I just received this email from Alan Grayson, former Democratic congressman from Florida and outspoken progressive. Unfortunately, I must say that in this political climate, it is difficult to believe that a fire that resulted in the destruction of an office dedicated to recalling Republican state senators was an accident.
It is worth nothing that the fire had no known cause.
Nader certain that a Democrat will challenge Obama in 2012
Ralph Nader, four-time candidate for President of the United States, is determined to unseat President Obama in his bid for reelection.
“What [Obama] did this week is just going to energize that effort,” Nader promised in an interview with The Daily Caller. “I would guess that the chances of there being a challenge to Obama in the primary are almost 100 percent.”
Nader also went on to decry Ron Paul’s candidacy and the extreme wings of the tea party.
“Ron Paul is a conservative libertarian. These are the conservative corporatists that have decided they like the brand name ‘Tea Party’ because the press reports on every movement of the Tea Party. So they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and hijacked it.
“There are a lot of Tea Party people, for example, who wanted more revenues. I think the polls showed that half of them wanted more revenues. And a lot of the Tea Party people want to get out of the wars. But its been hijacked by the corporatists.”
Nader has all but ruled out a fifth run at the presidency, but said he would work to see that Obama is challenged by a more progressive Democrat in 2012.
This is a long one but it’s worth watching. It’s too bad that journalist Molly Ivins is no longer with us. For those who don’t know of her, she was famed for her spot-on reportage and an unassumingly sharp Texan wit. Among her thoughtful observations is one that is directed in particular towards young people, and which bears repeating here:
Politics is not something you can look at as though it were a picture on a wall or a program on television and say, ‘Well, I just don’t care about that.’ I hear people all the time say things like, ‘Uh, I’m just interested in politics,’ ‘Oh, they’re all crooks,’ ‘Well…there’s nothing I can do.’
We are collectively the heirs to the most magnificent political legacy any people has ever received. ‘We believe these truths to be self-evident, that all men’—and women—‘are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these Rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe that Governments are instituted among men to secure these Rights and that whenever any Government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.’
Those words are so profoundly revolutionary that more than 200 years later they echo all over the world, and people are willing to give their lives for a chance to live under that system. People died for it in South Africa, they died for it in Tiananmen Square, they’re dying for it today in Myanmar. And in Iraq they’re proving they don’t want it shoved down their throats.
That legacy…should not be thrown away out of boredom or cynicism or inanition. Politics is not about those people in Washington, it’s not about those people up in Baton Rouge. It’s our deal. We run this county. We are the Board of Directors. We own it. They’re just the people we have hired to drive the bus for awhile.
(Source: youtube.com)
GOP wants to stop unions at all costs
In the interest of destroying labor unions, House Republicans have blocked all funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (which is of course heavily unionized). To clarify, these are the folks that make sure we get from point A to point B safely when we fly on airplanes. As if that weren’t bad enough, the tea party seems to care very little about the resulting loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in FAA tax revenue that the government desperately needs.
The lack of funding also stopped airlines’ collection of millions of dollars in ticket taxes used to pay FAA employees. If the shutdown lasts all the way to early September, when Congress is scheduled to return from recess, the lost revenue could top $1 billion, the Transportation Department estimated. (MSNBC)
Goldman Sachs to hijack even more government?
Former Goldman Sachs CEO-turned-politician Jon Corzine could be headed back to Washington, a bond offering from his current employer MF Global showed. The New York Times speculates that Corzine may be in the running for Timothy Geithner’s soon-to-be-vacated role of U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Joe Biden calls out tea party ‘terrorists’
Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60421.html#ixzz1TojeTlym
Bill O’Reilly only makes sense when he’s (drunk?) on vacation.
If I open a PayPal account for donations, can we send a copy to every Democrat in Washington?
