Tag: 2008 elections

Oregon Senate candidate Jeff Merkley is heading to Austin to attend Netroots Nation! Jeff has always believed that the netroots is a critical part of how we make progressive change in this country. He also knows that upstart, passionate Democratic challengers like Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown need the netroots to defeat entrenched incumbent Republicans like Gordon Smith.

Follow me below the fold to find out more about Jeff’s visit to Austin…

Recently both leading presidential candidates have increased their outreach to Latino voters with appearances at various events sponsored by prominent Latino organizations. Not surprisingly, the topics of immigration and immigration reform have played a central role in this outreach effort.

As an issue where both candidates feel they exhibit some strength with Latino voters, they have both attempted to utilize this perceived strength to make inroads into what most believe will be a crucial voting block this coming November.

But what we have received from both candidates thus far are vague promises and pleasant platitudes about “A Nation of Immigrants.”

This is a complex issue, and as the history of failed efforts at reform clearly shows, it will take more than quick sound bites and quotes from Emma Lazarus to solve the problems with our failed current immigration system. In order to enact meaningful immigration reform that is practical, rational, fair and most of all humane, tough questions must be answered and problems dealt with.

Now in the Midnight Oil … also up at Agent Orange, so tipping and rec’ing that diary might help get the word out in a small way.

What do you do when you are a Congressional candidate … your Presidential candidate is campaigning on the basis of Potemkin Energy policies like drilling for an extra 100,000 barrels of oil a day starting a decade from now (when a Saudi announcement of an extra 500,000 barrels later this year did not move prices by any discernable amount) … and a gas tax holiday …

… especially when in the last contentious Ohio State highway funding fight, you as the Republican voted for Governor Taft’s gas tax hike, and your Democratic opponent voted against it?

Simple: you lie.

Well, of course, this is a Republican candidate for Congress we are talking about here … you don’t lie yourself, you have an “independent group” with a name like Freedom’s Watch lie for you.

Things are looking bleak for the Progressive Movement.  We’ve been saddled once again with a corporate-conservative Democrat whose willingness to drop popular policy positions to placate the far right will likely cost his political party — and, by extension, the rest of the country — the presidency; we’ve been threatened and bullied by increasingly uncritical sycophants from within the Democratic Party who refuse to acknowledge that their candidate isn’t what far too many Americans have pretended he is; and we’ve been denied by the corporate establishment any and all presidential candidates truly representative of the Progressive Movement.

Our options are few and dwindling by the day.  On one side we have Republican John McCain, who represents plainly and simply an extension of the Bush regime.  He is unacceptable.  On another we have Barack Obama, who has tacked so far to the right from the mythical “center” that his policies now show little or no practical difference from his opponent’s — or, for that matter, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s.  On yet another side, we have independent and third party candidates running for president: Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney (on the Green Party ticket), and Bob Barr (for the Libertarians).

Perhaps the single biggest limitation on our options is the elimination and marginalization of candidates whose records and rhetoric go against the status quo.  The establishment, from the corporate masters to their propagandists in the media to a large portion of the very electorate itself, actively discourages the voicing of that dissent which is expressed in the form of votes.  We are threatened with another Republican regime if we dare “waste” our ballots, if we dare presume to think that voting our beliefs might truly make a difference.  After all, the brainwashing campaign dictates, Democrats are better than Republicans by far.  By what standard, though?

Of the two major political party presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, which one has moved to the right of the shrub — let me repeat and emphasize that for you: to the right of the shrub — on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel?  Obama, that’s which one.  Not even McCain or the boys holding his leash have guts enough to state that position publicly.  On this issue, is Obama better than McCain or worse?  The answer, of course, is “worse.”

On a host of other issues, an Obama administration offers the following:

No health care reform,

Publicly subsidized slums,

No end to the occupation of Iraq on his watch,

Continuation of NAFTA and other disastrous trade deals,

All hope for a return of the Fairness Doctrine dead, and

Continuing erosion of civil liberties.

In what way is Obama fundamentally different from, or better than, his Republican counterpart?  From where I’m sitting he is absolutely no better, and in some respects he is much worse.  Why, then, should progressives throw away their ballots on him?

Desperate times require desperate and drastic measures.  Democrats blew their chance to hold Barack Obama accountable during the primaries, but it’s not too late to force him to run to the political left and stay there, lest he cost us the election like John Kerry and Al Gore before him.

A couple of weeks ago I received junk mail from the Obama campaign in the form of a contribution request.  Instead of enclosing money (which I don’t have anyway), I instead inserted a note stating that until Obama met certain requirements, he would receive no money or vote from me.  Those requirements were:

– Immediately demand that Pelosi allow impeachment proceedings against the shrub and his gargoyle to proceed,

– Stand up to the shrub on FISA, filibuster the amnesty bill, and filubuster all of the shrub’s nominees,

– Push for single-payer health care, and

– Push for cutting off funds for the occupation of Iraq and bringing our troops home.

You might share my positions on these and other issues.  I declared my intention to vote for Dennis Kucinich as a write-in if Obama does not get his act together.  You may wish to vote for Nader, McKinney, or the write-in of your choice.  The point is not to try to win the election for these independent and third party candidates, but to send a message to Obama that his cynical political games will not be tolerated by progressives.  This is the last, best chance we have of holding him accountable.

Democrats will only take their party’s progressive base seriously if they know in their hearts that alienating it shall only cost them more and more elections.  If they choose not to learn their lesson, then we progressives must break from the Democratic Party, abandoning it to its Republican masters, and start anew.  Either way, unless we act, Obama will surely blow it for us — and America — in November.

You gotta love Republican economics.  It flip flops like a fish on a dock.  Is it supply side or is it deficit hawk?  Is it for profligate spending and no taxation?  Will it claim somehow to balance the budget by decreasing taxes?  What kind of crazy voodoo economics is it this time?

An early example of fish thrashing on wood.  When he was trying to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, George H.W. Bush (George Pere) derided Reagan’s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics”. Later he promoted those policies to become the Republican nominee 1988.  Famously pronouncing, “Read my lips, no new taxes”, he ended up eating his words. He imposed tax increases.  He was for tax increases before he was against them and then he was for them again.  Mostly, he was for rich folks’ benefit and winning the election.  That seems a fairly easy idea to fulfill.  Not.

And now you have John McSame who is dancing to the same Republican economics pipers. Today’s New York Times reports that McSame’s economics policy is not very pleasing at all to the rich folks:

As Senator John McCain began a week of economic-themed campaigning here on Monday, it was apparent that some of the underlying tension between the two schools that guide his economic thinking – supply-siders who want to cut taxes and deficit hawks who want to balance the federal budget – remained unresolved.

Mr. McCain is pledging once again to balance the budget by the end of his first term as president in 2013, his advisers said Monday, reverting to an earlier pledge that the Arizona senator had abandoned in April when he proposed a series of costly tax cuts for corporations and high earners, and said it might take two terms to balance the budget.

“American workers and families pay their bills and balance their budgets, and I will demand the same of the government,” Mr. McCain said at a town hall-style meeting here.

But it is unclear how Mr. McCain plans to balance the budget, given that fiscal analysts who have examined his economic plans say his calls to extend the Bush tax cuts while cutting corporate and other taxes would likely increase the deficit significantly.

This tension between steep tax cuts and deficit reduction has been a recurring theme in the evolution of Mr. McCain.

This is not a criticism – it’s a plea.

We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species.  What we do now will determine the fate of our kind.  We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.