Hey you...

...yeah you.

You know who I'm talking to here. You need to calm down and quit crying.
I know you're all apprehensive and worried about the election. You think the Republicans are going to steal another one. You know what? YOU'RE WRONG. Dead wrong. You're just making shit up to worry about. People have had it with Bush and Bush McCain. They've had it with conservative misrule and greedy power mad priggish pseudo religious Republicans. The right kind of people, and by that I mean progressives, liberals, people of color, gays and lesbians, and clear thinking independents, and forward thinking Republicans are going to band together and we are going to elect our first ever black President. We're going to vote in such numbers that our votes can't be discounted or thrown out. We're voting early, by absentee ballot, by any means necessary. We're going to win. So please, I beg you to stop whining, to stop spreading discontent and negativity, and to do something positive to help us end the Republican reign of terror. Offer to drive the elderly to the polls on election day, call your friends, neighbors, and family and remind them to vote.

Seriously, you know I love you and most of the time we're on the same page on most things, but you've got to stop your fucking whining right this minute or I'll crush your head.
I am not kidding, I will crush that melon you call a head if you don't stop scaring people with your doomsday bullshit.

The correct choice

Here's why Obama's choice of Joe Biden was the right one, even though he was not my personal choice:

• My choice was Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. But if he had picked her then the Republican hate machine would have spewed out the "Holy shit, that damn dirty negro is defiling that white woman!" line of bullshit for the next few months.
• If he had picked someone to the left of himself then they would have kept harping on the "He's a socialist!" angle.
• If he had picked a black woman or black man it would have been political suicide. We are ready for one African American on the national ticket, not two.
• If he had picked Hillary then he would have had to deal with Hillary and Bill's baggage.
• The choice of Biden, a corporate Democrat who's an insider, sends a message to Wall Street and corporate America that things under an Obama presidency are going to be like they were under Bill Clinton's. And while I despise most everything about Wall Street, corporate America, and big business, a signal like this needed to be sent to calm fears about his "socialism."
• Biden also covers Obama's perceived "weakness" in foreign policy and defense.
• Biden's "advanced" age balances Obama's "youthfulness."
• Biden is the man who kept the most dangerous Republican Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, off the Supreme Court. That one fact alone should earn him the gratitude of all progressives everywhere.

As for all the bitching, pissing, and moaning from the various camps within the Democratic party about how bad a choice this is, I would like to remind you all that in the end this is a race that Obama wants to win, it's not some noble exercise in civics and race relations. Sen. Obama was not my first choice, but he turned out to be the best choice, just as Biden was not my first choice to be his veep but he has turned out to be his best choice.

So now it's time to head to the convention and to make history and then take back the White House. And it's time for all true Democrats to get in line and work to get our candidates elected. It's time to stop whining, to grow up and smell the coffee, and to get the Obama/Biden ticket elected in November. But if you're one of those bitter people who are clinging to the wreckage of the Hillary campaign and who plan on voting for McCain just so you can show us all a thing or two about a thing or two, then to you I say, take your Bush McCain vote and your PUMA merchandise and shove them up your you know where.

Speaking of the convention, here's a photo of my young friend Cameron, that's him on the left, holding a cool T shirt out in Denver. He and his brother Quinn are out in the Denver area with their parents for a few days, they're taking in an outsider art exhibition that focuses on art about Obama and his impact on America.

And yes ladies, Cameron is "available."

Recount? What Recount?

We watched the HBO movie Recount tonight. The film tells the story of the fight to decide the Presidential election in 2000 in Florida. It's a gripping account of how the Republicans won Florida and how they then did everything in their power to ram rod the suspicious results through so that Bush Jr. could be made President.
Kevin Spacey did not chew as much scenery in this film as I thought he would and he deserves mucho credit for turning in a mostly restrained performance. In the case of this performance Spacey must have been reminded by director Jay Roach that less is more.

The rest of the cast turned in great performances as well, highlights among them were those turned in by Ed Begley Jr and Laura Dern. Republicans and her admirers will decry Dern's performance but she managed to make the dragon lady Kathryn Harris seem human, flawed and vain as the day is long, but human nonetheless.

What struck me about this film was how in the aftermath, the last eight years in fact, the Republican party, led by Bush and his lackey Karl Rove, has cried about "voter fraud" while it was them and their party that has perpetrated voter fraud by doing their damnedest to suppress the votes of blacks, Hispanics, and anyone else who traditionally votes for Democratic party candidates. They have engaged in purges of the voter rolls, in disqualifying absentee votes based on the thickness of the ballots, and a myriad of other underhanded and deceitful methods of denying legitimate voters their rights. When they say voter fraud what they mean is they want to make sure voters are defrauded out of their right to vote, especially if they are black and Hispanic.

The other thing that struck me, and I didn't realize it until Sparky pointed it out, was that there was no actual recount of all the votes in Florida. Some counties did machine recounts, that's letting machines recount the ballots, some only rechecked the totals on their voting machines, and we all remember the hand recounts of the ballots in a few counties that had hanging or dimpled chads. At no time was there a recount by all the counties in Florida where all the counties followed the same rules.

And to make matters even worse were the facts that Bush's brother was the Governor of the state in question and the person whose job it was to certify the results and declare a winner, Kathryn Harris, had a top position on Bush's Florida campaign. No conflict of interest there right? Right? "Yeah, right," he said sarcastically.

It's critical that we don't let something like this happen again in our country. So I suggest you help in getting as many people registered to vote as possible and that Democrats all over this country unite behind the person with the most delegates, Sen. Obama, and we all work to make him our next President. Those to Democrats who support the other candidate who say you'll vote for McCain if your woman is not nominated, I say you are traitors to the party of the people, to the party of JFK, RFK, LBJ, and FDR and you should go on and join the Quisling vipers like Joe Liberman, Zell Miller, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell and become Republicans in name to go with your Republican voting.