Set Thine House in Order!
In July, I shared with you Bump’s favorite YouTube video. Well, he has a new one, which I have to say is quite addictive. This is so going on my workout play-list. Happy chair-dancing:
“I mean, come on, they must think you’re stupid.”
– Barack Obama, Indiana political rally 9/6/08
So I found myself thinking a lot about Paul Wellstone during the RNC. He, you may recall, was the popular and outspoken (dare I say pit-bullish?) senator from Minnesota who died in a plane crash (with his wife and daughter) just before an important election that he was expected to win, even after voting against the Iraq War when everybody and their brother were too cowardly to do so themselves. Wellstone wasn’t your typical spineless democrat. He had moxie, voted progressively, and had the good fortune of winning elections in the process. He was known by many as the “conscience of the Senate.” Wellstone had originally planned to step down from office, pledging earlier in fact to limit his terms to two. But the corruption behind the Iraq war — a war he saw as nothing more than oil profiteering made manifest — convinced him to run again. This apparently pissed off a lot of Republicans, who responded by hand-picking an opponent to run against him. Rove was quoted as saying that getting Wellstone out of the senate was “priority #1″ that year. The GOP was desperate to gain control of the Senate, something Wellstone’s victory would have prevented. And all this just before the war. This was a victory that could have potentially said to the other democrats that opposing the war doesn’t necessarily mean political suicide.
And then he died. Poof. Just like that. Patrick Leahy cried on television. Ted Kennedy weeped as well. It was really sad. Read the rest of this entry »
If you haven’t discovered her yet, perhaps this will convince you to do so:
I get the feeling that people around the world are looking at this election as a gauge to see if America is finally ready to wake up and realize that we are not the only country on this planet. They are waiting to see if we are going to put yet another fundamentalist loon in charge of public and foreign policy, someone who doesn’t think that global warming is in any way caused by humans, so screw the rest of you who live here on this planet, we need that cup of oil with breakfast in the morning.
Once again, Dennis Kucinich succeeds in telling it like it is. Notice the slight looks of surprise as the delegates slowly start tuning in to his ballsy speech. This is so Jimmy Stewart!
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