For Dems only.

[Rex Kickass]

 

I am Poli-Bot 3000.

 

Those clowns in Congress, what a bunch of clowns.

[BigSqwert]

Bush's 60th b-day card. I like Alberto Gonzalez's comment along the middle...

 

[Rex Kickass]

Was just gonna link that, hysterical.

[kapkomet]

 

That's great.

[Balta1701]

"Guantanamo ought to be closed immediately"

 

Reportedly said by Colin Powell yesterday.

[KipWellsFan]

Cowboy Diplomacy is Dead

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1211277,00.html

 

Great article

[BigSqwert]

Ann Coulter on Adam Carolla's show. Edited July 9, 2006 by BigSqwert

[CanOfCorn]

Ann Coulter on Adam Carolla's show.

 

That...was...awesome.

 

Although I wish DJ's would do more of that...not necessarily to Ann Coulter.

[Rex Kickass]

I thought that was hilarious. And I usually don't like Adam Carolla.

[Balta1701]

So I figga this ought to be posted somewhere...a judge ruled that the FBI Raid on Rep. Jefferson's office was in fact legal and constitutional.

[Rex Kickass]

Good.

[Balta1701]

Vlad (the democracy impaler) Putin:

 

Cheney, in a May speech in the ex-Soviet republic of Lithuania, accused Russia of cracking down on religious and political rights and of using its energy reserves as “tools of intimidation or blackmail.”

 

In response, Putin said, “I think the statements of your vice president of this sort are the same as an unsuccessful hunting shot. It’s pretty much the same.”

[Balta1701]

"The President is always right"

 

Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, before Congress when quizzed on the Hamdan decision.

[Balta1701]

Damn WSJ hippies with their fuzzy math...

 

Do tax cuts pay for themselves? Not if you read the fine print in the new White House midsession review of budget trends. “While difficult to estimate precisely,” Treasury long-run analyses of the effects of President Bush’s tax cuts “may ultimately” raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%.

 

So is that enough to pay for the tax cuts, even after allowing them to work their economic magic over the next 10 years? The Center for Budget Policies and Priorities, a Washington think tank and advocacy group that is distinctly unfriendly to Bush fiscal policies, says it isn’t. “A 0.7 percent increase in the economic output that the Congressional Budget Office has projected for 2016 would represent an additional $146 billion [in gross domestic product],” it says. “If new revenues equaled as much as 20% of the additional output, the increase in revenues resulting from making the tax cuts permanent (assuming Treasury’s best-case assumptions) would be $29 billion.”

 

That’s a lot of money. But how does it compare to the size of the president’s tax cuts? The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, using conventional analyses, says making the president’s tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate by prompting more hours of work, more savings and investment and more efficient use of resources. –David Wessel

[Balta1701]

Speaker of the Iraqi parliament blames the violence in Iraq on..."The Jews."

[Balta1701]

I don't think the DCCC should have used the image in their ads, but the Contrast here is beautiful.

DCCC Has Launched A "Distasteful" Ad Campaign Using "Flag-Covered Coffins Of Dead Soldiers." "The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has stooped to a new low. The group is using flag-covered coffins of dead soldiers and other images as distasteful propaganda in a new fundraising campaign ad ... Ironically, the title of the video is 'America Needs a New Direction' but it ends with Bill Clinton waiving his hands in the air." (Ivy J. Sellers, "DCCC Uses Dead Soldiers To Raise Funds," Human Events Online, 7/12/06)

 

And, barely 2 days later...

 

Using vivid images of smoke pouring from one of the towers of the World Trade Center, Republican Sen. Mike DeWine unleashed a commercial yesterday that charges Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown with casting votes in Congress that could have weakened America’s response to terrorism.

 

The new TV commercial, which also flashed images of the 19 hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11 attack, is an apparent effort by the DeWine campaign to jar Ohio voters into remembering the terrorist attack in New York and suburban Washington and to convince them that the senator will support tougher anti-terrorism measures than Brown, a congressman from Avon.

 

Seriously, both sides, do we need this s*** in ads? And Republicans, would you like to practice what you preach here just a little bit?

[Balta1701]

Meet the New Boss...

Tapping a rich vein of longstanding relationships with lobbyists and their corporate clients, Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has raised campaign contributions at a rate of about $10,000 a day since February, surpassing the pace set by former Representative Tom DeLay after he became majority leader in 2002, a review of federal filings shows.

Public financing of campaigns. It's the only solution.

[Rex Kickass]

I don't think the DCCC should have used the image in their ads, but the Contrast here is beautiful.

And, barely 2 days later...

Seriously, both sides, do we need this s*** in ads? And Republicans, would you like to practice what you preach here just a little bit?

 

The Democrats in response to the criticism pulled their ads. The Republicans - won't most likely. Which is why they win. They do the thing that wins, not the nice thing or even the right thing.

[Soxy]

Interesting Editorial from that liberal rag, the NYT

Exerpts:

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

 

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

 

 

The president’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.

[Soxy]

My gosh, linguists are so brilliant. . .

 

FINE POINT: A LOOK AT THE WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Linguist has message for Democrats

 

By Michael Tackett. Michael Tackett is the Tribune's Washington Bureau chief

Published July 16, 2006

 

On paper, George Lakoff doesn't seem a likely oracle for the Democratic Party. He's a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of expertise: the "neural theory of language, conceptual systems, conceptual metaphor, syntax-semantics-pragmatics," among other things.

 

It's hard to imagine a caricature more ripe for Republican mocking.

 

In person, it isn't much better. Bearded, bespectacled and a bit on the portly side, he also in no way lacks confidence in his intellect. A central-casting Cal-Berkeley liberal.

 

But Lakoff may be on to something.

 

He makes a very persuasive argument that Democrats have allowed Republicans to hijack words such as "freedom" and "liberty" in fundamental ways that have undercut Democrats' credibility. His latest book, "Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea," builds on earlier works that urge progressives to stop getting their pockets picked by Republicans over issues in which, he says, progressives actually hold the higher moral ground.

 

Lakoff contends that Republicans not only have taken ownership of words, they also have skillfully succeeded in framing the debate. That has trapped Democrats into being reactive, implicitly buying into the GOP framework and almost dooming them to failure.

 

Consider the war in Iraq. Republicans have adroitly labeled Democratic calls for troop pullbacks as "cut and run." So how did Democrats respond? With John Kerry saying that the Bush strategy is "lie and die."

 

Instead, Lakoff says, Democrats must change the nature of the debate, starting by rejecting the premise that America is in fact at war. The war, he says, ended when President Bush said it did with his "Mission Accomplished" stunt on an aircraft carrier. Now, Democrats should refer to the conflict as an occupation. They should say U.S. troops were not trained to be occupiers and that they were betrayed by administration policy, with the U.S. weakened as a result.

 

Lakoff makes a similar point about the "war on terror." Terrorism, he says, should be fought in the same way the government went after the Mafia.

 

Right or wrong, no prominent Democrat has adopted Lakoff's proposed framing. That hasn't stopped him from making the rounds in Washington, urging Democrats to take heed.

 

He is a one-man army for the counterintuitive. Democrats, he says, are an anti-intellectual party. It is Republicans, he says, who support conservative intellectuals with many think tanks and interest groups to promote a conservative agenda.

 

Republicans, he adds, actually control the media. They reinforce Bush's positions and use radio, television and the Internet to create an amen chorus before Democrats can even deliver a compelling sermon.

 

Democrats, he says, need to become framers.

 

Lakoff says the Democratic message needs to be something like this: Republicans oppress people when they can't eat the fish they catch because of water pollution, when kids get asthma because of bad air, when ranchers can't let cattle drink the water in the streams that run through their land, all because of lax regulation. And don't make the mistake of labeling yourself an environmentalist.

 

Lakoff likens the GOP orthodoxy as offered by Bush to a "strict father" mentality with a stark and unambiguous view of right and wrong. Democrats offer more a "nurturant parent" who is empathetic and looks at things in context.

 

Democrats, he says, need to start framing with core convictions and not with calibrations to try to win over converts.

 

Framing alone won't get it, though. Lakoff recalled a conversation with Richard Wirthlin, the pollster for Ronald Reagan. Wirthlin told him that when he did surveys for Reagan, he found that voters disagreed with Reagan but liked him for the values he projected--authenticity, trust and the ability to connect with voters on a personal level.

 

And Reagan didn't move to the middle to try to get votes. Rather, his personal traits had a pull for those voters in the middle who were willing to support him almost in spite of his positions.

 

"Talk to the center the way you talk to your base," Lakoff says.

 

In Lakoff's view, most of the Democrats being discussed as potential presidential candidates don't have that skill set. Not Hillary Clinton. Not John Kerry. Not John Edwards.

 

His lone exception: Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

 

"He's amazing," Lakoff says, ticking off Obama's capacity for authenticity, values, trust and connection. "He doesn't just get up there and give a laundry list of programs."

 

Obama, he says, has an innate understanding of language and framing that the others do not.

 

Lakoff made a point of saying that he has talked to Obama. We will see if Obama listened.

[Rex Kickass]

Lakoff is really interesting. I enjoyed Don't Think of An Elephant and am looking forward to reading this particular book too, but I think he's a little too centered on framing as the root of our problems. Part of the root of our problems is prior to this year, the Democratic Party leadership has been very unresponsive to the rank and file. With the election of Howard Dean, this is starting to change.

 

Doing things like rebuilding the party in Montana and Nebraska, and in the South is going to go a much further way to make change than framing words.

[Soxy]

Lakoff is really interesting. I enjoyed Don't Think of An Elephant and am looking forward to reading this particular book too, but I think he's a little too centered on framing as the root of our problems. Part of the root of our problems is prior to this year, the Democratic Party leadership has been very unresponsive to the rank and file. With the election of Howard Dean, this is starting to change.

 

Doing things like rebuilding the party in Montana and Nebraska, and in the South is going to go a much further way to make change than framing words.

I agree with you, that there is definitely more to winning the election than a simple lingustic/thematic shift. But I think he makes a very interesting and valid point about the power of language. But I wholeheartedly agree that rebuilding the bases is really going to be the future of the party.

 

Another interesting, but long piece from the Times.

[Rex Kickass]

He's been preaching it for three years - and Lakoff is desperate to become the Democrats' answer to Luntz.

[BigSqwert]

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/07/bu...chancellor.html

[Balta1701]

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/07/bu...chancellor.html

Here's your question...how would the media react if that were Bill Clinton instead of George W. Bush?

 

Of course, one could also wonder how they'd react if Clinton had personally stepped in and ordered a stop to some random investigation of his actions, but of course, we can't forget 9/11.