...voted AGAINST the Iraqi war resolution.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237

This is libertarian occupation. 'The army that occupies least occupies best.' As if.

History isn't going to berate us for invading Iraq, it's going to berate us for invading Iraq and not doing everything we could to secure the safety of the Iraqi citizens we supposedly 'liberated.' We will be remembered for caring more about the lives of Americans than the lives of Iraqis.

We are a cheap cowardly nation of irresponsible do nothing libertarians, and that applies to both the American right and left.

...a nincompoop ranting in his underpants? He's on radio, so he could be. And he's certainly a nincompoop.

It's a relevant point because IMO too many bloggers have taken Rush Limbaugh as their model. Look at the Daou report today, with it's utterly unfair ranting about Bush and Laura having a laugh on the end of the day on 9/11. That reminded me of when Rush Limbaugh was on tv and he showed the video of Clinton supposedly laughing at Ron Brown's funeral--over and over again. But people laugh on sad days--they need to.

As far as the commencement speech, I believe the point is that the public deserves better than online amateur news hour and isn't getting it.

Really most of the good news these days comes from not from bloggers but from overseas.

...that our soldiers are bent on protecting themselves rather on accomplishing their mission--the presumptive mission being to make Iraq safe, secure, and pro-US. Of course every atrocity makes this mission less likely to be accomplished.

However, the attitude of the troops is understandable, given that their own government seems to have no real interest in accomplishing the mission either, or in giving the troops the tools and manpower they need to do the job.

Our troops are suffering from magically optimistic thinking on the part of our leaders.

...has to put up facts, not smears or accusations.

The real problem is that we live in a 50/50 nation. National elections are so close that suspicion of fraud is inevitable. If the Democrats had won, you better believe the Republicans would be crying fraud, and probably a lot louder and with more tears.

What Democrats SHOULD be doing in this divided country is making the case for the Democratic party and for liberalism. Frustratingly, neither the activists nor the mainstream Dems seem to be at all interested in making this case: the activists want to indulge their paranoid fantasies regarding Bush and the mainstream Dems seem bent on repudiating liberalism itself.

...elections in the US are local and are carried out locally. They are NOT conducted from above by sinister forces.

There are thousands and thousands of election precincts in this country. Elections in those precincts are monitored by local citizens in local parties, usually Democrats and Republicans. For widespread conspiracy to occur, you not only have to not only have the connivence of local Republicans, but also that of local Democrats. You are now talking about 100's of thousands of people involved in a deep conspiracy, many of them simply ordinary citizens who've volunteered their time for local democracy.

The problem is that we have so thoroughly demonized politics and democracy itself in this country that many of us are no longer able to trust our fellow citizens. (And this is true of both Democrats and Republicans.) We are so isolated and ignorant of local affairs (God knows that we can't trust our local tv news stations to actually cover our local news) that many of us are able to imagine all sorts of dire and stupid conspiracies that we would never dream of if we had any actual knowledge of the actual local people who run our elections.

In this country, election fraud has historically been committed in counties that were overwhelmingly for one party or the other: election fraud apparently did occur in heavily Democratic Chicago in 1960, but fraud also apparently occurred in majority Republican counties in rural Illinois as well. THAT'S why Nixon didn't contest the vote in 1960--the fraud pretty much balanced out.

As I stated earlier, we don't live in one party nation; we live in a divided nation, a 50/50 nation. Elections are hotly contested in places like Ohio and Florida; if real fraud occurred, it would be damn difficult to get away with it.

The real problem is that we simply don't have an accurate notion of how our own country and our own democracy works.

...the burden of proof is on showing that this was a legal election - not that it was stolen

Well, say goodbye to the Enlightenment. Get ready to prove that you're not a witch by promptly drowning when you get tossed in the water, because, as we all know, only witches can float.

Have people gone absolutely nuts? If the election in Ohio needs to prove it was legal, then every election ever held anywhere also needs to prove it was legal. But this is as impossible as proving you're not a witch, or the killer of Nicole Simpson. No election can possibly prove it was 'legal.' Absent proof or solid evidence of fraud, we can only assume they were legal.

Requiring elections to be absolutely perfect and absolutely undisputed can only lead to the destruction of democracy itself.