Moving on out of California, which had a fairly small number of its members break ranks to vote with the Republicans in favor of George W. Bush’s no-strings-attached money for the continued fighting in and occupation of Iraq, we now go to the Colorado Democrats, who didn’t come out looking so good.

Colorado Democrats were more like the Democrats of Alabama or Arizona when it came to voting for the war. Half of the Democrats representing Colorado in the United States House of Representatives voted against the Republican plan to keep on waging war in Iraq exactly as Bush plans. The Democrats who voted against continuing the Iraq Occupation without limitation were Diane DeGette and Ed Perlmutter.

Unfortunately, the other 50 percent of Colorado Democrats in the House of Representatives voted to give George W. Bush exactly what he wanted for Iraq. The Colorado Democrats who voted along with the Republicans to follow Bush’s lead in Iraq were John Salazar and Mark Udall.

Bad news for Colorado Democrats: Mark Udall wants to be the Democratic nominee for United States Senate in 2008. Pay attention to the details when it comes to Congressman Udall. So far, in our index of votes on progressive legislation in the House, Mark Udall only earns a 41 percent positive rating out of a possible 100. It seems that, if you’re a Democrat who has progressive values, you just can’t count on Mark Udall to represent you very well.

Let me just put it this way: If I were a Colorado Democrat, I would not support Mark Udall’s campaign for United States Senate in 2008.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party may be the biggest players on the block when it comes to the 2008 elections, but they’re not the only players. Unity08 is a media darling, proclaiming its interest in fixing all the problems besetting this nation by electing its own candidate, although it stridently refuses to develop its own platform describing how it will, you know, fix all the problems besetting this nation. It just will, OK? Unity08 suffers from the additional problem of shady-looking funding from hedge fund operators, venture capitalists, and zero-interest payback-optional loans.

Similarly, the Green Party has suffered an image problem since it came out that its own candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania was the only non-Republican contributor to Green candidate Carl Romanelli’s campaign. This kind of information makes the Green Party look like a puppet of the Republicans. However, when you look at individual leaders of the Green Party, it’s easy to find a lot of people who have a solid history of activism and an earnest desire to make this country a better, fairer, more just place to live in.

Take Rebecca Rotzler, for instance. As a SUNY New Paltz student, she headed up Students for a Free Tibet before becoming part of a Green Party team that ruffled a few feathers while running the New Paltz city government. Rotzler has recently been involved with anti-war, anti-Bush and sort-of-socialist group World Can’t Wait and helped organize that recent Impeach Bush summit in New York City you may have read about. Rotzler got just 8 votes out of a total of 122 in an exploratory Green Presidential instant runoff poll in January of this year, but those who appreciate her work feel strongly enough that they’ve started up a website to Draft Rotzler for President in 2008.

This is the time in the election cycle when we’re supposed to be looking around and considering our alternatives, right? Why not cast that net as widely as possible? If you’re looking for a candidate to articulate values on the left side of the progressive political spectrum, follow the links above to check Rotzler’s record out (read also this profile). If you’d like to get in touch with Rotzler or the Draft Rotzler campaign, either with questions or offers of assistance, head over here.

They’ve hidden it now, but if you poke around long enough you can still find the full text of Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal article on Tinky Winky, entitled “PARENTS ALERT . . . PARENTS ALERT: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet”:

The sexual preference of Tinky Winky, the largest of the four Teletubbies characters on the series that airs in America on PBS stations, has been the subject of debate since the series premiered in England in 1997. The character, whose voice is obviously that of a boy, has been found carrying a red purse in many episodes and has become a favorite character among gay groups worldwide.

Now, further evidence that the creators of the series intend for Tinky Winky to be a gay role model have surfaced. He is purple — the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle — the gay-pride symbol.

Furthering Tinky’s “outing” was a recent Washington Post editorial that cast the character’s photo opposite that of Ellen DeGeneres in an “In/Out” column. This implies that Ellen is “out” as the chief national gay representative, while Tinky Winky is the trendy “in” celebrity.

These subtle depictions are no doubt intentional and parents are warned to be alert to these elements of the series. However, many families are allowing the series to entertain their children. In the January 10 Blockbuster “Hit List” of the top-ten selling videos, two Teletubbies titles appeared on the list. The itsy bitsy Entertainment Company will release interactive Teletubbies dolls in March.

Jerry Falwell is freshly dead, and the Teletubbies are long out of production, so you might think the fundamentalist Christians would have moved on from this bizarre contention.

You’d be wrong.

Jim Brown and Jody Brown of OneNewsNow, the wire service arm of the American Family Association, have written an article released today in which they cite the opinion of Allan Carlson of the international fundamentalist organization World Congress of Families:

An American pro-family leader says the Polish government’s decision to look into whether the children’s show Teletubbies contains homosexual propaganda is a “legitimate inquiry.” Dr. Allan Carlson says it’s just the latest attempt by the conservative government in Warsaw to stamp out what it views as homosexual propaganda….

Media reaction notwithstanding, family advocate Dr. Allan Carlson says the Polish government is legitimately trying to protect children — what any good government should be doing. Carlson is secretary of the World Congress of Families, a large international pro-family gathering that was held earlier this month in Warsaw, Poland.

“One treads very carefully here because … the late Jerry Falwell got himself in great trouble [when he] was ridiculed for suggesting that ‘Tinky Winky’ might have been a homosexual Teletubby,” Carlson notes. “Even with that said though, I don’t think anyone doubts that the creators of Tinky Winky intentionally were using stereotypes regarding homosexuality in creating this character. That’s not only a surmise, I think they’ve essentially admitted it.”

Carlson believes Poland is asking the right questions, and “erring on the side of protecting children from harmful propaganda generated by the sexual revolution.” As the family advocate points out, propaganda can take many forms.

“Propaganda aimed at children works to reinforce some stereotypes [while] at the same time breaking down legitimate concerns that parents might have, by kind of sneaking the propaganda in under their nose,” he explains.

The producers of Teletubbies have actually very specifically denied that Tinky Winky is gay:

A spokesman for Itsy Bitsy Entertainment Co., who licenses the characters in the United States, said it was just a magic bag. “The fact that he carries a magic bag doesn’t make him a homosexual. It’s a children’s show, folks. To think we would be putting sexual innuendo in a children’s show is kind of outlandish,” he added.

“To out a Teletubby in a pre-school show is kind of sad on his part. I really find it absurd and kind of offensive.”

A BBC spokeswoman said: “This is not the first time that people have read symbolism into a children’s TV programme and it probably won’t be the last.

“As far as we are concerned Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag.”

Plus, there’s the whole lack of genitalia thingy. How can a sexless creature possibly be gay?

Someone should gently explain to Carlson, OneNewsNow, and the American Family Association that there are affinity groups out there for people who find themselves obsessively thinking about the sexual behavior of fuzzy fictional costumed characters. Who’d have thought that so many fundamentalists would turn out to be Furries?

Most of the reporting on the newly released Global Peace Index focus on how poorly the United States performed: 96th out of 121 nations. There are some nations that got an even worse ranking in the Global Peace Index than the USA, however. For citizens of the USA, three of those nations in particular are worthy of note.

These dramatically unpeaceful nations deserve special attention because they have an especially close relationship with the government of the United States, receiving weapons, funds, and dangerous technology. In our growing list of reasons to elect a progressive President in 2008, the unpeaceful ranking of each one of these three nations merits its own reason to support a progressive candidate for President.

1. India ranked 109th out of 121. We tend to think of India as the nation of Mohandas K. Gandhi, but the truth is a lot less pretty. India ranks in the Global Peace Index as even less peaceful than the brutal dictatorship of Myanmar. India has recently sent military supplies to Iran, and has built its own arsenal of nuclear weapons. In spite of the aggressive stance taken by India, the American White House and Congress recently agreed to send India nuclear technology and supplies that can be used to create more nuclear weapons.

2. Israel is ranked in the Global Peace Index as 119th out of 121 nations. The reasons are many. Some of Israel’s military activities take part as legitimate self-defense, but many of its activities are agressive and reckless far beyond the bounds of legitimate response to the aggression of its foes. The United States has offered uncritical support of Israel’s militant behavior. Progressives don’t call for all American support for Israel to end, but they do call for an appropriate, selective reduction in American support for Israel in order to pressure the Israeli government to abandon its provocative and destabilizing tactics.

3. Iraq is ranked as the least peaceful nation of all the nations listed on the Global Peace Index. Some of the responsibility for the violence in Iraq lays at the feet of insurgents and non-government militia. However, the current bloodshed throughout Iraq was provoked by the American invasion and occupation, and is perpetuated by American support for elements in Iraq that are known to engage in genocidal violence.

(Sources: Global Peace Index, 2007, Congressman Ed Markey, November 14, 2006; Huffington Post, March 3, 2006)

You may have read in the newspapers today that the United States has received a very low ranking on something called the Global Peace Index, a new measurement put together by a consortium of of peace institutes. You may have read that the United States just one slot above Iran, and even worse than Yemen.

But what about the other 121 nations that were ranked? The chances are that you haven’t had a look at how they scored, and how they compared to the United States. That’s due to the increasingly apparent limitations of the newspaper format for reporting the news.

Reuters released an article about the Global Peace Index yesterday, which was printed in many newspapers around the world this morning. However, there just wasn’t room enough in the Reuters article to print the scores of all 121 nations evaluated. In a newspaper, space is limited, after all. So, most people came away from the Reuters article knowing just a little bit about the results of the Global Peace Index, but not enough to give it the kind of international meaning for which it was designed.

Online, the restrictions of space that so roughly cut back the information released in a newspaper don’t apply. We can publish as much information as we please, as fast as we can get it out. So, at the end of this article you will see the full Global Peace Index, as released on the new Vision of Humanity web site. The higher the number, the less peaceful the nation is.

As you can see, the United States did in fact earn a ranking as one of the least peaceful nations on earth That’s yet another excellent reason to vote for a progressive President in 2008. Progressives encourage concrete work toward peace, whereas right wingers just pay lip service to peace when it’s convenient for them to do so.

1 Norway - 2 New Zealand - 3 Denmark - 4 Ireland
5 Japan - 6 Finland - 7 Sweden - 8 Canada - 9 Portugal
10 Austria - 11 Belgium - 12 Germany - 13 Czech Republic
14 Switzerland - 15 Slovenia - 16 Chile - 17 Slovakia
18 Hungary - 19 Bhutan - 20 Netherlands - 21 Spain
22 Oman - 23 Hong Kong - 24 Uruguay - 25 Australia

26 Romania - 27 Poland - 28 Estonia - 29 Singapore
30 Qatar - 31 Costa Rica - 32 South Korea - 33 Italy
34 France - 35 Vietnam - 36 Taiwan - 37 Malaysia
38 United Arab Emirates - 39 Tunisia - 40 Ghana - 41 Madagascar
42 Botswana - 43 Lithuania - 44 Greece - 45 Panama
46 Kuwait - 47 Latvia - 48 Morocco - 49 United Kingdom - 50 Mozambique

51 Cyprus - 52 Argentina - 53 Zambia - 54 Bulgaria
55 Paraguay - 56 Gabon - 57 Tanzania - 58 Libya
59 Cuba - 60 China - 61 Kazakhstan - 62 Bahrain
63 Jordan - 64 Namibia - 65 Senegal - 66 Nicaragua
67 Croatia - 68 Malawi - 69 Bolivia - 70 Peru
71 Equatorial Guinea - 72 Moldova - 73 Egypt
74 Dominican Republic - 75 Bosnia and Hercegovina

76 Cameroon - 77 Syria - 78 Indonesia - 79 Mexico
80 Ukraine - 81 Jamaica - 82 Macedonia - 83 Brazil
84 Serbia - 85 Cambodia - 86 Bangladesh - 87 Ecuador
88 Papua New Guinea - 89 El Salvador - 90 Saudi Arabia - 91 Kenya
92 Turkey - 93 Guatemala - 94 Trinidad and Tobago - 95 Yemen
96 United States of America - 97 Iran - 98 Honduras - 99 South Africa
100 Philippines

101 Azerbaijan - 102 Venezuela - 103 Ethiopia - 104 Uganda
105 Thailand - 106 Zimbabwe - 107 Algeria - 108 Myanmar
109 India - 110 Uzbekistan - 111 Sri Lanka - 112 Angola
113 Cote d’ Ivoire - 114 Lebanon - 115 Pakistan - 116 Colombia
117 Nigeria - 118 Russia - 119 Israel - 120 Sudan
121 Iraq

(Source: Global Peace Index, 2007)

Unity08 has a stated goal of registering 10 million delegates by July 1, 2008 to participate in the world’s supposed first-ever online secure national presidential nomination. That’s just one year, one month and one day (397 days in all) from today.

Unity08 has two classes of participants, members (who have the privilege of posting on the Unity08 message boards) and delegates (who get to vote in the presidential nomination next year). Every delegate is also a member, but not every member is a delegate. This means that the number of registered members provides the upper limit of the number of delegates registered to vote in the online election next July. By tracking changes in the registration of members, and making the generous assumption that every new member is also a new delegate, we can see how close or how far Unity08 is from reaching its stated goal of 10 million delegates by July 1, 2008.

As of this morning, May 31 2007, the highest registered member number is 40,067. That’s just four tenths of one percent of the way to Unity08’s goal.

By looking at the rate of delegate recruitment — the number of new delegates per day, we can see whether Unity08 is recruiting delegates fast enough to reach its ten million delegate goal by next July. The graph below shows Unity08’s daily delegate recruitment rate from March until now (if, again, we make the generous assumption that each new member is also signed up to be a delegate):

Before May 21, I had been taking measurements about once a week. Since then, I’ve been taking daily measurements, resulting in the appearance of greater fluctuation during that time. Between this time yesterday and this time today, Unity08 added 84 new delegates. Over the past ten days, Unity08’s delegate recruitment rate averaged out to 124 delegates per day.

If this rate of 124 delegates per day is maintained over the remaining 397 days Unity08 has to reach its goal, Unity08 will obtain at the very most 89,295 delegates — 9 tenths of one percent of its recruitment goal of 10,000,000 delegates — by July 1, 2008.

In order for Unity08 to actually reach its goal of recruiting 10 million delegates by July 1, 2008, its recruitment rate will have to change by a large amount — a very large amount. In order to succeed, Unity 08 will need to recruit 25,088 delegates each and every day starting today. And for every day that Unity08 fails to reach that recruitment rate, its needed recruitment rate in the time remaining will rise ever more. Unity08’s needed recruitment rate is already 1,000 delegates per day higher than it was just two weeks ago.

The arranged appearances by Sam Waterston on TV aren’t doing the trick. Something else will have to come along if Unity08 doesn’t want to bite reality’s dust.

Waging war against a nation wrecks lives. Over 2 million Iraqis are now refugees. Most of them are innocent civilians. Many of them actively helped the U.S. government. But the Associated Press reminds us that the United States has accepted fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees into the United States. The Bush administration has just announced it will accept a larger number — 7,000.

But 7,000 isn’t enough. The United States has wrecked more than 7,000 lives. We should accept more than 7,000 refugees. We should accept every single Iraqi who applies for asylum and who is not a security risk. We’ve made their home unlivable, and we have the room here, so we should accept responsibility and accept as many new American citizens as it takes.

I just finished painting Canada, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, England, Belgium, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe today. It’s really fun — you ought to give it a try.

My offer from yesterday still stands — if you have a school with a blacktop on which you’d like to paint the world, send me an e-mail with your school name and address. The offer stands until this Friday, and I’ll send out two on Saturday… if anybody actually takes me up on the offer! Come on — help the kids around you learn a little geography beyond their current horizons. And yeah, have some fun with a paintbrush, too.

Do you think Jesus was well-hung or not? Why?

It has been two and a half years now since George W. Bush was re-elected as President of the United States of America. In the aftermath of the 2004 election, President Bush said he was going to work to overcome the strong divisions between Americans that had grown during his first term in office. Bush said that he was going to reach out to the people who voted against him, and offer a government under which all Americans could unite.

“A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation,” Bush said. “We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”

I was feeling awfully sore at Bush and the Republicans, but I decided that, if the right wing would really offer a platform of unity, it might be worthwhile to support it, for the sake of the country. For such a platform, I suggested the following actions as a gesture with which Bush could regain the trust of American progressives:

I was reading Freewayblogger today, who was reflecting on the decision by Cindy Sheehan to head home out of exhaustion and renounce, for the time being, her life of activism. I’ve read a fair number of eulogies delivered on the grand meaning of the loss of Sheehan’s leadership, but the Freewayblogger concludes, I think, the opposite: Sheehan wasn’t essential, and she shouldn’t ever have been taken for essential. Following movement leaders isn’t essential, and neither is forming big organizations, or writing manifestos with 15-point plans. All that matters is that a lot of people get off their asses and each do something. The something that other people engage in may not be your idea of something:

When I started doing this, I didn’t think it’d take more than a couple hundred signs, at most, for people to “get it”: the simple, obvious and irrefutable fact that when you put a sign on a freeway, a HELL of a lot of people read it. With 200,000 people seeing the same sign, day after day for weeks, it seemed reasonable that at least one of them would say to themselves, “Hey! I could do that!” and that the ball would just start rolling from there. Didn’t Happen. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it, and frankly still confounds me.

But if you can find your niche, don’t wait for it to be the most popular thing to do:

The reason I’m bringing this up is to emphasize the power that one person can have when they decide on a plan of action and then just Do It. Don’t get together with friends, don’t form a group and for God’s sakes, don’t hold another meeting. Figure out the most useful thing you can do with the resources you have and then Just Do It.

Head out of committee. Stick your head up in the air and look for an opportunity. Grab it.

These messages could be part of some stupid slick bootstraps advertisement in Fortune magazine. But take it literally for a minute. Look up for a second. What are the opportunities to shake things up where you are right now? What can you get away with?

Republican presidential candidate James Gilmore is getting scared. He’s tried to be faithful to the core beliefs of the Religious Right: That foreigners and evildoers threaten to kill us and disintegrate American society, that traditional values are threatened by the liberties of the Bill of Rights, and that global warming is nowhere near as serious a threat as a progressive tax system.

Still, James Gilmore (his campaign wants you to call him Jim) has not surged in the polls. It’s a confusing circumstance, for a politician who has repeatedly gained power in the past by pandering to right wing zealotry.

So now, James Gilmore has been reduced to pleading. In the Pueblo Chieftan, Gilmore begs for the Religious Right to come to his rescue, warning, “I still believe the faith community could play a role, but . . . they better decide pretty soon, because the three front-runners . . . will become the de facto field unless the conservatives in this country get involved.”

On his own campaign web site, Gilmore searches for ideological moorings as he asks for more right wing support. “Are Republican conservatives going to have a candidate to carry our banner in this process? Or, are we going to be sitting on the sidelines while the GOP nominee is chosen? I believe that unless we begin to work together soon to unite behind a consistent conservative candidate who can speak for us on national security, economic security and traditional family issues, we have little chance of having a Republican nominee who shares our values.”

James Gilmore has noticed something rather striking in the dynamic of the 2008 presidential election. In spite of a lot of hype about the importance of right wing so-called “values voters”, the American public, including most Republican voters, just doesn’t seem very interested in hearing all the old right wing ideological babbling that has traditionally been the fuel for Republican politics. America has tried the right wing version of reality for years, and found that it brings division, debt, and destruction.

That shift in American voters’ attitudes leaves James Gilmore feeling confused as he flails, ever more vainly, in search of a Christian fundamentalist bandwagon that he can ride into the White House. For us, the disillusionment of American voters with the faith-based nationalist jingoism of the Republican Party only brings additional clarity to the conclusion that 2008 is the year to elect a progressive President.

(Sources: Pueblo Chieftan, May 26, 2007; GilmoreForPresident.com)

There was bad news from the Democrats in Alabama and Arizona last week. In those states, 50 percent of the Democratic Party delegation to the House of Representatives voted in favor of the legislation to provide George W. Bush billions of dollars in money for the war in Iraq - no questions asked.

Things look more sunny over in California. 33 Democrats from the California are in the U.S. House of Representatives. Out of those 33, only the four voted in favor of the bill to keep funding the Iraq War with no strings attached.

The following are the four Democrats who voted with the Republicans in Congress in order to help George W. Bush prolong the American presence in Iraq:

Joseph Baca of California
Dennis Cardoza of California
James Costa of California
Susan Davis of California

These four pro-war Democrats give the California Democratic delegation to the House a 12.1 percent pro war score, and an 87.9 percent antiwar score.

It’s not a perfect record for California Democrats, but it’s a good place to start. A good next step would be for the constituents of Joe Baca, Dennis Cardoza, Jim Costa and Susan Davis to find Democratic primary challengers, so that the Democrats in those districts can get more worthy representation. California Democrats in the U.S. House should be on notice that they risk losing their party’s nomination when they vote in favor of George W. Bush’s plans for more war.

You know, I’ve written in the past about my disappointment with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which managed through the first six years of the Bush administration to preserve its nominal status as an organization but failed to actually do much of anything. There was a lamely plausible excuse for this: with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, any legislation the CPC proposed might have been doomed to failure. The CPC could still have tried, could still have used the megaphone of congressional membership to make a stink, could still have arranged press conferences, could still have arranged hearings, could have, could have, could have, but didn’t.

At least back then the Congressional Progressive Caucus had an excuse. Now, the Democratic Party is in the majority in the House and Senate. So there’s no excuse. Go ahead and visit the Congressional Progressive Caucus homepage, look at it, and ask yourself why the CPC has only made two press releases this year, and none at all for the past two and a half months. Why is the CPC Events Gallery completely blank?

This is similar to the question I’ve been asking myself about Mike Gravel, who has by dint of his status as a presidential candidate gained the potential attention of a whole lot of people, but who (until yesterday) had let his website shrivel and hid press releases dry up, because, because… why was that again? It’s great to see that Gravel’s staff is using his website again to promote his campaign. I’d like to see the Congressional Progressive Caucus follow suit and use its attention-grabbing potential to actually grab attention, affect the course of debate, change people’s assumptions, and, you know, promote progressive policy change! Wild and crazy junk like that.