I wish others could recognize this man

Was just catching up on reading some blogs and refound my boy The Progressive Proletarian (high school buddy). He had a link to this video that I didn't get to see from the DNC. Awesome. Inspiring. Touching. If you were (or weren't) juvenated, this will rejuvenate you.

I just wish people would see Mr. Kucinich as a viable candidate so we could really start doing some things right in this nation.



Don't forget to register to vote if you want to take part in the election next month. Deadlines are fast approaching. If you moved, register for your new place. If you are away at school or out of town, get an absentee voter ballot.

If you know some one who is going to be in the hospital on the day of the election, let them know that they can contact the election board and have some one come out and vote them in the hospital. (Same applies for people in jail that have not been convicted of a crime.)

Also be sure to look into the local issues around you that will be on the ballot. If you aren't going to vote for national stuff, at least take care of the stuff around you.

Flip flops, mix-ups, or just plain lies?

More politics. I can't help it.

More campaign distortions, missteps, and round about answers

I keep trying to stay away from the politics but like Michael Corleone, "just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

First up, McCain campaign ad distortions (otherwise known as lies). Unfortunately the people who really need to see these lies are probably not going to see them or even click to see this video.

Do watch.



Next we have him saying that governors and mayors do not have national security experience. You can also read the transcript here. He said it during a debate last year. But, suddenly your VP pick is ready when last year you said someone with th same experience as her would not be ready to be in office?



Here, Palin finally addresses (you be the judge of how successfully) the bridge issue. Again, she is good at bringing the question to an answer she has practiced giving rather than actually answering the question being asked of her.



You can also read this article here about Palin's words that were not so nice to various people in the community or to the Democratic presidential nominee. It also talks about how many people in her home state and where she was mayor are afraid of speaking out against her for fear of the "Republican Party machine".

If she's not going to blink, the rest of us need to. Blink. Open our eyes. And really see and listen to what is going on here.

I'm going under the bridge

Two weeks of political ups and downs, many over exaggerations, and too many life stories are finally over.

The song that has popped into my head today is some old Chili Peppers -- Under the Bridge.

Seriously. I don't want to feel like I did these past few days and nights. And I don't want to ever feel anger like I felt after reading the anonymous poster's ignorant statements on Africa (and other nations) and on African Americans conditions and how black people really have it so easy in life. I have almost calmed down enough from those comments to be able to sit down and craft a response this weekend. Stay tuned.

Take me to the place I love.



Looking forward to a weekend of semi-mindlessness. Some house work. Some grading. Some planning of what could turn out to be THE event of the fall.

But definitely some chillin' out, maxin', and relaxin'.

About to go let it all begin with a/several dranky-drank(s) with some friends. Holla at me if you want to help me/you chill out this weekend.

Take me all the way.

Obama-McCain forum with Warren

Watching the forum with Senators Obama and McCain and Pastor Rick Warren. Obama really rocked out with his answers on abortion, teachers' salaries, stem cell research, and "working in concert with the international community" to solve problems and address genocide and the high orphan rates.

The more I see him the more there is something about him that just reminds me of my man. They have similar smiles and teeth and those thick, low brows. Both just really represent that educated, confident, grown-man sexy.

On the other hand, McCain really just irks me. With Bush, I really can't stand listening to him talk and change the channel of the radio or the tv when he is about to do a sound bite or a speech, but if McCain is elected, not only will I not be able to stand listening to him, but I will avoid even just having to look at him. Wow. The lack of lips, the super-duper short arms (No offense, I understand he was tortured in Vietnam while he was in service and they were taken out of the sockets repeatedly, but how does that make them shorter?), the voice, the way he seems to treat/refer to his wife, all the stories of his evil anger problems. I don't know -- I just can't/don't want to see him as a president. It took everything in me to not switch during the questioning back to the Olympics instead of waiting until the commercial break.

On a totally different note, CONGRATS to Christian Cantwell on his Olympic shot put silver medal!! Way to go Mizzou track teammate -- he taught me to not drink before or during a meal so that I could eat more of the wonderful food before me.

McCain made me cringe when he said we need to focus on off-shore oil drilling, but tried to redeem himself by then mentioning the other types of energy we should also use. Then he went on to talk about other issues and judges that I don't support and that don't support the rights and needs of the various majority of people of this nation. He did a lot of joking with the crowd, calling the audience "my friends", and shared a lot of old anecdotes which is a good way to get the basic American public on his side without making them actually listen to his words and ideas.

If you missed the forum, which was run pretty well by Warren, you should definitely read the transcript or find the video. There were questions asked that are not typically asked and it was nice to have a person asking the questions who was not a reporter, though at times, he did seem to prefer McCain's answers and presence, he still did all right as the moderator.

Who taught you to hate yourself?

Still on my color kick today.

This is decades old, yet still resonates. Especially with a lot of the drama going on in the media with comments/covers made about the Democratic presidential candidate.

The Onion kills me

Also check out the other video links. The How to Pretend You Give A Shit About the Election, the McCain, and the Supreme Court Rules the Death Penalty is Badass bits are funny, too.


Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Alternative ideas to the status quo

Wednesday Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) conducted an interview with third party candidate for president, Ralph Nader. He talked about his platform and also about Obama and his beliefs.

Read the whole interview here.

Check some excerpts here:

On some of the ideas he is pushing:

We have a security speculation tax. $500 trillion in security derivatives are going to be traded this year. A tiny tax on those transactions would relieve the federal income tax up $100,000 on American workers. We have solar energy, instead of nuclear power. We have single-payer health insurance, which replaces the health insurance moguls and their enormous administrative and bureaucratic waste and their denial of doctor discretion and their “pay or die” policies in America, unlike all Western democracies.

So, you can see in many ways that we favor workers, and we favor consumers, and we favor small taxpayers, we favor the environment to the expense of corporate power. I mean, the issue here is centralized corporate power. And that’s why day after day, whether through demonstrations in front of toady government agencies and trade associations in Washington to campaigning with people and their controversies for justice all over the country, we have made our website, votenader.org, a very vivid, vivacious website for people who want to volunteer, who want to get engaged, who want to contribute money to our campaign. We take no commercial money or PACs, so we rely on individuals.

On Senator Obama's statements on Israel:

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, on his first day as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Barack Obama traveled to Washington to address AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is some of what he had to say.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state—the Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper, but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

AMY GOODMAN: Obama later appeared to backtrack on his comments about the future status of Jerusalem as capital in a follow-up interview on CNN. He said it would be up to the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think Barack Obama is in training to become panderer-in-chief. That was really a disgraceful speech. It didn’t further the peace process, the two-state solution favored by a majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, a majority of Israeli and Palestinian people. He basically sided with the militaristic approach to occupying, repressing, colonizing, destroying the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. He hasn’t even spoken out against the international crime of the blockade of Gaza, one-and-a-half million people, from medicine or drinking water, fuel, electricity, food—lots of silent fatalities in Gaza because of that.

Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z.

On Iran:

Iran has not invaded anybody in 250 years. Yet it’s obviously frightened. It’s surrounded by the US military west, south, east. It’s been labeled “Axis of Evil” by Bush, who invaded Iraq after he labeled them “Axis of Evil.” We have Special Forces, according to Sy Hersh, that go in and out of Iran. What are they going to do? They talk very belligerently nationally, but they’re really scared. I mean, we supported Saddam Hussein, logistically and with materiel, in invading Iran, which took a half a million Iranian lives. They remember the shooting down of their civilian airliner years ago...

...The point is that we are exaggerating that threat instead of using diplomacy, number one. Number two, Iran does not have nuclear weapons; they’re nowhere near nuclear weapons, according to intelligence estimates. Number three, Israel has 250 nuclear weapons. Does Iran really want to commit suicide? And number four, two major national security experts in Israel have been reported as saying Iran is not a problem. So why are we beating the drums, and why is Obama falling for this kind of trap?

On Iraq and his plans for withdrawal:

Six-month corporate and military withdrawal from Iraq, during which we negotiate with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for modest autonomy, which they worked out in the 1950s before the dictators took over. Under a unified Iraq, continue humanitarian aid, some peacekeepers from nearby Islamic countries, and UN-sponsored elections. That’s the way you knock the bottom out of the insurgency. That’s the way you get the authority figures, the tribal leaders and the religious leaders and others, who still have authority over millions of Iraqis, to get together, because the alternative is constant bloodshed and civil strife. So you give them a stake by using the only chip we have, which is to give back Iraq to the Iraqis, including their oil. Now that—otherwise, it’s constant, constant strife.

You saw that huge explosion in Iraq, in Baghdad, yesterday. The Pentagon doesn’t count Iraqi civilian tolls. They don’t even count officially US injuries unless they occur right in the middle of combat. So US injuries are triple what their official figure is. And all the press, including the liberal press and the indie press, still uses that figure of some 32,000 injured soldiers, when it’s triple that. I don’t understand why they follow that kind of Pentagon line. So that’s the way to deal with it.

Wow. And Nader and McKinney are steadily ignored by the media, and the populace in general, as viable presidential candidates.

A novel idea

Here is a pretty good blog about Cynthia McKinney -- a great candidate for the next president of the United States:

Here's a Novel Idea: Support an African-American Woman for President - on AfroSpear. Read some of the other commentary on this blog also, seriously -- good stuff.

Here's a website for Cynthia McKinney.

Think outside the box if you are really searching for Change We Can Believe In. Find candidates that support your beliefs, who don't contradict themselves, who don't follow the status quo.

Obama's speech

In case you don't want to read the transcript I posted before, here is the video. Even better.

Parts of it honestly send chills through me. Other parts are a bit contradictory. It makes me really slightly proud to see all the people behind him in that huge stadium. A much bigger support group than the 600 that showed up to hear McCain yesterday.

It's about time

Wow!! The Democratic race is finally over -- at least to everyone accept Senator Clinton who has not conceded yet.

If you didn't hear the speech Obama gave, you really missed out. But you can read here the transcript. Not as powerful as hearing him give it, but still a touching speech, still a speech that should convince everyone that change is necessary in this nation.

It is really amazing what a good speaker Senator Obama is. Seriously. Amazing. Mesmerizing. Enlightening. Really brings people to want to take part in the democratic process that so many in this nation (me included) have been deluded by for so long. He made me want to vote again. He made me think that change really is possible, not only through his words, but also by seeing other people actually give a shit again.

As he said at the end of his speech:

This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

I am almost proud to say I am from here.

Then I read some of his contradictions and remember how the Green Party is really more "for the people" than he is. Hopefully others will see that, too. Hopefully he will understand that that party has more strategies and ideas that are good for the people and he will adopt those ideas.

Breakfast, euphoria, sexism?

There is nothing better than waking up in the morning and eating a St. Louis Bread Co. (Panera for those not in Da Lou) breakfast sandwich. Those things are like that shot of meth the guy on the corner needs to get through the night, or that sniff of coke the CEO needs to make it through the broker meeting. The only thing better is when I have become such a regular at the store that even though there are five people in front of me, the lady at the counter calls out my name and asks, "Breakfast sandwich? How many?" I answer, she calls a guy out from the back to go over to the sandwich section, and my order is started with 4 people still in front of me in the line.

Sweet.

The euphoric state of mind was almost ruined when I got in the car and heard a story of some women on NPR saying that the only reason Clinton is not doing well is because of sexism. That her followers should jump from the Democratic side to the Republican candidate if Clinton is not the Democratic nominee for president.

Bitch, please. It's not because she is a woman. I give them the point that there are some people in the media who are constantly dissing her and using sexist comments about her, but come on now. She is not the best candidate for all the people. She is not as charismatic or as good at uniting people as the other Dem candidate.

And if these people are so willing to support the Republican candidate if she is not in the running, then they need to seriously look at why they are supporting her. It must not be due to the issues she stands for, otherwise they would see that the Rep have completely opposing views.

They must be only voting for and supporting her because she is a woman. Not because of her stance on the issues.

Perhaps they are the sexist ones.

Funny politics

This is a funny site with a list of things younger than Mr. John McCain.

Hilarious. And true.