"Jumbo" got his nickname playing prep-school football. It's a reference to the legendary Giants/Jets offensive tackle, Jumbo Elliott. He is an anarchist at heart, a Green by registration and a Democrat when he needs to be.
So my right-wing boss's #1 issue is "thegoddamngreedybastardteachersunion!!" and I'd like to be able to tear him a new one with facts and figures but I usually fall short.
So a lot of people want action and fighting over election reform, yeah? I personally think the goal of overturning this past election is so far-fetched and would be so unpopular (do you really think Kerry won the popular vote?) that it's probably not worth the fight. The battle for making John Kerry president is over for me. But the battle to modernize our electoral system so that it is completely transparent and everyone's right to vote is guaranteed goes on. There's a whole host of reforms to get behind and which we could potentially get passed with broad bipartisan support. I suggest we take a lesson from our de facto Fearless Leader and march on Washington.
Hey everybody, I've been kind of light on my Kossing ever since election day. If you don't mind I'd like to catch up by presenting a little digest of my personal opinions on the events of the past few weeks. If you do mind, please refrain from complaining in my comments bin, just email me your address and I'll come over to your house to fight you.
I'm not a copyright lawyer so I have know idea how legal this is, but I'd just like to remind people who might have missed it last night that Going Upriver is available for free download online.
Give Cheney his props. Use his momentum against him: He's obviously smarter and more capable than his boss.
Whenever a Democratic surrogate is confronted with a question like: "A lot of people are saying Dick Cheney performed quite well last night and some are saying he won the debate outright, what did you think of the VP's performance?" The response should be:
"I too was impressed by Mr. Cheney's performance last night. After the President's, frankly pathetic performance in the first Presidential debate I was struck by how much more prepared and knowledgeable Mr. Cheney was compared to his boss. If you ask me, the GOP made a mistake and put the wrong guy at the top of the ticket."
Or
"If this election was all about who's going to be the next President of the Senate, then Dick Cheney did very well last night. But this election is about who will be the next leader of the free world. As long as the Republicans have George W. Bush at the top of their ticket, it's hard to take them seriously."
One of the things that struck me about today's round of post-debate spin was how much better John Kerry is when he's in a formal setting like a debate or a prepared speech. In the debate footage, the media couldn't help but make Kerry look presidential, wise and capable. When they cut up the soundbites from his stump appearances and rallys, they can make him look smug or arrogant or whatever they want. Throughout this campaign Kerry's highlights have been scripted: his acceptance speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire, his speech at the convention, his pre-debate foreign policy address, the debate itself. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign and the media seem to jump on the extemporaneous things Kerry does at campaign stops: the "lying, rotten bastards" mic mixup, the "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it," the TV interviews that make up most of the new Iraq war flipflop ad.
Damn! Did anyone see Tony Blankley sputtering like a beached whale on the McLaughlin Group tonight. He had nothin'. Pat Buchanan wasn't giving him any kind of help. The unanimous decision of The Group was that Kerry won but Tony B tried to squeeze out some credit for Bush saying he lost on style but won on substance. Lawrence O'Donnell responded by asking how he could have won on substance if he couldn't even fill up the alloted time without repeating himself.
I figure the McLaughlin Group is a fairly good sample of the range of spinnery out there. From what I could tell, the GOP's best tactic is to change the subject and avoid actually talking about Bush's debate performance.
Now polls, smolls, it'll take a while for this all to sink in and spread around. But my personal political seismograph is starting to pick up the kind of minor, imperceptible rumblings that will lead to a major tectonic event in November. As Lawrence O'Donnell so succinctly put it tonight, America is not going to watch George W. Bush lose three debates in a row and then re-elect him.
I for one have been fairly impressed by the Karl Rove's effectiveness with the Swift Boat stuff and the flip-flop crap. He went right for John Kerry's strengths and managed to create a plausible narrative of Kerry as a flip-flopping pussy that has become, whether we like it or not, a dominant storyline in this election. I like what Kerry's been doing recently, getting tougher and simpler. But I think someone needs to do to Bush what was done to John Kerry.
Jay's talking about going to an antiwar march in Washington:
Jay: Yeah, oh, and at the end all the cops were lined up in a long long row to keep us from going to a certain park, and as I passed I thanked them, I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, nodding to each one of them, because they had been restrained, and there hadn't been any violence, and that's something. that's really important.
Ben: So you thanked them.
Jay: I did, and the next day, when I woke up, I told myself you're not going to read blogs all day. Because I'd been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, , Talking Points Memo checking Google News twenty times a day.
Ben: I don't read blogs so much.
Jay: I said to myself, No more, because where does that get you? You've got to detach. It's happening no matter whay you do, no matter how well informed or not informed you are. [Emphasis and links mine]
This is likely voters:
Aug 9-11 Kerry 47 (47) Bush 50 (51)
Jul 30-Aug 1 numbers in parenthesis.
Sorry, gotta go to class, no time for analysis. There's a lot more in the link so you should be able to find some things to talk about amongst yourselves...
J. Patrick Rooney, aka Whitey McWhiteguy, is putting up $30,000 to fund a group called People of Color United that's running anti-Kerry ads on black radio stations. Here's a picture of the not-very-black insurance magnate himself in case for some reason, you thought maybe the major donor to People of Color United was a person of color. The ads themselves are real cute:
One of the radio ads addresses Kerry's failure to vote on a bill to extend unemployment benefits for 13 weeks: "It needed 60 votes to pass. Ninety-nine out of 100 senators voted -- Kerry did not! It lost by one vote! Maybe Kerry thought the more of us who are unemployed and hurting, the more likely we would vote Democrat."
Another ad attacks Teresa Heinz Kerry, who, at the Democratic convention last month cited her birth and upbringing in Mozambique and who has described herself as African American. In the radio commercial, the announcer says: "His wife says she's an African American. While technically true, I don't believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies."
The money quote comes, not surprisingly, from the Money Man himself, Mr. Rooney:
Rooney, who is white, said in an e-mail response to an inquiry from The Washington Post: "I support [the] group because the genuine word from the black community should be heard, not white folks saying for them."
So we're driving up to the Capitol and we're running a little late. The tickets said doors open at 5:00pm and it's about 5:30 already. And then my dad sees his most hated thing in the world: red brake lights ahead. Traffic. Inchworm style. We plod along trying to keep my dad cool and maintain our enthusiasm. This is no ordinary construction traffic or even a roadside accident. Up ahead we see people turning onto the grass median to turn around. A cop is directing people to the exit to Elizabethtown. Things are not looking good.
I'm listening to my recording of today's Al Franken Show and I just hit the section with Sean Hannity. Man, Hannity on Franken and Moore on O'Reilly. Talk about Kerry being a uniter not a divider. This is the kind of media incest that makes Conventions worth it. Fuck Tom Brokaw interviewing Tim Russert and Joe Scarborogh. It was a great segment. If you missed it, keep your eye on the Archives for today's show. Al gets Hannity to admit to saying Howard Dean said Bush knew about 9/11. He has to play him a clip before Hannity'll cop to it, of course. There's some cross-talk occasionally but I was struck by how civil-yet-firm Franken is. He concedes points occassionally, listens to Hannity bloviate, but he consistantly calls Hannity on his lies. When Al tries to explain the context of Hannity's misquotes, Sean basically sticks his fingers in his ears and goes "La, la, la lah- I'm not listening!" (I'm paraphrasing).
I don't want to ruin the movie for everybody so I'm not going to give away too many juicy bits. But I'm a spoiler by nature so if you're afraid of juicy bits, go see the movie first, then come back here. I will say that it was a much more satisfying time for me than Fahrenheit 9/11. F9/11 had the emotional impact of a really incredible Hollywood action-comedy. Control Room is more of a classic documentary. It feels like a documentary. The style is mostly verite fly-on-the-wall mixed with interviews. The filmmakers stay totally off camera and off the soundtrack. I was expecting more of an expose on Al-Jazeera, and there's definitely a lot of that, but it's really an alternative history of the Iraq war from the perspective of an American looking over Al-Jazeera's shoulder. That is to say, much of it consists of Al-Jazeera footage of the war, but the perspective of the film is not Al-Jazeera's. It's Al-Jazeera explaining itself to an American audience. It's a really fascinating and complex perspective.
I'm sorry for the long delay. I've started taking a summer school class and my reading habits have drifted away from the turgid prose of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LeHaye. For those of you just joining us, you can go back and read parts 1, 2, and 3.
Oh man did this one suck. I'd been forewarned that this book, Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides was the beginning of the saggy middle of the series where the plotline gets stuck in the mud and even Buck's magic Land Rover can't get it moving again. The structure of this book was sooooo tedious. Basically there's a lot of set up and some interesting scenes in the beginning, after the Wrath of the Lamb (global earthquake) from the last book, then fucking nothing happens for like two hundred pages. The last chapter is a Jenkins classic of wrapping everything up and throwing a bunch of new shit at you in the last five minutes to wake you up enough to go out and by the next book.
