Tag Archives: President

John Kerry will not Run for President in 2008

The 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee who probably really won but didn’t become President has decided not to enter the 2008 race. According to the Washington Post Kerry

“announced today that he has decided not to run for president again in 2008, saying that he will devote his energy instead to ending the war in Iraq.

Kerry made the announcement at the end of a lengthy speech on the Senate floor about the war. He said he felt a personal responsibility to work toward ending the involvement of U.S. combat troops in Iraq because he had “made the mistake” of voting for the 2002 congressional resolution that authorized Bush to take military action in Iraq.

Kerry said he came close enough to winning the presidency in 2004 to be tempted to try again. “But I’ve concluded this isn’t the time for me to mount a presidential campaign,” he said. Rather, it is time “to do all I can to end this war” and focus on fighting “the real war on terror,” he said.”

Senator John Kerry is an honorable man and would have served our country well as President. His campaign in 2004 was assaulted by right wing fear mongers inspired by Karl Rove who falsely attacked Kerry’s war record in a Swift Boat ad campaign that falsely distorted Kerry’s record. Rovian tactics were also behind labeling Kerry a flip flopper – another deceitful ad campaign that relieved on repetitious ads amplified by the right wing noise machine of talk radio and Internet postings and right wing media outlets like Fox news. Also numerous instances of attempts to disenfranchise voters like those documented in Florida and efforts to mislead voters and malfunctioning voting machines in places like Ohio as documented by Robert Kennedy Jr and others helped to keep Bush in office.

Kerry was again attacked in 2006 by the right wing propaganda campaign in the telling of a joke about Bush that the media turned into a diatribe about making fun of Kerry. Meanwhile the ineptitude of Bush was ignored by the media for most of Bush’s time in office until finally the 2006 national elections brought home the fact that it was not Kerry but Bush who was the real joke. Its one of those joke where you only laugh at because it’s so painful otherwise.

Kerry leaving now opens up the Democratic race for President by leaving behind the baggage of Kerry’s loss. It also opens up the race to new visions and hopes for a different future.

Is Hillary Power Hungry? Is that Bad?

Women who run for President shouldn’t be power hungry. And they should never forgive their husband if he has an extramarital affair, particularly if they want to run for President. Right wing talk radio? Michael Savage? Rush Limbaugh? No, a post by a “progressive” blogger.

I can’t vote for someone who I perceive as so cravenly hungry for power that she’ll do absolutely anything to obtain it.” so says Carla over at Preemptive Karma.

While Carla says ” I can’t pretend to understand the goings on in people’s marriages” she savagely trashes Hillary for sticking with Bill anyway after the Monica Lewinsky affair. Carla ” can fathom no reason for staying in such a dysfunctional situation except to stay next to power.”

The vast right wing conspiracy loves you Carla. The right wing long ago launched a “Stop Hillary Movement” See efforts like Stop Hillary clothes at Cafe Press, Stop Hillary PAC, the Hillary Project -educate yourself on the most corrupt politician in recent history, Blogs Against Hillary, and on and on. The right wing is afraid of Hillary. Such right wing noise and fear mongering makes me suspicious of any anti -Clinton spin and so here’s my response to Carla which I posted on her site:

I truly don’t see that your argument makes sense. Maybe a different perspective is that Hillary leaving Bill would have added fuel and support to the mean spirited partisan right wing Republican power play to impeach Bill Clinton and push him out of office. Maybe it was more an act of courage to stay and deny the right wing satisfaction in their meddling in a family personal matter and trying to use it for their right wing political ends. In fact your link to wikipedia speaks to this – the vast right wing conspiracy.

As some who took after Clinton found out, they had things to hide also. Hillary Clinton was hardly the first person to be married to a straying husband who had sex with someone else.

If you ask me, your comments fall into the Republican game plan to have us buy into this idea that there is something wrong with Hillary both because she stayed with her husband and because now she wants to be President. Why is she being singled out as someone wanting power that we should judge as bad? Could it be that this is parroting back one of the Republican talking points to stop Hillary? Tell me the name of one candidate for President that doesn’t want power?

You have to want power to be able to reach your goals and implement your visions. Remember the event that did in Ted Kennedy’s 1980 attempt at running for President – the CBS Roger Mudd interview where he couldn’t explain why he wanted to be President?

If a candidate doesn’t have the drive and ambition to be President, do you think they’re going to run a strong campaign or be a strong President? Would you vote for a Democrat that didn’t have the passion to want to be President and that couldn’t persevere through adversity – including an extra marital affair of a spouse?

How about judging Hillary and the other candidates on what they say they want to do as President and whether they have what it takes to get elected and take this nation forward after the dismal Bush years? Let’s not buy into Republican spin mongering. That’s what this Hillary “power” trip thing is. It’s also a sexism thing because it supports the image that women wanting power are not O.K while men wanting power are OK.

Let’s not buy into Republican spin mongering. That’s what this Hillary “power” trip thing is. It’s also a sexism thing because it supports the image that women wanting power are not O.K while men wanting power are OK. Why is this discussion only about Hillary wanting power? Seems to me that this is what the Republican spin machine wants us to talk about. Its part of their stop Hillary campaign.

I looked up John McCain on nndb.com. It said “McCain had an extramarital affair with Cindy Lou Hensley, whose father owned Hensley & Co., a Phoenix-based liquor company that is the nation’s second largest Anheuser-Busch distributor. McCain and Shepp were divorced in 1980, and he married his millionaire mistress the following month” So is John McCain a better candidate for President?

Remember the Kerry criticism by the right wing of marrying into the Heinz family money. It’s all a matter of where you’re coming from politically as to whether it matters or not about the details of ones personal marital life it seems.

Or lets look at Gingrich who pushed for Clinton’s impeachment. “Gingrich has been married three times. In 1962, Gingrich married his first wife, Jackie Battley, resulting in the birth of two daughters. He began to discuss divorce with Jackie in 1981, while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. Gingrich married his second wife, Marianne Ginther, in the fall of 1981. [4] They divorced in 1999 because of her dislike for Washington D.C. and other difficulties. A year later, he married a House aide, Callista Bisek [5] amid rumors the two had an affair during his previous marriage, even while presiding over Clinton’s impeachment”

Time for US Senators to Open Their Campaign Books in a Timely Matter.

Old Time Senators seem fearful of opening their campaign books to voters and for too long have tried to unreasonably hide them from the public. While candidates for the Presidency and House of Representatives file electronically with the Federal Election Commission, members of the US Senate do not. As we’ve written previously, they are still in the dark ages .

As the Federal Elections Commission notes, this means “it can take as long as 30 days before some detailed data filed on paper is available in the Commission’s database.” They have since 2000 requested that Senate candidates file with them electronically but the US Senate has refused to comply, instead having campaigns send paper reports to the Clerk of the Senate, who then forwards them to the FEC to be scanned. Software is obviously available for Senate campaigns to enter data and forward it directly to the FEC since this is what House candidates use.

But that’s only half the story. As Common Cause notes:

The current situation is absurd. Senate campaigns keep their contribution records electronically anyway. What happens next is like a reporting machine designed by the old cartoonist, Rube Goldberg. As it stands now, Senate campaigns take their own electronic records, print them out on paper, ship the paper (cumulatively thousands of pages’ worth) to the Secretary of the Senate, which the Secretary then copies to send to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then pays six figures of taxpayers’ money to hire a contractor to retype the information into an electronic format!

Senator Russell Feingold (D) on January 9th, 2007 has again filed his “Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. ” It is filed as S-223 . On Jan 11, 2007 Feingold and Republican co-sponsor Thad Cochran in a press release stated that this “commonsense bill to make our electoral system more transparent is long overdue.” We agree.

But we also think the bill doesn’t go far enough. Compared to Washington State’s campaign Disclosure laws it’s rather wimpy because current disclosure for both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate only require quarterly reporting. Quarterly reporting means that US Senators and Representatives file campaign reports on April 15th, July 15th and Oct 15th before a November election, and on Jan. 31st after the election. This is hardly timely and significant disclosure in light of how quickly money can be raised and spent in campaigns. Disclosure forms need to be filed monthly!

Disclosure in a timely fashion of who is donating to whom and how much is essential to voters being able to know who’s trying to get you to vote for who and why. It helps to know whose interests candidates will be representing even though they will tell you the money has no influence on their votes. Like we are all supposed to believe that, right.

Presidential candidates have the option of reporting monthly or quarterly. I think it should all be monthly. We do it in Washington State for all statewide, legislative and local campaigns. It just makes sense.

Current sponsors of S-223 are Senators Allard, Biden, Boxer, Cornyn, Dorgan,Durban,Feinstein, Graham, Grassley, Hutchinson, Kerry, Landrieu, Lieberman, Lugar, McCain, Murkowski,Obama, Reed, Rockefellar, and Salazar.

Hey Washington State voters – where is Murray and Cantwell? Seems a few other Northwest Senators are also missing. Time to send a few e-mails. Go to the links below and ask them to co-sponsor S-223. Tell them you want to see monthly reporting, not quarterly reporting as they have now.

Washington State Senators:

http://murray.senate.gov/email/index.cfm

http://cantwell.senate.gov/contact/

for other Senators go to:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm