More Zealous Religious Fascism Is Not What The World Needs

Live from St. Paul: America is Safe!

And Now, Appearing at Your National Carnival in St. Paul!

Talk about long overdue!

The War Crimes of the victors are never punished - they simply disappear into the fanciful weave of cultural folklore.

That no serving U. S. president has ever visited Hiroshima is scandalous...that no apology has ever been extended, a mockery of international justice.

Hats off to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who on Tuesday, became the highest-ranking serving American official to pay respects at the memorial site of the world's first atomic bomb attack.

zjm

More on the GOP VP pick...

Sarah Palin: "conduct unbecoming a human being, never mind a governor" - Vice President, or God Forbid, President? PLEASE!

Palin's responses on radio talk show very unbecoming

DAN FAGAN | COMMENT | 1/27/08

The governor's appearance on KWHL's "The Bob and Mark Show" last week is plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician.

Anchorage DJ Bob Lester unleashed a vicious, mean-spirited, poisonous attack on Senate President Lyda Green last week while our governor was live on the air with him.

When we played the tape on my show the day after it happened, we received 130 calls. Even some Palinbots were disgusted.

The Daily News posted the recording on its Web site and it fired up bloggers.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial writers demanded the governor apologize. The Juneau and Ketchikan papers also ran the editorial.

The Daily News opinion page addressed the governor's gaffe. They wrote "She came off looking immature herself, almost high-schoolish. It was conduct unbecoming a governor."

It was conduct unbecoming a human being, never mind a governor.

The governor's office eventually tried to spin the public relations disaster, releasing a statement reading, "Governor Palin was caught off guard by Bob Lester's reference to Senate President Lyda Green."

I don't buy it. Early on in the conversation before Palin started to crack up, Lester referred to Sen. Green as a jealous woman and a cancer. Palin, who knows full well Lyda Green is a cancer survivor, didn't do what any decent person would do, say, "Bob, that's going too far."

But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.

Lester questioned Green's motherhood, asking Palin if the senator cares about her own kids. Palin laughs.

Then Lester clearly sets the stage for what he is about to say by warning his large audience and Palin. He says, "Governor you can't say this but I will, Lyda Green is a cancer and a b----." Palin laughs for the second time.

What were teenage boys thinking when they heard the governor laugh at someone being called a b----? How about the teenage girls who look up to Palin. What did they think when they heard her laugh?

But there is more. Lester then describes Green's chair as big and cushy. A clear reference to the senator's weight. Palin laughs a third time. She's just having a grand old time.

Palin was clearly enjoying every second of Lester's vicious attack on her political rival.

But it gets worse.

Lester asks Palin point blank: "Do you have any idea of what you did, to make Lyda Green dislike you, hate you?" How does Palin respond? Does she do the right thing? What you would expect from a mature leader, a governor and say, "Bob, Lyda doesn't hate me."

No, she responds like a 13-year-old and says, "Um, you know once and a while I try to figure that out but I can't figure that out."

The Palin camp says the governor did call Green and apologize. That was the right thing to do. But the governor's statement shows the apology a half-hearted one.

The statement in part reads: "The Governor called Senator Green to explain that she does not condone name-calling in any way and apologized if there was a perception that the comment was attributed to the Governor."

But there's strong evidence Palin did condone Lester's name-calling. At the end of Lester making fun of Green as a mother, calling her a cancer, twice, and saying she has to go; after calling the senator a b----, making fun of her weight, and accusing Green of being jealous and hateful; after all of that, Lester ends the conversation offering to visit Palin.

How does Palin respond? "I'd be honored to have you."

The statement released by the governor's office also called Palin's action bad judgment.

But bad judgment is when you stay up late the night before a big test, order steak at a Chinese restaurant or wear blue jeans to a black tie affair.

What the governor did was wrong.

Not only did she sit by and watch a decent public servant get thrashed in front of tens of thousands of people, she actually enjoyed it.

This is our governor, for goodness sake.

Our leader. I wonder.

Dan Fagan is a radio talk show host on KFQD 750 AM

Have a listen for yourself...

A woman - but why this woman?

Susan Reimer | 9/1/08
So. This is what being pandered to feels like.

John McCain picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and mother of five, to be his running mate to woo women like me.

He seems to think that my girlfriends and I are so disappointed that an utterly qualified woman is not going to be president that we will jump at the chance to vote for an utterly unqualified woman for vice president.

You gotta love a guy who thinks things are that simple.

Women already outvote men in this country, and it isn't because we like voting for all those women on the ballot.

Does McCain think we will be so grateful for a skirt on the ticket that we won't notice that she's anti-abortion, a member of the NRA and thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution?

His selection of Sarah Palin is insulting on so many levels that I am starting to feel like the Geico caveman.

You want to look like a maverick and like you think outside the box? Pick a woman for a running mate.

You want to look good to the evangelicals? Choose a running mate with a Down syndrome child.

(When James Dobson, the conservative Christian radio host who fancies himself a kingmaker, jumped up to say that the selection of Palin means he can now "pull the lever" for John McCain, I almost felt sick. I don't know what I'll do if she trots out the story of her 5-month-old baby to shore up the Republican base.)

Palin's personal story is very compelling, but it reads more like a movie pitch than a resume for national leadership.

Champion high school athlete, beauty queen. Married to her high school sweetheart. Car-pooling supermom who went from PTA activist to mayor of her tiny (population 9,000) Alaskan town.

Fisherman, sportswoman, hunter. Speaks truth to power in a state corrupted by oil. Has a son headed to Iraq. A woman who made the decision to carry to term a baby she knew to be developmentally disabled.

She makes John McCain, Naval Academy graduate, fighter pilot and prisoner of war, look like just another grouchy, old, rich white guy.

Oh. Right. He is.

And that's the other point here. McCain is 72. He has had at least four go-rounds with melanoma, a deadly cancer.

Under the circumstances, the decision to choose this woman over the likes of, say, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson looks less like a stroke of genius than a stroke. It looks crazy. It looks wacky.

And that's the other part of this decision that is so infuriating.

If you are going to pick a woman for the sake of picking a woman, can you at least make it a credible choice?

Can you at least make a choice that doesn't give the gag writers for Jay Leno and Jon Stewart the month off?

(The jokes started immediately: She won't be able to hold her own against Joe Biden in a vice presidential debate. But wait until the swimsuit portion of the competition.)

Can you at least make a choice that doesn't have Rush Limbaugh panting? (He called Palin a "babe." It was another memorable moment in the ascent of women in this country.)

Barack Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, for heaven's sake. And the best McCain can do is a woman who minored in poly-sci at the University of Idaho?

Palin might do just fine during the campaign. And she might do an excellent job of going to diplomatic funerals. (Which McCain once said is the only job description for the vice presidency.)

But it is more likely that she will be in over her head, and all the women McCain thinks he is courting will be cringing for our sister instead. And then we will be furious at him for setting one of us up to fail.

It isn't just that Palin might look bad campaigning against the likes of Biden or Obama.

It's that she already looks bad compared to the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Best Stay in Alaska, Governor

Bill Maher on the choice of Sarah Palin

Eyes of World on American Election

I was privileged to spend most of the first 15 years of my life growing up in the Philippines. My view of the United States was formed through a lens looking back at the white picket fences of my country, as opposed to having those white picket fences serve as blinders to keep the rest of the world at bay. I came to understand the difference between the love other peoples of the world have for Americans and the American Dream...and the disdain they hold for the often provincial and myopic political leadership that wars against that very American Dream, as well as the best interests of all nations.

Lisa Van Dusen has penned a column this morning that brings to life the importance of Barack Obama, and his campaign, to all of us who inhabit this tiny planet at this critical juncture in history. It is a column of wisdom that reflects the perspective of the world I came to know as a child looking out over the South China Sea.

zjm

Eyes of World on American Election

by Lisa Van Dusen, Sun Media

One thing about U.S. presidential campaigns that doesn't apply anywhere else on the same scale is that when America picks a president, the whole world is watching.

If there was any doubt elsewhere that progress has a life of its own in America, 45 years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and 40 years after Bobby Kennedy predicted it could happen within 40 years, the first black candidate claimed the mantle of presidential nominee of a major party.

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination Friday night, it meant something not just to African Americans and to all Americans, but to people watching around the world, many of whom doubted that it could actually happen.

For all the hits Obama took this summer from the Republicans for his international popularity, it was no accident that 200,000 people came out to hear him speak in Berlin in July, and it's no accident that he's equally popular elsewhere, including Canada.

It isn't, as the attack-ad mongers would have you think, because foreigners are foreign and so is he. Obama's race didn't matter to those people who stood in Berlin that day; Germans have their own historic traumas to heal. But they know his race does matter to some Americans, and that if he becomes the next president of the United States anyway it will be in part because enough of those voters overcame the very fears of change, of the unknown and of the "other" that his international popularity has been used to stoke.

It may be that Obama is popular elsewhere not just because, in Canada for instance, we tend to favour Democratic presidents but because an Obama victory would somehow represent the end of that era of post-9/11 insularity and fear that, projected as Bush foreign policy, became neurotically anti-diplomatic and objectifying to the countries in its crosshairs.

Because of the way he talks about America's role in the world and maybe because outsiders suspect that, as an African-American, he has a more nuanced relationship with power than previous presidents, foreigners see in Obama a potential dialing down of the big-stick Bush overkill of the last eight years.

As so many polls have shown in the years since the invasion of Iraq, foreigners still make the distinction between America and its leadership.

People still see and love those things about America that have lured, for more than a century, so many who know that to take your chances on an American experience you have to actually drink the water and for them, Obama represents more than the sum of his parts even as a symbol of racial reconciliation.

There may be a sense that if enough Americans can overcome that downright un-American reflex to stick with the safe and the inward, especially after the kind of shock that would understandably make you wary of the unknown, then there may be light at the end of the post-9/11 tunnel.

Even before Obama's speech Friday night, the rest of the world got hints from Denver that this election process might hold something close to the promise of a new normal.

SOMETHING LARGER

When Hillary and then Bill Clinton overcame the campaign baggage of seeing their own dream slip away to unify the party by endorsing Obama, it not only reminded Democrats that something larger is at stake, it reminded the world that there was a president before the last eight years who knew something about how to communicate in a way worthy of a great power, that there could be another one and that that unfortunate interlude was more about a man than about a country.

If Obama loses on merit; if his campaign somehow derails on the ground at this late stage or if Republican running mate Sarah Palin succeeds in rustling those die-hard Hillary voters to greener pastures on the rebound or he makes the sort of huge, unforeseeable gaffe that can't but disqualify him, then the rest of the world will turn the page.

But if he were to lose because not enough voters were ready to remember that witnessing history isn't always a bad thing, the reaction elsewhere may be regret over a reunion sadly postponed with an America that people would rather not stop waiting for.

History Made Once Again: The First Siamese Twins Candidate for President!

What? Who? It's okay... go ahead and have a good laugh!"

Introducing the New Republican Vice Presidential Candidate: A Heartbeat From the Presidency?

A Speech for the Ages

Only in America

Dignity, Grace, Strength, and Vision: The Next First Lady

The Lion Roars One More Time

Obama Chooses Biden -Joe Wastes No Time in Taking on McCain

Clinton Factor Lives On

Lisa Van Dusen | Sunday, August 24, 2008

I can't speak for all women who've given birth, but when I did it, there was a definite over-under moment about six hours into the contractions. As I was pacing around my coffee table cursing the words "creative visualization" and the womb-less bugger who thought them up, I looked down at my stomach, did the quick math on the situation and thought, "Okay, how do I get out of this?"

Then, just when it seemed I couldn't go to the next level, my pain threshold magically re-set itself like a jimmied odometer and I was able to get through the last bit.

As Barack Obama ponders the last 18 months of room service club sandwiches and hog-calling contests and looks ahead to the next few days in Denver, he could probably use just that sort of superhuman second wind.

This next bit for Obama will be a convention week that might have been entirely about hope and change -- and history -- but instead will also be about The Clintons, who, in this melodrama, come with an upper-case "The," and their own spine-chilling organ flourish.

Hillary, as runner-up, will deliver a prime-time speech Tuesday night and Bill, as the former two-term Democratic president and rightful big dog of the party, will speak Wednesday.

She will be nominated and put to an ostensibly symbolic roll call vote because her supporters will have come to Denver, to hear her tell it, in search of catharsis, and political convention roll call votes are famous for their purgative properties.

Observers at the more dubious end of the Clintonology spectrum know that the range of plausible scenarios might include something more sinister and that the process, cleansing though it may be, might also serve to devalue Obama's currency as the nominee.

HILLARY'S VISION

Because the general assumption among Clintonologists of every height, weight and paranoia class is that Hillary, rather than process her belated primary concession as a character-building loss, has seamlessly shifted her gaze toward her own catharsis in 2012, everything she says and does in Denver will be magnified.

In the weeks since Hillary conceded in June, she has been, except for that somewhat unnerving catharsis crack, an absolute trouper.

Bill, on the other hand, has made it known that he is pouting over his perceived mistreatment as a race-baiter during the campaign and that he has doubts about Obama's readiness to lead that couldn't possibly have anything to do with his wife's presidential ambitions. And when Bill Clinton is pouting, we are conditioned to know, anything can happen.

Because Hillary can't afford to do anything that could be construed as disloyal to a Democratic party she'll need in about two years if her universe unfolds as it might, her speech will likely be gracious, unequivocally supportive and wistfully humble about her own destiny.

But Bill's will be parsed for how long it takes him to mention Obama, how much of it is about Hillary, how much of it is about him, whether he uses the word "ready" and whether it's delivered by his voluble, generous inner dog or his gnarly, grudging, thwarted-entitlement inner dog.

If their famously double-edged political instincts haven't been entirely doused by anger over losing the nomination (and especially if, by the time this runs, she happens to have been named the longshot/shock-and-awe VP choice), they'll both give genuinely unifying speeches.

It's fun, right?

Obama, meanwhile, has to look like he's having fun again. He has to remind Democrats of why they wanted change in the first place and what that has to do with John McCain. He has to either explain why he won't fight dirty or decide that he will. And he has to revisit the issue of race in a way that establishes the act of transcending the wrong kind of doubt as a patriotic thing to do.

If he does buy into creative visualization, I'd suggest he picture a Denver boot; that big ugly metal clamp used to thwart scofflaws and carjackers. It was invented in 1953 by Frank Marugg, a violinist with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a man who clearly possessed a fine appreciation of both artistry and muscle.

Commentary by James Carville: Why Obama has to get mad to win

(CNN) -- With all of the vice presidential buzz in the air and the Democratic convention just days away, what's most important is what Sen. Barack Obama's campaign does following his speech to the masses at Invesco Field next Thursday.

Quite simply, he needs to create a more compelling narrative on change, use history as a context for the economy, and get mad about something.

First and foremost, Obama must bring a narrative to his position as a change agent. You can't simply seek change for change's sake.

The argument must be made that this is an election with two choices: the change-seeking good guys or the status quo-clinging bad guys. The campaign needs to brand every negative attack by the Republicans as just another desperate attempt of the status quo clinging to power.

Obama's campaign should argue that all of our political friends have the courage to break from the same old game in Washington in order to provide the change we need, while all of Sen. McCain's friends in Washington refuse a new direction for America.

McCain keeps trying to claim he's a "change Republican." I don't really know what that means, but Obama and his team must continue to highlight the "McSame" that he offers: more of the same failed Iraq policy, more of the same tax breaks for oil and drug companies, more of the same Swift-boat-style tactics, more of the same on education and healthcare.

And he certainly offers more of the same failed Bush economic policy, which leads me to my next point.

Obama can connect with voters on the economy by using history as a guideline. He should start by reading "Unequal Democracy," by Princeton academic Larry Bartels. The non-partisan and non-political Bartels points out devastatingly after an exhaustive study of Democratic and Republican presidents that the Democrats built a better economy and a more just society.

The campaign needs to say that, since 1900, Democratic presidents have not only "won" but dominated on every economic front: GDP growth, employment, deficit and income equality. Need more? How about a better performing stock market and a more fiscally-responsible spending.

There's no need to listen to McCain's marginal rates, death tax, deregulation, trickle-down, supply-side shenanigans because historically Democratic presidencies have produced better economies. And with the economy still in the forefront, it seems like a no-brainer for Obama to talk about the historical supremacy of economies under Democratic presidents.

And my last piece of advice to Obama and his team is to just get mad about something. Obama's campaign seems so intent on branding him as a "cool and calm" leader.

Well, voters want to see a sense of urgency and outrage in their president: Outrage over our dependence on foreign oil; outrage over our increased cost of living, health care and education; outrage over declining incomes; outrage over an endless war and an idiotic foreign policy; and outrage over our country's loss of prestige over the last 7½ years.

To put it bluntly, Obama needs to get outraged over something other than "attacks on his patriotism."

When all the dust settles after Denver, if Obama can do these things between now and November 4, he just may become President Barack Obama. No convention or vice-presidential pick will matter as much as connecting with voters on these key issues.

James Carville, a Democratic strategist who serves as a political contributor for CNN, was the Clinton-Gore campaign manager in 1992 and political adviser to President Clinton. Active in Democratic politics and a party fundraiser, Carville has not represented any U.S. politicians recently but has consulted internationally.