On Wednesday, January 23 John Edwards was a guest on Keith Olbermann's program, Countdown.  KO played clips of Clinton and Obama talking about party unity.  Then after the setup he asked Edwards to react and provide his own viewpoint.

The following is an excerpt from the transcript of that show.  I have added emphasis.

We are in the midst of our "democratic" candidate nomination process.  There has been a great deal of excitement concerning the methods used by the various states and many are not satisfied with the process.  We have heard about real or imagined problems with machinery, counting, intimidation, suppression, registration, locking doors, and we have had lawsuits, media bias, and money issues.  There is more, but what I have listed is enough.  The founder of this blog has summarized our predicament well.  He said:

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman writes about the reactions of the presidential candidates to the impending recession.  

He also aims a little sarcasm at the MSM, by asking them to stop analyzing "tone of voice" and "facial expressions" and analyze "economic policy" instead

I have confessed many times here that I don’t understand economics so I can’t make any judgments about Krugman’s observations, but here and there are a few sentences that I do understand.

From time to time Gallup tries to measure the mood of the country.  They ask if we are satisfied with the direction of the nation.  They ask this question several times a year, sometimes monthly, sometimes more, sometimes less.  I have summarized each year’s data from 1992 through 2007.

I have been watching Mike Huckabee and seeing the MSM’s lack of reaction to his fundamentalist background, and reading about House Resolution 888 which is trying to establish an ancient untruth – that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles.  I am not a Christian but I was raised a Southern Baptist and I graduated from Baylor University many years ago.  I have many friends, some of whom are now dead, who became Baptist preachers throughout the South.  I live in the heart of fundamentalist Texas only a few miles from the Creationist Evidence Museum.  My county puts on a passion play each year with the local citizens playing the roles.  I have been immersed in this irrationality longer than most of you have been alive.  

I have confessed many times on this blog that I just don't get economics, and I am now beginning to think nobody does.  A current case in point that is driving me crazy is the new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan, who the book jacket identifies as an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University.  

His thesis is that ignorant, sometimes willfully ignorant, and irrational citizens of the United States are not fit to run our democracy and that the control of policy should be left to elected representatives, but, even better, to free markets.  He thinks that America would operate better if markets did their work freely.

As if we needed another reason to win the White House in 2008, think about this: on Memorial Day 2009, there will be a rededication of the Lincoln Memorial.  The current plan calls for the 44th President of the United States to speak at the Memorial on the 87th anniversary of its original dedication in 1922.

Let us suppose we elect a Democratic President in 2008 and one of his/her positions is that he/she is against gay marriage, but for civil unions.  Some questions arise.

How will civil unions be made legal?  Will there be a Federal law passed?  What are the probabilities it will pass by 2010? 2020? 2050?

When civil unions do become law, how will we implement them?

Because the whole basis for not permitting same sex marriages is that God has reserved marriage for a man and a woman will the words relating to marriage become reserved as well?  In all the statutes and regulations that exist around the country will we have to go into the text and add new words for civil unions wherever "marriage, marry, married, wed, wedding, wedded, etc." are used?  Sometimes, I think, marriage is described as being a "union."  That could be confusing.

When George W. Bush ran for President I knew he was a very dangerous man.  Before I discovered Daily Kos I followed TPM.  I wrote a rant to Josh Marshall during the 2000 campaign in which I said that Bush "would tell any lie and break law to get what he wants."  Mr. Marshall responded tersely, "Hmmmmm, interesting."  I might have gotten the number of "m’s" wrong.  It was frustrating to me because I knew some of Bush’s history and some of his friends and both were bad.  But what are you gonna do?

When Al Gore chose Joseph Lieberman to join him on the Democratic ticket as a candidate for Vice President, it was okay with me.  I liked Gore, still do, and I figured he would choose a good man to run with him.  I didn’t have an opinion about Lieberman one way or the other, and frankly during the campaign I paid little attention to him.  But I don’t like him today and I think Al Gore made a mistake.  I wonder what Al Gore thinks?  I don’t remember anybody at the time who was critical of Lieberman except some Republicans, so I discounted them of course.

I think that Nancy Pelosi has saved George Bush's job and enabled him to improve his place in history, although he will always be regarded as an extreme ideologue and a fool.  But she did it, not because she gives a damn about George W. Bush, but because she cares about America.

Long before she became Speaker-to-be, Nancy Pelosi privately announced that she would not impeach Bush, and thus gave Poppa Bush the signal that he had better take control of his stupid son.  Thus was born the Iraq Study Group.  

The implicit understanding that Nancy Pelosi, long may she reign, gave to Poppa Bush and to the rest of the powers behind the throne in Washington DC was that if they would take charge and put the country on the right path, she would leave the Chief Evildoer alone.  But, and here she proves that she carries the biggest hammer in town, if they refused to reign the Spoiled Child in, she would impeach his sorry ass.

The furor over Kerry's blunder is typical of politics as usual.  The battle is over controlling the national dialogue.  Right now the R's and the MSM are in control, as they usually are.  But this is the perfect time for the blogoshpere to burst through and become the Big Dog.  But I don't know how to do it.  Whenever I think about this kind of situation I just can't come up with the answer.  We know we have plenty of favorable topics to have on the front-burner:  Iraq in general, the order from the Iraqi govt that made our troops leave Sadr City, the missing billions, the racism and criminal record of George Allen, the list is long.  The fund-raising and organizational prowess of the blogosphere is impressive and none more so than Dkos.  I know that someone out there on Dkos has an idea that will turn the political world on its ear and we will get the conversation turned in our favor.  

Thirty-five years ago or so Fortune Magazine had a cover story about the "First Computer Fraud."  An insurance company in California (Equity Funding, I think) was accused of computer fraud.  What was really happening was several of the executives of the company were having weekend meetings in which they would manually create false applications for insurance and then shepherd them through the policy issue process and then steal commission advances.  The computer was simply an innocent bystander.  I think a similar thing has happened with voting machines.  The makers of such machines have done such terrible work, perhaps even criminal work, that they have given the machines a bad name -- when the actual problem is people.

John Danforth has a new book out in which he says that the Republican party has been taken over by the religious right.  He says a lot of things that are correct and I was interested in hearing his interview with Al Franken on today's Al Franken Show.  Al handled himself very well and he kept the pressure on Danforth.  

Al asked some pointed questions trying to get Danforth to admit that the Republican Party and the current administration are to blame for the bitterness that is tearing our nation apart.  Danforth, who says that we have to be humble and work together just could not walk his talk.

The Republicans are always saying that the Democrats don't have any new ideas, and we are always saying, "Oh yes we do."  Well, a friend asked me to name some of them.  I did not score very well on his test.

I made my pile, such as it is, helping American business switch from manual operations to computerized operations.  As part of that work we were coming up with new ideas all the time.  Whenever a business was computerized, the technology made many things possible for the first time.  Some good some bad, of course, but new nevertheless.

What if the Democrats win the House this November?  What will happen?  Will we reverse any laws that are currently on the books?  Will we pass some tax increases?  Will we pass a new stem cell bill?  Will we impeach Bush and/or Cheney?  Will we withdraw from Iraq?  Will we investigate... gosh there is so much to investigate.  Will we call for the removal of any Bush appointees by issuing Resolutions?  Will we pass new redistricting rules?  Will We pass new laws about voting machines?  Will we reopen the 2004 election?  Will we open Medicare to all citizens?  Will we pass a new Constitutional amendment to guarantee freedom of speech for scientists no matter where they work?  Come on, make some predictions.  I will save them and we'll see how we did in a couple of years.

I feel overwhelmed with political parties.  They are on the evening news, the Sunday talks, the blogs... There is a constant din about good strategy, bad tactics, financing, framing, etc.  The public, according to Gallup, has either "a great deal or quite a lot" of confidence in the three branches like this:  Presidency 33%, SCOTUS 40%, and Congress 19%.  Are they really talking more about parties than the three branches?  Don't parties dominate all three, even SCOTUS?  I suppose that parties were good for something in the early days, but I don't think they are making a net positive contribution to America.  Am I wrong?  What good are they?

On October 31, 1992, as reported in the Los Angeles Times Pope John Paul II warned the world, subtly, that the Church still holds the hammer. See the following excerpts.  The first is about Galileo and the second is about when life begins.  The Pope in the first case carefully staked out his territory, and in the second case he claims it.

The Dems need an overarching reason to persuade the electorate to put them in charge of both houses of Congress.  The electorate has a lot to think about: Iraq, Civil Liberties, Loose Nukes, Checks and Balances, the balance of the Supreme Court, the weakening and misuse of our military, our energy policies, rebuilding governmental agencies, Homeland Security, Osama bin Laden, New Orleans, healthcare, and more.