Really, When Did This Happen?

And why did we let it happen?

Hope for the Left, In Spite of Yesterday's Loss

Okay, sure, Jon Ossoff lost yesterday against Republican Karen Handel in Georgia's 6th District.

You wouldn't think anyone in this nation could say, publicly, in the middle of a political campaign, as Ms. Handel did, that she's against a living wage and still win an election but here we are.

That said, even with knowledge of yet one more loss today, last evening, there are two things to keep in mind. First, there is this from the  New York Times a few days ago (link below).

If Mr. Ossoff wins the election, Republicans can argue — with some credibility — that Georgia’s Sixth was a particularly ripe opportunity for Democrats at a time when Mr. Trump’s ratings among college-educated voters have sunk into the low 30s.

But even if he loses, Mr. Ossoff’s strong performance has already demonstrated that Republicans in well-educated but traditionally conservative areas now shoulder the burden of Mr. Trump’s weak performance. It suggests that previously safe Republican incumbents in Orange County, Calif., or the suburbs of Dallas and Houston could face serious challenges next November. And most important, a close race in Georgia’s Sixth suggests that control of the House is in play, regardless of which candidate comes out on top.

Second, next, there is this today, from Professor Robert Reich's Facebook page.

As the national political and media world focused heavily on the Georgia race, an underfunded, overlooked Democrat, Archie Parnell, also a first-time candidate, almost pulled off a huge upset in the South Carolina seat vacated by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director. Parnell lost by about 2,800 votes, a little more than 3 percentage points, after party leaders decided to devote all their attention in the run-up to Tuesday’s elections to the Ossoff-Handel race.

Bottom line: Democrats are doing extraordinarily well in traditionally red districts -- and have an excellent chance of taking back the House next year.

So take heart all you Liberals (libruls), Lefties, Democrats, Progressives and Socialists out there. There is cause and room and reason for hope.

We just have to get out there and work our tails off.

And VOTE, of course.

Links:

The 15 Best-Educated Districts in the U.S., 

and Why It Matters in the Georgia Race

Robert Reich

The Democratic Party Must Finally Abandon Centrism

Don't get demoralized by the big Georgia loss, Democrats

I'm Not Demoralized by Jon Ossoff's Loss

Neither Triumph Nor Despair: Sizing Up a Loss in Georgia

Buck Up, Democrats

Decision 2016, In the Can

It's all over but the crying.

On Dubya's chosen Iraq War then and Israel's occupation now

Chris Hedges, over at Truthdig, posts a magnificent column today on the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney wildly illegal and irresponsible Iraq War they dragged us into and on Israel's oppression of the Palestinians now and why it all matters:

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Just a bit from it:

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman,George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

We need to be better than that 2nd Iraq War and we need to make certain nothing like it happens again.

Speaking up now, against the oppression of the Palestinian people, even if it is by the Israelis, is merely the right thing to do.

What those daffy Liberals and Lefties and Communists believe

Just crazy, aren't they?

Can you imagine?

Those crazy, Leftist, Pinko, Commies are at it stil

Big, ugly, inefficient government?

Or people working together?

From Slate.com:

"Massachusetts tops the nation in fourth and eighth grade education, has the lowest child and teen mortality rates, the lowest percentage of uninsured residents, and the second-highest per capita personal income in the country.

Maybe the liberals there are doing something right?"

Link: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/05/massachusetts_is_the_best_state_in_the_union_.single.html

A Liberal?

"What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'Liberal?' If by 'Liberal' they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of 'Liberal. But if by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal.'" --Former President John F. Kennedy

If you can't laugh at yourself, right?

Right wing ignorance on Sunday's op/ed page in The Star

I can't imagine two more Right Wing cases (outside of the Tea Party) than George Will, nationally, and Thomas McClanahan, locally. And each of them, yesterday, on the op/ed page had two of the most either wrong or ignorant columns I could imagine. Mr. Will came down squarely against campaign finance reform laws while Mr. McClanahan's headline spoke for itself: "IS PRESIDENT OBAMA TO THE LEFT OF DENG XIAOPING?" To Mr. Will's column, I have to ask, how else are we to get corporate and wealthy people's money (bribes) out of our legislator's pockets and out of legislation and so, out of our government, unless and until we kill these "campaign contributions." The answer is, of course, we won't. We need stringent campaign finance reform and we need it badly and as soon as possible. As for Mr. McClanahan's column, it's just too plainly ignorant to spend (waste?) time or energy on. Links: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/24/3164591/is-president-obama-to-the-left.html; http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/24/3164592/rigging-the-process-via-curbs.html

Great question

Answer:  It's not.  It's decidedly not.

Oh, yeah, and to repeat, Jesus would have been a "Liberal".

This is why Republicans and the Right-wing hate the media

Proof positive, folks, of why the Republicans and Right-wing hate the media, first, but also call it the "Liberal" and "Left-wing" media (well, besides the fact that they keep reminding us of those pesky poor people in the world, of course).  This article out today on Yahoo! News and written by and for the Associated Press:

Across country, GOP pushes photo ID at the polls

By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. – Empowered by last year's elections, Republican leaders in about half the states are pushing to require voters to show photo ID at the polls despite little evidence of fraud and already-substantial punishments for those who vote illegally.

See that?  Right up there, above?  That part where the author wrote "despite little evidence of fraud and already-substantial punishments for those who vote illegally."?  

That's what they hate.

Is it true?

Sure it is.

Is it documentable?

Again, yes, absolutely, and it has been proven in state after state, all across the country.

Will that stop the Republican leadership from pushing this "shrink the voting electorate" agenda of theirs?

Certainly not.

And in the meantime, they want--prefer--that the media just kindly please shut up and stop reporting this stuff, even if it is true and patently, provably true, at that.

It's that nasty, Left-wing, clearly Liberal media that hurts this country.

All that information and truth and data and statistics.

Liberal, left-wing, progressive, inclusive haters.

Link to original post:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110325/ap_on_re_us/us_voter_id

Quote of the day--on being a "Liberal"

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal.'"   --President John F. Kennedy

Olbermann quits--or is fired from--"Countdown"

Or so you would think.

Yi.

Chill, people.

Want better government? Get behind the "Fair Elections Now Act"

Everyone complains about government. Sure. We always have and always will. But doesn't it seem as though it's gotten far worse? Doesn't it seem as though the big corporate money and lobbyists and problems have pretty much taken over? Would you want to take our government back? I know I would. This is a big part of how we could do it: In a push to implement a publicly-financed election system and curb moneyed interests in politics, a pair of good-government groups is launching a television ad campaign with a noteworthy price tag. Common Cause and Public Campaign, two organizations known for exposing the murkier influences on legislative and electoral processes, are staking $8 million to try and burnish Congress with the willpower to pass the Fair Elections Now Act. And they're willing to spend as much as $15 million on their campaign-season gambit. We need to get campaign finance reform, shorten our elections as the British have done (this isn't pushing for that, unfortunately), and get big money, the corporations and their lobbyists out of our government. We need to take our government back and this is how to do it. You need to be aware of this and we all--Right, Left, Center, Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats, everyone--need to get behind this. It's not about taking a voice away from any one of these groups (except maybe fatcat, corporate Republicans). It's about giving a voice BACK to the American people. Let's do this. Link to original post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/good-government-ad-campaign_n_638887.html

2 HuffPo articles on the "Tea Party" and its lack of a future

The first headline: Lindsey Graham On Tea Party: 'Just Unsustainable,' No 'Coherent Vision,' Will 'Die Out' Here's hoping he's right. I believe he is. And a quote from the second by writer Richard Geldard: It is a misnomer to call the Tea Party a protest movement. It's just a bumper sticker movement spawned in irrational anger but without coherent protest. Genuine protest produces poetry, not slogans. And then, once it's dead, let's hope these people reclaim their mantlehood of and as Americans and they rejoin the rest of us--Conservatives, Libertarians and yes, even the Liberals, Leftists, Moderates and all others of various beliefs, colors, creeds and sexual orientations, and help us both define and then solve our problems. Link to original posts here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/lindsey-graham-on-tea-par_n_632480.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-geldard/why-the-tea-party-has-no_b_632658.html

Screwed-up priorities

Wow.

Did you see this story?

It's on page A2 of the Star today, and a small article, at that, under "Today's Top 5".

It seems someone let their dog urinate on a 69-year old former-Marine's well-manicured lawn and he got upset. He got so upset, he killed the neighbor whose dog it was.

To repeat: wow.

Holy cow.

Stunning.

Shocking.

Disturbing.

Disturbed.

And sure, that's what I mean by "screwed-up priorities".

But that's not all.

The other, further part of this is that the guy's bail is set at three million dollars. That's right, $3 million.

It seems that, as a culture, we are so quick and decisive to do something really tough to people who do things to pets--dogs and cats--but if you do it to a child, an infant, well, you get punished, but not anything like if you did/do to that pet.

Abuse a child? Sure, you get spanked.

You might spend a few years in jail or something, absolutely.

But somehow kill a dog?

Fugghedaboudit.

You're going away.

And this is one such case, it seems to me.

You can have children starving in Mississippi for decades--but that's just because they're poor or black or trying to abuse the system.

Abuse one animal?

You're going down, big time.

What's the number one newer news segment on the 10 O'clock news?

Frequently, it's the "adopt-a-pet" feature.

Where's the one about the 13 year old boy or girl who needs a foster home?

Oh, that's right. That would make the news channel "Liberal" or "Left" or Left-leaning" or just too political or sympathetic, wouldn't it?

Pathetic. Pitiful.

Yeah, we have screwed up priorities, all right.

Wow.