The Last Chance Democracy Cafe

In a blog entry I otherwise largely agree with, John Aravosis of AMERICAblog, who indisputably gets an A-plus on the A-list of liberal bloggers, made some fairly extraordinary comments about how “nice” right wingers can be in person.  I’ll have to admit that upon first reading this — well, actually on the second reading (the first time through I just assumed I was hallucinating), my jaw fell so far down that my dental work became caught up in my keyboard, necessitating a surgical procedure known as a keyboardectomy.

I’ll be forwarding the medical bills to your attention soon, John. (more…)

For eight months Horace, Tom, Winston and the rest of us at The Last Chance Democracy Café have been looking ahead to one day. God help us, now that day is almost at hand.

The Last Chance Democracy Café
Episode 23: Five Breathless Days

by Steven C. Day

Horace was gazing into his beer with the intensity of a wizard studying a mystical orb. “I’m astonished, really, by how profoundly I care about this election . . .” he said at last. “I don’t think I would ever have guessed that I could care this much about anything . . . anything, that is, other than the health and welfare of my family.”

“I get your point,” Tom tossed in, his voice sounding distant, even distracted. “We’re all political animals here. People, who by our nature tend to care a lot more than most people about the outcome of elections. But this time it’s different, more intense . . .”

Horace continued, “I mean, I was depressed when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, when Reagan topped Carter in 1980 and when Gingrich & Co. took over the House in 1994. And then, of course, there was 2000 . . . although that was more anger than depression. But in none of those elections . . . even the theft of 2000, did I feel the way I feel today.”

“That we’re playing for all the marbles?” offered Tom.

“No . . . that we’re playing for my grandchildren’s futures.”

(more…)

John McCain

John McCain reincarnated as a political opportunist snuggling up with the Religious Right is like James Dean playing Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, while wearing a three-piece business suit and selling life insurance.  It won’t sell.

Antonin Scalia

He should have remembered that the cover up is always worse than the crime.

Cell phones during airline flights

70 percent of passengers oppose it.  The telecommunications industry wants it.  Guess who’s winning?

The power of prayer

Medically worthless. 

Bush and Iraq

Maybe the cover up isn’t always worse than the crime, after all: The Bush Administration successfully stonewalled on this one until after he was reelected:

As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq.

Something Democrats and Republicans can agree on

The GOP is now brand W.

As most of you know, Ann Coulter is in a wee bit of legal trouble over what appears to have been illegal voting.  It seems she voted in the wrong precinct, with the evidence giving rise to a fair inference that she did so knowingly.  Here’s an early Palm Beach Post story, via Atrios:

A Palm Beach poll worker says he tried to help GOP-loving pundit Ann Coulter vote in the right precinct last week. But, Jim Whited says, Coulter dashed out of the polling place when he told her she needed to file a change of address.

“I even ran out after her,” he says. “But she was fast.”

Later, elections records show, Coulter cast her ballot 2 miles up the road — in the wrong precinct.

Whited, a former candidate for WPB mayor, was posted at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Feb. 7 as a $185-a-day precinct adviser, records confirm.

“Ms. Coulter came to me, and the address we had for her in the computer didn’t match the address I know she lives at,” Whited says.

He says he remembered a Page Two story in April about Coulter, 44, buying a $1.8 million home on Seabreeze Avenue. Yet county elections records show Coulter gave an address in June at the northern tip of the island, on Indian Road, when she registered. Turns out the addresses are in different precincts.

Apparently, whenever questioned about this during her spring college speaking tour, Coulter has simply dismissed the whole affair by falsely claiming she didn’t even live in the area.  But it appears the matter isn’t going to die quite that easily.  According to a new article in the Palm Beach Post, the election supervisor is hot on her trail: (more…)

Even speaking as a political junkie who loves talking politics, I absolutely hate debating the death penalty.  Sure, I can marshal the logic and empirical evidence that proves, in my judgment, beyond any fair debate that capital punishment is bad policy: It doesn’t deter crime, it’s horrendously expensive, it’s applied in a racially discriminatory fashion, innocent people have been sent to death row in shocking numbers and on and on.

But that’s all background noise.  And few people give a damn about it, because in the end the death penalty, at least as it’s practiced in this country today, isn’t about logic or empiricism, or even about what’s good policy; it’s about revenge — bloody, Old Testament style vengeance.  And we don’t even try to hide it anymore.

I guess that’s why I hate debating capital punishment so much; it always degenerates into something terribly depressing.  Within 10 seconds, at the outside, your pro-capital punishment opponent will resort to something similar to Bernard Shaw’s totally inappropriate, but very damaging, question to Michael Dukakis during a 1988 presidential debate, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis (his wife) were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” (more…)

Just in the unlikely event someone here is missing him, I want to remind everyone that the best political cartoonist in America is found online.  Here’s his latest.

(Readers: If the spirit moves you, feel free to post links to your favorite Tom Tomorrow cartoons.)