While we’re gone, I’ll be putting up some links to various articles even if I don’t have a chance to post about them.
To start, Bob Herbert’s column on liberals in the NYT.
Let’s Start with Seven, in Seven
In a week’s time, straight Americans will be standing up for LGBT Rights – here in New York, including Brooklyn, but also in California, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, etc. The basic idea is that straight people will attend vigils – and other media-making events – in order to bring attention to the political issues facing LGBT Americans.
This is a damned good idea (and it’s brought to you by Atticus Circle, and Soulforce).
You can get involved by signing up here, and you can email your friends about it, too.
Looking for a T Republican
I’m looking for someone who can write an articulate piece about being trans and Republican. I really don’t understand it myself, so I’d like someone who would be willing to address themselves to left-leaning Democrats.
Hardballs
Chris Matthews is in fine form making fun of Buchanan having suddenly become a Women’s Rights Man. Entertaining.
Jon Stewart to the Rescue
& he’s got the clips to prove it.
The Requisite Sarah Palin Post
The real kicker of Sarah Palin’s talk tonight was the “scary ideas from Europe” idea. I mean, seriously? Scary Europeans? Where there’s national healthcare and maternity leave and no gun crime? That scary place?
I’m still flummoxed by just about everything she said tonight. Astounded, even. Aside from the Big Fat Liar issue – she was for the Bridge to Nowhere until she was nominated, and she raised taxes on Alaskans – I can’t believe her entire talk was about the elites, and scary European ideas, and tiny government. (You know, like the kind that brought you Katrina.) I mean, aren’t culture wars so 90s?
But it’s more than that. The cynicism and sarcasm and meanness she expressed blew my mind. I like people who are clever and clear-thinking, but that’s not what she is. It makes me so sad to think anyone might admire her, or find like-mindedness in her comments. She’s like Dr. Laura, and those platitudes don’t work as advice, and they definitely don’t work as policy.
Please, Dems, don’t rest easy. We need to kick this woman’s ass. She cut funding on a center for pregnant teenagers even though she has one. Talk about elitism. She tried to ban books and she got pork-barrel funding for aerial hunting (which is about the lamest, most shameful thing I’ve ever heard of).
Choosing Choice
Sarah Palin’s daughter is 17 and pregnant.
I’m not sure if that’s funny or tragically, tragically funny. Or, as our friend The Lazy Cartoonist put it, Bristol Palin is apparently open for drilling.
Feministing did a fine job of making the political hay that’s there to be made.
Obama PIRG
Well this explains everything about why I like the guy: I worked at NYPIRG, and I went to City College, too. I showed up at both about five years after he was there.
After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.
Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling†— a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues†like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.
“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,†said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.
Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.â€
(From The NY Times)
McCain Sucks
I can’t find any other words & apologize for the obscenity, but the suggestion that all the Hillary voters, and other women, would vote for him because he found a woman who will run with him just pisses me off.
Take your condescension & shove it, McCain.
The cynicism of this move is even more despicable.
She is anti-choice, pro-creationism, and for drilling in Alaska.
Obama
10:08PM – Here we go. I’m fully expecting to cry through most of his speech, and I expected that before Olbermann read some of it as a preview.
10:09PM – Though wow is this video heavy-handed.
10:13PM – As a speaker, I think I know that look on his face. He is about to blow this thing wide open.
11:02PM – By God. That is an historically important speech – the craft of it, the earnestness, the humor, the empathy. By god. “It’s how Henry won at Agincourt,” says Chris Matthews. Nation of whiners my ass. Own your failure, you ownership society types. Democrats and Republicans fight and die under the same flag. What a stunning piece of work, which simultaneously laid out his plans, criticized the bullshit that’s in DC, and taught Americans how to defeat and debunk the Republicans & John McCain. Jeez louise he just hit that OUT OF THE PARK.
ENOUGH, he said. I agree. We have had enough. Change doesn’t come from Washington; the people go to Washington and demand it. Damn straight.
Sign me up for the PA canvas. & Otherwise you can donate through the Trans for Obama campaign.
1:30AM – & on the second listen: “You’re on your own” = Obama’s summation of Trickle Down Economics.
& Pat Buchanan says it wasn’t a liberal speech. Silly, silly man. What it was is something so rare in American politics that we don’t recognize it when we see it, A Genuine Article Populist Speech.