Ohio 2nd Blog

• David Sirota > 6/27/06 – A Day That Will Go Down In Infamy
• BSB > DeWine – Jingoistic Panderer
• TPM > President makes midterms referendum on selling off Social Security.
  Democrats should oblige him.
• Kos > Bush pledges to destroy social security again
• Bonddad > Bush Proves Trickle Down Doesn’t Work As Advertised
• gjohnsit > A corporate scandal that dwarfs Enron
• Dave Lindorff > Cut and Run – A Winning Strategy
• Margaret Carlson > Ike’s Warning May Just Tell Us `Why We Fight’
  Andy Rooney talked about this.
  Listen to the speech here.

UPDATE:

• Washington Post > A Single Person Could Swing an Election

Very interesting article in the LA Times by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, authors of the book One Party Country : The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century, on the Republican’s superior GOTV technology as it relates to the CA-50 race.

(via Donkey Rising)

BTW, BradBlog has been covering the dark side of the Republican’s technological superiority.

Every time I see a story like this about NASA I’m reminded of what my uncle told me a few years ago shortly after he retired from working there for 25 years: “NASA is dead.“

Not that anyone in Congress cares. It’s just D.C. prime pork sausage now.

Did you know that members of Congress automatically get a pay raise unless they vote to stop it? Pretty neat trick.

UPDATE: Also, is the President becoming a Republican thought crime?

Great post by Pho covering Sherrod Brown‘s introduction of H.B. 5635, the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act. Pho states that a bill against sweat shops doesn’t have a chance of passing in the Republican controlled Congress, but I bet if people really learned how the clothes they wear were made it would have a very good chance.

I had this idea for an interesting book. (I’m an idea man. Sorry.) Take photographs of people in various settings. A kid ready for school. A person cooking dinner. Someone driving to work. And you then seperated out all of the objects in the photo…. jeans, schoes, shirt, mp3 player, gas, etcetcetc, and then you trace where they came from all the way back to their origins (sweat shops, prison labor camps, migrant farm workers, etcetcetc). Showed the real, human suffering that went into the things that we use and the clothes on our backs. I bet you’d make a real impression on people.

One part of the post stands out:

With that, the floor opens to the crowd. None of the press have any questions.

That about sums up the state of American journalism. If there’s any group of American workers that cries out to be outsourced it would be America’s journalists. I’m sure some guy making $3 a hour in Delhi can condense a campaign press release into a few paragraphs. Start making that a reality on a few papers and watch how they cover politics.

D.U. Precinct Group

Democratic Underground has set up a new group specifically devoted to politics at the precinct level.

Not-So Fancy Farm 2006

David Sirota will be the featured speaker at the Not-So Fancy Farm 2006 Political Picnic and Candidate Forum Wednesday, July 12, 2006, Kentucky Horse Park (Man-O-War Area).

I think it would be fun to finally meet my infrequent sparring partner.

Puppies Need Rescuing!

Dear Animal Lovers & Soon-To-Be Animal Owners,

This note is for those of you who are, or know someone who is, in the market for a new dog, or would like to save a dog or two. Please realize this specific plea is representative of the greater need by animal shelters throughout the region and country.

The Grant County Animal Shelter in Williamstown, KY, is scheduled to euthanize 53 puppies and dogs by this Wednesday 28 June due to over-crowding. Please consider that adopting from shelters is better than adopting thru breeders and pet stores, who indirectly cause millions more such deaths. Shelters often have purebred dogs for people so inclined. Dogs understand and appreciate that you have rescued them.

The Grant County is immediately southwest of the county of Covington (Campbell). The dog warden, Jeremy, is very rescue friendly and is asking all of us to help save 53 puppies and dogs that need to be put down on Wednesday for lack of space. He’s getting in 8 dogs a day.

Grant County Animal Shelter
218 Barnes Road
Williamstown, KY 41097
Tel: 859.824.9403
Email: JSouder@Grantco.org
Website: http://grantcounty.ky.gov/living/animal_shelter.htm

Please call Jeremy at 859-824-9403.
Please spread the word.

So far the best coverage of the blog rumble between Daily Kos and The New Republic has been done by Matthew Yglesias and Garance Franke-Ruta on the American Prospect’s Tapped blog.

The thing that I find interesting in this whole exchange is that everyone avoids talking about the real world Ohio angle. Staff @ BSB sees all this as the death of Daily Kos, citing David Brooks. I don’t buy it. First off, David Brooks is an idiot, and as kossack Bob Johnson wrote today, Kos does not equal The Daily Kos. A network as strong as Daily Kos will take more than rumors of politics as usual over things that very few people care about.

Finally, Jerome Armstrong has resurfaced an his site MyDD to comment on the events, and does the smart and uncharacteristic thing of laughing it off. I do get a little nervous when he starts equating questions of his character with attacks against the grassroots movement itself.

Just curious… are my references completely wasted on blog readers?

UPDATE: Tim Russo, one of political Ohio’s great tragic figures, has come out of blogging retirement to get his I told you sos in, and he certainly seems to be enjoying himself. While I’m not going to analyze or debate his comments, from a pure soap opera dramatic perspective the whole thing is very entertaining.

One comment that I do have is that hatred is a very dangerous emotion. This comes from watching friends and loved ones let hatred stemming from some perceived wrong eat them alive. If, as Frank Herbert says, fear is the mind killer, than hate is the soul killer.

NYT > Sharp Split With G.O.P. Leaders Hurt Bush on Immigration Plan

Of course, this would happen on the one issue that I pretty much agree with the President on. Do nothing Congress indeed.

Lots of notable Democrats will be out tomorrow at a “Turn Ohio Around” rally in Northside at 1:30. Candidates for office in 2006 include Ted Strickland, John Cranley (OH-01), and Dr. Victoria Wulsin (0H-02). Mark Mallory and Todd Portune will be there too. The rally will be taking place in Hoffner Park (corner of Hamilton and Blue Rock roads)…I’m excited. I still have yet to meet Cranley, Mallory, or Portune. And the last time I talked to Strickland, I was in the early stages of backin’ Hack*, to give you some frame of reference when that was.

*link intentionally dead.

For some reason (don’t ask me why (I can’t explain it)) I wound up on Michelle Malkin’s site. On it she links to the websites for several of what are being called the “Camp Pendleton 8″:

• http://innocentmarine.com/
• http://patriotdefensefund.com/
• http://www.defensefundformyhero.com/

I read their stories and it’s like a knife. How would I have reacted if placed in their situation? From my far away lens they are heroes until proven otherwise, and I can’t imagine how that difficult a case could be made. Instead they are being treated like serial killers, already tried and convicted before the cruelest of courts.

Personally, I expect marines to be killers. Establish the target. Take out the enemy. Go home. I don’t expect them to be trained to manage cluserf___s like occupying foreign hellholes. They’re sitting ducks in the worlds largest shooting gallery. Innocents played for patsies by the minions of big oil. It’s insanity, and when surrounded by insanity insane actions become perfectly reasonable.

How can it be seen as anything but surreal when you contrast how we treat the lying architects of this so called war to a marine placed in the middle of an eternal fire fight whose decided to resolve the madness of an unachievable objective once and for all? We train them for results. The world’s best killers. America’s centurions. The enforcers of the bottommost bottom line. How little we understand or respect the price of their mission.

As an empire America sucks. At least Rome was honest with themselves. They were rulers. When you messed with them you died. PERIOD. We live in a dream world. Idealistic obese hypocrites happy as long as our cable works. We wave the flag and jump up and down not noticing as neighbor after neighbor is ground into dust… collateral damage thrown into the world’s largest meat grinder.

As time goes by the great machine that is Washington D.C. will need more grist for the mill of public opinion looking for answers to the unanswerable. Hero’s scapegoated because they had the courage to say yes and liberals branded as traitors because we had the courage to say NO.

When does the madness end? When do we truly take responsibility for the burden of freedom that we all like to sing about? When do we send the real criminals to trial? And who would we send? Bush? Congress? The Courts? Ourselves?

Oh, heavy burden.