Take the Pledge

Take the Pledge:

The Supreme Court's flawed decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts to influence election outcomes endangers our democracy and threatens to drown out the voices of individual citizens. I pledge to protect America from unlimited corporate spending in our elections by supporting a Constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision giving corporations the same First Amendment rights as people.

Sponsored by People for the American Way and Pubic Citizen.

We need to generate and sustain momentum. This is a multi-generational struggle.

• Contact the US Senate
• Contact the House of Representatives

SOS: Campaign to Hammer Bill O'Reilly

Woody, of Walled-in Pond Blog, has a special way with words presented in their full glory below. BUT, searing words aside, the bottom line is a campaign to get Bill O'Reilly to stop stalking and harassing his critics. The campaign is contacting O'Reilly's advertisers, and apparently, UPS has had enough of Toxic Bill.

You can TAKE ACTION HERE at the "Stop Supporting the O'Reilley Harrasment Machine" campaign, which Woody urges us to call "SOS" Stop O'Reilly's Shit (or Stalking depending on the company).

Read about it all only as Woody can say it:

Rightwing Arch-fucktard, serial sexual harrasser, and vicious, villainous, lying sack of shit Bill O'Reilly has a trick. (Well, according to Andrea Mackris, he has a couple of them, but only one is relevant here.)

When somebody pisses him off--say, they contradict one of his many egregious lies, or otherwise hold him up for the ridicule he so richly deserves--he dispatches a team of flying-monkey trolls, led by particularly nasty, feculent bit of work, the baby-faced, fascist fuckwit Jesse Watters, to ambush his accusers, trying to embarrass them on tape, which O'Reilley will then use on his tv show to exact revenge for the other's having had the temertity to fuck with Big Bill-o. It has happened AS MANY AS 40 DIFFERENT times.

It occurred most recently when Falaffel Bill dispateched his team of feculent orcs to trail and ambush a blogger named Amy Terkel. She'd criticized O'Reilley for hypocrisy (the easiest charge in the world to level and prove against that bill-ious duckwhistle) in seeming to support some sort of post-rape intervention while simultaneously seeming to hold women responsible for rapes if they were seeming to "ask for it." THE DETAILS ARE HERE. In short:

On Saturday, March 21, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly sent one of his producers to stalk, harass, and ambush ThinkProgress.org’s managing editor Amanda Terkel. Upset over a ThinkProgress report that noted O’Reilly’s insensitivity to rape, O’Reilly sent two men to track Amanda in a car for two hours, and then confronted her with hostile questions while she was on vacation.

The good folks at ThinkProgress decided upon a strategy to reply, by contacting Bill O'Loofa's advertizers.

They didn't complain about the toxic, rampant racism of BO's usual discourses. They didn't complain about his easily provable lying. They didn't mention his fascistic, simple-minded, ideological pur-blindness. No. They simply asked if the advertizers were comfortable supporting someone who used his public persona to stalk and attack his opponents. This is how Keith Olberman phrased it:

ThinkProgress.org contacted the sponsors of O’Reilly’s TV program, asking — not if they support his right-wing stances, his hypocrisy, his racism, his misogyny, his fact-optional approach — but if they could stomach him time after time stalking people who had dared to criticize him in print or online. And tonight, UPS has said enough.

All this is preface to what, in the scope of the whole enterprise, is really nothing so much as a quibble: the name that TP assigned to their campaign. They called it "Stop Supporting The O’Reilly Harassment Machine." But it strikes me as overly recondite and wordy, so I am suggesting an alternative title: the simple, widely used, S O S: Stop O'Reilley's Shit (or Stalking, if you're telling your mom).

Similar campaigns have been waged semi-successfully against such other Rightard bags or reeking shit as Michael ("Savage") Weiner in the past. Some tens of thousands of bloggers and other citizens have joined the campaign, and I encourage my reader, devoted as s/he is, to join the campaign, too, whatever they call it, and request sponsors of Bill-o's toxic dump to reconsider their support for this clearly psychopathic, probably dangerous, shitwhistling fucknozzle.

Paris Hilton Rebuts John McCain in YouTube "Campaign Add"

Surprizingly good delivery from Paris (only about 30 Sec.) The remainder is Kieth Olbermann and clips that make McCain look like.... John McCain.

Gambling on Oil Prices

Today the Wall Street Journal reports a campaign has begun to challenge oil speculators in the financial industry:

Strapped by rising fuel prices, the airline industry, gasoline retailers and an array of transportation interests are enlisting thousands of travelers to pressure Congress to reign in oil markets speculation -- a campaign that has triggered a lobbying war with the financial-services industry.

The article continues that, "The airline industry email to frequent flyers urges them to learn more on a campaign website, www.stopoilspeculationnow.com." In part, the e-mail says:

"Twenty years ago, 21% of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66%" of all oil futures contracts, the frequent flyer letter reads. "Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs."

The Bush administration, and Phil Gramm (photo with McCain above), are responsible, in part, due to their deregulation ideology, which promotes rampant speculation. See the July/Aug 2008 Issue of Mother Jones Magazine, on the Enron loophole: Forclosure Phil.

The financial industry counters the airline industry claims, saying, according to the Journal, that "speculation is less responsible for spiraling oil prices than is turmoil in supplier countries and the weakness of the dollar on world markets." If you believe the financial industry, we can also blame the Bush administration for the first factor, turmoil in supplier countries. Bush is also to blame for the second factor, a weak dollar, which is due in part to the US debt created by Bush.

Bottom Line: Bush administration policies have fed the increase in oil prices and gas prices at the pump. Call this a failure? No! Bush represents a small elite minority, not the vast unwashed masses. Unfortunately, the latter failed to figure this out soon enough, many voting for Bush, and against their own interests, in 2004 when the writing was on the wall.

Hopefully they won't make the same mistake in November 2008 by voting for John McCain, for whom Foreclosure Phil Gramm is a key economic adviser.

Sources:

Wall Street Journal, Airline Oil Lobbying Alarms Financial Firms, Elizabeth Williams, July 12, 2008.

Photo Credit: Mother Jones Magazine, Foreclosure Phil, July/August 2008 Issue.

McCain Was Already Dead

The establishment media has now figured it out; John McCain's campaign is dead. Big news!

Campaign Manager Terry Nelson has also resigned. He should have been let go as soon as he started, or better yet, never have been hired by McCain. As Media Matters reported, way back in December 2006:

The media largely ignored the hiring of Terry Nelson to serve as campaign manager for John McCain's presumed bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, and with few exceptions, those that did report on Nelson's hiring have largely overlooked Nelson's connections to various Republican scandals.

Hmm... what scandals could they have been?

Nelson was responsible for a television advertisement attacking Senate candidate Rep. Harold Ford Jr. that many criticized as racist.

Remember the scantily clad blond saying, whom Ford supposedly met at a Playboy party saying, "call me."?

Then, there was this one:

.... the indictments of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) on campaign finance-related charges alleged that Nelson was the conduit for money transferred through the Republican National Committee (RNC) between DeLay's political action committee and Republican Texas House of Representatives candidates.

Yes, that was a GOP operation, following DeLay's corrupt Congressional redistricting, that renders the US House of Representatives, and its actions, illegitimate 'til this day. Scary. An unraveling of civilized society.

Then there was Nelson's close association "the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal." James Tobin was convicted in the following:

During Nelson's tenure as RNC deputy chief of staff, one of his subordinates, RNC New Hampshire political director James Tobin, conspired with several GOP operatives to obstruct the Democrats' get-out-the-vote effort in the state by jamming the phone lines they used on Election Day, November 5, 2002.

And Nelson rubbed elbows with another dirty dealer:

Nelson's consulting firm, Crosslink Strategy Group, counts Chris LaCivita among its employees. While working for a separate Republican strategy firm in 2004, LaCivita was a paid consultant and media adviser to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In other words, it became clear that McCain was desperate when he hired this slimy character, Terry Nelwon, to run his campaign. Now the evidence is clear. McCain's campaign is dead.

Oh, yea. The fact that McCain hitched his wagon to Bush's war, careening off a cliff, didn't help either.

Update: March 4, 2008

After all of the other Republican candidates self destructed, or were exposed as wackos, John McClean is the only one left standing. Pathetic miracle.

Sources:

Who is McCain campaign manager Terry Nelson? And will the media tell us? Media Matters, December, 13 2006.

Senate Public Funding Bill S.936

The Senate has a "public financing bill" S.936, introduced March 20, 2007 by Richard Durbin (D-Ill) and Arlen Specter (R-PA).

Here's how it works in a nut-shell:

Step 1: Collect Seed Money
+ this is the "operating cost" money
+ Limited to $100 per doner

Step 2: Collect Qualifying Contributions
+ This is like a petition to show the candidate has support
+ Must be $5 each (not sure if the operating donations count toward this)
+ Need 2,000 contributions plus another 500 contributions from each congressional district.

Step 3: Follow Spending Limits
+ After candidates commit to and qualify for public funding, they cannot use private donations or their own money.

Step 4: Comply with Simple Rules

Step 5: Receive Enough Public Funding to Campaign
+ Senate candidates receive $750k plus $150k for each congressional district for the general election.
+ "Fair Fight" funds are provided if a privately funded candidate is highly funded.
+ Smaller amounts are provided for the primary election.

Remember: It's Voluntary
+ Because money has been defined as "free speech" by the US Supreme Court, public financing cannot be mandatory, unless we change the US Constitution.

Sources:

Public Citizen News, May/June 2007.