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Wonderful picture of our next First Couple:

Picture from Ebony's 10 hottest couple issue, via Daily Kos.

In 2004 and 2006, I supported Leonard Boswell, Congressman from Iowa's third Congressional district. Boswell has been heavily targeted by the Republican party and tends to squeak by to victory. His age and health were issues in 2006. I supported him through it all.

This year I am supporting a primary challenger to Boswell with some reluctance. Bottom line is I am tired of having to defend the district against increasingly aggressive Republican challenges just waiting for Boswell to retire. The time for him to retire is now and there is an excellent alternative.

I posted this awesome video when we were in the old server at the evil web hosting company that failed us miserably for the past 6 months. Yet in the move, we lost the last two entries to the site.

So let me repost this video. It's just too good.

H/T, once again, to Elephant Journal.

There's an ad out there that is pissing off Colorado Republicans, even though all it does is tell the truth. The ad calls attention to Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer's connections to convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his clients who are sweatshop owners on the Northern Mariana Islands. The U.S. government found that women employees were mistreated and abused. But Schaffer defended the sweatshops and took thousands in campaign donation from their owners. The video shows these connections:

I am always amazed at how furious Republicans become when people try to hold them accountable for their corruption. Abramoff was a major part of the Republican Party machine across the nation. Face facts! The Republican Party has to purge itself of these corrupt bastards if they don't want to be constantly attacked for corruption.

Hillary Clinton won in Indiana by by 1.39%. In North Carolina though, Obama trounced her by a 14% margin.

As I called it during my live twitter stream, HRC went from a double digit lead to 1-2% win. She squeaked it and it looks like the TV pundits finally have caught on to the fact that Ms. Clinton would have to get the superdelegates to decide the election in her favor.

I'll update later with the highlights of the night. Until then, good night!

I have had some contact with Kalyn Free since I support and blog about her organization, Indigenous Democratic Network (INDN List). INDN is an excellent organization that has been organizing Native Americans on the grassroots level.

Kalyn Free is also a Superdelegate and has just endorsed Obama. This, on top of the Native American Times endorsement, may be showing robust support for Obama among Native Americans. Endorsement statement below:

Statement from Kalyn Free:

DNC Superdelegate, INDN's List Founder and
USW (United Steelworkers) Associate Member Kalyn Free
Endorses Senator Barack Obama for U.S. President

CHICAGO, IL -- Kalyn Free, an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee, today announced that she supports Illinois Senator Barack Obama for the party's presidential nomination. As a DNC member, Free will serve as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention. Free is also founder and President of INDN's List, an organization dedicated to recruiting and training American Indian candidates.

This brings the total number of superdelegates to endorse Barack Obama to 258. Senator Obama is 276 delegates away from securing the Democratic nomination.

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

In Night Wiesel describes in considerable detail the experience of the freight car taking him to the Auschwitz. Everything about the experience was dehumanizing, mile by mile stripping away the humanity of the Jews not only in the eyes of the German guards, but even in the eyes of the Jews themselves. In many ways Dan Pagis’ poem is rehumanizing those who went through the experience, by framing it in terms of a Biblical incident that supposedly frames human origins. When I read the description of the freight cars in Night I kept returning to this poem, contrasting these two portrayals of the same experience in my mind. Both are born of the same experience but in many ways they are mirror images: the dehumanizing, “humans as freight” experience, and the experience that encompasses all of humanity, thus rehumanlizing those who experienced those freight cars. They are not contradictory versions, but are two sides of the exact same experience: the narrow one of what the experience meant right at the time to those directly involved, and the expansion of that highly personal experience to put it into the context of human nature and human history in general. What we do to each other now replays the family tragedy of the Biblical myth.

LAST WEEK we watched a young man (whom one person wrote me and called "arrogant") engage the democratic process as he questioned Hillary Clinton during her Town Rally at the South Eugene High School (April 4, 2008). The bold student wanted to know if when all was said and done the Senator was more interested in her own candidacy than preserving or encouraging the viability of the Democratic Party's eventual as-of-yet-unselected nominee. In Part 4, this conclusion to our four part series, she responds.

(Please excuse the audio buzz that can be heard for aprx. the first 50 seconds.)

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

The latest video by Oregon's Official MTV Choose or Lose Street Team 08 Citizen Journalist, Nezua.

Clicking the picture above will take you to the video page.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican and OpEdNews.

This man is running for Congress and he hangs out with Nazis:

From CBS News:

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in northern Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

The event Zirkle attended was in celebration of Hitler's birthday. These people are real Nazis, losers who still believe in Hitler's ideology more than 60 years after Hitler got his ass kicked.

Of course this is no surprise coming from a Republican who is pro-segregation.

Republicans are not Nazis. But the ties between Republicans and white supremicists and their willingness to accept intolerance is disgusting to me. Also in Indiana, Republican Speaker of the Indiana House Brian Bosma told a group of Jews they didn't matter because only 2% of the population is Jewish. Ann Coulter has attacked Judaism and Islam. Racism is a frequently used and well-documented tactic by the Republican Party in electoral politics. A Republican in Montana has been openly racist towards a Native American politician. Right-wingers in Delaware have even carried out a genuine pogrom against a Jewish and a Muslim family. Prominent Republicans even blame Jewish conspiracies for their problems. Anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance are rampant in the Republican Party these days.

It is now five years since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. Five years since Bush gloated that we had won...and yet almost every day brings more casualties. We are STILL mired in Iraq, still have no exit strategy. And Osama bin Laden, who has never set foot in Iraq, remains free and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization is stronger than ever.

Bush has failed.

And John McCain has vowed to continue Bush's Iraq Quagmire for as long as 100 years. Yes...he said he would be fine with continuing this failure for 100 years. Let's look at McCain's views of Bush's failed Iraq Quagmire: (thanks to MoveOn.org)

* John McCain recently said, "No one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have."1 He was Bush's strongest ally in the march to war in Iraq. McCain consistently repeated the same misjudgments made by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and President Bush. More than 4,000 American troops have lost their lives because of these misjudgments.2
* McCain says we could be in Iraq for 100 years, and has consistently opposed any plan to withdraw troops from Iraq.3 He'd rather dump billions more in Iraq than invest it in our economy back home.