John Kerry

John Kerry is known to hold the largest mailing lists of Democratic Party donors in the United States (at last rumors, it's supposed to be 4 million strong). If it has a return rate of even 3-5%, that's right there 150-200,000 active donors.

This endorsement if a major coup for the Senator from Illinois and in some mailing lists it is being described as a smackdown and repudiation of John Edwards.

Harsh.

Following is the text of the email with the links to the fundraising page in bold. It reads like a PBS fundraising event, LOL!

It's 2004 all over again, 'yall! Political manwhore and principal funder of the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is at it again. GOPers are the party of crazy-makers and T. Boone Pickens is the guy who paid for the 2004 crazy-making anti-John Kerry smear campaign that claims to have given Bush the 2004 elections.

Unhappy with not being in the news during this election cycle, the oilman seems to have been drunk at a dinner sponsored by the American Spectator magazine. In a room full of Washington movers and shakers he claimed to be willing to pay 1 Million Dollars to anybody who could prove his "Swifties" lied about John Kerry's record.

Kerry issued a statement accepting the challenge and vowing to give the money to Paralyzed Veterans of America. So what does the GOP douchebag say to that? In what a colleague described as "a game of GOP Calvinball", the guy completely changes the rules of the wager by demanding that Kerry "provide his Vietnam journal, his military records, and copies of movies and tapes made during his service".

First off, I was upset that my colleague used the Calvinball reference to describe anything to do with the crazy-making slimeballs working for the Republican party. Bill Waterson is one of my heroes and Calvin and Hobbes is a masterpiece for how he captured the anarchic innocence and creative exhuberance of childhood.

Yesterday's climate-change debate between current Senator Kerry and former Speaker Gingrich seems to have earned a big raise for all concerned.

It raised awareness of the urgent need to deal with the science of global climate change in a responsible manner.

It raised questions of why smart people from both sides of the issues can't work together more often to find mutually-acceptable solutions to common problems.

It raised the bar for reasonable, rational, respectful discourse between persons from different partisan political parties.

It raised eyebrows on the part of pundits who had been predicting a 'smackdown' but got a hug fest instead.

It raised the hopes of those who believe progressive politics is finally on the rebound in America.

And it raised the hackles of arch-conservatives who bitterly accused their erstwhile standard-bearer of selling out to those terrible tree-hugging leftists.

(I especially like that last aspect of it -- let the über-right wingnuts go choke on their own vile bile. Sorry, you whackjobs, Gingrich's goin' green. Deal with it.)

John Kerry and Newt Gingrich are debating the government's role in dealing with global climate change this morning at 10 am EDT, and enviromentally-minded netizens will be blogging about it in real time.

The debate, hosted by New York University’s John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress, will take place in the Russell Senate Office Building and will be broadcast live by C-Span and simultaneously webcast at http://c-span.org.

As TheHill.com notes, this event ought to be a thinking-man's matchup well worth watching:

Kerry, who bowed out of the 2008 presidential race earlier this year, has been dubbed an “environmental champion” by the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters. His website touts a long record of fighting for the environment. He and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry also recently wrote This Moment on Earth, which addresses climate change and preserving the environment.

"Newt’s a guy who has spent a lot of time wrestling with climate change and the environment. He reads about it, he teaches about it, he writes about it,” Kerry said Thursday. “We don’t see eye to eye about everything, obviously, but that’s what makes for a good debate.

“As a father, when someone tells me that within the next decade, if we don't deal with global warming, our children and grandchildren may deal with global catastrophe, that tells me I damn well better do whatever I can to help make Washington deal with this responsibly,” Kerry added. “We need these good old-fashioned debates and forums and discussions to get everyone thinking creatively on both sides of the aisle.”

John Kerry and Newt Gingrich are debating the government's role in dealing with global climate change this morning at 10 am EDT, and enviromentally-minded netizens will be blogging about it in real time.

The debate, hosted by New York University’s John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress, will take place in the Russell Senate Office Building and will be broadcast live by C-Span and simultaneously webcast at http://c-span.org.

As TheHill.com notes, this event ought to be a thinking-man's matchup well worth watching:

Kerry, who bowed out of the 2008 presidential race earlier this year, has been dubbed an “environmental champion” by the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters. His website touts a long record of fighting for the environment. He and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry also recently wrote This Moment on Earth, which addresses climate change and preserving the environment.

"Newt’s a guy who has spent a lot of time wrestling with climate change and the environment. He reads about it, he teaches about it, he writes about it,” Kerry said Thursday. “We don’t see eye to eye about everything, obviously, but that’s what makes for a good debate.

“As a father, when someone tells me that within the next decade, if we don't deal with global warming, our children and grandchildren may deal with global catastrophe, that tells me I damn well better do whatever I can to help make Washington deal with this responsibly,” Kerry added. “We need these good old-fashioned debates and forums and discussions to get everyone thinking creatively on both sides of the aisle.”

Senator John Kerry (D, MA) posted this over on dKos this morning:

A quick note this morning -– I'm chairing a Senate Small Business committee business meeting this morning and running around between votes -- but I'll check back in the afternoon to read and respond.

But before I go -- netroots, we need you to meet the ‘new environmentalists.’

Over the last two years, I thought a lot about the political process – about how to make issues voting issues. It’s been a ‘back to basics’ approach for me. I came into politics as an activist –- Earth Day 1970 and then full time in the movement to end the Vietnam War.

And when I thought of the environment, it hit me that even more dangerous about this administration’s assault on the environment is the assumption on which that assault relies: they think people don’t care. They’ve gotten away with dismissing the environmental movement as “elitist” ... or do-gooder ... “tree-hugging.”

[snip]

No doubt, we in politics must work to solve the problems at 30,000 feet -— with bold new ideas for energy independence—but this movement will only succeed if it’s more about you than us -– if Americans get out there to protect the ground beneath their own two feet.

No doubt the right wing is going to pile on. We’ve seen what they‘ve done to our friend Al Gore, and as an old friend of mine used to say “it is what it is.” But I hope you’ll step in and fight their cynicism. This book isn’t about us.

[snip]

Okay, fair enough. The man says he wants to hear what we say, and he's offering to read & respond to what we post in that thread. (Well, better make that "those threads" instead -- the piece he penned for dKos is also cross-posted on his own blog here as well.)

Sounds like a reasonable offer to me. Senator gives us a shoutout, asks us for a talkback, promises he'll respond. Okay, that works. Let's run with it.

Goddess knows that the more pols who would be willing to do that sort of thing, the better off this country would be in the long run...

I was surprisingly inspired by John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s new book, This Moment on Earth, coming out March 26th, 2007. This inspiration snuck up on me around the third chapter. Prior to that, I found the book good, well worth reading, but a little bit like just one more book outlining what humans are doing wrong. Starting around the third chapter I realized I was referring to the book in several conversations and several blog diaries and that several of the people and organizations featured in the book I mentally filed away as worth looking into for future political connections, diaries and general research.

In short, almost without my realizing it, John Kerry’s book was getting into my brain and inspiring me. The book starts a bit dull but by the end is excellent.

My earliest impression, from the press material that arrived with the book and from the introduction, was that this book promised something really new and welcome. The book was billed as the next step in the evolution of the environmental debate. I was ready for a book that took as given the problems and focused primarily on solutions. Having been through way too many “debates” online where I yet again outlined the very clear scientific evidence for global warming only to have yet the same false claims that global warming was some kind of scam or myth (these claims are never backed up by scientific evidence of any substance), I really was ready to have a book that moved beyond that.

No, not on the edge as in excitement and fun. More on the edge of sleep about 24 hours a day. Never really awake, never really able to sleep well. Living with a baby, and the brain suffers.

So there we were, ready to get ready to dress up to go to the special reception to meet John and Teresa Heinz Kerry on their book tour. We had told our son, Jacob, that we were meeting John Kerry and he was excited. He has no idea who Kerry is, but he remembers meeting Bill Clinton and he LOVED that. So he was excited. "We are go-ing to meet John Ker-ry...going to take a TRAIN." Yeah, taking a train was also part of the excitement.

So we were all ready to meet Kerry.

Until I saw Michael Bouldin's diary describing the very event we were about to go to...which actually happened yesterday.

D'oh! Only that is the polite version of what I said upon realizing I had gotten the day wrong.

Sleep deprevation is par for the course when you have a baby. And sleep deprevation is cumulative. It has been well over 2 years since I routinely got a good night's sleep and the cumulative effects show...memory declines, motivation declines. About the only thing that can get us to Manhattan in the evenings these days is Bill Clinton or John Kerry. I can assure you Hillary or Chuck wouldn't be enough to inspire us to make the trek and give up even a small amount of sleep.

...we're gaining an outstanding senator.

For those of you who hadn't yet heard the news, John Kerry officially announced yesterday that he is not going to run for president again in this election cycle.

Not surprisingly, this news was greeted with illiterate and mouth-foaming chortling in some quarters; there was much gnailing and washing of teeth in others; and there were exudations of philosophical sadness but hope for the future from others as well.

For the record -- not that this is much of a surprise to anyone here I'm sure -- yr hmbl otr crspndnt falls into the latter camp.

I like John Kerry. I like his intelligence, his experience, his integrity, his commitment... and besides that, I know from personal experience that he is a warm and witty guy to hang out with on a windy Boston evening.

Did I want Kerry to be president in '04? Hell yeah, of course I did. Shucks, if it came down to a choice between a rotting fence post and the current inhabitants of the White House, I'd've gone out beating on doors in the freezing rain browbeating citizens into signing petitions on behalf of the fence post at the time.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth. I did remember Kerry from my own "fulminating against the corporate-imperialistic war machine" period during the Vietnam years, of course. But I'd lost track of him in the ensuing decades, until he decided to run for president a couple or three years ago

Republicans know they are going to loose big time on Tuesday. So what do they do? They attack John Kerry. Yup. John Kerry is not even running for office, but he's become the target, again, of swiftboaters and the 101 Wingnut Keyboardists.

Media Matters explains:

At an October 30 speech at a campaign rally in Pasadena, California, Kerry told a group of assembled college students, "Education, you know, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." In response to the uproar over these remarks, Kerry's staff gave reporters what they claim were Kerry's prepared remarks, which make clear that he intended to criticize Bush's intelligence -- not the troops'. From the November 1 Los Angeles Times article on the controversy:

Kerry's office said the Democratic senator had misread prepared remarks, which said: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

Kerry's explanation that his comments were a "botched joke"

As Taylor Marsh puts it brilliantly: This is what happens when a political party provides an opening for the opposition by sacrificing one of their own.