Elections

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” The answer is, of course: heartlessly, callously, sociopathically, from a state of denial and chosen blindness. The answer is fundamentally the same as what would allow John Kerry to give the speech he gave at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Kerry is, of course, the same loser who eight years ago wanted to be elected on the strength of not being George read more

Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine spoke prior to Obama’s speech on Wednesday in Charlottesville, Va.  He had praise for anyone signing up to go to war in Afghanistan.  “We can still put our positive thumbprint on that nation,” he said, to wild cheers.  Imagine the competition among the world’s nations to get our thumbprint next!  Imagine what it costs to get our assprint.

“So, who are you voting for?” an Obama follower asked me prior to read more

The acceptance speech of the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1924 would have made a dramatic improvement on President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of 2009.  The 1924 speech was given by the incumbent president who would go on to win reelection and to act on his rhetorical commitments.  His name was Calvin Coolidge.

The speech has been virtually erased from memory, as has the movement that inspired the read more

According to the Huffington Post, “President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and Democratic political groups have been eager for Romney to pick Ryan, the architect of plans to slash government spending and overhaul entitlement programs that Democrats believe are political losers.”  read more

With seven days remaining, Oregon has leapt forward and many other states have advanced in our matching funds push to Double Your Green. Oregon joins New Mexico at the 3/4 mark, and a dozen other states are closing in.

If you haven’t seen yesterday’s important message about what you can do, please click here to check it out. And on Tuesday we sent an update about our Illinois ballot drive, giving you an example of what doubling our money will accomplish. 

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U.S. Senate candidate from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren is taking on the establishment.  Her campaign website declares:

“Iran is a significant threat to the United States and our allies.  Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, it is an active state sponsor of terrorism, and its leaders have consistently challenged Israel’s right to exist. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is unacceptable because a nuclear Iran would be a threat to the United States, our allies, read more

By David Swanson, Remarks at Left Forum

I think two opposing trends have been at work in U.S. history. One is that of allowing more people to vote. This is an ongoing struggle, of course, but in some significant sense we’ve allowed poor people and women and non-white people and young people to vote. The other trend, which has really developed more recently, is that we’ve made voting less and less meaningful. Of course it was never as meaningful as many people imagine. But we’ve read more

For progressives and populists around the country who take an interest in Congressional races there are always a few good challengers we might hope to send to Washington.  Incumbents, we assume, can take care of themselves.

But in Northern Ohio, redistricting has thrown two incumbents into one district.  It’s a heavily Democratic district created purposely to guarantee a number of other districts to Republicans.  The incumbents are both Democrats, both white, both 65, and many imagine read more

Presidential candidate Barack Obama won the Democratic primary last time around largely on the strength of his extremely limited and inconsistent opposition to the war on Iraq.  Then he chose as his running mate Senator Joe Biden, a man who had led efforts in the U.S. Senate to support the invasion. Obama’s staff told reporters that he would be inclined to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of War (or “Defense”) — exactly the same plan proposed by Senator John McCain’s read more

Bad idea #1: listen to Jack Abramoff.

Bad idea #2: this one I heard from Jack Abramoff who was holding forth on ethical and unethical bribery the other day on National Plutocracy Radio: If you give a candidate money because you love your country that’s good. If you give a candidate money because you want a particular favor, that’s bad (or, one might add, Abramoffian).  The problem of course is that most people can’t afford to give money, so your well-intentioned money perverts read more

I cannot stress sufficiently that we will best move Congress toward peace and justice by keeping it at arm’s length and pressuring it without self-censorship, compromise, or entanglement with one or the other of its two branches: the Democratic or Republican. We are engaged in a long-term campaign to undo a plutocratic war state. Moving that campaign forward in the general culture is more important than which criminal enterprise has a majority of seats: the Democratic or Republican.

But it read more