"The Republicans need a divided country. We don't." --President Bill Clinton

We are going to win this thing and the country will be better for it!

Here’s the text of John Kerry’s excellent speech.

Once again the Bush campaign shows just how much it values the American worker.

“A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones – or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

‘Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy – or go on Prozac?’ said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.”

As I have said before, these people just don’t give a damn about average Americans.

via Kos

Marc sends me a Reuter’s piece that includes the following:

President Bush (news - web sites) may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the Sept. 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Talking about death can raise people’s need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat,” said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study.

“We are saying this is psychologically useful.”

Jeff Greenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said generating fear was a common tactic.

“A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil,” Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association.

You know, Chris Matthews nearly popped a blood vessel on Monday when Jimmy Carter hinted that the President was generating “public panic“, but now it looks like it is true.

I think people are sick of being scared. I just don’t see how “Death is on the way” beats the Kerry/Edwards slogan of “Hope is on the way".

I can’t find a link to confirm it on the web, but over lunch I heard Kerry spokesperson Tad Devine on the Al Franken Show. Devine claimed that the Kerry campaign raised 3.2 million dollars last night on the internet alone.

That has to be a record.

If so, we can always try to break the record today, the last day Kerry can accept donations through his campaign. I just gave a few dollars myself.

John Edwards’ speech last night was not as stirring as Barack Obama’s the night before or even Al Sharpton’s a few hours earlier. As a result, I noticed some disappointment among a few citizens of blogotopia and some of the lowly TV pundit class. I don’t think Edwards had to be stirring last night for his speech to be successful. I think he accomplished laying out a glimpse of what he and John Kerry will do once they are sworn in. In doing so, I think he began to make the case that he isn’t just a pretty face and has some idea of how he, as Vice President, can help move the country forward. Most importantly in this age of headline “journalism”, however, Edwards’ speech contained two powerful soundbites that encapsulated the themes of the entire convention. The first was his strong warning to Al Qaeda: “We will destroy you.” The second was his optimistic chant of, “Hope is on the way.” I knew the speech was successful as I walked past the newspaper machines on my way to get coffee this morning, and I noticed that every single paper had some variation of “Hope is on the way” in the headline. If Edwards’ speech hadn’t successfully hatched that sound bite, I would wager the headlines would be different.

I’ve mentioned this before, but even as a party die-hard, I cannot stress how impressed I am with the way the DNC has run this show. Every major primetime speech has built on the themes of Strength and Hope. Even Sharpton’s barnburner of a speech, which caused the TV chuckleheads to clutch their pearls and rail away about Sharpton breaking the precious schedule, was infused with hope for the future of this nation.

Finally, the other thing I have noticed about this convention is the impressive diversity of the delegation. Every camera shot of the crowd contains faces of all ethnicities and ages. It is something that cannot be choreographed. Our delegation really does look like all of America.

I cannot wait for tonight.

While perusing the Kos diaries, I came across a piece by noted conservative pundit Charlie Cook:

Anybody who has been around politics for a while (32 years for me) knows that competitive presidential elections are never over three months before the election. There are always unknown factors or unexpected events that can alter what would seem to be the likely outcome. At this point, I believe, it’s safe to say that unless something happens to change the dynamics and circumstances of this race, Bush will lose.

He backs it up with some internal data from polls. I’m hesitant to call this race myself, but I have to admit, I feel more optimistic than pessimistic about Kerry’s chances. Here’s to hoping he nails this thing down with his speech on Thursday evening.

I guess there is a lot ot say about last night’s convention, but one word, or actually name, keeps coming to my mind… Obama. Last night was the first time I had ever seen Barack Obama speak, and from the first word it became obvious it would not be the last. In an email to my friend Marc in Chicago, I wrote that I envied him that he gets to cast a ballot for this phenomenal man this year. I have the feeling, however, everyone in the nation will get that same chance in the future.

Simply reading the text of the speech does not do it justice, but this particular section solidified not only why I am a proud Democrat, but why I am so proud to be an American, which, in all honesty, is a pride I have not felt so fully in a long time:

…For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief - I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper - that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.'’ Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America - there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism here - the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

Tonight, if you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, the same hopefulness I do - if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president, and John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.

You can read the entire text of Obama’s speech here and watch a realpayer stream of the speech (highly recommended if you haven’t seen it) here. As they did yesterday, Newsday has the text of all the major convention speeches.

You betcha!
Today’s candidate is Kelly White who is running against the allegedly corrupt Todd Baxter for the Texas State House seat in District 48.

Ms. White is another candidate with a compelling story. A victim of domestic abuse, Kelly, went on to lead SafePlace, a non-profit organization that aids victims of rape, abuse , and domestic violence. You can read more about her here and check out the QA here.

I bounced around between C-Span and MSNBC early in the evening, but after getting totally fed up with Chris Matthews intellectual laziness and browbeating of his guests, I switched permanently to sweet, pure, unfiltered goodness of C-Span. I have to admit, I was surprised. I can’t believe how focused and on message my party was last night. Every keynote speech built on the one before it and everything was all set up for the Big Dog to knock it out of the park.

“Strength and wisdom are not conflicting values – they go hand in hand"… what a line.

Afterward I switched back over to MSNBC just in time to hear Republican Joe Scarborough say he would sleep well knowing Kerry was in the White House. At that point I knew the night was a success.

What impressed me the most last night was that the Democrats were not trying to run away from or change John Kerry’s personality. Instead they are embracing Kerry’s seriousness, and rightly so. We need a serious person to get us through the dire situation America finds herself in now. It’s no longer a time when we can have the niceties of a President who, the pundits love to point out, is the kind of guy we would like to drink a beer with. We had that for four years and look where it has gotten us.

Anyway, you can find the text to all the keynote speeches here. If you didn’t get to see them live, they are worth a look.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Air America has a new look on their site and a very nice Democratic Convention coverage page. Included on the convention page is a link to Tom Oliphant’s article in the latest American Prospect. Oliphant has covered Kerry for 35 years and was standing near Kerry when he tossed his ribbons over the fence so many years ago. I haven’t read the article yet (I just got my copy of the Prospect today), but I am going to go out on a limb and recommend checking it out.

Now it’s time to dive into convention coverage. If you are away from a TV, you can catch all the coverage online on national treasure c-span.

I love Roger Ebert, but this paragraph from his otherwise positive review of the Bourne Supremacy made me laugh:

I have the weakness of bringing logic to movies where it is not required. There’s a chase scene where he commandeers a taxicab and leads a posse of squad cars through an urban version of Demo Derby. Although the film does not linger over the victims, we assume dozens of cars were destroyed and dozens of people killed or maimed in this crash, and we have to ask ourselves: Is this cost in innocent victims justified in the cause of saving Jason Bourne’s life? At the end of the film there is a heartfelt scene where he delivers an apology. If he ever goes back to Berlin, he’ll have to apologize to hundreds if not thousands of people, assuming a lynch mob doesn’t get to him first.

There is no way anyone but a liberal would make an observation like that about an action movie, and I love it. I just got a great idea for a script, however. A heartfelt drama about the lives of 4 strangers whose lives are brought together in physical therapy as they attempt to recover from injuries resulting from auto accidents caused by Jason Bourne. Think I can sell it?

Media Matters has an excellent summary that attempts to filter through the swirling cloud of speculative crap floating around the Sandy Berger story.

Sometimes I don’t think that the media is biased as much as they are lazy and stupid. This Media Matters post as well as the Daily Show clip I linked to earlier, and some things I observed while riding in a press van during the primaries seem to bolster my feelings. I think the Right is just better able to take advantage of the situation and that’s why their spin on the story seems so predominant.

yoyogurl, over at the Pinko Commie Biznitch News Network (which, incidentally, is in contention for my favorite blog-name of the year), draws my attention to this story from the AP:

The Bush administration cleared the way Wednesday to sell arms to Iraq just as it does to other allies, reversing the ban in place for much of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Bush made a presidential determination that the standard methods of engaging in munitions transfers with friendly nations are now appropriate in the case of Iraq and will promote democratic reforms, help achieve reconstruction and strengthen the Iraqi government.

The United States, Bush decided, will rely on the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act in making Iraq eligible for arms sales on a case-by-case basis.

According to this Deutsche-Welle article, the EU has done the same thing:

The US and the European Union have lifted bans on exporting weapons to Iraq, freeing the way for the Iraqi government to buy equipment for the country’s new army. But European companies are unlikely to benefit.

According to the Financial Times Deutschland, US firms are expected to get most of the contracts as Washington pays for most of Iraq’s reconstruction.

The lifting of the embargo became possible after the UN Security Council recognized the new Iraqi government in a resolution on June 8.

The move ended severe economic sanctions against Baghdad, which were imposed 14 years ago. Under the trade embargo, the Iraqis were only allowed to export oil to buy food, medicines and other civilian goods through a special UN agency.

US President George W. Bush has issued an order stating that Iraq should be treated like other friendly states, allowing the government in Baghdad to order weapons and other military equipment.

Of course, it looks like the EU part of it is just window-dressing to make it look like the world is united behind US defense contractors’ righteous march to liberate the temporary Iraqi government from its money.

Did it occur to anyone in the Bush Administration that it might be a good idea to wait for things to stabilize over there, and for the Iraqi people to actually elect a government before we start selling the country arms? How many times does our government have to make the same mistake before they learn their lesson? I really am not a communist, but sometimes I think the greedy quest for corporate profit will lead to the death of us all.

Thank you to Marc, who emailed me the finest piece of political journalism you will see this year.

It’s a piece by Jon Stewart describing how GOP talking points pervade the news without any question or research. I don’t want to say anything else about it. If you haven’t seen it yet, got watch it now.

Here’s the link (requires Real Player)

In the August issue of Sojourners, Bill Moyers talks about what is really happening to the middle and working classes in the USA. Here are some excerpts from this excellent article:

There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said The Washington Post in an editorial called “Leave No Rich Child Behind,” is “bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d be embarrassed but they’re not.”

Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families - are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it’s been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all Western nations. They don’t seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom. For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn’t expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing. That’s not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor “are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life.”

And household economics “is not the only area where inequality is growing in America.” We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe “a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.” That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called “democratic debate.” That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils. If you want to know what’s changing America, follow the money.

Moyers summarizes how the nation arrived at this situation…

What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: “Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: “During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area.” Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.

And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: “If there was a class war, my class won.” Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins With Bush.”

Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they’ve pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. President Reagan’s own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to “starve the beast” - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn’t have made up the things that this crew in Washington have been saying. The president’s chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president’s Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president’s labor secretary says it doesn’t matter if job growth has stalled because “the stock market is the ultimate arbiter.” And the president’s Federal Reserve chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.

The article also discusses the role of Christianity in all this mess – How the right and the power-mad have hijacked Jesus, and how anyone who calls him or herself Chrisitian should be outraged by the situation facing the nation. Since the piece is directed at a liberal Christian audience (Sojourners is a Liberal Christian publication), Moyers concludes the piece with some words about what Christians can do to help restore the promise of America:

Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that “all men are created equal.” Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.

But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: “One loving soul sets another on fire.” But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.

I’ve excerpted a lot, but the entire piece is worth a read. I also recommend Sojourners to anyone who, like me, sometimes forgets that in a time where it often seems like being a Christian hinges on how you fall on the issues of abortion and gay marriage, there are liberal Christians out there that are working to make the world better and not divide it further.