Standing strong for the Liberal Left

Dennis Kucinich is an odd little duck — he would be a dear friend of mine if he was “just folks” and lived on my block; we share a vision and I have no doubt he could speak “airy faerie” with aplomb.

The Righty wingnuts at FAUX News say he’s a Lefty wingnut … interesting how our wingnuts come from the heart, stump for the little guy and urge reform while theirs slide on the razors edge of hypocrisy and hate-speech and laugh all the way to the bank. I think that lack of character was illustrated by O’Reilly’s fit of pique in the Obama camp last week, and Sean Hannity’s close encounter with his own, being chased down the street by enraged Ron Paul supporters.

Dennis is the man most embraced by the Left — and John Edwards aligns most closely with his goals. Yet we are told, repeatedly, that we are not close enough, nationally, to their liberal vision to make it real. Maybe if “they” stopped talking for awhile, we could make up our OWN minds!

Here are some reads on Dennis, doing his Dennis-thing, bless him [his attempt to impeach Cheney is gathering some speed, by the way, but probably too slowly to take Uncle Dick down while he's in office.] At the bottom, a Washington Post article splits out the Blue politics realistically, and you’ll find a link to my weekly piece, “Dream Walking.”

By way of disclaimer, if some of this rubs you the wrong way, please don’t kill the messenger — I never promised you I’d be politically correct or give you less than my honest opinion, and right now the Flashing Yellow light in my solar plexus is telling me to slow down and smell the accommodation to stale, time-worn politics.

Jude

Viggo Mortensen on Kucinich: “The Man Knows What Needs to be Done” [VIDEO]
The charismatic movie star makes a passionate and convincing argument in support of Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign.
Adam Howard, AlterNet
January 10, 2008

In this video, actor Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings trilogy, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) gives a stirring interview where he talks about why he believes Dennis Kucinich is the “best presidential candidate running for president that [he's] seen in his lifetime.” For him, his faith in politics has been in an ongoing downward spiral ever since Ford pardoned Nixon and is his estimation there have been the same corrupt characters transferring power back and forth ever since. Check out the video to your right for more.

Kucinich Requests Recount of New Hampshire Ballots
“This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process,” says Kucinich.
Manila Ryce, The Largest Minority via Alternet
January 11, 2008

Hillary has not only taken policy advice from the Neocons, but advice on how to “win” elections as well. Exit polls are never wrong, yet they predicted that Gore would win Florida in 2000, that Kerry would win Ohio in 2004, and that Obama would win New Hampshire last week. What’s the variable that ties all of these anomalies together? Diebold.

Only 20% of New Hampshire’s primary ballots were counted by hand. The other 80% were counted exclusively by Diebold machines. Obama secured his predicted lead on the hand-counted ballots, but Diebold-counted ballots ended up giving the lead to Hillary. Stalin once said, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Or was it John Kerry who said that after he conceded the 2004 election? Well whoever said it, it’s Kucinich who has had the courage above his slighted contenders to request that the New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner recount Tuesday’s election.

“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery - not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”

Also, the reports, allegations, and rumors regarding possible vote-count irregularities have been further fueled by the stunning disparities between various “independent” pre-election polls and the actual election results,” Kucinich wrote. “The integrity, credibility, and value of independent polling are separate issues, but they appear to be relevant in the context of New Hampshire’s votes.”

He added, “Ever since the 2000 election - and even before - the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”

Kucinich, who drew about 1.4% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, wrote, “This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.” No other Democratic candidate, he noted, has stepped forward to question or pursue the claims being made.

“New Hampshire is in the unique position to address - and, if so determined, rectify - these issues before they escalate into a massive, nationwide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation,” Kucinich wrote in his letter.

“Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the Presidential nominating process,” said Kucinich, who is campaigning in Michigan this week in advance of next Tuesday’s Presidential primary in that state.

You can contact New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner at (603)-271-3242 or at Elections@sos.state.nh.us. Every transfer of these ballots in the chain of custody from person to person must also be documented and proven that nobody else could have accessed them.

It’s clear from Disney’s lock out of Kucinich from the previous debates that corporations have too much control over our electoral process. They have the power to manipulate everything we see and know about this world, and use that power frequently to their advantage. Government is supposed to check private power, but when the so-called top-tier candidates are owned by this Mickey Mouse operation, there is no accountability. Since they’ve failed, it’s up to you and me. Kucinich can’t do it alone. ABC and Diebold would never have robbed us in broad daylight if they didn’t think they could get away with it. They’ve crushed democracy in Florida, Ohio, and now New Hampshire. Don’t let your state be next. Demand a recount.

Kucinich undaunted by fifth-place showing
JASON CLAFFEY, Fosters
Thursday, January 10, 2008

DOVER — Dennis Kucinich’s fifth-place showing in Tuesday’s primary won’t mean much to his presidential bid, as he vowed to continue campaigning across the country for the Democratic nomination despite capturing a low percentage of the New Hampshire vote.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, the Ohio U.S. congressman received just 1.4 percent of the vote. Locally, he received single-digit vote totals in 12 communities, with lows in New Castle (1 vote) and Newington (2). He received highs in Portsmouth (125) and Dover (170), but still finished fifth in both cities. He also finished fifth in Durham, where he and his wife, Elizabeth, made multiple campaign stops at the University of New Hampshire.

The low numbers didn’t seem to faze him, as he scheduled a Monday appearance at the University of Michigan in preparation for that state’s primary the following day.

During a televised primary rally Tuesday night at Jillian’s in Manchester, Kucinich said he would continue to focus on his policies, including instituting a universal, single-payer health-care system and canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Some of Kucinich’s other proposals, such as impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney for “leading the country into an illegal war with Iraq” and creating a Department of Peace to replace the Department of Defense, have sometimes been viewed as controversial.

And as he has never been a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, according to state and national polls over the last few months, gaining attention for issues such as those may be all Kucinich can hope for the rest of the 2008 campaign.

That and helping to reform his own party.

During an editorial board meeting with Foster’s last week, Kucinich said:

“I’m running (from) inside the Democratic party to challenge the party. I haven’t been someone who on the campaign trail has railed about Republicans because the fact of the matter is, I see the flaws within my party and want to make it effective in the two-party system, and it hasn’t been.”

Kucinich then inferred that the views of surprise primary winner Hillary Clinton and second-place finisher Barack Obama are too similar.

In the middle of the meeting, Kucinich, who has called himself a “long-shot” candidate, was asked: “Your (polling) numbers are in the single digits … are you a serious candidate for president? Or are you a serious messenger for the direction in which the country should be going?”

“I’m a serious candidate for president because I’m a serious messenger,” Kucinich responded.

As of Wednesday, his stance hasn’t seemed to change.

An Old Democratic Fault Line
Harold Meyerson, WaPo
Thursday, January 10, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. — All 50 states hold elections, but only New Hampshire raises the dead. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, like Bill before her, have now been saved from political extinction by Granite State voters, who have managed in the process to set up a protracted contest for the Democratic presidential nod. (The Republicans were never going to avoid one.)

The battle in the Democratic Party features divisions that the world’s oldest political party has never before experienced, just as it has never before seen candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The gender gap, up to now a phenomenon that distinguished one party’s supporters from the other’s, has become a phenomenon that distinguishes one Democrat’s supporters from another’s.

But beneath the profound novelties of the Democratic race lurk the same rifts that have characterized the party’s presidential contests for 40 years. Breaking down Tuesday’s vote, the old divisions of class, and the sometime divisions of age, are plain to see. Like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore before her, Clinton is winning downscale and older voters, and the support of party regulars. Like Eugene McCarthy, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley before him, Obama has the backing of more upscale and younger voters, and independents.

Obama carried the college towns. Clinton swamped him in working-class Manchester. Among voters who told the exit pollsters that they were getting ahead economically, Obama won 48 percent support and Clinton just 31 percent. But among voters who said they were falling behind economically — and there were twice as many of those as the “getting aheads” — Clinton led 43 percent to 33 percent. She led Obama among voters from union households, and she led among voters who said the economy was the most important issue — which a plurality did.

Over the past week, Clinton showed a keen eye (not just a damp one) for the economically anxious. In Saturday’s debate, she was the only candidate to bring up the sharply rising unemployment figures, and in one campaign stop after another, she waded into the weeds of proposals that would generate good jobs.

Obama spoke brilliantly of changing history, Clinton prosaically but empathetically of providing employment. There was nothing prosaic, however, about her victory.

But it doesn’t follow that because Humphrey, Mondale and Gore all won the nomination, Clinton should be favored, too. Obama, for one thing, is no McCarthy, Hart or Bradley. His ability to command African American support is obviously vastly greater than theirs. (Running against Mondale — and Jesse Jackson — in the 1984 Alabama primary, Hart actually won 0 percent of the black vote.)

Obama’s ability to inspire — and to pull young voters to the polls — exceeds that of his upscale-vote predecessors; it exceeds anything American politics has seen in a long time.

Moreover, Obama’s appeal should be able to cross barriers of class as it has barriers of race. He was, after all, a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side and has longtime fervent admirers among Illinois union leaders and activists. His election-night concession speech in New Hampshire came complete with references to South Carolina textile workers and Las Vegas hotel dishwashers, and with an English-language version of the old United Farm Workers battle cry: “Yes, we can” (” Si, se puede”). With each passing day, Obama incorporates more of John Edwards’s attack on corporate power into his stump speech. (As does Clinton, who went after pharmaceutical and oil companies in her own election night speech.) In short, Obama clearly intends to contest Clinton for at least some of her working-class base.

(Obama also has an important edge, not of his own making, if the election comes down to California on Feb. 5. In California, it’s up to the state parties to decide whether independents can vote in their primaries, and while the Democrats invited the independents in, the hard-right purists who control the state GOP locked them out. Advantage Obama, to the detriment of both Clinton and McCain.)

Despite their divisions of age and class, the Democrats hardly seem poised to reenact the catastrophic rifts of 1968 and 1972, when the Gene McCarthy and George McGovern kids and the Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson regulars actively hated each other. Then, the Vietnam War and a host of social issues divided the two camps; today it’s hard to find an issue on which Obama’s and Clinton’s supporters disagree.

But electoral politics is a zero-sum game; a new establishment threatens to supplant an old one. Hopes (for Clinton’s backers no less than Obama’s) have been raised and, for one camp or the other, will be dashed. The Democrats won’t fracture, but some bitterness will surely come.

Dream Walking
Judith Gayle, Political Waves
1/11/08

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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