Eight years ago, then Governor George W. Bush revealingly joked about his backers at the 2000 Al Smith Dinner.  "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores," Bush said, adding, "Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."  With his own quip Saturday night that "$5 million" is his definition of "rich," John McCain made no mistake that he is Bush's natural heir.

As always, click on all pictures for the larger version.  And you can see the rest at my Flickr page

Crossposted at New Mexico FBIHOP

Saturday, I followed Tom Udall around the city, starting up in the Northeast Heights at Page One, the largest independent bookstore in the state.

Page One Town Hall

The event at Page One was a town hall meeting, where about 100 people showed up to hear Udall give a short speech and ask the Congressman questions.

Udall began the speech by telling about his accomplishments both as the Attorney General and as a Congressman.  He mentioned he voted against the war in Iraq and said, "We should have stayed in Afghanistan; we should have captured Osama bin Laden."

As we continue to celebrate the Olympics with profound pride and patriotism , I wanted to share some disheartening rankings that reflect our country's stark decline relative to the rest of the world. I list these fully knowing this community's cognizance of such issues, but sometimes numbers yield a haunting, and thus effective, reminder.  For anyone truly proud to be American, these numbers should anger, motivate, and prompt action.  

32nd - World rank of U.S. infant mortality rate.

First - CEO to Worker pay ratio (531:1) (Second place is Brazil at 57:1)

9th - Adult Literacy Scale (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)

12th -  student reading ability (Source: OECD)

37th - U.S. rank on the Healthcare Quality Index (World Health Organization)

I've gotten tired of explaining why supply-side economics -- i.e., voodoo economics -- don't actually work. So I've decided to write up a quick-and-dirty version that I can just link to as necessary. This is not meant to be a definitive statement on the subject. It's not even an air-tight argument of the principles being espoused. It's just me pointing at some pretty fundamental absurdities in voodoo economics and saying, "Hey! Look! Have you even thought about this? It doesn't make any sense!"

John McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time last year.

That's no small feet.

But when McCain says that he refuses to let soldiers return from Iraq until he "wins with honor and victory," it's not Bush I'm thinking of, but McCain's old hero, Richard Nixon.

In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that a doctor is not permitted to discriminate against gay patients on religious grounds. Moreover, the court noted that the doctor was selectively refusing to perform the same procedure on a gay patient that the doctor had performed without incident on heterosexuals.

The court sided with the plaintiff on the grounds that California state law strictly prohibits discrimination on the basis of one's sexual orientation. In doing so, the court rejected a claim by the physician that treating a gay woman would be against her "Christian" beliefs.

Hello all, I'm a citizen of New Orleans and blog almost purely about local politics and recovery issues at We Could Be Famous. I wrote this earlier today on my blog after the release of the 10 year facilities master plan that will guide the future of New Orleans public schools. Because my blog tends to be written for a local audience, I've added an extra piece at the end for Kos readers.

Essentially, the schools master plan punishes the communities most in need of social services and municipal investment by rewarding school facilities primarily to communities that already have rebuilt their assets. Please read on.

McCain has flopped from opposing  wind energy to supporting wind energy. Has McCain really flipped or has he only embraced a pseudo flop to publicly pander for renewable energy votes while he more quietly takes actions to block wind energy progress? McCain can be very clear and specific when talking about nuclear energy, or coal, or off-shore oil drilling, yet he can not even muster up one "yes" vote out of 8 chances on renewable energy tax credits legislation.  His actions are consistent with blocking wind energy, which is a competitor for oil industry subsidies and may transform oil barons into barren businesses no longer needed.  

Hope you don't mind a break from all this VP talk.

A few weeks ago I got an email from my college's financial aid office.

Dear Student

Your lender is no longer processing loans for us so you need to complete a new promissory note.  Please contact the Financial Aid Office for help with this.

I didn't think much of it, other than it was really inconvenient, and I hoped that it wouldn't delay my aid.  So, the next day I called the financial aid office and got the instructions for completing a new master promissory note.  It was when I was finishing up my promissory note that I realized something was hinky.

This is the fifth and final segment in a series that compares three alternatives in the "ethical coffee" market:  fair trade, direct trade, and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. practices.  Part one in the series explains how conditions in the traditional coffee market initially gave rise to fair trade coffee.  Part two explains what fair trade means.  Part three explains what direct trade coffee is.  Part four explains Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. practices.  The latter three articles also address criticisms of each of these types of "ethical coffee."  What follows below is a set of conclusions which, while intended to be understandable if read in isolation, does rely on the preceding articles for supporting argument and evidence.

Time for an update on McCain's growing problem as a serial exaggerator and liar, a facet of this campaign that has gone almost uncovered by the traditional media.  Today, just a half-hour ago, we had the very first major media mention of his
"cross in the sand" story being potentially copied from a story attributed to Alexander Solzhenitstyn.  Jack Cafferty read a letter on the air mentioning this (transcript and/or YouTube).  Cafferty didn't editorialize about it but just read the allegation from one of his emailers.  The rest of the program continued as if this wasn't uttered by anyone, but it's starting to get out there.  A religion blogger for the Dallas Morning News brought it up but tried to dismiss it:

A Democratic Tsunami is approaching the nation, due to hit polling places with a crash of confusion, overcrowding, long lines, excitement, and potential disorganization at approximately 6:00 a.m. on November 4th.

2008 Democratic primary races across the country were shattering previous records to the tune of 500 or more percent above the turnout of the last presidential election.  It's hardly news, however, that we're going to see a lot of people at the polls this year of all political and religious beliefs, all ages, and all ancestries.

What is news is that with such a landslide coming in to the polls, the GOP has few tactics left available to them that will allow them to even come close to winning this year, or that will even allow them to staunch the bleeding by furiously trying to save house and senate seats in key districts.  They will do this through Voter Intimidation, "Irregularities", and Tampering.

The good news, of course, is that you can go a long way towards preventing many of these violations from ever occurring.

This is the first in a continuing series of posts on the disaster that is our food safety system in the United States.

A substantial majority of consumers assume that the USDA tests all kinds of the meat products it inspects, and does not allow E. coli O157:H7 to be present on any them.  That assumption is wrong.  Since January 11, 1999, it has been USDA policy to only test for this deadly pathogen in ground beef and those raw materials headed to another USDA-inspected grinding operation.  This conveniently leaves out the majority of the meat introduced into commerce each month.  This so-called "gray area" was the subject of a recent article in The Washington Post, which began:

It can be legal to sell steaks and roasts that carry a potentially deadly strain of E. coli. But it is not legal to sell that meat if it is going to be used to make ground beef. As meat makes its way from packer to distributor to retailer, those distinctions can get lost, as Whole Foods found out in last week's recall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

What follows is my commentary on this sad and deadly state of affairs.

I awoke this past Saturday morning at the Asheville Friends Meeting House, and then went upstairs to wake up the dozen or so college students who had spent the night there.  They were in town for a regional meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, and were busy planning their trip up to St. Paul to protest the Republican Convention.  I then went to pick up Adrianne and her daughter Willa – we had a big day planned for Rusul and her dad.

More below.

The Washington Post ran an article today discussing the passing of a 2004 ballot initiative in Colorado requiring that energy companies produce 10% of their electricity from renewable sources.  The largest utility in the state, Xcel Energy, fought the initiative tooth and nail as you might expect, but they lost.  Then, when they turned around and actually got to work on meeting the goal, they met it 8 years ahead of schedule and later agreed to double the goal.  Musings below the fold on the incredible power of government policy to change incentives for energy producers for the better, and lessons the rest of the nation can take from this.

Recently, I wrote a diary on a revealing report by the Federal Trade Commission about how food companies are targeting kids with all kinds of junk food marketing, to the tune of $1.6 billion annually. I praised the FTC for writing such a damning indictment of how the likes of McDonald's and Kraft Foods take advantage of children's vulnerabilities, often going behind parents' backs, for example, in schools. But the detailed description of how kids are marketed to is where my praise for the agency ends.

Like many other government reports, it's like one staff person (among the rank and file) wrote the description of the problem, while another (more politically accountable) wrote the recommendations. Trouble is the two don't go together. What’s the point of having a government agency conduct a damning investigation that results in no meaningful recommendations for regulatory action?

So there have been about 50 Billion Veepstakes Diaries lately. Even I have written one or two. Most of these diaries focus on who the author wants to be Obama's VP. What the latest rumors are on Obama's VP. Who is and isn't speaking on what nights of the Democratic National Convention and things of that nature. But what about that desolate land on the other end of the political spectrum? That dark place known as Republican land? Not a whole lot of attention has been paid to McCain's prospective VP choice.

Furthermore there has been virtually no discussion on who WE should be rooting for when it comes to McCain's VP selection. Who has the potential to turn off the most voters, who exposes a weakness in McCain or forces him to change positions? Lets find out together. Below the fold we'll take a look at who could be one (very old and decrepit) heart beat away from the Presidency come 2009.

Given the McCain "Cross in the Sand" story and his appearance in two of these films, you should make an effort to see these and pass them on to fence sitting friends who need an additional wake up call

I stopped by the local DVD rental house on Thursday and given the dearth of decent possibilities I found myself in the "special section" where people rarely go.

I found a goldmine of well crafted 90 minute anti-Republican commercials that filled my past two days with rage and crushing depression. These are "must see" films that strike hard at Republican Moral Values.