Wednesday, October 11, 2006
North Korea, six years of Bush failures
Bush came into office with very harsh rhetoric for North Korea and no plan for stopping their development of nuclear weapons. The result was inevitable. The Republican response - it is all Clinton and Carter's fault - those traitors.
Here is a real 20-year time line of NK nuclear development.
AP's John Solomon seems to be stretching another story about Senator Reid
Back at the end of May, Solomon filed an extremely misleading story about Reid getting seats at boxing matches. John Solomon had a pattern of selective and misleading omissions and facts in the story to make it seem criminal. There were many factual errors in the story that the AP never corrected. How did AP respond when informed of the lies, mistakes and omissions of the Solomon story? They praised it and gave the story an internal award.
Solomon has now filed another long story on a real estate deal where Reid made a million dollars in the hot Las Vegas market. Reid reported this profit but Solomon thinks he didn't report it correctly and slants the story to make it seem criminal again.
I am not the biggest fan of Harry Reid and I don't think that the soon to be Senate Democratic Majority Leader ought to be from a politically closely divided state but this inflamatory rhetoric and slip-shod reporting is the bigger issue.
ADDED: Immediately after my posting I see TPM also just posted the story and that the AP headline itself is misleading - Reid made a $700,000 profit and it is Solomon's third misleading story on Reid. I would have beat their posting time but I stopped to fire off a snarky letter to AP and then watched TV before hitting Blog-This.
Clear Lake politician under investigation for $100,000 in campaign finance violations
Just another career politician like State Rep. Robert Talton. Nothing too odd showed up in Talton's ethics reports except his close financial ties to Christian broadcasting in Houston, somewhat obscure in the reports, and to Harris county GOP leadership. Talton does like limos. He works for the GOP Republican chairman's law office which helped explain his leading role as a possible DeLay replacement. That and his even more extreme than DeLay Christian nationalism and homophobia.
Talton personally, not his political campaign, was paid $2500 by the DINO Don Harrison campaign in the runoff election which resulted in pretty much another tie and the year long court battle after Harrison refused to give up his seat. One thing odd about the expenditure is that Harrison's opponent was openly Republican although not tied into the party. Not sure what kind of election help that $2500 bought Harrison. Concerning Stanley's lack of ties to the GOP, I remember Leroy Stanley's wife asking me: "what does GOP mean?" That is not much of a Republican. Not sure she would appreciate me writing now that currently it seems to mean Grand Old Pedophiles.
Back to work, lighter posting soon as I start a class in tax preparation and the Janette Sexton campaign ties other time up.
Signs of sick Republican values in Clear Lake
One more reason why to not spend too much on signs, out of control GOP vandals. How many people base who they vote for on a sign?
Working on Texas State House Campaign
Just got done preparing a list of 16,384 phone numbers for robo-calls. I am not that fond of robo-calls but it is only a 30-second pitch and we would actually like it to be captured on an answering machine and not in person. The criteria was very high likelihood of voting and not obviously Republican for Janette Sexton's stealth campaign against Robert Talton. She did decide to splurge for 100 yard signs for early voting locations. Might consider pre-movie advertisements at two theaters, They are pretty cheap. There is also a Latino theater if money can be found. We can dream of Christian radio spots running against Talton as a lawyer who has failed to represent voters in Austin and supports toll roads or cable TV elderly women spots with Janette's picture and running on education and the environment. I would prefer that Talton continue to ignore her as she conducts a quiet campaign.
How come someone hasn't done a PR notice about all the first time Houston area Democratic females running to clean up Texas politics? Get all the candidates to sign-off and make a pitch to all the local papers. All you need is a group picture, some written verbiage and a few phone calls. Makes a perfect story for local papers.
Friedman calls Bell a terrorist after Bell asks him to drop out
Wow, Kinky sure doesn't guard his comments. After the favorable things Kinky said about him in the Texas gubernatorial race Bell asked Kinky to drop out to ensure Perry's defeat. Suddenly Kinky says Bell is a terrorist supporting the two-party system.
Do we want a governor with this much of a problem with foot-in-mouth disease?
Link from Latinos for Texas.
GOP Senator denounces Bush Iraqi non-plan
"As conditions in Iraq continue to worsen, there must be no question among the administration, the Congress and the Iraqi unity government that staying the course is neither an option nor a plan."
Turning Liberal Faith into Political Action
UUA News & Events: The mid-term elections are one month away, here are things you can do.
Pat Van Houte, reluctant Pasadena community activist, is working with ACORN registering people to vote - that ends tomorrow or so. That came when I suggested we try their just above minimum wage jobs. At the end of the first day I said they were too disorganized but she went to the office to complain and got a job in the office trying to straighten them out on how to do the paperwork properly.
Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000
This study will shortly be denounced by the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the right wing blogs and media machine despite its excellent methodology and the credentials of those conducting the study. That happened to an earlier Lancet study which dropped from the sight of American media after it found around 100,000 Iraqi deaths and was quickly denounced.
The Apparat - Bush's Back Door Political Machine
The NCRP has identified at least 350 tax-exempt, ostensibly non-partisan organizations within the right-wing's activist front, many operating at regional, state, and local levels. They have penetrated the three branches of the federal government, and dominate the political debate. They guide and oversee the agenda that directs White House action (or inaction). Two of these organizations housed the planners who invented the Iraq war.This was published a couple years ago but nothing has changed. Well, almost nothing. The strains in the GOP are very evident right now and some of the old network is denouncing the new guys or at least the corrupt leadership in power. One of the founders of the modern GOP has called present White House and Congressional leadership corrupt and inmoral and said "a defeat would do it good." Might say there are a few cracks in the foundations.
Rob Stein, an independent Washington researcher, follows the money flow to the radical activist establishment. He estimates that since the early 1970s at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding has been awarded to the 43 major activist organizations he tracks that constitute the core of the radical machine.
He terms the big 43 the "cohort" -- an "incubator of right-wing, ideological policies that constitute the administration's agenda, and, to the extent that it has one, runs its policy machinery."
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Some Safe GOP seats now too close to call
This Colorado Springs Congressional seat has never voted Democratic, is the center point of the new theocratic Christians, but now the House race is too close to call.
Democrats, Liberals, and Libertarians
Meyerson responding to Kos, where liberals and libertarians meet and where they don't.
As for pure libertarianism, by denying a role for the state and dismissing the threat to liberties increasingly posed by the dominant corporate sector, it is about as germane to the American future as Trotskyism.BTW - The new documentary on Goldwater is very good. It does hint at things critics would explore more in depth, but hey, its family.
Markos quotes an entry that a reader posted on his Daily Kos blog in which the reader cites his realization that “corporations are becoming more powerful than governments” as the key to his switch to a neo-libertarianism concerned with regulating corporations. But surely, concern over disproportionate corporate power has been a main concern, if not the main concern, of populism, progressivism, and liberalism dating back at least to the 1890s. Americans railed against the railroads and the oil trusts and Wall Street long before they railed against government regulations, for the simple reason that government regulations didn’t seriously begin to curtail the abuses of the rails, of oil and of Wall Street until the New Deal. If libertarians see their mission as defending freedom, liberals, seeing freedoms in conflict, have defined theirs as balancing those freedoms, and regulating their excesses, in the cause of a greater social good. The moral calculus that liberals have used in weighing one freedom against another, to be sure, has often been at odds with the moral calculus of conservatives and the conceptual calculus of libertarians. Liberals, for instance, insisted that the right of a black person to equal access exceeded that of a property owner to discriminate on racial grounds, which upset racist traditionalists, as well as libertarians such as Barry Goldwater, who privileged the property owner’s right above the black person’s.
Far from an October surprise the Foley scandal was being leaked for many months
Harper's had the story, saw it was textbook predator language, couldn't get anyone on record.
Among those who received information about the story but declined to pursue it were liberal outlets such as Talkingpointsmemo.com, Americablog.com, and The New Republic (The Hill, Roll Call, and Time magazine also had the Foley story, though I'm not certain when it came to their attention.) Ironically, it was ABC - which just weeks ago was being defended by Republicans and attacked by Democrats for airing The Path to 9/11—that finally ran the story. The network obtained the emails from a person who is scrupulously non-partisan.
If this was all a plot to hurt the G.O.P.’s chances in the midterm elections, why did the original source for the story begin approaching media outlets a full year ago?
'The Republican Party have pure contempt for the Evangelicals who put their party in power'
Elite Conservative Tucker Carlson tells the truth to the church goers who support the party of privilege: You've been duped.
MATTHEWS: How do you know that? How do you know that?
CARLSON: Because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Because I live with them. They live on my street. Because I live in Washington, and I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the evangelicals. And the evangelicals know that, and they're beginning to learn that their own leaders sort of look askance at them and don't share their values.
MATTHEWS: So this gay marriage issue and other issues related to the gay lifestyle are simply tools to get elected?
CARLSON: That's exactly right. It's pandering to the base in the most cynical way, and the base is beginning to figure it out
What it means to be a liberal - Chicago Tribune
Not a bashing but a definition to open a debate.
He might add:
Tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition.
Having political or social views favoring reform and progress.
Tags: liberal
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