The issue is strength. The contest is joined. One guy will walk away as the winner with the other guy on his hands and knees trying to figure out what just happened to him and what is this warm, thick, red stuff running out of his nose? Republicans are ready for the fight. Democrats are checking their pocket protectors.
The new Republican Ad (http://www.boston.com/...) running on CNN (and other networks?) presents a massive opportunity for the Democrats. The ad chooses to portray Osama Bin Laden, his lieutenants and followers as current threats that only the Republicans are qualified to fight.
How is it that as prices at the pump are tumbling like few times in the history of the world, we spend our time wringing our hands about this election poll and that? We need to be tolling the bell in the public square to announce our rejection of the Brokeback cuddling between the vice-president and his energy industry boyfriends.
These guys are like the nation's scout masters, they line us up at the pump and we all get drilled as they syphon our pockets for their profits. Now we are supposed to accept this election-season-reach-around and grant these buckaroo-pirates more time in the seats of power so that they can send more American children off to die in a foreign desert in their monkey-cluster of a war that guarantees higher oil prices and gilded retirements for the execs.
Karl Rove once changed the game in a Texas election from focussing on the issues to concern about his bugging of his own office.
Mr. Lieberman's campaign has likewise set out to change the discussion from focussing on the gargantuan issues facing today's voters to a discussion of his supposed victimhood in regards to difficulties managing his website.
Will Mr. Lamont's people, or the Dem. party, show the stones and good sense to go ahead and draw the circle around the Lieberman and Bush camps? This is the final nail in the "Lieberman is a Bush boy" coffin.
If there really is an effort by the Dem. Party to escort their winner to victory, then they should step up and call a spade a spade: brand Lieberman as desperate and small, and guilty of hijacking the election away from the issues of economy and war and toward his own selfish desire to stay in power, all of this according to a strategy pioneered and perfected by the Bush campaign.
They want to hit below the belt, then kick them in the balls and march on.
We were going to stop the Swiftboating 527's, but the issue left the headlines and it stopped being important before it got done. We were going to stop Alito, but we couldn't fight the Delay/Rove push when they had the majority in the House and Senate. We were going to fight the Patriot Act but we got distracted by other issues.
I can just see Karl Rove in his scivvies holed up in a hotel room in a gleeful hyper-caffinated sweat while he twists up the results to fit his 2008 Republican agenda.
The closing of the Dubai Ports World deal on March 1 is a travesty of American process. With the highly publicized 45-day review getting underway, it is not right that this deal closes at the outset. The Bush Administration under the direction of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove is, yet again, railroading the American people in order to acheive their own ends.
This country acheived greatness via a system of respect for the citizen and a balance of governmental powers. This latest attempt by the White House to subvert these American values and our protocols is a recipe for more of their totalitarian disasters (Iraq, Katrina response, Medicare funding,...).
We have elected you to represent our best interests to the government. We encourage you in the strongest possible terms to resist the closing of the Dubai Ports World deal before the 45-day review is completed to the satisfaction of the congress.
We will be avoiding any and all products from companies that are based in South Dakota. We are encouraging all of our familiy and friends do likewise. We are dissuading everyone with whom we have contact to avoid travelling to or through your state.
Our country acheived greatness because of our capacity to seek social solutions based on the pursuit of freedom and the respect for the innate value of each and every person. Your state's desire to deal with the prevalent difficulties of unwanted pregnancies is admirable and probably required for the future success of our republic. However, your state's choice to deal with the challenges by forcing your ideology onto the women of South Dakota withdraws your state's recognition of respect for the citizen. Your representatives have determined that the American course of respect for the citizen is not worthy of their consideration and they have discovered that the course of totalitarian edict that has yet to produce the first hint of success in this country, is the wise choice.
President Bush told the nation that any White House employees connected with the leak of Valerie Plame's identity to the press would be fired. When it became clear that Karl Rove was among the leakers, he dropped the subject.
He has emasculated himself on the issue of punishing those that leak classified information.
Now the president comes out swinging at the leaker(s) of the news that the NSA is spying on Americans. How weak and fragmented is the Democratic Party that not one single representative in the House or Senate has come forward to highlight this glaring hypocrisy?
In order to prevent the Rovian plan of elevating Mr. Bush to a position of "nice-speak" while Cheney and other henchmen slash and burn good men's reputations, we must in turn elevate the public perception of Mr. Cheney and other attackers to Oval Office spokesmen.
Yesterday's Pandemic fog-blast from the President contained a toxic additive that was masked by all the sugary sweet tidbits of money flying everywhere. Billions here, billions there, blah, blah... Most of what was announced yesterday is either programs already initiated by Congress or programs that had previously been gutted by the White House budget. Mr. Bush probably doesn't even know that he was sent onstage to act like he was proposing to do what someone else has already done or that he was contradicting his own budgetary demands.
One of the responses from the Dems. to Bush's Alito nomination needs to be that it is now apparent that Bush is the errand boy of the religious right. With this nomination Bush has, in one short week, withdrawn his own personal best choice for the court and replaced her with a far-right extreme judicial activist, all at the express behest of the religious conservatives.
The Talking Point:
"It would be better for this process and the country if our President and his administration had the wherewithall to lead according to values shared by a majority of Americans. Instead, as with the abandonment of Harriet Miers, George Bush has decided to avoid the hard work of leadership and is instead folding-up like a cheap umbrella in a stiff breeze and following the demands of a small narrow minority of far-right ideologues."
This is a very simple point: Libby made it difficult to impossible for the grand jury to discover the truth. He squelched the linear progression of an investigation with a baffle built of lies, and he is willing to face prosecution. In return, he is able to prevent the prosecution of others in the Bush Administration (at least temporarily) on charges as bad or worse than his own.
Period.
He stopped the buck - fell on his sword - is a good Bush soldier.
I have never served in the military and do not suppose to understand the culture of military life. I come from a family with a strong military history, but my generation was encouraged to dedicate ourselves to our studies and avoid what the generation before endured in southeast Asia.
My point in bringing up the shortfalls of our miltary planning for the curent Iraq campaign is that our military might is not what it was nor what it should be because of severe mismanagement by the civilian managers at the top. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their team have been screwing the pooch regularly.
Is the Bush Administration rife with the cronyism that has resulted in America's severe vulnerability to terrorist and natural disasters? It appears so, and it looks like the crux of this "give the tax-payers' money to my friends" death-spiral is Karl Rove. Please read Paul Krugman's editorial in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html).
Think about this, between one-fourth and one-third of your day is spent paying for Karl Rove to gut our federal services in order to surround George Bush with two types of people: those that the Administration owes for election assistance or sycophants. Qualifications be damned.
This is the moment to re-introduce the "unqualified" Karl Rove to the headlines. "Bush's Brain" needs to be leveraged back into the mainstream. The Plame issue should be revisited. Rove's resume needs to be examined under a microscope. The Bush Administration is in unchartered territory and they must be struck with repeated sharp blows in order to assure that they continue their collapse.
Can someone that has chosen a career of public office announce a campaign of accountability for the many hundreds or thousands of innocents that have perished because we have a flawed disaster relief system? Can they do this as a function of a coordinated party campaign to discover and broadcast the truth? Can one aspect of this campaign be to effectively counter and minimize the message of the majority party that appears to be protecting cronies whose occupation of positions of importance threaten our lives and property?
Is there no Democratic Party at all?
Is there not even a loose confederation of elected officials that can agree to announce that they are taking it upon themselves to "speak for those that can not speak for themselves."
George W. Bush conducting an investigation into the professional performance of the men he appointed to FEMA's top posts is ridiculous. We must not stand for it. We can not have many thousands of American dead dishonored by the selfish acts of a desperate man.
