Tuesday, November 4, 2008
We the People of the United States of America
Thank you for this moment
This is a truly amazing moment in our nation, and we couldn't be more delighted to share it with you. Just marvel at the historic change occurring right now -- change that seemed like a dream only a year ago -- and you helped make it happen. You saw the explosion of grassroots activism around the country and recognized the importance of participating in democracy by spreading our videos, signing our petitions, and supporting our various campaigns.
When the corporate press wasn't doing its job to portray John McCain accurately, you took it upon yourselves to spread The REAL McCain videos like John McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare, which has received a whopping 8 million views! And when it became clear that FOX News would stop at nothing to smear and slander Barack Obama, you made sure millions more could see the truth by spreading our FOX Attacks Obama series. All told, over 25 million people watched these videos -- all achieved with people-powered persuasion.
Tonight is a beginning. We look forward with excitement and anticipation to the opportunities ahead to fight for social justice. We are already at work on efforts that will provide positive change for our country.
Thank you,
The Brave New Films team
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A Man Discovers Real Americans In An Odd Place
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank is employed by a newspaper that publishes in the heart of a city—Washington D.C.—that has been identified by the McCain campaign’s chief geographer, Sarah Palin, as a place where real America does not exist.
The trouble with Washington, she has been advising real Americans, is that it attracts too many fake Americans who coddle terrorists--such as Democrats, independents who act like Democrats and Republicans who sometimes vote with Democrats, which obviously explains why Washington has been so corrupt the eight years of the Bush administration.
Impressed by these discoveries yesterday, Milbank went in search of real Americans in this political season.
He chose the nearby state of Virginia. You would suppose that newspaper sleuth could have flown to Utah or southern Alaska. But newspapers in Washington aren’t in much better shape financially than they are in Minnesota, Texas or California. So he judiciously decided to stay on budget and wound up in the city of Richmond, Virginia.
“I can’t get much more real American than Richmond, Virginia,” he told himself. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, the political hub of a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election in the last 44 years.
So here was a journalist Diogenes, on the prowl for real Americans. His roamings took him to the Richmond Coliseum, where 12,000 people had jammed their way to hear a political speaker. It was the maximum they could pack into the building. If you got there late, you were going to have to depend on loudspeakers or Fox News to meet the real Americans in Richmond. Milbank got there in time.
In fact he got there a couple of hours before the speaker came on. They played the national anthem. People sang it with gusto. Some of them had American flag pins. You couldn’t tell offhand whether they were hard-working and kind and good and courageous. This is the McCain campaign’s description du jour of people who are now enshrined as the real Americans, as opposed to Democrats. But Milbank figured there was a fair chance that some of them in the Coliseum might qualify.
He interrogated folks in the front row, people who looked suspiciously like genuine Americans despite the admission that most of them were Democrats. The interrogator was expecting anger and scorn in the wake of the McCain campaign’s robocall offensive depicting Democrats as subversives.
He got laughter.
“I’m a terrorist,” said a woman food vendor. “We’re probably communists,” said one of her partners. But what the crowd was there for was to hear the main speaker address whatever furies they were feeling over the phony “we’re the real Americans” postures the McCain people have adopted in the flagging weeks of the election bombast.
The speaker was Barack Obama.
What he said deserves an audience wider than the one in Richmond, not so much because it reflects a man still walking a higher road than his detractors but because it reflects a simple truth and a reality of an America that for all its present turmoil and pain and division is still a country capable of something rare and good and great when it remembers its history and its strengths.
“There are no real parts of the country and fake parts of the country,” he said. “There are no pro-America parts of the country and anti-America parts of the country. We all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, young old, rich, poor gay, straight, city dweller, farm dwellers, it doesn’t matter. We’ all together.”
But sometimes we’re not. National elections have that wicked genius, bringing out the worst of what we are and who we are.
But coming together, in the worst of times, not necessarily the best, is the indispensable part of the American pilgrimage. Just as indispensable are leaders who remind us of what we have achieved when we come together to recognize our deepest needs and our deepest worth.
“There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq,” Obama said, “and patriots who opposed it. There are patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women from Virginia and all across this country who serve on our battlefields, some are Democrats and some are Republicans and some are independents. But they fought together and bled together, and some died together under the same proud flag.”
The temptation for some is to discard this as campaign rhetoric. I don’t. It’s something to remember when most of the rest is forgotten.
By Jim Klobuchar
c Jim Klobuchar
Monday, November 3, 2008
Get ready for the right's post-election delegitimization drive
Of course, you didn't hear that much after 2000, when the future Worst President in History effectively stole the White House without even winning the popular vote.
Now that they're on the verge of getting an ass-kicking of historic proportions, they're warming up that familiar refrain.
The Instaputz cleared his throat today with a numbingly dumb NY Post piece titled "Stealing an Election? Obama's Dubious Allies". John Fund also held forth in Politico at length about how, yes, those falsified voter-registration form can in fact turn into real votes.
Well, yes, it is possible for fake registrations to be used for actual votes -- but to do so takes a large number of hoops to jump through on an individual basis. And it's what you call a low-reward crime; there isn't much incentive for large numbers of people to actually jump through all these hoops.
Fact is, the vast majority of fake registrations are winnowed out before Election Day. And if fake voters actually do make it to the polls, their numbers will be so small as to be inconsequential.
No, the main way to commit voting fraud on a massive scale on the registration level is to sign people up for the election -- and then throw out their registrations if they're from the opposite party. Who's been doing that? Republicans.
You can also run massive voter-purge operations and voter-caging schemes that rob citizens of their legitimate voting rights. Republicans have been doing that too.
Facts don't matter to people like the Putz and Fund, though. They're only interested in propagating right-wing bullshit. These guys are setting the table for after Tuesday.
We can count, I'm sure, on four years of hearing how Obama stole this election. After all, the one thing they can't stand is to admit they actually got their asses kicked.
Bill Kristol says they'll greet the news with "with our usual resolute stoicism or cheerful fatalism."
Yeah, right, Let's not forget their usual conspiracism and hysterics, either. Because that's what we're already getting. By David Neiwert
John McCain's First Wife
In a recent blog post, I expressed my disappointment at what I felt was an inappropriate explanation by McCain regarding the failure of his first marriage.
Josheph Bailey responded to that post and said, “I thought that McCain did a great job of answering the question about his first marriage. He did not back down from it and was direct in his response. This American does NOT need to hear the sordid detail’s of that failed first marriage.”
In a recent interview with McCain CNN’s John King brings up the fact that McCain applied for a marriage license to Cindy before his divorce from his first wife was final and, the couple had dated for a period of nine months while he was still living with his wife.
McCain responded to King by telling him, "It's 30 years ago. I have a happy marriage." If that isn’t backing down I don’t know what is? He sidestepped the subject and blatantly refused to openly discuss the actions he had taken and why he felt those actions were appropriate.
What does his response say about John McCain or anyone else who commits adultery? Is it an indication of a man who can’t take responsibility for his negative behavior? He is a man who is running for president of the U.S. How do we, people he has no emotional connection to put any trust in him to honor his commitment to us if he can’t even come clean about his actions toward his first wife?
As a person who is deciding who she will vote for in November I don’t care if John McCain has a happy marriage now. I care about the man’s belief system, what he feels is right and wrong, moral and immoral. If he feels the failure of his first marriage was his greatest moral failure, I want a clear, concise answer about what he did and what he has done since to make up for that moral failure.
If John McCain felt good about his actions toward his first wife, he would not be sidestepping questions about the subject. I want to know what he was thinking 30 years ago. What beliefs he held back then that helped him justify cheating on his wife and whether or not those beliefs have changed.
This is the way I view it. Thirty years ago, John McCain wanted Cindy. He did whatever he had to do to get Cindy. That included destroying his family. Leaving a wife, someone who had waited for him while he was a POW, had been severely injured in a car accident and was quite dependent on her husband. He broke up the family of his young children because his desire for a woman 17 years his junior was more important than the needs of the woman he was already married to and the needs of his children.
John McCain now wants to be president. We know from his past actions that when McCain wants something he is willing to go about getting it in an immoral way. His refusal to openly answer questions about the failure of his first marriages causes me to question whether his belief system has changed. Does he still believe that it is OK to get what you want in spite of whom you have to hurt in the process?
Then we have Cindy McCain and her own denial about her actions when she dated a married man. Cindy told King that it didn't bother her to be dating a married man because "my husband had been separated. ... You know, six and a half years, it was a long separation."
Hello Cindy! Your husband was a POW. He was not a man who was separated from his wife due to marital problems. He was a POW who came home and joined his wife and family and, according to his first wife promised to care for her and make a life with her. You’ve lived for 30 years lying to yourself to justify becoming involved with a married man and you are now your expect Americans to buy into your justification.
“I think I’ve been a good wife and I’m a good mother and I think that is what he wanted and what he saw in me,” said Cindy McCain.
Am I the only one who cringes at that statement? From all accounts, John McCain had a good wife when he met Cindy McCain. His wife was a good mother. She was no longer young, her car accident had left her with disabilities and she wasn’t the wealthy daughter of a beer distributor. By Cathy Meyer, About.comSunday, November 2, 2008
Obama + Franken = Change
Dear Friend,
It has been a long campaign, and a tough one. Norm Coleman has sunk to historic depths to smear Al Franken and make this election about something, anything other than his own record and the issues that affect the people of Minnesota.
But what Norm Coleman did yesterday was something else entirely, and you need to know the truth.
Here's the story: A Republican businessman in Texas by the name of Paul McKim filed a lawsuit this week against Nasser Kazeminy. Kazeminy is one of Norm Coleman's biggest donors and closest friends - he's the same man who flew Coleman on his private jet to vacations in the Bahamas and Paris.
Only a small portion of the lawsuit has anything to do with Norm Coleman - but the part that does is incredibly serious. McKim's sworn affidavit, since corroborated by a second lawsuit, describes an effort to funnel $100,000 to Senator Coleman.
So are the allegations true? We don't know. In fact, we at the campaign didn't know a thing about this lawsuit, had never heard of this company or Paul McKim, until we read about it in the newspaper.
Then came yesterday. Instead of answering these very serious allegations, Norm Coleman released the most dishonest ad of the year, blaming Al for the lawsuit.
That ad is up on TV right now. And it's a despicable lie. Al Franken had nothing to do with this lawsuit.
Norm Coleman, faced with sworn allegations of a conspiracy to funnel him improper payments, is trying to deflect blame by lying about Al Franken in a TV ad. No matter what candidate you support or what party you belong to, it is a sad day.
With just a couple of days left, the only way we can stop him is with the truth. After all, that's what Al's always been about: letting the truth carry the day.
But we need your help. Please forward this email to everyone you know. And please know that no matter what happens in this election, you can be proud that you were part of this campaign.
Thank you for all you do,
Andy Barr
Al Franken for Senate
P.S.: If all this has you pretty outraged, don't just sit there and take it. We need volunteers on the phones and at the doors over the next 48 hours. Please go to www.gotvforchange.com and sign up for a shift right now - it's not too late!
Seniors can make the difference
Seniors all across America have been stepping up to help bring the change we need.
They know that Barack has a plan to deal with skyrocketing health care and prescription drug costs, protect social security, and help those who have been hit hardest in this economic crisis.
But he can't do it alone. With just days left until Election Day, your support is more important than ever.
We've put together a video about seniors who have been getting involved to help Barack.
Watch the video, then sign up to help in the final push: Everything will come down to these last few days. No matter what anyone says, this election will be decided on the ground by dedicated people helping to get out the vote.
We're almost there. And we need you to take us over the finish line.
Watch the video, then take action to make sure we bring the change we need:
http://my.barackobama.com/
With your help, we can make history and change our country.
Thank you for all that you're doing,
Seniors for Obama
