Yeah, I know that sounds like a clich?, but it’s true. There’s a ton of stuff worth writing about. Since work commitments are keeping me busy, here’s a quick overview of our trip. I’ll be elaborating on some of the more exciting moments in the next day or two :

Since we flew on JetBlue, we got to watch Sunday’s senate debate on the plane. Sharpton’s attacks on Dean were a perfect example of why I would never vote for him. Dean’s state is 96% white and there were only 6 cabinet-level positions on his staff. Only an opportunist like Sharpton would insinuate that the lack of minorities in those six positions makes Dean some sort of closet racist. I’m glad Carol Moseley-Braun took Sharpton to task for his comments.

Checked into the hotel and watched Fox News for a few minutes. At one point when “The Beltway Boys” (not to be confused with “Good Ol’ Boys”) did a brief mention of Bush’s immigration plan, they featured footage of a bunch of people running across the border. Just in case there was any doubt about it, this settles it. Fox News is xenophobic and evil.

Went to Ground Zero. (I’ll post more about this later)

Bought a bunch of bootleg DVDs and CDs. I’m now the proud owner of Kill Bill and the mono version of Sgt. Pepper.

Hooked up with Dan Perkins (aka. Tom Tomorrow) at the awards ceremony. Overall, I thought the ceremony was more anger and less disappointment (see below). Also, I wish there had been more comedy and less music. I could do without the rapping Margaret Cho and Moby’s cover band.

If we had won, I would have said something along the lines of “George W. Bush isn’t a bad person, he’s a bad president. From the moment we all walked in here, it was obvious that the media was going to spin this as a gathering for angry America-haters. I dunno about you, but I feel like more of a depressed America-lover….” Of course, I probably would have been too nervous to ever say something that articulate.

Dan took us backstage where we met some of the presenters. When I told Al Franken how much I loved his book, his reply was “Well, it makes a great gift” before quickly leaving the room. Later I learned that Stuart Smalley is notorious for blowing people off.

Dan took us to have dinner with Michael Moore, Kathleen Glynn, and a friend/co-producer of theirs whose name I forget. Needless to say, spending a couple hours hanging out and talking about politics with my favorite political cartoonist and favorite political filmmaker was a lot more exciting than winning any award.

Dan scored us an invite to an after-party thrown by Moby. Needless to say, it was as loud, obnoxious and hipster-filled as one would expect. The highlight was that we were able to hang out with the makers of the “Child’s Pay” commercial and get to know them a little.

Overall, it was an amazing trip. I’ll write more later when I get a chance.

Via Kos, I see that the “Dean=Hitler” meme is still going strong among conservatives. The thread at the Free Republic has already been pulled, but Google’s still got it cached. For all the shit Republicans have been spewing about Democrats and MoveOn not adequately distancing themselves from the “Bush=Hitler” commercials (They wouldn’t be satisfied with anything short of “anyone who criticizes the president should be shot”), Free Repiblic’s own message about the thread is a weak “This is not the kind of thread we need.” That’s a given, but is it safe to assume that it’s the kind of thread they want?

And for those of you too lazy to click on the links, here’s the “Dean=Hitler” picture :

So I was just using Technorati to look up at what sites were linking to http://bushin30seconds.com and I saw something strange….

Could this be the conservative revenge for the unelectable Google bomb? If so, then they’re using a different technique than we leftys used. If you type “unelectable” into Google, you get Bush’s site first, followed by a ton of liberal blogs. But typing in “NAMBLA Journal” gets you a bunch of stuff about…well…NAMBLA. In fact, Bushin30Seconds.org doesn’t even come up in the top few pages of results.

So how did was this rigged/hacked to make Bushin30Seconds.org appear to have a connection with an infamous group of child molesters? This listing on Blogshares is one of the only two other citations that I could find that link Moveon’s site with NAMBLA :

The other link I could found was this RootBlog listing. Does anybody know what’s going on here??

By the way, if any conservatives are reading this, you’ll have a hard time convincing people that MoveOn.org is guilty of “political hate speech” if you link them to child molesters. You guys are just as hypocritical as anybody else (if not more). And don’t give me the “these guys aren’t affiliated with us” line. If we can’t use that argument, then you can’t either.

Dear Greg Ed,

I hope you had a fun and relaxing holiday season. We have a very busy year ahead of us making sure our entire Republican senate team is elected in November, and I am confident that with the help of your hard work we will be successful.

This week I asked the nine senate presidential candidates president to repudiate two ads MoveOn.org an editorial the New York Post had posted on its Web site that compared President Bush Howard Dean to Adolf Hitler. MoveOn.org said the ads comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler that it had posted as ones the group would consider selecting for $7 million worth of paid airtime were only one of hundreds submitted and that MoveOn.org tried to screen out ads in such poor taste. The New York Post has yet to respond to this outrage. Such ads editorials are anything but appropriate for television the internet and newspapers, and MoveOn.org the New York Post should apologize for posting them.

Moreover, a third video was also discovered comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. The video appears to be produced by one of the fifteen finalists in the MoveOn.org ad contest. Moreover, a political ad from late 2002 was also discovered comparing triple-amputee veteran and Senator Max Clelland to Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The ad appears to be produced by the Republican party. MoveOn.org The GOP should make clear they want no affiliation with anyone who would engage in these types of vile tactics, and I hope that MoveOn.org will disqualify their entry from further consideration President Bush immediately resigns and takes his whole damn administration with him, in addition to admitting their his regret over posting the initial two Hitler ads the blatant hypocrisy of his party.

Every Democrat Republican seeking his or her party’s nomination, and who stands to benefit politically from MoveOn.org’s the New York Post’s efforts to defeat President Bush Howard Dean in November through millions of dollars in advertising, should repudiate these vial attacks. So far, none have. Call talk radio stations, write letters to the editors, talk to your friends. Demand to know why none of the senate candidates Republicans have renounced these terrible ads yet.

Sincerely,

PS. Writing your signature with a mouse is a lot harder than it looks.

Wow, the year is only nine days old and I think we’ve already got a winner for the dumbest headline of the year :

Charlize Theron Loves Eating Potato Chips

And on a possibly unrelated note, try to shake this image the next time you see a copy of Maxim or Playboy on the newsstand :

I dunno about you guys, but subglandular gelatinous silicone-based implants put in place with periareolar or trans umbilical incisions are so sexy!

Those Negative Nancy’s at the Associated Press are always concentrating on the negative :

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in December to the lowest level in 14 months, but employers finished the year without many help wanted signs for the holidays, adding just 1,000 new jobs.

The 0.2 percentage point drop in the jobless rate occurred because fewer people were looking for work, the Labor Department said Friday. More than 300,000 people gave up their search for jobs and dropped out of the pool of available workers.
. . .
Weak holiday hiring by retailers was to blame for holding back job gains. Analysts were surprised by the anemic job growth because they expecting companies to add 100,000 to 150,000 jobs to their payrolls last month. But the net gain was just 1,000 jobs — which is “quite shocking,” Cheney said. “I would certainly have not expected anything resembling that.”

Why don’t they mention the positive side of these numbers? For instance, there are now 1000 more jobs now. That’s, like, a really big number and stuff. At this rate, Bush will be able to virtually wipe out his administration’s job losses in 250 years or so. Jeez, people are so impatient these days.

On Sunday, Tom and I will be flying to New York to attend Monday night’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” awards ceremonies. I don’t have any details about the ceremony, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the entertainment will include Gallagher smashing watermelons with Saddam’s face on them, the guy who can fart the national anthem, or Toby Keith singing “Iraq and I Roll”.

Seriously though, I’m pretty excited about this trip, since the only other time I’ve been to New York was in high school when I flew out there to attend a computer programming contest. (Keep your hands to yourselves, ladies. I’m taken.)

I’ve made the mistake of looking at event listings and I’ve seen two different shows that conflict with the awards show (Les Paul’s residency at a local jazz club and a “secret” They Might Be Giants show). I’m starting to think that the next time I plan a trip to New York, it should be for longer than 36 hours. Although our free time will be pretty limited, any ideas what we should do/see while we’re there?

While I’m on the subject of Bush’s immigration plan, lemme just say my initial impressions of it leave a bad taste in my mouth (figuratively, of course). Leaving aside the military stuff and my general distrust of anything that George Bush does, this feels like a subversive way to legalize something that really should be illegal.

And by that I’m not referring to immigration. Although I sympathize with the conservative “cutting in line” argument, I really think that if somebody is willing to bust their ass doing manual labor for criminally low wages, then they’ve earned their entry. Hell, they’ve worked much harder to achieve the “American Dream” than I ever have and will. Besides, if they’re already here and working, why not make them pay taxes and such?

No, what I’m afraid of is that this is a sneaky attempt to legalize a whole segment of the labor market that should be illegal. When conservatives harp about illegal workers, they always act is if it’s the workers who are the bad guys here, when the real bad guys are employers who have been working around the system of worker protections that have been getting put in place for the last hundred years. These workers are making below minimum wage, aren’t getting benefits or overtime pay, work in hazardous environments, aren’t allowed to form a union, etc. Is this what Bush wants to legalize?

Y’see it’s a simple supply/demand thing here. The only reason there are so many illegal workers over here is because there’s a tremendous demand for their services. Bush said as much when he announced the policy :

Allowing undocumented workers, who make up an unknown percentage of the approximately 8 million illegal immigrants now in the United States, to work legally here would benefit all Americans, Bush argued. He said it would make the nation’s borders more secure by allowing officials to focus more on the real threats to the country and would meet U.S. employers’ dire need for workers willing to take the low-wage, low-skill jobs unwanted by many Americans.

Of course, the reason these jobs are unwanted is because it’s nearly impossible to make a living off a low-wage job.

I’m convinced that if businesses were forced to adhere to the labor laws that are already on the books, this wouldn’t be a problem. Instead, we’ve got a domino-effect where one employer breaks the law (ie. Wal-Mart) and is able to undercut the competition so much that the business community makes the argument that the need to break the law in order to stay competitive. This is the “dire need” that Bush is referring to.

Maybe we really are living in Bizarro World. Where else would a government respond to rampant law-breaking by loosening the laws instead of enforcing them?

I just saw this question posed in a message board that piqued my interest.

For the last couple months, there has been a lot of increased talk about bringing back the draft. This problem is made worse by the fact that the current debacle in Iraq has made recruiting and reenlistment numbers in steep decline. The fact is, we’re stuck there. An early pullout from Iraq could make a bad situation much worse, but at the same time, Bush knows that if this “death a day” thing is still happening in October, he’s screwed. The only thing that would be worse for him politically would be to bring back the draft. So what’s he gonna do?

He’s gonna go to the people that all unscrupulous employers go to when they have a job that’s so shitty that “regular” Americans don’t want to do it : illegal immigrants. And let’s face it, I can’t think of a job worse than sitting in 100 degree weather waiting to be murdered by Iraqi guerrillas. With the crux of Bush’s plan that it’ll let illegal workers be here with the sponsorship of an employer, it’ll be interesting to see if the military starts up a parallel “open sponsorship” program.

Hey everybody. Our ad “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?” is now in the running for “Best Animated Ad” at Bush in 30 Seconds. Please take a moment to vote for our commercial, by clicking on the image below :

Once, you vote, don’t forget to check your email. MoveOn will send you a confirmation URL. If you don’t confirm your vote, it won’t count.

Once again, thanks for all the support. To see a much higher quality version of the ad, click on the image below :