Jason G. Damron, a student at Portland State University, has written this letter to President Bush, inviting him to attend a day of classes with him and get a real education. It's terrific, go read it.

Update: We do take issue with the phrase "Zionist zealotry"--we didn't catch it on our initial reading of the article. (Commenters have pointed out the two words, about five lines from up from the end--it's hardly the focus of article.)

Update: Too many off-topic comments, despite warnings. Comments closed, the last several were deleted entirely.

This is great news.

A group of former US officials is urging voters to defeat President Bush in the November election, saying his policies have isolated the United States, a spokesman for the group said on Sunday.....26 former diplomats and military officials, including appointees of former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, plan to issue an open statement on Wednesday criticizing Bush's foreign policies.

"We just came to agreement that this administration was really endangering the United States," said William Harrop, a former ambassador to Israel under the previous Bush administration.....Signers of the statement are concerned that the administration has undermined U.S. leadership in the world and alienated U.S. allies, Harrop said.

The AP is reporting that John McCain has personally told John Kerry that he would not accept the vice-presidential slot on the Democratic ticket if it were offered to him. We're glad. we want John Edwards. Or at least a true Democrat.

Tom Daschle is facing the fight of his career this November. Jerome at MyDD has all the details. We're proud to host an ad for him on TalkLeft, and hope you will go over to his website to learn about him and his campaign, and contribute. We need to take back Congress. We need Tom Daschle. If Daschle loses, we lose the Senate. It's that simple.

by TChris

"There is no better way for a political party to establish the legitimacy of its political point of view than to declare that Jesus is one of its members." Steve Duin quotes Tony Campolo to explain why Jesus joined the Republican Party in the late 1980's.

Duin notes that the Bush campaign is striving to turn churches into campaign field offices and suggests that the churches should try to cut a better deal in exchange for their support.

Why not insist on universal health care and cheaper drug prices for the elderly so middle-class Republicans can focus on immediate family needs? Why not order the administration to replace John Ashcroft at the Justice Department with Eliot Spitzer so the White House can train its guns on white-collar criminals rather than septuagenarians seeking autonomy at their own end times?

Instead, they give up their time and votes in trade for unenforceable laws banning abortion procedures and meaningless squawking about threats to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. With Jesus on their side, you'd think they could do better.

by TChris

Florida is up to its old tricks, trying to assure that potential voters in Democratic counties are disenfranchised, lest they vote for someone other than the Governor's brother.

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood has now told county supervisors that 47,000 more names are likely to be purged from the voter rolls this year, and election watchdogs fear that Florida is poised to repeat the mistakes of 2000 on a much larger scale.

Hood claims that procedures are in place to assure that voters aren't mistakenly removed from the rolls, as they were in 2000, but "the state is using the same flawed database that misidentified so many voters in 2000 and has done little to improve its accuracy."

Hood staunchly denies that politics is at play, but her critics point out that almost a third of those listed reside in the heavily Democratic South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Polls show that Democratic contender John Kerry and President Bush are running neck and neck in the state, where the President's brother Jeb is Governor.

Our local Denver news just reported that John Kerry has canceled his trip to Colorado tomorrow and Monday. He is going to go back to Washington and suspend campaigning for a few days, obviously linked to former President Reagan's death.

by TChris

Thanks to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for the next six weeks you can play Republican Survivor. In exchange for your email address, you have the weekly opportunity to watch the Republicans compete against each other before voting one off the island: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Katherine Harris, John Ashcroft, Tom Delay, or Ann Coulter.

In the Christian Science Monitor today, more about Rock Against Bush:

Protest song is back - with a vengeance. And this time the lyrics are not just antiwar. From hip-hop to punk to rock, artists are wailing against President Bush.

Some of the new songs, unsurprisingly, address the war on Iraq. But whereas protest songs during the Vietnam era were broadly antiwar in their message, the new batch of political tunes aren't narrowly focused on the recent war. It's more personal than that. Most of the music is targeted at the actions and policies of one man: George W. Bush.

Organizing the project is the leader of NOFX, Fat Mike, who also started the website punkvoter.com, now getting 500,000 unique visitors and 14 million hits a month:

"Punk rockers have been against government policy from the start, but it's never been specific," asserts Mike. "This is the first time we've been focused on one thing - getting Bush out of office."

As to the music:

Volume II of the Rock Against Bush compilation will come out Aug. 10 and includes such mainstream pop acts as No Doubt, The Foo Fighters, Green Day, and Yellowcard.

Here's a sample of Volume I which came out April 20. You can buy it here.

Update: The anti-Bush movement is spreading to designer clothing stores in New York.

CNBC has hired Al Sharpton, former Democratic presidential candidate, to provide commentary during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

We're still waiting to hear from the DNCC on our application for blogger press credentials so we can attend the convention and blog live from Boston. We've offered our blogging services to a few media organizations as well. At this point, hotel rooms are so scarce it may be that sponsorship by a network or publication that has a block of rooms will be a necessity.

Update: Fox will be generating their own blogging material for the conventions rather than using outside bloggers. We got a very polite thank you from them for our offer. And a big thanks to Roger Ailes (no, not that one!) for his vote of confidence.

Congrats to South Dakota's new Congresswoman , Democrat Stephanie Herseth, who has won the special election for former Congressman Bill Janklow's seat. Daily Kos has the details.

Remember in February when Drudge tried to break a scoop that John Kerry had attempted to bed an intern? It fizzled. Now the intern, Alexandra Polier, speaks out in a feature article in New York Magazine:

Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it.