This story from the Onion News Network:

In the interest of providing equal time to different viewpoints, here’s a Republican promotional video, courtesy of ImVotingRepublican.com:

H/T: Matt R.

In February, Bush asked a reporter:

“Wait a minute.  What did you just say?  You’re predicting four dollar a gallon gasoline?  I hadn’t heard that.”

Look at him.  He’s incredulous.  He looks like he’s about the accuse the reporter of fear mongering.  Gas prices were close to $4 at the time of this press conference, and today it’s well over $4.50 (at least where I live).

Later on in the press conference when asked a completely different question, Bush dodged it, saying he couldn’t answer because he’s been too focused on other things, like high gas prices.  The same ones he learned about for the first time in that same press conference.

Here’s an excerpt of Clinton’s speech, delivered today:

Back in 2006, I had a little political argument with a group of friends over dinner.

I argued that the Democratic Party nominee would pick Barack Obama as the VP candidate in 2008.  My dinner companions were unanimous in declaring how naive I was.  “Obama as the VP nominee?”  They laughed.  “Impossible.”  We actually made an informal bet, agreeing that the loser would give money to charity of the winner’s choice (5:1 odds against).

It’s now official: I lost the bet.

Not long after that, I wrote this less-than-accurate post explaining why I thought Obama would end up as the VP nominee.  Among my other statements, I said “he won’t run for president, so he won’t get bloodied in the primary.”

Genius.

This was a little less than two years ago, long before Obama had declared his candidacy for presidency.  Even a year ago, how many of us just assumed, as a matter of accepted truth, that we would never see an African American at the top of a major party ticket in our lifetimes?  We just assumed we hadn’t yet made it that far as a country.

It turns out Obama had more confidence in us than we had in him. 

Go Barack!

If you’re a political junkie, you might find this parody of “The Office” is pretty funny. You can ignore the first 35 seconds:

He’s a populist and a Democrat:

Message to my millions (?) of readers: sorry for taking so long between posts recently… I just started a new job and am a bit distracted.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders had promised to veto a City Council resolution supporting gay marriage. At the eleventh hour, with the resolution on his desk, he changed his mind. In an emotional speech, Mayor Sanders explains why he reversed his position.

With his wife by his side and holding back tears, Mayor Sanders reveals that his daughter Lisa is a lesbian. Speaking of her, and of the gay and lesbian members of his staff, he says:

“In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife, Rana.”

On April 15th, 1994, a sane Dick Cheney confidently explains how trying to take over Iraq would lead to a “quagmire,” that wouldn’t be worth the American casualties:

Funny stuff. Max Blumenthal visits a College Republican convention, and after hearing the expected GOP pro-war talking points (”what people don’t understand is if it’s not faught in iraq and we don’t win over there, it’s gonna happen here.”), Blumenthal asks:

“If you support the war, why aren’t you serving in the military?”

The results are hilarious.

Blumenthal doesn’t just cover the war in his visit with the Chickenhawk College Republicans. When he interviews some Republicans about their feelings about gays, at first there’s some old fashioned GOP anti-gay garbage. But it gets really interesting when a member of the College Republicans lets us know that he’s been dealing with some suppressed feelings:

Republican Guy: “Everybody at one time in their life has had the inclination towards the other — uh — towards the same sex. . . . But just because you have the inclination does not mean you’re gay because if you have the inclination because you’re curious and stuff like that. . . . But if you accept it, and then suppress your feelings and you pray about it to god, and know that you’re not — are are so much stronger than some other people.”

Max Blumenthal: “Have you accepted it?”

Republican Guy: “Yes, I have accepted it, I have prayed about it to God, and I know for a fact that I am not gay.”

Not quite convincing… but funny to watch.

Anyway, here’s the video:

I had the privilege of meeting Elizabeth Edwards at the Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco this weekend, and seeing her deliver this moving speech. How can you not love this woman?

When the Iraq war was launched, Bush’s secretary of Defense told us it
“certainly isn’t going to last any longer” than five months.

Years later, we’re told by the President that we’re “making progress.” But he’s said that a lot over the years. Take a look at this 30-second montage (2003-2007):

(this clip is actually a TV spot targeting a specific Senator, but the message is relevant to a wider audience)

Don’t forget what we were told:

I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Nov. 14, 2002.

Remember the Iraq Study Group? That was the bi-partisan panel put together to come up with a proposed solution that would hopefully get the US out of the Iraq quagmire. It turns out that “America’s Mayor,” Mr. Rudy Giuliani, quit the Iraq Study Group in 2006 so he could do more fundraising.

I would criticize him for dropping out of such an important effort … but since Bush ignored the Iraq Study Group Report in its entirety, I suppose no harm was done.

There’s something a bit “off” about Mitt Romney. He looks and sounds like a normal person, but you might say there’s a certain something missing. He seems hollow somehow.

Thanks to YouTube we’ve seen that Mitt Romney can movingly (and with the appearance of the deepest sincerity) express the exact opposite opinion from one he movingly expressed a few months before.

One could argue that this flip-floppery doesn’t set Romney apart from other politicians. But to me, Romney does seems different. His hollowness goes deeper, it’s more complete.

For example, what kind of a person puts a pet dog into a carrier, straps the carrier to the roof of the car, and then drives for 12 hours?

Yeah, according to the Boston Globe, that’s exactly what Romney did back in 1983. As if that wasn’t strange enough, the Boston Globe adds this disgusting but revealing detail:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.

I mean, I’m sure the station wagon was crowded, but who treats the family dog like a suitcase?

I’ll get behind Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination, but I hope she doesn’t. Why? Because she, unlike Edwards or Obama, is deeply associated with the inaptly named “Democratic Leadership Council,” or DLC.

The DLC is not the Democratic Party. It’s a separate organization, run by a group of people who wrongly see themselves as leaders of an effort to “modernize” Democratic politics. Up until the 2006 election, they had tremendous influence on the direction and campaign strategies of Democratic politicans and candidates. They steered our party the wrong way in every election since 1994.

The DLC was useful once, back in the early 1990’s. But ten years later and they’re woefully out of touch. Just look at this comment made last April by Harold Ford, homophobe and new Chairman of the DLC:

“we should all remember that the DLC played an instrumental role in giving Bill Clinton - then an Arkansas governor - a policy platform to campaign on and from in 1991.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell.

The DLC is stuck in 1991, seeing every election through an aged and dusty lens. They fail to recognize the changes in the GOP and in the American electorate in the intervening period. After helping bring us victory in 1992, their myopia brought us a nearly unbroken string of election disasters starting with the unimaginable loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, the razor thin Gore victory in 2000 (stolen by the Supreme Court), and a nearly hegemonic GOP by 2004.

Following the DLC’s playbook, we lost an election in 2004 that should have been ours by a landslide.

It’s hard to imagine it now, but until very recently the DLC was convinced that the Democratic party would suffer terribly if Democratic politicians and candidates spoke out publicly against the war in Iraq. The DLC considered it dangerous for democrats to be seen as “anti-war.” In their minds, being anti-war means hippies, marijuana, flower children, and John Lennon. Bad images that they thought would be off-putting for the rest of the country. “Too liberal,” they said.

The GOP has been governing solely to their base for the last six years, maybe longer. Under the DLC’s direction, the Democratic Party has done the opposite. Embarrassed by, ignoring, and discounting the base. This was slowly driving the party into the ground, creating a party that stands for nothing at worst, or “Republican Lite” at best.

The Party largely followed the DLC’s deadly advice on the Iraq war until John Murtha, Howard Dean and a few other started ignoring the DLC’s advice. And guess what happened? We started winning.

The 2006 election was the first moment in a decade where the Party slipped from the DLC’s death grip.

Try and forget for a moment how morally wrong the DLC’s advice was on the war. Ignore temporarily how wrong and harmful it was to the country and the world for so many Democrats to sit quietly while Bush steered the country into disaster. With that out of your mind, focus on the how absurdly wrong the DLC was in their claim that being “anti-war” would cause the democrats to lose elections. In other words, not only was their advice immoral and damaging, it actually hurt the party at the ballot box. They can’t even do Machiavellian politics right.

Just look at how a confident Bob Shrum, Democratic political adviser, recalls his profoundly dim-witted and Machiavellian advice to then-Senator John Edwards to vote for the Iraq war:

“…But Edwards didn’t want to look “liberal” and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council…” [source: TMP memo emphasis added]

By any objective measure, this was horrible advice. In sum: Support the war because you don’t want to look like a sissy and because you want the support of the DLC.

It’s hard to imagine that any Democrat would still listen to the DLC. Yet some Democrats do. Hillary Clinton does. This is the main reason why I won’t — I can’t — vote for her in the primary.

The 2006 election was the first nail in the DLC’s coffin. If Hillary Clinton wins, she’s going to pry open that coffin and bring all of her DLC advisers and policy people back into the White House and back to the top of Party leadership, where they can start messing things up again. We need a candidate that repudiate the DLC’s backward ways, and move the Party — and the country — forward.

The joke’s on us, unfortunately.

In November, 2004 , I traveled to Columbus, Ohio the week before the presidential election to volunteer for John Kerry. Kerry wasn’t my top choice for candidate, but we all knew how important it was to defeat Bush. When I got there, you wouldn’t believe the energy in the air. It was amazing. People of all ages, races, religions, backgrounds, from all around the country (and local people) converging to volunteer and help.

And you know what happened? The local Democratic Party squandered about 99% of that energy.

I remember the night before the election standing in a big auditorium packed with volunteers, and watching the local party officials (through astounding incompetence and ego) throw away all that effort. They were supposed to be training us for election day, but they didn’t bring the training materials, and none of the dozen party officials would get off the stage and drive the 5 miles to go get it. Instead, they all had speeches to give. I offered to drive and get the materials, and to make Kinkos copies myself (as did several other volunteers) but the offers were refused. “That’s now how things are done.” This happened with 2 consecutive volunteer trainings, both with the auditorium filled to capacity. And so the next day, Election Day 2004, those volunteers who hadn’t given up and gone to work for MoveOn were untrained and uncoordinated.

The next day I showed up at a polling place in the heart of a low-income neighborhood on Columbus, Ohio. Party officials sent me there with a specific goal: I was supposed to answer voters’ questions, and to check voters’ names off the official party (registered voter) list as they came to the polling place. The idea was that this list would be picked up by a Party official in the afternoon, use it to find out which Democrats hadn’t voted, and send volunteers knocking door to door and encourage them to vote. It’s the classic Election Day “get out the vote” effort.

But after I stood all day at the election place, outside in the pouring rain, nobody from the Democratic Party ever came and picked up my voter list. I’d meticulously introduced myself to every voter and checked their name off the list. I still have that list, because nobody from the Party ever picked it up. I found out later, that this exact story repeated itself at polling places all over Columbus Ohio. The volunteers did their jobs, and there were more volunteers waiting to go door-do-door. But at polling place after polling place, Democratic Party officials pick up the voting lists! So it was all a waste. No door-to-door follow up at the homes of Democrats who hadn’t voted yet.

This was Ohio, 2004. Remember Ohio, 2004? This was the State that decided the election. This was the State where Kerry lost by a handful of votes.

Up until the night before the election — that night in the auditorium — I was 100% sure we’d win. And suddenly that cold night, a tiny feeling crept in: “Oh my God. we’re going to lose this. We’re going to throw away the election that was handed to us on a sliver platter.” I never forgot that night, and I never forgot how incompetence and ego in the senior local party officials threw away party energy and enthusiasm.

Since then I’ve been a deep supporter of the netroots, Howard Dean, and the 50-state strategy. I’m sure not every local party organization is as bad as the one in Columbus in 2004 — for example, the local Democratic Party here in San Francisco runs a tight ship — but where it’s still like it was in Columbus, Ohio in 2004, we can’t stand still. But where leaders like we had in Columbus, Ohio in 2004 st, we can’t stand still. We need to take back our Party from incompetents and fools, this confederacy of dunces. We need to win.

George W. Bush and Paris Hilton have this much in common: They were both born into a world of privilege and power unimaginable to most Americans. They come from elite, wealthy families, yet they are famously disdainful of sophisticated thought. Good fortune has made neither humble — instead, they both act with confidence and swagger, emboldening them to do what few others would dare. Neither seem particularly concerned with helping those who are not equally fortunate. And finally, both seem to believe that they are above the law.

Hurray for happy, proud elephants and firemen!

Boo for sad, nerdy donkeys with glasses!

Do you like balloons? All good Americans like balloons! So let’s vote for the smiling man with extreme comb-over hairdo!

That’s essentially the message of this 1952 TV advertisement for Dwight Eisenhower:

If you thought American political discourse was on the decline, this video provides some evidence that it’s been bad for a long while. And judging from the color of the faces in this cartoon, another thing that apparently hasn’t changed much is the target racial demographic of the GOP.

By the way, in watching this video, was anyone else reminded of a certain Scandinavian retailer? At least if you’re looking in black and white:

No? Anyone? Maybe it’s just me.

Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson said two weeks ago that it should be legal to fire employees for being gay. Thompson now regrets having said this, but his apologies leave something to be desired.

You see, Tommy Thompson says that it’s not his fault that he gave the answer he did during the debate. He’s a victim! Tommy Thompson’s list of excuses include (this is not a joke):

• a dead hearing aid battery
• an urgent need to use the bathroom
• the flu, bronchitis, and a recent trip to the hospital

Remember the scene in The Blues Brothers when the Carrie Fisher character (having gone homicidally insane after being left at the altar by John Belushi’s character) aims her gun and says “You think you can talk your way out of this? You betrayed me.” The response is a John Belushi classic:

No I didn’t. Honest… I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.

I’ve pasted this movie clip below.

If you’ve seen the movie, you remember laughing when Fisher’s character appears to be convinced by this rambling series of contradictory excuses. But in the real world, no one is going to be convinced by Thompson. From now on, if you hear anyone give multiple, contradictory or irrelevant excuses for why they did something they regret, this is called a “pulling a Tommy Thompson.”

“Why is it that Republicans are so offended to see two gay men holding hands, but do not have the same moral outrage about two children who are being turned away from the hospital because their parents can’t get health insurance?”

“What about that moral outrage, what about those values?”

-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (April 29, 2007)

Four years ago today, President Bush surrendered the war effort in favor of a costly photo-op in which he declared that major combat operations were over:

In recognition of the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, I’m re-posting two videos that I’ve used before. The first is a 38 second clip from the famous “Mission Accomplished” speech given four years ago today, and the second is the clip from a few months prior to Mission Accomplished, where Donald Rumsfeld promised that the war would last no longer than a few days, weeks or months.

I’m torn between Edwards and Obama as my top choice for Democratic nominee.

Either would make a good president. Even better if they were on the same ticket. The question for today’s post is who would make the better presidentialcandidate. In terms of being able to offer bold leadership and in terms of his ability to inspire, my current view is that Edwards is the better choice.

This goes against the conventional wisdom, which to some extent is that Obama, with his immigrant roots and amazing life story, is more “inspirational” than Edwards, with his expensive haircuts and equally expensive smile.

As pretty and privileged as he may be, I believe that Edwards genuinely cares about this country and has great compassion for the poor and those who are too weak to protect themselves. Obama undoubtedly feels the same way, but comparing the two I think Edwards has shown greater strength of his convictions in this early phase of the election cycle. He seems to be less willing to listen to the bad advice of Washington “beltway” advisers and pundits, who strive to water-down politicians’ messages until they all sound alike. Obama, I’m afraid, is starting to sound more and more like other generic Democratic candidates (such as Clinton, my third choice).

Edwards was burned in 2004, and learned some lessons from that defeat. He knows that one reason the Democrats lost in 2004 because people saw the party as wavering and flip-floppy, while they saw Bush as stronger in his convictions. The new, seasoned Edwards is bolder, clearer, and more intelligent than the one we saw in 2004. He knows what’s right and importantly, he isn’t afraid to say it. For example, he’s the first one to put a specific health care proposal on the table.

Personally, I believe that about 30% of this country is very conservative, 30% is very liberal, and about 40% have no strong convictions either way, but they do have a wide range of opinions that would seemingly put them in both camps — at times in a somewhat contradictory way. (For example, they are pro-health care reform, but fearful of big government actions in the economic market). However, one thing that all of these middle 40% want is someone with courage, strength, and confidence. They want a strong personality — a leader. Kerry had trouble with these voters when he gave esoteric and complex answers to seemingly simple questions. Other democrats struggle with these voters when they say they are strong on health care and then don’t really have anything specific when they are asked what they intend to do about it. Republicans, even ones with extreme flip-flops such as Bush (click for examples of extreme Bush flip-floppery) attract these voters when they speak in moral absolutes about things like god, gays, and guns.

Edwards has been through the fire of one of the most brutal campaigns in recent history. He came out of it, learned lessons from it, and as a result has more strength and confidence than ever before. Obama has not been there — his senate campaign was a breeze. As it stands, I’m afraid that Obama is too susceptible to the pundits. This fear was partially confirmed when I heard him speak in Oakland a few weeks ago. He spoke in broad, general, generic terms that were barely distinguishable from the other Democratic candidates. Too much like Senator Clinton.

So as it stands, I’m leaning towards Edwards.

This skit from MadTV would be hilarious if it weren’t so painfully true: