Washblog

[Front paged: NM]

If you live in the 7th CD, you know that McDermott could be caught with a live boy or a dead girl and still get elected.  Democratic candidates in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 9th are in reasonably good shape after the primary as well.  Many Democrats from those CDs are contributing  a lot of time and money to Darcy Burner's campaign--an obvious place where people in safer Democratic districts can potentially do a lot of good.  I'd like to suggest that money and effort could also go a long way in George Fearing's campaign in the 4th CD.

I was out multitasking today, lobbying against the Highland Park jail proposal, registering voters, and doing candidate/issue ID.  One of the voters had quite a bit to say on transportation.  He's in construction and looking at the issue from that perspective.  Anyway, he communicated with the governor about it and passed me a copy of the letter.

My issue junkie areas are health care and election integrity, and I rely on discussions with other people to keep up to speed with education, transportation, land use, etc.

[Front paged: NM -- On a Washingtonian originally from Iraq moving up in the delegate process. Good luck Majid Al-Bahadli!]

After an all-nighter, I just got back from the 7th CD convention.  Before passing out, I had to get the following delegate information posted.  I took a couple of photos of the only copy of the promotional material and scanned them.  Then it occured to me to use those internets tubes.

This is a really great story.  Hope he made it into the finals today, and that I can meet him at the state convention otherwise.

I have been tearing my hair out reading all the nitpicky squabbling in cyberspace about minor differences in the platforms and voting records of Clinton and Obama whenever anybody attempts to discuss framing. Once and for all, framing is NOT policy dammit! Clinton's voting record for the most part establishes her as a Democrat, but that has not stopped her from using Repub framing, and constant use of Repub framing by Dems has caused us to lose national elections from 1980 on, and from 2000 on it's caused them to be close enough to steal. Also, it really clouds the discussion to say that Clinton actually is a Republican (which way too many folks say), because that too distracts from the issue of framing.

People who think that Democrats who attack other Democrats with Repub framing are doing them a favor by "vetting" them are full of it. That's not vetting; that's just being one more Repub 527 swiftboating operation only with funding from Democratic money. If you don't know that, the sociopaths at the Weekly Standard sure do--they're pissing their pants with delight over the fact that Clinton is so strongly validating them by constantly agreeing with them. And if anyone thinks that will make them grateful enough to her that they'll stop supporting Roger Stone's anti-Clinton Citizens United Not Timid 527, I have a really great deal from a Nigerian barrister that I'm sure they'll want to take advantage of. (On the other hand, attacking any Dem from the left really is doing him or her a favor, but that's a whole different topic.)

Framing that we damned well need to break---fast.

I ran some data from the 11th LD caucuses derived from VoteBuilder.  There is a truly astonishing increase in the percentage of people who are classified as Unknown + No Data for party affiliation.

[Ed note: Excerpts are from the Huffington Post and Rolling Stone stories, linked to below. NM]

huffingtonpost.com

In 2004, the Kerry/DNC campaign proved that, without a long period of meticulous organization building in advance, no amount of money can buy you an effective national field campaign. The Bush campaign taught us the exact opposite lesson, with its meticulous preparation and high-accountability organization that extended all the way down to volunteer county chairs as early as 2002.

[Ed Note: I'd like to see comparative discussion of these agreement points. A.R.] *that imposing an "oil law" on Iraq for the purposes of outright theft is a good idea
*that we should maintain an ongoing presence in Iraq to defend a Vatican-sized embassy built with slave labor
*that we can afford to continue funding an American military empire
*that we should be spending even more on the military and increasing its size
*that US military intervention in the rest of the world is just social work done with M-16s, JDAMs and cluster bombs
(continued)

[Ed note: From Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall]

"As you know, here at TPM we've been really curious what happened up in the Republican caucus in Washington state. For probably the first time in all the primaries and elections I've ever watched, the folks running the election decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted. And this wasn't a 70-30 blow out, but a tight race where the two top vote getters were separated by less than 2% of the vote. Then this morning, state party chair Luke Esser decided to declare McCain the winner.

"Now, when we were watching this last night and I was trying to examine the tea leaves this morning, I was assuming they'd come forward with some story that there was some hang up with the votes or some mechanical issue. Whether it would be true is another matter. But you'd think you'd at least come up with a good story.

Track these and report to the Obama campaign for starters.  Not sure where else to report them.  Suggestions?

[Front paged: NM]

It does NOT matter if your preferred candidate has dropped out of the race or not.

What I would suggest--

http://www.docaucus.com /

This is not in any way accessible from the official state party website for some reason. Please disseminate widely.

--besides Clinton, I mean.  There is no individual, corporation or foreign government whose image is in need of refurbishing which too slimy for this guy.

His defense is that he doesn't do the actual work on the accounts of Burson-Marsteller.  Last I heard, CEOs generally don't do details regardless of the nature of their business.

The bottom line is that he is working for the one percenters, that is to say the people who visit decisions about how the world is run on the rest of us, who are all in the disposable human garbage category.  Even those of us who are profesionals and technocrats don't escape this category--we're just temporarily privileged.

Online at pdcw@riseup.net.  Ccmments are in reverse order.

Walter Kloefkorn <wkloefkorn {at} yahoo.com> wrote:

Sure, I'm even going to combine that response and this and make them into a post to my Progressive Farmer blog on Democrats.org. About time I posted something about farming.

There'll be plenty of Democratic ag types who don't agree  We've actually got folks trying to build more dams, and want the second half of the Columbia Basin project undertaken. Some think we should abandon the dryland wheat model and go to irrigated wheat farming.

We still don't have one standard communications method for reaching all members, as not everyone wants to sign up at the Google announcement group we have created for this purpose. http://groups.google.com/group/wspc-announce

If you are in the Google group and do not want to receive more emails, let me know and I'll take you off of my separate email blast list. If you prefer regular email to the Google announcement process, let me know that as well

Martha Koester
Secretary, Progressive Caucus
fomalhaut2003@yahoo.com

Not that Rove has a conscience, but the rumor mill has it that he opposed it because it would be bad politically.  Cheney seems to be in charge, and he is batshit crazy.  Ring the phones off the hooks until they do something about this.

http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Study_US_preparing_massive_military_attack_0828.html

Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.