Wow. Kerry fighting back. Where was this 2 years ago? He was in the president’s grill. He didn’t allow the Republicans to get off the hook. He has actually counter-punched. OMG!!! Someone call 9-11. I can’t beleive my eyes and ears. This what I have wanted to see. Some backbone. Some standup and fight. Damn it. American is worth fighting for!!
(I still don’t change my earlier comments.)
I’m about to throw up. Who cares? Who cares what John Kerry has to say? He had his chance and blew it. He ran against the most vulnerable president in history and lost. He didn’t lose from a lack of ideas. He lost because he got “swift boat’ed” and was asleep at the wheel. Now, he gives the Republicans something to get round up about — why? Why doesn’t he have the discipline and the intellect to know when to shut up?
The Republicans were looking for something, anything. John Kerry threw them something. I’m going to puke now.
(see a few days ago for part 1)
Well, we’re four-plus days into the stay and there has been far less political discussion than I expected. We’ve been quite busy playing with the kids and spent Saturday and Sunday up at the Grand Canyon, so maybe there just haven’t been as many opportunities as during some trips. It’s kind of hard to work up any kind of political ire when you’re in the presence of the awesome beauty of the Grand Canyon.
What has come out so far, I think, is more evidence that he’s of the “smaller government, less bureaucracy” species of Republican, one who might fall into more of a Libertarian camp, if there was much of one to fall into in Nebraska.
I had him intrigued with some copies of Sojourners magazine and their discussion of having a consistency of your thought in your politics. That you can’t be “pro-life” when discussing abortion and then be pro-death penalty, or pro-war. That it doesn’t make sense to read and preach the Beatitudes and then support legislation that doesn’t “walk the talk”.
I’ve noticed a conspicuous absence of the generic morals-based bashing of the Democrats of the kind that I used to get sick of during and for some time after l’affaire Lewinsky. I’m sure ithe absence is out of an embarrassment felt by many of the more religious of the right. I haven’t brought up that bone to pick, and I don’t exactly know why. I guess it’s because I’m not trying to convert him, and I know he’s already familiar with the issues.
Tomorrow is Halloween and the visit is nearing an end. Recent polls suggest he may return to Nebraska to find that he has a Democratic challenger leading the race for the NE-03 house spot and I’m still not quite sure if he’ll think that’s a trick or a treat, even though I’ve asked him point blank. There’s a certain degree of suspicion of an Ivy league education that is fairly common in the western part of the state and which will turn many folk out there against Scott Kleeb, but Kleeb does have pretty strong family roots in the region and Nebraskans are much more open-minded than one might think.
As for me, I’m going to put the computer to bed for a while and work on carving a Jack-o’-lantern that just says “VOTE”. I’m hoping I find a Harry Mitchell in my bag next week rather than another lousy J.D. Hayworth.
Peace.
So, what happened? A week ago, I was ready to stick a fork in the Cowboys because they were done. Hell, after the first quarter of this game I thought the Cowboys were done. They were down 14 -0. The Panthers seemed to be moving the ball at will. Then some happened. It happened slowly. The Cowboys just didn’t lose. I’m not sure why they didn’t they just didn’t. Romo wasn’t great. He was good. He threw the ball well in the 5 - 15 yard range. He was never given a chance to throw really deep. He moved well in the pocket. he ran a couple of times to avoid a sack. He was clearly a good note.
Vanderjagt!?? What’s wrong with your head? I was out there, pre-game. You were nailing kicks from 45 - 50 yards without a problem. In the game you clang a 43 yarder off the goal post?
The Cowboys have a long way to go if they are going to go to the playoffs. This may be a start.
Oh, there’s plenty to talk about. The Republicans are cranking up their lying machines. So, I have to counter than with the truth. George Bush is meeting with Generals about Iraq. Shouldn’t that have been done 3 years ago?
I bring it real with some GREAT guests. Former Majority Leader Tom Daschle is in the HOUSE!! We discuss the Center for American Progress and the Patriot Act. I also have Steven Freeman author of Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
This is a rough cut polished gem!! I’ll edit it a little more later.
Remember I’m on iTunes on several other podcasting services.
From WaPo:
On the brink of what could be a power-shifting election, it is kitchen-sink time: Desperate candidates are throwing everything. While negative campaigning is a tradition in American politics, this year’s version in many races has an eccentric shade, filled with allegations of moral bankruptcy and sexual perversion.
At the same time, the growth of “independent expenditures” by national parties and other groups has allowed candidates to distance themselves from distasteful attacks on their opponents, while blogs and YouTube have provided free distribution networks for eye-catching hatchet jobs.
“When the news is bad, the ads tend to be negative,” said Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford professor who studies political advertising. “And the more negative the ad, the more likely it is to get free media coverage. So there’s a big incentive to go to the extremes.”
The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit. A few examples of the “character issues” taking center stage two weeks before Election Day:
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You know these guys make me sick.
Diddy is back.
This clip got a lot of air play about a month or so ago. O’Reilly was peddling his book. So, of course, he had to talk about Iraq. Letterman maybe getting old but he can still jab and knockout with the best of them.
Detroit kitties that is. Cards take game 5 to win their 10th World Series title in club history. (2nd behind the Yankees and their 26….aarrgghh, we hate the Yankees)(but I digress)
Any World Series is worth watching in my book, but the lasting memories from this one are going to be about how poorly the Tigers played defense. Eight errors in five games, including five by their pitchers. Those five miscues by the pitchers led to eight unearned runs over the series. The Tigers only managed to push across eleven runs of their own in the five games and gave up almost that many as gifts. No wonder the Cardinals were able to win without hitting the lights out.
The Cards stumbled into the postseason with the second-lowest winning percentage ever to make the playoffs. They got past the Padres and the Mets on the strength of Chris Carpenter and improbable performances by Jeff Weaver and Jeff Suppan. They were carried into the World Series by the miraculous ninth inning wonderblast from ?Yadier Molina? Yes, I had to rub my eyes in disbelief as well. Yes, that Yadier Molina. The one with a season batting average of .216 and a career total of 16 home runs spread out over three years. That Yadier Molina.
And there they were, going into the World Series as underdogs in almost everybody’s books, but I guess that’s why they play the games. Hardly a classic among post-season classics, but every World Series is interesting in its own little ways.
Well, now there’s only about 155 more days to go until Opening Day ‘07. But only about 124 until Spring Training begins. And only 38 until the winter trade meetings begin. OK, I guess I can live with that. Suffice it to say that baseball remains my #1 sport of obsession. Maybe I can get some work done over the next few months. Hmmm, maybe after the elections.
If you have early voting in your area, do it. Vote early. This will decease the chance of “incidents” happening on Election Day.
This might also be a bit ambitious for an initial foray, but I’m faced with an upcoming six days that are sure to be equal parts frustrating, enlightening, mystifying and educational.
My wife and I grew up in Nebraska and have landed in Arizona, where we’ve lived for ten of the last 16 years. We both fall squarely into the liberal democrat camp, making us minorities in either state. My wife’s parents have arrived to spend the next six days with us and our kids. My father-in-law is a Republican, most of the time, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why he would be. I think he’s more of a “social values” Republican, of the church-going variety. He sure shouldn’t be, based on financial issues, and he also spent quite a chunk of his life in a union. He knows I’m one of them durned liberals, and we’ll dance around the topics from time to time when we are together, until we just agree to disagree.
With the election coming up so soon, I think the topics will be sure to come up more frequently, and for this weekend, I’m going to try to engage the discussions, rather than avoid them. I have no idea how many days it can go on, or if my wife will issue a cease-and-desist order before it’s over, but we’ll see how it goes.
This afternoon we chatted about Scott Kleeb’s chances in western Nebraska’s third congressional district race and about criminal prosecutions of Enron executives. The likelihood of a nationwide “Throw all the bums out” sentiment on election day and the issue of term limits in the U.S. Senate and House also came up. I’m still not sure how the recent Republican meltdowns and scandals may have affected his thinking, but I feel like he is representative of the type of Republican who would turn against the party based on their recent activities.
Or maybe I’m naively and hopelessly optimistic. I’ve been accused of that before. I may be, but I just don’t see much mileage in the alternative.
Five more U.S. soldiers died today in Anbar province, bringing the death toll for the month to 96. That’s a total that hasn’t been exceeded since January, 2005, twenty-two months ago. And what kind of administration response is there to this carnage? A change in semantics. Whether we were ever “stay-the-course” or not now seems to be the major discourse. But you know what? Whatever we were, or are, it’s not working! And we still haven’t heard the Bush administration utter a single new, original, different thought, about what we should do.
We are apparently putting a lot of hope in this Baker report, that won’t be released until sometime after the election. Because apparently he is going to be some kind of genius who will figure out a way for us to “win the war” and make everything better. Harps will play, angels will descend, deus ex machina, and we will finally be greeted as liberators.
And we aren’t going to see this report until a minimum of 13 days from now (Baker hinted that the report might not be out until early next year), because we wouldn’t want it to sway the election. We wouldn’t want the public to possibly hear that we might be doing something wrong over there. Well, by my math, that means, that at the current daily rate for this month, that another 48 U.S. soldiers will die before we even start to talk about doing something differently. That means another 48 of these will be coming home.
As near as I can tell, there’s only one sure way to stop this death toll from going higher. It’s called troop withdrawal. You can call it “cut and run”, you can call it “defeatist thinking”, apparently now, you can even call it “stay the course”. I don’t care what you call it. Just start doing it. Because our troops are currently stuck in the middle of a civil war where the only thing the two warring sides can agree upon is that they don’t want us there.
I’m just saying…….
The clip speaks for itself.
Keith Olbermann pulls no punches. He is exactly right. There is no reason for us to be finding human remains at the WTC site 3 years after we were suppose to have found everything. The commercial is simply wrong, not just poor taste. Oh, and the commercial that has that White Girl asking Harold Ford to call her - WRONG. That was simply racist. Simply racist but what’s new for the Republican party.
Here in North Carolina we have had a Republican call Doug Jones (candidate for State House) a professional politician when he is in fact a professional teacher!! He teaches 11th grade history. Charles Taylor (R) has called Heath Shuler for not paying his taxes. I have gotten over 10 calls which are political ads telling me that Heath Shuler didn’t pay his taxes. WRONG!! Anyone can look it up and find out that he isn’t associated with the company and he has paid his personal taxes. Lies. Lies and mo’ LIES.
So what party shielded Mark Foley in order to avoid a scandal for as long as they could???
There seem to be 50 or a hundred posts (probably more like 100,000) throughout the web which all claim to increase your blog traffic. They have the secret. Most of them tell you what they have done and how they have increased their traffic. A few of them, try to go about it more scientifically and have a list of things that “guarantee” that you will increase your blog traffic. Horse hockey.
There is no magic. There is no special ring of blogs. There’s no special service. Technorati is a nice service but it’s not a panacea. Making your blog compatible with Google is also nice but you won’t see traffic increase overnight.
There is lots of discussion about content out there. The discussion centers around what you should and shouldn’t write. The bottom line, is if you have started a blog in order to make money, I have some oceanfront property to sell you in Wyoming. It probably will not happen. On the other hand, if you started a blog because you had a specific interest and you thought that a blog was the best way to express that interest, then a blog is great. A blog is a great way to communicate amongst family members. It’s great to post pictures. You can even post video. For the most part, you really don’t have to learn a whole lot to run a blog. You do not need to learn HTML or JavaScript. A well-written blog could be a good way to promote a business. Sending customers there for help or other information could be beneficial.
The bottom line is there aren’t any magic bullets. If you start a blog today there’s almost no way that you will have a thousand people tomorrow or at the end of the month hanging on your every word (unless your name is Justin Timberlake or JoJo). You simply grow traffic by telling your friends. If your friends happen to be interested in the same things that you are then they will tell their friends and slowly but surely your blog will grow.
From CNN.com:
Another former altar boy says he was sexually abused in the 1970s by the same retired Catholic priest who acknowledged fondling former Rep. Mark Foley when Foley was a teenager, the man’s attorney said Wednesday.
The new allegations against the Rev. Anthony Mercieca were made by a man who lived in North Miami and was an altar boy at St. James Catholic Church, where Mercieca worked, attorney Jeffrey Herman said.
Herman said he planned to file a lawsuit Wednesday against the Archdiocese of Miami. His client, now 40 and identified in the lawsuit only as John Doe No. 26, says Mercieca abused him when he was about 12 years old.
“He had been thinking about it before Foley came forward, and then when Foley came out and the church encouraged other victims to come forward, he decided to come forward,” Herman said.
The man said “all of my nightmares came back” when Mercieca’s picture appeared on the news last week amid Foley’s claims that the priest had molested him. Foley had resigned amid accusations that he sent sexually explicit messages to teenage boys who had worked on Capitol Hill. more
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I thought as soon as Foley pointed the finger at someone in the clergy, more accusers would come out of the woodwork. I’m not saying that someone is lying. Instead I’m saying as soon as one person gets the courage to jump in the water others will follow. It is rare for someone who molests children to only molest one. Sad case.
On the other hand, why hasn’t any one in the Republican leadership resigned over this? Are they the moral party? Isn’t that what the Contract with America was for? Some where in the contract it said - “This year’s election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.“ I’m sure having your 15, 16 or 17 year old son or daughter hit on by a Congressman is not a family value.
Hilarious Daily show cartoon
From Hotline:
Two independent sources tell the Hotline that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has decided to spend as much as $5 million between Friday and November 7 in a last ditch effort to dislodge Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez from office.
Michael J Fox has done several ads for progressive candidates. In deference to my good friend, Theron, I will say that the stem cell research debate has oversimplified a very complex issue. But then again, that is what politics has become these days. Whether it is border security — if you don’t support building a fence and you don’t support border security; the war against terrorists — if you don’t support a bill which basically destroys habeas corpus then you are for the terrorists.
So, Michael J. Fox has a very moving commercial which Rush Limbaugh takes it upon himself to comment on. “He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners yesterday. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.” Many blogs have commented on Rush and his ignorant declaration.
Interestingly, this issue, this subject, has become national news. The national news is not whether stem cell research needs to be done or funded by the federal governement. The national news is of course about whether Rush Limbaugh was way off base or not. Today’s Washington Post has an article. In the article there’s the following quote, “Anyone who knows the disease well would regard his movement as classic severe Parkinson’s disease,” said Elaine Richman, a neuroscientist in Baltimore who co-wrote “Parkinson’s Disease and the Family.” “Any other interpretation is misinformed.”
I would really like to spend more time on the issues and less time on he said, she said.
The Cowboys need something. A spark. They also need to learn how to block. It doesn’t matter who the quarterback or running back is if the offensive line can’t or won’t block. Tom Brady is immobile. He has an offensive line. Michael Vick is mobile and has been complaining about all of the hits that he has taken. He wants to stay in the pocket.
So, it is Tony Romo’s turn to step up to the plate. I wish him well. I hope that this is the spark that the Cowboys need. Starting against the Panthers isn’t the way that most quarterback would like to ease into the league. Julius Peppers is playing better than ever.
Of course, Tony Romo isn’t going to be able to fix the defense of the Cowboys. Jake Delhomme is famous for the deep passes that the Cowboys can’t stop. This could be another ugly game.
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, fulltime sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
