Bill Clinton still has it right.

In New York yesterday, former President Bill Clinton said it would be “a mistake for our party to sit around and … whine about this and that or the other thing.”
Mr. Clinton said Mr. Kerry was particularly weak on connecting with voters on moral issues.
“If we let people believe that our party doesn’t believe in faith and family, doesn’t believe in work and freedom, that’s our fault,” he said in a speech to the Urban Land Institute.
He added that Democrats “need a clear national message and they have to do this without one big advantage the Republicans have, which is they won’t have a theological message that basically paints the other guy as evil.”

While President Clinton might have personally succumbed to the weakness of the flesh, Dumbya beats it all in his succumbing to the devilish temptation of ego and global self-importance. To compare the moral devastation of their two sins is absurd.
The neocons (who actually have an impressive roster of fleshily sinful members) have portrayed us liberals as godless and immoral and enemies of faith, family, work, and freedom. Clinton is right. We need to push hard to reveal that part of the truth of who we are — which is much more moral than those hypocritical neocons. We need to push hard, push harder.
Truth is a virus. Talk hard.

bartering to survive

Several years ago, two musicians, one from Seattle and one from Los Angeles started writing music together, using the mail to send each other the pieces of the bits of music each had created. After several months, they had jointly composed an album. They decided to call themselves “Postal Service” after their method of working together.
Then they heard from the real Postal Service with a cease-and-desist letter.
The outcome was as unusual as the band itself. This week the real U.S. Postal Service signed an agreement with the band’s label granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of of the album will have a notice about copyright, while the federal Postal Poster Service will sell the band CDs on its website.
According to an article about this win/win compromise in the NY Times:
Gary Thuro, a manager of communications for the United States Postal Service who handles licensing and promotion, said the publicity would be valuable.
“We’re always looking for ways to extend our brand and reach into areas we don’t typically reach,” he said, “like teens and people in their 20’s, who are typically doing business online and are not familiar with the Postal Service.”

When my kids were little, I used to cut my neighbor’s kids’ and husband’s hair in return for fresh vegetables from her garden. I bartered my friend’s hand-made jewelry and batik for Barbie clothes that I knitted for her daughters.
I predict that rough economic times are coming for us have-lesses under Bush’s delusionary “mandate.” Maybe we can do some creative bartering to keep our personal costs down. Hell, if the federal Post Office can do it to avoid spending money and time on litigation, why can’t we barter to keep our own expenses down.
Hair cut, anyone?

My next two favorite tree-huggers

On a black screen Michael Moore gives us 17 reasons not to give up. My favorites are the last two:
16. There are nearly 300 million Americans — 200 million of them of voting age. We only lost by three and a half million! That’s not a landslide — it means we’re almost there. Imagine losing by 20 million. If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying — especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!!
17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed “The #1 Liberal in the Senate.” That’s more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this — that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals — that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that’s BIG news. Which means, don’t expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it’s better that they don’t. We’ll need the element of surprise in 2008.

And my other favority is Paul Krugman, who begins his Op Ed piece with:
President Bush isn’t a conservative. He’s a radical – the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda
and then he says what I, too, believe:
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that’s what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, “We’ve got to close the cultural gap.” But that’s a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn’t be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right – not to be confused with religious Americans in general – isn’t a majority, or even a dominant minority. It’s just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year’s polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats – who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents – need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.

In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn’t cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges – even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.

C’mon Democrats! Push hard or get out of my way.
And make Dr. Dean head of the Democrative National Committee

My Blue America

I am so sorry you feel this way. If you actually had a clue as to what made this nation great, you would quit trying to suck the life out of it. America was founded on great conservative christian values (the Ten Commandments). You are free in this country to think and for the most part do what ever you want. But you do not have the right to hijack this country with your socialist values that undermine our national identity and security. We will continue to fight you and the terrorist with every fiber in our bodies. Because it is you who invited the terrorist into our country to kill our family members

The quote above is a comment left on my Radical Rosie post by someone calling him/herself “Righteous.”

Well, I say that those who don’t know our country’s history are bound to keep screwing it up.
Perhaps “Righteous” is referring to those “Christians” who fled from Europe to seek religious freedom, freedom from persecution. Oddly enough,
Although they were victims of religious persecution in Europe, the Puritans supported the Old World theory that sanctioned it, the need for uniformity of religion in the state. Once in control in New England, they sought to break “the very neck of Schism and vile opinions.” The “business” of the first settlers, a Puritan minister recalled in 1681, “was not Toleration, but [they] were professed enemies of it.”

Puritans expelled dissenters from their colonies, a fate that in 1636 befell Roger Williams and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, America’s first major female religious leader. Those who defied the Puritans by persistently returning to their jurisdictions risked capital punishment, a penalty imposed on four Quakers between 1659 and 1661.

In other words, those righteous Christians became the kind of persecutors they were running away from. We all know what they did to those poor old women they decided were witches, right? But that’s another long and horrible story that needs truth telling about.

And let’s not forget all those Native Americans that were displaced and persecuted and executed by all of those righteous Christian members of our military:

Rotten Fruit

A GOP nemesis of mine has accused me of “sour grapes” for continuing to oppose Bush and his policies. I’m far from the only one who maintains that it’s not a matter of sour grapes; its a matter of some rotten fruit on the American political vine. Just check out these links:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.votergate.tv/
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/52213/1921
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04025.html

blamepink2.jpg

The liberal Brits are with us Blue Americans.

From blogger Glovefox (whose site is retricted), an email documenting that fact that Liberal Britain goes into depression and shock as it sides with the Blue States of America.
We are not alone.
And, just for more to ponder, a couple of relevant quotes:

“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.”
— Adolph Hitler, 1933
(Proclamation to the German Nation at Berlin,
February 1, 1933).

(I think I’ll put the above in my sidebar.)
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
— Edmund Burke

Heh. Just found some other Hitler quotes that seems uniquely appropriate to what we just witnessed from the GOP:
All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I

I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almight Creator by warding off the Jews. I am fighting for the Lord’s work.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf