This evening's Rescue Rangers are Louisiana 1976, jlms qkw, HansScholl, dopper0189, BentLiberal and ItsJessMe, with jennyjem spinning around in the editor's chair. Wheeeee!
The diaries up for rescue tonight are:
While the warmongers beat their chests over Georgia, ignatz uk writes about a brewing humanitarian crisis in a forgotten corner of the world in 160,000 refugees at risk as Tamil Tigers face defeat. (HansScholl)
What happens when former prisoners of war play soccer against the forces occupying their country? Read all about it in gjohnsit's Games of Life and Death. (BentLiberal)
Here's a new ad, Three Times, from the Obama campaign, scheduled to air in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia beginning today.
"Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system, beloved by liberals, as his plan for broader coverage evolves over time.
"If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system," Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall style meeting on the economy.
Barack Obama is getting praise from Nashville, courtesy of one big, patriotic country star.
Toby Keith, perhaps best known to non-country audiences for his post-Sept. 11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," says he's a Democrat, and was impressed by the senator from Illinois.
Keith has said in the past that the 2002 song — which included lines aimed at the Taliban like "we lit up your world like the Fourth of July" — was more patriotic than pro-war.
Wouldn't it be nice if we really had a "liberal media"?
Giuliani to keynote Republican convention. I can't wait to see what drinking games are devised for that one. And no, "9/11" shouldn't be one of the drink markers. We don't want a rash of alcohol poisoning that night. Then again, maybe he's McCain's veep nominee, which would be totally awesome.
Aren't you glad we kicked Lieberman out of the Democratic Party? Otherwise, he'd be pulling his Zell Miller act as a Democrat.
Wait, what? NATO is in crisis because it didn't render aid to Georgia, which is not a NATO nation?
DC readers, Raising Kaine's Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox will be at Busboys and Poets (2021 14th) tonight promoting their book, Netroots Rising. The signing will be 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The book is out today. I'm so excited! If you're in the Bay Area, hope to see you tonight, everyone else, I hope you pick up a copy of the book and share your thoughts on it.
Tonight's Rescue Ranger streetcar riders are yashua, vcmvo2, jennyjem, dopper0189, dadanation, and jlms qkw, with YatPundit at the motorman's controls of the 1923-vintage Perley A. Thomas Editmobile.
wecouldbefamous ominously notes how the education reconstruction plan for New Orleans ends up permanently "shrinking" the footprint of the city itself in Neoliberalism Amok In Plan For New Orleans Schools. (vcmvo2)
In a victory for equality, Dirk McQuigley writes about a recent court decision ruling that a doctor has to treat gay people the same way as straight people.Cal Supreme Ct rules MD violated rights of gay patient. Nondiscrimination--what a novel concept! (dopper0189)
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse illustrates that McCain is not telling the truth about his "support" for renewable energy sources in McCain's Wind Energy Double-Talk Express. (vcmvo2)
Paul Anderson details a more appropriate (and frightening) frame of reference for the Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate in McBush? What about McNixon?. (dadanation)
Since I couldn't think of anything to write today, and there just so happens to be a town hall starting soon, AND I've always wanted to do a live blog, here ya go! You can view the town hall at www.cnn.com/live and on the Obama website.
[Update: 6:42 PM ET] It hasn't started yet, the CNN feed just has the crowd.
[Update: 6:47 PM ET] Obama just came out to a cheering crowd, the sound is doing something funny on my cnn feed, is it just me? Anyway, the crowd looks pumped :o)
[Update: 6:49 PM ET] Man, the sound is REALLY jacked up on cnn.com, or the crowd is REALLY loud. He's being introduced now by Gloria Craven, a regular citizen. She's going to tell us "how it is"
Bill Donahue has quite the racket -- he creates an organization with the name "Catholic" on it without any sanction from the Vatican, then he claims to speak for all Catholics. And the media gives him attention! But sometimes, he overextends himself.
Okay, I admit it. I had to read this twice before I got the joke. And then, I laughed and laughed and laughed.
AK-Sen: Ted Stevens' new defense: he's above the law. I wonder how a judge will treat that claim.
Everyone has veep scoops! Too bad none of the names match. We've got Kaine, Biden, Sebelius, Reed, Dodd and Daschle.
Gore will speak Thursday at the convention, at Invesco Field.
One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer. They have posted an advert on the listing site, Craig's List, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege.
The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book. "You will need to be able to copy the look and style of both author's signatures," it says.
If it’s true that the venue for this announcement will be Ohio, that in and of itself could be telling. Former Ohio Rep. Rob Portman has often been mentioned in conjunction with McCain’s short list and he would, perhaps, make Ohio a little more competitive for McCain than it’s already going to be. Portman also represented Ohio’s second congressional district — the second most Republican district in Ohio — which is not that far from Dayton. Moreover, the fact that we received the news about McCain’s announcement from the chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party rather than the Montgomery County Republican Party is very telling; Dayton is in Montgomery County, but Rob Portman is in Hamilton County.
McCain is hoping to steal some of Obama's convention-related glow with his veep announcement a week from Friday. If he picks a no-name like Portman, that strategy won't be half as effective. I'm certainly rooting for Portman, Bush's choice for McCain's veep:
Choosing Portman will mean that John McCain has accepted that he is running for President Bush’s third term. Robert Novak reported in February that Portman’s name was floated as running mate material by the Bush political team, effectively making him Bush’s choice of running mate. Portman is irrevocably tied to President Bush’s massive deficit and to the fiasco that has been "free trade" under the Bush administration. A look at Portman’s On the Issues profile demonstrates that he has been in lockstep not merely with the Republican Party in general, but with the Bush administration specifically. (See, for example, his positions on illegal immigration, out of step with most Republicans but perfectly in sync with Bush).
He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.
I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.
(DemFromCT)
Jonathan Cohn at TNR writes about the Democratic platform on health care... and its implications for an Obama Presidency.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is the sheer amount of attention--and apparent priority--health care gets in the platform. Health care is the first policy issue the document takes up in depth. No other platform in recent memory dealt with health care so prominently--or in such detail. Even in 1992, the last
year in which a Democratic nominee seriously proposed universal coverage, the platform relegated health care to lesser status: It appeared ninth in a long list of measures to improve economic security. Priorities like deficit reduction, public investment, and agriculture all came before it.
I gave in and made an open thread. Either this will be ignored and scroll into oblivion as new VP threads make their way into the noise, or we can distill all this fervor a little bit.
The book hits virtual and meatspace bookstands tomorrow, Wednesday. It's been six months since I delivered the book. It'll be nice to finally see it in circulation. It's a good one. I'm quite proud of it. Pick it up when you get the chance and then let us all know here at dKos what you think of it.
The fact that Barack Obama would show up at an Evangelical Church and take the tough questions is a credit to him. I mean he knew he was the visiting team so to speak yet he handled these questions like he has in the past: with relative ease [...]
Overall the night was a success for Obama. He didn’t get put on the spot too much with the abortion questions. He handled the "Jesus" question about his faith with ease and maybe most important he looked comfortable up there.
This wasn't a night for Obama to "win", but to remind people that he's not a Muslim Manchurian candidate, and in that regards, he had great success.
Obama raised $7.8 million in San Francisco for his campaign and the DNC Sunday night in scaaaary San Francisco, where gay people live! Hopefully the trip reinforced some San Francisco values, like entrepreneurship, innovation, and tolerance. Those are good values.
Poor Kristol, being forced to flack for a lying McCain campaign. Tom Tomorrow catches some creative rewriting:
Kristol's latest column in the dead tree NY Times:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on "Meet the Press" that "the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama."
That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.
Now the online version of that column:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on "Meet the Press" that "the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they’re putting out privately is that McCain ... may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama."
There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.
So he essentially went from, "no way did McCain overhear" to "McCain didn't get any advantages from overhearing". Nice. The online version doesn't even catalog the changes from the print version, and the NY Times abets this dishonesty since in the era of Google, it's the online version that will endure.
Was McCain's "cross in the dirt" story stolen/plagiarized from Alexander Solzhenitsyn? The evidence sure points in that direction.
"If the convention wasn't in St. Paul, I wouldn't be at the convention."
Poblano/Nate notes (with graphs!) that Clinton fared poorly against McCain while being attacked, but rose only after the RNC and Obama campaign ceased attacking her. Remember, in February of this year, the Obama campaign had pretty much won this thing, and stopped attacking Clinton to 1) focus its fire on McCain, and 2) stop needlessly antagonizing Clinton supporters. The RNC, for its own part, stopped attacking Clinton because it didn't want to further damager her. They wanted a competitive Democratic primary as long as possible.
It's a point I made often at the time when people claimed Clinton was doing better against McCain than Obama -- it was easy for Clinton to look better when no one was dragging her name through the mud while Obama was getting the full Wright treatment.
I have come around on Clinton. I think she would at least be a decent VP choice for Obama, and possibly an excellent choice.
But let's not get into revisionist history. She remains a candidate with significant negatives and, when those negatives were being leaned upon, her electoral position was vulnerable.
Personally, I still think those "significant negatives" would make her a terrible pick. Unfortunately, I'm resigned to Obama making a terrible pick with someone else anyway (Biden? Bayh? Kaine?), so if it's between one of those three terrible picks or Clinton, I throw my hands up in the air.
Speaking of Nate, he has his latest list of "battleground states", ordered from tightest to widest gaps. These are pretty much the states Nate considers tossups: Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Montana, Michigan, New Hampshire, Missouri, Florida, New Mexico, Iowa, and North Carolina.
Regardless of the exact timing, the voter is going to get two vice presidential nominations, and two sequences of four nights of party conventions -- all within the time period from now through Sept. 4.
A few days after that, say about the weekend of Sept. 5-7, we'll know where things stand as a baseline and starting point for the sure-to-be-hyperactive fall campaign. Meanwhile, our Gallup Poll Daily tracking will monitor the ups and downs of the candidates as each day's new events unfold.
And not until then will we know where we are starting from. (DemFromCT)
While Mr. Obama could prove beneficial to House candidates by increasing turnout in urban communities and raising enthusiasm among young voters in college towns, party officials believe an association with known Democratic candidates down the ticket could pay off for Mr. Obama among people who frequent Wal-Mart and passed up college to work.
"It is a two-way street," said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "There are going to be many districts where the Obama campaign helps our candidates, but our candidates are going to bring out people and we want to be sure they vote for Obama as well."
After success with the program in special Congressional elections this year, the party is putting more money into what strategists call early voter persuasion, getting a jump on previous years in their push to identify Democratic voters and nail down their allegiance by providing background information and other material. It is distinct from voter turnout drives that will begin closer to the election.
Planning began last November, and the committee has already spent $9 million, as much as was invested in the entire previous campaign season. Seven staff members oversee the national operation, compared with one in the 2006 cycle. The Democrats hope to record at least 13 million personal contacts with voters in 50 House districts before they are through.
ID-Sen: The first debate of the general election for Idaho Senate is tonight, making Idaho (and U-Stream) history by being the first debate broadcast live, online. It's also significant because Republican candidate Jim Risch, as usual, has refused to participate. But Democrat Larry LaRocco and Independent Rex Rammell will be there. You can watch, and ask your questions, making it an interactive, online forum. Watch it tonight at 7:30 MT (109:30 ET) at LaRocco for Senate. [mcjoan]
In Strategery '08: The Neocons' Caucusus Project, daveinchi analyzes the extent to which the "Rove" effect is governing the McCain campaign's response to the Georgian/Russian international crisis. (vcmvo2)
In a thoroughly researched and fascinatingly detailed diary, JohnnyRook explains why Spain is last among developed countries in meeting its Kyoto targets to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases, and what it can do about it, in Spanish wind looks sexy, but California efficiency is really hot. (ItsJessMe)
webuyitgreen continues a series on the distinctions between various coffee industry efforts to make coffee production more humane, this time examining Starbucks' C.A.F.E. Practices (claude)
prouddemocrat discusses how the facts demonstrate that America can achieve energy independence from the Middle East without additional drilling sites, despite what the President and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee have told us, in Bush and McCain Aim Low on Energy. (PaintyKat)
I have to say that this IS poetry, though disturbing, as poetry should be. Yosef 52 once again bares his soul and ventures beyond the comfort zone. Perhaps you will agree: I Don't Know About YOU, But I Could Use Some Poetry! (claude)
leftist vegetarian patriot suggests earlier concerns about the insolvency of American banks may have been misplaced since the downward spiral in the non-borrowed money reserves finally may have come to a halt in Huzzah! Our banking troubles are over. (PaintyKat)
Please use this as an Open Thread as well as your chance to promote your favorite diaries of the day. Respectful engagement is most welcome here. Please keep in mind that each Diary Rescue's daily purview extends from 3pm PST yesterday to 3pm PST today.
For the third day, bombers have targeted Shiite pilgrims in Karbala, killing as many as six today. Meanwhile, as Greg Mitchell reports, the death toll for U.S. military personnel for the first two weeks of August has topped last month's rate.
The Justice Department has sent target letters to half a dozen Blackwater security guards. They have initiated a probe into the shootings that killed 17 Iraqis last September.
A new Pew Research survey breaks down the partisan divide of cable news viewer:
As Atrios sez, you'd think that might actually lead those cable news programmer to "rethink the 'no liberals allowed on the teevee rule." I'm not going to hold my breath waiting.
Neo-Con Man Bill Kristol had one of his weekly ironic moments...
"...if countries don’t have confidence in our ability to help them, it’s going to be a much more dangerous world."
Sigh.
Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are phenoms, there is absolutely no doubt about it. And congratulations to them both. But this shout out is for Dara Torres. Dara, you're my hero.
Ever wonder what a bear really does in the woods? Scientists finally are answering that question, thanks to some high-tech cameras hooked to an equally high-tech Internet uplink. More important, the solar-powered remote sensors also are helping biologists to catch just the bear they want, when they want.
The USGS has been deploying remote video cameras in Glacier National Park to monitor grizzlies (update: home page with lots more video). One of their cameras caught amazing video of a wolf interacting with a sow and two cubs. The wolf and the cubs appear to want to play, though mama isn't too keen on the idea. Here's your moment of zen.
