First Door on the Left

A bit of John Edwards’ address to the Democratic National Convention was covered in the post prior to this one. After watching and listening to the speech (twice, thanks to C-Span), there were two things in it that really stood out for me.

First, the all-important issue of national security…

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know that we have to do more to fight terrorism and protect our country. And we can do that. We are approaching the third anniversary of September 11th, and I can tell you that when we’re in office, it won’t take us three years to get the reforms in our intelligence we need to protect our country. We will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to make sure that never happens again, not to our America.

When John is president, we will listen to the wisdom of the September 11th Commission. We will build and lead strong alliances and safeguard and secure weapons of mass destruction. We will strengthen our homeland security and protect our ports, safeguard our chemical plants, and support our firefighters, police officers and EMT’s. We will always use our military might to keep the American people safe.

And we will have one clear unmistakable message for al Qaida and the rest of these terrorists. You cannot run. You cannot hide. And we will destroy you.

Second, hope is on the way…

So when you return home, you might pass a mother on her way to work the late-shift—you tell her……hope is on the way.

When your brother calls and says that he’s working all the time at the office and still can’t get ahead—you tell him……hope is on the way.

When your parents call and tell you their medical bills are through the roof—you tell them……hope is on the way.

When your neighbor calls you and says that her daughter has worked hard and wants to go to college—you tell her……hope is on the way.

When you talk to your son or daughter who is serving this country and protecting our freedoms in Iraq—you tell them……hope is on the way.

And when you wake up and sit with your kids at the kitchen table, talking to them about the great possibilities in America, you make sure that they know that John and I believe at our core that tomorrow can be better than today.

Tonight, John Kerry accepts the nomination.

The transcripts from all the speeches delivered at the convention can be found here.

John Edwards is scheduled to address the delegates at the Democratic National Convention about an hour from now, yet Reuters is reporting that his speech has already been delivered.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards called on Americans on Wednesday to reject what he denounced as the Republicans’ “hateful, negative politics” and embrace John Kerry and his “politics of hope.”

“The Republicans are doing all they can to take this campaign for the highest office in the land down the lowest possible road,” Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Democratic National Convention.

“This is where you come in,” Edwards said in an appeal to what polls show to be sharply divided voters: “Between now and November … you can reject the tired, old, hateful, negative, politics of the past.”

“And instead,” Edwards said, “you can embrace the politics of hope, the politics of what’s possible because this is America, where everything is possible.”

The time stamp on their story is 6:53 PM ET. Edwards is scheduled to speak at 10:25 PM ET. How do they do that?

I’m trying to watch the proceedings at the convention, but it is raining here and we have DirecTV satellite. Mostly what I am watching is a notice at the bottom of the screen that says “Searching for satellite signal.”

Ryan Seacrest’s talk show has been canceled…

LOS ANGELES – The syndicated TV series “On-Air with Ryan Seacrest” is going off the air, permanently. Seacrest was unable to turn his visibility as host of Fox’s “American Idol” into success for the talk and music show, and low ratings led Twentieth Television on Tuesday to announce the end of production.

Now I don’t know what time of day his show was on where you live, but here it was on opposite Ellen DeGeneres. Did they really believe that Ryan could compete with Ellen? I mean, c’mon!

I know… I have way too much free time these days. Now off to watch some more convention on C-Span.

The Associate Press reports…

The median pay for a CEO in the United States increased by 15 percent last year, and rose even more — 22 percent — for chiefs at larger companies, according to a survey by The Corporate Library.

The survey, released Wednesday, showed increases in almost every category of executive compensation, including base salary, annual bonus, total annual compensation, restricted stock, long-term incentive payouts and the value realized from the exercise of stock options. The only category to decline from 2002 to 2003 was the value of stock option grants.

Despite some calls for more restraint in CEO pay, it was a better year for the executives than 2002, when total compensation rose by a median of 9.5 percent.

Did you get your 15% pay raise last year?

The Republicans call this “trickle down economics” — give more to the guys at the top (higher salaries, bigger tax breaks) and eventually it will trickle down.

Have you been trickled on yet?

In case you did not have the opportunity to hear them tonight, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and read tonight’s remarks by Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Teresa Heinz Kerry.

They were all excellent, though Dr. Dean (I thought) did not really have the fire he displayed on the campaign trail. The reception he received, however, was incredible.

Ron Reagan did a tremendous job of explaining embryonic stem cell research and why the opposition of the evangelical right wing to it is so ridiculous. I have not been able to find the text of his remarks online yet, but the Washington Post has the video.

Update: The NYT now has the text of Ron Reagan’s speech posted.

Your tax dollars at work in the Iraq that George W. Bush created:

Iraqi police face charges of past

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Intelligence Service has its own secret prison. Criminals wear uniforms and collect police salaries. Senior security officials hand out jobs to family members. Investigators charged with being watchdogs over the police say they have little or no power. They report to the interior minister rather than to justice itself. The police arrest the innocent, beat them, and imprison them without charge; and in at least one case, police shot dead an innocent bystander.

This is not Saddam Hussein’s corrupt police state. This is the new Iraq run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the man the international community is hoping will shepherd Iraqi democracy into being early next year. There are so many corrupt, violent and useless police officers in the new Iraqi police force that, according to a senior American adviser to the Iraqi police, the U.S. government is about to pay off 30,000 police officers at a cost of $60 million to the American taxpayer.

George Bush fought tooth and nail to prevent the creation of the 9/11 commission. Now, suddenly, he is promising quick implementation of its recommendations.

Read Richard Cohen’s column in todays Washington Post…

Bush’s 9/11 Farce

BOSTON — Back before Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in 1952, summer could be a bad time for America’s children. The fear of polio often kept them indoors, away from the beach or out of the pool. So it came as something of a surprise when the government somehow ran out of the vaccine and the secretary of health, education and welfare, Oveta Culp Hobby, uttered one of the great dumb remarks of American history: “No one could have foreseen the public demand for the vaccine.”

The spirit of Mrs. Hobby lives on in George W. Bush. Almost three years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — the biggest intelligence failure in U.S. history — and after his own administration went to war for reasons that did not exist, the president has ordered his crack staff to see which of the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendations can be implemented fast and without congressional approval. Bush, you will recall, opposed the creation of the commission in the first place.

…

Still, it is the president who runs the government. Now he suddenly discovers he is expected to do something about national security. He cannot be serious — and rest assured he is not. The many months of inactivity in this area offer eloquent testimony to Bush’s firm belief that little needs to be fixed. In the same way he could not answer earlier this year what mistakes he had made as president, he cannot even say what mistakes his government made that might have led to Sept. 11 and the debacle in Iraq.

Now we are engaged in a great farce. Outside my hotel room, a good piece of the nation’s political talent is engaged in a purposeless convention to nominate a man who has already been nominated. And down in Crawford, the White House staff is dutifully feeding the press accounts of Bush’s newfound concern about what ails the intelligence community and even — imagine! — that Bush took the Sept. 11 commission’s report with him. From somewhere, Oveta Culp Hobby smiles. She is finally off the hook.

Incompetence and arrogance do not begin to do this administration justice.

I thought the first night of the convention went off rather well, don’t you? The highlights of the evening were, of course, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

The one thought that really hit me hard came from President Clinton when he said that the Republicans, in order to win, need this country to be divided. If you really think about, that’s very true. Why else would they be insisting on placing so much emphasis on the issues that divide this country, like abortion and same-sex marriage, rather than on the issues which unite us, like homeland security, good jobs, high quality education, etc.?

For the Democrats to win, we must be united; for the Republicans to win, we must be divided. Democrats want to govern for the benefit of all the people, while Republicans want to govern for the benefit of their base only. That, I think, is the truth that needs to be driven home to every American during this election.

Tomorrow evening it will be Howard Dean’s turn to take the podium. I can guarantee he’ll get the place rocking (unless Kerry’s folks have made him tone it down too much). At any rate, you won’t want to miss it!

You know those “50 things about me” you see on a lot of weblogs? The Dallas Morning News has one about John Kerry…

“50 things you need to know about John Kerry”

Only it lists 52 things. I guess 50 things sounded better in the title than 52 things.

Here’s just a few of them:

13. He had a pet parakeet during his junior year in college that he taught phrases in English, Italian and French.

23. His favorite album “by far” is the The Beatles’ 1969 classic Abbey Road.

29. For good luck, Mr. Kerry keeps a laminated four-leaf clover in his pocket and his Navy dog tags from Vietnam in his leather briefcase.

41. He wears $15 reading glasses off the shelf from CVS.

You need to know these kinds of things about our next president. I’m not kidding, you really do.

The Democratic National Convention opens for business today. There was a time I would have been excited about that. There was a time when political conventions were something to get excited about. Ah, the good old days.

All the business of the convention has already been taken care of — the nominee has been selected, his running mate announced, the platform written — so there is really nothing left except the speechifying. There will be plenty of that this week (62 people scheduled to speak over the course of four days). There are only a few speeches that I really look forward to watching (hearing?) — Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Ron Reagan, and maybe John Edwards and John Kerry.

I was really hoping that Howard Dean would be the nominee. I had this dream that maybe this would be the year that the Democratic party would break away from the middle-of-the-road establishment that took it over in 1992. It didn’t happen, the establishment still reigns — though I really believe it is close to breathing its last breath.

So even though I am not 100% sold on John Kerry and I still do not believe he was the best candidate to emerge from the primaries, I will support him and I will vote for him. It is as I have said many, many times, anybody — anybody — will be inifinitely better than four more years of George W. Bush.

Perhaps my excitement will increase as the week progresses. Don’t count on me to stop bashing Bush, though, as the Democrats in Boston have promised to do this week. I’ve been bashing him since he first became governor of my state, and I see no reason to stop now.