"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Bush 'goes against values I treasure'

Wow. Check this newspaper editorial from Kentuckey:

For nearly 50 years, I considered myself a Republican. I usually voted for Republicans, and I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. I have deep family roots in the Republican Party. My father, Thruston Morton, served as a Republican U. S. senator from Kentucky and also served as national chairman of the Republican Party. My uncle, Rogers Morton, also served as national chairman of the Republican Party, served as a Republican in the U. S. House of Representatives, and served in the cabinet under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

I cannot in good conscience vote for President Bush in this election. What he has done since his election in 2000 goes against the values I treasure both in terms of leadership and in our nation. He has not done what he said he would do. He has lost my trust and my respect.

He is not a strong leader. He is a creature of the neoconservative ideologues who surround him. He chose to go to war in Iraq under false pretenses, turning responsibility over to the military with no plan to win the peace. He refuses to admit mistakes, let alone learn from them. His campaign is based on fear.

The name Ballard Morton carries weight in KY politics, so this isn't just some random weird ranting.

There are a lot of things I respect about the Republican party, man. And it's really a good thing to see some of them taking the risk of turning against Bush. Depending on how all this goes, people have to know that their future careers may be hurt by being associated with support of this administration. It's getting harder and harder for me to see how people can wholeheartedly support the guy, to be a partisan without reservation, to believe in George W. Bush the way I had believed in Howard Dean.

Those people are out there, though. Oh Yeah:

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Just so you know, reality is on the ballot in a couple weeks.

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Power Corrupts: The "Holy Fucking Shit This Is Our President?" Edition

The New York Times Magazine: Without a Doubt

I'll write more on this, but this NYT magazine article is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how we got here and why the Bush administration must be removed from power.

Read it. It's usually something of a comfort to inhabit the world of mainstream politics, where there are all kinds of stories and "reasonable explanations" for things. There are ways to rationalize horrible news of death and destruction -- a few marines here, a score of Iraqis there -- and other ways to gloss over sometimes more horrific statistics -- several million people living in proverty. There are ways to believe that all this business with our country lately is just little rough water, that nothing is seriously amiss or going wrong.

But as my mother quipped in a comment somewhere below: "I was tear-gassed by Nixon. Bush makes him look like a saint." Read the article.

This isn't "Bush Hatred" (which by the way is a made-up idea created by the spinmeisters in the west wing to supress reasonable dissent), it is the truth; and there's a fear that comes with that truth that all of this -- the faith-based president, the debased state of journalism, the world of 24-hour talking heads jacked up on the sickeningly stimulating death-juice of 9/11 -- it all might just be more that our country can handle. I do believe we run the risk of coming apart at the seams. I do, really, but I don't like to think about it because it's very frightening.

The article is very frightening. Here are some things we can do:

Voter X
MfA Get Out The Vote
ACT (massive grown-up GOTV)
Where's my polling place?

Please vote; and please tell everyone you know that you're doing it. Send an email to all your friends and let them know how you feel. Call everyone you know on November 2nd. Call them next week and tell them to vote early.

The most important motivator for new and unlikely voters is being asked to vote by a friend or peer. Do it. Lobby your friends and your family. There are no good reasons not to vote, and a million and one really important things on the line in this election.

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GOP Stragegy

Interesting:

And finally, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that BC04 is simply freaking out at Kerry's exposure, deliberate or inadvertant, of a vulnerability in their base-first strategy, which depends heavily on piggy-backing battleground state referenda on gay marriage.

This makes sense, and I find it interesting. It was clearly in effect in Michigan when I was there, but it's a spectacularly short-sighted strategy for the GOP. Younger conservatives (they're out there) aren't fired up about banning gay marriage. Most of them, in fact, are fine with it -- or with civil unions or some equivalent solution -- and don't want to be strongly associated with outright homophobia.

By tying their base-mobilization strategy to bigotry and religious fundimentalism, Rove's GOP is narrowing their base and turning off younger party activists.

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Freeway Free Speech Day Pictures Page 1

Awesome: culture-jamming is getting smarter and more mainstream. That's a good thing.

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