Bring It On! Election 2008

And they are doing it on a lousy technicality:

He didn’t open an office in the state with paid employees..only volunteers apparently. But Keyes was allowed in the Rethug debate yesterday? Hell I didn’t even know that fuckwit was running, although according to Eugene Robinson last night on Countdown Keyes runs every election cycle for President..its his only job apparently. Back to my man Kucinich, his office released the following statement regarding the horseshit excuse given him by the idiots in Iowa:

“The Iowa caucuses have been portrayed as having national implications, and if the Register has decided to use hair-splitting technicalities to exclude the leading voice of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, then the entire process is suspect,”

Call or email the Des Moines register and voice your complaint. Even if you don’t plan to vote for Kucinich, he is the only voice of the progressives in this Presidental election cycle. He shouldn’t be uninvited. According to NYTexan, the paper is being flooded with calls by irate voters that want to hear ALL the Democratic candidates.

the Des Moines Register’s top officials, including editor Carolyn Washburn (515) 284-8502.

Laura Hollingsworth President and Publisher (515) 284-8041
Randy Brubaker Managing Editor (515) 284-8590
Randy Evans Assistant Managing Editor (515) 284-8118

The Des Moines Register letters to the editor e-mail: letters@dmreg.com
Telephone switchboard
Local: (515) 284-8000
Iowa: (800) 532-1455
Outside Iowa: (800) 247-5346

Edit: from one of my commenters on Sirens Chronicles, we get their advertisers info:

CALL advertisers off their web site. Be polite, ask to speak to the sales, general
manager or person in charge of advertising. Object to their advertising in
a paper that would include Keyes in the Republican debate, but exclude
Kucinich.

Des Moines Chrysler Plymouth (515) 270-8100
Charles Gabus Ford 800 742 6403
Karl Chevrolet, Ankeny, Iowa 800 622 8264
Business Furniture Warehouse 515.254.9091
Prudential First Realty Phone: (515) 453-7200
Village of Pondersa 515.440.2222
McGowen, Hurst, Clark & Smith, P.C. (CPA’s)
515-288-3279 - 515-462-1882

If you are feeling REALLY frisky, go into classified ads and contact people who have something for sale and object to them advertising in the paper. IT WORKS. They call the paper back and say WTF?

Thank you to Obama’s website for sending me this video. Its Oprah’s stumping for Obama this past weekend. 29 Thousand showed up to see what Oprah and Obama had to say..and Buddha knows it had to be cold. Its only three and a half minutes long. Obama is one helluva orator, I will give him that. I am still on the fence about him however. Kucinich is still my man.

On Saturday December 1^st, 3600 individuals braved the nasty weather in Des Moines IA to attend a forum. This forum was special in the fact that the everyday people would be able to ask five of the Democratic Presidential candidates questions that mattered to them. The Democrats who showed up were: John Edwards, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and my pick for President, Representative Dennis Kucinich. Only Hillary phoned it in, unable for some reason to attend in person.

The Heartland Presidential Forum has received scant notice, hell NO notice by the MSM…which shouldn’t surprise us, but it should piss us off. This Forum was unique in that the questions weren’t filtered through a cadre of network heads like CNN, MSNBC or Fox Noise. Real Americans asked their real questions and voiced their real concerns to the candidates. The Forum was sponsored by community groups across the nation. It should be noted that the Republican candidates were also invited, but only one of them accepted the invitation. The forum lawyers ruled that to only allow one Republican to attend might appear to be an illegal political endorsement and therefore he was not allowed to attend.

This wonderful forum allowed everyday Americans to address the candidates of their choice directly on the stage, face to face. The entire video of the event can be seen at MovementVisionLab.org or portions can be watched on their YouTube channel. The one MSM writeup I could find was the San Francisco Chronicle. Below are some of the individuals and their stories they highlighted from the event:

Erica Fernandez, a 17-year-old student from Ventura County, spoke eloquently of her community’s struggle against the siting of a liquefied natural gas facility - and asked John Edwards to address questions of environmental justice (the first time I’ve heard the issue raised at the presidential level).

Patricia Divine Wilder, a small business owner from Walla Walla, Wash., spoke to Hillary Clinton, choking back her own tears (and ours) as she struggled through a story of a nephew whose recurrent neck pains went unaddressed because he lacked health insurance. When he finally broke down and saw a doctor, it turned out to be inoperable lung cancer. Clinton responded at length about the arcane details of her health care plan - and was then cut off for exceeding time limits so that she could hear from an undocumented immigrant student. Identified by first name only, she noted that she had graduated at the top of her high school class, is two years away from finishing a B.A. in education, and will never be able to teach. Following her, Larry Ginter, a white family farmer from Iowa, pleaded that “to save our national soul, we have to stop treating immigrants like common criminals.” Echoing the theme, Tam Tran from Los Angeles told Dennis Kucinich her tale: she and her family fled from Vietnam, were rescued by a German boat, and came to the United States when she was 6. Now the United States wants to deport her - to Germany - and agents have followed up by raiding her parents’ mobile home two months ago.

And Barack Obama found himself floored by Dedra Lewis from Springfield, Mass. She recounted her shock when her 10-year-old daughter, Alexsiana, developed a sight-threatening eye condition - and her relief when the State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) program threatened by President Bush’s veto pen had saved her when she lost her job and her private insurance. Alexsiana was there - she and Obama exchanged hugs and quiet words before he went on to outline his health care plan.

There are many more stories like these on the pages of the SFChron writeup as well as the writeup by the MovementVisionLab author Sally Kohn who calls these folks this years swing voters in her article. There were white folks, brown folks and black folks that brought their issues to the Presidential candidates. Many of the stories rang true for me or people I know and love. I would like to suggest you watch the entire presentation, but if you don’t at least watch some of the YouTube video’s of the speakers and the candidates response, it will make you proud to be an American again..at least it did me.

We need more of these types of events for the candidates, where the questions are asked by those who will be voting for our next President. Nothing was canned or phony to me, it was genuine concern based in living a life in these here United States. The American’s were from all walks of life, investors, farmers, undocumented immigrants who have worked hard to make a life here and still fear being deported. Single mothers who worry about making ends meet and feeding their children every day. I could go on and on..but hopefully you get my point dear reader. So watch our Americans in action and how the candidates responded to them.

Do yourself that favor today ok?

Crossposted at Leftwing Nutjob

New York’s semi-smarmy super hero, the drag queen wannabe who no doubt wishes he could campaign wearing Annie Oakley-esque outfits complete with a pair of precious plaid holsters sporting a set of sassy squirt guns, apparently left some rather large loose ends in his winsome wake…and I’m not talking about the backsides of his bevy of former Frauleins. It appears that Rudy made a number of trips to the Hamptons to shack up with Judy “Make Room For My Vuitton” Nathan on Gotham City’s dime.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

Now one can speculate what America’s mayor meant by “security” when deflecting questions about these rather suspect expenditures…perhaps his psyche was subconsciously pondering the problems he might encounter if the woman holed up in Gracie Mansion had the goods on her cousin kissin’ diddly dallying husband?

I could include additional excerpts but I’m having way more fun sharing my silly and snide snark. When I read about Rudy’s amorphous accounting, I couldn’t help but harken to the head-scratching that followed his loquacious telephone interludes with wifey number three while standing at the podium to deliver a speech. Perhaps the current Mrs. Giuliani wants to keep account of her hubby…after all, she knows all too well about her hubby’s clandestine capabilities.

Truth be told, I doubt Rudy could afford the crown wife number four might require should he elect to discard his current tiara topped trysterina. Besides, can the leader of the free world be found out to be kitty kaptured? I think not. Anyway, I suspect he will have to keep his untrustworthy tallywhacker in toe for the time being.

In the meantime, it looks like Rudy Rudolpho, the ever morphing mayor, has got some splainin’ to do…and I’m not sure he’s all that capable of selling his version of “vitameatavegamin”.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

Elections have a way of bringing out the beast in Bob Novak…and his latest skewering of Mike Huckabee, “The Angelic Arkansan”, is a classic example of his efforts to annihilate the man he views as a threat to his current iteration of “real conservatism”.

They don’t call Bob Novak “The Prince of Darkness” because he’s mister sunshine and rainbows. In fact, “Novakula” is often the bearer of bitter bits of bloviating aimed at anyone and anything he deems to be detrimental to his “demonic” vision of democracy.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Huh? Has Bob been banished to his den of darkness for the last seven years such that he failed to witness the very same thing under the Bush presidency? While George W may lack Huckabee’s holy credentials; it hasn’t prevented him from administering his own version of virtuous values. In fact, our sitting president (the one who imagines himself seated next to the almighty) has a penchant for political pontificating that clearly crosses the line of live and let live conservatism and likely set the bar for those who now embrace the likes of Governor Huckabee.

If George Bush’s promises to act as a uniter and not a divider are the template for compassionate conservatism, then Mike Huckabee is simply taking the next step to insure the inevitable biblical bliss that comes with lockstep legislation, a cash cow for faith based initiatives, loving the sinner by acting to outlaw the lifestyle, the imperial imposition of a Christian capitalist ideology coined as the exportation of freedom and democracy, and the busting of the bank in order to buttress one’s beliefs.

Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the “Club for Greed”? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle. In fact, the rejoinder comes from Mike Huckabee, who has broken out of the pack of second-tier Republican presidential candidates to become a serious contender — definitely in Iowa and perhaps nationally.

Huckabee clearly departs from the mainstream of the conservative movement in his confusion of “growth” with “greed.” Such ad hominem attacks are part of his intuitive response to criticism from the Club for Growth and the libertarian Cato Institute about his record as governor.

Quin Hillyer, a former Arkansas journalist writing in the conservative American Spectator, called Huckabee “a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak.” Huckabee’s retort was to attack Hillyer’s journalistic procedures, fitting a mean-spirited image when he responds to conservative criticism.

OK, I’ll admit that I love it when the leaders of the once seemingly invincible klatch of conservatives and christians resort to mudslinging in order for both groups to preserve their perceived political power…and the cash they both know it can generate. Poor Bob must be beside himself now that the evangelical segment of the GOP coalition is finally clamoring for the results they’ve been bamboozled into believing would be delivered by their divinely driven demagogues.

Truth be told, Novak and the many other Republican revisionists who have run roughshod over these religious rabble-rousers for years are simply confounded by the fact that the chickens may have finally come home to roost. It’s no surprise that the purveyors of these ideologically intransigent identities have finally reached what may be an insurmountable impasse.

Nothing shines a brighter light on hypocrisy that those moments when the compassionate christians set out to crucify their conservative conspirators…as well as when the libertarian vitriol of the consummate conservative finally calls for the cutting of the cord that has linked their aspirations for power to the politics of inviolable virtue.

Looks like a garden variety divorce to me…although I’d bet the farm that one side will scurry to slap together a new “relationship” (hint: time to invoke the evils of “icky” immigrants) and the other side will ask the almighty for an annulment in order to preserve its “papered” piety.

The following graphic summarizes the duality which is all too often inherent in these oh so dubious “deals with the devil”.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater