(h/t Ricardo)

Transcript (courtesy of Salt Lake Tribune):

A patriot is a person who loves his or her country.

Who among you loves your country so much that you have come here today to raise your voice out of deep concern for our nation - and for our world?

And who among you loves your country so much that you insist that our nation's leaders tell us the truth? Let's hear it: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let no one deny we are patriots. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.
Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.

Read on...

AGITPROP: The Understander...and don't miss the Wingnut Roundup!

The Reaction: This Canadian blog examines the attack on America's free press

Calling All Wingnuts: Always entertaining. Recordings of Mike Stark's never-ending battle against the airwave wingers

Drive Democracy: George Lakoff's new book, "Whose Freedom," addresses the fundamental fight -- the radical conservative idea of freedom as obedience and unaccountable authority and the progressive idea of freedom as responsibility and opportunity.

David E’s Fablog: Heaven Knows Mr. Obama

Shakespeare's Sister: A Tale of Two Pictures

The Hill: How some lawmakers are sabotaging the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and why they are wrong.

My run-in with a Fundy...We need never bow to God's bullies. After reading these two items, I thought it was important to support this soldier in the fight against the AmTaliban .

Online NewsHour: Offered a timid examination of the controversy surrounding the use of electronic voting machines. Serious problems were noted but they didn't mention this or this.

Workbench: Andrew Breitbart is getting huge traffic and raking in lotsa ad $ because former partner Drudge links to his copies of AP and Reuters news stories. Don't generate any click-thru cash for him. Avoid Brietbart.com links.

The Impolitic: White House announces its new al Qaeda chief in Iraq

IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE: by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935--"Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist...Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?" (thnx to reader Cynthia)

Gen. George Joulwan on Rumsfeld
The General came on "The Situation Room," and talked about the criticisms being heaped on Rumsfeld's handling of the military and the war. He says that the military leaders are very frustrated with Rummy and believes they will begin to speak out. That's something I'll believe when I see it.
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They highlighted Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold's recent article in TIME magazine:

"Why Iraq was a mistake"

"Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war.

Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort....read on"

Demagogue

Today's Daily Darfur is up on the coalition blog.

On an unrelated note, a quick Factiva search reveals that, in the last month, there have been 6179 media reports mentioning Terri Schiavo.

There have been 942 mentioning Darfur.

For every one article mentioning Darfur, there are been 6.5 mentioning Schiavo despite the fact that her death is just 1/ the number of deaths occuring every month in Darfur.

Moon: Discard Democracy   Where in Washington, D.C. is Sun Myung Moon?

The Washington Times owner's most recent of many consistent entreaties to toss democracy on the scrap-heap along with Communism:

Translation:

1. Ever since the Garden of Eden, mankind has pursued the wrong relationships and forms of government.
2. Human beings are loyal to brothers. Instead, they should be bowing down to the True Parents.
3. The result of their sinful ways is democracy.
4. But the proper and ultimate relationship, Moon says, is sworn obedience to parents. (He calls himself the True Father.) 10,000th the number of deaths occuring every month in Darfur.