disconnect

Bush/Cheney campaign Church coordinator duties. Among my favorites:

Send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney '04 Headquarters or give to a BC04 Field Rep.

So in case you go to a church regularly and start getting unsolicited calls from the Bush campaign, you might have some idea how they got your name...

. . .place reminder bulletin about all Christian citizens needing to vote in Sunday program or on a board near the church entrance.

Today we turn to the scripture for... hey, wait a minute, what is this... "And Karl Rove's voice boomed down from the heavens, 'Blessed is he who votes for the President. Blessed are the wealthy, for their children shall inherit the earth (because we abolished the estate tax). And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my tax cuts, and you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my pre-emptive shock and awe upon thee.'"

Listen to Paul Krugman give the keynote address yesterday at a panel hosted by the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Chuck once sent me a link to a Krugman speech and it was quite good, even if it did leave me wanting to put all my money in a Swiss bank account and live in a bunker. But I enjoy his op-ed columns so much (like today's on Fahrenheit 9/11 and why it's been so successful telling us stuff we should have known already) that I thought everyone ought to have the chance to hear him in his own words, at length.

I haven't listened to it so I can't tell you if it's any good or not, or even how long it is, but when I'm off work this weekend I'll give it a listen.

Nice.

More here.

Since John Kerry commented this week that Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Illinois, will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention next month (possibly as the keynote speaker), I wanted to find out more about him and thought I'd pass it along.

Here is his standard campaign bio.
Here is a Washington Post article about him from last week (mirrored on his campaign site so you don't have to register with the WP to read it).
Finally, here is a story on him in the New Yorker.

(I wonder if linking like that screws up Google's page-ranking systems. Like when you link to George Bush's bio in a link called "miserable failure", it associates those words with that site, so when you do a search for "miserable failure", that's the top site you see (though Republicans have managed to get Jimmy Carter second and Michael Moore third). But I'm linking to everything with the word "here". Whatever.)


Edit: That New Yorker article is huge, but if you have the time to read it, it's really good. I thought I would post the following excerpt which was pretty funny:

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “OBAMA” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”

I had thought it was kind of dumb, touting the guy to be the first African-American President when he hasn't even won his Senate race, but after reading that article, given the choice in a 2008 or 2012 primary between him and Hillary Clinton, I can tell you who I'd be inclined to go towards.

One of the statistics in Fahrenheit 9/11 that I found difficult to believe was that Bush was on vacation 40% of the time before September 11. I mean, I know the guy goes on vacation a lot, but 40%? I wanted to see it for myself. So Google turned up this article on Slate counting the number of days pre-9/11 Bush was at Camp David, or Crawford, or Kennebunkport: 96 days between January and September 2001, or about 40 percent. But not only that, it links to a more recent article showing that he's been on vacation for part or all of 40% of the days since then too. This from our "war president". Was FDR at Camp David 40% of the days during WW2? What I'd be interested to see is how many days he vacations between now and November. I'm willing to bet that his attention gets a little more focused all of a sudden when facing being kicked out of office. It's unfortunate that leading the country for the other 3 1/2 years doesn't garner the same attention.

Finally, myself and whoever else is on either George Bush or John Kerry's mailing list has already heard about this, but while it's still up I wanted to mention it. It seems Bush has a new video up on the front page of his site, georgewbush.com. Go check it out. I notice now that it begins with the disclaimer "The following video contains remarks made by and images from ads sponsored by Kerry supporters." This helps me understand what the hell is going on, but not by much. It then goes on to say that Kerry's campaign attacked him for this ad, but didn't attack people comparing Bush to Hitler. Aside from the absurdity of making John Kerry responsible for the actions of every person who hates George Bush, I recall Bush's spokesman pointedly refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh for comparing the Abu Ghraib torture to fraternity hazing, and calling it "brilliant". Just for context here.

Anyway, that disclaimer was added after I watched the ad Friday night, so let's get to business. The general idea of the ad is that Democrats are angry and yell a lot. So it starts with Al Gore yelling. Al Gore funny. Then, Adolf Hitler pops up. Um... ok. You may or may not notice something afterward saying "sponsored by moveon.org". This initially led me to believe that it was some ad moveon.org sponsored, which is only vaguely accurate, but more on that later. Suffice it to say that without the disclaimer that was added, I had to watch it twice before I could figure out what the deal was. So after Hitler pops up, Howard Dean is next. Nice juxtaposition. Then Michael Moore, then Dick Gephardt. Then Hitler, again. Now they've added "Images from moveon.org ad" to the bottom. Nice touch, since earlier there was nothing at all to indicate where the Hitler footage was from. It appeared to simply be Hitler sandwiched in between Gephardt and more pictures of Al Gore yelling for no apparent reason. I inferred that this was another anti-Bush ad, which again was partially correct, but with nothing to tell you one way or the other before they added the disclaimer, it was simply Hitler included in images of Democrats. After Al Gore finishes, John Kerry comes on. He says something about Bush "kicking your ass", in the context of laying off your camel and taxing your shovel, in a mildly agitated voice. The fact that this was the footage of Kerry they got at his most riled up doesn't exactly blow me away - in fact he sounds practically comatose compared to those other guys. That's not surprising given that Kerry is rather dull, but this ad needed "angry Kerry" footage so they did the best they could I guess. Then a picture of Bush shows up with soothing music that could be in a Bush ad parody if it wasn't real, made all the more ironic that basically all of Bush's ads have been attack ads. All in all the most bizarre ad I've ever seen for a political race, and it's been on Bush's front page for three days now.

So what about those Hitler ads? Now they've established that they're from moveon.org. Moveon.org, by the way, is not affiliated with Kerry's campaign (and was actually much more affiliated with Dean at the time those ads were produced). With no help Friday night, I guessed that they were ads that moveon.org sponsored. Their disclaimers reinforce that in the current ad. However, these are actually ads submitted for moveon.org's Bush in 30 Seconds contest, the winner of which was supposed to air during the Super Bowl before CBS banned it. Moveon.org took the ads down when notified of their Hitler-ness. But according to the ad, they're right up there identifying the Democratic party along with Gore, Dean, Gephardt and Kerry.

Now I've heard Ann Coulter say "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." and that we should kill civilians in reference to Muslim countries after 9/11. I've read conservative message boards where people make fun of the Israeli peace protester crushed by a bulldozer. I've seen comments in message boards where people advocated nuking Fallujah after the American contractors were burned and hung from a bridge (examples: one, two, three). Even though I think Bush and co. are right-wing nuts, I don't attribute those statements of other wingnuts to the administration because they didn't say them. Bush's administration doesn't have any control over what these loons say. Similarly, neither Kerry nor any member of his campaign ever said Bush was Hitler, nor do they have any power to keep anyone from comparing the two. And the ad was even pulled from moveon.org after it was noticed. But hey, let's not waste an opportunity to put Kerry in bed with the guys who made the ads comparing Bush and Hitler. And if some people view the ad before we add the disclaimers, or don't quite understand what the disclaimers mean and associate the Democratic party with Adolf Hitler, well that's just a shame, isn't it? On the front page of the website. I knew they'd start getting desperate when they started falling behind, but in June, this is unbelievable.