John Edwards on the Rise for 2008

John Edwards on the Rise for 2008

The NY Observer is reporting that Hillary Clinton's "Iowa predicament can be summarized in two words: John Edwards." Steve Kornacki says:

Consider yourself excused if you haven’t kept tabs on Mr. Edwards since 2004. Now an exiled former Senator based out of Chapel Hill, N.C., he has been toiling under the radar, and the opinion-shaping class in Washington sneers at his prospects. But look for yourself and you’ll find a new Mr. Edwards emerging before your eyes: an unreconstructed, Potomac-phobic crusader for economic justice who has persuasively repented for voting as a Senator to send America to war.

Chuck Todd sees John Edwards as a candidate who may naturally benefit from the new DNC primary calendar for 2008:

Think of this primary calendar schedule as a "draw" and then match up the candidates best positioned to run the table in those states.

Suddenly, you come up with another front-runner with Clinton: and his name isn't Mark Warner or Evan Bayh or John Kerry. It's John Edwards.

Organizationally, Edwards is in the best shape of anyone in Iowa. His close ties to the hotel labor workers give him an interesting leg up in Nevada. South Carolina is a primary he's already won once. About the only state where Edwards is weak is New Hampshire. And, frankly, if he wins Iowa and Nevada, New Hampshire support will gravitate to him. He's planted plenty of support seeds in the state, but he's just never been anyone's 1st or 2nd choice.

But let's forget geography for a minute and look at who is best positioned on the two biggest issues Democrats will debate between now and 2008 -- Iraq and electability. Edwards has become an unabashed opponent of the war and liberal activists in Iowa will remember that. That should play well in New Hampshire as well. He's also heavily courting labor and someday labor is going to matter again in a Democratic primary; at least that's what labor keeps telling itself. But the combination of labor and Iraq positions Edwards very neatly to Clinton's left, where she'll leave a vacuum since she's trying so hard right now to make herself electable in a general.

Fox News is reporting that Americans are giving John Edwards "a second look" for 2008 and they show how, in an August Gallup poll, Hillary Clinton's lead is diminishing while Edwards' is raising:

Thirty-five percent of respondents said [Hillary Clinton] was the Democrats' best bet compared to 24 percent who said former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards would be a winner. Seventeen percent backed former Vice President Al Gore and 13 percent pointed to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the party's presidential candidate in 2004.

In June (June 1-4), the Gallup poll reported Hillary Rodham Clinton had a 36% rating among Democratic voters and John Edwards had had only 12%. Edwards has doubled his support among Democrats in two short months.

In the August Gallup poll, the gap between Clinton and Edwards is even smaller when the Republicans' opinion on the chance of a Democratic candidate defeating a Republican candidate comes into play.

In the following poll question, you can see that those who choose Edwards are firmest in their belief that no other Democratic candidate would prevail against a Republican in 2008. This shows strength in voter confidence toward John Edwards.

When You Can't Afford to Go Back Home Again..

When You Can't Afford to Go Back Home Again...

If you asked Americans, I'd wager that a significant amount of them would be ashamed to know that, after Katrina, many families who rented apartments in New Orleans will never be able to afford an apartment in New Orleans again.

LINK

[..] Before the storm, [Tina Moore] paid $415 a month for an apartment. Now those few available apartments are going for nearly twice that amount.

"I don't make that kind of money. Neither does my husband," she said. [..]


[..] According to a report released Wednesday by the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP many Gulf Coast residents like Moore who lost everything in the storm stand little chance of getting any of the billions in federal recovery dollars streaming into the region.

Nearly half of Gulf Coast residents were renters, not homeowners. Most of those residents, many of whom make up the Coast's working poor, are not eligible for a share of the $5.1 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds allocated to the state last December.

The report, which was produced in conjunction with the Rutgers University School of Public Policy, found that renters and low- to moderate-income residents face more hurdles to recovery and risk falling prey to predatory lenders.

The report praises the philanthropic efforts of charities and faith-based groups, but concludes those efforts are not enough to plug the gaps.

Minister Points to Old-Time Religion After Katrina

Minister Points to Old-Time Religion After Katrina

Katrina served to change one minister's church and faith focus from what he calls the focus of the "normal" American church toward a more ancient Biblical time - or a third world. On the first-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Rev. Cliff Nunn, pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, will preach at a Marietta church.

"I believe one of our major roles as clergy is interpreting this event for the rest of the country. We need to go to where they are and encourage them to come to where we are. If I can get them down here and get them a scouting trip, I can tell people we have a mission field down here. We need all the help and support we can get."

Pastor Cliff Nunn said First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans lost 46 pews, 184 hymnals and 92 Bibles when water filled the sanctuary to a depth of two feet. Photo credit: Evan Silverstein.
Caption credit: PC-USA

Katrina served to turn Reverend Nunn around after he saw what became of the people in his small parish.

....the storm upturned normal lives and so-called normal churches, he said. "The storm makes you into a church that is much more like the Old Testament image of the Israelites and the New Testament early church than our normal American church experience. There are people who are suffering and poor and who have diseases - and you don't typically have that in the normal American church. And so people feel like they have been made abnormal. I used to have some poor people in my church. Well, now I have a whole bunch of people with a whole set of problems."

What he says here reminds me of the Biblical references to lepers.

It doesn't matter to the volunteers who've traveled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast - Republican, Democrat, church, religious affiliation - people who are willing to help their fellow men and women in New Orleans are finding their "own circle"...and this circle reminds Reverend Nunn of the earliest Christians at a time when the passions were pure and the motivation was nothing more than the message of love.

Since Katrina Hit the Gulf Coast

Since Katrina Hit the Gulf Coast...

At the most recent count, 1,836 people lost their lives as a result of the storm, with a further 150 still unaccounted for almost a year after the event. (some say 1723). Forty nine victims remain unidentified. Developers want to bulldoze the areas where the poorest populations resided. Many of those people are still waiting to get their possessions out of their condemned apartments.

Outside the tourist areas, New Orleans seems ghostly a year after Katrina. Shopping plazas are boarded up in empty parking lots. In one article, a comment was made that "ruined belongings are still piled up in yards, and it looks like a week has passed since Hurricane Katrina, not a year."

Less than half of city's 450,000 population have gone back to their homes one year after Katrina. Newsweek has a new article about where the storm evacuees are today. Many of the 25,000 to 50,000 evacuees in Baton Rouge, Louisiana today are uninsured, and hundreds are still living in FEMA trailer villages—unsure how to start anew, with no place else to go. A Texas state-funded survey released recently implies that most of the quarter of a million Katrina evacuees still living in Texas don't have jobs and nearly half live in households with incomes of less than $500 a month.

More than one hundred thousand Gulf Coast residents have been living in FEMA trailers, which recently have been the focus of health and safety concerns. In St. Bernard parish, nearly 1,200 families are still waiting to get into trailers that sit locked on their home sites but need utilities or other services and an additional 400 families who were made homeless by Katrina are still waiting for trailers. Until recently, FEMA was not allowing residents in FEMA camps to speak freely with the press. Some families have been waiting since last October for a huge pile of sand left by the levee break to be removed from their back-yards so they could begin to repair and rebuild. In some spots, the sand was higher than the window sills of the homes.



Eldo and Julia Allen's story is a testament to the kind of government failure that cuts to the soul's core. Say a prayer for them tonight as Katrina's anniversary draws near.

American Psycho Blames American Psyche

American Psycho Blames American Psyche

Psyche is defined as the seat of the faculty of reason.

George W. Bush says the American psyche is "strained."

Given the fact that Bush flatly refuses to campaign for the Republican candidate in Connecticut - just because Joe Lieberman supports the Iraq war - shows that Bush's own reasoning faculties are intact and that the psyche of the Republican National Committee is hard at their desperate work.

With his usual fuggly grimace, Dick Cheney adds to the psyche strain by blatantly suggesting that Connecticut voters are aiding the terrorists by having democratically chosen someone in the Connecticut primary who strips the emperor of the paper-thin veil of clothing he's got left.

The Bush administration has been a miserable and embarrassing failure in Middle East policy. And Bush blames the psyche of the Americans, in yet another astounding attempted escape from accountability, for his own responsibility for the faliure in Iraq.

The American people are smart enough to have reasoned it all out by now. If there is an effect on the American psyche, it comes with the innate ability to reason with which each human is potentially equipped by the Creator.

What Bush is really saying is: Americans aren't stupid. They see my complete failure. They're concerned. They're going to vote for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 because Democrats won't only bring tax relief to the middle class, they will bring death-relief, disaster-relief, and failure-relief.

What better way is there to unstrain the psyche?

Mary Beth Maziarz

Mary Beth Maziarz

Listen to the sweet voice of Mary Beth Maziarz singing A More Perfect World. This YouTube video is a creation by " mnemosyne23" featuring the characters Jim and Pam from an NBC show that I love - "The Office".



Note: The YouTube video is strictly from the creator's own artistic ideas, not an actual production of The Office show. Mary Beth's songs have been heard on TV shows like Dawson's Creek, Everwood, Beautiful People, and Joan of Arcadia

Bush's Strategy....

Bush's Strategy....



"The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and their dreams.."

- George W. Bush, August 21, 2006

A Year After: Katrina Poverty Ignored - Poor Berated by Some

A Year After: Katrina Poverty Ignored - Poor Berated by Some

I added some links to this excerpt from a Shreveport Times op-ed from a Louisiana minister who has been highly disappointed about the political rhetoric of false promise and the lack of action on poverty.

As the anniversary of Katrina approaches, I wonder what happened to the great debate on poverty in America.

Shortly after the hurricane, politicians on the right, left and in the center were talking about the ugliness of poverty. Even the president stood in New Orleans' Jackson Square and spoke about the deep, persistent poverty in the Gulf Coast region. Promises of action were made. So, what happened since?

Not much. But that shouldn't be surprising. After all, talk is cheap.

We've all seen political opportunism before. The reality is there is more political traction to be gained by playing the politics of terror and politics of religiosity than the politics of helping those in need. Recent elections bear out that there is no political pressure on elected officials or points to be made helping poor people. Too many people believe the poor are either not poor enough or they are poor by choice. Not to mention those who see the poor purely through the prism of race and therefore say, "why bother?" While many Americans were truly generous and briefly remorseful there still are those who saw Katrina as just another opportunity to berate the poor and underprivileged.

The federal poverty level for a family of four is $18,400. However, realistic evidence shows at least double the amount considered poverty is needed for most families to provide basic necessities like adequate food, stable housing and health care. The families who live in a sort of "gray area" between "official" poverty and minimum economic security share many of the material hardships and financial pressures "officially" poor families face. Studies suggest approximately 40 percent of all American children live in low-income households.

That's troubling.

Let's face it, the talk about a new attack on poverty was dead in the political water from the start. While Katrina momentarily increased empathy for the poor, it didn't alter the public attitudes of likely voters toward them. What is unfortunate is that people tend to equate the terms poverty and welfare. While we all saw the horrible depictions of the elderly trapped in the scorching heat without medicine or children trapped on rooftops all some people could think about were welfare checks.

Someday, politicians of all stripes will take poverty seriously. And someday, propagandists will stop framing poverty as an issue of laziness.

That day may come when attitudes change.

- Gregory Hudson, a local minister from Shreveport, La.

DSCC Leader Mark Pryor Betrays democracy and Democrats

DSCC Leader Mark Pryor Betrays democracy and Democrats

In my book, any Democrat who would ignore the Connecticut Democratic primary voters' choice Ned Lamont - like DSCC vice-chairman Mark Pryor who so disrespects real Democrats and trashes traditional democracy - is a blatant betrayer of his own party and of the American way.



Pryor's the same turncoat who sided with the Republican party and the Bush administration in favor of using torture as an interrogation tactic. America wants its values back!

Experts: Bush Foreign Policy A Bigger Security Threat than Iran

Experts: Bush Foreign Policy A Bigger Security Threat than Iran

This is a must-see from Foreign Policy Magazine. Click on each section below to read how more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts rated Bush's War on Terror.

McCain Would Heap More U.S. Troops on Iraq Mess

McCain Would Heap More U.S. Troops on Iraq Mess

On Meet the Press this morning, Senator John McCain rightfully criticized the Bush administration's many Iraq war blunders, but I felt that his failure - and his calculated resistance - to put any responsibility directly with the President of the United States was rationally ludicrous and it made McCain look like Eddie Haskell from the old Leave it to Beaver series.

SEN. MCCAIN: "It’s never been the right strategy as far as I’m concerned, since the beginning when I came back from my first trip to Iraq after every military person, including the British, told me that we didn’t have sufficient troops to control the situation."

Eddie Haskell was a well known insincere brown-noser. McCain talks about Bush like Eddie Haskell used to talk to Ward and June Cleaver. Kiss-up city. He verbally whips Donald Rumsfeld, but he tells us what a wonderful job President Bush is doing. Bah! Who does he think he's kidding? He tells us that there were never enough troops to do the job - as if that's news to us. That water that went under the bridge almost four wasted years ago.

I wondered why McCain would have spoken so highly of Bush at the 2004 RNC convention when he told David Gregory this morning that he had anticipated many problems because of the insufficient number of troops in Iraq.

He was overly critical, in my opinion, of General Peter Pace's recent comments about the state of the Iraq war - seemingly attempting to make General Pace look naive - while McCain defended the Commander in Chief and himself at every step of the Meet the Press interview.

How to insult General Pace, then go wobbly on the reality of civil war and what to do about it:

SEN. McCAIN: General Pace, you said there’s a possibility of the situation in Iraq evolving into civil war. Is that correct?

GEN. PETER PACE: I did say that, yes, sir.

SEN. McCAIN: Did you anticipate this situation a year ago?

GEN. PACE: No, sir.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: Why was that an important question and what did the answer tell you?

SEN. McCAIN: Because many of us anticipated that we would have greater difficulties because of the lack of troops on the ground and the lack of the elected government in Iraq from, from being able to stand up and from the problems with the police that many of us thought that it might—that this deterioration may take place. And we expect our leaders to anticipate things in war, we really do. And so because we don’t anticipate, then you are surprised.

"MR. GREGORY: Should U.S. troops remain in Iraq if they are in the middle of a civil war?

SEN. McCAIN: I think that that’s a very difficult decision because you’d have to, to decide whether we can have an effect on a civil war if it was taking place in Iraq, so I don’t know the answer."

"I’m not sure that it’s turned into a civil war."

McCain's answer is pouring more troops onto a four-year old disaster that has turned to an undeclared (and hotly burning) civil war.

"DAVID GREGORY: ...do you need more U.S. soldiers on the ground now?

SEN. McCAIN: I think so.."

More troops - and from where, you ask? I would have hoped David Gregory would have pinned McCain down on that one - where is he going to get these troops? A draft, perhaps? I really don't think an uneasy public is going to go gently toward that idea. McCain said - with much bravado - that President Bush doesn't pay attention to public opinion. More troops in Mess'o'potamia? Is McCain brown-nosing to get Rumsfeld's job, perhaps? (Who'd want it?)I think John 'Eddie Haskell' McCain had better think this one out again. Ward and June didn't like 'The Beave' and Wally hanging out with Eddie. Like Ward and June, many Americans won't be comfy with a weasly wobbler like John McCain hanging around our Oval Office. His respect for the President is more fake than Eddie's greasy compliments to Mrs. Cleaver.

Real Americans want to bring our troops home and see our leaders call a spade a spade.

Photo/Poem

Adirondack Mountain Pond
photo by Jude Nagurney Camwell

All day we swept the lake,
searched every cove,
North from Camp Maple, south
to Osprey Bay,
Watching when the loud dogs
should drive in deer,

Or, listening to the laughter of
the loon;
Or, in the evening twilight’s
latest red,
Beholding the procession of the
pines;
Or, later yet, beneath a lighted
jack,

In the boat’s bows, a silent night
hunter
Stealing with a paddle to the
feeding grounds
Of the red deer.

- from "The Adirondacs"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adirondack Lily
photo by Jude Nagurney Camwell

Hakuna Macaca

Hakuna Macaca

See Bob Geiger at the Yellow Dog blog for details. ;)

Don't miss Alternet's awesome singalong video!

Disney should sign George Allen on as their newest little slightly-simple-white-supremacist-but-oh-so-good-humored cartoon character.


* See Jeffrey Feldman's comments about Allen at Daily Kos.

John Edwards Supports Ned Lamont in New Haven

John Edwards Supports Ned Lamont in New Haven


photo by Aldon Hynes

Sen. Edwards in Ct with Ned Lamont! - One America blog

Guerrilla Vlogging: Lamont and Edwards in New Haven - mbair/DailyKos.com

JRE and Lamont in New Haven by Zen Blade/OAC blog

Edwards, at Lamont Rally, Says Democrats Must Beat G.O.P. ‘Fearmongering’ - NYT

A Heavyweight Stumps for Lamont - New Haven Democrat

John Edwards and Ned Lamont meet the bloggers - My Left Nutmeg

Lamont Confident He Can Broaden Base - CBS News

Edwards says his vote on Iraq was wrong - Mercury News/APWire

Lamont and Edwards Event Video - Connecticut Local Politics

Edwards Backs Lamont - Shows His Support in New Haven - Connecticut Blog

Mid-week Edition of JRE Buzz (18) - Benny's World

Ct. - Sen Edwards Says Joe Must Go - McJoan/Daily Kos

New at the Ned Lamont Resource Friday - Spazeboy


(see Video: Edwards Speaks to Spazeboy)


COMING UP:

John Edwards and Heath Shuler to address affordable housing in Hendersonville - NC Democratic Party

Turkey an Integral Political Player in Middle East

Turkey an Integral Political Player in Middle East

Turkey and Iran are apparently cooperating in cross-border attacks on Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. Turkey is claiming that the U.S. has not done their part in stepping up to the plate and flush out guerrillas linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have hideouts in Iraq.

Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts. "We would not hesitate to take every kind of measures when our security is at stake," Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said last week.

The worry for the U.S. would be the destabilization of the Kurds' self-ruled region, one of the only alleged post-invasion "success stories."

The U.S. is responding to Turkey's complaint that U.S. officials haven't spoken clearly or acted aggressively enough on the PKK "terrorist" threat:

Criticized by Ankara for not taking concrete steps against the terror network, the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party), the U.S. administration called upon the PKK “to cease its terrorist actions and lay down its arms.”

Turkey is still considering if and how they will contribute to a UN force in Southern Lebanon, expressing solidarity with the Lebanese government and keeping a close eye on Hezbollah - not wishing to be part of any force that could be seen as being against the Lebanese people. Turkish officials say that the stance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah towards the UN force will be an important factor in their final decision.

Since the US occupation forces in Iraq as well as the Jordanian government are preventing flights from Iran to use the Iraqi and the Jordanian airspace, the only loophole left for supplying Hezbollah with weapons would be Syria - via Turkey. Turkey is being urged by Israel to take all possible steps to prevent the transfer of arms from Iran to Syria to resupply Hezbollah. The Arab Monitor reports that the Israeli policy of trying to involve Turkey in an embargo against Iran puts Turkish interests under strain as Turkey has good commercial relationships with Iran and depends on Iran for gas and oil supplies.

Turkish pundit Cengiz Candar believes that Turkey's military contribution to any international force would symbolize a robust political comeback to the region. He gives three key reasons why there will be no real danger of a Turkish confrontation with Hezbollah, should Turkey decide to contribute to a UN force.

___________

Related:

Turkey And Iraq Are Inseparable Parts Of The Region, Gul - Turkish Press

'Turkey Could Play Critical Role in Peace Force' - Zaman Daily News

Fundamentalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

Fundamentalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

One thing that is particularly wrong with the direction the Bush administration has taken on foreign policy is that, if our government's leaders do not like what another nation is doing, they refuse to talk to any representative of that nation. There is little to be gained by such an approach.

In his book "Our Endangered Values - America's Moral Crisis," President Jimmy Carter mentions that his next book will cover developments in the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine. He talks about a trip he’d arranged to observe the Palestinian elections in 2005, and on that same trip he would have planned to visit Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. He had especially wanted to encourage the peace process between Israel and Palestine. When he notified the State Department and the White House of his plans, the president’s national security advisor called him and said that, because Syria had not been cooperative with certain issues involving the Iraq war, the U.S. policy was to restrict all visits to Damascus. There was what President Carter called a “heated discussion” between the two of them, and the final request was that, on behalf of President Bush, the trip was to be cancelled. A policy of not communicating with potential adversaries is an indication of a fundamentalist policy.

President Carter believes that the political right-wing has been influenced by a religious fundamentalist way of thinking: 'We don't deal with those who don't agree with us'; 'We don't talk with inferiors.' It is clear that a war in Iraq was planned long before George W. Bush was ever elected and that it was a coalition of right wing ideologues who have implemented the strategy that has the underlying premise: "A fundamentalist is never wrong." Religious fundamentalism is characterized by rigidity, domination, and exclusion. They are convinced that they are right and anyone who contradicts them is evil. The fundamentalist feels that they have a unique relationship with God - and that they actually speak for God. When there are serious differences between the U.S. and other nations, we cannot brand those who differ as pariahs or inferiors worthy of despise - yet fundamentalism in foreign policy tends to do just that. It leaves no room for discussing of ideas or for compromise.

The American people must redirect our government’s legal, religious, and political commitments to our long-held and unchanging principles.

As The One Year Anniversaryof Katrina Approaches

As The One Year Anniversary
of Katrina Approaches
Marc H. Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League doesn't have to use intellectual phrasings or fancy rhetoric to impress upon you what he's learned from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath:

I could rattle off tomes of statistics about disparity. I could talk about the wealth gap, the job gap, the wage gap and the health gap. I could speak in erudite and intellectual terms about income, health and equality in America. But I don't have to: Katrina did that for me through images of people suffering. It was through reality's lens that Americans witnessed the tragedy not through a full-length movie or cheap sound byte. But the images seen on most Americans' television sets nearly a year ago were not just pictures of my hometown. They represented people in poverty in urban areas all over the nation.

Last September, after seeing the face of poverty that Hurricane Katrina had revealed, I'd said,

A moral wake-up call to America is indicated by these recent events. If we saw the faces of our frightened and needy American brothers and sisters living in the kind of poverty that had trapped them in their city of ruins this week, and if it touched something deep inside of us, I believe that we need to make a commitment to not only call for their imminent basic needs to be met, but to call upon government to take every step possible to help them – and other Americans - to move out of their poverty.

In an article titled Bush's Poverty Talk Is Now All but Silent, the Washington Post's Michael Fletcher pointed out that aiding the poor seems to have been only a brief priority for President Bush after Katrina, and it soon dropped off the Republican radar. It took the GOP only nine months to wait out the disturbing images of New Orleans, and once they felt that the shocking poverty that Bush had paid lip service to after Katrina had faded enough from the national consciousness, they brought back their push for the estate tax repeal and used it as a double-cross against Democrats who wanted to raise the federal minimum wage for the common good.

A year after Katrina, the GAO reports that the Department of Homeland Security and National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) cannot say how they will meet the needs of nursing home residents during evacuations or how the federal government will assist state and local governments with transporting residents and patients from nursing homes and hospitals to NDMS mobilization centers.

Louisiana's state and local governments, already hit hard these past five years by shortfalls in federal funding, have taken the economic brunt of the troubled times on the Gulf Coast. Their problems with the federal government began with the woefully inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina by FEMA, which had been downgraded from a cabinet-level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security under President Bush. Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly called the four years preceding Hurricane Katrina "four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence." Last fall, in the face of all of the federal government's post-Katrina failures, U.S. House representative Tom Tancredo (R-Co) had the nerve to say that he didn't trust federal funds for rebuilding New Orleans in the hands of local governments. In light of the Jack Abramoff scandal that subsequently haunted so many Republicans and blew the lid off the hidden corruption in Washington, D.C., Congressman Tancredo's statement now looks even more hypocritical.

Joseph Arthur to Perform on A&E this Sunday

Joseph Arthur to Perform on A&E this Sunday

Joseph Arthur will be appearing on A&E Breakfast with the Arts with KCRW's Nic Harcourt this Sunday (Aug 13th). He'll be performing two songs from his forthcoming album. On the YouTube video below, he's performing Electrical Storm (live), a song off the new Nuclear Daydream CD.

Stirling Newberry's Thoughts On a New Direction

Stirling Newberry's Thoughts On a New Direction

Stirling Newberry has written a thoughtful piece about political vision and direction. Competing visions of how America should progress have split the Democratic party, but if there is one thing we can see, it is that the curtain is falling on the Reagan Democrats of decades past. A single idea of a fundamental social mandate has still not been isolated, and that's why we're seeing Democrats approaching their individual campaigns from so many different angles. Is there a unifying theme through which the Democrats could gather around? Mr. Newberry says that the Iraq war's fiasco has only offered an opening for this wide discussion. We're on our way to a new meaning - a "city of tomorrow."

An Excerpt:

The progress of this pattern - of a different mandate producing a different meaning, and reaching voters through a different medium - is going to dominate the Democratic Party for some time to come, until the decisive political moment arrives, and a singular politician is able to sweep into power a majority of representatives willing to move a very different agenda in government.

It is not clear that 2008 is that year, but it might be. 2004 was not, and could not have been that year, but was, instead, the last gasp of trying to hold on to the Clinton Compromise with Reaganism. Hillary Rodham Clinton might win the nomination, but it will only be by coöpting a movement which, so far, she has attempted to oppose. However, she and her advisors can read the tea leaves and the polls extremely well, and the picture they show is no longer a donkey with an elephant's trunk.

Aish Video of Doctored Photography

Aish Video of Doctored Photography

I wish for Israel to stop its attack of Lebanon, I wish for Hezbollah to stop firing rockets at innocent people in Israel, and I wish for a UN resolution that is fair to both Lebanon and Israel.

I want to see an end to senseless killing of innocent people.

That said, I do think you may want to take a look at this video from Aish.com, exposing the ways professional photos are looking more like an art form than depicting absolute and untainted reality. It doesn't mean death, destruction, and sorrow are not being brought to the door of the Lebanese or innocent Israelis by savage warfare, but professional journalism shouldn't be Photoshop 101 nor should it be deliberate propaganda. Journalists are humans with the capability to sympathize and empathize - just like you and me. Professional journalists should understand, however, that you check that symapthy at the door during your working hours. Cheating only hurts the cause they may sympathize with when they doctor up photos or stories.