I'd like to quickly recommend the Wage Slave Journal, the George W. Bush scorecard of evil is excellent.

Also take a look at a list of the 20 Most Annoying Conservatives

I was going to put up some more posts, but my microwaved grilled cheese sandwich has turned into a disappointment/disaster.
I'd just like to point out that Sen. Bill Frist (who is going to replace Lott) may be guilting of race bating in his first run for the senate.

Gore & the Need for a 'Counter-Media'
To quote Link of the mod squad, "Solid". The Democrats need a partisan counter media, a liberal answer to Fox News, Limbaugh (and all those other right wing buffoons on WABC) and freerepublic.com. Still, I'm not sure Media Whores Online and other anti-Bush sites ought to be the model for a response to Conservative domination of the media. These websites are amusing, but juvenille and are not a serious solution, mainly they just preach to the choir, take cheap shots at the GOP and will fail to persuade most Americans. The first step to a counter media is a paritsan cable news network that would help get the message out there and have the kind of prestige to get other media outlets to pick up on it. All that is needed is a little cash from some wealth center-left types, George Soros and Warren Buffet, I'm looking at you.

Kerry, Lieberman lead Democratic poll
A minor monkey wrench in the works for my favorite, John Edwards, but the article had an important disclaimer:

Such early polls are largely a measure of the public's familiarity with potential candidates.

As time passes and the candidates and the issues become better known I think the primaries will be the Kerry-Edwards faceoff that I predicted. Unless of course, John McCain rides in on a white horse and with a ride to power marked by a spontenaous riot of McCain Fever at the Democratic Convention, but that is pretty unlikely.

Ungrateful Free Rider Watch
Seoul Man

On Thursday Roh Moo-hyun was elected President of South Korea. Roh Moo-hyun supports reconciliation with the North, his campaign was helped significantly by the wave of anti-Americanism following the aquittal of two US servicemen who ran down two Korean girls with an armored vehicle. More and more Koreans are becoming increasingly opposed to the US presence in South Korea and don't think that North Korea is a serious threat.

I think it is time to withdraw from Korea. If the South is too seperated from reality to know what is good for it (totalitarian police state working madly to manufacture nuclear weapons is a serious threat), I don't see a reason to try and protect it, especially since we don't have to worry about the Cold War and the spread of communism and soviet influence to worry about. So let South Korea go, let it reunify with )read: be invaded by) the North, defending them is not worth one American life. The resulting disaster of continuing the "sunshine policy" towards Kim Jong Il's dictatorship may bring other countries around and make them understand that the United States isn't the bad guy.

The Daily Howler takes the Washington press corp to task for failing to pick up on the Lott story earlier

Yes!
Sen. Lott to step down as GOP leader

Things not to do
Canadians go to Baghdad as 'human shields'

Faith in federal charity funding
Church-state wall comes a-tumbling down

The Bush administration is now allowing the federal government to fund charities that discriminate based on religion. Yep, tax supported bigorty, all in a day's work for the Republican party.

Faith in federal charity funding
Church-state wall comes a-tumbling down

The Bush administration is now allowing the federal government to fund charities that discriminate based on religion. Yep, tax supported bigorty, all in a day's work for the Republican party.

Your Ballroom Days Are Over....

Bush won't intervene to save Lott's job
Lott's future hangs on GOP Jan. 6 vote
Josh Marshall on Lott

Lott's finished, the GOP is pushing "racially edgy agenda" and the last thing it wants is someone like Lott to be the one to push it. Hopefully Lott will stay in the news a bit longer and further sully the image of Republican party and impair its ability to actually pass that agenda.

Gore Bows Out
Yes, I know you probably heard this somewhere else, but damn it, I'll do what I please

I don't think Gore is politcally dead, he's just sleeping. He is still relatively young and maybe just hiding in the political wilderness untill he thinks he has a better shot at success. Richard Nixon's 8 years out of government following his loss to Kennedy come to mind. Whether there will be an auspicious time for Gore is any ones guess.

As for the 2004 race, I think the democratic primary may turn into a battle between Edwards and Kerry. Howard Dean is liberal, from a small state and his campaign is poorly funded. At most he'll be the Paul Tsongas of this campaign, forcing the other candidates to debate his ideas. Lieberman is dull and probably too conservative to have a chance and most commentators don't expect him to do well in the primaries. Dick Gephardt is doomed, there is no way he's going to be able to wash the stench of the Democrats' failure in 2002 off himself and he wasn't an attractive candidate even before 2002. I think Daschle may have the same problem as Gephardt, he's tainted by the midterm losses and he's also been a lightning rod for the right since Bush became president and may very well be burnt to a crisp by 2004.

I have decided to reverse my posistion on Edwards, because I think he has a good chance at winning (the thought of Bush serving 2 terms is extremely noxious to me) and his posistions are pretty appetizing, at least to a pragmatic centrist democratic such as myself. Earlier I blasted Edwards as an opportunist and nothing but a charmer, but now I'm begining to come around. First of all he is a hawk, which gives him points in my book and will be a political advantage if the US blows down Saddam's playhouse with ease, an outcome that is more than likely given enormous advantages the United States has. Secondly, he is a southerner, it has been fourty years since a Democrat from outside the south has won and I don't think that trend is likely to change. Thirdly and possibly most importantly, his posistion on taxes is very attractive. He's insulated against charges of being a tax and spend liberal because he voted for the Bush tax. Edwards has also come up with an inventive way to attack Bush's tax cut. He proposes repealling the parts of it which benefit the wealthy while making permanent (right now their scheduled to expire in a few years) the cuts for the upper middle class and middle class tax payers, further bolstering his ant-tax credentials and making Republican claims to the contrary sound even more ridiculous.

Well, I haven't had much time to update the site, but as regular readers may have noticed, I have been fooling with the templates again! I'm really not sure what the hell I'm doing. Do do do da da do.

Snow Job
Daniel Gross unfavorabley compares Bush's pick for Teasury Secretary John Snow to his choirce for the new SEC chairman, William Donaldson . While Donaldson was a good businessman who succeeded on his own, Snow's success with CSX is largely due to his poltical connection. Oh yes, I almost neglected to mention that CSX under Snow did an excellent job of tax-dodging. If you think Snow (or any Republican) is serious about taking on corporate tax fraud, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

Ah this Lott furor is absolutely goregous. Don't you love it when everything just comes together? It took a good while for the press to get the ball rolling, but once it did...All of Lott's quasi-segregationist quotes from the past, all his hobnobbing with racists, all his stupid and sickening votes are not only coming back to bite him on the ass, but to come back and burrough through! I really hope lot doesn't resign, he's the gift that keeps on giving. It is hard to imagine something better for the Democrats than having the 2nd most powerful Republican in the country be a suspected racists with nostalgia for Jim Crow and the Confederacy.

More Lott
At a 1980 Reagan campaign rally, Trent Lott (with Strum Thurmond standing beside him) said:
"You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

Click here to read Trent Lott's interview with the neo-confederate magazine Southern Partisan.

Among other things, this interview has such gems from Lott as

"I think that a lot of the fundamental principles that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important to people across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party ... After the War between the States, a lot of Southerners identified with the Democrat Party because of the radical Republicans we had at that time, particularly in the Senate. The South was wedded to that party for years and years and years. But we have seen the Republican Party become more conservative and more oriented toward the traditional family values, the religious values that we hold dear in the South. And the Democratic party is going in the other direction. As a result, more and more of The South's sons, Jefferson Davis' descendants, direct or indirect, are becoming involved with the Republican party. The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there - from tax policy, to foreign policy; from individual rights, to neighborhood security - are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in."

It is most excellent that all the skeletons falling out of the Senate Majority's closet after his remarks at Thurmond's Birthday. Finally the press is probing the GOP's heart of Darkness...

Who Will Replace O'Neill and Lindsey?

Bush ousts top 2 aides on economy
Charles Schwab among those rumored for Treasury secretary
However, it is also rumored that House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer, retiring Sen. Phil Gramm, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, all of Texas are also being considered to replace Paul O'Neil. That is a frightening prospect given that Archer, Gramm and Armey have all be supporters of a flat tax and could be counted on to further tilt the administration to the right. I don't know if Schwab is the best choice, but he seems much more reasonable then the others. However, the administration also dumped Lawrence Lindsey, a big believer in supply side economics (I should say "thoroughly discredited supply side economics"), perhaps that is a sign that they are moving in a more sensible direction.

Rebuilding Process
A US peacekeeping/nation building presence has finally be dispatched outside of Kabul. It is about time that the administration realized that it couldn't let the Afghan country side to fester. The deployment is small, but it is a step in the right direction.

Report: Presidents Washington Through Bush May Have Lied About Key Matters
I had no idea! I'm shocked and saddened by this disturbbing news...

if you want me, I'll be crying in the bathroom.

Man gets life term over 3 lbs. of mailed marijuana
That is pretty damn harsh, considering that the average sentence for murder is less than 20 years in prison and the average sentece for rape is less then 6. I think I'll mail this poor bastard a copy of The Trial or perhaps the entire complete works of Kafka. He'll have plent of time.

In the distant future...
I see me putting up a post fulkly explaining my support for a war with Iraq...

Poll: Bush Bests Gore in Rematch

Given that this is a report coming from Fox News, the above headline is not the real story. Oh no. The real story is that despite his high approval ratings, only 44 percent of the public say that they will vote to re-elect Bush. Yes! He is vincible after all.

PPI Trade Fact of the Week
U.S. exports to Argentina
are down 70% this year.

Argentina's problems are our problems too. Why doesn't the IMF get his? If we stimulat their economy with low interest loans, they'll trade with the First World more and everyone will win, ah but this all too Keynesian for those free market fundamentalists down at the IMF and the White House.

"Trying to Make a Turkey Fly"
Bush's changes to the Clean Air Act are a bonaza for big businesses interests at the expense of the environment and the public. Why doesn't that suprise me? Oh yes, I almost forgot Bush and the GOP are subsidiaries of big business! I can't way to give them all the boot in 2004.

Gore’s TV War: He Lobs Salvo At Fox News

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they’ll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they’ll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they’ve pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.

Gore's right about the influence the conservatives have over the media. It is about time that we saw a Democrat beat the press, the Republicans have been doing it for years and maybe the masochists in the mainstream media outlets will begin to internalize the Democrats' criticism, it's worth a shot.

The Latest Kissinger Outrage
Bush, in his wisdom, has decided to put Kissinger of all people in charge of the 9-11 commission. Nothing says secretive and underhanded like the presence of Dr. K, which I suppose is exactly the point. Bush didn't want a 9-11 commission to investigate failures that allowed the terrorist attacks to happen and now he has probably assured that the commission won't acomplish anything. Kissinger's report will probably be so filled with doublespeak and deception that it will be useless.