“You know what a gaffe is? A gaffe is when you tell the truth when the people in Washington don’t think you should have.”
I was told that Howard Dean said that. And also
“The President wants to go to Mars. I think Mars is a great idea… I think he should be the first to go.”
I actually contributed to moveon.org’s campaign to get the winner of its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest on as the first ad on before the Super Bowl.
It’s well worth watching all 26 of the finalists in this ad contest. If you can’t get to all of them, be sure to see the winner.
My personal fave is the “Hood Robbin'” entry.
Let’s hope it all works to win one for the truth-telling gaffer.
Go Dean!

“Flash Jackson doesn’t give a flying fart what’s ladylike and what isn’t” states the main character of this novel by William Kowalski that I’m recommending even though I’m only half way through.

First of all, the main character is a spunky, sassy, horse-riding 17-year-old 0ld-Soul girl who lives in rural upstate New York and whose grandmother, a Mennonite, lives in a shack in the woods where she brews up herbs and other witchy things.

Secondly, this girl’s best friend is a 28-year old diagnosed (perhaps not totally accurately) schizophrenic who can’t dream and who has the mind of a young boy. During one of his “episodes,” as he stands with the girl before an open field, he says that he wants to build a theater there. He says:

“This will be a place where people can come and tell their stories. They’ve been silenced, Haley. It’s not right . Someone has to help them get their voice back, and I’m going to do it. [snip]

“Someone has to give them their voice back, or I don’t know what will happen. But it’ll be bad. It’s already bad. And it’s going to get worse…….The state of communication in the world today,” he said, “is very very bad……I’ll build the theater and they can come from all over. People from the whole world can come right here, and they can get onstage and tell everyone their story, and then things will be okay again. People will understand each other.”

That resonated for me with what Ken Camp has posted about today and also what Jeneane once envisioned (a kind of bloggers encampment). This is it, the stage from which people tell their stories. Blogs. The understanding is happening. Slowly, maybe, but it’s happening.

Take heart, Shelley, wherever you are.

This is a Reader’s Comment on BuzzFlash (I don’t have the link because it was emailed to me without one.)
The Hypocrisy of Bush Investigations
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
It amazes me the difference in how the administration requests investigations and tries to file criminal charges to anyone that is not agreeing with their views, but how much they drag their feet to the investigations that are important to the American people, like the 9/11 case or the CIA’s agent name leak….I pray that before November many more Americans follow their conscience and bring to light all the irregularities of the current administration.
Another thing that really amazes me is the fact that the Republicans have been saying for the last years that Clinton was not impeached because of the affair but the fact that Clinton LIED about it…..are our troops being killed and maimed because of the TRUTH relevant to the WMD? …Just asking.
Helloooooo……does impeachment apply in this case?
ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto

From the end of Paul Krugman’s piece in the NY Times today about the awful truths coming out in Ron Suskind’s new book “The Price of Loyalty:”
The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean’s assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn’t made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a “detour” that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O’Neill’s revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O’Neill’s character but haven’t refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O’Neill’s TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they’re cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam’s capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn’t reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn’t excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
As Paul O’Neill described, Bush and his Cabinet are deaf and blind. And, it seems, too many Americans stand mute. Feh.