I know there are a lot of these so just think of it as a reference sheet more than a diary.  

Print this off and have reluctant Clinton supporters read it. The Democratic Party needs their votes.

This part 3 of Voting Record Comparison. I’ve added Hillary Clinton’s voting record on the important issues to Obama’s, Biden’s and McCain’s so that Clintonites and Hillraisers can judge whether or not they want to vote for Obama or McCain based on the issues not based on an emotional attachment to their disappointment.

While the example that I’m going to give is extreme, bordering on the ridiculous, it will illustrate the absurd nature of switching from Hillary Clinton to John McCain. If Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi and Joseph Stalin were running and you couldn’t vote for Mother Theresa. Would it make sense to now vote for Joseph Stalin? A final word to Clinton supporters: Silence gives consent.

The Republicans are all over the fact that Obama's stage has a Greek Revival look to it.  This has gotten me thinking about what Barack may have planned for tomorrow night, and which, if he does, may well destroy not just McCain, but the entire Republican party.

As Josh Marshall pointed out, the two most likely reasons are the analogies with the Lincoln Memorial and Martin Luther King's speech in front of the same. Thus, his placement in front of the Lincoln memorial figuratively invokes putting Obama in as the inheritor of King's legacy. Which, along with being a powerful image, also has the virtue of being true.

But, I think the more intriguing possibility is that Obama, the Senator from Illinois, can also claim Lincoln's legacy.  

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

The Catholic Right, Part Sixty-six

Michael Novak, George Weigel and other Catholic neoconservatives have been spinning a yarn for the last twenty-five years that their brand of laissez-faire capitalism is the brand sanctioned by the Vatican.  It has been around so long and become so ubiquitous and because it has been largely left unanswered, their narrative has almost become urban legend.

The Republic of Korea (ROK) is what we call "South Korea". The peninsula divided by an artificial border by the international powers in 1953 (Russia and the US). North Korea is a wreck. South Korea seems to be thriving. The actual situation in the ROK is actually far more complex but that is not the focus of this essay, energy is.

The ROK (hereafter simply "Korea") is vasstly expanding it's extremely well run nuclear industry. It is doing this, as the last excerpt below shows, to reduce the amount of money spent on fossil fuel purchases, of which Korea has none, and has to import it all: coal, oil, gas.

The Korea Times ran the following article here: Here are some excerpts:

The New York Times had an article today about how some wind farms are bumping up against the limitations of our Grid system. This is no surprise, because we don't have an electricity superhighway in this country. It's time for one.

    John McCain will announce the name of his running mate in Dayton on Friday at Wright State University, named of course for the Wright Brothers. Just miles from the old Wright air field, in the atom-bomb basket of America, amidst the oldest monuments of prehistoric North American civilization, the choice of location is rich in symbolism and foreshadowing.

    Every indication is that the pick will be native son Rob Portman, former southwest Ohio congressman, Bush Budget Director, and liar extraordinaire. The choice may fly or it may bomb.

    This is installment #4 in my exploration of Mr. Portman's grooming to be the number two man in America, and eventually number one. Please consult the first three parts for background, here (1), here (2), and here (3)

Once a year the professional golf community comes to visit my neck of the woods, in the form of the PGA’s Champion’s Tour.

It’s an event that changes the character of the community in several ways: spectators swell the size of the town, there’s a media focus that usually doesn’t exist...and an actual, no kidding, traffic jam might develop—on a weekend.

It’s a great economic barometer, as well. Despite the efforts of the Professional Golfers Association (the PGA), there is a lot more of an upper-income demographic attending the tournament than there is a Happy Gilmore kind of crowd.

Which brings me to the point of today’s examination: what can we learn about the state of the economy from the perspective of the tricklers, as opposed to how it looks from the point of view of the trickled upon?

When talking about American elections one of the most common lamentations is that we have poor turnout. The commonly held belief is that we need to make voting as easy as possible to increase turnout. To this end, a number of options have been considered including internet voting and entirely mail in elections. Is this really the right approach? Are the elections in which these options have been used actually showing higher rates of turn out, and if so is across the board or only among certain demographics? Several studies have been conducted to examine these questions and the answers are not as straight forward as might be expected.

I have been a fixture in a lot of health care diaries. It's one of my pet causes, it's just about an obsession for me since I don't have health insurance.

As we wait for Gustavo to make its move on the Gulf, with its trajectory very scarily looking like the one of Katrina almost exactly three years ago...

...it bears repeating that NOLA is still wounded, with no healing in sight.

More over the flip.

Despite being the beneficiaries of America's Good War, which enjoys broad bipartisan support in the US, and despite being assured by both John McCain and Barack Obama, that their liberation will be escalated next year by about three American brigades, the Afghanis continue to bitch about civilian casualties this, repeated air strikes on villages that. Now Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is ungrateful both for his installation as puppet president and for the generous salary he received as an American oil company exec, is demanding a reevaluation of the status of foreign forces in his country, all because of some silly misunderstanding. While the Afghans aren't acting nearly as uppity as their ungrateful conterparts in Iraq, it is becoming clear that, once again, yet another backward country has failed to appreciate America's greatness and is now starting to reject the hand of generosity reached out to them by the Pentagon. It's the Dominican Republic all over again!

Feel free to read more insults to America after the flip.

[Cross Posted at VetVoice.com]

To the Senior Senator from Arizona:
  Apparently you don't read the diaries on Vetvoice. It's OK and I'm not at all surprised. You haven't been listening to the needs and concerns of this country's veterans for sometime now. I am writing you in response to your extremely troubling appearance last night on Jay Leno's program. When questioned on the number of homes you own (or really your wife), you dodged the question and again played the POW card. In case you missed some of the analysis of your answer on MSNBC, here it is:

I am growing tired of the television pundits referring to the backbone American families as "working class" rather than "middle class."  I don’t know who came up with these distinctions, but they don’t seem to me to be accurate, and I think they work to divide this country in ways that it is not, economically speaking, divided.

If someone knows a (quote unquote) middle class family who is not working hard, please alert me.  I am not familiar with any such family.  We need to stop quaking to the Karl Rovian splinter politics -- all middle class families are "working class" Americans because ALL of them work for their incomes.  It is time to remind everyone that the divide is not between some illusory group of "working class" Americans and "middle class" Americans, but, instead, between those whose incomes are derived from work and those whose incomes are derived from wealth.  Period.

Cross-posted on Docudharma

I have never been tortured. But I have worked clinically with those who have, including U.S. POWs. I can tell you it breaks the mind and the body, the soul and the spirit, in a way that can never be forgotten.

Now John McCain cites his experience as a POW and torture victim as an anodyne to every mildly injurious political attack. While his painful experience as a POW matters in the history of the man, in our nation's history, what matters now is that McCain has betrayed that experience, and the lives of thousands he could both know and not know. In doing so, he also betrayed the ideals of American fair-play and justice, going back to George Washington (who forbid his revolutionary army to engage in torture, even if the British did). As everyone should know, those ideals were not realized fully, and we are still fighting for them today. But McCain has trampled them in the mud.

Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer

The possibility that Republican presidential candidate John McCain, if elected, might reinstitute a military draft has become hot news lately.

Keith Olbermann devoted major time to the topic last Thursday and Friday on MSNBC's Countdown. The Keith O pieces were driven by McCain's answer to a woman's question at a town-hall campaign stop in New Mexico.

Here at Legal Schnauzer, this got us to thinking about the draft in larger terms--particularly terms that apply to the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A strong case can be made that George W. Bush is both the worst and the dumbest president we've ever had. But bad, dumb people can teach us valuable lessons--in a "never again" kind of way.

The past few weeks have been filled with busy, busy days.  I have been to my 20th class reunion and I continue to do events around DC for the Obama4UnityBeatsMcCain slate that I am running on for the DC Democratic State Committee. Hell, I’ve even had a friend visit and I had the sheer pleasure of hanging out with UnionReview’s own Richard Negri one night last weekend.  In all of this, I’ve been thinking about women, unions and what exactly all of our stories really are and where they are.

This is probably due to the current negotiations with the WTU (AFT local 6) that I’ve been reporting on for longer than I’d like (seriously, sure looks like Fenty and Rhee are anti-worker in all this). It may have something to do with the recent election of Randi Weingarten, Antonia Cortese and Loretta Johnson at the American Federation of Teachers.

As I sit here charging my laptop at Google's fantastic "retreat" at the Big Tent, I'm still trying to take it all in.  Being among so many creative and talented bloggers both here and at Netroots Nation earlier this month is a truly humbling experience: there's nothing quite like the synergy of so many people all working, each in their own unique way, to advance the progressive cause, largely without institutional backing of any kind.

It feels, in a certain sense, like we've arrived.  The movement our network of creative and passionate individuals has created already seems to be just as powerful and influential as anything on the Right.  The Big Tent, after all, is the place to be in Denver this week, with top-notch panels and presentations and the best creative and online media networking opportunities anywhere.  We've helped elect a swatch of more and better Democrats from Jon Tester to Jim Webb, officially pushed Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party, and provided a bulwark that was instrumental in defeating the DLC wing of the Party in this year's primaries.

Greetings folks, the start of new week and thus we kick off another episode of Manufacturing Monday!  Never a dull moment when it comes to covering stuff that either goes into the products you buy, or the impact that that consumption leads to. Now originally, I had these other items on bio-fuels, hydrogen cars, China and oil, and a few other things.  But I see now that my section on the bailout of the US automakers is so big, that the whole thing is too long.  So, if it is OK with you, I will post those items tomorrow.

Everytime convention rolls around I begin to squirm. It is impossible for me to avoid the pre-convention hoopla if I'm going to stay informed on other topics, so I just grit my teeth and bear it, but it really sets my teeth on edge. Here's why: