Best Campaign Moments for Reporters

post from Garling Gauge on 05 November 2008 07:53:16 AM. © Garling Gauge

Campaign reporters share their best?and most hilarious?memories from the trail.©2008 Garling Gauge. All Rights Reserved..

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GarlingGauge/~3/443225155/

Add to del.icio.us

Digg this

Post to Furl

Add to reddit

Add to myYahoo!

PalinAsPresident.com knocks it out of the park

post from DemConWatch on 05 November 2008 07:49:00 AM. © DemConWatch

I'm sure most of you have seen PalinAsPresident.com. My favorite was the dinosaur walking past the window.

Today they topped themselves. I'd put up a picture of it in the post but it would take away from going to the site.
Click here to see it.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.demconwatchblog.com/2008/11/palinaspresidentcom-knocks-it-out-of.html

Digg this

Americas Paradigm Shift

post from Garling Gauge on 05 November 2008 07:48:55 AM. © Garling Gauge

©2008 Garling Gauge. All Rights Reserved..

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GarlingGauge/~3/443225162/

Digg this

President Obama and the Politics of Tolerance

post from Koulflo Memo on 05 November 2008 07:44:53 AM. © Koulflo Memo

Drawing on words from Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, Barack Obama transformed American politics last night. White Americans with beautific grins and black americans rejoicing in tears, tv screens across the world attested to this fact that racial barriers to the highest job on the planet have been torn down.What this says about a [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://koulflo.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/president-obama-and-the-politics-of-toler
ance/

Digg this

President Obama and the Crumbling Walls of
Intolerance

post from Koulflo Memo on 05 November 2008 07:44:53 AM. © Koulflo Memo

Digg this

A beautiful Day!

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 05 November 2008 07:44:23 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Hello my friends!I just wanted to share with you my joy over Barack Obama's victory. It is the first time in years that I feel hopeful about the future - for my sons and for all of us on this planet. We have elected someone who is a real[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/443277598/showDiary.do

Digg this

What Just Happened

post from TPMCafe on 05 November 2008 07:43:00 AM. © TPMCafe

Isn't this strange. Maybe you have to be old to appreciate it. Fasten your seatbelts, now the fun begins.

Atrios calls it concern trolling. I maintain that if a politician can still get burned talking about a lower defense budget and higher taxes for bigger, better government, it's still a center-right country. At the same time, PRESIDENT OBAMA (hmmm . . . ) has an opening a mile wide for new initiatives. With creative financing, there will be enough slack to get a lot of new projects launched, and not everything new and good will cost money. Get those patriotic gay Arab-American translators cracking!

It was amusing to watch Fox news bounce around between new narratives. Is Obama going to disappoint the liberal legions, or is he going to lurch to the left. Are his supporters raging leftists, or does everybody long for centrist, bring-us-together policies. Should the Right go into fanatical opposition or bring an openness to working together. Decisions, decisions.

I keep going back to 1992. In that year the Democrats won nice majorities in the House and Senate. The following Spring, Bill Clinton gave a rousing defense of his first budget. Meanwhile, the termites got to work. Senator David Boren (D-OK) was a key saboteur of the legislative agenda. The Arkansas Project was hatching.

The Empire will strike back. In the meantime, enjoy this:

video details and more

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tpmcafe-main/~3/8CsgxsyXysk/

Digg this

Neocon Bunker Hunker

post from My Left Wing - Front Page on 05 November 2008 07:40:28 AM. © My Left Wing - Front Page

by Jeff Huber

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

-- Sun Tzu

It ain't over just because they've been voted out of power. Until January, young Mr. Bush is still commander in chief and Dick Cheney is still in charge. Surge architect Fred Kagan is putting the finishing touches on the "resurgence" strategy, and the neocons have two months left to do that voodoo that they do so well.

A former professor of military history at West Point, Fred knows the components of a classic advance-to-the-rear maneuver: the main body backs down toward safe haven where it can regroup for the counter-offensive, leaving skirmishers in its wake to mine, booby trap, burn bridges and otherwise harass the advancing enemy.
Know Your Enemy

In the case of the neocons, safe haven amounts to a well established network of think tanks, academic citadels and media outlets. Among the scholars and fellows camped out at the American Enterprise Institute are Kagan, John Bolton, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Irving Kristol (Bill's dad and the "godfather of neoconservatism"), Richard Perle, Gary Schmitt, the completely despicable Paul Wolfowitz and the possibly even more despicable John Yoo. Midge Decter, Steve Forbes and Richard Scaife anchor the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation; Bill Bennet and Ed Meese hang out there too. Meese, Condi Rice, John Abizaid, Tom Sowell and James Woolsey haunt the hallowed halls of Stanford for the Hoover Institution.

John Yoo, whose sophist interpretation of the president's constitutional powers made young Mr. Bush into a virtual deity, teaches law at the University of California, Berkley. Bill Kristol is on the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy school of Government, and Mackubin Thomas Owens, coauthor of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, is associate dean of academics at the U.S. Naval War College. Donald Kagan, father of Robert and Fred Kagan, is a professor of history at Yale. Condi will doubtless reclaim her chair at Stanford, even if she has to step over the corpses of half the student body and faculty to get to it.

Noted Cheney chamberlain and dumbest freaking guy on the planet Doug Feith finally got the boot from his visiting professor gig at Georgetown University, but don't shed a single crocodile tear for him. He'll be joining Norm Podhoretz and a host of other B-list Likudniks at the Hudson Institute.

Rupert Murdoch has ensured the warmongers will always have a balcony and a megaphone handy. Bill Kristol and collaborator Robert Kagan (Fred's brother) are well established at the Weekly Standard, and Kristol is now a fixture at the feckless New York Times. Charles Krauthammer holds down the fort at the other "liberal" bastion, the Washington Post. Max Boot has a long-standing relationship with the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Ralph Peters and Newt are columnists with the right wing New York Post; Cal Thomas and Suzanne Fields write for the equally laughable Washington Times.

That's just the tip of the print media iceberg. Add the broadcast sewage from talk radio and FOX News to the mix and, great Caesar's ghost, it's a wonder there's a sentient being left in America.

So don't worry that those poor neocons won't have two nickels to rub together or a place to rest their wicked heads. They have silk-lined coffins stashed all over the place.

As strategists, the neocons are no Sun Tzu. For all the damage they've managed to do, they did darn little in the way of detailed planning for it. In fact, one can hardly call them strategists at all. What grand scheme they have amounts to a simple tactic, similar to ice hockey's "dump and chase" offense, where your fling the puck into the other guy's end, fight for it in the corner, and try to slide it out to a teammate open in front of the other guy's net. No skilled maneuvers, no coordinated efforts, no sophistication, and nothing remotely creative. The only talents required are speed, brute strength and persistence, all of which the neocons, like all bullies, have an unlimited supply.

If the tactic doesn't work, oh well. You back check and live to dump and chase another day. Or, as Chairman Mao dictated, "Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again."

Know Yourself

As the latest shenanigans in Syria and Pakistan confirm, the warmongery intends to drill the puck as deep into eternal war territory as it can while it still controls play. Obama may not be able to exert much influence on their behavior, but he needs to straighten out a few closets in his own house before he takes on the job of straightening out the abject disarray young Mr. Bush leaves behind.

In an April 2007 Washington Post column, Robert Kagan wrote that, "Obama wants to increase defense spending. He wants to add 65,000 troops to the Army and recruit 27,000 more Marines. Why? To fight terrorism."

Kagan went on to directly quote Obama, writing, "He wants the American military to 'stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar,' and he believes that 'the ability to put boots on the ground will be critical in eliminating the shadowy terrorist networks we now face.' He wants to ensure that we continue to have 'the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.'"

"Obama never once says that military force should be used only as a last resort," Kagan gloated. "Rather, he insists that 'no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary,' not only 'to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked,' but also to protect 'our vital interests' when they are 'imminently threatened.' That's known as preemptive military action." (Italics mine.)

"This is a left-liberal foreign policy?" Kagan taunted. "Ask Noam Chomsky the next time you see him."

Come election time, Obama might have stiff-armed jibes made by a leading neocon over a year and a half before, but he did just the opposite. When the Republican National Committee ran a deceptive ad in the military-centric Norfolk, Virginia market accusing Obama of planning to cut defense spending by 25 percent, Obama shot back with an ad that quoted the 2007 Kagan article, bringing specific attention to Kagan's observation that Obama wants to expand the military to "fight terrorism."

If that's Obama's idea of change we can believe in, I believe we just rejected Johnny McDitto and voted in Sam O'Same-o.

Next: Know Your Friends

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=23556

Digg this

Question of the Day: Pride Edition

Ohmyfuckinggod. It's all over but the inauguration. After eight long years there's finally some good news. I am so relieved, happy, exhausted, stunned. I spent the day yesterday doing Election Protection lawyering. It was exhausting, rewarding, infuriating, but so worth my while.

To help people vote in such an historic election is a privilege I'll never forget. Seeing young men waiting for hours to cast their vote for a candidate who looks like them, and having them come up and hug me for helping them solve their voting problems makes the discomfort of standing in the cold rain for hours on end seem meaningless.

Watching the lines at the polls I thought about how long and hard the battle has been to get us to this point. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and thousands and thousands of others, black, white, Asian, Latino, who have fought for their own rights and for the rights of all Americans to have the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.
I was able to assist one man in filling out his ballot. He'd recently suffered a stroke, forgotten his absentee ballot at home, couldn't find his glasses, but wanted to vote for Obama and the rest of the Democrats on the ballot. He was such a sweet man; I was privileged to help him.

I also was threatened with arrest by a poll captain who had no precinct information on any of her signs, had a police officer posted at the entrance to the polling place and was sending young people away without even offering them provisional ballots. I stayed (outside the 100 foot line), reported her infractions and helped many people vote both regular and provisional ballots at that precinct. Funny thing, it wasn't even on my list, I just was driving by on my way home to get a jacket (did I mention it was COLD AND RAINY?) and saw the policeman and no signage, so I stopped in to check on things, and ended up spending almost three hours there.

I have done some phone banking and canvassing throughout the campaign, but this was even more amazing, if that's possible. I was helping people exercise their rights as citizens of a democracy.

Over the last eight years, I've wondered if we even still have a democracy. We've seen such an abrogation of our rights and seen several elections "won" by suspicious means that I've been very worried that the pendulum may have swung so far toward fascism that we wouldn't see the return swing in our lifetimes.

I think, I hope, I was wrong.

On 9/11 I stood horrified, like everyone else, at the destruction wrought to our country. The next day, my husband put up an American flag on the front of our house. I'm not big on displays of patriotism. I don't consider myself to be particularly patriotic, but he's the son of a retired military officer, and I wasn't going to question his motives.

That flag flew in front of our house even after the invasion of Afghanistan. I understood the desire to find the mastermind behind the attacks and punish him for his actions. I also knew what a repressive regime the Taliban commanded, and in the post-traumatic haze of 9/11, I supported the President.

But the Iraq invasion was a completely different matter. I was horrified by the Machiavellian planning behind the Iraq "war" and our government's cavalier dismissal of the United Nations and its inspectors.

The day the invasion began, I took down our flag, and it has remained in storage since 2003. This morning, I dug it out and hung it on the front of our house.

We have a long way to go in this country. We face economic crises not previously seen in any of our lifetimes. We still have far too many troops deployed throughout the globe. Despite the election of President Obama (my, that sounds good), racism is far from dead.
Complacency is still our enemy, but it sure feels good to have something to celebrate for a change. It feels good to no longer be ashamed to be an American. I may take my passport out of its Maple Leaf case before I travel abroad again.

video details and more

In England, November fifth is remembered as Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whose goal was to blow up Parliament and kill the king. For generations, English children have learned the verse:

"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."

George Bush has a much more limited view of history. When Bob Woodward asked him how he thought the Iraq war would be viewed years from now, his answer was:

'History, we don't know. We'll all be dead.'"

Well, my friends, we now have our own reason to remember the fifth of November. It is the first day of a new era. The first day of the end of the Republican permagov. We have lots of work to do, but we've shown we're not afraid of hard work.

How will you commemorate this historic day? How will history view this election? Will it always be seen as something monumental, or will its import fade under the weight of the accomplishments of the Obama presidency?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=23555

Digg this

Wednesday Post-Election AM Stuff

Here is what I thought was the very gracious concession speech by John McCain last night (and wise move not to let Palin open her mouth)...

...and here is the victory speech from President-Elect Barack Obama.

Read The Full Article:
http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2008/11/wednesday-post-election-am-stuff.htm
l