Full Mike Gravel Interview

NAC caught up with Mike Gravel at EcoFest 2007. All 13 minutes of the interview is found below. He talks about ecology, economy, and corruption (at the highest levels). He calls Bush an idiot and takes a few shots a Hillary. Keeping in step with the notion that you should decide for yourself, we have posted the entire unedited interview here. You can watch it in either YouTube or Revver players.

Let us know what you think!

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YOUTUBE:

The Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks: Courage

Courage

The final building block of good character is courage, but, like responsibility, courage has no meaning unless it is built upon the foundation of the previous four values: honesty, compassion, respect, and responsibility.

Bill Maher famously said that the 9-11 hijackers, whatever else, were not cowards, and for saying it, lost his show on ABC. While Maher was no doubt correct in his observation, as far as it went, the terms of the discussion were muddied with the emotion of the time. However, I'd argue that those hijackers, while displaying macho, perhaps, in the face of death, cannot be said accurately to have exhibited courage, because what they did was built on dishonesty, a lack of compassion, misplaced respect, and a sense of responsibility to the load of nonsense which is fanatic religion.

Similarly, I'd have to say that "our troops," that sacred cow of today's public debate in America, might be macho, but also do not exhibit true courage, because, even if it's no personal fault of their own, their actions are not based on honesty (there was no imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), compassion (this war-for-greed has killed a portion of the Iraqi civilian population at least equivalent to the city of Philadephia, probably more like losing all of New York or L.A.), or respect (does the term Abu Ghraib ring a bell?).

Courage is exactly what Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc. etc. all lack, on three counts: One, they never even consider an act of sacrifice for themselves or for the powerful capitalists who are their puppet-masters. Two, they never engage in a fair debate that is based on the centuries-old rules of rhetoric and logic. Three, perhaps most damning, they are narrow-minded and conventional.

Courage was exemplified by Martin Luther King, Jr., not only because he knew he was at lethal personal risk for taking the stand he did, and not only because he was willing to argue his case with infallible logic as well as with passion, but most importantly because he was willing to transcend the rules of the day in pursuit of a higher justice that he could perceive and that he could flawlessly argue was based on the "ladder" of honesty, compassion, respect, and responsibility. He was willing to be jailed when be broke the laws of the day, hoping that his act would, as it eventually did, change those laws.

Courage is at its most essential that crowning element in the values that constitute good character, because it is that within human nature which is able to transcend even those rules and laws that currently might embody humans' best attempt at a just system. Democracy might be better than monarchy, but a democracy in which only property-holding white males can vote is a system that must be transcended.

Of course, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Scooter Libby, et. al., all lack courage of the everyday variety as well. As Al Franken has pointed out, these are all "chicken hawks" - cowardly bullies who send the children of the working class and poor into a war being fought to enrich Halliburton and Blackwater, and FOR NO OTHER REASON.

I'd love to have a chance to kick their ass.

Well, that's it: Honesty, Compassion, Respect, Responsibility, and Courage: Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks.

Learn these well: It makes Evil easier to spot.

Cheers!

The Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks: Responsibility

Responsibility

Probably the most ironic thing about the right wing in America is their reputation - if only amongst themselves and among the shamefully stupid American electorate - for being the "grown ups" at the party. They're the ones you're supposed to trust to run business, to operate heavy machinery, to conduct war, and so on. Really, nothing could be further from the truth, as we see again and again.

The fundamental building block of good character that we know as "responsibility" is, essentially, the call to action based upon the three building blocks upon which it rests: honesty, compassion, and respect. If you are honest and have compassion and respect, you are responsible for acting in a certain manner. If you're honest, for example, about attacking a nation because you believe it is aiming weapons of mass destruction imminently at your own nation and at your allies, but you nevertheless have compassion for that nation's civilian population and your own troops, and if you respect the rule of law and such concepts as justice, then you are responsible, when you find you're mistaken, for apologizing, withdrawing, and working your tail off to repair what damage you can.

We see none of this in the right wing. The Bush administration denies the reality of global warming as long as it possibly can; they refuse to acknowledge mistakes in any area, even the Iraq War, now seen by a majority as the worst policy disaster in American history; they spend irresponsibly, cut taxes irresponsibly, well, basically, they do everything irresponsibly.

How can this be? How can these "grown ups" act like total savages and get away with it? The answer is actually quite easy: selfishness. Responsibility certainly includes one's responsibility to take care of one's own health, one's children, and so forth, but it is a broader concept that most pointedly entails taking actions consistent with honesty, compassion, and respect even when those actions might be at one's own cost. Not only is the right wing extravagantly selfish, they (especially masterminds like Karl Rove and media whores like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh) are extremely adept at exploiting the selfishness of the American electorate. "Sure, you can accept these tax cuts, drive big SUVs, support an illegal, immoral war, and still be good." It's a siren song the stupid and/or mendacious cannot resist.

The question, of course, is to whom or to what should you be responsible. If you're only "responsible" to corporate greed, well, don't be surprised if the world's disenfranchised can be coaxed into flying planes into buildings or strapping bombs onto themselves and striding into Starbucks. Responsibility, again, is an empty concept in and of itself -- it must rest on a foundation of honesty, compassion, and respect in order to have any meaning.

Next up: Courage.

The Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks: Respect

RESPECT
Ann Coulter is the perfect example of so many things that are wrong with the right -- no honesty, no compassion, no responsibility, and no courage -- but perhaps most of all she exemplifies a total lack of respect.

Respect is one of the building blocks of good character, and it's distinguished from its "neighbor" value, compassion, in two important respects: One, it includes SELF-respect, and two, rather than involving empathy only for living things, it includes such qualities as honoring the law, deference to other people's peaceful religious symbols, and so on.

Coulter and the right, of course, respect nothing: worse, they pretend to respect all sorts of things, like the flag, "our troops," and "freedom," while really merely exploiting the electorate's feelings about these symbols, people, and ideas for their own gain.

This hypocrisy is clear when they get all in a huff because MoveOn.org publishes a mocking (if amateurish) ad about General Patraeus's name ("betray us") but find it entirely acceptable to viciously attack the reputations of bona fide soldiers like John Kerry, and even in their own party, John McCain, when it suits their selfish, immediate ends.

Coulter's lack of respect is, in fact, finally marginalizing her. The statements she's made about the 9-11 widows (never seen women so happy about their husbands' deaths) and about Elizabeth Edwards's cancer and the death of John and Elizabeth Edwards's son are so mean spirited that, I hope, the "normal" end of the conservative spectrum is at least embarrassed by her.

Bush is a study in a lack of respect, however, which is more interesting than Coulter's case. Bush's sloppy mode of speaking, his chewing with his mouth open at diplomatic events, his incessant monkey-like mugging for the camera, all speak to a lack of respect for anyone and anything outside his billionaire-baby circle, a lack of respect borne of his never having to make a living or so much as wash a dish, much less clean up his own larger mistakes. Cheney's lack of respect (the infamous "go fuck yourself") is more ham-handed, less "cute" perhaps than the spoiled-puppy demeanor of Bush, partly due to the simple fact that Cheney is a really ugly fat man, while Bush has the physique of a billionaire baby who was on the T-ball team, etc., even if the other kids were told to let him win because their dads all work for his dad.

Limbaugh's mocking of Michael J. Fox's Parkinsons symptoms was another great example of the right's lack of respect.

You get the idea. Next up: Responsibility

A fitting tribute for 9/11

It's difficult to find a fitting tribute. The media outlets seem remarkably quiet. Perhaps, honorary silence is the best way to remember those lost on 9/11 and following.

-NACDaddy (9/11/07)

Did he say anything?

So, the man towed the party-line and explained that there is progress in Iraq!

These guys are saying: no paper report... doesn't that somehow mean he isn't actually saying anything?

Who will hug Mrs. Edwards?

You know, for all the great stuff John says and riffs on in this video... his wife makes me just want a hug!

Check out Elizabeth's hug here:

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Senator Larry Craig could have at least learned from that Sienfeld episode, what... a decade ago and added: "not that there's anything wrong with that!" Hello Larryboy! The crime you were charged with was NOT for being gay, but for indecent behavior in a public place. I believe that is a crime regardless of your orientation. Hmmm.

See for yourself:

More bad news for a Republican Presidential Contender

Boy, what do you make of Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho seeking a private liaison in a public place? Dunno? Here's what the NYT had to say about it: Senator, Arrested at Airport, Pleads Guilty.

Omi-goodness-golly!

Adios!

After a bit of a vacation, NOT ANN COULTER is back... And what a joyous return it is. And... there he is, the ever-lovable Alberto Gonzales. Adios!

Doesn't she just nail it?

Okay, Barrack, the heat is on. Let's get some rhetoric going... In the meantime, you can kickback and enjoy hearing the mistriss preach!

Did he really say this?

Holy Cow. Make this man a Democrat! Oh, he knew that BEFORE the war? What do you do to the man who knew this would never work but sent our soldiers to die there anyway?

Cheney on Iraq:

See ya?

This man claims he's leaving the White House for his family. I wonder if he's talking about the Republican Party the way one may talk about, say, a crime family?

Not the Face of a President

Thankfully, this will not be the face of our next President:




Well, that leaves the question of the other Thompson. Any bets?

Preach it!

Gotta say, there's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing this kind of dialogue. "Mistakes? Who made mistakes?"

Cuz They Need the Help

The man must be standing in the corner with a blindfold on! There it is on the left (links to the Washington Post... though clearly not left at all): Bush is trying to give his big-business friends another break (Bush May Try to Cut Corporate Tax Rates). Are we surprised? Meanwhile, middle-class Americans are schlogging through a homeloan crisis.

Georgie, one question: do you serve the people or the corporations?

Time to get off your privileged duff and bring home our troops and help save the middle class from bad homeloans from irresponsible lenders!

2007-08-03 Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks -- Part Two: Compassion

by NacGump

As I noted last time, Ann Coulter and her ilk lack honesty, meaning not just that they tell lies, but that honesty isn't a core value for them.

I also pointed out that my notion of these five values is that they form a sort of moral curriculum, a sequence. Honesty, not only with others but also with oneself, is the foundation. The very next value is compassion, for without a basic sense of compassion for other people, other living things, perhaps in a sense for the grand order of the universe, then mere honesty leaves you potentially as a mere witness, clear-eyed, but with no means by which to judge things or to make decisions.

Now, compassion is an interesting term in American politics since 2000, because the most fundamental broken promise of the Bush administration is to be compassionate as well as conservative. Of course, Karl Rove is the particular type of liar for whom all of these words mean nothing, but he is also the type of liar smart enough to know that this oxymoron was exactly the right slogan to allay people's fears, as it intimated a pledge that the administration would steer clear of the "worst" aspects of conservatism -- oh, things like stripping away American civil rights, raiding the treasury and stealing from the poor and the middle class to further remunerate one's already Midas-rich "base," and spreading hatred and violence far and wide.

We know now, and Katrina is the "poster child" event that triggered our knowledge, that there is no compassion in George Bush or Dick Cheney, at least, nothing of the regular, pure and simple compassion that would be recognizable to a child in the third grade. Even their lip service to anything and anyone that isn't a part of their plutocratic power core is slim.

That basic third-grade compassion is that impulse we have to root for the underdog in the teen movie who's up against the popular kids, led by the captain of the football team who drives a Porsche to school and beats the crap out of our hero. Bushies, on the other hand, love the bully. It might be in secret, but they just love that scene where the football captain's friends hold our hero's arms while the football captain lands major gut punches. In the core of a Karl Rove, a Dick Cheney, a George Bush, or an Ann Coulter, there's a huge fan of the football captain who's chanting, "Hit 'em again, hit 'em again: harder! harder!" Cheney is sitting there when there's the close-up of our hero's bloodied face, and Cheney mutters, "Hey, why didn't you get a crowd of guys together?"

From a psychological point of view, this is because Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George Bush are all cowardly little girls and, well, Ann Coulter would break her spoiled little wrists punching out Elmo. This type of wimp, the type Al Franken calls "chicken hawks," exploit their enormous power, rather than being responsible stewards of it, because their own personal "powers," whether of the body, of the psyche, or of the soul, are so desperately lacking.

Without compassion, of course, you have no civilization. The savagery of Darfur is the breakdown of basic human compassion. So is the commitment of the American treasury and American lives to a war that was launched for exactly the same reason that taxes were cut for the wealthy, that corporations now control all regulatory agencies, that there is opposition to the only type of health care system that makes sense in a modern country -- a single-payer system that cuts the parasitical insurance industry out entirely, and most desperately for the same reason that the Bush administration is still trying hard to make us ignore the fact that we probably have a very small window of time before we have ruined the planet's ability to sustain human life: greed.

Greed is the opposite of compassion, and at least in this administration's track record there is nothing to suggest -- NOTHING -- that 'conservative' means anything other than "greedy."

"Compassionate conservative," therefore, has been proven to be a nonsense phrase, like "hot cold" or "green red" or "up down" ... It was just the first of many Orwellian verbal constructions concocted by Rove et. al., but all the others, pretty much, rest on this evil foundation.

NEXT UP: RESPECT

Executive Privilege, Does it Equal Culpability?

by NAC Daddy

Puppet master Rove won't testify before Congress. Claiming executive privilege, the truth gets suppressed even more! Are we surprised? With this Supreme Court and this Executive Branch, we'll be lucky to hear first-hand how much political interference there has been in the Justice Department.

Hopefully, members of Congress have a little something fun up their sleeves for all these so-called advisors.

2007-08-01 Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks

by NacGump

Good name for a "liberal" blog -- NotAnnCoulter -- because she emboies the exact opposite of the values that the embattled but noble term "liberal" represents.

There are five of these values in all, and they occur in a specific order.

PART ONE:

Honesty

No need to catalogue Coulter's lies, as they are well documented elsewhere, but more importantly, because the point isn't her specific lies, but that she seems to feel no requirement to be honest at all. Honesty, per se, just isn't the point. In Coulter's mind, everything is a tactic, everything Machiavellian, everything is a political thrust or parry, even, incredibly, the death of John and Elizabeth Edwards' son and Mrs. Edwards's breast cancer! We liberals, by contrast, must be honest.

For one thing, not only the overtly right-wing media, but also the corporate media in general, roasts a Michael Moore for the slightest twisting or cherry-picking of facts, while the likes of Dick Cheney (hmm ... "likes of Dick Cheney" must mean Darth Vader or Dr. Doom) can blithely continue to imply that Iraq was actively complicit in 9-11, that global warming is a myth, and so on, and the corporate media wimpers almost inaudibly while the right-wing media uses these statements in footnotes as if they were citing the Encyclopedia Britannica!

The other reason liberals must be honest is because we believe, most fundamentally, that we're all in this together -- we're certainly all dependent upon an increasingly fragile ecosystem -- and therefore we believe that lying hurts the liar just as much as it hurts anyone else.

No doubt there are philosophical debates worth having about "white" lies, and about the scale of lies -- I doubt even Ann Coulter really believes that lies regarding a consentual tryst are as serious as lies told about the causes for going into a war. But these philosophical niceties aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the old "I'd rather be right than president" attitude, that attitude which simply aknowledges that these matters are of too great importance to let one's political loyalties trump the truth.

Honesty is the essential ingredient of good citizenship, if I must state it in such a "civics class" manner. And the sad thing about someone like Ann Coulter is that she is so cynical and empty as a human being that there is no truth, only tactic, to be found in her. The sad thing about someone like George Bush is that he is so simple minded that he really does believe the majority of the nonsense he's been told to believe. The sad thing about someone like Dick Cheney is that there seems to be no Luke Skywalker or Fantastic Four available to defeat him and his super-powerful military-industrial death machine.

NEXT UP: Compassion

After that: Respect, Responsibility, and Courage

Bribery in Alaska

Well thank my lucky stars that Howard Dean didn't give up on Alaska this last summer and spent the extra dough to travel there as part of his DNC planning (party insiders recommended against this, so it was reported at the time). Cuz, darnitall if there's maybe a snowball's chance in Alaska that a Dem might succeed the longest serving Rebublican in Senate history.

There it is, right there in the Washington Post article: ALASKA SENATOR'S HOME IS RAIDED

And, that's the real question: is Ted Stevens corrupt?

"In truth, yes, I was lying!"

What he should say:

"In truth, yes, I was lying!"

I'm Seeing Fred!

Fred's effing everywhere! Including on TV. If the Govenator was any lesson, Democrats beware! Even though Fred's a little overweight, that just means most Americans will idenitfy with him. Hear me out on this; for those of you who actually read the George Lakoff book, Don't Think of an Elephant, Fred's character on TV actually plays to the dominant-father metaphor, which is the backbone of Republican philosophy AND he's the face of a HUGE American brand... So, here's the NAC-Daddy's recommendation on breaking the metaphor:

• Equate him with the reprimanded child
  (here you can think of Georgie-Bush as the metaphorical dunce in the corner)

If I had a team of private investigators... That's what I'd look for. If you ever thought of being a P.I., now's your chance.

Resignation Coming?

Check out the Washington Post headline on the left side of our front page (http://www.notanncoulter.com/) and you'll see that monkey-boy's ratings are close to being the lowest in history. NO KIDDING!!!! No breathing American needed the Washington Post to tell them that. It's all in the details... ONE POINT! Staff Writer Peter Baker tells us that Richard Nixon got as low as a 66% disapproval rating four days before resigning. Puddin-n-pie is sittin' pretty at 65%. It's time for him to trade in the political shoes for some mountain biking sneaks and head back to Crawford! Clearly, this man is sucking the life out of the American people.

George W. Bush = 65% Disapproval

Richard M. Nixon = 66% Disapproval

The Face of Cronyism and Corruption

Here he is, Mr. Let-Me-Tell-You-What-I-Remember!

Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"Yes, that's right, I usually visit sick people in the hospital to give them beuarocratic updates."

Hillary, Liberal or Progressive?

Hill, what gives? How about being a progressive liberal?

(see: Hillary's response at the YouTube/CNN debate from last night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQJyOyg0p74)

Last time I checked, liberals meant: "I'm for the people and I'm damn proud of it!"