It's official.  Big business owns 'Energy Independence.'  

First, it's ethanol - a slap in the face to anyone who takes global warming seriously.  Ethanol is a gift to Archer Daniels Midland - the Exxon of corn.  

Now the coal industry wants to feed at the 'energy independence' trough:

WASHINGTON, May 28 — Even as Congressional leaders draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, a powerful roster of Democrats and Republicans is pushing to subsidize coal as the king of alternative fuels.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

The Democratic controlled congress is a big improvement, but from the war in Iraq to global warming all I can say is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  

This diary includes a poll that asks a simple question:  are you a "war pragmatist" or a "war abolitionist."  I like that poll so much I want to know more.

Here's my stab at a more accurate poll, with 6 different categories.  Please take the poll and comment if you like:

• Bush Doctrine idealist: You are one of these if you think Donald Rumsfeld was a genius and you think we're winning in Iraq.  
• Conservative Isolationist:  You are one if you think delaying US entry into WWII was a good idea. Pat Buchannan is one. Not many on Kos...I hope.
• Conservative Realist: You are one if you're a conservative hawk, but not an idealist.    

Over coffee this morning on your way out to your local Earth Day pre-event you may have been pleasantly surprised to see a beautiful green vision of the American flag front-paged on the New York Times magazine.  

The photograph takes on a menacing militarized hue, unfortunately, once you see the title:  "the greening of geopolitics."  Inside, an article advocating a green-tinted version of the Bush Doctrine.  

The first clue is that the article is written by Thomas Friedman.  The same hawkish neo-liberal who helped convince countless democrats that the war in Iraq was a just war, and who never wrote about the environment at all until he discovered the "geopolitical" angle.  

Great blog post by Gregory Djerejian highlights this tidbit from the NY Observer.

Mr. Giuliani has criticized some aspects of the American performance in Iraq, but has basically supported the President’s plan without addressing its specific shortcomings. Asked about his day-to-day Iraq advisor, his campaign would only say that he speaks with many individuals, including retired Gen. Jack Keane and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

Say that again?  Who is Rudy Giuliani's trusted diplomatic advisor on Iraq?  John Bolton? Former US ambassador to the UN? The same John Bolton who once said, '"There is no such thing as the United Nations," and "if the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."  That John Bolton?  

It gets worse...

Rudy Giuliani is dangerous.  Dangerous because he can win.  Dangerous because if he wins he'll make Ann Coulter look like a diplomat.  Dangerous because he was incompetent as mayor of NYC.

The only practical question is, how to stop him?  Rely on pictures of Rudy in drag making the rounds in the GOP primary?  Think again.  

Author Robert Polner says Dems need to go straight after his supposed strength.  9/11:

As Rosaleen will tell anyone willing to listen, the vintage radios that Sean and 342 other city firefighters carried at their deaths on 9/11 were known to be defective. The faulty radios were the target of years of scathing internal assessments, bureaucratic wrangling, and accusations of bidding favoritism, and still the Giuliani administration had never replaced them.

http://www.salon.com/...

A lot of bloggers think Al Gore would make a great candidate. They think Al Gore can win in 2008.

Fucking pessimists!  They make me want to puke!  Ptoooey!

If Al Gore runs, here's what will happen.  

• March 23, 2007 at 10:00 am: Gore declares he's running.
• 10:10 am: Other Democratic candidates quit.  Rather than face Gore in the primary. Except Kucinich.
• 10:30 am: Mitt, John and Rudy hold a joint press conference.  All three start weeping.
• 12:30 pm: Mitt moves to a country with the sorts of freedoms he and the GOP stand for. Haiti.
• 8:00 pm: Rudy gets a job singing in a bar. As a woman.  
• March 24, 2007  8:00 pm: McCain Who?
• March 25, 2007  Karl Rove declares martial law just to avoid the election.  And because he's like that.
• January 20, 2009 Gore becomes President anyway using his superior intellect and charm.

However, we need to think bigger.  Much bigger.

I have a dream.  Not a very nice dream on the surface.  More of a necessary dream.

Imagine we could harness the creative power and talent of the entire DKOS community in an important political task:  namely, finding the best negative branding strategy against the three stooges: Mitt, Rudy and John?  Remember, the point isn't to be nice. It's to win.  

Here I want to focus in on the true story of a formidable candidate, John McCain.  The next time some distant cousin or relative or co-worker says they're planning to vote for McCain, ask they if they know McCain is an ANGRY, STUBBORN OLD MAN WHO MAY BE LOSING HIS MARBLES.  

I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues," said former Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee and on Republican policy committees. "He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that.

 

Republicans don't win elections.  They tear down the other side as TomP's recent diary explains very well here. Why? Because it works.

So a challenge for the DKOS community: what's the best negative branding strategy for Democrats to use against the three stooges: Mitt, Rudy and John?  Remember, the point here isn't to be nice. It's to win an election.

I'll start with a few ideas.

Mitt Romney is a CORRUPT BOY SCOUT

Romney may look like a boy scout but he is also the candidate of big business. Do we really want to endure 4 more years of the same corruption that marked the last 8 years?  

John McCain is an ANGRY OLD MAN WHO IS LOSING HIS MARBLES
 
The straight talk express is now more like the crazy train in supporting the surge.  Plus he's older than Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan were; he clearly has a temper; and is really kind of scary.  

Rudy Giuliani is a DANGEROUS LOOSE CANON

If elected Rudy will steer our foreign policy to the right of Dick Cheney while wearing a dress.  The question is not who will Rudy invade. It's who won't Rudy invade? North Korea? Iran? China?  

Your thoughts?

Where is the furious shit storm over Republican Congressman Virgil Goode's comments that Muslims are not welcome in the United States of America?  

If you somehow missed it, Goode personally attacked a fellow congresman (the first Muslim elected to conress), by saying we need to change our immigration laws or "many more Muslims" will be elected to Congress.  

This sort of hate speech is unacceptable. It's the sort of speech our enemies overseas will use against us as propaganda, particularly if we don't reject it now in the most forceful way.  

It's also incredibly hypocritical.  If Congressman Goode had said the same thing about Latinos, or African-Americans, or Jews or Buddhists, there would have been a total shit storm.  I have no doubt he would have apologized long beore now.  So where's the shit storm this time?  

Action is needed, and it's up to the Democrats to confront the bigots. Let's make a bit of noise, Democrats!

Write to your Representatives requesting a formal censure of Goode.  This should be one of the first actions taken when Congress goes back into session in January.  

Stop!  No more lectures about poverty by people wearing Dick Cheney masks.  It's not just wrong on the gas tax.  It's getting scary.  

Seriously, the Dark Lord Cheney himself couldn't have come up with a more fiendish line of bullshit. Re-frame an energy tax proposal as an attack on poor people? Divide and conquer?  Ex-cellent.

Solutions to this red herring are many, but here's one proposal:  to balance the energy tax, we can in turn take on poverty directly.  Reduce payroll taxes for anyone earning less than 45K/year, on a progressive scale--for every increase in their energy taxes.  Poverty red herring, solved. Dick Cheney thwarted.  

More ranting if you care to continue...

When I hear Bush saying things like 'I'm optimistic we'll succeed in Iraq,' as he did this week, I'm faced with two choices:  A)  Vomit and gargle with it.  or B)  Read the comic strip Get Your War On.  I prefer choice B.  

Get Your War On is the smartest, single best antidote for the nauseating, frat boy, chicken hawk rhetoric that continues to spew out of Washington D.C. (And that's just the stuff DINO democrats are saying).

If by some chance you live under a rock and have never seen GYWO, read it all right now.  I promise you'll fall out of your chair laughing.  It's one part Dilbert; one part Enron; and one part corporate GOP chicken hawker.  The war-cheerleading characters are all brain-dead corporate idiots.  

http://www.mnftiu.cc/...

So...for the majority who have read GYWO two questions:  what is your favorite "Get Your War On' strip?  And second, tell us what you think the author David Rees should go after next?

I'll start here:  I think this single frame pretty much says it all:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/...

More below the flip:

 I am certainly not a port security expert myself, and I respect many of the bloggers who claim to have security fears about America's ports, but I think I can answer one question--what is xenophobia? How do we decide in this case what in the media and the blogs is xenophobic, and what isn't?  

Well, irrational fear of foreigners is xenophobia. So here's my proposed test:  If, in our concern about foreign ownership of US ports we ignore the best evidence--whether it confirms our fears or not-- then we aren't being rational.  That would be xenophobic.  

So, what do the experts have to say about port security?

Human earwax is proof positive of intelligent design.  

First of all, earwax is complicated.  Much like a mouse trap.  Nothing with so many working parts (i.e., earwax) could possibly have "evolved."  Plus, like a mousetrap, earwax is sometimes sticky (though not always).

Nevertheless, scientists and so-called 'genetic researchers'--all clearly Agents of Beelzebub--claim to have uncovered the key gene behind the waxy mystery.

The report in Monday's Nature Genetics journal solves a long-running anthropologist's riddle - why many people in China and Korea, as well as elsewhere in Asia, have dry earwax while the rest of humanity enjoys the sticky variety.

snip

Geneticists had known the neighborhood of the earwax gene from previous work and decided to pin it down. The earwax riddle surprisingly comes down to a single gene, dubbed ABCC11, reports a Japanese team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of the Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. The gene comes in two types, or alleles, corresponding to wet or dry earwax.

http://news.yahoo.com/...

Ha!  

I've been wondering about the possibility that chaos was the original goal of invading Iraq ever since Josh Marshall penned his brilliant article, Practice to Deceive: Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.  

In the end, the war turned out as Marshall predicted-- Iraq looks more like a post-invasion Lebanon than a city on the hill in the middle east.  It is a failed state, and a haven for terrorists.  

But what if this is all part of the plan (B)? The failed state scenario?  More importantly--what should democrats do?

More follows:

• Where do you get your news?
  
• Are there people out there who use blogs as their primary source of news?  
  
• Do you get your news from three or more sources every day?

• Please feel free to comment about the results below. I'll need to check back later today to comment.

Please recommend this poll, if you think it's interesting...
 

All of this polite squabbling over the '08 nominee is fun but it misses the point.  Gore, Hillary, Clark, Spongebob-- in the end it makes no difference who we nominate.  Unless things change at the highest levels, our glorious nominee will be killed again by bad advice from cautious handlers and beltway inside dopesters.

Consider the recent past.  It seemed like Kerry stood a chance in 2004, but only early on. Here's how he sounded in early 'O4, for example, coming out of a tough primary battle against the populist-firebrand duo of Dean and Edwards:

Ahhhh, those were the days...when Kerry seemed infused with confidence and poll numbers that looked like he might win.

http://www.cbsnews.com/...

That is until the whisperers of caution, the Machiavellis of sucking up to the powerful screwed Kerry's chances and in the process screwed America...

To Jerome A Paris et al:

The phrase "Energy security" hurts our ability to draw attention to the very real threat of global warming. Energy security is a self-defeating frame.  

Here's why: our opponents find it incredibly easy to turn this language to their advantage. Ted Stevens,  R-Alaska (not known as a skilled persuader outside of Fairbanks) illustrates the point today in his piggish demand for drilling ANWR.

 

Over 20K are dead in Pakistan, and the death toll is rising:

What is Bush doing?  What are we doing?  What are you doing (other than preparing for theoretical future threats here at home)?

In addition to the human tragedy, here's another opportunity for Americans to show actual concern for people in parts of the world where there's still great (and at least partly understandable) animosity towards the U.S.

China has offered 6.2 million, the Czech republic pledged 1 million, and Belgium 300K. So far Bush is offering "condolences," experts, and $100,000 in emergency aid.