Terry's Ruminations

Yellular: Urban Word of the Day

2009-02-25T13:17:00.001-08:00

February 25: yellular

The loudness one adopts in response to a bad cell-phone connection, in the misguided hope that talking louder will improve the connection.

"I'm so embarrassed. I went totally yellular at a restaurant last night."

comment on this definition

Is it time to cut GM and Chrysler loose?

2009-02-24T10:07:00.000-08:00

Thom Friedman makes a case that it's time to let GM and Chrysler die and invest in the technologies of the future.

Start Up the Risk-Takers

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

I’ve been traveling all across the country on a book tour, and every evening I return to my hotel with my pockets full of business cards from inventors in clean energy. Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

Yes, we have to shore up the banking system, which underpins everything; and finding a fair way to prevent hardworking people, who played by the rules, from losing their homes to foreclosure is both right and essential for stability.

But beyond that, let’s think, talk and plan in more aspirational ways. We’re down, but we’re not out. As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

To be fair, the stimulus package that the Obama team and the Democrats in Congress recently passed — with virtually no Republican help — goes some way toward doing just that. Hat’s off for that. Now let’s do more.

The renewable-energy business — wind, solar and solar thermal — was almost dead in this country. Most new projects stopped last fall because they depended for their financing on selling their renewable energy tax credits to Wall Street firms. As those Wall Street firms went bust or suffered steep losses, they had no need for tax credits because they had no profits to offset. The stimulus package created a mechanism for renewable energy innovators to bypass Wall Street and monetize their tax credits directly through the U.S. Treasury, for any project that starts between now and the end of 2010.

The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects — the equivalent of five big nuclear plants — at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs ... We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics. Together they will drive innovation in all these areas — and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

Make America Happen. Again.

2009-02-10T17:07:00.000-08:00

The economy is tanking. People can't afford health care. The middle class is struggling. Big problems? Without a doubt.

But, history tells us that we have overcome great challenges before and we can do so again. As public service workers, AFSCME members are uniquely suited to lead the way. That's why AFSCME has launched the "Make America Happen" campaign.

- Together, we can jump start the economy by creating jobs and investing in communities.

- Together, we can make affordable health care available to all.

- Together, we can rebuild the middle class.

- Together, we can Make America Happen.

Visit http://www.makeamericahappen.com/ to find out how.

Favorite commercials during the Super Bowl

2009-02-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of "30 Rock" on NBC and think that Alec Baldwin is hysterical on that show. He is channeling the same character for this commercial for Hulu, my favorite during the Super Bowl.

In this ad for Bud Light (a close second), Conan O'Brien demonstrates the power of being willing to make a fool of one's self.

Bridgestone uses a common cultural reference, Mr. Potato Head in a truly ingenious way.

It's a New Day (Enhanced) - will.i.am

2009-01-20T23:40:00.000-08:00

Obama Inauguration Speech

2009-01-20T13:52:00.001-08:00

The Price Of Their Security

2009-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

The Price Of Their Security
By Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; Page A17

Understanding isn't the same as forgiving. The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values -- but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.

The basic argument that they're making deserves to be taken seriously. I don't think either man would object to my summing it up in one sentence: We did what we did to keep America safe.

That terse formulation of the Bush-Cheney apologia leaves out important details. Cheney came into office with preconceived ideas about restoring executive branch powers and prerogatives that he believed had been lost after Vietnam and Watergate; Bush either shared Cheney's views or was willing to go along. But the main narrative of the Bush presidency began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists -- the worst such assault ever on American soil.

In a not-for-attribution chat I had with a member of the Bush Cabinet a couple of years ago, conversation turned to Sept. 11. I said something like, "I can imagine what that day must have felt like for you." The response was immediate: "No, you can't."

The official went on to describe the chaos and anguish -- the shock of seeing the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse into rubble, the fear that other hijacked planes might still be in the air, the gut feeling that the president and those around him were personally under attack. The official talked of how the president and his aides racked their memories to think of anything they might have done differently to prevent the attacks. I doubt that anyone in the White House Situation Room actually quoted Malcolm X, but essentially a vow was taken to protect the country from another assault "by any means necessary."

These were human reactions, understandable and appropriate at the time. The truth is that the administration had missed signs that an attack was brewing -- most famously, the president's daily brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." But these portents were lost amid the avalanche of information that buries every president every single day. Anyone in Bush's position would have been filled with grief, anger and resolve.

Initial reactions are supposed to give way to reasoned analysis, however. For Bush and most of his top aides, this didn't happen until far too late.

For Cheney, apparently it never happened at all. In an interview broadcast Sunday, he invited Fox News' Chris Wallace to "go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again." People have since become "complacent," he said, but the administration's actions have "produced a safe 7.5 years, and I think the record speaks for itself."

That record, admirably, includes the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the dismantling of al-Qaeda's infrastructure and the killing or capture of some of the terrorist organization's most important operatives. Shamefully, however, it also includes the violation of international and U.S. legal norms by subjecting terrorism suspects to indefinite detention and cruel, painful interrogation; the creation of a mini gulag of secret CIA-run prisons abroad; and unprecedented domestic surveillance without court supervision -- all justified, Cheney maintains, by a state of "war" that has no foreseeable end.

The Bush-Cheney record also includes the invasion of a country -- Iraq -- that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sept. 11. This misadventure has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and grievously damaged our strategic position in the Middle East. In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News this month, Bush claimed credit for vanquishing al-Qaeda's forces in Iraq. When Raddatz pointed out that there were no al-Qaeda forces in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion, the president answered, "Yeah, that's right. So what?"

Here's so what: Bush and Cheney, understandably shaken by an unprecedented act of terrorism, declared and prosecuted a "war" without specifying who the enemy was. Rather than focus on the architect and sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, they turned away to lash out at others in preemptive blows that dishonored our nation's most precious ideals.

History will note that the point of the Constitution is that the ends don't always justify the means -- and that nowhere in the document can be found the phrase "so what?"

Bush Final Press Conference According to Doonesbury

2009-01-20T13:45:00.000-08:00

8 Years On The Dark Side

2009-01-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

8 years on the dark side
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / December 20, 2008

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney said this week that he directly approved waterboarding to torture terror suspects. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney told "ABC News." Asked if he believes the simulating of drowning is an appropriate technique, he said, "I do."

Last week, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded that the 2003 Abu Ghraib detainee abuse was not just the result of a few rogue soldiers. It said: "Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."

Those items help cement this White House as among the most cancerous in American history. Cheney told us after 9/11 that the administration would protect us by working on "the dark side . . . in the shadows in the intelligence world." Cheney, Rumsfeld, and President Bush turned the dark side into a blind eye, the shadows into a shroud, and obliterated intelligent discourse on terrorism with raw fear. That was only the warm-up for twisting intelligence to invade Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

For eight years the administration never feared trampling truth and justice, even as Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2004 about Abu Ghraib, "Anyone who recommended that kind of behavior that I have seen depicted in those photos needs to be brought to justice." At the moment, the administration faces no serious repercussions for decisions that resulted in many times more deaths in Iraq than here on Sept. 11, 2001. Rumsfeld went from disgrace to a visiting fellowship at the Hoover Institution. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz went from miscalculating the need for hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq as "wildly off the mark" to counting the planet's dollars at the World Bank - until corruption ended his presidency there.

Bush is sure to regale us about compassionate conservatism in his sugar-coated presidential library and Cheney will mumble from some undisclosed bunker about being the great liberator. All they currently face is the judgment of history.

It was something of a consolation for history that President-elect Barack Obama named Eric Shinseki to be the next secretary of Veterans Affairs. Shinseki was the general who made the Iraq troop estimate that Wolfowitz criticized.

And at least we have some facts to go with the fiction. The Senate report released jointly by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and John McCain of Arizona said Rumsfeld's authorization of techniques "was a direct cause of detainee abuse." It also said that Bush's presidential order saying the Geneva Convention for humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to al Qaeda "impacted the treatment of detainees."

Cheney and the report give us fresh clarity on their obfuscations. For instance, two years ago, Cheney was asked on a conservative radio talk show, "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Cheney responded, "Well it's a no-brainer for me." The White House immediately trotted out the late White House spokesman Tony Snow and vice-presidential spokeswoman Lee Anne McBride to convince the press that Cheney was not referring to waterboarding.

McBride said, "The vice president does not discuss any techniques or methods that may or may not have been used in questioning." Snow was challenged by reporters that it defied common sense to deny that a "dunk in water" was waterboarding. Snow still asserted, "he wasn't referring to waterboarding. He was referring to using a program of questioning, not talking about waterboarding." Pummeled by the press over this parsing, an exasperated Snow said, "I'm telling you what the vice president's view is, which is it wasn't about waterboarding. Period."

The not-so-funny thing is that Cheney's "no-brainer" remark was an honest window into his brain. True to the eight years of this administration, even the truth must be covered with a lie.

Take Me To Your Leader (last week)

2009-01-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

Pre-Inauguratoin

Time to Reboot America

2009-01-20T13:39:00.000-08:00

Time to Reboot America By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 23, 2008

I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas!

Ellen Goodman: Bush the last guy who should get a No Regrets Tour

2009-01-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

Ellen Goodman: Bush the last guy who should get a No Regrets Tour

I was doing fine until I saw the rocking chairs. My attacks of Bush-bashing were in remission. I told myself it was time to move on, to embrace the change you can believe in and, well, you get the idea.

So when the president — he’s still the president? — popped up on television, I would repeat what Republicans told Democrats in 2000 after the Supreme Court ruling made George W. Bush president: Get Over It. Snap Out Of It. When he made a cameo appearance to socialize another piece of the economy, I silently counted the days of his tenure, backward.

I didn’t even squeal when they unveiled the presidential portrait of the man in his Casual Friday duds. And if I started to backslide, I logged on to YouTube. There — nepotism alert! — my comedian daughter Katie posted her own toodaloo to the president, a PG-13-rated satire called “Time to Say Goodbye to George W. Bush” that raised my spirits.

But then came the moment when the senior staff of Bush enablers gave two comfy rocking chairs to the man who described himself as “an old sage at 62 ... headed to retirement.” The symbolism was too much.

Hadn’t Bush just said, “this isn’t one of the presidencies where you ride off into the sunset, you know, kind of waving goodbye”?

Nevertheless, the chairs came with a video of the sunset over Crawford, Texas. It was a gift-wrapped reminder that after leaving the country in shambles, he is leaving the White House with peace of mind.

You see, what sticks in my craw is Crawford. What’s equally hard to swallow is Preston Hollow, the Dallas neighborhood where the Bushes bought a $2.1 million house that, as Jay Leno quipped, “thanks to his economic plan, he got it at a bargain.” What I can’t “snap out of” is the fact that he is preparing to write a book and design a library whose themes will undoubtedly be: “Heckuva job, George.”

The 43rd president is going home with less remorse and fewer regrets than my grandchildren express for spilling their cereal.
This is the tenor of the farewell tour being conducted across the landscape from ABC to the American Enterprise Institute. It’s the No Regrets Tour, the non-reflective “reflections by a guy who’s headed out of town. “

George W. Bush will be remembered with names such as Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Katrina. With phrases such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “mission accomplished.” He came in with a budget surplus and leaves with a massive deficit. He blew the good will of the post-9/11 world. But being this president means never having to say you’re sorry.

Leaving office, he takes credit for seven years of safety and no debit for a day of disaster. He takes credit for the boom — “it’s hard to argue against 52 uninterrupted months of job growth” — without taking responsibility for the deregulated bust. He takes credit for the surge, not the disastrous pre-emptive war.

“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” he said. But would he have led us to war anyway? “It’s hard for me to speculate.”

No. 43 has the lowest approval ratings in modern presidential history. But he told Charlie Gibson, “I will leave the presidency with my head held high.” This is what puts me between a rocking chair and a hard place.

Bush says he doesn’t worry about short-term history. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.” Yet on this farewell tour, he sounds like an artist scorned by the public and sure that he’ll be seen one day as Vincent Van Gogh.

Well, history is a funny business. In an offhand survey of historians, 61 percent ranked Bush dead last among presidents, below even the barrel-scraping James Buchanan. Bush, of course, prefers Harry Truman, who rose from the ashes of his reputation.

But Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has a simple way of assessing presidents. “Great presidents rise to the occasion; poor presidents fall to the occasion.”

So Bush is headed to Texas with his rocking chairs and we’re headed into a new year with Barack Obama. I am reminded that January is named after the Roman god of beginnings and endings who looked forward and backward at the same time.

There are no do-overs. But there is no forgetting either. George W. Bush fell to the occasion.

Time to Say Goodbye to George W. Bush - Katie Goodman

2009-01-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

"A Race to the Bottom" By BOB HERBERT

2009-01-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

A Race to the Bottom
By BOB HERBERT, NY Times

Toward the end of an important speech in Washington last month, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said to her audience:

“Think of a teacher who is staying up past midnight to prepare her lesson plan... Think of a teacher who is paying for equipment out of his own pocket so his students can conduct science experiments that they otherwise couldn’t do... Think of a teacher who takes her students to a ‘We, the People’ debating competition over the weekend, instead of spending time with her own family.”

Ms. Weingarten was raising a cry against the demonizing of teachers and the widespread, uninformed tendency to cast wholesale blame on teachers for the myriad problems with American public schools. It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

But Ms. Weingarten’s defense of her members was not the most important part of the speech. The key point was her assertion that with schools in trouble and the economy in a state of near-collapse, she was willing to consider reforms that until now have been anathema to the union, including the way in which tenure is awarded, the manner in which teachers are assigned and merit pay.

It’s time we refocused our lens on American workers and tried to see them in a fairer, more appreciative light.

Working men and women are not getting the credit they deserve for the jobs they do without squawking every day, for the hardships they are enduring in this downturn and for the collective effort they are willing to make to get through the worst economic crisis in the U.S. in decades.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate this month, the president of the United Auto Workers, Ron Gettelfinger, listed some of the sacrifices his members have already made to try and keep the American auto industry viable.

Last year, before the economy went into free fall and before any talk of a government rescue, the autoworkers agreed to a 50 percent cut in wages for new workers at the Big Three, reducing starting pay to a little more than $14 an hour.

That is a development that the society should mourn. The U.A.W. had traditionally been a union through which workers could march into the middle class. Now the march is in the other direction.

Mr. Gettelfinger noted that his members “have not received any base wage increase since 2005 at G.M. and Ford, and since 2006 at Chrysler.”

Some 150,000 jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have vanished outright through downsizing over the past five years. And like the members of Ms. Weingarten’s union (and other workers across the country, whether unionized or not), the autoworkers are prepared to make further sacrifices as required, as long as they are reasonably fair and part of a shared effort with other sectors of the society.

We need some perspective here. It is becoming an article of faith in the discussions over an auto industry rescue, that unionized autoworkers should be taken off of their high horses and shoved into a deal in which they would not make significantly more in wages and benefits than comparable workers at Japanese carmakers like Toyota.

That’s fine if it’s agreed to by the autoworkers themselves in the context of an industry bailout at a time when the country is in the midst of a financial emergency. But it stinks to high heaven as something we should be aspiring to.

The economic downturn, however severe, should not be used as an excuse to send American workers on a race to the bottom, where previously middle-class occupations take a sweatshop’s approach to pay and benefits.

The U.A.W. has been criticized because its retired workers have had generous pensions and health coverage. There’s a horror! I suppose it would have been better if, after 30 or 35 years on the assembly line, those retirees had been considerate enough to die prematurely in poverty, unable to pay for the medical services that could have saved them.

Randi Weingarten and Ron Gettelfinger know the country is going through a terrible period. Their workers, like most Americans, are already getting clobbered and worse is to come.

But there is no downturn so treacherous that it is worth sacrificing the long-term interests — or, equally important — the dignity of their members.

Teachers and autoworkers are two very different cornerstones of American society, but they are cornerstones nonetheless. Our attitudes toward them are a reflection of our attitudes toward working people in general. If we see teachers and autoworkers as our enemies, we are in serious need of an attitude adjustment.

The Bush Legacy

2009-01-20T12:58:00.001-08:00

A look back as the sheriff rides off into the sunset
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
January 19, 2009
For many of us, the end of George W. Bush's presidency could not come quickly enough. But as power changes hands peacefully, the result of a decisive democratic verdict, the most important question is: What can our new president learn from the one heading back to Texas?

The Bush administration's specific failures -- in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties -- are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public's disaffection goes beyond these specifics.

From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue.

It is in part because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama's first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed analysis and to put whatever challenge he is confronting into some larger context. He absolutely loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his "if you have a better idea, I'll take it" approach is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the last eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not win.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election with political threats and campaign trail rhetoric.

"It's better to fight them there than here" was not an argument that took the average citizen's intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking citizens to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush's larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush's prescription-drug plan under Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect. But they reflected broadly shared goals -- expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education -- and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation.

Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush's dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terror for electoral advantage.

A hyperpartisan domestic politics of us vs. them followed naturally from the president's instinct to confuse moral certainty for moral clarity. In his farewell address, he reminded his listeners yet again that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security vs. liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq vs. a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not an us-vs.-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. It's not enough. But it's a start.

A charming Christmas poem by Robert H. Harbridge, 1973

2008-12-19T13:12:00.000-08:00

Christina Harbridge of Allegory Training sent me this poem in her company's Christmas Newsletter. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share it with all my blog readers. Happy holidays and Enjoy!'

Christmas 1973 a poem by my dad

Christmas this year
Should cost at least
A thousand dollars.

It should be
In the Ideal Bar & Grill
On 163rd and St. Nicholas
Waiting for the first
Tattered little boy
To come in selling
Tomorrow's morning papers
Roughing up his hair,
Giving all his papers away
And giving him
A hundred dollar bill.

It should be
Walking through the
Bowery,
Finding the drunk
Shivering in the dark doorway
And giving him,
Instead of a religious tract
Or lecture,
A hundred dollar bill.

It should be walking,
Down Beale Street,
Stopping the first
Poor black child,
Giving him a smile
And a hundred dollar bill.

It should be
In Albuquerque.
Not a donation to a fund,
But taking the time to find
The sad-eyed Chicano child,
Taking him to a toy store
And letting him run riot.
Picking up the tab, the
toys and him and
To take them to
Wherever or to whatever
His home may be,

And leaving him the change
Of a hundred dollar bill.

It should be in San Diego
Out on the wharf,
With the old fisherman
Who mends nets
Because the tuna
Don't run for him anymore.
A "Vaya con Dios"
And a hundred dollar bill.

It should be
In a Santa Monica Bar,
Smiling at the tired barmaid
Who came to the coast
To be a star
And only found reality,
Giving her conversation,
Respect,
And a hundred dollar bill.

It should be in
A Nob Hill restaurant.
Giving the maitre d'
A smile. And the busboy,
Who no one has noticed
All year,
A hundred dollar bill.

It should be
With a little old lady
In San Francisco's Mission
Street
Selling flowers, Late at night
In the Tenderloin
Taking all her
Wilted posies,
Giving her a kiss
And a hundred dollar bill.

It should be
In Seattle's skid row
Down near the Totem Pole
In Pioneer Square,

Giving the startled
Indian panhandler
A measure of returned pride
And a handshake
And a hundred dollar bill.

It should be the last saved
For the thief
Anywhere,
Who needs it worse
Than anyone,
Not just the money
But the need to
Be superior to someone.
Let him steal from me
A hundred dollar bill.

But most of all...
To have any value at all,
Let Christmas Day find me
Broke,
With empty pockets
Hanging inside out,
Still
In
Love
With
Man.

By Robert H. Harbridge, 1973

Note: This poem was written in 1973 (in case you worried about it not using the right PC language). The writer,
my dad, had lost his son the year before writing this poem and had just been diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease.
And still he could see what matters most.

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, my former improv group member Margaret Cho, and others...

2008-12-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

MSNBC Keith Olbermann on Prop 8, Marriage and more!

2008-12-03T16:00:00.000-08:00

Grease fire in the kitchen? Important safety video

2008-12-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

What would you do if you had a grease fire in the kitchen?

This is a very important video about kitchen safety.

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

2008-11-25T15:36:00.000-08:00

Stunning Break with Last Eight Years
From BOROWITZREPORT.COM

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

"The Insider’s Crusade" By David Brooks

2008-11-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

This is a terrific piece from David Brooks at the NY Times.

The Insider’s Crusade
By DAVID BROOKS, MY Times
Published: November 21, 2008

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.

The fact that they can already leak one big appointee per day is testimony to an awful lot of expert staff work. Unlike past Democratic administrations, they are not just handing out jobs to the hacks approved by the favored interest groups. They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically. As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute notes, it was smart to name Tom Daschle both the head of Health and Human Services and the health czar. Splitting those duties up, as Bill Clinton did, leads to all sorts of conflicts.

Most of all, they are picking Washington insiders. Or to be more precise, they are picking the best of the Washington insiders.

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced “fresh faces” to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

As a result, the team he has announced so far is more impressive than any other in recent memory. One may not agree with them on everything or even most things, but a few things are indisputably true.

First, these are open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence. Orszag, who will probably be budget director, is trusted by Republicans and Democrats for his honest presentation of the facts.

Second, they are admired professionals. Conservative legal experts have a high regard for the probable attorney general, Eric Holder, despite the business over the Marc Rich pardon.

Third, they are not excessively partisan. Obama signaled that he means to live up to his postpartisan rhetoric by letting Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship.

Fourth, they are not ideological. The economic advisers, Furman and Goolsbee, are moderate and thoughtful Democrats. Hillary Clinton at State is problematic, mostly because nobody has a role for her husband. But, as she has demonstrated in the Senate, her foreign-policy views are hardheaded and pragmatic. (It would be great to see her set of interests complemented by Samantha Power’s set of interests at the U.N.)

Finally, there are many people on this team with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests. Dennis Ross, who advised Obama during the campaign, is the best I’ve ever seen at this, but Rahm Emanuel also has this capacity, as does Craig and legislative liaison Phil Schiliro.

Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.

Race was never the issue of this election

2008-11-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Race was never the issue of this election

By ELLEN GOODMAN, BOSTON GLOBE

Published: Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 4:20 a.m.

It was 11 p.m. in Chicago when the new first family of the United States stepped out before a sea of joyous, incredulous, tearful Americans. Barely a year ago, many in that crowd and in our country had taken it as an article of faith that America wouldn't elect a black man president. Oh we of little faith.
The eloquent man on whose slim shoulders this country now rests stood in Grant Park telling "anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible" that "tonight is your answer."
As he spoke, as his supporters exhaled with relief and happiness, as victory margins rolled up and across the nation, I thought about a woman who missed this night. The woman he called Toot, the Kansas grandmother in the saga of this Kansas-Kenyan American.
Madelyn Dunham had "gone home" just one day before the election. This woman linked by ancestry and marriage to the nation's original sin of slavery had voted for her grandson -- and woe unto anyone who challenges that absentee ballot -- but she wasn't able to cross this historic finishing line.
There was symbolism as well as sadness in her passing. When we're young, we think change is a 100-yard dash. As we get older we think it's a marathon. Eventually we see a relay race. Barack Obama once described Toot as "a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world" but "on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." He was accused of "throwing his grandmother under the bus," but he was openly describing a complex generational truth. He shared his ability to hear that truth and his desire to heal it.
Race was not "the issue" in this election. I know that. The issue was the economy. The issue was the war. The issue was the dark conviction that America was heading full speed ahead on a disastrously wrong track. We chose the cool hand of a change agent.
But if race wasn't the "issue," it was the "story" in the word history. It was the narrative, the huge question mark hovering around our sense of self on magazine covers and conversations that asked: "Is America ready for a black president?" It ended with a resounding "Yes, we can."
Americans didn't vote for Obama to prove that this is not the same country that once sicced dogs on black school children. But it proves that.
Americans didn't pick Obama to rebrand our country in the eyes of the world and trash the cartoon images put forth by our enemies.
But it does that.
We didn't choose Obama to show that scare-mongering -- socialism! radical! Muslim! Barack the Redistributor! -- has failed. But it shows that.
So too, we didn't push the lever for Obama to crack the shell of cynicism that dampens the expectations of inner-city black teenage sons of single mothers. And we didn't elect Obama to grab back the word "values" from those who use it as a wedge to keep us at each other's throats. But these messages also lurk in the 7-million-vote margin of victory.
There is a saying, widely attributed to Winston Churchill, that "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing . . . after they have exhausted all other possibilities." We arrived at a moment when change was the most conservative option. The 47-year-old president-elect came to represent the belief that Americans had to embrace change to conserve those things that mean the most to us, including our country's future.
So Tuesday we voted to reboot America. All the same problems Obama listed are on the desktop this morning: "two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century." It won't be long before excitement is edged with impatience.
But this is a day to celebrate our belief in possibilities. It's a day to bear witness to a victory lap in the relay race of social change.
One of the first things Obama will do as president-elect is to bury the last of the people who raised him, the grandmother born in 1922, the American who lived through the Great Depression, a world war and "poured everything she had into me." She was a woman, he once wrote, who was "content with common sense." She used to say, "So long as you kids do well, Bar. That's all that really matters."
Today the country seconds her sentiment.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for the Boston Globe. E-mail her at ellengoodman@globe.com.

Morning in America

2008-11-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

Morning in America
By Eugene Robinson. Washington Post
Thursday, November 6, 2008

I almost lost it Tuesday night when television cameras found the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Chicago's Grant Park and I saw the tears streaming down his face. His brio and bluster were gone, replaced by what looked like awestruck humility and unrestrained joy. I remembered how young he was in 1968 when he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., moments before King was assassinated and hours before America's cities were set on fire.
I almost lost it again when I spoke with Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bravest leaders of the civil rights crusade, and asked whether he had ever dreamed he would live to see this day. As Lewis looked for words beyond "unimaginable," I thought of the beating he received on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the scars his body still bears.
I did lose it, minutes before the television networks projected that Barack Obama would be the 44th president of the United States, when I called my parents in Orangeburg, S.C. I thought of the sacrifices they made and the struggles they endured so that my generation could climb higher. I felt so happy that they were here to savor this incredible moment.
I scraped myself back together, but then almost lost it again when I saw Obama standing there on the stage with his family -- wife Michelle, daughters Malia and Sasha, their outfits all color-coordinated in red and black. I thought of the mind-blowing imagery we will see when this young, beautiful black family becomes the nation's First Family.
Then, when Michelle's mother, brother and extended family came out, I thought about "the black family" as an institution -- how troubled it is, but also how resilient and how vital. And I found myself getting misty-eyed again when Barack and Michelle walked off the stage together, clinging to one another, partners about to embark on an adventure, full of possibility and peril, that will change this nation forever.
It's safe to say that I've never had such a deeply emotional reaction to a presidential election. I've found it hard to describe, though, just what it is that I'm feeling so strongly.
It's obvious that the power of this moment isn't something that only African Americans feel. When President Bush spoke about the election yesterday, he mentioned the important message that Americans will send to the world, and to themselves, when the Obama family moves into the White House.
For African Americans, though, this is personal.
I can't help but experience Obama's election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance -- which is patently absurd, if you think about it. The labor of black people made this great nation possible. Black people planted and tended the tobacco, indigo and cotton on which America's first great fortunes were built. Black people fought and died in every one of the nation's wars. Black people fought and died to secure our fundamental rights under the Constitution. We don't have to ask for anything from anybody.
Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans -- white, black, Latino, Asian -- entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency. I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there's more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there's more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.
It's not that I would have felt less love of country if voters had chosen John McCain. And this reaction I'm trying to describe isn't really about Obama's policies. I'll disagree with some of his decisions, I'll consider some of his public statements mere double talk and I'll criticize his questionable appointments. My job will be to hold him accountable, just like any president, and I intend to do my job.
For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say "it's morning again in America." The new sunshine feels warm on my face.

Today's Political Cartoons

2008-11-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

A New Era for America By E. J. Dionne Jr.

2008-11-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

"A New Era for America" By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Yes, it is time to hope again.
Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between "values voters" and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician.
Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching.
Barack Obama's sweeping electoral victory cannot be dismissed merely as a popular reaction to an economic crisis or as a verdict on an unpopular president, though the judgment rendered on President Bush is important.
In choosing Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, the country put a definitive end to a conservative era rooted in three myths: that a party could govern successfully while constantly denigrating government's role; that Americans were divided in an irrepressible moral conflict pitting a "real America" against some pale imitation; and that market capitalism could succeed without an active government regulating it in the public interest and modestly redistributing income to temper inequalities.
John McCain believed he could win by attacking Obama as a "socialist" who had said he would "spread the wealth around." But a substantial majority rather likes spreading the wealth if doing so means health coverage, pensions and college opportunities for all, or asking the wealthy to bear a slightly larger share of the tax burden.
"John McCain calls this socialism," Obama said at a Pittsburgh rally last week. "I call it opportunity." So did the voters.
Right to the end, McCain and Sarah Palin thought ideological name-calling would work yet again. On the eve of the election, McCain attacked Obama for being in "the far left lane of American politics" while Palin warned of a victory for "the far left wing of the Democrat Party." This year, those epithets didn't hunt.
After 1980, Democrats often chose to accommodate themselves to conservative assumptions. Obama exploded the old framework. He explicitly rejected the idea that Americans were choosing between "more" or "less" government, "big" or "small" government.
He cast the choice differently. "Our government should work for us, not against us," he would say. "It should help us, not hurt us." Obama ran as a progressive, not a conservative, but also as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That combination will define his presidency.
Since the Nixon era, conservatives have claimed to speak for the "silent majority." Obama represents the future majority. It is the majority of a dynamic country increasingly at ease with its diversity. It reflects the forward-looking optimism of the young. It draws in new suburban and exurban voters whose priorities are resolutely practical -- jobs, schools and transportation -- and who dislike angry quarrels about gay marriage, abortion and religious orthodoxy.
It is the majority of a culturally moderate nation that warmed to Obama's talk of the importance of active fathers, strong families and personal responsibility. He emphasized reducing abortion, not banning it. He honored faith's role in public life but rejected the marginalization of religious minorities and nonbelievers. For large parts of the world, his middle name will be an icon, proof of America's commitment to religious pluralism.
And Obama not only broke the ultimate racial barrier, he also spoke about race as no other politician ever has. He was uniquely able to see the question from both sides of the color line even as he embraced his black identity. He is not post-racial. He is multiracial. The word defines him as a person. It also describes the broad coalition that he built and the country he will lead.
And the majority Obama built wants the country to be strong but also respected, and prudent in its use of power. Iraq was on the ballot after all: Pew's final survey found that those who thought the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong backed Obama by better than 5 to 1; those who thought it right supported McCain by a nearly identical margin.
Obama inherits challenges that could overwhelm any leader and faces constraints that will tax even his exceptional political skills. But the crisis affords him an opportunity granted few presidents to reshape the country's assumptions, change the terms of debate and transform our politics. The way he campaigned and the way he won suggest that he intends to do just that.

McCain Delivers Gracious, Classy Speech

2008-11-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

Obama Victory Speech - Yes, We Can!!!!

2008-11-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama
(as prepared for delivery)
Election Night
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Chicago, Illinois

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he’s fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation’s next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House. And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics – you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington – it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.

I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor’s bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Daily Show - What?!?! A REPUBLICAN Community Organizer for Obama?!?!?

2008-11-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

Where is Joe the Plumber?

2008-10-31T12:00:00.001-07:00

Support the Walkout Against McCain's Slime Calls

2008-10-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

40 Americall call center workers in Hobart, IN walked off the job on Monday, October 27 rather than read a script attacking Obama for supposedly “coddling criminals” and voting against “protecting children from danger.”

For this act of conscience they lost their wages for the day. Let’s stand with them, and against slimy campaigning.

$9 will cover an hours wages — an hour they won’t be making slimy attack calls against Obama. $2,880 will cover the full day’s wages for all the workers who walked out. Nobody’s credit card will be charged till we reach our total goal.

Please give $9 (or more) to Support the Walk Out against Slime Calls. If we receive more than $2,880, we will make the funds available as a kind of “virtual strike fund” for any other walk outs that occur before Nov 4. You can donate here or by clicking on the "badge" in the upper right of my blog.

See full story here.

Candorville Runs Funny Series on John McCain Campaign

2008-10-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

This series of comic strips on Candorville has been quite amusing:

Doonesbury Nails Fox News

2008-10-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

Alaska's largest newspaper endorses Obama

2008-10-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Alaska's largest newspaper endorses Obama
USA Today

ANCHORAGE (AP) — The Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's largest newspaper, has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president.
The newspaper said Sunday the Democrat "brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand."

The Daily News said since the economic crisis has emerged, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has "stumbled and fumbled badly" in dealing with it.

"Of the two candidates, Sen. Obama better understands the mortgage meltdown's root causes and has the judgment and intelligence to shape a solution, as well as the leadership to rally the country behind it," the paper said.

The Daily News said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has shown the country why she is a success as governor. But the paper said few would argue that Palin is truly ready to step into the job of being president despite her passion, charisma and strong work ethic.

"Gov. Palin's nomination clearly alters the landscape for Alaskans as we survey this race for the presidency — but it does not overwhelm all other judgment. The election, after all is said and done, is not about Sarah Palin, and our sober view is that her running mate, Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation," the paper said.

"Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time," the paper concluded.

The Rise of the Obamacons (From the Economist)

2008-10-26T21:41:00.000-07:00

The Rise of the Obamacons
A striking number of conservatives are planning to vote for Obama
Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

IN “W.”, his biopic about his Yale classmate, Oliver Stone details Colin Powell’s agonies during George Bush’s first term. Throughout the film Mr Powell repeatedly raises doubts about the invasion of Iraq—and is repeatedly overruled by the ghoulish trio of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. In one of the final scenes, with his direst warnings proving correct, Mr Powell turns to Mr Cheney and delivers a heartfelt “Fuck you”.

The real Colin Powell used more diplomatic language in endorsing Barack Obama on October 19th, but the impact was much the same. Mr Obama is a “transformational figure”, he mildly said, and his old friend John McCain had erred in choosing a neophyte as a running-mate. But you would have to be naive not to see the endorsement as a verdict on the Bush years.

Mr Powell is now a four-star general in America’s most surprising new army: the Obamacons. The army includes other big names such as Susan Eisenhower, Dwight’s granddaughter, who introduced Mr Obama at the Democratic National Convention and Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative icon William Buckley, who complains that he has not left the Republican Party: the Republican Party has left him. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska and one-time bosom buddy of Mr McCain has also flirted heavily with the movement, though he has refrained from issuing an official endorsement.

The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended “war on terror”, and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights. There are two competing “libertarians for Obama” web sites. CaféPress is even offering a “libertarian for Obama” lawn sign for $19.95. Larry Hunter, who helped to devise Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, thinks that Mr Obama can free America from the grip of the “zombies” who now run the Republican Party.

But the army has many other brigades, too: repentant neocons such as Francis Fukuyama, legal scholars such as Douglas Kmiec, and conservative talk-show hosts such as Michael Smerconish. And it is picking up unexpected new recruits as the campaign approaches its denouement. Many disillusioned Republicans hoped that Mr McCain would provide a compass for a party that has lost its way, but now feel that the compass has gone haywire. Kenneth Adelman, who once described the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk”, decided this week to vote for Mr Obama mainly because he regards Sarah Palin as “not close to being acceptable in high office”.

The rise of the Obamacons is more than a reaction against Mr Bush’s remodelling of the Republican Party and Mr McCain’s desperation: there were plenty of disillusioned Republicans in 2004 who did not warm to John Kerry. It is also a positive verdict on Mr Obama. For many conservatives, Mr Obama embodies qualities that their party has abandoned: pragmatism, competence and respect for the head rather than the heart. Mr Obama’s calm and collected response to the turmoil on Wall Street contrasted sharply with Mr McCain’s grandstanding.

Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. His story also appeals to conservatives: it holds the possibility of freeing America from its racial demons, proving that the country is a race-blind meritocracy and, in the process, bankrupting a race-grievance industry that has produced the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

How much do these Obamacons matter? More than Mr McCain would like to think. The Obamacons are manifestations of a deeper turmoil in the Republican rank-and-file, as the old coalition of small-government activists, social conservatives and business Republicans falls apart. They also influence opinion. This is obvious in the case of Mr Powell: Mr Obama is making liberal use of his endorsement to refute the latest Republican criticism that he is a “socialist”. But it is also true of lesser-known scribblers. At least 27 newspapers that backed Mr Bush in 2004 have endorsed Mr Obama.

Moreover, the revolt of the intellectuals is coinciding with a migration of culturally conservative voters—particularly white working-class voters—into Obamaland. Mr Obama is now level-pegging or leading among swing-groups such as Catholics and working-class whites. A recent Washington Post-ABC poll shows him winning 22% of self-described conservatives, a higher proportion than any Democratic nominee since 1980.

Don’t blame the rats
The more tantalising question is whether the rise of the Obamacons signals a lasting political realignment. In 1980 the rise of the neocons—liberal intellectuals who abandoned a spineless Democratic Party—was reinforced by the birth of working class “Reagan Democrats”. Is the Reagan revolution now going into reverse? There are reasons for scepticism. Will libertarians really stick with “Senator Government”, as Mr McCain labelled Mr Obama in the best slip of the tongue of the campaign? Will economic conservatives cleave to a president who believes in “spreading the wealth around”?

Much depends on how Mr Obama governs if he wins, and how the Republicans behave if they lose. Mr Obama talks about creating an administration of all the talents. He promises to take the cultural anxieties of Reagan Democrats seriously. For their part, hard-core Republicans are handling their party’s travails abysmally, retreating into elite-bashing populism and denouncing the Obamacons as “rats” who are deserting a sinking ship. If the Republican Party continues to think that the problem lies with the rats, rather than the seaworthiness of the ship, then the Obamacons are here to stay.

Ron Howard's Call to Action!

2008-10-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Barack in Virgina: "We ALL love America!"

2008-10-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

Palin's Daughter Expresses Her Attiude

2008-10-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

"The Choice" - A Terrific Video from Frontline

2008-10-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

A terrific video titled "The Choice" from Frontline.
It tells the compelling story of both candidates in the presidential campaign.
The video is 1 hour and 56 minutes long.

Obama's Life Story from Kronomy

2008-10-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

Cool tech, huh?

Barack Obama ´s life path
Support Obama Share this timeline

Palin Livin' Large on the Taxpayer's Dime

2008-10-23T15:29:00.001-07:00

I guess this is Sarah Palin's idea of an ordinary "hockey mom":

Charging taxpayer's for her family's travel expenses
Buying $150K of clothing from fancy East Coast clothing stores.

McCain’s Plan to Build a Green Economy: Drill, Baby, Drill

2008-10-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the environment, John McCain only has the interests of Big Oil at heart. That’s why he has over 22 Big Oil lobbyists advising him. That’s why he favored lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling — a move that prompted Big Oil to donate over $1 million to his campaign. And thanks to the League of Conservation Voters, we’ve got the proof!

Palin the "Hockey Mom" Wearing $150K of Designer Labels Purchased by Republican Contributors

2008-10-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

I loved this piece in the L.A. times which reports that while Sarah Palin bills herself as a simple small-town "Hockey Mom" she is wearing thousands of dollars of designer labels from Saks 5th Avenue, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus, etc. I guess she really is an East Coast Elitist after all.

Sarah Palin's $150,000 Wardrobe Malfunction?

An excerpt:

So it seems you can take the girl out of the beauty pageant, but you can’t take the beauty pageant out of the girl.

Palin's clothes came from retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York, and expenses included nearly $5,000 for hair and makeup. Maybe this is actually her one-woman economic stimulus plan. Lord knows the retail sector needs it.

Still, voters must find it unfathomable for Palin, who has been presented as a woman “like us,” to spend that kind of money on clothes in these difficult financial times, to see her speaking so passionately about Joe the Plumber while plumbing campaign coffers for Valentino jackets and pencil skirts. And yet, they’ve eaten it up, tittering on chat sites about Palin’s Kawasaki eyeglass frames and her Naughty Monkey red peep-toe pumps.

McCain and Palin Incite Hate on the Campaign Trail

2008-10-17T16:16:00.001-07:00

McCain is 90% Bush

2008-10-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

The World's Election

2008-10-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

Timothy Garton Ash writes an insightful column noting that:
1) This presidential election affects the entire world, not just the U.S. - and
2) Obama is preferred 4 to 1 over McCain outside the U.S.

The World's Election
Timothy Garton Ash, SF Chronicle
Thursday, October 16, 2008

From my observation perch in Stanford, and as an English European turned 24/7-cable news-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don't they understand? This is our election. The world's election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote.

The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across 22 countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a ratio of 4 to 1. Nearly half those asked said an Obama victory would "fundamentally change" their perception of the United States. And it certainly needs changing. Over the two terms of President Bush, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys, has documented what anyone who travels around the world knows: a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States.

In the American context, Obama is black or African American. His candidacy exposes yet again how that thing anachronistically called race - meaning the legacy of slavery and segregation - is the hidden warp and woof of American politics. In the international context, Obama is three other things. First, he's one of us - the child of an increasingly mixed-up world, now aspiring to be the most powerful man in it. A true cosmopolitan: not just African American but also a little bit each of Hawaiian, Kenyan, Kansan, Indonesian. Second, he's not Bush. McCain is not Bush either, but a lot less not-Bush. Finally, he personifies everything that foreigners still love about America.

Back in Oxford, and traveling around Europe, I constantly meet young people who have grown up furious at the United States. "You know, I'm very pro-European," one British student informed me. Stirred by this rarity - a pro-European Brit - I asked why she was pro-European. "Oh, I guess mainly because I'm anti-American." But she wasn't really anti-American. I would bet my bottom euro that she's an Obamaniac now.

Culturally, socially and aesthetically, he represents the America that is deep in young Europeans' everyday imaginations, transported there by the soft power of American films, music, literature, and television series such as "Friends," "ER," "The West Wing," "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and even "Star Trek," together with serial abuse of the word "like": You can hear it at any coffee shop in Oxford, and the speaker may be Slovak, German or Chinese. That someone from Obama's modest migrant background can make it this far also revives a potent, positive image of the United States as a land of opportunity - an American self-image that much of the world has internalized, however little it corresponds with the statistically recorded facts of limited social mobility.

Were he elected, we would discover within a few months how much of the worldwide hostility loosely tagged anti-Americanism really was anti-Americanism, and how much was just a violent allergy, shared by many Americans, to a particular president, a specific set of policies, and a certain version of Americanism. Yet this very popularity of one candidate raises the stakes in this election to an alarming degree.

Just because international hopes have been raised so high, the disappointment if Obama fails will be devastating. The shock will be even greater because of McCain's choice of Sarah Palin - who, like Bush, reinforces every European cliche about the otherness (cowboyness, hickiness, wackiness) of Americans. This disappointment might be unfair to the likely content of a McCain foreign policy, but in international politics, as in financial markets, the perceptions are a large part of the reality. If Americans were to choose McCain-Palin, after re-electing Bush in 2004, I don't think it's too much to say that a lot of Europeans would feel like giving up on them. Of course European governments wouldn't, and couldn't afford to, give up on Washington; but they would have to operate within the constraining reality of popular disillusionment.

This would matter to the United States at the best of times. It will matter a lot more in these times. Even before the financial crisis, the list of problems piling up for the new president's in-boxes (both the one marked Urgent and the one marked Important, to recall John F. Kennedy's distinction) was already formidable. Even before this crisis added perhaps a trillion dollars to an already staggering national debt, the relative power of the United States to achieve its goals on its own - unilaterally - had significantly diminished over the last eight years, also because of the renaissance of great powers such as China and Russia. Somewhere around 2000 may be marked by future historians as the zenith of American power. In such a world, the need for allies and international credibility is greater than ever.

Timothy Garton Ash is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and professor of European Studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is "Free World." This piece will appear in the forthcoming election issue of the New York Review of Books.

Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen - Funniest Comic Going

2008-10-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen is one of the funniest comics going today. This one is a riot (as usual).

Two Columnist Observe That Republicans No Longer Value Intelligence

2008-10-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Two recent columns caught my eye. Both put forth the observation that the Republican Party seems to have turned it's back on intelligence and education. They both offer Sarah Palin's candidacy as an example. I found both interesting reading. David Brooks' column is particularly striking as he is a conservative.

The Class War Before Palin
By DAVID BROOKS, NY Times
Published: October 9, 2008

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counter-establishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Sarah Six-Pack is getting a bit stale
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Maybe you remember Dave. It was a 1993 movie starring Kevin Kline as Dave Kovic, an everyday guy who happens to be a dead ringer for the president. When the chief executive is stricken, his aides secretly recruit Dave to fill in for him. Problem is, Dave quickly begins to lose himself in the role. There's a wonderful scene where, trying to find money in the federal budget to fund a homeless shelter, Dave turns to his friend Murray, an accountant, for help.

''Who does these books?'' asks Murray after taking an adding machine to the budget. ``If I ran my business this way, I'd be out of business.''

Like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington in 1939, Dave's central conceit is that what Washington needs is a jolt of reality from everyday people. As a movie, that's a charming idea. As real life, it has proven frightening and bizarre.

But we will talk more about Sarah Palin in a moment.

First, let's concede the obvious: Every politician wants to be seen as Everyman or woman. That's why every primary season brings the curious sight of millionaires in plaid shirts wandering through county fairs eating fried things on sticks. It's why Hillary Clinton hit that bar and Barack Obama went bowling, badly.

In that sense, Sarah Six-Pack is nothing new. The ''g'' droppin', moose shootin', eye-winkin' hockey mom has plenty of antecedents. But there's a difference. Those antecedents were smart, wonkish people pretending to be one of us. Sarah Palin is one of us.

And by ''us,'' I don't mean you, necessarily, or me. I mean the lowest common denominator us, the us of myth and narrative, the us of simple mind, the reactionary, ill-informed, impatient with complexity, utterly shallow us.

You think that's mean? Go back and look at the Katie Couric interviews again. Or the Charlie Gibson interview. I don't know about you, but I want a vice president who can identify Supreme Court rulings she disagrees with. Or define the Bush Doctrine. Or name a newspaper. Or -- heck, I'm not picky -- construct an intelligible English language sentence.

Even many of her most ardent admirers no longer dispute that Sarah Six-Pack is, shall we say, incurious. What's striking is how little that seems to matter. A McCain spokeswoman suggested before the vice presidential debate that it would be unfair to question Palin, a woman who could be president, too closely on foreign policy. And when thinking conservatives (remember when the adjective was not necessary?) like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks declared Palin unfit for office, they were shouted down by their ideological brethren. Parker got e-mail she called ''vicious and threatening.'' Brooks was dismissed by another pundit as a ``conservative intellectual.''

You're left to wonder when intellectuals -- thinking people, for goodness sake! -- became the enemy. Are we to regard unthinking conservatives (will that adjective soon be superfluous?) as the only true conservatives? Indeed, the only true Americans?

One gets that sense from Palin's recent campaign appearances. Her attacks have grown increasingly strident and divorced from reality as John McCain's poll numbers have gone south.

She blames Katie Couric, and not herself, for her inability to answer fair questions. She frames Obama as some exotic unknown with terrorist associations.

And the rabble duly rouses. They boo Couric, which is not unlike booing Mickey Mouse. They scream death threats. Someone addresses an African-American sound man for one of the networks with a racial epithet and screams, ``Sit down, boy!''

There is an ugliness here. It is disguised as decency, disguised as politics, but it is only ugliness, mean and raw and given license by the desperation of a man who used to be honorable and a woman who said she was just like us.

And for the record: It's not a movie.

I only wish it were.

McCain Campaigns Lack of Focus on Issues

2008-10-17T14:18:00.001-07:00

McCain Campaign In Complete Dissaray

2008-10-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Senator Lindsey Graham, right, in an interview discussed a tax plan by Senator John McCain that his campaign later disavowed.
No New Economic Proposal Expected From McCain
By JACKIE CALMES, NY Times
Published: October 12, 2008

WASHINGTON — Despite signals that Senator John McCain would have new prescriptions for the economic crisis after a weekend of meetings, his campaign said Sunday that Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, would not have any more proposals this week unless developments call for some.

The signs of internal confusion came as the campaign was under pressure from state party leaders to sharpen his message on the economy and at least blunt the advantage that Democrats traditionally have on the issue in hard times. Republicans have grown fretful as Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, has edged ahead in polls three weeks before the election, while Mr. McCain has veered between ill-received economic plans and attacks on Mr. Obama’s character.

Mr. McCain took a break Sunday from filming campaign advertisements and practicing for a final debate with Mr. Obama on Wednesday to cheer volunteers at a phone bank near his Northern Virginia headquarters. Mr. McCain told them he planned to “whip his you-know-what in this debate.” The group erupted with laughter and applause.

On Saturday, his advisers were considering a range of economic ideas, one indicated. On Sunday, on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a confidant of Mr. McCain, confirmed a report on Politico.com that Mr. McCain was weighing proposals to cut taxes on investors’ capital gains and dividends. “It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy,” Mr. Graham said, “by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes.”

But McCain advisers later said they did not know why Mr. Graham said that. One noted that Mr. McCain’s economic plan already would cut capital gains and dividend tax rates, by extending President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts. At the phone bank, Mr. McCain declined to answer a question from a reporter about what he was considering.

“We do not have any immediate plans to announce any policy proposals outside of the proposals that John McCain has announced, and the certain proposals that would result as economic news continues to come our way,” said a campaign spokesman, Tucker Bounds. Mr. McCain’s policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said, “I have no comment on anything, to anybody.”

Rarely have presidential campaigns had to react so close to an election to so serious a crisis as the global economic panic. Both candidates are struggling to look like leaders, without impeding the efforts of those in charge. By nearly all accounts and in recent polls, Mr. Obama has received higher marks for projecting calm and consistency while Mr. McCain has been criticized as flailing.

“At this point I don’t think McCain can say anything on the economy that will sound credible,” said Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan and President George Bush.

Mr. McCain continued to draw criticism for his announcement last week that, as president, he would have the Treasury buy troubled mortgages at face value and give qualified homeowners instead government-guaranteed, low-interest mortgages based on their residences’ reduced value. After first saying lenders would pay the difference, the next day the McCain campaign said taxpayers would.

On the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, the second-ranking House Republican leader, Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, suggested, as the Obama campaign has, that the McCain mortgage proposal was unnecessary because the concept was “essentially in several pieces of law already” and wrong to leave taxpayers with the cost.

“Somebody needs to take the loss here, and it needs to be the person that had the bad judgment of making that loan, of buying those poorly put-together mortgage-backed securities,” Mr. Blunt said. “It shouldn’t be loss borne by the taxpayer.”

Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama plan speeches Monday on the economy. Mr. Obama, at a rally in Toledo, Ohio, will suggest ways to build on the government’s plan to inject capital into banks to ease the credit crisis, an adviser said.

Mr. McCain will be in North Carolina and Virginia, states that Republicans can normally count on but where Mr. Obama is showing strength. In his visit with volunteers on Sunday, Mr. McCain acknowledged that “the economy has hurt us a little bit in the last week or two” and that he was “a couple points down” in national polls.

But he said he would rebound because voters “want knowledge and they want vision.”

Elisabeth Bumiller and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

MC Yogi: Obama '08 - Vote for Hope

2008-10-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

A Conservative for Obama

2008-10-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

I liked this column so much that I have pasted it here in it's entirety. You can read the commentary, etc at this location:

A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief, D Magazine

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Democracy In Danger

2008-10-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

An HBO video that demonstrates that votes were tampered with in Florida in 2000.

Thank Florida and Diebold for the last 8 years of disaster!

Note: Video is 1 hour 20 minutes long.

"All Your Stars" Barack Obama Music Video by Silky Dave

2008-10-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

This is a pro-Obama YouTube video and song written and performed by one of a freind's-friend’s-boyfriend.
Thanks for passing it on, Fiona!

Slimy Tactics of Republicans

2008-10-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting story I heard on Fresh Air on NPR about Voter Intimidation Efforts In Philadelphia.
Zack Stalberg worked as a journalist for more than 30 years before becoming president of the Committee of Seventy.

Fresh Air from WHYY, October 8, 2008 · Fliers warning that people with outstanding warrants or unpaid parking tickets could be arrested if they show up at the polls on election day appeared recently in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Zach Stalberg, the president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Committee of Seventy, suggests that a Republican Party supporter may have posted the fliers in an effort discourage voters.

A native Philadelphian, Stalberg was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News for 20 years. In 2005, he became president of the Committee of Seventy, a group founded in 1904 with a mission to improve the Philadelphia region by fighting corruption and demanding ethical conduct of public officials.

Sarah Palin Lies Again on Bridge to Nowhere, Earmarks

2008-10-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

How to tell when Sarah Palin is lying? Her mouth is moving.

MSNBC Video on the Keating Documentary

2008-10-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

The McCain / Palin Campaign is beginning to show the desperation that comes from a team that knows that they are LOSING!

Why McCain is Clueless About the Economy

2008-10-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

This video shows why John McCain is clueless about the economy AND has flip-flopped on regulation.

2000 George Bush vs 2008 John McCain. Are they MCSAME? Daily Show

2008-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

As usual, John Stewart and the Daily Show are both right on and hysterical!

McCain Tells Rape Joke & Other Bad Jokes

2008-10-09T00:02:00.001-07:00

McCain makes a rape joke and his campaign admit it is an example of the "authentic" McCain.

McCain Attacks to Distract from the Economy

2008-10-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

SNL Doesn't Need Writers to Spoof Airhead Sarah Palin - She Does it All By Herself!

2008-10-08T17:26:00.000-07:00

McCain Shows His True Colors in Presidential Debate

2008-10-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks goodness that Barack Obama is so calm and imperturbable. Otherwise, he might have launched back a similar personal attack to counter this rude and petulant statement by John "I Am Losing And Therefore Desperate" McCain.

McCain Needs to Reign-In the Snarling Palin

2008-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

McCain Botched the Presidential Debate

2008-10-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

This video from MSNBC buttresses my observation: that McCain needed to have a dramatic victory in last night's Presidential Debate. He didn't. In fact, Republicans are now "morose" about the basic "competence" of the McCain campaign, particularly in dealing with the nation's financial situation.

HILARIOUS Daily Show video about the Bailout Bill

2008-10-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

I LOVE this video! Jon Stewart has never been more:
• Snarky.
• Funny.
• Biting.
• Angry.
• Right on!

Enjoy!

McCain's Sketchy History With Bank Failures - The Keating Five

2008-10-08T13:27:00.001-07:00

Before Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns,
Before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
Before AIG and the $700 Billion Bailout,
There was the Keating Savings and Loan scandal.

Guess who was right in the middle of it?

John McCain

35 Second Preview Video:

Full 13 Minute Documentary:

John McCain's ads are LIES. Here's the video proof.

2008-10-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

John McCain's ads are LIES. Here's the video proof.

Obama Speaks to Issues That Affect Real Americans

2008-10-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

Real Issues for Real Families

McCain and Palin Enjoy "White Privilege"

2008-10-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

This is Your Nation on White Privilege
By Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is:

when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll “kick their fuckin' ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
being able to say that you support the words “under God”
in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s--while if you're black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), you're a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn't fit to safeguard American institutions.
being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.
being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto is “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.
being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college and the fact that she lives near Russia, you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.
being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a “second look.”
being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.
when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to get to a hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be viewed as a great mom whose commitment to her children is unquestionable, and whose "next door neighbor" qualities make her ready to be VP, while if you're a black candidate for president and you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you're irresponsibly exploiting them.
being able to give a 36-minute speech in which you talk about lipstick and make fun of your opponent, while laying out no substantive policy positions on any issue at all, and still manage to be considered a legitimate candidate, while a black person who gives an hour speech the week before, in which he lays out specific policy proposals on several issues, is still criticized for being too vague about what he would do if elected.
being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.
not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.
being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and Harvard Business School (George W. Bush), and still be seen as an "average guy," while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then Harvard Law, makes you "uppity" and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.
being able to graduate near the bottom of your college class (McCain), or graduate with a C average from Yale (W.), and that's OK, and you're still cut out to be president, but if you're black and you graduate near the top of your class from Harvard Law, you can't be trusted to make good decisions in office.
being able to dump your first wife after she's disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you then go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you're black and married for nearly 20 years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called "terrorist fist bumps."
when you can develop a pain-killer addiction, having obtained your drug of choice illegally like Cindy McCain, go on to beat that addiction, and everyone praises you for being so strong, while being a black guy who smoked pot a few times in college and never became an addict means people will wonder if perhaps you still get high, and even ask whether or not you may have sold drugs at some point.
being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you dangerously naive and immature.
being able to say that you hate "gooks" and "will always hate them," and yet, you aren't a racist because, ya know, you were a POW, so you're entitled to your hatred, while being black and noting that black anger about racism is understandable, given the history of your country, makes you a dangerous bigot.
being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism and an absent father is apparently among the "lesser adversities" faced by other politicians, as Sarah Palin explained in her convention speech.

And finally, the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

If the candidate were trains ...

2008-10-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

How Racism Works Against Obama

2008-10-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

I received this in an email from my friend Leza:

How Racism Works

--------------------
What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
--------------------

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to?

What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer
measured up to his standards?
--------------------

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain
killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
--------------------

What if Obama were a member of the Keating-5?

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
====================

If these questions reflected reality, do you think the polls would be as
close as they are?

What is it that rationalizes and minimizes a black candidate's positive
qualities and qualifications?

You're The Boss ... which team would you hire with America facing historic
debt, two wars (to date), stumbling health care, a weak dollar, all-time
high prison population, mortgage crises, bank foreclosures, etc?

====================
Educational Backgrounds

Obama:
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science; specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Biden:
University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Pinocchio Politics - McCain and Palin's Lies

2008-10-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

I came across a great new web site: Pinocchio Politics

Here's some great stuff from their "List of Lies" page:

World Wide Web of Lies

It's tough to keep up with the "blizzard of lies" coming from the McCain campaign, but here are a few sites that can help :

"Unraveling the myth of the Straight Talk Express"-- an Obama campaign memo, posted on the TIME Magazine site, lays out Myth & Fact in detail

McCain-i-pedia's "Count the Lies"

Politi-fact's "Truth-O-Meter"

LieCount - More GOP Whoppers

"Lies to Nowhere" -- Think Progress tracks all the lies about the Bridge to Nowhere.

We have an economic Crisis.

What's McCain's Response -Lie!

Our economy is in crisis and all John McCain can do is lie. He's making the totally false case that Barack Obama doesn't have a plan for the economic crisis. "Senator Obama," he says, "has still not offered any plan of any kind." In fact Obama has offered a plan. And its McCain that has been notably short on details on how he would handle this crisis.

Palin & McCain Resort to More Swift-Boating Lies

2008-10-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin has been learning from her mentor John McCain about how to spread lies and smears about their opponent, taking a page from the Bush-Rove-Swift-Boating-Playbook.

Why would they do this? Because they are scared - they know they are LOSING!!

As Yahoo News reports:

While it is known that Obama and Ayers live in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board together and had a fleeting political connection, it's a stretch of any reading of the public record to say the pair ever palled around. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts.

Nonetheless, Palin made the comments at two appearances in separate states.
"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country," Palin told a rally of about 10,000 gathered at a tennis stadium in Carson, a suburb of Los Angeles.

That echoed comments she made earlier in the day to donors at a private airport in Englewood, Colo.: "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race. Coming late in the campaign, Palin's remark could be particularly incendiary, however, and could knock Obama off his focus on the troubled economy.

MSNBC adds:

At issue is Obama's association with Ayers. Both have served on the same Chicago charity and live near each other in Chicago. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s, the event cited by Palin.

In February, Obama strategist David Axelrod told the Politico Web site: "Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school. They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together."

But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they "pal around" is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.

At a rally in North Carolina, Obama countered that McCain and his campaign "are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance." The Democrat described the criticism as "Swiftboat-style attacks on me," a reference to the unsubstantiated allegations about 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry's decorated military record in Vietnam.

Why do I say that they are losing? I'll write more in my next post.

Airhead Palin as VP - that is TERRIFYING!

2008-10-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin is an Airhead Beauty Queen!

She couldn't win the Miss America contest with this lack of substance. And the GOP thinks she should be VP? If McCain wins, we are in BIG trouble!

Tina Fey IS Sarah Palin!

2008-10-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

Tina Fey is uncanny in her impersonation of Sarah "Airhead" Palin!

McCain's Honor and Palin's Sound Bite Lies

2008-09-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Real Mccain in his own words. Lies and flipflops

2008-09-25T15:12:00.000-07:00

John McCain - A Liar and a Flip-Flopper

2008-09-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Why would anyone in their right mind vote for a man who lies and changes his positions regularly as John McCain?

Why McCain is clueless about the economy

2008-09-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

Obama: Bailout shouldn't be 'blank check'
Illinois senator advocates help for homeowners, but McCain says rival's plan lacks details
By DAN BALZ and ROBERT BARNES, WASHINGTON POST

"As of now, the Bush administration has only offered a concept with a staggering price tag, not a plan," the senator from Illinois said at an afternoon rally. He added that "in return for their support, the American people must be assured that the deal reflects the basic principles of transparency and fairness and reform."

As Hill Debates Bailout, Wall St. Shifts Continue
Paulson, GOP Oppose Democrats' Proposal to Limit Executive Pay
By Lori Montgomery and David Cho, Washington Post Staff Writers

Congressional Democrats considering the Bush administration's emergency plan to shore up the U.S. financial system countered with their own demands yesterday, presenting draft legislation giving the government power to cut salaries of chief executives at firms that participate in the bailout and slash severance packages for their top management.

Why is this so very important? Because the very corporations who made these catastrophically stupid investments want to expand the program to help shield them from other losses.

Big Financiers Start Lobbying for Wider Aid
By JENNY ANDERSON, VIKAS BAJAJ and LESLIE WAYNE, NY Times

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

In nature, the strong survive while the weak die. Perhaps THIS is why the right doesn't like the teaching of Evolution and Natural Selection in our schools. Their incompetence will be revealed.

Finally, how did we get into this mess in the first place?

GOP Legislation To Blame For Financial Crisis
By KATHY CASTOR, Tampa Tribune

Early in the 1990s Congress played an active role for families borrowing money to buy homes. The Home Ownership & Equity Protection Act of 1994 included consumer protections for mortgages and required the Federal Reserve to issue rules against abusive lending practices. Under the Republican-controlled Congress, these regulations to protect all of us were never enacted.

The heart of our present problem dates to legislation passed in 1999. Sponsored by then-U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, the bill obliterated the long-held walls between banking and commerce. The new rules, championed by congressional Republicans, allowed for the excesses of banking and securities firms and insurance companies that culminated in last week's crash and the ongoing crisis in our housing markets.

Gramm, R-Texas, said he was proud of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. During his closing comments on the Senate floor, he said: "The question is not how proud we are of this bill today. The question is, how will it look 50 years from now when it has gone from infancy to maturity?"

We didn't have to wait 50 years. We know right now. In Tampa, in St. Petersburg, on Wall Street, it's just not working. An unbridled, unchecked system just doesn't cut it.

Take a guess - Which presidential candidate hired Phil Gramm as an economic adviser? That's right, John "Economically Clueless" McCain.

“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he said. But, “I’ve got Greenspan’s book,” he assured the audience.

Wow, I feel so much better now!!! Meanwhile, John McCain apparently is still clueless about the economy saying on Sept. 15, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

McCain Gaffes Could Undercut Message on Economy, Foreign Affairs
Presidential Candidate's Misstatements Threaten to Derail Campaign Message
By JENNIFER PARKER
Sept. 22, 2008

The most damaging gaffe came Sept. 15, when McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," which was a hard sell because it occurred on the same day that venerable firms Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were collapsing.

While that statement is likely to haunt McCain through the rest of the campaign, he went on to make several other slips in the following days.

On Thursday, the Arizona senator said he would "fire" Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox. However, while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president.

Trying to recover the next day, McCain confused the SEC with the FEC, the Federal Election Commission.

So, what is the approach of the McCain campaign when faced with their own incompetence? When in doubt, lie and flip-flop.

McCain should have stood by his words
MARSHA MERCER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

After noting "tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and on Wall Street," he said, "People are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times."

Instead of standing firm, McCain did what Washington politicians do when something they say ricochets around the talk-filled universe. He waffled and then he caved. First, he said he meant to say that American workers are strong. And then he scurried away from his words entirely and declared the economy in "a total crisis."

McCain camp criticism rife with lies

2008-09-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

An exceprt from a nice piece at Politico.com:

McCain camp criticism rife with errors
By BEN SMITH | 9/22/08 3:58 PM EDT

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

For more go here.

John McCain has MAJOR anger issues!

2008-09-22T17:02:00.000-07:00

Is this the guy you would like running our country?

Is this the guy you would like with the finger on the nuclear launch button?

I find his inability to control his anger very scary!

Keith Olbermann exposes the lies of McCain

2008-09-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

Naomi Wolf wonders - Is the US headed toward an authoritarian state?

2008-09-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Naomi Wolf offers a well-reasoned argument that the measures taken by the Bush Administration (and supported by McCain) put us on a dangerously slippery slope - headed towards an authoritarian state.

She tells of an older German woman who lived in Nazi Germany who kept saying, "They did this in Germany" and gave Wolf a number of books that prompted this talk.

She reveals the FRIGHTENING news that as an American citizen ("a short Jewish woman") she is on the Homeland Securities watch list, along with a constitutional scholar who is critical of the Bush Administration, two elderly women from SF, 2 staffers at the ACLU, one of the leaders of Greenpeace, and A DEDICATED WAR HERO who flew many missions for the US military.

"Drill, Baby, Drill' Equals Insanity

2008-09-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Thom Friedman speaks with Tom Brokaw on "Meet The Press". He responded to the INSANE approach put forth by the dinosaur Republicans who think we can "Drill, Baby, Drill" our way out of our dependency on foreign oil.

Maureen Dowd raises tough questions about Sarah Palin

2008-09-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd of the NY Times compares Sarah Palin to Eliza Doolittle and raises some questions that Sarah Palin should have to answer in her column titled ...

My Fair Veep
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 9, 2008, NY Times
WASILLA, Alaska

For example:
• What kind of budget-cutter makes a show of getting rid of the state plane, then turns around and bills taxpayers for the travel of her husband and kids and sticks the state with a per-diem tab to stay in her own home?

• Why was Sarah for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against the Bridge to Nowhere, and why was she for earmarks before she was against them? And doesn't all this make her just as big a flip-flopper as John Kerry?

• What kind of fiscal conservative raises taxes and increases budgets in both her jobs -- as mayor and as governor?

• When the phone rings at 3 a.m., will she call the Wasilla Assembly of God congregation and ask them to pray on a response, as she asked them to pray for a natural gas pipeline?

• Does she really think Adam, Eve, Satan and the dinosaurs mingled on the earth 5,000 years ago?

• Why put out a press release about her teenage daughter's pregnancy and then spend the next few days attacking the press for covering that press release?

• As Troopergate unfolds here -- an inquiry into whether Mrs. Palin inappropriately fired the commissioner of public safety for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law -- it raises this question: Who else is on her enemies list and what might she do with the FBI?

• Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants as well as on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian?

• Does she talk in tongues or just eat caribou tongues?

• What does she have against polar bears?

2 Interesting Columns on the Election

2008-09-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

I was struck by 2 interesting columns in today's newspaper.

The first is from EJ Dionne, who posits that the McCain campaigns sequestering of Palin from the press is a tacit admission that she is not ready for the Prime Time of the Vice Presidency.
Pulling the Curtain on Palin
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The second comes from David Brooks of the NY Times. Brooks points out that in the first ever election where 80% of voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, traditional campaigning is not working. What is working? Weirdness.

Surprise Me Most
By DAVID BROOKS, NY Times
Published: September 8, 2008

Poor Bush leadership continues to amaze

2008-06-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Today's local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a column by Thomas Friedman titled, Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave which criticizes the Bush administration for their poor leadership in dealing with the energy crisis.

He makes the point that Bush policy isn't doing anything to promote long-term solutions. In fact, his policies are making the situation worse. Imagine that! The Bush administration making our lives worse!

The opening of the column follows:

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”
It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is.

To read the full column, go here.

I could not agree more. How is that this man has not been thrown out of office?

What happened to the "inevitability" of the Clinton nomination?

2008-03-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

This column by E. J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post raises the question - Why is Hillary trailing Obama when her nomination looked "inevitable" just 3 months ago?

What happened to Hillary Clinton?

Last fall, she was the "inevitable" nominee whose "machine" would raise scads of cash and push her to an early victory. She demonstrated poise and knowledge in debates, and party leaders lined up behind her, fearful of missing her fast-moving train.

But this narrative was flawed from the beginning. Her campaign has suffered from profound organizational failures, small mistakes that took on larger import and miscalculations that have put her in a position where to survive, she must defeat Barack Obama in both Texas and Ohio next month.
The major flaw in the early story line is that there never was a Clinton machine in the sense of a well-populated organization skilled at turning out votes ...

Obama, by contrast, was shaped by his early work as an organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation and his political life in Chicago, a place where people still talk about ward committeemen and harbor memories of something that was called "The Organization" ...
Her larger problem, which she must solve if she is to best Obama in the March 4 primaries, is reflected in her struggle to find a message, a purpose and a voice suited to the disoriented mood in American politics bred by the frustration of the later Bush years.

Obama is inspirational, of course, but in a particular way: His message has been constant since his boffo Nov. 10 speech at an Iowa Democratic dinner. He is less specific about policies than he is in describing the frustrations voters feel -- with Bush, with Washington, with divisiveness, with partisanship. His consistent promise is not to pass a detailed program but to change the mood and style of politics.

Clinton has offered experience and some well-thought-out policies. That might be enough in a different year. But when it comes to a larger theme, her campaign has been all over the lot.

This one of the reasons that I have continued to support Obama, though I think Hillary would make a fine president.

This election is about something larger than just policy. This election is about leadership and inspiration. If you are anything like me, you feel disappointments, frustration and anger with the absolute lack of leadership and vision and accountability coming from the Bush administration.

Bush has never asked the American people to sacrifice anything to enjoy greater security from terrorism or to support the war in Iraq. He has never offered a vision of what America should be doing. He has squandered the good will that we as a nation enjoyed after Sept. 11. If you think his approval numbers are bad in the US (high 20s - low 30s), listen to the words of Jonathan Rauch, currently a senior writer and columnist for the National Journal, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and a writer-in-residence at the Brookings Institution , Rauch is also the author of five books. Here's what he has to say about the legacy of the Bush administration:

International opprobrium. The Iraq adventure fueled a precipitous decline in America’s image abroad, and Bush’s pugnacious style during his first term and his tin ear for foreign opinion made a bad situation worse. This is more than just a public-relations problem. National prestige is diplomatic capital; the more unpopular America becomes, the higher the price of foreign support. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s deputy secretary-general, recently said that suspicion of the United States has grown to the point where “many otherwise quite moderate countries” are inclined to oppose anything we favor.

Hence, any new president will need to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. This will take empathy, diplomatic skills, superb listening skills, and the ability to form cooalitions. Obama has these in abundance.

In addition, the next president must repair seriously damaged relations with Arab nations who see Bush as aggressive and arrogant.

As Lawrence Lessig (a great thinker and compelling speaker) points out in this video from a previous post, who is better equipped to do this than a dark skinned man named Barack Obama?

The next president must also inspire the American people to get off their collective lazy butts and take part in making this the greatest country in the world again. We need to invest in infrastructure (roads, bridges, fiber optics, etc), education and health care. These are not on the table for John McCain who has staked his presidency on a possible 100 year presence in Iraq. Apparently, McCain and the Republicans have so little cash as to invest in pollsters. Otherwise, they would be getting the message that most Americans think the war in Iraq was a big mistake.

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BTW, while researching this post, I came across this blog by Oliver Willis, which he subtitles "Like Kryptonite To Stupid." It's worth reading.

Copycat Campaigning

2008-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

This cartoon from Walt Handelsman of Newsday made me laugh.

Obama Vs. Hillary

2008-03-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

Cartoonist Paul Combs says it all ...

Time for Hillary to call it quits?

2008-02-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed this column by Eugene Robinson who wonders if Barack Obama had lost 10 primaries in a row, would he be under greater scrutiny than Hillary Clinton? I think so.

In this blog post titled, "The First Major Call For Hillary to Drop Out" at the National Review Online, Jim Geraghty had the following to say:

John Nichols of the Nation made an interesting remark during our radio appearance this morning - he was in Wisconsin, and he noted that in 2006 and 2007, as Hillary was running as the inevitable candidate, a lot of Democrats at many levels signed on because... well, she was inevitable. And they came with their own agendas. Some wanted jobs in her administration, some wanted to ensure they had an in with the new president, etc.
Obama's supporters and staffers signed on because they believed. The chances of a benefit or cushy appointment from President Obama seemed pretty long odds, so they were motivated by something different - actual agreement on the issues or stirred by his rhetoric or whatever.
You have to wonder how many Hillary backers, staffers, and endorsers are quietly thinking to themselves, "dang, I backed the wrong horse, how do I get out of this?"

Associated Press reporter Tom Raum thinks Clinton is "on the ropes" in this column.

She's still fighting, but it's awfully hard to find encouraging news for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic homestretch.
She's behind in money, delegates and momentum. She's selling experience when everyone seems to want change. And all the cheering for the man who could be the first black president is drowning out any excitement for the first female.
Once deemed the nearly inevitable Democratic nominee, Clinton has now lost 10 presidential contests in a row as the battle heads for a March 4 showdown in Texas and Ohio — states she must win. By most measure.

He goes on to make the point that Clinton faces 3 major challenges:

"Obama has outpaced Clinton in fundraising and spending."
"She's behind in delegates, and the gap has been growing."
"Momentum? That clearly goes to Obama ..."

Micheal Grunwald of Time wrote a piece titled, "Clinton's Spin Machine: Spun Dry" and comments on the Clinton campaigns tendency to discount Obama's primary wins saying that they don't matter.

So maybe all these Obama victories mean something after all. Maybe they mean that voters are sick of the perpetual Clinton spin machine. At the very least, they've made it clear that the machine is broken, if not dead.

Hillary, please do the right thing. Step aside for the candidate who can and will win - Barack Obama.

3 Reasons to Vote for Obama from Lawrence Lessig

2008-02-20T19:14:00.000-08:00

This video from Lawrence Lessig lists 3 important reasons why he supports the candidacy of Barack Obama. Lessig's presentations are always thoughtful, well-reasoned and articulate.

He states: "He represents the very best of who we are ... character, integrity, ideals ... as someone who opposed the war from the start."

Vote for Barack Obama in 2008!

Vote Obama Unless You Want John McCain in the White House

2008-02-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

3 columns in today’s newspaper have crystallized a thought that has been forming in my mind for some time: If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate for President, John McCain (“who almost promises a war with Iran”) and the Republicans may win the presidency again in 2008.

10 Key facts to consider:
1. Romney has quit the race, making McCain the de facto Republican candidate.
2. Contributors are voting with their wallets for Obama:

a. Obama’s campaign raised $32 million in January, $3 million on Wednesday (the day after the Super Tuesday) and $7 million total since Super Tuesday.
b. Clinton’s campaign only raised $4 million since Super Tuesday.
c. Clinton has loaned her campaign $5 million.
d. Clinton staffers are voluntarily forgoing paychecks.

3. Clinton is seen as “the most polarizing person in contemporary politics.” (George F. Will – see below, Stanley Fish, NY Times)
4. Obama has greater appeal than Clinton to independent voters.
5. California voters could play a critical role again in November.
6. Obama only lost in California by almost 390,000 votes, he surely ran much closer in the votes cast on Tuesday, after Clinton’s double-digit lead in polls had evaporated.
7. How many votes already cast in California for John Edwards would have gone to Obama?
8. Party identification is weak in California. Democrats are losing ground with registered voters.
9. The rapidly growing ranks of independent voters hold the balance of political power in California.
10. A poll of likely California voters found that McCain was virtually tied with Clinton in a hypothetical match up while Obama held a seven-point lead over McCain.

Key points from all three columns:
1) “Division Problems” By E. J. Dionne Jr.

John McCain is now the clear Republican front-runner, but … has survived only because conservative opponents have fractured their movement.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fought to a near draw (and the) primaries revealed a sharp gender gap; a generation gap at least as deep as the age divide that was so widely advertised in the 1960s; and differences across ethnicity, race and class.

... Obama is the overwhelming favorite of voters under 30, and has inspired a disciplined army of youthful organizers who helped him win decisive victories in caucuses in Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota and Alaska. If Clinton is the nominee, how many of these young voters will walk away from a process that thwarted their hopes?

Does Clinton’s weakness among male Democrats -- she lost men by 20 points in Delaware, 21 points in Connecticut and 39 points in Georgia -- portend problems in a general election?

----------------------------------------------------------

2) "Democrats Living Dangerously: Early Voting Insanity And a GOP Gift"
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Thursday, February 7, 2008; Page A21

Forewarned, Democrats now are forearmed -- not that they will necessarily make sensible use of the gift. Tuesday's voting armed Democratic voters with the name of the candidate that their nominee will face in the fall. Will their purblind party now nominate the most polarizing person in contemporary politics (Clinton), knowing that Republicans will nominate the person who tries to compensate for his weakness among conservatives with his strength among independent voters who are crucial to winning the White House? Perhaps.

The Republican Party's not-so-secret weapon always is the Democratic Party, with its entertaining thirst for living dangerously.
...
The surest way to unify the Republican Party, however, is for Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, the foundation of whose candidacy is his early opposition to the war in Iraq, would be a more interesting contrast to the candidate who is trying to become the oldest person ever elected to a first presidential term and who almost promises a war with Iran ("There is only one thing worse than military action, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran").

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3) "California may have a voice in November"
By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee
Wednesday,February 6, 2008

California's decades-long isolation from national politics ended Tuesday as voters turned out heavily to vote in two close contests for presidential nominations – and they could play a critical role again in November.

The political media have made much of the state's non-involvement in choosing presidential candidates for the last several decades, thanks to its traditionally late primary elections, but California also has been taken for granted in the November duels.
...
Party identification is weak in California, and both parties have been losing ground in voter registration – especially the Democrats – and the rapidly growing ranks of independent voters hold the balance of political power. Independents – liberal on social issues, generally, but conservative on taxes and crime – have favored the most centrist, or the least ideologically rigid, candidates.

Independents have leaned Democratic in most recent high-profile elections but the election and re-election of Arnold Schwarzenegger indicate that they're willing to vote for a moderate GOP candidate. And McCain fits that description, a Republican who, like Schwarzenegger, is often castigated by the GOP right for deviating from ideological dogma – on immigration most notably. A poll of likely California voters by Field Research found that McCain was virtually tied with Clinton in a hypothetical matchup while Obama, thanks largely to his broader appeal, held a seven-point lead over McCain.

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Vote for Obama in 2008 - Our best hope for the future
Please forward this link to people you know in these key states: Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, Washington, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Hawaii

Yes, we can.

2008-02-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

Yes, we can.

Vote for Barack Obama.

Excellent blog post on presentation from Jake McKee

2008-01-28T19:44:00.000-08:00

Jake McKee is the Principal at Ant's Eye View, a Dallas-based customer collaborations strategy practice.

Clearly, this post on his blog belies the comment, “I’m just a n00b at all of this public speaking stuff.” He offers up some sophisticated tips which are very useful to the average business presenter.

His brainstorming and content creation process is quite ingenious:

Typically my presentations, whether client research findings or conference keynote, start on the white board. I start free forming a running list of ideas, thoughts, points, and issues that may be relevant. This includes everything from major points to minor factoids.

Once I come across a point that I see as “significant”, I write it down on an index card and lay it on the floor. (I may also thumb through an old stack of cards from an previous session) Pretty soon there’s a bunch of cards laid out on the floor. I take a first pass at culling them down a bit, putting them in some sort of order, and identifying anything that might be missing. I’m a very visual person, so seeing this all laid out in front of me really helps.

This idea of whiteboarding, then culling the broader points to index cards is outstanding. Too often, speakers think of their presentation as text and words. This method is a more visual, right-brained, big picture method that is likely to lead to a better organized and well-thought-out structure. It's a very effective and creative way to get started.

Jake goes on to add a great suggestion about time:

No audience likes watching the presenter hurry through the last 15 slides in 2 minutes because they ran out of time. I tend to plan content for no more than 75% of the time allotted, although typically I plan for more like 50% of the time allotted.
Throughout the planning process, I’ll develop for that 50% target (i.e. 30 minutes of content for a 1 hour time slot). This helps me to ensure that I’m focusing on the truly important issues, but it also makes it easy to deal with the “oh yeah!” content that pops in during the rest of the development.

He is SO right about ideas coming up later in the process and adding that extra 25%.

I concur completely with Jake's point about clothing: “one step above the audience.” I want to be the best-dressed person in the room but only by a little bit.

He says:

I always try to ensure I’m presenting wearing my wildly comfortable Nike AirMax 360 sneakers.

If you can get away with sneakers, more power to you. I wear either Ecco, Rockport, Cole Haan Air Nike brand dress shoes because they are as comfortable as running shoes but very stylish and acceptable in ANY environment, right up to the boardroom.

He also has some great tips on visual media - images, PowerPoint / Keynote, etc.

Terrific post, Jake!

Clinton's Strategy Backfires

2008-01-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

A colleague emailed me a link in reply to my blog post on Barack Obama's concession speech from New Hampshire.

The link led me to Peggy Noonan's piece "Declarations" in the Wall Street Journal online.

I once thought highly of Bill Clinton. I think he made a huge mistake in lying to the American people about having sex with Monica Lewinski. His appeal has waned even further in the last couple of weeks. I found the following excerpt rang true for me.

In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton "predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties" and suggested his wife may lose Saturday's primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It's the press, and Mr. Obama. "Shame on you," Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the backdoor of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: "Sticky Fingers Obama."
Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

I am reminded of a comment made by David Geffen of Dreamworks SKG (G = Geffen) who is currently supporting Barack Obama for President and raised $1.3 million for his campaign. On February 21, 2007, in an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Geffen described Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton in unflattering terms: "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling." He said that Hillary Clinton was "incredibly polarizing" and described Bill Clinton as "reckless" and cast doubt on those who say he has become a different person since leaving office.

When I heard this story, I found it a disturbing reminder that Bill Clinton has a thorny relationship with the truth.

Bill's credibility has become an issue in Hillary's Campaign. I suspect her campaign sees this as a NIGHTMARE - it is the last thing they want people talking about. This speaks once again to the importance of authenticity and credibility in communication.

Bush Legacy: 935 Lies About Iraq

2008-01-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration lied to the American people 935 times in the build-up to the Iraq war, according to a report released by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization based in Washington, D.C.

"President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses ...

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14)."

Ultimately, this will prove to be a big part of the Bush legacy along with a faltering economy, the home mortgage collapse, the disgraceful response to Katrina, a massive $250 billion deficit largely driven by astronomical costs of the Iraq war, election fraud, the scandal surrounding the firing of federal judges and the resignation of another lier Alberto Gonzales (# 1 on Bert Decker's list of Worst Communicators of 2007), and the Valerie Plame / Scooter Libby scandal.

These have all led to some of the lowest approval numbers in US history. Bush and Co. have a lot to learn about authenticity and credibility.

Man, I cannot wait until late January, 2009 when this administration is GONE! Good riddance, Dubya!

Strong communication from Shell's CEO Hofmeister

2008-01-23T11:53:00.000-08:00

As I was driving to San Francisco Monday evening, I was listening to "It's Your World" broadcast by the World Affairs Council of Northern California on our local PBS station, KQED in San Francisco (which I recently heard has the third most popular dot-org website behind Craig's List and Wikipedia).

The speaker was John Hofmeister, CEO & President of Shell Oil Company and the event was titled, "How the US Can Ensure Energy Supply for the Future." This appearance was part of a 50 city tour that Hofmeister and other Shell executives have been conducting to start a "dialogue" with the American people.

I was impressed by Hofmeister's candor and willingness to acknowledge the poor reputation that the oil industry is suffering in the media. They are experiencing record profits while gas prices are at their highest levels in history. The public's perception of his company and industry are so poor that he reports receiving a death threat in the mail - a drawing of his body hanging from a tree.

As the event was held in San Francisco, you can imagine that Hofmeister responded to questions about the companies record profits, offshore drilling, conservation, and alternative energies. Hofmeister candid and measured responses sounded both well-informed and balanced - acknowledging the US need for new sources of energy with the long-standing 100 + year dependence on oil and a highly-developed oil-based infrastructure.

I came away thinking that Hofmeister was a very effective communicator and leader. As he speaks about in the interview, Hofmeister earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in political science from Kansas State University. He comes across as erudite. and seems to fully grasp the "big picture" of his industry and is able to articulate it's dynamics extremely well.

His candor typified the qualities of transparency and authenticity that I've written about in many posts here.

You can listen to the recording, see the video or download an MP3 file of that speech at the WAF audio and video archive here.

Obama's Concession Speech is Brilliant

2008-01-15T13:59:00.000-08:00

Hearing Barack Obama's concession speech after the New Hampshire primary, I was deeply impressed. He is clearly echoing Martin Luther King Jr's great "I Have A Dream" speech by treating adversity as a challenge, inspiring his campaign and supporters to redouble their efforts.

His repetition of a simple phrase "Yes, we can" is a use of a recurring theme that makes his presentation memorable, 'sticky' and very effective. Note the audience picking up the chant ... in spite of the fact that he "lost" the primary, this audience doesn't seem deterred. They seem even more committed to their candidate.

Partial transcript:

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

This is superb communication and leadership. He uses language that makes the audience feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves, something meaningful, something important and exciting. They are cast as heroes on par with Jefferson, Washington, Louis and Clark, Lincoln, and King. It's heady company and intoxicating to think of one's self as part of a movement.

On the macro level, his themes of hope and change have given him a competitive advantage against Hillary Clinton, who many saw as the front runner in this election -- as though it was hers to lose. But I don't hear any consistent message coming from her candidacy other than experience and wonkiness. When Obama speaks about hope and change, it comes across as authentic.

When the Clinton campaign (and all the other campaigns) suddenly picked up on the theme of change after Iowa, it seemed like a lame and inauthentic attempt to hitch themselves to Obama's message, as though it was their own.

Consistently, I find myself deeply moved by his speeches. Though I would think that any of the Democratic or Republican candidates will provide an improvement over the TERRIBLE communication and leadership we suffer from the current administration, no one else inspires like Barack Obama.

Considering the deep hole we are in terms of our economy, our world leadership in science and education, the weakening of the dollar, our current lack of sophisticated understanding of the world's political dynamics, I feel that what we as a nation need right now is a leader who inspires us and who can form relationships with enemies, on the other side of the political aisle and on the other side of the globe. In my view, Barack Obama is that candidate.

It's important to acknowledge Garr Reynolds again for this post from his terrific blog, Presentation Zen. I recommend it highly to all my readers and clients and I encourage you to subscribe.

The Happiness Hypothesis

2008-01-11T15:15:00.000-08:00

Reading The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt has been a revelation and a joy. Haidt is a teacher at the Univ. of Virginia and a social psychologist. He says his "corner is morality and the human emotions."

In the book, he lays out a path to happiness buttressed by psychological study and generous references to spirituality and philosophy. Here are a few nuggets that I'd gleaned so far (I am on page 101 of 243):

Emotion is critical in decision making.
Learning to understand, distract and coax the beast of our unconscious mind is critical to happiness.

"An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider [conscious mind /reason] who knows how to distract and coax the elephant [our unconscious mind] without having to engage in a direct contest of wills" because the elephant will win such a contest every time.
We make decisions based on unconscious emotion and justify them based on reason.

"It is the elephant that decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly (as Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink), but only the rider can string sentences together and create arguments to give to other people."
Negative emotions leave stronger impressions that positive ones.

For example, "If you were designing the mind of a fish would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats? No way. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low; odds are there are other fish [meals] in the sea ... The cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator, however can be catastrophic. Game over ..."

This reminded me of the post that I made about reputation and transparency in June of 2007. One mistake can outweigh hundreds of successes when it comes to people's perceptions of you.
Happier people have greater activity in the left side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
Less happy people have greater activity in the right side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
To change your level of happiness ("your affect"), you need to change your thoughts.
The 3 best methods for changing your affect are:
1) Meditation,
2) Cognitive therapy,
3) Prozac.
The "happiness formula" is: H=S+C+V
H = Happiness
S = biological Set point (happiness determined by genetics)
C = Conditions of your life
V = Voluntary activities you do.
Happiness is determined by strength and number of relationships.
Activities that induced happiness are described as the "flow" state, a phrase coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
There are 3 key qualities to "flow" experiences:
1) "There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention"
2) "You have the skills to meet the challenge"
3) "You get immediate feedback about how you are doing at every step."

(Qualities that are present when delivering a well-crafted, successful presentation, by the way.)
If you spend money, spend it on experiences, not on stuff - assuming you want to increase your happiness level.
You can chart your own happiness and find out what activities are likely to make you happy online at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center site here. (My chart is below.)

I am happy I found the book ... or the book found me.