Read thi for a perfect example of why Larry King is the most incompetent man in show business:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Good article by one of McCain's key people on the corporate-owned and coroporate-controlled Bush administration:

NDOL: Under the Corporate Influence by Marshall Wittman

Republicans had a big problem going into the 2000 election. The anti-government and anti-communist glue that had bound the conservative movement was dissolving. Whatever his weaknesses, Clinton had taken away the easy targets for conservative attacks on Democrats. After years of denying there were any New Democrats or that there was any Third Way, most Republicans knew they had to change.

They were offered two paths. The first, provided by Sen. John McCain, was to recapture the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt, by advocating government as an agent of "national greatness" and insisting on reform of government and of corporate influence on government. The second, provided by Bush (and backed by conservative ideologues, K Street, and the Christian right), was to change the face of the Republican Party rather than its ideology. The Republican faithful -- or more accurately, a few thousand primary voters in South Carolina -- chose the path of least resistance.

Excellent rant about what's wrong with the major American political viewpoints: Conservatives couldn't care less about anyone but themselves. Libertarians are unrealistic fantasists. Liberals are incompetents without the courage of their convictions.

Willamette Week Online | Cover Story | Candidates for Metro president.

I hate your politics.

Each of you carries baggage from your political affiliation, and all of that baggage has a punky smell to it, like one of your larger species of rodent crawled in and expired in your folded underwear. Listening to any of you yammer on about the geopolitical situation is enough to make one want to melt down one's dental fillings with a beeswax candle and then jam an ice pick into the freshly exposed nerve, just to have something else to think about.

The editors of The New Republic on Bush abandoning his free market "principles" for political gain and to help big business fatcats.

The New Republic Online: Making Hay

These recent deviations from free-market orthodoxy have been dramatic enough that it's tempting to conclude the president has no coherent economic philosophy at all. But that isn't quite true. A clear pattern has lately emerged: When intervention in the market would benefit a wide range of Americans--say, a substantive patients' bill of rights or a prescription-drug plan--Bush opposes it. Ditto for an intervention that would actually make the economy run more smoothly--as in the case of reforms to the accounting industry. Indeed, it seems only when a market intervention lacks a compelling economic rationale and helps the few at the expense of the many--as in the steel, energy, and agriculture decisions--that the president sets aside his free-market principles. Call it "uncompassionate unconservatism."

The reason is that while only intermittently pro-market, Bush is steadfastly pro-business. Just how far the president is willing to bend the former principle in service of the latter can be seen in the farm bill he is preparing to sign into law.

Jonathan Chait responds to David Broder's slamming of the idea of John McCain switching parties to run for the Presidency as a Democrat, and his apparently willful misreading of people who advocate a switch:

The New Republic Online: No More Mr. Nice Columnist .

I find McCain admirable because he has embraced a worldview that, on issue after issue, elevates the broader good above narrow self-interest: on tax cuts, pork, environmental and gun regulations, foreign policy, and so on. It's all lost on Broder.

EJ Dionne on why we should all want the government to set aside money for social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security:

Why the Lockbox Won't Die (washingtonpost.com)

All of us hope we'll save so much that we won't need to rely on Social Security checks. But we can never be absolutely sure we won't need them -- what if your portfolio is bulging with Enron stock? -- so we're glad Social Security is there for everyone.

We'd like to think we won't get sick. But even the fittest in our ranks will need more medical care as they age. We subsidize and socialize health care for the elderly through Medicare because we know the dangers, as Franklin Roosevelt once put it, of having "a rich man's security and a poor man's security."

These programs, in other words, insure all of us, and insure society against having a large class of destitute elderly people.

Text of Al Gore's speech to the Florida Democratic Party:

algore04.com - The Grassroots Site Dedicated to Re-electing Al Gore

Now, here in America patriotism does not mean keeping quiet. It means speaking up. It means speaking out. It means exercising our freedom of speech. It means drawing the line where we have strong differences with the administration. It means debating what we believe is right, and what we believe is wrong. It is in this sprit of patriotism that I appear before you here today to engage in the debate that we so vitally need to build a brighter future for our country.

The time has come to speak out boldly, not only when we believe the administration is right, but to offer constructive alternatives when we believe what they're doing is wrong for America. And a lot of what they're doing, I believe, is wrong for America........

........In each of these areas, the Administration is following the same pattern: selling out America's future in return for short term political gains. They've returned us to the days of deficits and debt, the days of irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy; the days of loosening environmental safeguards to satisfy the polluters. And they've turned their back on America's covenant with our greatest generation, raiding the Social Security and Medicare trust funds without pause, without remorse, and seemingly without even a thought to the long-term consequences of what they're doing.

Much has been made about the increasing dominance of the Republican Party in the South and the Democratic Party on the Coasts, but the area of greatest dominance seems to be the Republican lock on the Southwest and Mountain West. Of the 20 Senators representing TX, OK, NM, AZ, UT, NV, CO, MT, WY, and ID, only 3 are Democrats. As long as this is true, the hard right will only need 24 out of the remaining 80 Senators to be able to filibuster any laws they don't like and 34 out of 80 to control the Senate.

This area, which gave us Mo Udall, Gary Hart, and Frank Church, now seems to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the right wing of the Republican Party. There seem to be three major reasons:
1) The rise of a poltically active Religious Right
2) Backlash against environmental policies which many see as imposed by elitist Easterners
3) Guns

The Religious Right has been able to dominate debate on "moral" issues for over two decades, since the Left won on their biggest moral issues: Women's Lib, Vietnam and Civil Rights (and, no, I'm not implying that there isn't any work left to do on Civil Rights or Women's Lib). They've defined the debate so well that anyone who considers themselves a "moral" person (especially devout Christians) will automatically identify themselves with the Republican Party solely on social issues. While the Left should never try to out-pander or out-bigot (and there are still a lot of bigots out there) the Religious Right, there is a way to defuse their rhetoric:

1) Emphasize economics above all else. Make the case that the Party of "family values" is the one that makes it easier for people to raise their families with some economic security, not the one that spews platitudes and then votes with the corporations every time. Sell economic populism as "family friendly" politics. This'll take a lot of sting out of the attacks of the Right.

2) Emphasize the "personal freedom" platform of the Left. Sell gay rights and abortion rights (the two biggest remaining social battlegrounds) as guarantees of liberty. Make the case that the government shouldn't be telling people what they can do in the privacy of their own homes and what they can do with their own bodies. Making the case in this way will play to natural distrust of intrusive government, and should be far more effective than trying to convince people to actively approve of homosexuality and abortion (which may be a good thing to do on its own, but is a political loser).

3) Make the case that protecting the environment is in the interest of Westerners themselves. Emphasize the economic benefits of a cleaner enviroment (especially tourism), the better quality of life (cleaner air and water), and the harm done to future generations by destruction of the environment. Like most Americans, Westerners will sacrifice immediate gain for the future of their children, but they won't do it just to make Joe Lieberman happy. We also need to point out that a lot of environmentally destructive activity makes no sense from a financial point of view. We spend more building roads for loggers than we get from selling the trees (this won't convince the loggers, but it will other people who only hear one side now). Let's also stop using the shorthand word "environment", which lots of Westerners have come to think doesn't apply to anything they care about. Instead, talk about "clean air", "clean water" and "beautiful countryside". Give people something tangible to imagine.

4) Tilt government spending more towards local schools, local hospitals, and other things that people experience every day. If folks think that none of their tax dollars go to help them, they'll vote for the people who want to dismantle government. If they see their tax dollars at work, they won't. This is also, frankly, what government is supposed to be doing with its money. Slash corporate welfare, spend it on schools, and you'll have the thanks of the people who have kids.

5) To people who live on ranches and in small towns, guns are more often thought of as the solution rather than the problem. 911 doesn't help much if the police are a 30 minute drive away. You'll never convince these people that guns should be banned, so stop trying. Completely abandon any attempts to ban guns, which would be a disaster to enforce anyway. If the single issue gun voters knew for a fact that their guns wouldn't be taken away, they wouldn't have nearly the same aversion to reasonable attempts to keep guns away from kids, ex-cons, and the insane. Until they know this, they'll keep voting solely on guns for the people who hurt them economically.

Tom Vilsack (Gov of Iowa) wrote this Op-Ed after vetoing a budget that cut millions from education and healthcare:

DesMoinesRegister.com | News

I have heard the argument that the road fund is sacrosanct - even though we used those revenues in the general fund as recently as the year 2000. We are told that those funds are off-limits, because roads mean jobs and economic development.

But businesspeople and academic experts tell us again and again: The single most important component in attracting growth and investment is the quality of the work force. That is our advantage in Iowa. We have a highly educated population. We value learning and knowledge, and our budgets and policies have always reflected that.

This budget breaks faith with that tradition. It undermines our greatest economic advantage by disinvesting in students, teachers, training, technology, community colleges and universities.

It all comes down to kids or concrete............

..........Today, the Legislature can choose either to stand with Iowa's children and families, or to stand on the side of powerful interests at their expense. I implore you to make the right choice for Iowa's families and Iowa's future.

The people are watching. Will it be kids . . . or concrete?

John Kerry on transforming our economy from one dependent on foreign fossil fuels to one using domestic renewable energy:

Earth Island Institute: Earth Island Journal - Summer 2002

America has a choice between two competing visions. The Administration sees a world where our principal effort is to drill our way out of our problem. I see a world where our primary focus shifts to exciting a new marketplace for alternative and renewable energy sources.........

...........I respectfully suggest that it is time to pursue a national Strategic Energy Initiative. Its goal is quite simply to initiate a transition from our heavy dependence on polluting and insecure fossil fuels to more efficient, clean and reliable energy.

America has made exactly this sort of energy transition more than once before. For much of the 1800s our primary source of energy was wood. By the late 1800s, coal was king. That changed when the automobile went into mass production and demand for gasoline soared. Natural gas was added to the energy mix in the '40s. Nuclear power came online in the '50s. Now we need to prepare our nation for the 21st Century and begin a transition to domestic, clean and reliable energy technologies.......

.......I believe we should set a national goal of having 20 percent of our electricity come from domestic alternative and renewable sources by the year 2020. Twenty-twenty - I think it's a vision worthy of America; a goal I believe our citizens are ready to embrace........

.......The growth of wind, solar and geothermal would spark a surge in production resulting in a net gain to our national economy, a net gain in employment, and a net gain in wages. There are simply more jobs-per-megawatt in the renewable industries than in fossil-fuel sectors.

Domestic, renewable sources are entirely under our control. No foreign government can embargo them. No terrorist can seize control of them. No cartel can play games with them. No American soldier will have to risk his or her life to protect them.

Joshua Green on why McCain should switch parties to run for President.

"The Big Switch" by Joshua Green In fact, the best Democrat may be someone who's no Democrat at all: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

As a war hero who's hawkish on foreign policy, he more than matches Bush on the military front. As a reform-minded foe of corporate welfare, Big Tobacco, and the Republican right, he is peerless. McCain is Bush's most vociferous critic, voted against the president's tax cut, forced his hand on campaign finance reform, and federalized airport security in the face of White House opposition. He has co-sponsored numerous bills with Democrats--many of them in the presidential-aspirant class--requiring background checks at gun shows (Lieberman), a patients' bill of rights (Edwards), better fuel-efficiency standards in cars and SUVs (Kerry), and expanded national service programs (Bayh). He is even drafting a bill with Lieberman to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate global warming. As Ronald Brownstein remarked recently in the Los Angeles Times, "[McCain] has become the most hyphenated name in Washington."............

...............The prospect of a McCain switch seems a surprisingly popular topic of discussion among Democrats. In my conversations with party leaders and activists, from the most moderate to the most liberal, an interesting pattern emerged. After citing their personal admiration for McCain and offering boilerplate ideologically concerns, nearly everyone asked to speak off the record, and confessed to fantasizing about a switch, as if yielding to some forbidden indulgence. McCain's appeal to Democratic politicians as a legislative collaborator is not quite so secret. But the mounting concern among party insiders that Al Gore will try again has prompted some discreet political infidelity. "You don't know how many Democrats come up to me and say, 'I wish we could get [McCain] to run,'" says a top adviser to McCain. "Some of them are pretty prominent [figures]."

Missed this the first time around:
Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader
Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."

If there's anybody who's likely to be touchy about legitimacy coming only from a majority of the voters, it's a Bush administration official.

Jonathan Chiatt on why John McCain should run for President as a Democrat:

The New Republic Online: What's in a Name?

McCain's domestic agenda increasingly consists of bold reforms that expand the scope of the federal government. During the campaign, McCain paid lip service to anti-government bromides while supporting government intervention in specific instances. In the last year though, his ideology has grown coherently progressive. "We have had regulatory agencies always to curb the abuses or potential abuses of the capitalist system," he said earlier this year on cbs's "Face the Nation." "This is not a totally laissez-faire country." McCain, in other words, now believes in progressive government to counteract the excesses of the market and recognizes that the mere fact that business interests complain about such intervention does not by itself make it wrong. There is a term for people who think like this: Democrats.

Article by David Talbot on the Democrats' need to get tough in the face of increasingly brutal tactics from their political opponents.

Salon.com Politics | Fight or flight?

Confronted with these relentless opponents, the Democrats have all too often caved in. When Al Gore blasted Bush last week, it was a painful reminder of what he and Joe Lieberman didn't do in Florida, when GOP bullies simply ripped the presidency out of their hands. Until the Democrats learn to fight for what they believe in as tenaciously as their opponents, they will never be an effective political force.........

.........The Old Testament fervor that inflamed the GOP and the conservative movement throughout the Clinton era is still very much alive, from the attack ads on Tom Daschle comparing him to Saddam Hussein for his opposition to Alaska oil drilling to John Ashcroft's suggestion that anyone who opposed his attempts to shortcut the Constitution was on the side of terrorism. The excesses of the current conservative crusade may not match the outrages documented by Brock -- but only because Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat, does not occupy the White House. And it's not necessary for the GOP to go scorched-earth when, ever since Sept. 11, the Democrats have obligingly turned themselves into "war wimps," in Rich's phrase.

But now that even chronically cautious Al Gore has begun raising his voice against the Bush administration, it seems that political life might be coming back in America. This means the holy warriors of the right will once again be on the march, eager to put any moral or political enemy (generally one and the same) to the torch. With the Bush political operation run by the win-at-any-cost heirs of Lee Atwater, and the GOP ranks filled by passionate Christian activists, the Republican cause still carries the air of a religious war, even without revolutionary prophets like the disgraced Newt Gingrich (who undoutedly is plotting a Nixonian resurrection)..........

...........Politics is a blood sport, but it doesn't have to be so savage that it subverts our political system, as Republican zealots like Bob Barr, Ted Olson and Robert Bork did when they began intriguing for Clinton's impeachment long before the nation heard of Monica Lewinsky. The problem for Democrats in recent decades is that the party's national standard bearers have often felt unsuited or uncomfortable at playing this sport, preferring governance over politics. But as John Kennedy observed, you can't have one without the other. When JFK was reminded of Eisenhower's disdain for the very word "politics," he responded, "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics.' It's the way a president gets things done." The Democratic candidates who obviously were more enamored of policy than politics proved to be losers -- Dukakis and Gore. The ones who thrived at the game of politics -- JFK, LBJ, Clinton -- have been the party's winners. And they knew how to play the game hard........

........."Whereas Gore regarded the battle as primarily legal, Clinton saw it as political -- and fierce," writes Toobin. "Gore wanted no demonstrators in the streets; Clinton wanted lots of them. Gore worried about pressing his case in court; Clinton thought the vice president should have sued everybody over everything. Gore believed in muting racial animosities about the election; Clinton thought that Democrats should have been screaming about the treatment of black voters. Gore believed in offering concessions, making gestures of good faith; Clinton thought the Republicans should be given nothing at all but should rather be fought for every single vote. 'He got more votes -- more people wanted to vote for him. This is the essence of democracy. But the fix is in. This thing stinks.'"

Good article on how stupid it is to lock up people for smoking pot when we've got many more things to be worried about.

Deroy Murdock on Marijuana on National Review Online

The NYPD's arrests for possession and/or public smoking of marijuana have swelled from 1,362 in 1993 to 50,830 in 2000, equal to 15 percent of that year's total arrests. (NORML correctly prefers citations and fines to apprehension for public smoking.) In 2000, 734,498 Americans were arrested nationwide for breaking marijuana laws, 646,042 of them for mere possession.

Using U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, the Marijuana Policy Project calculates that 37,500 federal, state, and local inmates were imprisoned for cannabis violations in 1998, 15,400 of them for possession alone. At an average cost of $20,000 each, the government spent $750 million to incarcerate these offenders. MPP estimates that the war on marijuana costs taxpayers $9.2 billion annually.

This shopworn policy devours scarce public resources, even as authorities struggle to prevent future airline hijackings, bioterrorist attacks or even the detonation of a "dirty nuke" in Times Square. Every law-enforcement asset arrayed against nonviolent potheads is one less asset that can be deployed against al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Good article on the fact that the September 11th hijackings aren't related to immigration at all.

Daniel T. Griswold on Immigration on National Review Online

In his April 22 article ("May We Get Serious Now?"), John O'Sullivan declares that "the [September 11] hijackers were all immigrants." Dead wrong. None of them were. They were all here on temporary "non-immigrant" tourist or student visas. They never applied to the INS for green cards or any other permanent status.....

........O'Sullivan and other anti-immigrant crusaders blur this distinction for an obvious reason. Their most pressing agenda is not border security but immigration reduction. They are attempting to hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause.

In one of the most stunningly hypocritical speeches in recent memory, George W. Bush referred to his tax cut expiring in 9 years as a "quirk in the law". If you'll recall, they made the tax cut expire so that they could lie about how much it would cost.

Bush Pressing to Make Cut in Tax Rates Permanent

Looking ahead to Thursday, when the House will take up a Republican bill to make the tax-cutting package permanent, Mr. Bush urged Congress to eliminate what he called "a quirk in the law" that would see income tax rates in 2011 go back to their 2000 levels and the federal tax on large estates be eliminated in 2010 and then spring back to life in 2011.

Ehud Barak on what Israel should be planning for the future:

Israel's Security Requires a Sturdy Fence

For Israel, this struggle involves making clear that our enemy is not the Palestinian people but only Palestinian terror. The focus of our struggle is not on smashing Yasir Arafat to the wall; it is about trying to push the Palestinian leadership toward the resumption of negotiations.

There is an urgent need to shape a coherent Israeli strategy, which is now absent. Such a strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.

The Bush administration must really miss the bad old days, when the CIA and State Department interfered at will in Latin American politics, giving the hemisphere decades of Augusto Pinochet and central American death squads. They have apprently been talking with the Venezuelan plotters for months.

Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader

Senior members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office, administration officials said today.

But administration officials gave conflicting accounts of what the United States told those opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways of ousting him.......

.........But a Defense Department official who is involved in the development of policy toward Venezuela said the administration's message was less categorical.

"We were not discouraging people," the official said. "We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, `No, don't you dare,' and we weren't advocates saying, `Here's some arms; we'll help you overthrow this guy.' We were not doing that."

Paul Krugman on the aborted coup in Venezuela, and hos stupid and shortsighted Bush's support for it truly was:

Losing Latin America

Here's how the BBC put it: "Far from condemning the ouster of a democratically elected president, U.S. officials blamed the crisis on Mr. Chávez himself," and they were "clearly pleased with the result" — even though the new interim government proceeded to abolish the legislature, the judiciary and the Constitution. They were presumably less pleased when the coup attempt collapsed. The BBC again: "President Chávez's comeback has . . . left Washington looking rather stupid." The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, didn't help that impression when, incredibly, she cautioned the restored president to "respect constitutional processes."

Surely the worst thing about this episode is the betrayal of our democratic principles; "of the people, by the people, for the people" isn't supposed to be followed by the words "as long as it suits U.S. interests."

But even viewed as realpolitik, our benign attitude toward Venezuela's coup was remarkably foolish.

It is very much in our interest that Latin America break out of its traditional political cycle, in which crude populism alternated with military dictatorship. Everything that matters to the U.S. — trade, security, drugs, you name it — will be better if we have stable neighbors.