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threatening a guy who was reporting and pelting the charter buses with eggs

Impressive multitasking! Reporting AND pelting charter buses with eggs! So intentionally causing damage to property whilst recording license plates and such ISN'T threatening, only verbally threatening is? I'm confused! My head spins!

I did search for Kenneth Gladney... I was kinda curious about your description, since most reports I read stated that he is a Democrat-leaning supporter, who happened to be selling merchandise outside a rally. Thugs? Sure. Not sure there was much proof of SEIU involvement, or that it happened "for supporting the Tea Party".

You need to find some mules with voices to nip this in the bud before it goes any further.

I think at one point in history the party affiliation of a candidate would have stood for something.

It still does. While there are notable major exceptions, they are rare enough that the media tends to frequently emphasize the difference, making it hard to miss. For example, you often see a sentence that starts something like, "Senator Specter, the pro-choice republican who chairs the judiciary committee, ..."

It's still easier to define a candidate by the exceptions to the party platform. For example, my congressman and both of my senators are all members of the same party. I check the congressional record every day, so I know they agree with the party line the vast majority of the time, but I also know what few specific issues they disagree on. It's easy enough to keep straight that they only surprise me once or twice a session.

I would recommend to any "uninformed" voter, to spend a few minutes reading the current republican platform and democratic platform, bearing in mind that they were written at the 2004 national conventions, decide which platform he agrees with more, and vote a straight ticket. The chances that he will select a candidate that deviates so far from the platform that he wouldn't have chosen that candidate are slim. Chances are that an informed straight ticket vote will make him happier with his representation than a pure random choice or letting someone else decide would.

Just informing himself enough to know what party he currently agrees with most is not ideal, but is definitely better than nothing.

If Clinton were still president I have a feeling this issue would not even be here.

The 13 stray democrats who voted for the bill did so because the republicans would make them look unpatrotic. Infact a well known congressmen from Georgia who lost both his arms in Vietnam lost his election in 2004 because he was viewed as unpatriotic due to his opposition to the Iraq war.

This is really getting insane.

Why are the republicans doing this? Elections are near and the democrats might take back one or perhaps both houses! So what do they do? Make all the headlines about national security to make the republican party in the mind of voters and to change the issue away from Iraq. Lets hope the strategy is not successfull as we don't have these morons in office for another term.

Vote democratic if you want change? Democrats are nothing are not anything by a long shot like the republicans. The democrats own website even has negative press about the bill yet the republican's is all hype and manipulative garbage. Where are you getting this idea that the democrats are jsut as extreme to the right as the republicans?

Democrats might not be perfect but are at least sane and would stop changing issues to cover terrorism and worshipping Bush when it suits the president best and might do something like plan timetables to leave Iraq and ballance the budget and save us from HMO's and high medical insurance premiums.

THe dems are people on my side while the republicans stand for the big aristocracy of the wealthy and corrupt. Dont vote for a third party that will ensure another republican victory. Yes things were much better in the Clinton years.

I went to the last paragraph and generally agree with it. That said, here is my response to the DNC...

The problem isn't that voters are stupid (thus responding better to propaganda). The problem is that the Democrats' platform is mushy goo with no distinct identity or purpose. Go see the agenda on DNC.org and tell me what kind of person really supports all those points. It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to be a Democrat these days.

Democrats want better health care but aren't willing to nationalize it; they want "better" national security but also want to pay down the debt; they want fairer elections but say nothing about making Election Day a federally-recognized holiday (forcing companies to pay overtime for workers who can't reach the polls between 8-5pm); they love the troops but can't acknowledge the atrocities the troops are committing in our names; they love Social Security but don't care about unemployment insurance or welfare; they love higher education but still think we should all pay individually for it.

It's a platform that says essentially: we want to help America, and we're convinced that we can do so without incurring much more taxation or changing much about how we go about doing things. On foreign policy we are Republicans except for a few quibbles; on domestic policy we are Republicans except we don't cater to the Christian Right in name or deed (prayer NOT in schools, abortion legal, homosexuality ignored) and we want minor tweaks to medical financing and some minor environmental legislation. In other words, the DNC is still Diet GOP.

Here's a real platform:

1) Make impeachment functionally easier via Constitutional amendment. (And pass the Equal Rights Amendment already.) Allow criminal charges against both elected representatives and appointed officials for actions that violate the law while in office (such as passing FDA approval and then taking a position on the board of a company that benefitted directly from that approval (time-shifted bribery); or deliberately disregarding the FISA statute for mass wiretaps).

2) Make Election Day TWO days and make them both federal holidays. Hype them up like July 4. (We can celebrate ancient military victories over BBQ, but we can't vote without making special arrangements at work?) Also make any US citizen anywhere in the world eligible to vote regardless of past criminal history; when millions of people can't vote on the very issues that stripped them of their right to vote, democracy is broken.

3) Roll Social Security payroll taxes in with both income and unearned income taxes and lift the $85K ceiling on it already. Acknowledge that SSA is here to stay, and we ALL pay for it (even those wealthy investors technically earning "nothing"), and it helps everybody; roll welfare and unemployment into SSA. Begin sending SSA checks (even if only $15/mo) to everyone over 18. Pull the retirement age back down to 60.

4) Put an end to the American Empire: begin a serious phased withdrawal of US troops at all overseas bases. Prepare to close many (but not necessarily all) of the bases not on USA soil. Acknowledge that with the Cold War over the international US military is now a diplomatic liability. Relocate the personnel to USA bases and use the money saved for a general pay increase.

5) Begin denying funding for many military boondoggles (especially jets). Use the money saved (which is VAST) to increase public school teacher and administrator pay 2X make them more in line with corporate pay standards. (Did you know that a school superintendent with 2000 white-collar report-to's makes only about $80K? In corporations you'd have to pay at least $150K for a manager at that level.)

6) Increase funding for both science research and science education. Vastly increase funding for EPA to hire real engineers. (EPA is notorious for having bureaucrats close down businesses based on blatantly faulty science reports; more

The Internet is also a better source of what I call controlled bias, where the bias is strong and clear enough that you can easily take it into account by reading something clearly biased the other way. For example, reading both rnc.org and dnc.org will provide a better picture than a news anchor who is trying (but invariably failing) to be neutral.

The closer to the horse's mouth, the better. english.aljazeera.net is great for an Arabic perspective. I get sports news directly from my teams' web sites. I get entertainment news directly from local venues' mailing lists. I read and sometimes watch the video of the white house press briefings.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it isn't. In the half hour I would have wasted waiting for the one story in the newscast that interests me, I can use my laptop to google the subject from the teaser commercials and get to the other news I want more quickly, while I am watching a show I like.

Colaborative effort to spread misinformation and confuse lies? I thought that had already been done: http://www.dnc.org/ ?

take out dem anti-gun, UN pussy, liberal hippies!

-I'm a Republican but i do not represent the Republican party

...when you can read all of the articles for free HERE days before they are posted at Salon?

It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire ... While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.

For more examples see here and here and here and here.

just take a look at who relies on character assassination in the pursuit of political goals, and who doesn't

So, you're saying that the Clinton impeachment circus wasn't a GOP attempt at character assasination? Gimme a break - neither major party plays nice. If the GOP hadn't blown that issue WAY out of proportion, we wouldn't have spent the last 94 days finding out how much more conservative Dubya is than his handlers led us to believe last year.