Year: 2008

Al Franken Attacked by Republican Hypocrite Opponent — And It’s Bad

Trish

Say you’re Al Franken. Your idol was Sen. Paul Wellstone, a man who exemplified what was right with America and with America’s Democratic system of government. But Paul Wellstone died, and his alter-ego from hell took his seat: a man whose only ideas are those placed in his head by the Bush neocons, who voted with Bush on everything — especially everything Iraq-related — but the surge. And he probably only voted against that because he was looking at re-election and knew the subject of the ongoing occupation, which he facilitated at every turn, might come up.

Bad incumbents through the ages have used the same tactic when they have only a poor record of their own (except for bringing back hockey, but that’s another subject) on which to run: ATTACK! It doesn’t get much worse than this ad from Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman:

Coleman’s going the old, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to sound like it is,” one better by keeping his smears so vague it’s hard to even know what the ad is really saying, let alone how to refute it. But it gives people the impression that Al Franken has done some very bad things, especially if your preferred source of news is porky white guys in shirts from three different bowling leagues.

We all know Al Franken had a career before he ran for office. We also know, from listening to him on Air America, that he gets it, and that he could help Congress reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government.

The funny thing is, until 1996, Norm Coleman was a Democrat. When he was 20, Coleman celebrated his birthday at Woodstock. His college roommate, lawyer Norman Kent, recently took Coleman to task for hypocrisy on his past pot-smoking after Coleman toed the Republican line about the war on drugs.

My friend Norman,

Coleman during a Vietnam War protest

Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana…

Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows…yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s advice.

We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint.

You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good…

How about standing up and saying: “I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969.” That “I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal.” How about saying: “I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits.”

How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were?

Norm Kent

Those last words, about standing up for who you were, seem especially relevant. Coleman wants Franken to abandon his famous past, which aside from being in show business, consists of a 32-year marriage to his college sweetheart and fathering their two children, Thomasin, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate and, Joe, a 22-year-old Princeton grad.

If Franken wanted to go after Coleman with nods and winks and innuendo and whispers, it wouldn’t be hard. But then he wouldn’t be Al Franken. We know Franken will find an effective way to push forward, and we know it will take money.

Regardless of where you live, achieving the magic number of 60 Democrats in the Senate is vital. Help Al Franken return the seat once occupied by Paul Wellstone to its rightful owners: us. Please donate to Al Franken, the sooner, the better.

Obama to Sponsor the Olympics with $5 Million in Ads

Trish

If you thought you could escape political ads by watching the Olympics, we have some bad news. A presidential candidate has bought $5 million in ads. The good news is, it’s Barack Obama!

Will this make him the Official Presidential Candidate of the U.S. Olympics?

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage. In the first significant network-TV buy of any presidential candidate in at least 16 years, the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads.

According to NBC’s political file, the campaign had initially requested information about 500,000, $2 million and $4 million package of Olympics spots. The network also offered the candidate a $10 million package.

So will this make him the Official Presidential Candidate of the U.S. Olympics? Maybe not officially.

The Obama campaign will join major advertisers including McDonald’s and Anheuser-Busch. The Beijing games begin with opening ceremonies Aug. 8.

If you’re wondering, the last person to buy time during the Olympics was Bob Dole. Hopefully Obama knows what he’s doing. And let’s face it, he hasn’t screwed up yet.

The buy comes as the Obama campaign continues to set fundraising records. Its decision not to accept federal matching money leaves it able to spend as much money as it can raise. The campaign reported it raised $52 million in June, compared with the nearly $21.5 million raised by his challenger, Sen. John McCain.

Oil Spill Comes as Floridians are Told Drilling is Safe

Trish

Is this the future for Florida?

A chemical tanker collided today with a fuel barge from one of three nearby refineries in the Mississippi River near New Orleans, causing the barge to split in half and spill 420,000 gallons of oil into the waterways.

A sheen at least 12 miles long spread down river, and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said efforts were being made to minimize the impact on air and water quality and wildlife.

Drinking water intakes were diverted or closed in the area and citizens were asked to conserve water use to maximize supplies on hand pending resumption of water treatment operations, the New Orleans water department said.

Floridians have been told that Louisiana and Alabama allow drilling off their coasts and nothing bad ever happens to them. Right.

The Coast Guard has deployed 45,000 feet of inflatable booms to contain the spill and is lining up another 29,000 feet, but it could be days before the river is reopened, she said.

The accident left a sheen over 90 percent of the area, she said.

However, the spill is much smaller than the ones that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the Coast Guard estimated that more than 7 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Mississippi and nearby waterways.

While the accident is still under investigation, you can’t help but wonder if rough seas in the wake of Hurricane Dolly are partly to blame. But then again, Floridians been assured that oil operations always stand up to any weather challenge.

Adviser: As President, Obama Would Only Prosecute ‘Egregious’ Bush Crimes

Jon Ponder

Presidencies are about looking forward, not backwards, so it was predictable that Barack Obama would signal that, if elected, he would have little interest in prosecuting the criminal acts of the current administration.
If Nixon had been imprisoned, it’s doubtful that 30 years later Dick Cheney would have opted to exchange his seat as the head of Halliburton, where he was free to rape and pillage the world with impunity, for the vice presidency, where his power would have been constrained by the U.S. Constitution.
As predictable as Obama’s position is — John Kerry would likely have held the same view under similar circumstances, and certainly John McCain supports it — it is deeply troubling because of the seriousness of the crimes in question, which include lying to Congress about the rationale for war, authorizing torture, betraying a covert CIA agent, criminal negligence in the response to Hurricane Katrina, spying on Americans without warrants, using the Justice Department as the political enforcement arm of the Republican National Committee, election fraud and consorting with corrupt lobbyists, just for starters.

At the Netroots Nation meeting in Austin last weekend, Chicago Law School professor Cass Sunstein, an informal adviser to Obama, warned liberal activists not to expect Barack Obama, if he is elected, to prosecute Bush crimes unless the crimes are what Sunstein described as “egregious”:

[Sunstein] urged caution in prosecuting criminal conduct from the current administration, while also noting that egregious crimes should not be ignored. Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, he argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

The fatal flaw in Sunstein’s formulation is that, in fact, there has not been a “cycle of criminalizing public service.” There has been one system of high accountability for Democrats and another system that allows Republican White House officials to escape any sort of accountability whatsoever.

While dozens of Clinton White House officials were dragged before Republican-controlled congressional committees hundreds of times for matters as petty as an investigation into the Clintons’ cat, none of which resulted in a charge of wrongdoing — and Clinton himself was more than held accountable for the crime of lying about an extramarital affair in a deposition for a civil lawsuit — Bush, Cheney and their associates have not been held accountable for a whole host of deliberate criminal acts, especially including lying to Congress and the American people about their reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was by all measures an “egregious” abuse of power that has resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

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Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish.

— Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Welsh philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform and pacifist

Arianna: Crist ‘Made a Downpayment’ on the Vice Presidency by Announcing He’s Getting Married

Jon Ponder

The subject of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s impending nuptials drew snickers from the crew at “Left, Right and Center,” my favorite weekly political chat show, which is produced by KCRW-FM, in Santa Monica.

The topic was “veep stakes,” and the moment of mirth came after guest host Lawrence O’Donnell, who represents the political center, asked Tony Blankley, the former editor of the Washington Times and the show’s token rightwinger, whether Mitt Romney had made a “downpayment” on the vice presidency by opting to eat his $45 million campaign debt.

Arianna Huffington, who represents the “independent progressive blogosphere” on the show, noted, “Well Gov. Crist also made a downpayment by announcing he’s getting married … So there are downpayments all around being made.”

Republicans really do think people are stupid. Honestly, who really thought this would work — a sudden announcement of marriage that appears to be, because it is, hastily arranged to make Crist a palatable candidate for vice president? It reminds me of George Bush Sr. saying he picked Dan Quayle to be his running mate because Quayle was good-looking and so would get the female vote.

Who, indeed.

A rough transcript of the exchange follows…

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Bush 2007: ‘If [the Iraqis] Were To Say Leave, We Would Leave’ – McCain 2004: ‘It’s Obvious We Would Have To Leave’

Jon Ponder

Does anything that George Bush and John McCain say matter? Based on this colloquy between Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on “Countdown” last night, apparently not:
“We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.”
— George Bush

OLBERMANN: …The Iraqi government is saying, “Get out,” and President Bush swore, you know, “Some day if they say ‘get out,‘ we‘ll get out.”

MADDOW: That‘s right. May 2007 in the Rose Garden, Bush said—and I went back and checked the quote directly so I could be sure to directly quote him — “If they were to say leave, we would leave.” Also, for what it‘s worth, in April of 2004, John McCain at the Council on Foreign Relation said, “It is obvious we would have to leave if they asked to us leave.”

I mean, they told us that the point of invading Iraq was to topple Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was toppled; they told us that the point of staying there after, was to set up a sovereign Iraqi government. Well now, the sovereign Iraqi government is standing up on its hind legs enough to tell us to leave, and we‘re left with this situation where they need another explanation of why we can‘t leave. That‘s the real headline here.

Here’s the question Bush was asked in May 2007, as well as a bit of preamble to the money quote:

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Of T. Boone Pickens, Al Franken, and Hope for the Planet

Trish

T. Boone Pickens has done the impossible. The billionaire Texas oil man changed my father, a man who listens to entirely too much talk radio, from saying that oil alternatives are so much flooey and we should get real and drill in Alaska, to saying we must look beyond oil for our energy future. This commercial did it.

Al Franken was right when he said the Bush Administration is to global warming what Herbert Hoover was to the Great Depression

Pickens is one of many people who believe in the concept of “peak oil.” They state that at some very recent point, like 2005, we reached the top of the bell curve of potential oil reserves on the planet, and it’s downhill from here. They believe we have already used, therefore, more than half of the earth’s oil, and the finite resource will grow only rarer in the years ahead. I — like you probably — think they’re right. And even if we haven’t peaked yet, it’s only a question of when.

T. Boone’s “Pickens Plan” proposes using wind energy to power homes and businesses, and calls the Great Plains, “the Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.

Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.

That’s a lot of money, but it’s a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it’s a bargain.

True that. He also calls for cleaner burning and more efficient natural gas to fuel our cars. Bush’s beloved corn-based ethanol? Puh-lease!

The funny thing is that Pickens isn’t even trying to get through to George W. Bush. He knows a lost cause when he sees it.

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