First Door on the Left

At a fund raising dinner in Portland, Oregon the other day, George W. Bush collected $1,000,000.00 from 500 people who paid $2,000 each to attend.

Dean for America has announced that, in response, they plan to raise at least that amount in contributions by the end of the Sleepless Summer Tour next Tuesday evening. To do so, they brought out the bat again. Click on it (in the left column) to contribute!

From campaign manager Joe Trippi:

Yesterday George Bush took time off from his vacation to go fundraising again, this time in Portland, Oregon. At just one event he brought in $1 million from 500 of his biggest contributors. Outside the fundraiser more than 2,000 Americans gathered to speak out against Bush’s failed policies, which have ruined our economy and damaged our standing in the world community. Yet pocketing $1 million dollars was enough for George W. Bush to thank the people of Portland for their “warm welcome.”

We can’t let George W. Bush continue to rack up millions while the American people are left out in the street. Today, we’re bringing out the bat on the Dean for America website—and putting it up against George W. Bush. Our goal is to raise $1 million against George Bush by the end of the Sleepless Summer Tour—midnight this Tuesday, August 26th. Show George Bush that you are taking our country back by making a contribution today.

Governor Dean wrote an op-ed column for today’s Wall Street Journal:

‘We Can Do Better’

by Howard Dean

The economy is going through tough times. The average American family is in trouble. The economy has been losing good jobs, and the benefits that went with them, at an astonishing rate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Our economy has proved its resilience time and again. The skills and productivity of the American worker are the envy of the world. When we have had clear direction and effective leadership, we have created millions of jobs, raised the incomes of all Americans and diminished the gap between rich and poor.

But over the past two and a half years, the number of unemployed Americans has gone from under 6 million to over 9 million. Worse, the number of long-term unemployed–those who have been looking for a job for more than 6 months–has tripled to almost two million workers. These numbers are part of a larger story. The promise of America has been based on the understanding that hard work would pay off in a better job and a brighter future for the next generation. We need to restore that promise. Millions are unemployed, and millions more are underemployed in dead-end jobs. Wages are stagnant. Job security is disappearing.

One out of four U.S. workers is free-lancing, employed in a temporary job, self-employed or working part-time. Studies show that workers who lose manufacturing jobs take an average 13% pay cut in their next employment.

When companies cut back on health-care benefits and guaranteed pensions, workers are hit hard. Studies by scholars, including Karen Kornbluh of the New America Foundation, show that families compensate by running harder, and that stress can become unbearable. There are elderly parents to care for, children to educate, and the need to save for a secure retirement. Married couples now work 10 weeks longer each year than they did in 1968, and live with an accumulation of debt that threatens financial disaster.

As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out in their forthcoming book “The Two Income Trap,” today’s two-income families earn 75% more money than their single-income counterparts did a generation ago, but they actually have less money to spend. For many, personal bankruptcies have become the rule rather than the exception. This year more children will live through their parents’ bankruptcy than through their parents’ divorce.

In about 500 days, the next president will take office. There will be an inaugural address, full of talk of promises and hopes. Let us hope the next inaugural speech holds up better in the perspective of history than the last one.

Promising a “compassionate” administration, President Bush pledged to “recover the momentum of our economy,” “reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans” and confront economic problems now, “instead of passing them on to future generations.” Instead, he’s offered tax cuts that don’t address our needs, and saddled our children with debt for generations to come. On this president’s watch, the federal debt has grown by over $1 trillion. That’s the rough equivalent of putting $3,500 on the charge card of every American.

How did our nation come to this place? The answer is simple–the economic policies of this administration are aimed at ideological goals, not help for the average American.

We can do better. As president, my economic policies will be focused and clear. I will begin by repealing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and using the revenues that result from the repeal to address the needs of the average American, invest in the nation’s infrastructure and, through tax reform, put money in the hands of those most likely to spend it.

The task of meeting the needs of American families begins with health care. My plan will not only insure millions of Americans who are without adequate care today, it will reduce costs for small business, states and communities–freeing up funds that can be used to grow businesses and meet other national and local priorities.

An important part of my program for a full-employment recovery will be extending a helping hand to states and communities. My policies as governor kept Vermont strong fiscally; but all over America, the financial resources of other states and cities are strained to the limit. Teachers are being laid off, highways lack repairs, firehouses are closed. Instead of tax cuts that have not created jobs, we need to make investments in America. I will increase federal aid for special education, and provide more temporary help to the states–for homeland security and school construction and infrastructure modernization. And I will increase the availability of capital for small businesses, so that they can invest in new technology and create more jobs.

No program for economic recovery and growth can ignore the tax system, particularly the bizarre collection of tax expenditures, preferences, credits and deductions which has directed revenues away from the federal treasury and into uneconomic tax avoidance schemes. Average Americans pay their taxes through withholding or quarterly estimates. Meanwhile, corporations and multinational enterprises take advantage of elaborate tax shelters, and billions go uncollected. The need for reform is obvious and compelling, and I will give tax reform a top priority in my administration. But unlike the tax initiatives of the current president, my program of tax reform and relief will be targeted to the average Americans who are struggling to make ends meet–not those whose needs are well provided for.

Finally, maintaining fiscal discipline is essential to long-term growth; discretionary spending must be sustainable, and the federal budget must be balanced over the business cycle.

I balanced every budget during my 11 years as governor, despite the fact that Vermont is the only state with a constitution that doesn’t require a balanced budget. To keep spending in line, I will not be afraid to use the veto–a power President Bush has yet to exercise.

Some of these measures will be unpopular, and many will be opposed by the special interests. But the next president must take swift and decisive action to restore the economic well being of our nation’s families. They need meaningful jobs at good wages. They need the security of health insurance–no matter how old or young they may be, and without regard to their economic status. They have the right to educate their children to the limits of their abilities, not the limit of their pocketbooks, and to look forward to a secure retirement. In short, they expect a better deal, and deserve no less.

[Houston, TX] – Republicans in Harris County have pounded their Democratic opponents time and time again at the ballot box during the past decade.

Sunday, they intend to throw a grand old party to batter the Democrats’ former headquarters in Midtown.

Harris County GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill is asking local Republicans to bring sledgehammers and other implements of destruction to help level the building the Democrats vacated three months ago.

“You bring the muscle, we’ll bring the refreshments and we will have a party as we tear down the Harris County Democratic Party headquarters,” Woodfill said in his invitation to party faithful.

Harris County Democratic Party Chairman Gerry Birnberg was quick with a metaphor. That’s what Republicans do, he said, “tearing things down, destroying them.”

“They did it to our economy, to our jobs market, to our voting rights, to our democracy, to civility in government, to civil rights, to health care for children, to fair pay for teachers — they took out their sledgehammers and smashed them to smithereens.”

Harris County GOP officials tried to hammer the Democrats with words in a news release on the Dem-olition derby, saying that “the Harris County Democratic Party has been evicted from their party headquarters.”

Evict, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, means “to remove (a tenant) from leased premises by legal procedure, as for failure to pay rent.”

Birnberg said the party had a month-to-month lease on the old headquarters on LaBranch until earlier this summer. At that time, the building was sold to a developer who intends to tear it down for a new project. The owner gave the GOP permission to help with the razing.

The Democrats moved into new digs on the North Loop.

“There was no `eviction’ any more than Ronald Reagan was `evicted’ from the White House when his term was up and he moved to California,” Birnberg said. “But truth is not one of the virtues this bunch believes in or embraces.”

The Democrats have picked up support from a likely group — organized labor.

Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the local AFL-CIO, said union members will hold a “peaceful” sidewalk party nearby to watch the GOP “destroy the building and the economy.”

The Republican party seems determined to destroy any semblance of decency in politics in this state. What kind of jollies to they expect to get from destroying a building that the Democratic Party moved out of several months ago? They just like to destroy things, I guess. They’ve done a pretty bang up job of destroying our country.

by Bill Press

BREAKING NEWS!

There is still a race for president of the United States underway. Contrary to what you see and hear in the media, the campaign for president has not been suspended until after completion of the California recall on Oct. 7.

But if, due to some satellite breakdown, you accidentally happen upon any coverage of the presidential campaign these days, be forewarned. What you see will not be pretty. It’s a replay of the Donner Party: Democrats, about to enter the promised land, eating each other. And the one they’re feasting on most is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

The Democratic Leadership Council took the first bite. DLC Founder Al From, who recruited Bill Clinton to bring the Democratic Party back from ruin, warned that Dean belonged to the party’s “McGovern-Mondale wing” and would repeat their sad history by winning only two states.

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, DLC President, dismissed Dean’s criticism of President Bush with the taunt: “Do we want to vent or to govern?” Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, last year’s DLC President, called Dean “a ticket to nowhere.” And, like rats following Pied Piper, most political pundits agree, insisting that Dean is simply too liberal to beat George W. Bush.

They are all dead wrong. They underestimate the anger that most Democrats, and a growing number of Americans, feel toward this administration. Besides, Dean is not the wild-eyed liberal they paint him to be. And he definitely has what it takes to beat George W. Bush.

As the evil Richard Nixon once said, let me make myself perfectly clear: Dean’s not the only one. In my view, John Kerry and Dick Gephardt also have the right stuff. I haven’t endorsed anyone in the Democratic primary and, as a practicing journalist, I won’t. But Howard Dean is getting a bum rap.

Look at his record in Vermont. Dean governed as a genuine middle-of-the-roader.

He refused to raise income taxes. He opposed gun control, for which he received an “A” rating from the NRA. He supported the death penalty. And even though it was not constitutionally required, he balanced the budget every one of his 11 years as governor – and then set aside a “rainy-day” fund for fiscal emergencies.

Dean, in fact, governed as such a moderate and fiscal tightwad that in 1996, the DLC – the same organization which now denounces him as some neo-Vladimir Lenin – hailed re-election of “the centrist Gov. Howard Dean” as evidence of growing “New Democratic leadership.”

True, Dean remains the only governor in the nation to have recognized gay civil unions, although California’s beleaguered Gray Davis just promised to do so. But even there, Dean trims his sails. He signed the legislation only after the state’s highest court ordered him to. He defends civil unions not as gay “marriage,” which he still opposes, but as extending the same basic civil rights to all Americans.

Indeed, now that the Supreme Court has overturned Texas’ sodomy laws and Wal-Mart has granted equal benefits to gay employees, Dean doesn’t appear so radical on this issue anymore. Just ahead of his time.

More than anything else, it’s his opposition to the war in Iraq that sets Dean apart from the other candidates. John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards all voted for giving President Bush authority to go war in Iraq. Dean opposed it from the very beginning as unwise and unnecessary. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction or any connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11 prove that Dean was right and the others were wrong.

Dean has a few other things going for him. He is a licensed physician, not a professional politician. He has a McCain-like gift for straight talk. He doesn’t pussyfoot around his answers. He has demonstrated an astounding ability to raise money, especially from small donors on the Internet. And he’s not afraid to tackle President Bush head on. That’s good. Democrats will never beat George Bush by running Bush Lite.

The big question is: Can an outsider get elected president? The answer is: more often than not. Just ask Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Americans like former governors as president. The last person to go straight from the U.S. Senate to the White House was John F. Kennedy.

by Alan Bisbort

“The men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak.” – Anthony Swofford, U.S. Marine sniper, from his book Jarhead.

Not since the days of Marie Antoinette, or at least Nancy Reagan, has there been such a disconnect between the ruling elite and what Marie and Nancy might call the unwashed masses. A potent symbol of this cynical detachment is provided by George W. Bush’s month-long vacation, during which his only forays among the unwashed masses have been to whack his little white balls around a golf course — and to host a “down-home” barbecue to shake down rich donors for another run at the White House. The cover charge for barbecue with the Bushes? Each of the 350 “very special guests” paid $50,000 to nibble on those Republican pig and cow carcasses.

Meanwhile, the temperature in Iraq is 30 degrees hotter than it is in Crawford, Texas, and 20 degrees hotter than what killed 3,000 French people and hundreds of other Europeans. Iraq is, in fact, so hot that official meteorological data has been blocked from the media by the Department of Defense, presumably so that Americans won’t know that our troops are the human equivalent of down-home barbecue. What the DoD has also tried to keep a lid on, though foreign news services haven’t been so easily bullied as the embedded American press, is that our troops are operating in this inferno without adequate water supplies, sanitation, shelter or barbecue — actually, any type of food.

To the ruling elite — like the Crawford pig-nibblers — these men and women in uniform are useful members of the unwashed masses. They served their purpose as of May 1, when Bush — who went AWOL from military service during the Vietnam War — dolled himself up with codpiece and flight helmet for his campaign photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier. “Mission accomplished,” he trumpeted, and the media played along with the charade. Since then, at least 126 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and thousands have been wounded, physically and psychologically.

In the midst of Bush’s month-long AWOL from his duties as president during wartime (and crises like the worst blackout in U.S. history), the Department of Defense announced last week it intended to cut the pay of the 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and the 9,000 still in Afghanistan. These troops were to receive increases in imminent danger pay (from $150 to $225 a month) and family separation allowance (from $100 to $250). Sen. John Kerry, who did not go AWOL during the Vietnam War, sounded presidential when he told an Iowa audience: “The Bush Administration says they just can’t afford it. Well if they can’t afford to pay our soldiers in harm’s way, and support the families they left behind, then they better get their priorities straight … The Bush Administration questions the patriotism of those who ask questions about how you win a war, but I know no deeper violation of patriotism than dishonoring those who wear the uniform of our nation … .”

Am I the only American citizen who remembers Bush telling one of the network news dollies: “I hug the mothers and the widows of those who may have lost their life in the name of peace and freedom”?

As of this writing, no hugs have been extended to American mothers or widows by the commander-in-chief. Maybe Bush doesn’t want that kind of photo-op, though it comes with his job. Or maybe he fears that he’ll be slapped in the face, literally, just as his pick for the 9/11 investigation, Henry Kissinger, was figuratively slapped in the face by the families of the World Trade Center attack (thus leading to his resignation). The families of the troops are not taking this lightly. Because they, like the families of the World Trade Center victims, have been ignored by the White House, they — and other veterans, active duty personnel and reservists — have taken to the Internet, via www.bringthemhomenow.org.

The spirit of their dissent is summed up in this letter from a woman in Minnesota, posted on Media Whores Online: “After watching a piece on CNN the other night about the wounded soldiers now being attended to at Walter Reed, many of whom are now minus one or two limbs, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it just me? Did I miss the coverage of the current White House resident spending some serious time visiting these young soldiers? It would have been the decent thing (not to mention the least he could do) for Junior to have spent the first day of his vacation visiting with these brave young men. Before going on to Crawford and picking up the golf clubs, how about having spent some time with the young man who will never be able to hold his newborn infant with both arms?”

by Allen Snyder

Long before reading David Brock’s book “Blinded By The Right”, his exposé of the GOP anti-Clinton impeachment machine, I’d often wondered how any gay person could support a political party that so openly hates them. The Christian Right, at all levels of the GOP, are forever crusading to deny gays basic civil rights, vilifying and condemning them to an eternity of hellfire as dangerous moral, social, and sexual deviants.

How could any self-respecting homosexual overlook these constant attacks and rationalize continued GOP loyalty? Can Republican views on the economy, education, or guns ever be attractive enough to trump issues of sexual identity? How? How can hating people for who they are be a lesser evil than exploiting them for political gain?

The total non-response to #3 Senator Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) rant likening homosexuality to bestiality, incest, and pedophilia speaks volumes about the GOP party elite’s real mentality. While Trent Lott was skewered and roasted for his remarks about the joys of racial segregation, the bigoted Santorum emerged from his fracas relatively unscathed.

Add to this volatile mix same-sex civil unions, TV show ‘Queer Eye For The Straight Guy’, the attempted Episcopalian priest promotion kibosh, and the GOP-sponsored Marriage Limitation Amendment and it’s pretty clear what these compassion-less and soulless ‘conservatives’ (read: fascists) are all about.

Bush’s latest line is to respect homosexuals as people, but believe ‘homosexual acts’ to be immoral and ‘sinful’. It’s OK to be gay, but not OK to act gay. You can have gay feelings, but you can’t love, be loved by, or make love to any other gay person. Keep your asses firmly locked in the closet.

Firmly embedded in this Neanderthal view is the Christian Right mantra that homosexuality is a choice, a free autonomous act of the will for which one should be held morally responsible.

You remember ‘moral responsibility’, right, Mr. Bennett? It’s when we assign moral value to people’s actions and praise or punish them accordingly – a game that works only if we act freely. That’s why being black, Chinese, or female can never be morally wrong. No free choice; therefore, no moral responsibility.

While the scientific jury may be out, all the smart money’s on sexuality being no more a matter of free choice than skin color, ethnicity or gender. Rest assured BushCo will simply ignore any scientific evidence supporting that view. They still ignorantly deny global warming and evolutionary theory and think abstinence-only makes for good sex ed.

Since the Christian Right is so adamant about validating Biblical ambiguities, punishing gays for their heinous sins, and saving their pitiful souls, we’ll likely have to pry the ‘gay-as-choice’ idea from their cold dead brains. If being gay is like being white or Indian, homosexuality is value neutral and gay-ness is not immoral, the mere thought of which makes a Fundamentalist’s cranial veins pulsate dangerously.

Luckily for us sane people, a bit of common sense is all that’s needed to see the ‘gay-as-choice’ argument for what it is – total right wing bullshit.

Just apply some soothing reductio ad absurdum reasoning.

Let’s suppose homosexuality is a free choice – a function of the autonomous rational will. Everyone knows how badly homosexuality is stigmatized, what the prevailing attitudes are among many Americans, and the piss-poor treatment gays get, both violent and not (think of Matthew Shepard and ‘Will & Grace).

There’s overt discrimination, gay-bashing red-necks, and intolerant morons to contend with daily. Picture closeted gay people awkwardly laughing while pathologically homophobic Santorum-types tell fag jokes about pecker-puffers and butt-pirates, collectively cleansing their consciences by trumpeting at cocktail parties that some of their best friends are gay.

Why would anyone make such an obviously counter-productive and potentially life-threatening choice when ‘choosing’ heterosexuality would be so much easier? It’s simple – they wouldn’t. Outside the ultra-denial ‘gay recovery’ groups sporting ‘born-again’ heteros, no one has ever touted gay-as-choice with a straight face.

Common sense – 1. Christian Right – 0.

Let’s again suppose gay-as-choice is true. That means at some point, homosexuals make a conscious decision to be homosexual – to be attracted to and have sex with same-sex members. Logically, then, heterosexuals must also make a conscious decision to be attracted to and have sex only with opposite-sex people. What’s good for the gays, you know. Problem is, no one makes any such choice.

Righties would undoubtably argue the decision gays make is to deviate from the norm – choose to change God’s default settings, as if we were all born heteros. Funny how this reasoning necessitates using the same science Righties abhor when it doesn’t suit their purposes.

Common Sense – 2. Christian Right – 0.

So, let’s do ourselves a big favor and give this ‘gay-as-choice’ nonsense the indecent burial it deserves.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of room for gays on the left.