Sitting at The Tank provides an interesting view of what is going on. The Majority Report on Air America Radio is being broadcast live. Every once and a while they make comments about what is going on in the city… Fires on Park Avenue South, something like that. Jon has been watching from the news [...]

Bush Agenda Is AWOL

By Michael Cudahy, AlterNet. Posted August 30, 2004.

A former staffer for Bush I says that the RNC isn’t the best place to look for a clear sense of the GOP’s agenda.

While aides say that Bush will present a a detailed second-term agenda in his nomination speech, viewers are likely to find themselves questioning the president’s sincerity. Will we see the tax-cutting George Bush who seeks severe restrictions on stem cell research, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and who is working to replace the IRS tax code with a national consumption tax?

Or will he be someone else?

— snip

I have updated Orient Lodge to have the pictures I took during the demonstration and at The Tank.

Jon has written up a little about this at Smart Mobs

Meanwhile, there are reports that there are around 5,000 people protesting the delegates as they arrive at the convention. On my cellphone, I received the message, “R U sending txt alerts? If you can, tell people to leave midtown ASAP. NYPD gonna come heavy”

Things are heating up in the city. I took the train in and started receiving messages on my cellphone about police action at various places around the city. I headed to the Shut the Fox Up! Demonstration

Monday afternoon, I attended a panel discussion on the role of conservative books. … A lot of the talk was about Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative …Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion was about the importance of Blogs.

(Suggested by Jock Gill.)

Perhaps John Fund is right, it will be a litigious election season. It is already starting off poorly.

While neither report is necessarily fair and balanced, at least Anna doesn’t make false pretenses about being objective. By reading the blogs, you can get a more complete view of what is really going on and think critically about all the stories.

In today’s Cincinnati Post, Ann McFeatters suggests that negative campaigning works because we let it work. She goes on to say:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040830/opinion/30edit.htm

Editorial

By David Gergen
Time to face the real issues

On May 10, 1940, As Britain trembled at Hitler’s sweep across Europe, the king summoned a new prime minister to power. The next few days were a turning point, as Winston Churchill rallied his people and they valiantly held off the Nazi onslaught. Central to his leadership, as biographer Martin Gilbert points out, was his decision to form a unity government–one in which political rivals were forced to put aside old hatreds and, together, face the future. Churchill told his fellow citizens: “Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

One remembers that as our presidential campaign descends into the muck over who did what to whom during the Vietnam War. John Kerry can be justly proud of his heroism, but we have heard enough from him on the subject. And we are hearing altogether too much from George Bush’s supporters as they try to smear Kerry. The president should call off the attack dogs, and both sides should move on.

…..

Heart and minds. For starters, we desperately need a more comprehensive, bipartisan, and sustainable strategy to win this war on terrorism. So far, we have relied almost exclusively on our military power. While our troops have performed extremely well, it is now clear that our guns alone will not prevail.