John Edwards hit up New Hampshire over the weekend pushing his message on universal health care for all Americans, and I have to tell you this is like the only consistent news piece over the past month. The manufactured blog scandal came and went within a week, while another attempt at making scandals instead of breaking them -- this one regarding a month old statement on Israel -- has so far failed to get any attraction. I guess it wasn't sexy or dirty enough.
This is a problem, not just for John Edwards, but for all the candidates from both sides. There just aren't a whole hell of a lot of facets to presidential campaigns, not enough to stretch out for this length of time. The primaries don't start for another 10 months, and there are like two messages out there: Iraq bad, health care good! Not cutting it.
I can report on things like this whenever Edwards makes a stop someplace to campaign, and give you the inevitable quotes on the same old story like this.
"Honestly, if you don't bring up Iraq, I'll bring it up," the former North Carolina senator told about 150 people gathered in a state senator's living room and kitchen.
That's all well and great, except there is about a .001% chance that it won't be brought up by someone, no matter where he goes. The failed war gets worse almost on a daily basis, like today when I just heard that a failed assassination attempt on the Iraqi VP killed 20 and injured another 40. You wouldn't know it though, since the talking heads are obsessed with Anna Nicole, who wouldn't have commanded five seconds until she died mysteriously.
Was it even a mystery though? Not a good one. Her son just died from drug abuse, and they found a ton of drugs in her room. Some mystery that is. But now that I've been drawn off-track..
Edwards also brought his health care plan, which would require health insurance for everyone but also provide subsidies to help lower-income families afford it. He also touted proposals to cut energy subsidies to the energy industry, reduce global warming and address homelessness.
Edwards' work on anti-poverty causes since his last run brought Pat Harris to the event. She said she sees a bit of her political hero in Edwards.
"He's a Jimmy Carter-kind of guy," said Harris, who housed 20 John Kerry volunteers in 2004 but hasn't decided who will get her support in 2008. "I'm very impressed. I had questions. But the questions I had, he answered."
I'd like to see concrete plans for doing more than just reducing the deficit. Don't get me wrong, reducing the deficit and maybe even creating a budget surplus is fantastic progress that this country has only seen during Bill Clinton's presidency, but it's kind of like spending 12 years promising everyone that you are going to stop getting fatter. Good, but what about all the junk you've collected in your arse since before you learned how to do math?
We've racked up something like $8,774,000,000,000 in debt so far. The only thing gained by balancing the budget will be us not making it any bigger, and that's not good enough. What the hell is everyones plan to eliminate the eight trillion dollar national debt? Still waiting for that one, Mr. Senator.
In recent visits, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who top the polls, have held auditorium-sized events attended by sign-toting crowds and bookended by abbreviated glad-handing. They've talked in generalities about a new direction for the nation and of their desire to have "conversations" with the voters.
Yesterday, there was no campaign music or "town hall" discussion. There was no podium. Just John Edwards in a button-up shirt, squeezing through a packed living room in Nashua, standing on a chair to see over a crowd in a Concord home and talking in front of a Salem fireplace to people sitting cross-legged on the rug about the policy initiatives he's honed since he began his campaign in 2003.
"This is what New Hampshire campaigning is supposed to be about," he said at each place.
This is the difference, this is what killed Howard Dean. He had the people on the 'net which paved the way for everyone else, but he didn't have the people on the ground. If you ask people to vote for you with an e-mail and a smile, you'll get coin flips or people making decisions for retarded reasons like "well he's a farmer and I'm a farmer and we can trust our own."
Give me a break.
While it's probably true that most of the people that attend these house parties are Dem's that are going to vote for Edwards anyway, that isn't always the case, and the point isn't always to turn the crowd. If you can energize the people you already have, you can turn them into vote turners by pumping them up on the message and showing them that you care as much as they do. If any of these people go to work on Monday and turn just one or two people onto the message, that's powerful stuff. That's how you get votes in this country, you get off the throne that Bush is crapping on and you talk to them about what matters the most.
About the donor dust-up between Clinton and Obama, come on guys, you are embarrassing us. You'd think this was an Internet fight or something.
Pushing Rope has a video of John Edwards talking universal health care, though I'm not sure where it's from or when. There's a note in there about how Republicans were more interested in using health care legislation as a weapon against Democrats while Bill Clinton was President, and showed absolutely no concern for all the Americans that needed that coverage back then, and all of the Americans that need that coverage right now. Somewhere in this country, there are thousands and thousands of Americans that need to go to a hospital, but can't afford it. Many of them are suffering, and some of them will probably die long before they ever should.
The (health care) plan, he wrote in the memo, is a “serious pol- itical threat to the Republican party,” and its demise would be “a monumental setback for the President.”
While John Edwards and other Democrats both now and in the past push to end this travesty, Republicans fight against it. They don't care about you, or your kids. No, the party of "family values" only cares about your well being when it comes to who you're sleeping with and what you're doing in the privacy of your own home. If you're sick and need a doctor, oh well **** you then, because there's nothing they can gain from that. We all know where they stand on this and they can't run from it. We won't let them.
No one who plays partisan political games with Americans health deserves to hold public office.
There's new polling data out that I've seen in the last two days, but I'm not going to even bother posting it here since the first primaries are so far way. We're talking about a political climate where one screwup can tank your numbers permanently in roughly 24 hours. These numbers mean absolutely nothing. It's like using todays temperature to forecast what it will be nine months from now. Anyway, most of these little polls are just that -- little. I see no value in what 600 people think compared to the 300,000,000 others (half of which of course won't bother to vote) that will exercise their constitutional rights to reject the party of zero accountability and the mud slingers and the liars in 2008.
Republicans have serious problems right now and they are well aware of it. Their top three candidates all have baggage that are keeping them from gaining the support of the religious right; extremists like Jerry Fallwell. The GOP has universally acknowledged that this is the weakest group of candidates they've had in quite some time, and it's not like their party is popular right now either. The '06 mid-terms were a collective kick in the shins that showed the countries general discontent with the whole party, not just the White House. It's only going to get worse for them, and that's the bed they made when they got us into an unwinnable war.
Governor Tom Vilsack is announcing right now that he is ending his 2008 campaign for President. Vilsack's primary reason was the vast amount of money required to run in modern days and that he simply cannot compete with the other super stars in the field. Let me restate that -- he can't even get enough money to stay afloat, much less compete.
I find it incredibly pathetic that a person has to end their campaign just because they can't raise tens of millions of dollars just to get some TV air time. There is something deeply wrong with the system we have when you have to be connected at the hip to extremely wealthy people juts get going.
Is this really a democracy, or is it democracy light where only the rich get to run now?
All of the candidates have well-polished websites with opportunities to take part in or contribute to the respective campaigns. They all have things they call blogs except for grumpy old Dennis Kucinich, but it's John Edwards who takes the prize for most networked presidential hopeful...the list of social websites he's established profiles on is staggering.
I just hope that these campaigns realize that this stuff doesn't equal votes. It takes no effort to join some social networking group for a candidate you support, but not all of the people that do are going to actually go out and vote, and even fewer are going to go out and knock on doors to turn other voters. I'd also like to see a higher level of integration between all these disparate sites.
Campaigns need to find a way to connect the blog commenter's with the Second Life players with the MySpace friends and have set goals to accomplish. 1,000,000 friends on MySpace is cool, but not if they aren't doing anything. You need to get them to spread the message and get other people into the movement, otherwise it's all for naught.
More morons out there are trying to warp the Senators statement on Middle East tensions regarding Iran's nuclear weapons development into an anti-religious attack on Jews. I just don't see how people can be any more obtuse unless they are doing it on purpose. Israel has threatened more than once to attack Iran if their nuclear weapons program isn't halted, and that could bring the entire region into a state of chaos.
How is that anti-Semitic? I mean honestly, I think the term has been so abused over time that some people think any statement they can link to Israel that isn't proactively supportive must then be negative, derogatory, and apparently anti-Semitic since Israeli's have no other facets than their faith.
They have a term for that, it's called a victims mentality.
Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and Israel has threatened to destroy Iran's nuclear capability. These two are itching for a fight and if nukes are involved -- and by the way Israel does possess tactical nuclear weapons -- then all hell is going to break loose over there. That's not anti-Semitic, it's reality.
Nuclear armed countries that hate each other, I'm sorry to say, present an infinitely greater threat to the region than terrorists and an unstable Iraq do. Even if a terrorist cell managed to acquire and detonate a bomb, that's *1* bomb. Israel is estimated to have nearly 100 warheads with sea-launch capability, Iran aims to be able to produce as many as 20 warheads per year by the end of the decade. Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and is known to have contributed technical support to Libya and Iran. India is armed and doesn't exactly have the best relations with Pakistan right now. None of these countries have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and China has a dog in the game as well as the Russians.
The most immediate threat is Iran's accelerated program encouraging Israel to destroy said program, end of story.
counterpunch.org has a piece on the various Presidential candidates health care plans, which is kind of funny since I'm not sure any of then have actually put a plan on paper other than John Edwards.
"Romney's bill was written by Blue Cross," Woolhandler said. "Romney was saying he was going to offer health insurance starting at $200 a month. And of course, that was a hoax. No insurance policy in Massachusetts comes in at $200 a month. When Blue Cross was asked to produce the policy, it turned out the policy was going to cost $380 a month for a policy that had a $2000 deductible. So, you are going to tell this poor bloke who is earning $29,400 a year that he has to go out and spend $4,000 a year on an insurance policy. And if he gets sick, he doesn't even have any coverage until he has spent $2,000. And that's not family coverage. That's individual coverage."
Wow, I'm not sure I even have to say anything about that. Romney's plan pretty much destroys itself without anyone else's help. Good job Mitt! Unfortunately, it's not very high on the Senators plan either.
"Edwards plan is not going to work," Woolhandler says flatly. "We know there is not going to be fair competition between Medicare and the private plans. You have to take on the private health insurance industry and tell them you are out of here. This is an entitlement program like traditional Medicare or Social Security. We are going to get the administrative efficiencies you get from running it as a single program and use that to expand coverage."
It may not work in the end, but any improvement is better than what we have going on right now, and it's a heck of a lotter better than the pro-business plans that Republicans are touting which do nothing but make the big private providers more profit, and life for poor even more impossible. That is going backwards, not forwards.
Edwards is meeting with unions today in Tennessee to talk fair living wages.
Vanderbilt workers, many of them members of Laborers Local 386, have been attempting to persuade the university since last year to pay a living wage of $10.18 an hour. Currently, the lowest paid workers earn $7.55 an hour, well below the poverty level. Vanderbilt - whose chancellor is paid $1.3 million a year - continues to refuse to grant a living wage for employees.
It's funny when you think about it, how the rich are always the most greedy. You'd think someone who needs every dime that they earn just to pay the bills and put food on the table would be the most desperate to protect the money that they have, and fight hard to get even more of it, but you'd be mistaken. The rich hoard their fortunes like you're trying to rip their arm off. They want more of it and few have any intention of sharing. There is no excuse for people to be working for the University below the poverty level while the chancellor is pulling over a million per year.
Think about this for a minute, $10.18 an hour at 8.5 hours per day is only $20,767 per year. The chancellor is making enough money to give 62 people a raise to $10.18 per hour, all by himself. Unbelievable.
Presidential campaigns seemingly exist for a single purpose: so talking heads can talk. If there isn't a big scandal going on for them to pontificate about, then they'll take anything you say and generate one, usually by distorting what you really said into something that they can attack, e.g. they'll straw man you. Today, they did it to John Edwards.
The heads aren't happy that the manufactured blogger controversy is already dead and buried, so now they're making a big stink over what I think is a very reasonable and historically accurate assessment of just how unstable the Middle East is right now. As is to be expected, someone desperate for attention and ready to say anything so long as it is sensationalist will come out of the woodwork to claim that "situation x" has just cost "candidate x" the "party x" nomination. Cue wonkette.com.
Handsome boy John Edwards blew it by mentioning Israel in a possibly not-100% flattering light at a Hollywood talent agency meet & greet last month. Peter Bart mentioned the incident in a January 19 column on Variety.com, but it took the brave Israel defenders at National Review Online to blog it up today.
Imagine that, a minor statement made over a month ago was dug up by red-staters and blown up into a thing, when has that ever happened?
Consider for a moment that while the Jewish lobby is incredibly powerful in the United States, they only account for less than 2.5% of the electorate. A statement like this isn't going to matter to people who aren't artificially hypersensitive about all things Israel, and by that measure the general electorate just won't care. That isn't to say it isn't important, or inflammatory, but there is basically zero chance that something this small is going to end anybody's campaign.
You can tell pretty easily because the only place that picked this up in over a month is a red site that is notorious for generating scandal where there is none. There's no story here.
What would you have done to cause Saddam to dismantle and give up the WMD, once and for all?
A realistic, concrete answer is called for — especially because Mr. Edwards implicitly, if not explicitly, has criticized Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) for not stating she made a “mistake” in voting for the resolution. (Sen. Obama, it must be said, has not taken any shots directly at Sen. Clinton on this issue — as contrasted to John Edwards, although he reminds audiences that he was opposed to the war resolution, albeit while he was an Illinois state, not U.S., Senator.)
There is little point in posing such a question since you're now trying to judge someone on a fictional scenario that never happened, and it's pointless. John Edwards made a mistake when he voted to authorize the war, as did everyone in the Senate. There were a lot of people that knew the intelligence could only be described as weak -- even in the best light -- and knew better than to trust an administration whose chief evidence was "trust us."
I knew the intelligence was weak and any war based on it was wrong, and I never had the benefit of seeing the faked evidence that they did. How could I possibly accept excuses from them when even I knew better?
The realistic concrete answer has been given. President Bush faked the intelligence to get the war he wanted to execute for personal reasons, and all the suckers in Congress bought it. One of them has said he was wrong, and that his vote was wrong, and that man is John Edwards. There is nothing else out there to wring out of it. We were all lied to, and the focus today should be two fold: holding "the decider" responsible for lying to America, and electing an honest and responsible person to be our next President so that this never happens again.
A right-wing rag called gopusa.com is slandering an entire swath of the political spectrum, making me wonder just what limits -- if any -- these people have on who they will viciously attack and Swift Boat. Talk about wallowing in the mud, this is pathetic.
But what Edwards' hesitancy does demonstrate, says Bauer, is that Democratic presidential candidates are "scared to death" of left-wing activists operating websites like MoveOn.org and the Democratic Underground.
"On these sites you'll find an unbelievable hatred of Christians, of Evangelicals, of Jews, of conservatives in general, of the president," he explains. "And the people who go to these websites are often the volunteers, the doorbell-ringers, the envelope-stuffers, and the donors that unfortunately the National Democratic Party has come to rely on."
The truth is the GOP are the ones that are absolutely terrified of the grass roots Democratic activists, not for the reasons they lie about, but because we're not mindless drones they can control through spin and talking points. Nobody on this side hates or discriminates against any religious faith, but we do take it personally when people of faith start trying to replace real law with religious law and dogma. This group has become very powerful over the past five years, and they are scared to death of what it will do to them in the 2008 elections, and after what it did to them last year, who can blame them?
Well, I'll blame them, for slandering people whose only sin is being engaged in politics instead of standing idle why they are preached to, people who want to think for themselves and are willing to get off their rears and do something about it.
Michigan for Edwards has a video of John Edwards appearance on The Situation Room plus a transcript. They talk Iraq, and Edwards support for Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.
Well, the lesson -- you learn lessons in everything you do in life, including in political campaigns, Wolf -- is we're entering a brave new world with the net and the blogosphere. And it's a powerful world. It's a world that's going to have, and should have, a huge impact on the way we do politics in America. Because the net and the blogosphere is grass roots politics at its best. But candidates can't control what people say.
We believe in free speech in this country. This is a democracy. People have a right to express their opinions.
Conservatives who believe dissent and disagreement ought to be a crime: smacked down. Feeling frosty today: damn skippy.
Dean Barnett wrote about Amanda's apperance on MSNBC which I sadly didn't hear about, so I missed it. Sounds like it was a short deal where MSNBC was trying to milk more out of the story than still exists in order to fill dead air time. I have a suggestion, how about you guys report some actual news for a change? Just a thought. Anyway I hope she gave them a mouthful.
A post on the official blog about Elizabeth Edwards fight with cancer during the 2004 elections, something I don't recall ever hearing about.
Elizabeth's recent fight with Breast Cancer is an inspiration to anyone diagnosed with cancer. Elizabeth was diagnosed with invasive ductal cancer, the most common form of breast cancer, at the end of the campaign in fact her and John went directly to Massachusetts General Hospital after he gave his concession speech. Despite being told several days earlier that a lump in her breast could be cancerous, she stumped through 5 states for the campaign before she found out for sure.
It must take some real guts to continue through to the end of a Presidential campaign with something like in the back of your mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if it helped get her through the tough times either. Keeping yourself busy -- and I can't imagine being more busy than that -- helps keep you from dwelling on the worst-case-sceario, but it also bottles it up somewhat and when there isn't anything left to do but think about it, the dam bursts.
I'm glad she is still with us and it'll make it double sweet when Edwards wins it all in '08.
The AP has a piece on the Senator taking President Bush to task for continually fouling up opportunities to negotiate with Iran to resolve the nuclear weapons issue, instead of simply threatening them like a barbarian would. Here's the thing, nobody disagrees that the way we got played by North Korea should be a stern lesson in how to deal with nuclear weapons proliferation in the future, lessons that can and should be directly applied to Iran. We get it, what we tried before didn't work and now we've got to deal with an impossible scenario, two rather hostile nations being armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
That tacit recognition doesn't mean however that the only option left to us is to cross our arms and get ready to fight. I am so incredibly tired of the GOP's "do what what I tell you or it's war" attitude towards the world. The United States did not become a super power by throwing our weight around like some neophyte colonial power bent on dominating and then resettling every territory that disagrees with us. There are far more effective things we can do that don't involve force.
Something I heard either from the Senate or the House the other day -- I can't remember which -- some Congressperson said that as an example of what we could and should be doing is leveraging our capability to do just about anything we put our minds to, and some of these things are really not all that difficult to do and would actually help us in the process. Iran from what I understand is in the top four for oil exports in the world, yet imports nearly 50% of its gasoline from other countries because it simply cannot process the oil into gas for its own needs.
Think about what it would mean to Iran to be able to go from a gasoline importer to a gasoline exporter in terms of money and greater world influence, and we could help them do that...if they play ball on the nukes. See that? Everybody wins, because when you sit down and use the brain you were born with instead of grunting like a cave man and grabbing the biggest stick you can find, good things tend to happen.
Honestly, deals like that are not capitulation either, it's making a compromise where everyone gets at least some of what they want. That's what makes the world go around.
"The way for America to engage them on this issue is to use the economic tools available ... to make it clear if they are willing to give up their nuclear weapons we are willing to make nuclear fuel available to them," he told the AP.
If all Iran is interested in is safe nuclear power, we can help them with that, but I don't really think that is their only interest at this point. I hope it is, but honestly, having a capable nuclear arsenal means being virtually immune from foreign invasion. Do you think Bush would have hesitated to steam roll North Korea if they didn't have nuclear weapons already, or that he would have invaded Iraq, had they had tactical nukes?
The best thing about nukes -- and this is a grade school lesson from the cold war -- is deterrence. Iran doesn't really want nukes so they can use them against regional enemies, they know just as well as the rest of us that if you actually use them, then everybody loses. No, they want nukes to deter the United States, who is constantly threatening them, from invading. The faster they get them, the sooner we won't be able to touch them without glassing over the entire country, and they know that.
When George Bush was running for President the first time, and his response to how he would handle complex foreign policy such as this with absolutely zero experience and understanding of the global political climate, was to shrug his shoulders as if he'd just figure it out as he went along -- that's how we get into messes like this. Let's not do it all over again.
The rest of the fluff having been censored and/or sanitized for your wholesome protection, I'm signing off.
(To those of you whom I'm writing for the first time: Hello! And welcome to the campaign!)
As you know, this month John announced his plan to guarantee every man, woman and child in this country the top-quality health care we all deserve.
But changes this big simply can't come from just the top down. That's been tried before, and it doesn't work. To get this done right, we've got to build support for universal health care in every city and town in America - and we've got to start today.
So this morning, I'm writing a letter to the editor of my local newspaper to share why I personally support John's plan for universal health care -and I'd like to ask you to write one too.
You can write and submit your own letter to the editor of a local newspaper using our online tool, and it only takes a few minutes. Just click the link below:
There's no need to be a policy expert - just speak from the heart.
Here's the letter I'm sending to the Chapel Hill News, my hometown paper:
Dear Editor,
I'm writing to share why I strongly support John Edwards' plan for universal health care, besides the reason that he is my husband.
America has the best health care in the world; we know this because people with complex and intractable problems, the most desperate patients from around the world come to America for treatment. But for too many Americans, that same high quality treatment is not available. Under John's plan, it would be.
John's universal health care plan guarantees every American health care, preserves freedom of choice and shares responsibility among individuals, employers and the government. But these broad principles don't tell the real story. The real story is personal and poignant, the stories of people who do not have health care coverage at all, like a young breast cancer patient I met from Alaska, or the people for whom a pre-existing condition means their coverage doesn't cover their most dire medical needs, like a woman I met in Ohio.
I'm one of the lucky ones. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had health insurance coverage, and I could afford care. When I found a lump in my breast, I never had to think about whether I could afford treatment. I simply got the treatment I needed. That should be true for every one of us. A nation that prides itself on equality cannot have me getting the best treatment available while a woman I met from Greensboro, N.C. has to depend on the kindness of strangers for her treatment.
It is not just that John's universal health care proposal will make our health care coverage system more efficient - though it will. It is not just that it will boost our economic productivity - though it will. It is not just that people stuck in jobs they do not like because they cannot lose their health insurance will now be free to change jobs or start a business - although they will. It is not even that it will provide pressure to stop the spiraling health care costs - though it does that, too. It is that the lives of the woman in Alaska, and the mother in Ohio, and the Greensboro breast cancer patient will be better.
And that's why I will work hard every day to make sure John's plan becomes a reality. And I hope you'll join me.
Please take a few minutes to write and send your own personal letter about why you support John's plan. Together, we can make universal health care a reality.
Congratulations to Kevin Harvick for winning the Daytona 500! Harvick got a bump from Matt Kenseth to shoot past race leader Mark Martin on the final lap. Harvick also won the first Busch race of the season at Daytona, marking his first plate victories of his career. Harvick is also a winner of the Brickyard 400, and currently leads the Cup series points standings. It's sad to see Martin miss the win, but you only get what you can take in rcaing. Good luck next year.
Otherwise I'll open this with a brief sighting of John Edwards in an Iowa restaurant yesterday.
I waited on Senator John Edwards last night. He was in town (Davenport, IA) along with Senator Mcain for some sort of convention. I work at an upscale Italian restaurant in the downtown area. He was very nice and polite, even when dealing with a nearly constant stream of admirers interrupting his dinner and asking for autographs and swooning. also, he wore these trendy black framed glasses I've never seen him wear before. Funny because I was wearing almost the same glasses last night.
See the thing I like about this is that people standing in front of a microphone or a TV camera is going to act on their best behavior to give people a good impression of who they are and what they're about. Everyone running for office looks nice, but that doesn't mean they actually are. I know celebrities have to put up with a rude public all the time when they go out to eat and some handle it better than others. If a constant stream of people bugged me while I was trying to eat, I'd be pretty pissed. I mean was the general public raised in a barn or something?
Anyway, it looks like Edwards kept his cool even with people rudely interrupting his dinner, so good for him.
There's a story that ran in the Boston Globe yesterday that is rehashing the same tired accusations from the 2004 campaign that John Edwards refused to engage the Swift Boaters in partisan mud slinging, and that Edwards is apparently lying when he says he actually wanted to take the gloves off and go after them, but was held back to Kerry's retarded staffers.
The only person who knows which of these two accounts is true is Edwards himself, but one big point that needs to be made here is that there is a difference between aggressively defending the campaign, and turning into a garbage trawling dog only interested in hate and negativity, e.g. the Swift Boaters. See here's the thing, the SB's only attacked and disparaged people, they never contributed anything positive to the elections at all. People like that are of absolutely no value in life, and Edwards I think was smart enough to know that.
"Edwards refused to play the traditional role of a running mate -- being the person whose delivering the negative message on the opponents," said one former senior campaign official who was involved in the discussions between the Kerry and Edwards staffs. The official no longer works for Kerry and is not affiliated with any of the 2008 presidential candidates.
"He just wouldn't do it," the campaign official said of Edwards. "He wouldn't do it on Swift Boats, and he wouldn't do it on any other issue."
Perhaps the real problem here isn't that Edwards wasn't willing to engage their attackers, but that he wasn't interested in playing a tradtional role at all. I mean is this anonymous coward really complaining that Edwards refused to be Kerry's pit bull in a fight that already had far too many to begin with? Does this person see actual value in having someone who responds to mud slinging with more mud?
Look, if there is one thing that President Bush has ever been right about, it's that there is value in standing up and fighting for what you believe in, but that isn't a free pass to start hitting below the belt, lying, and cheating your way to a win. The axiom of winning at all costs is precisely how people end up shooting themselves in the foot and always ends up winning nothing at all.
"I wanted to fight back the day it started," Edwards said. "The decision was made not to do it, and I did not agree with that decision." In a new book, "What a Party!", Terry McAuliffe, former Democratic National Committee chairman, said Edwards made a similar statement to him. "Terry, they wouldn't let me" attack Bush, McAuliffe quotes Edwards as saying in December 2004. "I wanted to go after the Swift Boat guys. I wanted to go after Bush. They wouldn't let me."
So I really don't see a point in hashing this out right now. Kerry isn't running and if John Edwards can't respond to the coming diarrhea storm the conservative attack dogs are surely to spew at him, then he's done no matter what happened in 2004.
Edwards had prided himself on his positive campaign style during the 2004 primaries. He credited that style for his late surge in the Iowa caucuses, which enabled him to finish second to Kerry.
I am far more interested in a candidate that will raise the level of debate in this country beyond these cock-fights than one who is willing to sling mud to win it like it's a popularity contest. It's only boils down to that when we let it.
Onward..,
Ms. Fleming had no answer to that question, but I do. On the far left, Christian bashing is totally acceptable and rarely are any consequences imposed. The only reason these two women are not working for John Edwards right now is that he didn’t want to take the heat my program was giving him.
Yes Bill'O, just like racism, anti-gay bigotry, and misogyny is a staple of the radical right, aka religious fundamentalists, aka the same people complaining about a story that's already long dead.
This entire shoddy episode has badly damaged Edwards in my opinion, but it also points out that American culture, especially in the swampy blogosphere, is extremely tolerant of Christian-haters. Again, this could never have happened to any other religious or minority group.
It happens to blacks and gays all of the time, from your side of the fence, retard. If anything O’Reilly, the only difference between you and those you accuse is that they spew their hate on the Internet, while you spew yours on television. Honestly, the damage down to Edwards is miniscule, and the saddest thing about all of this is the hypocrisy -- the real bigots calling other people bigots. Incredible.
I'm not sure about the what or why, but here is a mini-bio on John Edwards that just popped up on my radar.
As a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Edwards worked tirelessly for a strong national defense and to strengthen the security of our homeland. He authored key pieces of legislation on cyber, bio, and port security.
Whoops, so much for Democrats being weak on national security. I guess we're kind of in charge of all those important intelligence oversight committees now, aren't we. We're all doomed.
The Senator hit up Sin City over the weekend looking to woo crowds in a state that will now have a hand in the early primary season next year.
Edwards was welcomed with enthusiasm at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union Hall. Edwards noted his brother, an electrician, was an I.B.E.W. union member. He told members that number one on his agenda is universal healthcare.
With 47 million uninsured Americans, including 437,000 in Nevada, our health care system is broken, says Edwards. Edwards outlined a plan to get affordable health care to all Americans over the next five years. A proposal with a price tag of $90 to $120 billion dollars a year.
"The way I would say it, we're just going to get rid of George Bush's tax cuts for people who make over $200,000 a year, and that's the way we're paying for it," Edwards said.
I think it's plainly obvious that anyone making over $200k per year can afford to pay some higher taxes right now. Seriously. This country has people -- entire families -- living on $16,000 per year that have absolutely no health insurance at all. Think you might have something seriously wrong with your digestive system? A colonoscopy runs about $1,000 these days, which only costs you about $40 if you have health insurance. If not, you can kiss 1/16th of your yearly salary (pre-tax of course) bye-bye just to have a camera shoved up your ***.
Yeah, those $200k earners can eat a tax increase. Sorry, but that two-week vacation to the Bahamas will just have to wait until everyone else can visit a hospital when they really need it the most.
Finally, I found a pretty good piece on Edwards by Kenneth T. Walsh highlighting his coming struggle against new comer Obama and Hillary "I'm-against-the-war-but-I'm-still-glad-I-voted-for-it" Clinton.
Edwards, reflecting the growing impatience of many rank-and-file Democrats nationwide, derides the nonbinding resolution now before Congress, which opposes President Bush's "surge" of 21,500 additional troops into Iraq. "Nonbinding resolutions don't stop the escalation of this war," Edwards told U.S. News. "It's time for Congress to use its power [over spending] to stop the escalation of this war and to keep this president from making another huge ... ego-driven mistake."
That's damn right, but with the obstructionist party (Repubs) blocking debate on the nonbinding resolution in the Senate, I don't see what could possible be done right now. Repubs are scared ****less of even talking about the war right now, much less taking a firm stance on anything. I just don't know John Edwards expects Democrats in Congress to be able to do.
Whether we like it or not, the Constitution gives command of the military to the President, and ours is currently insane enough to keep them in Iraq even if Congress did stop all funding. Let's put an end to that scary possibility by electing a real leader in 2008, and even if it isn't John Edwards, anyone is better than Bush.
John Edwards was on Bill Maher's show (no, not that Bill Maher) to talk about his candidacy for President, and his vote to authorize the Iraq war. I was personally disappointed with the Senate when he did this, especially since he was supposedly representing my state in the Senate. I felt that ultimately he was representing his own fears, not me, but Edwards has more than made up for it by admitting that his vote was just plain wrong. Via newsbusters.org,
“I was wrong” means – I’m only speaking for me – means that I take responsibility for making a serious mistake on a vote that was probably the most important vote I cast in the United States Senate. I think we desperately need leaders in this country who will admit when they were wrong. We’re all human. All of us make mistakes. Admit when we’re wrong, change course, take responsibility for being wrong. I don’t think you can have the foundation for leadership, the moral foundation for leadership, if you don’t start by telling the truth. And, at least for me, this is the truth.
Yeah, I edited that a little from what you'll find on Newsbusters, because when you transcribe stuff like this, you don't write in pauses or non-words for crying out loud. "uh" is not a word, k? Also, I have a bone to pick here, because I've never heard of Newsbusters before, and their title banner says "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias." Excuse me for a moment while I throw up on your shoes.
There, I feel better now. The news today is overwhelmingly conservative and has been pretty much since September 11th when it became cool to look like a patriot without actually being one. Waving a flag in a crowd, and hanging one from your porch is one thing, but waving it over your little news logo while reporting on a war that your country is involved in isn't patriotic, it's a violation of journalistic integrity that makes you a bitch to the cause.
Being a patriot simply means loving your country, it's not something to be used to place yourself morally above other people, and it's not possible to be a bigger patriot than someone else is. If you want to tackle bias, then have fun getting the entirety of Faux News Channel taken off the air, and do it right now. Until then, bugger off I say.
You can get video of some of that appearance over here.
A quickie from a local news affiliate in Virginia an another endorsement picked up by John Edwards,
The chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party has endorsed former North Carolina senator John Edwards for president. Former state legislator Dick Cranwell has announced his support for Edwards two days after officials with close ties to Governor Tim Kaine said the governor will back Democrat Barack Obama for president.
Good for Obama, but bad for the country. I feel like Obama let the celebrity go to his head instead of letting his head lead him to the correct conclusion that the best leaders are inevitably ones that never wanted to be leaders in the first place. If you want it, then you're probably the worst person in the world to have power. You know, kind of like President Bush.
Here is some wingnut stuff about "that blogging thing" that needs addressing,
Of course, John Edwards should have removed the bloggers for their profane, vehement and vitriolic anti-Catholic bigotry, because to do otherwise is to assent to a disturbing bias against more than 60 million Catholic citizens in our country, where he aspires to serve as president. The historian Will Durant observed that no nation in history has survived without a strong moral code informed by religion.
I'm always a little amused when I see statements such as this, because it's barely short of saying that all morals descend from religion and that without religion, there are no morals at all. Only religious fundamentalists (Christian and Islamic extremists) really believe this as far as I know, because it's just a silly statement on its face. Religion at best isn't but about 5000 years old while moral sensibilities can be traced back along the lines of human evolution for tens of thousands of years.
The only person who was deeply upset about what Marcotte and McEwan wrote was Donohue, a self-professed bigot and hate monger in a league all by himself. The rest was just a rally cry for the right to get upset about nothing instead of having to talk about real issues that effect all Americans like health care and the Iraq war. The right will do anything to avoid talking about the tough issues that require sacrifices and real effort to resolve. Also, I don't think those 60,000,000 Catholics would appreciate such a narrow minded person speaking for them. I have seen a number of Catholics that wrote letters of support to Marcotte ane McEwan that had no problem with them being free to speak their minds, and realized that people can separate their personal views from their professional jobs. People do it all the time.
There is plenty more of this hypocritical crap going on, but it just doesn't deserve a link nor the attention of anyone with a brain. If you want to read these liars, just turn on Rush for a while. Or stick your head in the same. Same effect.
Republicans filibuster debate on Iraq resolution, 56-34.
Republicans in the Senate have blocked the resolution supporting our troops from even being debated by a 56-34 vote. (60 were required, because the *Republic party is filibustering.) We're not talking about voting on passage of the resolution, these cowards won't even open debate on the resolution. This is what happens when you elect people that have no spines and or integrity. Blood thirsty conservative Republicans got us into an unnecessary war with Iraq and now that it is inarguable that it was wrong, and that it has become unwinnable, they don't have the courage to even debate the issue with their peers.
I have often called the *Republic party the party of zero accountability, because no matter what they do wrong, nobody has to answer for it. This is a perfect example of why Republicans were stripped of power in the Congress last November, and this should be a plenty good enough reason to finish the job and strip them of power in the White House two years from now. They have gotten 3,100 soldiers killed for no good reason, plan to send another 21,000 into the fire, and they can't even suck it up long enough to debate the surge which also supports our troops. I guess they don't want to support our troops after all, I mean, they are filibustering debate on a resolution that expresses our support for them. Nice.
I would like to say that there were seven Republicans that did vote to proceed to debate, and to them I would say you have my respect. You did the right thing, but your party has dishonored themselves and their country today. The American people will not forget this.
*Almost all Republicans in the House referred to the Democratic party as the Democrat party during their speeches this past week. Either they were being purposefully disrespectful and immature, or they are just plain old illiterate. Either way, I'm more than willing to give it right back.
John Edwards released a statement urging President Bush not to sign a free trade agreement with South Korea. From the official campaign blog.
Thousands of American autoworkers learned this week that they will lose their jobs because of ill-conceived and poorly enforced trade agreements - and what is the Bush Administration doing? It's working overtime to sign a trade agreement with a country that refuses to open its market to American cars.
Enough is enough. President Bush should shut down all trade negotiations with South Korea until they prove their willingness to open their market to American automobiles and other U.S. products and agree to trade fairly.
The huge loss of jobs announced this week by DaimlerChrysler should be a wake-up call for this president: one-sided trade agreements hurt working families.
There is a little more, so head on over if you'd like to read the rest of Edwards' statement.
As I expected, news if running a little light today. In fact there isn't any news, just blog hits. bivingsreport.com hits on the social networking presence of the Edwards campaign, which seems to be the hot thing this cycle, but I'm not buying into it. Some people may find it impressive that Barak Obama garnered over 1,000,000 "friends" or whatever on facebook.com, but the real question that we should be asking right now is do any of those people leave their house on a regular basis, much less vote?
It's a heck of a lot easier to start a grass-roots fanclub online than it is getting those people to get off their lazy rears on a cold rainy day. I'd be supremely impressed if even ten of them went out to campaign for their "friend" in a year. Heck, I'd be surprised if any of them are still logging into facebook or MySpace a year from now. From what I understand, most people sign up once and never come back to these sites.
Yours truly showed up in todays Google Alert for Edwards news in the blog section, which is good in that it means content from this blog is showing up in Google blog search now. It's bad in that there were only 5 things on the list today, and yesterdays post on the campaigns presence in Second Life was one of them. Okay then, we move on...
More Second Life reporting over here from a site apparently dedicated to the game/simulator/whatever, a blog roundup on the official campaign blog which totally ignores me, and finally an NRO writer talks up Amanda Marcotte's essay on why she got fired that was posted on salon.com. It's not a bad piece really, there is some common sense in there. Worth a read if you've got the time.
The United States House of Representatives has voted 246-182 to pass the Iraq War Resolution that condemns President Bush's plan to temporarily increase troop levels in Iraq by as many as 21,000 active serviceman, which could include another 20,000 in support personnel.
It was a forgone conclusion that the Iraq resolution would pass in the House of Representatives, given the superior number of Democrats and limited Republican support from across the aisle. The time for debate in the House had just come to an end just a little after 3PM EST.
Suffice to say this probably won't garner a significant amount of attention since it has been in the news for pretty much the past two weeks solid.
Harry Reid is going to call the Senate into session this Saturday in an attempt to get a vote on their version of the resolution, and even though there are enough Republicans willing to vote in favor of the resolution at this time for it to pass with a veto-proof majority, none of them are willing to let debate begin at this time.
Democratic attempts to initiate debate on the resolution have thus far failed, meaning no debate has even taken place in the Senate, while there has been over thirty hours of debate in the House with close to three-fourths of the members having a chance to speak.
Todays resolution is non-binding, meaning it has no force of law and is essentially an expression of the opinion of the House. As many as ten to twenty Republicans are expected to vote in favor of the House resolution.
The House has passed a number of smaller bills during morning business over the past four days, including -- and I am not joking -- whether or not to name a post office somewhere in Texas. There was nearly unanimous bi-partisan agreement that the House should name that post office, and it was quickly dispensed with.
With the inevitable passage of the House resolution, Democrats in the Senate, including John Murtha, are threatening to introduce bills that would repeal the previous Congressional authorization for the Iraq war, and would attach a number of strings to the $100 billion funding bill the President has requested for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though these bills would be certain to raise objections from President Bush, they could be attached to must-pass spending measures such as funding for the Iraq war itself, or overall omnibus spending bills that fund the federal government, making them extremely difficult to stop.
One of this strings would be the defunding of permanent bases in Iraq, and a requirement for a timetable of troop withdrawal.
The final vote was 244 Democrats and 182 Republicans in favor of the Resolution.
This seems to be the theme of the current news swirling around the John Edwards campaign in the past twenty-four hours. Sure, there are still a couple of mumblings about the manufactured blogger controversy, but that's all but now that both Marcotte and McEwen have resigned. I'm not sure that's really what the people on the right wanted though. They are both unleashed again to spew all the anti-Catholic stuff they want and are no longer constrained by representing a Presidential campaign.
So first a bit of background on this thing called Second Life" from the always-right-but-sometimes-wrong Wikipedia.
Second Life (abbreviated to SL) is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007. Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables users to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse.
If this is the thing I remember it to be, then it's a virtual world simulator of sorts that takes all of the fun aspects out of MMORPG games and leaves you with essentially a second virtual world to live in. The client used to be written in flash if I remember correctly, and the world itself features some of the most primitive and horrible graphics I've seen since before Doom hit the streets.
Apparently, the Edwards campaign setup a shop/office/building/presence of some sort within Second Life, and so I guess that's worth talking about when the first primaries are over a year away still.
Here is a blurb from a Mass. blog, short but sweet, my favorite kind. ZDNet probably has the best coverage of the deal, but webpronews.com has a bit as well. From ZDNet,
I started by asking what relationship, if any, he had with the official Edwards campaign. Rote explained that while he was doing this as a volunteer, he's in regular contact with Edwards' team and has their full support:
"… think of this as a scouting mission… it is unofficial in that the campaign is not spending money, and I am not paid, however the campaign is aware that we are organizing in Second Life, and cooperating as much as they can. I keep them updated on what I have learned, and they let me know things that will be helpful."
Rote says he expects his efforts to be incorporated into the official campaign within a month.
I just don't get Second Life. The graphics look 15 years old, it's not a game, and you still have to pay to use it. Where is the entertainment value?
The right got what they wanted, slandered, beaten, bloody and shamed, both Marcotte and *McEwan have quit the campaign. I sincerely hope that John Edwards learns a lesson from this, that people on the right will do literally anything to avoid talking about the issues. This should be a rallying cry from within the campaign to triple all efforts to get out the messages that these people fear, messages of hope and of new ideas, because those are the things that threaten them the most.
I'm sad that both of these women gave in, but let's remember that they didn't exactly surrender. They sacrificed their jobs so that the campaign can move past this, and one hardly need imagine all the hateful mail, accusations, and death threats they have endured over the past few weeks to sympathize with what has happened. I don't doubt that the harassment will continue for some time, and that's a real shame. It really puts an exclamation point on what a giant scumbag Donohue is, and all of the retards that made such a stink over nothing. I mean really, you'd think these people just now discovered that you can say anything you want on a blog and with that freedom inevitably comes things you don't necessarily want to hear.
You can read Melissa's message on resigning over here. Now, on with the news.
Because the manufactured controversy has finally come to a conclusion, unless there's a very good reason for doing so, I won't be linking to anymore blogs or news pieces about this. Maybe one or two here and there, but not like I have been. There probably won't be much news otherwise, so expect light posting for a spell.
Tom Eley writes on Obama's entry into the Democratic candidacy pool for 2008, and of course you should read all about it if you're interested in Obama, but I'm going to nitpick a little here with something I think is disingenuous.
For example, John Edwards-John Kerry's fervently pro-war vice presidential candidate in 2004-has, with considerable media assistance, rather incongruously attempted to stake out an "anti-war" position, calling on his rivals in the US Senate to cut off funding for Bush's escalation, a measure the Democratic congressional leadership has already rejected out of hand.
Couple points here, first being that "incongruous" means lacking in harmony, compatibility, or appropriateness. I don't see how the word applies at all, because John Edwards didn't stake out a position at all, he simply stated that his vote for the war authorization was just plain wrong. That by the way is something no other Democratic candidate has had the guts to so thus far.
Don't even bring up Hillary, please, she's been dancing around the war for far too long and has absolutely no credibility on the issue at this point. "If I were President, I wouldn't have blah blah"? Give me a break here, when she had the opportunity to act, Senator Clinton voted for it. I'm not going to call her an outright liar here, but you simply cannot have it both ways. If the intelligence was baked, then you were a fool for accepting it. If you knew it was baked, then why did you vote for it? It's lose/lose. The only way out is to admit you were wrong.
It's also important to note here that it doesn't matter how spineless Democratic leaders are when it comes to cutting off funding. For one it would be filibustered into oblivion by Republicans in the Senate, so it would be a waste of time, and I readily acknowledge that. But it would also force Republicans into a de facto support of keeping us in that war indefinitely. Something like that would be of tremendous advantage heading into late '08, so let's not jump to the conclusion that just because its off the table today, that doesn't mean it's off the table next year.
Obama has this advantage over Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and Edwards: unlike the other leading candidates, all of whom as senators voted in favor of granting Bush authorization to illegally invade Iraq, Obama publicly opposed the invasion while still a state senator in Illinois.
So did Howard Dean, and we all know that while it got his foot in the door, it didn't really give him any kind of advantage. It helped, sure, because virtually everyone else in the race still tacitly supported the war, but that isn't the case today. All Democrats are against the war, and Obama has problems of his own to worry about.
But as I said, this is a soft piece on Obama, so read it with an eye towards that and you'll be fine.
Americanchronicle.com has a piece up supporting Edwards for President, and The Boston Globe has a bit on the campaign hiring a new state campaign manager for New Hampshire.
That's all I've got from the last 24 hours, when you ignore the bloggate stuff, so smoke 'em if you got 'em.
I apologize to McEwan, I've been spelling her last name wrong all this time.
The title says it all, really. They harassed her and the campaign until she felt the negative attention was doing far more damage than she could do good. I personally disagree, I think what all of this did was show how petty the right has become and how unwilling they are to address Democratic campaigns on issues that voters really care about like health care, sane national defense, and of course those evil taxes.
Says Marcotte,
Regardless, it was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign. No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can’t do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn’t have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won’t do it. I resigned my position today and they accepted.
The letter written by Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice in support of Marcotte and McEwen is a breath of fresh air. I know there are a lot of people of faith out there that can be reasonable about these things, and this is certainly one of them. You can read Amanda's entire announcment at pandagon.net.
Amanda did the honorable thing by leaving the campaign, but I don't think it was the right choice. Edwards keeping them on staff sent a strong message to the fundies that nearly made them choke to death on their own bile, and as many noted, was the first real instance of someone standing up to the swift-boat tactics and shooting them down as nothing but inane screaming by people intolerant of others who have different views on the world than they do.
With Amanda quitting, I think -- to steal a stupid term from Republicans -- the whiners and the hypocrites have just been emboldened in ways we won't begin to realize for sometime. Now they know (even though it's illegal for them to do so) that they can interfere with elections without punishment from the law that they richly deserve, and now they know they can actually get what they want if they yell loud enough.
I hope that McEwen sticks with it for the duration and still lets her personal feelings and thoughts be known to the world in places more proper than the campaign blog. Let 'em have it.
News from around the blogosphere Paul Krugman, reprinted from the NY Times on the official campaign website.
What a difference two years makes! At this point in 2005, the only question seemed to be how much of America’s social insurance system — the triumvirate of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the Bush administration would manage to dismantle. Now almost all prominent Democrats and quite a few Republicans pay at least lip service to calls for a major expansion of social insurance, in the form of universal health care.
Funny thing about it, more and more people go without insurance every year and so the interest in universal health coverage in practically the only economically wealthy country without it increases as well. Conservatives hate the idea of the government paying for anything other than an obscenely large military, and you all know what the result of that is. It's time we try this a different way and see how it works, because believe me when I say that even if it fails, it won't be the end of life as we know it. Conservatives really need to stop fearing new ideas.
Greenwald on the "controversy" that wasn't, and the rise of the scandal obsessed culture. Read this.
For the last 15 years or so -- since the early years of the Clinton administration -- our public political discourse has been centrally driven by an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News. Every issue of significance is either shaped and wildly distorted by that process, or the public is distracted from important issues by contrived and unbelievably vapid, petty scandals.
I read Drudge a couple of times a day because that's where the news is and despite what other people think, it seems to me that Drudge's only crime is one of it's virtues: it lets people decide what the big new controversy is. It's a price you pay be only as long as you let it effect things.
If anything disqualifies John “The Hair” Edwards from the presidency of the local Kiwanis club — let alone the United States — it’s his decision this week to keep on bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.
Yes, it's his decision on keeping a couple of bloggers rather than his plan to revamp health care to provide guaranteed coverage to every citizen in the United States. It's not his interest in getting us out of an illegal war, or in helping 30,000,000 America's poor get out of poverty. Nah, it couldn't be for a substantive reason related to the actual job of being President, it has to be about two writers to occupy a small part of a campaign that will likely go back to their day jobs when the elections are over.
Good grief, do people like this not understand the real issues swirling around the early campaign fracas like the war, or do they simply not care? I wonder if this person has any intention of even voting. I swear to whatever God you may believe that I desperately hope people like this just butt out of the elections in '08. This country has enough trouble with stupid candidates and politicians, we don't need stupid voters too.
More on the manufactured controversy from tiara.org.
At some point, people need to call out so-called “Christians” on their involvement in politics while still happily claiming 501(c) status as non-profit, non-political organizations. I fully support your right to worship in any way you want. But legislating religious morality on others, such as the display of the Ten Commandments, outlawing gay marriage, promoting abstinence-only education and campaigning against the HPV vaccine, goes far beyond personal spirituality.
A couple of people have raised the point that Donohue was likely flaunting federal laws prohibiting tax-exempt churches from interfering with political campaigns, and in fact by calling for the Edwards campaign to fire Marcotte and McEwen, he seems to have done just that. Of course you don't hear about that from the other side, but "that's not the point." Sure it isn't.
Now I'm sitting here reading this post on the official campaign blog and I'm wondering after all the flak they've taken over Marcotte and McEwen why they would allow someone to say this on the campaign site, much less on the official blog.
Among others. They are demanding a specific response to assholes who do not merit a response.
BUt it is our job as the Senator's supporters to go out and defend him. So go to these posts and let it be known that the Edwards campaign cannot be bullied by either side and will act when it is appropriate.
This kind of untargeted rant serves no purpose, nor does the swearing or the lack of proof reading. There is something to be said for keeping your mouth clean when you're speaking to the public from the official website of a presidential campaign, and I'm quite bothered that they aren't doing a better job with this. Maybe I'm being as pointlessly nitpicky as the red stater's are, and maybe this just a 140 uneducated rant by one of the "angry leftists" that we're being labeled as.
Maybe they're right, because this kind of crap doesn't need to be on a campaign blog.
The so-called News Commentary from the Statesmanjournal.com on John Edwards health-care plan.
Edwards would repeat the mistake that was at the heart of Hillary Rodham Clinton's misadventure in trying to fix a health insurance system that was then, and is now, so out of whack that it manages to cover fewer and fewer Americans at higher and higher cost. [..]
He wants insurers to cover everyone, no matter how sick and expensive they are. He wants employers to continue to carry on their ledgers a cost that is ever more burdensome to them and to their workers, onto whose shoulders more of the health-insurance tab is being shifted.
I still haven't read the plan myself so I don't know how true this interpretation is, but I'm not sure I see the problem here. Big changes take big sacrifice, and if getting every human being in this country medical insurance takes dismantling the private insurance industry, then it was what was broken in the first place, not our federal system. Our system has been contorting itself for so long to appease greedy insurance companies that the time to put them back in the box and see how things shake out. With all of the corporate tax breaks that Republicans have been dumping on America over the past twelve years, I think they can probably afford to take a couple of hits right now.
And honestly, the other side of "fixing" this system had its chance to "fix" it when they had complete control over Congress, and they came up short. Risks or not, it's time to try something else.
This stupid stuff over John Edward's house also needs to stop. The man is a trial lawyer, all of those guys are filthy rich. So what? Almost every member of the Senate is a millionaire. President Bush is rolling in money, so I say again, so what? The tax cuts that Bush has been pushing his entire federal political career benefited people like Bush, like Edwards. Do you think Jon Tester, the farmer from Montana who beat Conrad Burns for a Senate seat last year benefited from those cuts? Laughable. If you want to know someone for being unapologetically rich, look to Bush, who cut his own taxes every year he's been in office.
This person said it best.
"Stuff like this comes with the territory," said Jennifer Palmer, an Edwards adviser. "It's all a part of the game of the presidential campaign. I don't think that voters are that interested."
Finally a bit of actual news from the Washington Post, wondering about just how much support Edwards can expect from trial lawyers this time around.
In the last presidential election, John Edwards had the powerful support and deep pockets of the nation's trial lawyers behind him. But when the lawyers gather for their winter conference today in Miami Beach, it will be Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) delivering the meeting's keynote speech.
Edwards, a trial lawyer who became a senator and now a presidential candidate, will be there, too. But the North Carolina Democrat no longer has a lock on the backing of the lawyers. This time around he will be battling it out with others in the Democratic field, who are seen as sympathetic to plaintiffs and their attorneys.
Nothing wrong with that, people should always consider all of their options.
It's also likely to attract and scare Americans in equal numbers -- with a price tag of an estimated $120 billion per year that will be paid, in part, by an elimination of Bush tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 a year and a number of reforms guaranteed to draw opposition from every interest group with a stake.
So yeah, some of the people paying for this will be the ones making over $200,000 per year. They can afford it, and it benefits sick people who simply cannot pay to get better on their own. Forced humanity sucks, but it's better than no humanity at all.
I lied, this is two days in news. The rest is mostly about the blogging stuff and I'm done with that crap. Adios.
I'm subscribed to a Google Alert for web, blog, and news updates daily which is how I find 99% of the things I post here. Very handy, especially since the three categories are nicely separated when you get them via daily digests. My problem and the reason for the last of posts over the past four days is that almost all of the new news articles are about old news, primarily Edwards health care plan. Different people come across this stuff over time so you keep getting the same old stuff every day, and I won't post redundant material.
While the blog posts tend to be more unique, they've all been stuck on the manufactured paid-blogger controversy lately. Not all of it is constructive or worth talking about. In fact, I don't think a lot of this crap deserves to be repeated here, or anywhere. On the other hand, I'm bored, so I shall expound for a moment. Just scroll past this stuff if you're only interested in news links.
I don't know if the entire site is this way, but I keep getting alerts from townhall.com which amount to biased rants from conservatives that just love to apply their "rigid" morals selectively to people they didn't really like in the first place. I guess they are just as bored as I am, because they keep writing about it, and they keep missing the point.
As one looks back at John Edwards and his Potty-Mouthed bloggers, that's the question that keeps springing to mind. What circuit misfired in the Edwards campaign that led him to hire two of the blogosphere's most notoriously bilious, hate-filled and obviously controversial denizens?
To which I would reply, there was no controversy until the leader/spokesperson of a private religious group started complaining as loudly as he possibly could. Not so much because these two bloggers aren't eight-years-old and know that swearing isn't going to be ending the world anytime soon, but because he perceived them to be anti-Catholic. Problem is this guy and his organization happen to be anti-gay and anti-choice. The latter is a debatable issue for another place and time, but come on, let's be open and honest about all of this. We're talking about a professed bigot calling other people intolerant. Just because the man doesn't swear (in public anyway) doesn't sweeten the stench coming from his side of the fence in the least. Hate speech and intolerance don't recognize party lines and nobody can claim morals as their own.
That has been said over and over but you don't hear it in the media, or from the conservatives, because intolerance is only bad when it comes from liberals when it concerns the right, and the media just doesn't care. If there is something they can run with to get attention, they'll do it.
This manufactured controversy is over all ready because the campaign has decided to keep both bloggers on their payroll for the time being, which I think is entirely proper given that they haven't done a single thing wrong since being hired. If they step out of line, then they need to go, nobody will argue against that. If they should be fired for what they did in the past however, then I fully expect these guys on the right to start writing a half dozen exposé's on the Catholic hypocrites and drag it out for a couple of weeks like they have this story. That's only fair.
Also, I'm calling out Dean Barnett for lying about these two being fired. This was dated the 10th, two days after Edwards personally announced that he was keeping Marcotte and McEwen. Note to the Senator: There is nothing wrong with being anti-Calothic per say, there are over 40,000,000 anti-Catholics in the United States and another billion world-wide; they are called Atheists.
Edwards acted promptly. He fired Marcotte and one of her colleagues in potty-blogging. His campaign, however, maintained a curious radio silence pertaining to the terminations. Other than a background notice to Salon that alerted Salon alone of the firings, no one knew exactly what was going on at Edwards HQ.
Neither person were fired, and no proof of this exists outside the imaginations of the right. I'm sure they'd love to believe they had some effect on the deal, but all they've done is blown up nothing into even more nothing. Marcotte and McEwen are still happily employed by the campaign, and that doesn't figure to change anytime soon.
But after his ill-advised hire, Edwards had the choice to offend the blogosphere or to offend the "godbags." He chose to offend the "godbags." Since the country is composed of 98% "godbags," this was a decision every bit as short-sighted and idiotic as was the original hire that kicked off the controversy.
It must be very liberating to just make up statistics, but I can tell you based on information I gathered for a recent article, it just ain't true. A person of faith once stated that America was a strong majority of believers and that it wasn't ever going to change. The statement on face is silly since everything in nature is subject to change, but this particular thing I figured was only getting stronger over the past few years, so it was worth looking into.
What did I find? I was wrong.
If you bundle all of the various sects of Christianity together, and compare it with the combination of atheism and agnosticism, the difference is quite striking when compared to Barnett's uneducated guess. The non-believers in America accounted for nearly 15% of the population six years ago, and was the fastest growing category in a measure of faith. Christianity has in contrast lost nearly 24 million faithful between 1991 and 2001 and only accounted for 79% of the faithful in this country, a drop of 8.5% over that span. All other religions combined only amount to 1.7% of the total population, so it's not even close.
As wrong as the "98% godbags" statistic is, I'm sure Barnett would be even more horrified than what Marcotte and McEwen are saying to find that the vaunted religious establishment in the United States is actually beginning to fade away.
That said, I'm hoping the stench from this manufactured crap will roll out of here soon as we can get back to real news like the thirteen million men all claiming to have impregnated the late Anna Nicole Smith.
Note:Given how much I ranted on the above stuff, I'm dropping the news into another post.
I touched on this subject a day or two ago where it seems that a number of people are unhappy with the Edwards campaign hiring Amanda Marcotte to write for their official blog. It didn't seem like that big of deal, and it still may not be, but the pressure is coming up now with the AP reporting that the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights is throwing a hissy fit over this.
"John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue wrote in a statement. "He has no choice but to fire them immediately."
Pretty strong words for someone who claims to be a supporter of civil rights, after all, the freedom to speak unpopular views cannot be considered anything less than the foundation of civil rights. How else could the struggle against inequality take place when one is chastised for speaking about it?
It gets worse however when you consider the war that Catholics are raging against same-sex marriage, and smacks of hypocrisy beyond the pale. Civil rights in these peoples minds only applies when they agree with what you are doing it seems. One could easily make the argument that Catholic-sponsored hate against gays is more vulgar than a few naughty words tossed about in a good Internet scuffle, but I leave that up to you to decide.
The important thing to remember here is that Amanda is not going to be posting her own thoughts on the official blog, though that would probably do more for Edwards campaign than simply giving an amusing slant to dull news. You can damn well bet there won't be any swearing or controversial but true personal statements appearing on that blog anytime soon, and understand that this is nothing but pissing and moaning by a group that is on the record as being gay-hating bigots themselves, and they are actually proud of it.
