With all due respect...

I think it is important for Dems to attempt to squelch fellow Dems who eagerly broadcast the "2004 election was stolen" meme.

I think that most of us have had access to the same information that you have and the consensus is that the election wasn't stolen. No Diebold hijinks, no widespread voter intimidation, no fraud. The story is a distraction from the work that we have in store for us in the near future and every airing of it further risks getting us painted as a group as "a bunch of kooks."

Stop spinning your wheels and refocus your energy in places that will make a positive difference for "the left," for our country and for the world moving forward.

1. He comes from big money. His mother is Gloria Vanderbilt - the railroad heiress, actress and designer bluejean namesake.

2. He lived in Vietnam for a year after college in the early 1990s and took Vietnamese language classes at the University of Hanoi.

A conspiracy theorist, that is.

We had a discussion about this online the other day that amazed me... Otherwise intelligent and articulate people not only buying in to the theories set forth by Loose Change, but also insisting that "most people" believe the same theories.

Here's a link:

liberalavenger.com/2006/05/20/loose-change-full-of-sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing

I was in Berkeley from 1989 through 1994. I was blown away with Slacker when it came out. It felt like the movie could have been filmed in Berkeley with the same extended circle of students, musicians, dope fiends and hangers-on that made up my world at the time.

There was always a bit of a Berkeley/Austin connection in the same way that the [much deeper] Boston/SF Bay Area connection was there. I think we knew that Austin was hip - just like we knew that Cambridge or Madison or Ann Arbor were hip. Something to do with being university towns, I suppose.

What do readers here - in Berkeley or Austin or other hip cities - think about the scene(s) there now? Is rootless slackerdom the exception or the rule? Is there still a young and hip crowd living for cheap beer, cheap speed, cheap pot, music and friends?

If bohemianism meant hippiedom in the late 60s and slackerdom in the early 90s, what does it mean today?

You must have balls of steel, Phillip. I can't imagine a situation where I'd have the courage to ask to see that sharia court.

The teaser for tomorrow's article says, "Tomorrow: the daily nightmare at Baghdad's mosque."

I'll bet it was supposed to say "Tomorrow: the daily nightmare at Baghdad's MORGUE."

You war-lovers in the crowd realize, don't you, that the events in and around Israel are the final and ultimate confirmation of the abject failure of Bush's foreign policy? This isn't to say that the events are Bush's fault - clearly they aren't his fault.

It is interesting to note, however, that there are those among you who have fellated Bush at every step of the way. Indeed, if a child helped an elderly person cross the street somewhere in the Middle East you cried out that it is an example of George Bush's Middle East policy "paying dividends." If George Bush has been responsible for anything positive taking place in the Middle East, shouldn't he also take responsibility for the bad?

But I digress.

It wouldn't be too much of an oversimplification to say that many of you have propped up and supported our brutal, pointless war in Iraq because you believed that the ultimate payout as a result would be "peace in the Middle East." Yo. Hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of casualties, death squads - be damned! You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and GW is making a giant Democracy-flavored omelette out of the entire Middle East.

Sadly, we're as far from that ideal as we ever were at this point - and today Israel and Lebanon are exchanging rockets and missiles.

Pax Americana, indeed.

Why declare multiculturalism dead?

Our world supports six billion people each living out lives on their own trajectories. The cultural integration between peoples only increases over time.

The world is awash with mundane examples of multiculturalism working. London and New York are two beautiful examples of people of all shapes, sizes, colors and creeds living and working together happily and peacefully.

That the world produces a relative handful of potentially violent discontents - and that they, in turn, create a reactionary group that decries multiculturalism - is unfortunate, but understandable. Even acceptable.

No - plotting to blow up planes is never acceptable. The fact that this occurs, however, hardly merits a denunciation of multiculturalism.

I've seen it everywhere today:

Diggs-Taylor was a CARTER APPOINTEE.

In light of THAT revelation, it's no wonder that she hates America.

Too funny!

Another new Bush talking-point/codeword is "Islamic Fascists."

Amanda at Pandagon has an excellent post looking at what might be behind his new terminology:

http://pandagon.net/2006/08/21/projection-2/

Pull my finger?

"How the other third lives..."

Oh, man, Tim. You kill me!

So damn funny. Love it.