces leave Iraq in defeat, whether it be next year or five years from now, there will be the usual excuses for our country's moral failure. Some people will say, "Well, that just goes to show that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. The Iraqis didn't want the gift of fredom, and so the whole debacle was really their fault." Others will look for scapegoats within the United States and blame those of us who opposed the war for its unsatisfactory outcome. The "Who lost China?" trope from the early 1950s will resurface along with the post Viet Nam lament of, "They wouldn't let us finish the job." The "who" and "they" will remain vague, but the insinuation will be that the honest, simple folk of America were once again betrayed by the Left. Blaming the Iraqis or blaming the Left will be widely embraced because doing so comes with a dispensation. Those who locate blame outside themselves do not have to entertain the possibility that they have been the authors of their own misfortune. They do not have to confront what has been done in their name and who they have become as a result of it.
This diary is for busy progressive voters in Colorado. Are you planning to vote the straight Democratic ticket but want to know the salient facts about the congressional race in your district? This diary is for you. On the other hand, if you're a political junkey and already know about Jay Fawcett's insurgent campaign in Colorado Springs or "Panama" Rick O'Donnell's junketeering, then the list of links below probably won't interest you.
For Coloradans this is old news. Back in 1998 Tancredo's opponent in the CD-6 race played a tape of a speech Tancredo gave to the Guardians of American Liberty, an organization listed by the southern Poverty Law Center as a militia group.
What did Tancredo tell the Guardians? Dig this: "I also must tell you that I believe with all my heart that there is a conflict in our culture today that is so very deep, and so very significant that it'll be played out really in one of two ways," Tancredo says on the tape, according to a transcript provided by Strauss. "It will be played out either at the ballot box or in the streets. That is how basic the division is." NB: Tancredo was talking to a militia group for pete's sake.
Last month Michael Moore finished shooting Sicko, and the film is scheduled for release in early 2007. The content of the movie is as secret as the goings-on at a papal conclave. Nonetheless, the pharmaceutical industry has already launched a preemptive PR blitz. But what is it, precisely, that makes Michael Moore a lightning rod for so much hatred and fear from the authoritarian right? After all, the gregarious guy from Flint, Michigan doesn't say anything more radical than what has been repeated on the DailyKos a thousand times before. He's probably nicer than most of us. So where do Michael Moore's superpowers come from?
Some GOP president or other once said, " A house divided against itself cannot long stand." These days he could be speaking to his own party faithful in Colorado. For a long time now the Republican Party has been of two minds. On one hand, the GOP ginned up social conservatives by appealing to emotion-fraught issues such as homosexuality, abortion, veneration of the flag, etc. On the other hand, the Republicans translated the victories handed them by the social conservatives into policies benefiting their business wing at the expense of the very values voters responsible for their electoral success. Vote for the Pledge of Allegiance and get a capital gains tax cut. Vote for the sanctity of the zygote and get a rollback of worker safety regulations. Even suckers wise up, though, and in Colorado, values voters have been flexing their muscles. By insisting on a share of the political spoils, the social conservatives are provoking a backlash from the laissez-faire wing of the GOP. For example, dig what happened in Colorado Springs CD-5 Republican primary where even a guy named Crank wasn't right wing enough...
It's GOP orthodoxy to say, "The market is always right." For example, you might hear your Republican brother-in-law declaim over the dinner table, "The liberal message is outside the American mainstream. Bill O'Reilly regularly draws 2.5 million viewers, but Keith Olbermann only reaches 350,000. Let the market decide." But by this standard, the real avatar of media message preference is SpongeBob Squarepants who drew 3,753,000 viewers this month--more than O'Reilly and Olbermann combined. Arguably, the market has spoken and America wants more bland, multicultural tolerance since more Americans trust their children's tender eyeballs to SpongeBob than to LoofaBill. So your brother-in-law's got a problem: his economic and social theories don't jibe and he can't explain why.
Cherry Hills Village, Colorado -- Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo (R) is not now and never was Italian. Rumors to the contrary are being spread by liberal elites intent on discrediting the Congressman's crusade to protect America's borders from People Who Don't Look Like Us. In plain point of fact, Thomas Tancredo is a descendant of the old Tancredwycke family of Gloucestershire, Great Britain (and, later, Philadelphia, Mississippi) which fought bravely for the Crown during the Rebellion of the North American Colonies and for States Rights in the War of Northern Aggression. The Congressman's father, Angus Tancredwycke, changed the family name in the 1940s in a misguided attempt to meet women. As a good faith attempt allay any doubts about his ancestry, Congressman Tancredo is releasing his family's Hard Sauce recipe which has been enjoyed by generations of Tancredwyckes at Thanksgiving Dinner ever since they came over on the Mayflower.
This morning's Guardian http://observer.guardian.co.uk/... has a story by Paul Harris about the GOP's strategy for winning in November--despite miserable congressional and presidential poll numbers. The pitch will be: only we can protect you. The Republicans are going to try to win by appealing to the voters' reptile brains. But, just maybe, the electorate is tired of being scared and will get a life.
[S]enior Republican strategists, including political guru Karl Rove, have long favoured fighting the November mid-term elections on the issues of terrorism and the war. Polls consistently show that voters favour the Republicans on national security, even as the Iraq conflict appears to be collapsing into a civil war. It will also allow Republicans to deflect Democratic criticisms over the economy, growing poverty and scandals ranging from lobbyist corruption to the lax response to Hurricane Katrina.
The terror alert level is red today, and I smell a PR blitz. Ned Lamont won a big one for the peace movement on Tuesday, and by Thursday cable TV watching Americans find themselves in dire fear of toothpaste tubes. Suspicious minds might discern a connection. Now before you start snarking about tin foil hats (not original anymore, by the way), hear me out. First, let's agree to a few things: (1) the Bush administration has been willing to exploit and politicize terrorism; (2) the White House uses words to elicit behavior rather than to mirror actual states of affairs in the world; and (3) they're better at public relations campaigns than governing. Now I have no doubt that the 20-odd suspects in custody in the UK intended to bomb airplanes and am even willing to stipulate that their conduct was more than merely preparatory. But I still want to raise one question: why now?
Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut should send chills up the spines of appeasement Democrats everywhere. In particular, Colorado's junior senator Ken Salazar should reconsider his July 5th statement that he would "support Joe Lieberman for the primary and beyond the primary." What happened in the Nutmeg State can happen in the Centennial State; what happened to Lieberman can happen to Salazar. But it's not clear that Salazar will change his accommodationist ways. Ever since the DLC and party insiders strong-armed Colorado Democrats into accepting Salazar as the 2004 US Senate nominee, almost every month we have had to swallow another Salazar betrayal. See below for some egregious examples...
Like the Democrats, the Republican party is an amalgam of constituencies. Fundamentalists, Neo Know Nothings, Chamber of Commerce types, property rights activists, domesticated Libertarians, and longtime party hacks have all found a home in the GOP, but is it accurate to assume that they all like one another?
As President Bush prepares to veto stem cell research legislation, I though it would be a good time to publish an email exchange I had with Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput last year. The Archbishop is a thoughtful, humane man, and in recent days he has had useful things to say regarding the immigration issue here in Colorado. However, the email exchange highlights a problem faced by anyone who attempts to argue for a policy in the public forum on the basis of purely religious reasons. Public debate in an open society has to take place on the basis of commonly ascertainable facts. Religious positions qua religious are based on personal experiences or divine revelation. This isn't to say that religious voices should be excluded from the public forum; it is to say that in a representative democracy religious leaders need to play by the same rules as everyone else.
