As we come ever closer to naming a Democratic nominee, I’m often reminded by various news articles that Barack Obama is the first ‘viable’ African-American candidate. Yet, I’m curious what makes a candidate viable (Is that shorthand for “Do they really think they have a chance”?) and wonder if Dick Gregory, Alan Keyes, Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, and the others I’ve not mentioned consider(ed) themselves impractical candidates.

Former US anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, who resigned in the first term of President George W. Bush’s administration, today said “the best thing that we could do to hit Al-Qaeda’s attractiveness to the Muslim world” is to “get out of Iraq“.

It must be terrible to be a gay Mexican trying to sneek over the border with your male lover. Especially if he looks middle-eastern.

I cannot take anymore of Bush’s bullshit. Yes, I should be more eloquent. I should choose my words more carefully so that I might reach more of you “in the back” as opposed to screaming at the converted. However, the bile in my gut simply allows me to do nothing but scream at the lying insanity of the Bush administration.

With Bush being caught lying again, this time about the levees in New Orleans, it’s good news that Lewis H. Lapham is finally calling for his impeachment in this month’s “Harper’s.” Sure, others online have been saying this for a while, but this is the first more or less mainstream publication to come out and scream for his dismissal.

We tried to impeach Clinton for getting a blowjob and not wanting to tell us about it, but here we have a president who has lied about WMD, terrorism, war, natural disasters, shootings, and who knows what else. He simply cannot be trusted. He is ruining this country. It will take us decades to fix the devastation he has wrought to our place in the geopolitical schema.

We have given full control of our country to a megalomaniacal dumbass who doesn’t even have the charisma to pull off a wedding toast. This man and those around him are poison.

Technorati Tags: bush, politics, katrina, levees, new orleans

Do you know what segregation means?

I’m not talking about the dictionary meaning, or the meaning you learned in grade school. Do you know what segregation really is?

Most of us have only witnessed true, living segregation in history books.

RememberSegregation.org tries to show us what segregation must have really been like.

The home page is divided into two parts, one side for “White Visitors” the other side for “Colored Visitors.”

It was shocking the first time I saw it. You know what is more shocking? There was a time when such division wasn’t shocking at all.

Never forget.

Operation Eden: A personal chronicle of what hurricane Katrina has done to my poor proud people.

Do yourself a favor and rush to this site now.

I’m not really going to go on about Tookie Williams. He was found guilty of crimes he still says he did not commit, and he may not have actually founded the Crips, as he claims.

What I found interesting was the impossible place Gov. Arnie found himself in last week when weighting clemency options.

If there is one issue I have no clear opinion on, it’s the death penalty. I don’t think it acts as an effective deterrent, but I think there are crimes that command the ultimate punishment. In other words, a member of the Crips may shoot someone regardless of if the death penalty. And while I think that few crimes should get the death penalty, someone should plug Andrea Yates into the nearest wall outlet right away.

But I’m getting away from my point. Last week pundits on both sides of the issue argued about what Gov. Arnie needed to do.

Boy was he stuck.

I tried to think about what I would do if I was in that position. If I was holding a pen in my hand, and I knew I could use that pen to stop a man from dying, I’d want to do it. Despite the crime, I’d likely sign the paper to convert the sentence to life in jail. (How perfectly liberal of me, eh?)

But then it dawned on me how disrespectful of the Justice system that would be. What gives the Governor the right to undo years of Justice system review? Years of trials, juries, appeals, Supreme Court reviews… and the Governor can just toss that aside and change the punishment. To me, that strikes as being disrespectful all the Judges and juries that heard the case.

I’m going to guess that Gov. Arnie didn’t know who Tookie Williams was until last week. Yet he held the history of the case in his hands.

What an awesome and troubling thing it must be to know you have that power, with the stroke of a pen.

Does this picture illustrate the effect of global warming, or just demonstrate that we now have more room to drill for oil?

I don’t yet know much about the Alliance for Justice, but you have to at least commend them on a speedy opposition response to the Alito Supreme Court judge nomination.

Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme’s. I’m not sure if I like this or not.

Don’t get me wrong here. There is only one person less qualified for the Court – me. She didn’t have the chops, but she also wasn’t a Dobson-loving, right-wing, science-hating minion.

That’s who we’ll get next.

With indictments on the way, half of the White House staff about to be measured for prison uniforms, the republican agenda stalled, a mounting death toll in Iraq, the President needs his grove back.

He’ll get his grove back by trying to get his splintered base back. I expect someone like Priscilla Owen to be next at bat. She has a proven pro-life record and she’s from Texas.

Priscilla Owen, if you remember, was the nexus of the “Gang of 14.” The 14 moderate Senator’s the banded together to make sure there was no filibuster on judicial nominees. Owen’s was what the left had to give up, since her nomination had been held up for three years.

Dobson, and his blind right, loves her. The left cite her as exactly the type of judge that shouldn’t be on the Court. That’s why she (or someone cut from the same cloth) will be nominated.

It will rally the right and start a firestorm. But oddly, that’s exactly what the right and Bush needs. They’ll control the conversation for once. The topic of discussion will be about values, and democrats have a history of losing on that topic.