Sorry, but the blog is temporarily closed.  It will reopen in January, 2007.

Since the Dems won’t take control of the Congress until January, 2007, I’ve decided this is the best time to “close for remodeling”, or to complete a site rework that’s focused on the long-term.

This will include a new forum, a few new site features, and some asthetic changes to the overall look-and-feel of the site.

I am also seeking volunteers for the site, including bloggers and forum moderators.  Ideal candidates would be individuals who have experience in campaigns, politics or government, or college Dems looking for writing experience.  If you are interested in volunteering for the new site, please send me a message via the Contact link.

Thanks for your patience, and please check back for updates!

Doug Marquardt
All Things Democrat

From George W. Bush or Chimpanzee?

From BuckFush.com

From wrapped-in-the-flag.com

“Tomorrow at the White House, President Bush will pardon the turkey … and today, Dick Cheney spent all day torturing it” –David Letterman

“President Bush on Monday met for more than an hour with the independent panel examining strategic options for Iraq and cautioned afterward that while he’s open to new ideas, he’d like them to come only from people who agree with him.” –Amy Poehler

“President Bush, trying to gain international support in Iraq … met with leaders in Vietnam. … Experts say nothing builds support for a war like a trip to Vietnam.” –Conan O’Brien

“Yesterday in a 25 to 24 vote, Republicans welcomed back Lott back into their leadership and named him minority whip. That is great for Trent. They say minority whip is a stepping stone to Grand Wizard.” –Stephen Colbert

“President Bush now in his eight day trip to China. His approval rating is 31%. Not good. To give you an idea of how unpopular President Bush is, on Air Force One now, he can’t even get the window seat.” –Jay Leno

“According to the Washington Times, there’s a revolt brewing among Republicans in the House. People are, of course, shocked by this. There are still Republicans in the House?” –Jay Leno

(more…)

No blog posts today… enjoy the holiday!

This appears to be good news for bloggers.  The Houston Chronicle (via CivilRights.org) reports -

Web sites that publish inflammatory information written by other parties cannot be sued for libel, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

In reversing an appellate court’s decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides broad immunity from defamation lawsuits for people who publish information on the Internet that was gathered from another source.

Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled.

Legal experts said the ruling follows similar decisions in other states designed to protect free and open access to information.

“Even though the court recognizes that it could have unfortunate consequences, they’re saying that Congress controls this area,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle…

I recently ran a post to report that peace activists, including quakers and church members, were being stored in a terrorist database called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice).

Now, Common Dreams reports that the Defense Department, amid controversy over disclosed documents, claims to have changed its procedures and removed peaceful First Amendment activity from the TALON database -

The head of the office that runs the military database, which is known as Talon, said Monday that material on antiwar protests should not have been collected in the first place.

“I don’t want it, we shouldn’t have had it, not interested in it,” said Daniel J. Baur, the acting director of the counterintelligence field activity unit, which runs the Talon program at the Defense Department. “I don’t want to deal with it.”

Mr. Baur said that those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate and that what was intended as an antiterrorist database became, in some respects, a catch-all for leads on possible disruptions and threats against military installations in the United States, including protests against the military presence in Iraq.

“I don’t think the policy was as clear as it could have been,” he said. Once the problem was discovered, he said, “we fixed it,” and more than 180 entries in the database related to war protests were deleted from the system last year. Out of 13,000 entries in the database, many of them uncorroborated leads on possible terrorist threats, several thousand others were also purged because he said they had “no continuing relevance.”

If it’s true that the Defense Department changed their procedures, we have the ACLU to thank.  They secured release of the documents and alerted the public.  Kudos!

Guest post by Ralph Brauer - 

Last week I happened to catch the end of Talk of the Nation’s discussion of the future of the Democratic Party. Like many in the oped pages and on blogs, the main theme of the discussion seemed to be that the American people hungered for moderates. No one defined exactly how one recognizes one of these moderates, maybe because they couldn’t.

As near as I can tell, as we say here in backwoods country, what the mainstream media labels as a moderate Democrat is someone who should be performing in a circus if not on “Stupid Pet Tricks” or one of those home video reality shows. A moderate, the guest “experts” implied was someone who miraculously “balanced” the agendas of various Democratic Party interest groups. One example given was of newly-elected Pennsylvania Senator Casey, who is pro-life, pro gun control, and against stem cell research but opposes a gay marriage amendment and drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and agrees we a need of change of course in Iraq. So three issues balance three other, completely different issues, making Casey a “moderate.” The venerable New York Times noted this, “But the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views on abortion and gun rights, most notably Bob Casey Jr., the senator-elect in Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, representative-elect from North Carolina.”

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I recently reported that the Dems made significant gains among hispanic and jewish voters.  But it turns out the Dems also made gains in the youth vote (under the age of 30), as the group voted in its largest number in 20 years.

From Young Democrats of America -

About 24 percent of Americans under the age of 30, or at least 10 million young voters, cast ballots in Tuesday’s elections that saw Democrats make big gains in Congress. That was up 4 percentage points from the last mid-term elections in 2002.

“This looks like the highest in 20 years,’’ said Mark Lopez, research director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which compiled the data based on exit polls. “Unfortunately, we can’t say if it’s a record because don’t have good comparable data before 1986.’’

Rock the Vote, a youth-and-civics group, said young voters favored Democrats by a 22-point margin, nearly three times the margin Democrats earned among other age groups and dealing a potentially decisive blow to Republicans in tight races.

Much of the credit goes to the numerous get-out-the-vote efforts targeting young voters, including these youth organizations:

Young Democrats of America
College Democrats of America
Young Democrats Abroad
Rock the Vote

The mainstream media is over-reporting on a comment that GOP presidential hopeful John McCain made on Sunday’s “This Week”. Quote courtesy of DK -

I don’t think a constitutional amendment is probably going to take place, but I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could [freudian slip?] overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support.

The premise is that this “moderate” Senator is pandering to the right in preparation for the ‘08 election.  In reality, McCain has never been a moderate on abortion (or any other issue).

In 1999, then presidential candidate McCain made several statements supporting his position against Roe v. Wade.  From the National Right to Life org -

In an August 23 letter from McCain to NRLC President Wanda Franz, he wrote:

“I have always believed in the importance of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, and as President, I would work toward its repeal,” McCain wrote. He did not repeat ­ but neither did he explain or withdraw­ his previous statements that there is a “need” for abortion and that overturning Roe would “force” women to seek dangerous illegal abortions.

On August 26, McCain said, “I have a moral belief that life begins at inception.”

On August 31, at a news conference in New Hampshire, McCain said that if elected president, he would “immediately support efforts to move in (the) direction” of banning abortion.

And in 2000, from World Net Daily -

McCain’s [campaign] website clearly states, “Roe v. Wade should be overturned and we should endeavor to change cultural attitudes about abortion in favor of life.”

Don’t be fooled - McCain is no moderate, and the myth of McCain will unravel long before the GOP presidential primaries.

It’s becoming increasingly likely that the war in Iraq will end soon, as Bush’s once loyal supporters distance themselves from his administration and our nation’s greatest international policy disaster.  Let’s review the defections:

Colin Powell and his aides (Haass and Armitage) began critcizing the Bush administration’s handling of the war as early as two years ago.  As recently as last month, the Star Tribune reported that Powell criticized the “stay the course” policy, Bush’s CIA interrogation program, the lack of troops at the start of the war, and said the war poses a question as to whether an essential “bond of trust that must exist within a nation…has been shaken.”

Over the past year, leading repugs such as Arlen Specter and John Warner have criticized the Bush administration for a number of offenses from domestic spying to detainee torture to the failed policies in Iraq.

In recent months, Ken Adelman and Richard Perle, the leading neo-cons and principle supporters of the war, have criticized Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld as being incompetent.  Adelman said he believes “the president is ultimately responsible” for ”the debacle that was Iraq.”  And Perle now says if he had known Bush was going to occupy Iraq he would have advised against it, calling the occupation “a foolish thing to do.”

The mid-term election, in which the majority of voters said the war in Iraq was their main concern, gave additional cover to presidential wannabes to express their opposition to Bush’s failed war policy.  John McCain now says our troops in Iraq are “fighting and dying for a failed policy”, and Lindsey Graham said “We’re going to lose this war if we don’t adjust quickly.”

The departure of Rumsfeld, his replacement with Bush I holdover Gates, and the anticipated results of the Baker group seem to imply that the current Bush’s failed Iraq policy will be replaced with the former Bush policy of coalition building and containment.

This past Saturday, Tony Blair, the only real ally in the so-called “coalition of the willing”, described the Iraq war as “pretty much of a disaster“.  This prompted other UK leaders to call for Britain’s exit strategy.

And just yesterday, Henry Kissinger conceded that military victory in Iraq is not possible.  Fairly significant when you consider that it was just last month when Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial was released, in which Woodward reported that Kissinger was advising Bush that “victory is the only meaningful exit strategy” for Iraq.

The good news… no, the great news, is that Bush has lost the support of leading repugs, his die-hard neo-con buddies, his only real coalition ally, and now Kissinger.  The writing’s on the wall, folks; this war is nearly over.

The DNC reports that, last Thursday, Tommy Thompson said he’s considering running as a GOP candidate for the ‘08 presidential race.  When Thompson was asked why he was running, he replied, “Why not?”

Being originally from Wisconsin, my first reaction was to laugh out loud.  Thompson’s tenure as Governor was a joke.  He can barely form a coherent sentence, and his “midwest accent” is basically mumbling (I lived in Wisconsin for 43 years, but I’ve never met anyone else from that state with his mumbling “accent”).  Supposedly, he was very unhappy when he was “awarded” the position of Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary for helping Bush win Wisconsin in 2000.  He didn’t understand that they threw him a bone - he was in no way qualified for that position.

The DNC lays out some of the reasons why a Thompson in ‘08 campaign is just plain ridiculous…

Dean Powers OpEd on the mainstream media’s attempts to “fracture and destroy” the Dems -

The media has showed more desperation in the two weeks since Election Day than the Republicans who lost power. Why? Because the news media has benefitted enormously under a corporate-friendly Republican government.

The mainstream media’s latest tactic is to split the Democrats by hyping a fizzled-out, fractured, ruptured, washed up Democratic caucus. They are desperate to portray the Democratic Party as fractured because it increases the odds that Democrats will break ranks with other members of their party and vote with the Republicans on corporate welfare initiatives.

Read the full story at OpEd News…

From Ralph, at Liberal America, on one of my pet-peeves, the public feud between Carville/Emanuel and Chairman Dean, and why Dean’s vision is correct -

I was going to post on something else tonight–even had it done–but the recent flap about James Carville’s calling out Howard Dean has me outraged, especially because I think Carville was obviously carrying someone else’s water. The reason I say that is because on election night the channel I watched most was CNN, on which Carville appeared as a guest commentator. Now I can’t claim to have watched every minute of the telecast, so I need to be careful with my facts, but at no time did I hear Carville say a word criticizing Dean’s strategy, not even during the early moments of the evening before the Democratic win became obvious. So if he disagreed with the Dean why didn’t he say it then? You will also remember one of my five election night predictions was that the Dean-Emanuel feud would continue until the Democrats reached some consensus on strategy.

Posts about Carville’s remarks have been appearing all over blogdom, so in keeping with this blog’s [Liberal America] position “off the beaten path,” I will give you what I hope will be a slightly different take that–like the election night predictions–you won’t see anywhere else. That take involves three essential points: 1) Carville was a bit out of bounds, 2) he needs to read Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline and 3) he needs to read the story of a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer and the history of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Read the full story at Liberal America…

America for Richardson, an unofficial site supporting New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson for President in 2008.  Actually, it’s a pretty decent community site that includes a blog and live chat, start your own blog, and a resource to find a local Richardson group.  Check it out!

Not surprisingly, hispanics voted in greater numbers in this election than in 2004.  USA Today reports that, according to exit polls, 44% of hispanics voted Republican in 2004, compared to only 29% in the 2006 election.

“This time there is no doubt they felt Democrats were on the right side of the immigration issue,” says Lionel Sosa, a Hispanic ad executive who has advised Republicans. One of the Democratic Party’s top-ranking Hispanics, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, agrees. He says Bush’s decision to bow to conservative pressure and sign legislation authorizing construction of a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border “sent a terrible signal.”

But it was surprising to me that the GOP lost jewish votes.  From TPM Cafe -

A much-ballyhooed campaign by a group called the Republican Jewish Coalition to win Jewish voters to the GOP has proven to be a miserable flop, the Washington Jewish Week reports. The group — which includes former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer among its board members — made a great show earlier in the cycle of boasting that the GOP’s pro-Likud stance would translate into huge gains among Jews. Didn’t happen, though. National exit polls cited by the paper show that Democratic support among Jews went from 74% in 2004 to … 87% in 2006.

Given Bush’s support of Israel during the Lebanon crisis, and the GOP’s overwhelming support of Lieberman, I thought they may actually gain jewish votes. But one TPM comment may have hit upon something I didn’t consider -

…it’s an insult to Jews to believe that their vote can be won over by pandering to their religious and cultural sensitivities. It’s only fundamentalist Christians who bite on this kind of political bait.