I kind of wish everyone in the nation would watch this video.

Sorry; force of habit. When a spoiler candidate is about to siphon votes away from a major candidate during a potentially tough election, I reflexively type “Nader”.

Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr was officially nominated Sunday as the Libertarian candidate for president…. His candidacy has attracted more attention to the Libertarian Party, with some GOP observers watching to see whether Barr will draw votes away from the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, in the general election.

“We’re not in this race to make a point, though a very important point will be made,” Barr said.

Read on at CNN.

As Obama wraps up the nomination — because Hilary, everyone but you knows that he has wrapped up the nomination — Christopher Bird provides this detailed examination of VP possibilities.

Thanks to Chris for the link.

AngryRenter.com looks a bit like a digital ransom note, with irregular fonts, exclamation points and big red arrows — all emphasizing prudent renters’ outrage over a proposed government bailout for irresponsible homeowners.

“It seems like America’s renters may NEVER be able to afford a home,” AngryRenter.com laments. The Web site urges like-minded tenants to let Congress feel their fury by signing an online petition. “We are millions of renters standing up for our rights!”

Angry they may be, but the people behind AngryRenter.com are certainly not renters. Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It’s a fake grass-roots effort — what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign — that provides a window into the sleight-of-hand ways of Washington.

Read on at that bastion of liberal bashing of Republicans, the Wall Street Journal.

Chris Matthews lays the absolute smackdown on radio talk show host Kevin James, who was parroting Bush’s offensive parallel about Obama’s diplomacy being like appeasing the Nazis. Matthews calls James on his ignorance and does not let up. This is a beautiful, beautiful piece of television.

The whole thing’s pretty good, but the good part starts around the the 4:00 mark.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, D-Delaware, called President Bush’s comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists “bulls**t” and said if the president disagrees so strongly with the idea of talking to Iran then he needs to fire his secretaries of State and Defense, both of whom Biden said have pushed to sit down with the Iranians.

“This is bullshit. This is malarkey. This is outrageous…”

Read on at CNN.

The Hill asked the other 97 Senators what they’d do if asked to be the VP nominee.

The responses vary between serious and funny. My favorites:

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.)
“No, I can already preside over the Senate, and I do not enjoy spending a lot of time at ‘undisclosed locations.’ ”

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho)
“I would say ‘No, Hillary.’ ”

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)
“I plan to stick with my current job until I get the hang of it.”

Via Metafilter, enjoy this collection of ads from other countries using W.

Now that the Iraq War has gone on longer than WWII, don’t you think it’s time for a new GI bill?

Congressional Democrats are pushing what could become the most dramatic expansion of college aid for military veterans since World War II… Pitched by the Democrats is a plan that would essentially guarantee a full-ride scholarship to any in-state public university, along with a monthly housing stipend, for individuals who serve the military for at least three years.

The proposal would give veterans 15 years to use the benefit, instead of the current 10-year limit, and would set up a new government program that matches financial aid by more expensive private institutions.

W, of course, is expected to veto the measure.

Cindy McCain has now made it official, telling Ann Curry she will not release her tax returns. The Democratic National Committee has quite correctly pointed out that this is unacceptable, especially when you consider that McCain has relied on his wife’s money and corporate jet to help fund his campaign.

Suprisingly, conservative magazines have attacked Mrs. McCain on this issue in an unexpected show of intellectual honesty.

The National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford writes:

Trusts and income this large, even if only partly controlled by a potential future First Lady, matter. We’ve already seen how (she) effectively helped finance her husband’s campaign, at least in its bleaker moments.

But wait. There’s a catch.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe.

Read on.

Via Metafilter, enjoy this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism discussing The Daily Show in a journalistic context.

“My students tell me they read the news for facts, but they watch Jon Stewart for the truth,” Professor Steve Lacy of Michigan State University has observed. The Daily Show’s sophisticated and often journalistic use of video to puncture the spin of the political may also connect to a deeper function that journalists are expected to serve—speaking truth to power, or at least unveiling deviations from the truth.

Whatever the elements, this brief examination makes at least some conclusions possible. In its subject matter, The Daily Show is indeed journalistic. Its topic agenda is highly focused on the public square, on issues of significance, particularly those focused around Washington. Its agenda is not dissimilar, indeed, from other cable talk shows. The language is even more blunt, and its point often more direct. The Daily Show is no doubt entertainment, but it is entertainment, measurably, with a substantive point. It is, in its own way, another kind of No Spin Zone.

The Politics of Preschool. 5 minutes, but totally worth it.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal injects its own take on religion in politics.

Former senator Lincoln Chafee, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans that haven’t yet been rounded up and moved to the reservation in Maine, writes about the first year of W’s Presidency with fascinating candor.

When the meeting ended, I felt worse about him than when I arrived. I was shaken. I admire old-fashioned virtues, chief among them honesty. Even at this early date in his tenure, the president had demonstrated an undeniable capacity for mendacity. America took him at his word when he said that he was a uniter, not a divider; that our foreign policy would be humble; that he would address climate change by regulating carbon dioxide. In the first months of his administration he had already turned his back on these bedrock campaign pledges.

My visit with the new president did nothing to assuage my apprehensions. The man—and by that I mean the inner man, the essential man—seemed unequal to the awesome powers entrusted to him. I was worried about the damage he might do over the next few years, never mind in a second term, which seemed unthinkable at the time.

Read on in the Brown Alumni magazine.

A new poll suggests that President Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history… “No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

“Bush’s approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s,” Holland said. “The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952.”

…CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, “He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974.”

President Nixon’s disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 66 percent.

Read on at CNN.

http://randomactsofshark.blogspot.com/2008/01/barack-obama-vs-pirates-of-wichita.html

Long, but made entirely of pure, pure awesome.

[...]

We followed the Ronpaul’s trail for fifteen days, from Joplin to Springfield to Peoria, until we were down to our last drum of corn-whisky, and Abigail’s turbines were smoking hot. We passed the days with tales of the Beltway Lords, and their incessant warring. Barrister was our navigator, and kept the ship’s logs, and he knew every Fed-yarn there ever was. He sang of Lord Gore: how he gained the power to speak the language of beasts by killing the god of werewolves, and how he called the last seven living griffins to him, and harnessed them to a chariot, and flew to the moon. I have been assured that he lives their still, in a city of silver and marble, and that all that dwell there are immortal, but cursed never to know laughter or joy, and there is no music allowed but Air Supply. He sang of Romney Three-faced, the Great Salt Pope, who wields the spiked and golden miter of Moroni and has twelve thousand brides, all fashioned, through surgery and sorcery, to look like Jessica Alba. He sang of fey Kucinich, who loved the queen of Faerie so much that he ceded her the great redwoods of California in which to make her court, and went to dwell there with her, and put up a girdle around the forest so that no man who enters can ever leave. He sang of Dame Hillary, and how she summoned up Old Man Coyote, and tricked him into wearing a manacle on his paw, and refused to release him until he taught her the secret of Skinchanging. The trickster-god denied her until she killed all his seven and seventy mistresses, and cut off his tail, and starved him for forty seven years.

[...]