"George Bush is being criticized for acting like a king as he asserts extraordinary new powers for his office. So it would be clever political theater if this week he delivered his State of the Union address on paper. He could emulate Thomas Jefferson, who in 1801 mailed his speech in, arguing that the ceremony smacked too much of the British monarchy."Newspapers are dead. Blogs rule.
For GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed, that "moral values" had made the difference.Bush Backers = Racist... D'uh!
In his latest book, Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004 Election, And Why They'll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values which swung the election -- it was theft.
"That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did."Who said this was the "Oil Administration"?
Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest oil company, said fourth-quarter profit rose 27 percent on surging energy prices to a record $10.7 billion, capping the most profitable year for any company in U.S. history.
"This extremity of Bush's position emerges most clearly in a 42-page document issued by the Department of Justice last week. As Andrew Cohen, a CBS legal analyst, wrote in an online commentary, 'The first time you read the 'White Paper,' you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided by an unfamiliar constitution.' To develop this observation a bit further, the nation implied by the document would be an elective dictatorship, governed not by three counterpoised branches of government but by a secretive, possibly benign, awesomely powerful king."Political opposites aligned against Bush wiretaps
A man high on methamphetamine rolled over in his sleep and suffocated his 1-month-old twin daughters, police said.
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.Bush the Incompetent
How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn't explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why Incurious George has repeatedly ignored the work of experts whose advice runs counter to his desires.Daily Kos: We're Winning the Long Struggle
Like Gandhi said in the over-quoted line: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ... then you win."
The Bible and death
A Gallop Poll found that Americans are woefully ignorant of Biblical content, yet the Bible is widely hailed as the underpinning of America's values.
In his letter (Pro-death crowd, Jan 19) Tony Shiflett tells us that Christianity and the teachings in the Bible celebrate life as a gift from God. The pro-death extremists celebrate "death."
While Shiflett no doubt knows there is a commandment against killing, he apparently is unaware that the Bible makes exceptions to this commandment that provide for killing just about anybody and everybody.
The Bible declares the following shall be killed: He that curseth his father and mother; witches; those who lie with beasts; worshipers of other gods; people who work on the Sabbath; adulterers; homosexuals; wizards; whores; blasphemers; stubborn and rebellious sons; thieves.
Notably absent from the Biblical hit-list are the practitioners of abortion. And today, Christ's most fervent followers crusade against abortion. Christ never mentioned the practice.
In Exodus 21:22, we find that an abortion has been induced through violence and this is not considered harmful, nor is it a capital offense or violation of "Thou shalt not kill."
Although Shiflett believes abortion is offensive to God, the prophet Hosea was comfortable asking God to induce abortions in the wives of his enemies.
"Give them, O Lord: what wilt thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb (an abortion) and dry breasts." Hosea 9:14. And from Hosea 9:16 we find, " ... yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb."
While "pro-lifers" thump the Bible in their crusade against abortion, I don't see them thumping the Bible in protest against killing innocents in Iraq or campaigning against the death penalty. Hypocrites!
David N. ****
Orange Beach
And simply by taking a baby step outside his protective bubble and fielding unscreened questions (most, but not all of them, softballs) from a starry-eyed, solidly red-state audience, he garnered buzz about being forthcoming.
But he wasn't.
In that book, Orwell spoke of “doublespeak” - naming something just the opposite, in order to cover how unpleasant it is in reality.
As we saw in the video, the President has been giving us doublespeak for years. He utters platitudes about helping Americans, when he’s really helping his special interest friends.
When he wanted to let energy companies release more pollution into the air, he called it the “Clear Skies Initiative.”
When he wanted to give tax breaks to his special interest friends – even though it meant adding more than $50 billion to the deficit, he called it the “Deficit Reduction Act.”
His “Leave No Child Behind Act” is leaving children behind every day because he refuses to fund it. And his new Medicare drug benefit hardly resembles a “benefit” for seniors.
Tuesday night, it is time for President Bush to end to this pattern of deceit. In his State of the Union, it is not enough for him to declare that the “state of our union is strong.”
by John KerryThere's something that doesn't sit right with me when, on the day Osama Bin Laden resurfaced in a disturbing audio tape, cable television ends up in a game of name calling as a war protester is compared to Osama Bin Laden.
That's reason to be outraged - but even more outrageous is the fact that in a flurry of sound bites what was lost was a real discussion of the fact that more than four years after the devastating attacks of 9/11, more than four years after George Bush boasted we wanted Osama "dead or alive," more than a year after Osama Bin Laden showed his hateful face in yet another video, this barbarian is still very much alive and boasting of additional attacks against the United States.
I too am delighted by John Kerry's decision to post here on Daily Kos. It speaks volumes to the viability and importance of this community and the Netroots in general.
....
I am also aware that many here, including myself, believe it quite possible that Kerry actually won in 2004. This is irrelevant to my point. I am not claiming Kerry wasted his chance at victory in 2004. I am claiming that he wasted his chance to run a meaningful campaign.It's the accountability stupid.
In all the banter back and forth about what went wrong in 2004, I've yet to hear anyone address the most obvious error of the Kerry campaign: failing to hold George Bush accountable.
What is it but a lack of accountability that allows George Bush to squander the commonwealth, blunder our foreign policy, repeatedly lie to the American people, and work tirelessly to enact policies that are not supported by the vast majority of Americans and still be re-elected to his office?
The essence of democracy is accountability. The idea is simple: unlike a monarchy, when our leaders fail to perform, or otherwise neglect or abuse their offices, they are challenged for those failures by their opponents and voted out. This system has been known to work well.
"All is not okay or right for those of us who return home alive and supposedly well. What looks like normalcy and readjustment is only an illusion to be revealed by time and torment. Some soldiers come home missing limbs and other parts of their bodies. Still others will live with permanent scars from horrific events that no one other than those who served will ever understand."
On January 16th, after having talked quite normally on the phone with at least two other people that same day, Douglas Barber, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) living in Lee County, Alabama, changed the answer-message on his telephone.
"If you're looking for Doug," it said in his Alabama drawl, "I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side."
"Muscle Shoals musician David Hood played on several of Pickett's recordings, including 1971's 'Don't Knock My Love.''He was a very dynamic performer,' Hood said. 'He was like a steel spring, like it was going to pop all the time.
'He was very energetic and outgoing. It was always something special to play with him.'
Hood said Pickett was a leader in the Muscle Shoals music scene.
'He was part of the early history and the later history of Muscle Shoals music,'' Hood said. 'He cut here before Aretha (Franklin) came here. In fact, it was his recordings that Jerry Wexler heard that made him bring Aretha here to record."
Hackett said he opposes capital punishment – too much risk of executing an innocent person – for everybody except the fool who violates his family and home.
"Break into my house, we won’t have to worry about the application of the death penalty. It’s going to be a simple 911 call: Come pick up the body."
With succinct coherence, Hackett said: "I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gayrights, I’m pro-gun-rights. Call me nuts, but I think they’re all based on the same principle and that is we don’t need government dictating to us how we live our private lives.
Read the entire text. It is worth it.
Here is a rebuttal to the LIES the Bush administration is putting for as a response....One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."
Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.
Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?
It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same....
Alabama House Republicans stood by in silence as GOP leadership purged the Ethics Committee.
The real congressional corruption scandal is the lack of outrage from members of what was once a Grand Old Party. It is a corruption of standards and decency -- yes, even a corruption of conservative values, including balanced budgets and safeguarding liberties.
And at the center of it is the moral, ethical and political bankruptcy of the House Republican leadership. Speaker Dennis Hastert and the old guard of the GOP countenanced a culture of corruption, claiming not to see it, in the hope that maybe the rest of us never would.
The Republican Party's slogan, "restoring morals" to the White House and Capitol Hill, was the big campaign issue in 2000 and 2004. So, what happened? This tops Clinton and his devil with a blue dress on.
I'm especially disappointed in our Alabama Republican representatives as they have yet to condemn Tom Delay and stand up for morals and ethics. I'm even disappointed with Bud Cramer and other Democrat representatives who remain silent.
In my research, this is what I've found about our Republican representatives:
Spencer Bachus has taken $1,166 from Tom DeLay's ARMPAC. No surprise that Bachus voted with DeLay 96 percent of the time between Jan. 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005. Jo Bonner has taken $10,000 from ARMPAC. No surprise he voted with DeLay 97 percent of the time between Jan. 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005. Robert Aderholt has taken $19,571 from ARMPAC. No surprise that he voted with DeLay 94 percent of the time between Jan. 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005. Terry Everett has taken $6,020 from ARMPAC. No surprise that he voted with DeLay 93 percent of the time between Jan. 1 2004 and March 31 2005. Michael Rogers has taken $30,000 from ARMPAC. No surprise that Rogers voted with DeLay 96 percent of the time between Jan. 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005.
Is this the kind of government-for-hire that working families deserve?
Rhonda B****
Tuscumbia
"I think he's got it," Clinton says of McGraw in an Esquire magazine story that hits newsstands Monday. "The Democrats need candidates whom people can relate to in a personal way, people who understand their lives and their concerns and share their values. And I think that's something Tim can do without even pretending."
...
He identified health care as his top issue, and said one of his main reasons for wanting to enter politics is Clinton, whom he calls "the best president we ever had."
Jason Isbell - Whiskey Business
Hood discussed several aspects of the industry including touring, merchandising, negotiating record deals and booking shows.
"“Warner Brothers doesn’t have an office on Clayton Street, and that was an attraction for me moving here,” Hood said. “I thought I could move to Athens and just record records myself. The longer you can do it yourself, the better."
Drive-By Truckers Bring Musical 'Blessings'When did you know that music was going to be part of your life forever?
From the start. I didn’t think of it as something that could be a career, initially, because I was just five or six. I probably wanted to be an astronaut or a fireman. Music was just going to be something I always did. I figured out when I was a teenager that you could actually make money doing it, which is still strange to me.
Kind of like getting paid to breathe?
Right. Or even more like getting paid to masturbate.
As I write this, Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings have begun. Regardless of their political affiliation, all Americans should be concerned about the possibility of Alito sitting on the highest court of the land. He is, like John Roberts, an evasive and fundamentally dishonest nominee who can't seem to recall his longstanding record of right-wing extremism.
There is no question that Alito leaves a lot to be desired in the ethics department. During his confirmation to the Court of Appeals, he said he would recuse himself from cases involving his own investments -- and then went back on that promise.
Even if you agree with Alito's basic politics, is he the type of nominee that you can be proud of? A man who dodges and evades and conceals his true agenda in order to occupy a position of power? Personally, I would have no confidence in a nominee who felt he had so much to hide.
At this point, we all know that President Bush's policies endanger both our civil liberties and the very concept of truth. We also know that he does not choose nominees whose views are not in line with his own. The new Supreme Court justice should not be a right-wing radical like Samuel Alito, but rather a moderate who will represent the majority of the American people.
Jonathan M.
Florence
"A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is 'truthiness,' defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts."Alito's Truthiness
...
"The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts," he said. "Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going make much progress.
| City, in order of education rank | % population with college degree or higher | Median household income & (rank) |
| 1. | 51.3 | $46,650 (8) |
| 2. | 51.0 | $60,031 (2) |
| 3. | 49.7 | $47,878 (7) |
| 4. | 47.7 | $46,574 (9) |
| 5. | 45.1 | $45,508 (15) |
| 6. | 42.9 | $37,385 (50) |
| 7. | 41.1 | $44,116 (20) |
| 8. | 40.9 | $45,892 (13) |
| 9. | 39.2 | $38,322 (43) |
| 10. | 39.0 | $51,382 (5) |
| 11. | 37.8 | $41,128 (28) |
| 12. | 37.7 | $46,190 (11) |
| 13. | 37.3 | $71,765 (1) |
| 14. | 37.2 | $46,082 (12) |
| 15. | 35.9 | $43,777 (21) |
| 16. | 34.4 | $46,500 (10) |
| 17. | 34.1 | $45,388 (16) |
| 18. | 33.6 | $31,910 (59) |
| 18. | 33.6 | $38,731 (41) |
| 19. | 33.5 | $31,960 (58) |
| 19. VA. Beach, VA | 33.5 | $55,781 (4) |
Four months after he took the oath of office in 2001, President George W. Bush was the attraction, and the White House the venue, for a fundraiser organized by thealleged perpetrator of the largest billing fraud in the history of corporate lobbying. In May 2001, Jack Abramoff’s lobbying client book was worth $4.1 million in annual billing for the Greenberg Traurig law firm. He was a friend of Bush advisor Karl Rove. He was a Bush “Pioneer,” delivering at least $100,000 in bundled contributions to the 2000 campaign. He had just concluded his work on the Bush Transition Team as an advisor to the Department of the Interior. He had sent his personal assistant Susan Ralston to the White House to work as Rove’s personal assistant. He was a close friend, advisor, and high-dollar fundraiser for the most powerful man in Congress, Tom DeLay. Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the President. From the same two clients he took to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated."
".... earlier this year when the Bush administration proposed cutting the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) by $7 million. The administration defended the 6-percent reduction by noting the number of coal mines has been decreasing. Yet coal mining fatalities have gone up for three years in a row. There were 42 mining fatalities in 2001, 29 in 1998. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, maintained the funding cut would cause a 25 percent reduction in the government's mine-safety inspection workforce. As of March, 612 federal mine inspectors were responsible for enforcing safety regulations in 25 states, and there were signs the system has not been functioning well.Think Progress has more on Shrub's neglect
However, nearly 70% of those surveyed in the online poll of 1,961 adults would oppose Judge Alito's confirmation if they thought he would vote to make abortion illegal.
The biggest corruption scandal to infect Congress in a generation took down one of the best-connected lobbyists in Washington yesterday. The questions echoing around the capital were what other careers -- and what other familiar ways of doing business -- are endangered.Talk about Must See TV. Letterman as you've never seen him before. You can actually feel the utter dislike Letterman has for O'Liely. You've gotta watch this:
"But Republicans worry about two possibilities. The first is that Abramoff, known for his close ties to DeLay, mostly implicates Republicans as a result of his plea agreement. That could shift public attitudes sharply against the GOP. 'People are uneasy about what else is out there,' said one GOP strategist who requested anonymity to speak more candidly about the possible political fallout."
The late-night program hosted by David Letterman is the toughest interview show on television.
That's because Mr. Letterman is a smart guy who can spot a phony with telescopic accuracy and expects his guests to bring something to the table. If a guest begins to sink on this show, the bottom is a long way down.
FLORENCE -- People aware of the history of Muscle Shoals music likely know the significance of the corner of Tennessee and Seminary streets.
Today, there is nothing but a parking lot there, but for about two years in the early 1960s, it was the location of the original FAME recording studios.
Some 45 years after FAME left Florence to relocate in Muscle Shoals, the site is being recognized with a historical marker.
....
"This was the starting place of Muscle Shoals music," Rodney Hall said.
"You can talk to people all over the world, in Europe, in England, they know about that drug store at the corner of Seminary and Tennessee streets," Hall said.
