Last weekend, I decided to make a video blog post explaining why people should support John Edwards for president.  Unfortunately, the full moon came up and this caused some technical difficulties.  But I did the video anyway, and put in subtitles to make up for the fact that I could only bark and growl:

I just realized the other day that I can't remember a single one of the Kerry campaign's 2004 ads.  I guess I remember a few visuals (one of the ads involved a big bale of hay) but even then I can't remember what the ads were about.  

By comparison, 527 ads tend towards the unforgettable.  Consider the classic VoteVets ad where the guy pulls out an AK-47, shoots two dummies, reveals the bulletholes in the stomach of the dummy that wasn't wearing body armor, and tells you that George Allen voted against armoring the troops.  You remember the feeling in your stomach after you saw that.  

Do you want this spring and summer to be all about 527s kicking the Republican nominee silly with hard-hitting ads that would make Bob Shrum's face turn white?  And do you want to pick which ads go on the air?  I do too.  And if John Edwards is our nominee, that's what will happen.  

Here's Barack Obama at the past week's AFL-CIO debate, explaining why he took so long to come out against the Iraq War supplemental, and making me wonder if he's really that naive:

My hope was that we would start seeing some progress among the Republicans, where they would begin to agree with us on a timetable to withdraw.

Did he really think we could get enough Republican votes to end the war through some kind of bipartisan agreement?  If so, he had no idea what the legislative state of play was until terribly late.  And more importantly, he doesn't understand the contemporary Republican Party.  

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton told us that there is "no debating the moral urgency of strengthening our healthcare system for children and all Americans."  

The trouble is that she feels that moral urgency less than any other Democrat.  If it's so urgent to her, why is she missing union deadlines for coming up with a universal health care plan?  And why does she want to put off universal health care until a hypothetical second term that she may never get?  

On May 2, SurveyUSA released some interesting single-state head-to-head primary polls featuring Clinton, Edwards, and Obama against Rudy Giuliani.  Unfortunately, SUSA has recently become resistant to putting all their data on a single easy-to-use chart (this data is on 33 different pie graphs!) so I had to do the work.  It's listed below, with the Democrat's number first and Giuliani's number second.  

I'm so happy to see one of our potential nominees saying this:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on Thursday outlined his plan to tackle global poverty that calls for educating 23 million children in poor countries and creating a Cabinet-level position to oversee other initiatives.

Seeking to link poverty in other countries to U.S. national security, Edwards argued that militant extremists in nations torn apart by poverty and civil war have replaced government educational systems and are teaching young people to hate the United States.

"When you understand that, it suddenly becomes clear: global poverty is not just a moral issue for the United States -- it is a national security issue for the United States," he said at Saint Anselm College.

"If we tackle it, we have the chance to change a generation of potential extremists and enemies into a generation of friends," Edwards said.  

Last night, right after Bush asked for another 20,000 lives to risk in Iraq, John Edwards took to the air to stop him.  Edwards has been among the most intense Democratic opponents of Bush's attempts to escalate the war - click the picture to sign his
petition against escalating the war.

I've transcribed some of his appearance on the Tonight Show last night.  Here it is:  

Leno:  Bush has called for this surge of 20,000 more troops.  What do you think of this?

Edwards:  I think he's dead wrong.  Dead wrong.

Update:  Unofficial totals show us with a 3827-3783 victory!  Thanks to all who voted!  

The race for Best New Blog is the closest of the big races in the 2006 Weblog Awards.   It's between Lesbian Dad, the blog of a lesbian non-birth-parent, and Hang Right Politics, a right-wing blog.  Here's the vote totals at present:

Hang Right Politics - 3506
Lesbian Dad - 3357

If you want to help Lesbian Dad win, all you have to do is go here and vote for Best New Blog!  We need 150 votes and we need them right away!

Did you see the classic sex ed parody videos from the now-defunct "Technical Virgin" site a few years ago?  If not, they're still out there -- on the internet, nothing funny ever dies -- so go have yourself a look!  It's the weekend, so the fact that they're borderline unsafe for work shouldn't be a problem.  This is the other one, and they're each only 30 seconds long.  Then come back and look below the fold -- because the Technical Virgin needs your help.  

On Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, John Edwards came out in favor of Russ Feingold's resolution to censure Bush for authorizing illegal wiretapping:  

BLITZER: Is it justified to think about articles of impeachment, as some Democrats have floated?

EDWARDS: Well, what I believe is, this president has engaged in behavior that certainly justifies censure.

It's a terribly worded poll too, from the Orlando Sentinel.  The question is "What science do you think is true?"  The four choices are:
-Creation
-Evolution
-Other
-Undecided

Currently we're up 53-39, but that really isn't a big enough margin.

Link to the poll:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/...

Link to the story:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/...

There's a lot to like about Paul Hackett -- his liberal social views, his excellent positioning on the Iraq War, his wonderful biography, and his status as the ultimate Fighting Dem (by which I do not mean an Ultimate Fighting Dem, though he'd probably be pretty good at that too.)  But lately I've been trying in vain to figure out what his views on important economic issues are, and I'm getting a little worried.  Can any of you guys help me?  

This is especially important to me because Sherrod Brown has been an awesome defender of progressive economic positions during his tenure in Congress.  (His voting record is here.)  While I really like the idea of having a fiesty Iraq War veteran in the Senate to slap Bush around, it's more important to have somebody who will be a reliable progressive vote on economic issues.  

The old conventional wisdom on Hillary's presidential aspirations was that they'd be crushed under her liberal reputation. The "socialized medicine" attacks on her health care reform plan stuck to her more than they stuck to Bill. And while Bill's country upbringing and red-state governorship made him acceptable to Southern regionalists, Hillary's Chicago roots and New York Senate seat marked her as someone from the strange liberal cities that many small-town folk still regard as foreign to their way of life.

Mukhtaran Bibi, who has done some truly wonderful things for women and poor villagers in Pakistan, has been thrown in jail because Musharraf's government feared that she'd dis Pakistan in her trip to America.  If Musharraf's big fear is losing his American support, we have to make it clear to him that jailing feminist heroes is a great way of doing exactly that.  At the end of this diary you'll find the email addresses that Ezra Klein found, for Pakistani diplomats you can email to express your outrage and help Bibi.  First, let me reprint some of Nick Kristof's piece on the situation, which I linked above.  
[Update]: Did we just win? Thanks so much to everyone who emailed!

There were a bunch of diaries on last night criticizing Voinovich for cowardice in voting to send Bolton to the full Senate while witholding his recommendation.  Sure, it'd be nice if he had a spine and voted his conscience.  But I'm willing to give some credit to the guy for having the third of a spine that it took to speak up, unlike some of the other unhappy Republicans on the committee.  He's helped us in the media battle surrounding the Bolton nomination. The way I see it, Voinovich is their Lieberman.  (Should I say "our Lieberman?"  Well, you know what I mean.)

When Harry Reid chosen as our Senate leader, I was a bit worried.  Why are we choosing a pro-life red-state guy to lead our party?  I felt a little better about him when I heard that he was a master of Senate floor procedure.  If he wins a vote or two by pulling crazy tactical maneuvers to outflank Bill Frist, I'll be really happy.  The personal stories about how he took on special interests who tried to blow up his car and grabbed the throat of someone trying to bribe him are also cool, but I'm wary of drawing any connections between that stuff and what a guy will do politically.  

The recent Jim VandeHei article in the WaPo -- a really good one on how the administration is manufacturing 'crises' -- makes me feel even better.  Reid gets three nice sound bites, which I've reproduced below the fold.  Plus, from the way he's talking, it's looks like he's going to fight Social Security privatization (and judges who don't respect people's rights) like hell.  

Right now there are three Recommended Diaries on dKos that have the word "FUCK" in the title, in all caps.  I've never had a Recommended Diary and I want one, so I'm going to follow the trend and see where it leads.  I'm not a fan of Kossacks being angry at each other, which seems to be another theme in those diaries, but I have a positive view of fucking.  So this diary is going to be about pro-fucking sites in the leftward part of the internet.  

(warning: links to mildly pornographic images will be something of a theme below)

Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has done an interview in which he talks about a bunch of big issues like globalization, colonialism, democracy, and religious conflict.  

Sen is one of the few economists whom I trust to be fully sensitive about the problems faced by people in Third World countries.  He lived in Calcutta in the 1940s when the British pulled the grain out of the countryside and forbade grain imports into Bengal.  Several million people died of famine in a good crop year, simply because of the complete indifference of British rulers. (Churchill shrugged off the disaster, saying that it was caused by the tendency of the people to breed like rabbits.)  

Sen won his Nobel Prize in part for showing that famines are usually result from bad systems of food allocation rather than simple crop failure.  He pointed out that famines don't usually happen in democracies, since governments that respond to the people act quickly to stop mass starvation.

I've included some of my favorite quotes from the interview below if you don't want to read the whole thing: