Common Sense Democracy

Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad
by Andrew C. McCarthy (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Publication Date: April 14, 2008

Buy new: $25.95 $17.13
15 used & new from $16.34

(Ranking is updated hourly. Visit the Hot New Releases in Nonfiction > Politics list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)

Learn more: #12: Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad

Leave Comment

A Letter to America
by David Boren (Author)
Publication Date: February 28, 2008

Buy new: $14.95 $10.17

Book Description
A Letter to America boldly faces the question of how long the United States, with only six percent of the world’s population, can remain a global superpower. University of Oklahoma president David Boren explains with unsparing clarity why the country is at a crossroads and why decisive action is urgently needed. He draws on his experiences as the longest-serving chair of the U.S. Senate’s Select… ( read more )

(Ranking is updated hourly. Visit the Hot New Releases in Nonfiction > Politics list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)

Learn more: #4: A Letter to America

Leave Comment

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)
by Chalmers Johnson (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: January 22, 2008

Buy new: $16.00 $10.88
29 used & new from $8.93

From Publishers Weekly
Like ancient Rome, America is saddled with an empire that is fatally undermining its republican government, argues Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire), in this bleak jeremiad. He surveys the trappings of empire: the brutal war of choice in Iraq and other foreign interventions going back decades; the militarization of space; the hundreds of overseas U.S. military bases full of “swaggering soldiers… ( read more )

(Ranking is updated hourly. Visit the Hot New Releases in Nonfiction > Politics list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)

Learn more: #16: Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)

Leave Comment

Reposted Via MoveOn.org

It was like a starter’s pistol went off. Ned Lamont wins and the next day Republicans are politicizing a terror threat with outrageous comments. Dick Cheney even said Connecticut voters were supporting Al Qaeda.¹

They can’t get away with that and, with voters angry about Katrina and Iraq, we can expose Republican posturing on security if we hit back hard.

This week newspapers will print letters to the editor about last week’s terror threat. If thousands of us write letters we can remind the public that five years after 9/11 the Republicans have made us less safe. Can you take a moment to write a letter to the editor of your local paper? Our tool makes it easy, all you have to do is click below:

http://political.moveon.org/lte?campaign_id=63&id=8447-4350126-r.2ya_vE2KySf8lywLqfrw&t=2

This moment is critical: public reaction will determine whether the administration can get away with blatantly politicizing terror threats. If we respond hard, their strategy will backfire, and the debate will shift to Iraq and the other ways they’ve made us less safe.

The opinion pages are the most popular pages in the newspaper, and if they’re flooded with our letters, we can help shape public opinion. It only takes a few minutes to write a letter and even if your letter isn’t published it encourages the editors to publish letters that tell our story.

And our story is important to tell—both to protect America and our democracy. Here are some key points to discuss in your letter (all of them are listed in the online tool too).

• Five years after 9/11, the Bush administration has failed to keep us safe.
• The war in Iraq has diverted attention from protecting America from terrorism. This past week 9/11 commissioners said Iraq is distracting from security at home.
• The war in Iraq has inflamed the whole Middle East and is helping Al Qaeda attract new recruits. Osama Bin Laden is still on the loose.
• Katrina showed all of us that the Republicans aren’t able to protect America at home. The Republican Congress hasn’t followed through on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.
• Republican political attacks during last week’s terror threat are outrageous.

This is the critical moment when a letter to the editor is important. Hundreds of newspapers around the country are examining what happened last week. Can you write one?

http://political.moveon.org/lte?campaign_id=63&id=8447-4350126-r.2ya_vE2KySf8lywLqfrw&t=3

There are more than 3 million of us who are part of MoveOn. If each one of us just does a little bit it will add up to something really big. Please write a letter today.

Thanks for all you do.

–Tom, Marika, Wes, Rosalyn and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
  Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Source:

1. Think Progress. August 10, 2006. (Includes link to full transcript of Cheney remarks.)
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/10/cheney-ct/

Leave Comment

• Dick Cheney Storey Follow-up on the Daily Show
  (tags: politics dick+cheney vice+president funny)
• A lengthy round-up of jokes on Dick Cheney
  (tags: politics funny dick+Cheney)
• YTMND - dickhunt.ytmnd.com
  (tags: politic dick+cheney)
• Ten ways Dick Cheney can kill you
  (tags: funny dick+cheney)
• White House’s joking about it
  (tags: dick+cheney politics white+house)
• The Smoking Gun
  (tags: dick+cheney politics)
• Marlin Fitzwater
  For that matter, Marlin Fitzwater, who served as press secretary for Reagan and Bush I has harsh words about Cheney not being more public about the incident.
  (tags: dick+cheney fitzwater politics)
• Cheney accident has political echoes - Politics - MSNBC.com
  Cheney shooting accident has political echoes Controversy erupts over White House handling of hunting incident news
  (tags: dick+cheney politics)

Leave Comment

The more I watch the news reports and follow along on blogs, the worse it seems to get. It’s just mind-numbing to see the devastation.

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of disaster relief organizations that need help in some form or another.

The Democratic Daily Blog » Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief Info (Updated).

Technorati Tags: Hurricane+Katrina, Katrina, Hurricane, Disaster+Relief, Red+Cross

Leave Comment

Blogs and Google Adsense go hand-in-hand. In case you’re not familiar with Google Adsense, it’s the advertising program sponsored by Google that allows site owners to put those little ad boxes along the margins, headers and footers of websites. Webmasters earn revenue from the clicks on the ad links. The type of ads that appear on a site depend on the content of the page and Google’s technology serves up ads that it thinks are relevant to the topic of the page based on various keywords and phrases. Most site owners use Adsense as a way to defer costs of maintaining the site (as is the case with Common Sense Democracy). One of things I find quite amusing is to watch the types of ads that are being served to my sites change based on what I’m blogging about that week. This brings me to the point of this post. This week the story broke on the Watergate’s “Deep Throat” and I posted several references to the news with various links to other sources. Shortly after, the Google Adsense ads stopped appearing on the home page of this site. This is not unusual, as occassionally the druids over at Google play with the algorithms that cause blips across the universe. What is unusual is the lengh of time the ads have not appeared. Digging deeping into other pages, I realized that the ads are showing in other areas, which rules out the argument that Common Sense Democracy was being somehow blocked or reindexed in it’s entirety. One conclusion I came up with was that Google just simply didn’t like the term “Deep Throat”. Perhaps their engines have determined this term to be profanity and so the ads are filtered on any page referencing this content.

Anyway, it’s just a theory. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has experienced this phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: Google, adsense, Google Adsense, deep throat, blog, profanity, search engine marketing

1 Comment

Via CNN.com

The Senate panel approved two more judges, sending them to the full Senate for confirmation. The debate over the use of the filibuster could get heated.

Read more at CNN.com
Technorati: Filibuster, Senate, Judicial nominees

Leave Comment

Just a follow-up to our previous post about Microsoft being bullied by the the religious right. Many employees of Microsoft are disgruntled by their 11th hour pull-out from backing the legislation. The bill ended up being defeated in the state Senate by one vote. Rumor has it that Microsoft turned tail due to pressure from local religious leaders who said they would organize a nationwide boycott of Microsoft if they continued to back the legislation.

A boycott?! What are they going to do? Go door to door and tell everyone to throw out their computer operation system?

Some decisions have to be more then just revenue based. This sets in motion a terrible perception of Microsoft, who has traditionally received awards for being so pro-gay rights.

As they say, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and one simple act to destroy it. The statement that this makes about how Microsoft does business could be much more damaging then any boycott the religious right could have orchestrated.

Read more at Technorati: Microsoft, Gay Rights, anti-gay discrimination

Leave Comment

I have several friends who work for master Microsoft, so I’m sure this news will generate some strong feelings.

Read more at towleroad: Microsoft Secretly Withdraws Endorsement of Gay Rights Bill
Also at Technorati: Gay Rights, Microsoft.

Leave Comment

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is continuing to pick fights with the judiciary, this time attacking Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, a Republican judge appointed by President Reagan.

Hopefully if he picks enough fights, the playground bully will eventually kick his ass.

Read more at MSNBC.com.
Also at Technorati: Justice Kennedy, Supreme Court, Tom DeLay, Judicial Activists

Leave Comment

The Senate has passed a resolution requesting that President Bush submit projected war costs in the U.S. budget he submits to Congress. The resolution was authored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). He said,

Over the last three and a half years, at a time when the government is swimming in red ink, the White House has charged an additional $280 billion on the national credit card, without proposing a single dime of that spending in its annual budget proposals

“The White House said war costs are too hard to predict”. So not only do we have a President who can take our country to war without the consent of Congress (because they provided him with that authority) but he can apparently spend whatever he wants without the consent of Congress.

I’m not sure there is much left in our form of government that resembles a Democracy.

Read more at Yahoo! News

Leave Comment

In case you missed the first part of this story, a law student at New York University asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia was speaking at the school in a crowded auditorium when the law student stood up to speak. Scalia refused to answer the question. [Read more on original story, at the New York Post.

Obviously, this has created quite a stir and there are many that say the student was out of line in asking such a question. The student has now responded in an email to the school’s student body. His response is great and very well written. I urge anyone interested or involved in LGBT issues to definitely read it. I have included the text of the email here.
Continue reading this post…

Leave Comment

More on how the GOP push to get rid of the filibuster on judicial nominee selection, could come back to haunt them should the Democrats get the majority in future elections.

The balance of power in government is a pendulum. What comes around, goes around and the majority today may not be so tomorrow.

Read more at Boston.com

Leave Comment

I try to scour the political spectrum of news for credible points of view from both the left and the right. I tend to lean toward the left because to me, these days, it just seems to make more common sense, and that is what we’re all about here. I grew up a Republican, but somewhere along the line I got an education and realized that money and corruption is not the same thing as believing in something.

I stumbled across a post tonight on the Right Wing News blog that discusses the so-called left’s hypocrisy about Gay Marriage. This writer has somehow tried to link the recent comments by Bill Clinton, regarding Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein, to the entire Democratic Party’s position on gay marriage. Sometimes you just have to respond to something so completely stretched and manipulated. Here is the original post at Right Wing News. I posted the following comment to their blog:

Bill Clinton’s attack of Finkelstein wasn’t about Bill Clinton’s view of gay marriage. It was about Finkelstein, a man who, for years has helped elect conservative, right wing Republicans to office who oppose gay marriage. It’s about Finkelstein who lobbies behind the scenes to promote an agenda of discrimination and hate. It’s about Finkelstein who supports an administration that opposes every fiber of gay marriage, and who then runs off to Massachusetts to marry his gay partner. Bill Clinton was merely pointing out that this right-wing Finkelstein either “believes his party is not serious… or is self-loathing”. What does this two-faced republican’s hipocrisy have, AT ALL, to do with the Bill Clinton’s view or the Democratic Party’s view of gay marriage???

Leave Comment

Oregon’s Supreme Court has invalidated 3,000 marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples on the grounds that they were unconstitutional.

Oregon’s Supreme Court said in its ruling that the licenses issued in left-leaning Multnomah County “were issued without authority and were void at the time they were issued.”

Kelly Clark, a lawyer with the Defense of Marriage Coalition in Oregon, said,

Marriage by historic definition is best between a man and a woman and that’s what creates the best foundational unit for society.

What is this historic definition? The historic definition of the right to vote, for example, also states that only white males can vote, but society somehow matured past this narrow-minded view. Marriage, this so-called “best foundational unit for society” is averaging a 50% divorce rate in the U.S. What are we really protecting here? Gay people just want the right to get divorced and take their spouse to court like every other straight couple. People who throw history around should be very careful of the argument they bring up. History also includes civilizations like Rome, thousands of years old, that accepted homosexuality. Civilizations like Rome, that wrote the book on Democracy.

Read more at Yahoo! News - Oregon’s Top Court Annuls 3,000 Gay Marriages
Search for more on Gay Marriage at Technorati.com.

Leave Comment

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay apologized Wednesday for his comment about judges.

I said something in an inartful way and I apologize for it,” DeLay told reporters who jammed a conference room in his Capitol office suite. “I’m sorry I said it that way and I shouldn’t have said it.

On the day Terri Schiavo died, DeLay’s had made the statement, “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” He has been increasingly attacked for his comments.

Members of Congress should just not make comments like that. After the recent attacks and murders of judges, do we really need our national leadership saying that retribution may be appropriate because he disagrees with the legal ruling of judges?

Well the apologies have now started. Perhaps the pressure of the recent corruption, scandals and off-the-hook remarks are starting to take their toll.

Read more at CNN.com

Leave Comment

Via MSNBC.com

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has asked his fellow Republicans to change the subject and blame Democrats, if they are asked about DeLay’s ethics controversies.

Officials said DeLay recommended that senators respond to questions by saying Democrats have no agenda other than partisanship, and are attacking him to prevent Republicans from accomplishing their legislative program. One Republican said the Texan referred to a “mammoth operation” funded by Democratic supporters and designed to destroy him as a symbol of the Republican majority……

The officials who described DeLay’s brief remarks noted that the session, a regularly scheduled weekly lunch, was held under rules of secrecy.

Well I guess that is the sensible thing to do. I mean if things heat up and people start questioning your character and honesty with a slew of public ethics charges, what choice do you have but to lie, right? Unless of course, the ethics and corruption charges are actually all false and made up, then of course, you would just have to tell everyone the truth and actually discuss the issues openly in order to save your reputation.

Leave Comment

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)has decided to hold hearings this week on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Open Letter to Oppose the Marriage Protection Amendment.

Dear Friends & Family,

The message that follows is a canned message but I wanted to pass it along. Every little push helps as we battle to keep our country free for everyone. Gay marriage has nothing to do with straight people. They can continue to live peacefully and love whom they choose, we aren’t going to brainwash them and make them wear fancy shoes. It’s just about things like living free and happy without having to go to the supreme court to visit the person you’ve committed to spending the rest of your life with, if they are dying in a hospital room somewhere.

Thanks! You can now continue reading the canned message from the Human Rights Campaign….

As the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)has decided to hold hearings THIS WEEK on the issue of same-sex marriage. The hearing is focused on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and, for all practical purposes, on the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) as well.

In light of the many serious issues that our country is facing, it is absolutely outrageous that a small group of right-wing Senators would make discriminating against GLBT people their TOP priority right now.

Stand with me and take action today to let your Senators know that you oppose any efforts to write discrimination against GLBT people into our Constitution.

Tell your Senator to Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

Leave Comment

Via Crooks and Liars. Former President Bill Clinton took Arthur Finkelstein to task at a recent news conference in Harlem. Apparently Finkelstein is behind the latest ‘Stop Hillary’ campaign and Bill Clinton was quick to shed some light on Finkelstein’s character. Finkelstein has worked behind the scenes for the conservative powerbase for years, helping to elect people like Jesse Helms over the years. The odd thing is that Finkelstein is also gay and traveled to Massachusetts last weekend to marry his male partner. Yet, as Crooks and Liars
Crooks And Liars put it,

the people you work to elect don’t believe in visitation rights, health care benefits and the other human relationship contracts for gay couples. They don’t think of your relationship as human or normal. They hate you.

I’m not sure how someone can work for a system that goes so fundamentally against their way of life. It is further proof that much of what goes on in politics, specifically with the convervative right’s agenda, is pure business. There isn’t one ounce of faith-based values in this man’s lobbying. It’s all dollars and cents and poll statistics. He gets paid to put certain conservative people in office regardless of their hate for homosexuality and then he goes home and climbs in bed with his husband. I’d like to know what his partner does for work and how he feels about all this. If you’re going to believe in something, then believe in it with all your heart. The definition of “Fink” in the dictionary is,

1. A contemptible person. 2. An informer. 3. A hired strikebreaker.

Finkelstein is just a fink.

Read more at Crooks and Liars.

[3] Comments