This video is getting a lot of well-deserved buzz this morning. Like good writing, good video CAN crystallize a moment, and make a compelling argument. Then again, the argument that the modern conservative movement has come completely unhinged is a fairly easy one to make. Never mind. Just watch the video:

And if you're in Washington, DC today, please consider joining The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater Washington, the InterFairth Conference of Metropolitan Washington, various faith groups, friends, and me for a vigil for peace and solidarity in front of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington, DC 20024 (just off 14th and Independence SW - closest Metro stop: Smithsonian on the Orange and Blue lines)

2:00pm today (Thursday, June 11, 2009)

We'll be there to express our support, unity, love, respect and to reflect in the aftermath of yesterday's tragic shooting of Stephen T. Johns, who gave his life defending our commitment to fight injustice and hatred.

I'd also like to put in a quick pitch for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Southern Poverty Law Center. Two organizations that do indispensable work and need our support.

Donate to The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://tinyurl.com/l9vp48

Donate to The Southern Poverty Law Center: http://tinyurl.com/krseva

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As Todd mentioned yesterday, MyDDer Adam Conner and myself are in Upstate NY this weekend volunteering for Scott Murphy, who is running to fill Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's seat in the NY-20 Congressional District, which starts in Dutchess County, a short drive north from New York City, stretches North well into the Adirondacks - bypassing Democratic Albany - and also stretches South and West towards the Catskill Mountains. It's gerrymandering at its finest.

All that cartological contortion extists to the keep the district Republican, but Kirsten Gillibrand's victory over John "the Sweenster" Sweeney has ushered in a new era in this former GOP stronghold, and now Democrat Scott Murphy is tied or ahead in the polls with the New York State Assembly Minority Leader, Republican James Tedisco.

Adam and I knocked a lot of doors in Saratoga yesterday and, although Adam had to fly back home this morning, I managed to walk two packets by myself today in beautiful Philmont, NY in the heart of Columbia County.

This is a very exciting race and I challenge the whole MyDD community to get involved. Here's why:

1. It's close. Margin of error close. I cannot leave you with a more important message than my conviction that this election is going to come down to a few hundred votes. Republicans owned this seat for a long, long time and they want it back. They will do whatever it takes to win. We can stop them.

2. Scott Murphy is a really good guy. He's also a progressive business leader who has made a career out of building innovative American businesses that create jobs and grow our economy. He gets what a successful American economy looks like and will be a valuable voice in Congress.

3. James Tedisco is best described with a word that rhymes with bassclown. He's the caricature of a hack Albany politician, with the least important job in the legislature. Assembly Majority Leader Shelly Silver rules with an iron fist inside an iron glove. He barely consults with other Democrats, let alone the minority party. A wax dummy of Tedisco could do his job just as effectively, and would have a more impressive legislative record.

Tedisco also claims to be a big labor guy, because his Dad was in a union. Of course he's opposed to EFCA (and Obama's budget, and healthcare reform, and puppies, etc) and doesn't have any union endorsements. Nice try, Jimmy.

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In roughly six hours, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. Wow.

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I'll be blogging about my experience throughout inauguration week.  Stay tuned. My inauguration week started Sunday at the airport bar at in Fort Lauderdale International Airport - yes, international, they have flights to Jamaica - killing time and watching a woman a few years younger than me throw back tequila shots with the kind of speed that would make Usain Bolt jealous.  It's Sunday, January 18th and I'm about to fly home to DC for a day I've waited a very long time for, the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. I turn to my libationionally-gifted neighbor and say "nervous flier, huh?" 

"Not particularly," she answers.

"Like tequila?" I query.

"It tastes awful."

I won't be defeated, and reply "burgeoning alcoholic?"

Exasperated, she turns to me to says "this week is going to be a shit show with all you Obama people everywhere in DC, I hate that I have to be there for class and I would give anything to be anywhere else."

An auspicious start to my inauguration week.

Baggage claim at Reagan National Airport in Virginia was surprisingly calm, like being in the eye of a hurricane, with a glance to the taxi stand revealing the chaos and destruction ahead.

The "We Are One" with everyone from Bono to Beyonce, happened while I was in the air, but I got home in time to watch the re-broadcast on HBO.

At the end of the concert, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sang "This Land Is Your Land." I grew up in Upstate NY, a short drive from where Pete Seeger lives.  He's the man who looked at an impossibly polluted Hudson River and said, yes we can...clean it up, more than 40 years ago, and started the Clearwater movement.  He heard Bob Dylan go electric and took an ax to the sound system - okay, nobody's perfect.  Still, hearing Pete singing this progressive ode to America - "In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple, near the relief office, I see my people" - moved me to song and tears.

 

And I wasn't the only one loving my country with the kind of passion usually reserved for bad reality television.  A friend assures me that at the exclusive hotel The Hay Adams, where Obama stayed last week, the entire bar sang along.  It took a diverse group of the fabulously wealthy - every rich color of the rich rainbow - and 400,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial joining in song to get me in the proper state of mind to celebrate this moment in history, the inauguration of Barack Obama and the end of the reign of error, 8 years of Bush/Cheney.

 

My next stop was the Florida Obama Campaign staff party.  I worked on the Obama campaign in Orlando, Florida for a month and  stepping into that party was like being back on election night.  The collective exuberance was still there.  As progressives, we want to change out country for the better.  But as campaigners, we want to win and there is no feeling like winning.  We won in Florida, so Katherine Harris, consider it recounted.

 

The last stop of the night was a friend's Hawaiian-themed inauguration house party.  There is one iron-clad rule of house parties: when the booze runs out the party is over.  I showed up, posse in tow, at 1am and you could hear the party down the street. We soon ended up on the packed dance floor, with TI pumping and the whole room dancing and shouting along.  The most amazing part, it was 1 in the morning and the alcohol had run out an hour ago.  But everyone in the room was dancing, laughing and calling their friends to tell them to come over.  A complete stranger turned to me and said "this is awesome," and I don't know if he was talking about the party or the inauguration, but I couldn't agree more.

 

What keeps a party going when the tap runs dry: hope.  Now I'm ready to celebrate this inauguration.

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Republicans are desperate.  You would be too if the economic theory you'd imposed on the country had just pulled a Hindenburg.  Bush and Paulsen are doubling down and asking for an "Authorization for Use of Financial Force" - a no oversight, $700 billion dollar bailout that we'd call nationalization if it happened anywhere South of the Rio Grande or East of NYC.  Patrick Ruffini is begging the Congressional GOP Caucus to demagogue on the issue, economy be damned. And John McCain is asking Americans to suspend any remaining disbelief and imagine him as a populist.

My personal favorite new tactic of desperation is the blame the victims approach that Neil Cavuto and Pat Buchanan debuted on Faux News and MSNBC, respectively. Try and stay with me, but apparently the economy is in meltdown because middle-income Americans (or "minorities and risky folks" according to Mr. Cavuto) had the audacity to apply for and receive loans.

What happened exactly?  Did millions of people walk into banks with guns and demand to be approved for risky mortgages.  Then, did they storm Wall Street and force the titans of finance to take advantage of John McCain's banking deregulation to re-package these mortgages into securities that are falling faster than Bush's approval ratings post-Katrina?

Watch Cavuto below:

And, Pat (skip to the 5:15 mark):

It is preposterous and offensive to blame this crisis on hard working Americans who broke no laws and were only trying to do exactly what they're supposed to - buy homes.  Banks, lenders and financial institutions of all stripes made a series of exceptionally bad decisions, decisions made possible by a conservative economic philosophy that condones epic failures in regulation and oversight.  The blame lies with John McCain and his conservative Republican allies in Congress, who ended financial regulation as we knew it, and with George Bush, who, in shocking news, was asleep at the wheel.

Blaming consumers is the "Saddam planned 9/11" of economic excuse-making and we have to push back against it.

John McCain's latest ad accusing Barack Obama of wanting to have sex with your (white) children has actually brought a lot of clarity to this race for me.

We have to elect Barack Obama because he will be a great President and because John McCain is dangerous for America.  But there's something greater at stake that I've been missing.  I haven't seen it because even though I voted for Obama in the primaries, I could never quite bring myself to quench my thirst for change at the bottomless kool-aid fountains.

Now it is clear.  Barack Obama may be running the last honorable campaign for the presidency.  If Barack Obama loses this thing, I'm not sure any Democrat will ever try to take the high road again - we know Republicans won't because they can't win on the issues, too few Americans agree with them.

Think about it.  Barack Obama is running a serious campaign about issues, and is working to unite Americans.

John McCain is running a campaign that makes what Bill Clinton called the "politics of personal division" look like patty cakes.  McCain has questioned Obama's patriotism, linked him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, called him the antichrist, done everything possible to avoid talking about real issues and now, is trying to link a good man and a loving father to pedophilia.

So that's what we're up against.  Sleeze and division versus union and issues.

I've wanted Barack Obama to hit harder and get his hands dirty more often, despite my concerns that the politcal means do define us as people - our leaders should never lose sight of that.  Now I sense that this is our last chance to have our national elections be anything more than the lowest common denominator.

Watching the upstanding campaign Barack Obama is running and the dishonorable one led by John McCain is like going all in, in a no limits poker game.  Win and we take all the chips, reverse course and take our first step into a better kind of politics.  Lose and it goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction.  We'll finally be able to drop the "Rovian" so often placed in front of the word "politics," because it'll be redundant.

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We're almost at the end of the 2008 MyDD Fundraiser.  Soon there won't be anymore Please Contribute to MyDD Today links and that means we only have a little more time to do the right thing and make this campaign a success.

Click here to contribute.

I just made my own donation and I'm proud to tell you a little bit about why I did.

I made my own modest contribution, because I know that the money I contributed will go directly to defraying the expenses of two extraordinary bloggers and pillars of this community, Todd Beeton and Jonathan Singer.

These two guys work their asses off on a daily basis to bring you unmatched political reporting.  I know, because I've seen them in action.

Yesterday, I was at the Obama rally in Alexandria where Todd, after a late night covering the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Richmond, was listening to an education round table event with Senator Obama and some concerned citizens.  When I say he was listening, I mean it.  The whole room could hear the Senator, but only one small speaker was picking up the feed from the other participants' microphones.  While many national reporters took this as an invitation to catch up on their email, Todd was part of a small group clustered around that one speaker, listening to the Senator answer questions about special ed and math homework.

I walked over with Todd to the main event, a rally in the home gymnasium of the T.C. Williams High School Titans of Remember the Titans fame - I wrote about it earlier here.  It was my first Obama speech since the 2004 convention, but Todd had seen a pretty similar speech the night before, so he jumped in the car to drive an hour North to Bowie, Maryland to hear Bill Clinton speak.

The night before that, I was hanging out with Jonathan Singer, who isn't letting a full course-load at law school get in the way of his work for this site.  It was a Saturday night in a city of beautiful women and strong drinks.  Or maybe it's strong women and beautiful drinks, it doesn't really matter.  The point is, that he spent most of it on the couch in my apartment watching election returns and blogging.  I finally dragged him out a little before midnight and despite the late evening, he was up before me the next morning to watch Dubya' on Faux y Amigos.

I can't say it any clearer, Todd and Jonathan are deeply committed to this community and this movement.  They support our habits as political junkies and their insights make us better activists.  Now it's our turn to support them.  Please give what you can so they can keep going and make MyDD even stronger in 2008.

Click here to contribute.

Following up on Todd's post earlier this evening, I was also at the Barack Obama rally earlier today at historic T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.  Like many politicians, Senator Obama is a pretty serious list-maker - he answered the last question with a list of three reasons why he would make a better president than Hillary, and the third reason had four sub-reasons.  Inspired thusly, I offer my own list of four observations from the rally.

1.  Tim Kaine might be ready for prime time

Governor Tim Kaine introduced Obama and really impressed me.  People in Virginia always talk about what a good guy and great governor he is, but after his lackluster response to the SOTU two years ago, I questioned his political skills.  Turns out it was the wrong format for Kaine, because he absolutely set the room on fire.

Kaine followed an immigrant from Peru and framed his entire speech around the idea that Obama is a bien listo, which I'll leave to someone in the comments to translate more accurately than the literal "well ready." Kaine - who as a young man spent a year volunteering with missionaries in a poor village in Honduras - gave an entire section of his speech in Spanish.  For the sake of poor high school Spanish students like me, he finished by saying "the translation of all that is: [Barack Obama] is a great guy."

It was a moment that reflected his ability to connect with the many immigrants who have made their homes in Northern Virginia, without losing the down-home touch that is a part of how he's maintaining Mark Warnersque approval ratings.

Kaine continued with a full-throated and very political speech in which he talked about strategy and momentum.  He also didn't hesitate to mention how early he endorsed Obama and his role as a national co-chair.

The two men are clearly friends and Obama reminded the room that Kaine is a truly decent man who is in politics for all the right reasons.  It was enough to make me wonder if Kaine would be on his VP shortlist - ignoring for a moment that the Lt. Gov. in Virginia is a Republican.  The ticket would pair two young rising stars within the party, a la Clinton-Gore and might have better chemistry than any Democratic ticket in recent memory.

2.  T.C. Williams High School is a great venue

I call it historic, because it is where the events took place that inspired the Denzel Washington film Remember the Titans.  Short version: the Alexandria public schools were integrated in 1959, but remained functionally segregated until 1971 when they were consolidated, bringing white and black students together for the first time at T.C. Williams.  At the time of the integration, Herman Boone, played in the movie by Denzel Washington, was hired as head coach of the newly integrated T.C. Williams football team.  He replaced a popular white head coach and inherited a team split along racial lines.  The story of how he brought those young men and that community together, while winning a lot of football games, makes for a great sports movie.  To paraphrase Senator Obama on the film, Remember the Titans is one of the movies where guys get choked up.  Remind me to update my Netflix queue.

 

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Cross-posted at The Albany Project

Draft movements are hot this fall.  Many of us have watched with high hopes as DraftUdall.com has given voice to the progressive grassroots in New Mexico.  It's almost hard to remember that a few short weeks ago, Congressman Tom Udall was very clear that he wasn't running for the Senate seat held for so long by the honorable troglodyte from the great state of New Mexico, Pete Domenici.  Now we're on the verge of Udall getting into the race and we've got Alex Flores and a network of progressives in New Mexico and across the country to thank for it.  Although recent DailyKos poll numbers may not show it, the NM Senate race should be a competitive one.

This kind of draft movement is a reflection of new energy and increasingly strategic activism.  Progressives are pumped, or at least as pumped as we can be after 7 years of Bush and a difficult to explain failure to bring an end to the War in Iraq.  This draft movement in NM and others like it reflect the energy we feel.  We can go out and demand the best candidate for these pivotal races.  We're looking for progressives with proven track records in office and on the campaign trail.  It's a level of sophistication from the grassroots that should give us all hope for the future of our politics.

But I'm not here to talk about those draft movements, which could be part of a cycle that takes us to 60 seats in the U.S. Senate.  Wow do I get excited typing that.  No, as the title of this post suggests, I'm here to talk about a different kind of draft movement.

The draft movement I'm launching is in the NY-21 Congressional District, where longtime Rep. Michael McNulty is stepping down after 20 years in the seat.  I'm hoping that my Assemblyman, the current Majority Leader in the New York State Assembly, Ron Canestrari will get in the race, and that's why I've launched DraftRon.com

The NY-21 is a pretty safe seat for Democrats, with a +9 PVI, although anything is possible when it's an open seat.  The reason I'm getting involved is because I believe strongly that unless we stand up and demand the candidate we want, we can't complain about the ones we get.

That's particularly true in the NY-21, a district that includes what's left of the Democratic machine in Albany, as well as parts of Rensselaer County across the Hudson river, and west to cities of Schenectady, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Schoharie County.  McNulty was a good Congressman, although not a true progressive, and his record on choice was abysmal.  McNulty's nomination was decided in a back room deal in 1988, when then Congressman Stratton backed out of the race at the last moment because of failing health.  McNulty was thrust upon voters as the machine pick and with the exception of a challenge from the left in 1996, has never faced very serious opposition.

I may live in Washington, DC, but I still vote and pay taxes in New York and I'm not going to stand by and let some DINO like Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings get the Democratic nomination.  Incumbency is too potent a force and none of us want to say we didn't do enough when the next Liberdem gets elected.

This time, it is going to be different.  I'm trying to draft Ron, and I think I'll have a lot of people in Upstate NY joining in on this, because Ron is the right guy for the job. He was the beloved mayor of Cohoes for 13 years, a former mill town that has seen its share of hard times.  He went on to the State Assembly where he chaired the higher education committee and last year, was made the day-to-day manager of the Assembly as Majority Leader, second only to Shelly Silver.  I won't bore you with his whole bio for national readers on MyDD, who may not be as interested, and for those of you seeing this on The Albany Project, who probably already know it.

 

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It's time for your weekly dose of MyDD politics and punditry with Jonathan Singer and co-hosts Adam Conner and me, Aaron Banks.

We hope you'll join us as we wrap-up the week's major stories and look ahead to the news that will matter this week, without ever holding back on the snark.

The call-in number for the show is (646) 652-2585. You can also submit questions online via AOL Instant Messenger to "MyDDdotCOM", send us an email under the subject line "MyDD Blog Talk Radio" to jonathan-at-mydd-dot-com or leave your question or comment in this thread.

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