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