Political Games - Where the fuck’s the reset button?

How dare you, sir? You have done an excellent job representing me these past four months, and I have highly approved of the job you’ve done. And when it came to Iraq, you had vocally called for the withdraw of American forces from that unwinnable war. You joined 168 of your colleagues and voted for the McGovern bill. Why, then, did you cave and vote for the war funding that does not have any timelines? As someone who actively supported you, went to a rally, and even had the opportunity to meet with you personally, I feel confused, disappointed, and betrayed.

Since last summer the op-ed you wrote for the Daily Times has hung on my door as a constant reminder of how true those words were and are. “I firmly believe in a planned end to our military engagement in Iraq within the next year.” You then went on to explain that the ONLY extensions should be those granted to give the military brass more time to remove troops; not to extend the mission in pursuit of “ever changing goals” that will always remain “elusive”; and CERTAINLY not as one of the worst and least-liked presidents in history sends more of our young men and women to die for his pride and vanity. All this bill does is allow George Bush to continue to let more Americans and Iraqis die for another 19 months until he is replaced. That is more than unacceptable. It is immoral. It is evil.

What puzzles me most is that, until now, you had been flawless in understanding and taking on the lies this Administration and its surrogates have used to smear opponents of this occupation. Why now have you fallen for their smear that failing to give Mr. Bush what he wants is tantamount to endangering our troops? As your constituent, I demand answers, and I demand accountability.

Sincerely,

Stephen Mann

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Those fucking, spineless Democrats. They’re caving to the President and the GOP and more war by giving him a funding bill without timetables. You can read about the damage here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I’m furious, assuming this bill comes to pass. This is a complete capitulation by the Democratic leadership, a complete abandonment of what was promised in 06 and what has been promised over the past several months. Of course, this isn’t the only issue where the party has either backed down completely or thrown the American people and party activists under the bus with watered down shit (as Atrios sez, “don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining”). Corporate coddling and weaker ethics reform, playing footsie with FoxNews while attacking ‘liberal activists’ [well wtf, aren’t Democrats SUPPOSE to be liberal?!], and plenty of other weak shit. Besides being a total sellout of what us activists have been striving for, especially on ethics and Iraq, there’s another thing that grinds my gears.

IT MAKES NO GOD-DAMN POLITICAL SENSE! Wake up, Democratic consultants and insiders: the public trusts you on every fucking issue; or it did, anyway. You probably just pissed away all the trust you’d made with BOTH the left and the “middle”. Good job.

Raise hell about this, regardless of your party affiliation. Let them know your party affiliation though: if they get complaints from “real Americans” [which is code for conservatives or right-leaning ‘independents’] as well as from us damn dirty hippies, maybe they’ll actually fucking listen.

EDIT: I don’t like Kos in terms of ideology, but I love his organizational skills and his dedication to cleaning up the party. So what he said:

Unless you care more about George W.’s ego than the safety and welfare of our troops, you are pissed right now. But there is productive pissed, and destructive pissed. The productive stuff has us redoubling our efforts to clean house in Congress, clearing out the dead weight, the corporatists, and the Republicans. There’s the taking over our local parties, bringing new blood and a cohesive sense of purpose to often moribund organizations.

That doesn’t mean ’stop being angry’. It means, ’stand tough and fight back’.

Fuck Yeah!

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(Note: I’m updating this entry as time goes by. Maybe I should link it on the mainpage…)

I’m going to be doing a series on the Democratic candidates for President and where they stand on a variety of issues. While Iraq and healthcare are Teh Big Issues, I want to do the first few sections on some issues that get less play in the media. We’ll start with gay civil rights, which includes a variety of things from workplace discrimination, bias-motivated crime legislation, and marriage equality.

The first two are actually the easiest to tackle: the 8 announced candidates all support laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and expanding “hate crimes” to include sexual orientation. As far as I can tell, they’re all in favor of repealing DADT as well and are opposed to a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. Where things get interesting is marriage equality aka legalizing gay marriage. I will mostly be basing this information off the candidates’ websites and outside sources when the sites are evasive. I will be working in reverse alphabetical order by last name.

Read the rest of this entry »

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This guy’s got huge LIBERAL credentials, and I mean left liberal. The only views of his I think are wrong are a progressive national sales tax [an oxymoron that would actually be near-impossible to implement] and the abolition of the IRS [while I’d like to see the tax-collecting agency rebuilt from the ground up, at this time it’s not feasible. If anything the IRS needs more support so long as it’s focused more on wealthy tax evaders instead of poor and middle-class], along with some minor nitpicking. I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna get him into the middle tier, let alone the top, but it really needs to be done if only to push the top tier candidates closer to his views. You can read about him here and his political views here. I’d really like to see this guy having a shot for being the President in 2008. Might I recommend joining his site and trying to elect Mike Gravel for President 2008?

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631 more days, folks… just keep up the good work we’ve all been doing the past couple years to keep this psycho in line and we can minimize the damage he can cause.

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I don’t have any words. A new level of wrong…

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