From Right to Left: The Adventures of a Liberal Veteran

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John Edwards: a portrait in authenticity

The Bright and the Dull.

"Cornbread and Roses" -The Nation

In February Edwards surprised them all, announcing a campaign to "eradicate poverty in America." With a $40,000 annual salary paid by private funds, Edwards became the first director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC, Chapel Hill's law school, largely a think tank designed to bring antipoverty scholars, activists, journalists and politicians together to cook up innovative ways to tackle economic and racial inequities.Edwards is also putting some of his ideas into action, including the College for Everyone program he promised in 2004. In low-income Greene County Edwards this summer announced a pilot program to pay for the first year of college for local high school graduates willing to work at least ten hours a week.

Since launching the center, Edwards has returned to perpetual motion, taking his antipoverty crusade to more than thirty states. Between visits to shelters and job-training centers and delivering his new stump speech, full of ringing challenges to view poverty as "the great moral cause of our time," Edwards has raised more than $4 million for Democratic legislative candidates in mostly red states, trying, as he says, "to build the party back from the ground up." He's teaming with unlikely partners on the left--including local AFL-CIO, ACORN and NAACP chapters--in campaigns to raise the minimum wage in Ohio, Arizona and Michigan. He's praising Big Labor's historic role in "lifting millions of Americans out of poverty." And he's floating serious--and surprisingly liberal--proposals to put his high-flown rhetoric into action. He's touting a controversial "cultural integration" plan to give low-income families housing vouchers to move into better neighborhoods. He's calling for expansions to Bill Clinton's earned-income tax credits, for concerted crackdowns on predatory lenders, and for "work bonds" to help low-income workers build savings and assets. He wants not only to repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent but also to raise capital-gains taxes for those on the top rungs. After Hurricane Katrina he spoke pointedly about how "the face of poverty in America is the face of color" and promoted an ambitious Gulf Coast recovery program modeled on FDR's Works Progress Administration--a touchstone for the kind of big-government liberalism that the old Edwards (like most Democratic leaders today) wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole.

Icky War Crimes are Making Scott McClellan Dance for his Dollars

White House Briefing: McClellan Deflects Questions on Torture Exemption A Couple Dozen Times

It must be tough being an apologist for war criminals and their icky need to torture, especially now that they can no longer claim proprietorship of the so-called American mainstream, which they polluted and left for dead, in their race to the right fringe of Hell.

So much easier to just emulate Jesus or Rumi or Gautama than to emulate power-crazed megalomaniacs -- who could never see beyond their alcohol-emboldened egos.

America should be courageous enough to cough up our own hairballs when they threaten the flow of air. And yet our air is filled with hairballs and nutballs, all hyperventilating shrill emotions, as if amplitude will serve to persuade. But as George Bernard Shaw once observed:
"Not intelligent, only opinionated." Yet some people guzzle opinion as if it were knowledge, thus real food. Only when they die of malnutrition might they realize that one has to eat something more than chicken. Faux chicken.

And that is why anonyMoses Enterprises has created an antidote:
Whenever you are in public, repeat aloud the words: "Rush is bigger than Jesus", which is literally true, although figuratively false.

Before long, the spell will wear off, and dittoheads will be given back their own heads, and sunshine days will return, and sweetness and light will dwell over all the earth. Maybe.

The Politics of Flu

The relationship between GW Bush, Scooter Libby and the Bird Flu.
[file under pharmaterrorism]

Penthouse courts sexual Panther Cheerleaders

Concupiscent Panther Pussycats

Most cheerleaders are celibate, and don't even think about sexual congress. Not so our brave and sexy Panther cheerleaders! And now Penthouse magazine realizes that southern belles have got what it takes to move mags, and we're not talking redneck wheels, which are typically already moving. The magazine is courting Renee Thomas, 20, (who looks a whole lot like Kelly Ripa) and Angela Keathley, 26, to pose nude, although it would generally be better is they were nekkid, since it is sexier to be nekkid than merely naked or nude. Nekkid, you see, has a special meaning down south, with the implication being that hormones are involved.

Go pussycats! You are putting our team on the map!

Oh wait! They are actually called the TopCats? Why not BottomCats?

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

A Revision Thing...
Posted on Monday, November 7, 2005. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2003. By Sam Smith.

(Thanks to FullThroat and Ra Bourbon for this nugget.)

With such gems as...

-It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. -We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade.
-We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases.
-The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.
-Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq.
-Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. -You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.
-The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely.
-His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox.
-Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.

-The United States was not interested in the oil in that region.
-We were intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national Iraqi control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all parts of the country.
-The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq.

On and on the lies go...

And people are still dying for them.

Carolina Panther cheerleader arrested for gangbanging team

Cheerleader arrested after alleged sex - NFL - MSNBC.com

OK, so she didn't really gangbang the whole team, or even one of them. She did apparently have sex in a bathroom stall, which is also quite sexy.


For more anonyMoses coverage of the Panther cheerleaders and their foibles, check here.



This will only make people want to see the Panthers more often, so...great going girls!

anonyMoses chosen as a BlogCritic of the Week

...for "Breaking the Gilligan Code".

This and others can be sound here.