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Do you want Denver's own Child's Pay to be the first political ad ever run during the Super Bowl? Make it so.

Building on the power and creativity of this work, were making an important announcement: With your help, we can take the winning ad to the Super Bowl. We were planning to play the winning ad nationally on CNN during the week of Bush's State of the Union address, but the response to the ads has been way beyond our expectations. We've been working to put together something even more exciting. A political ad has never been placed on the Super Bowl before, and with your help, "Child's Pay" will be the first. Together, let's send Washington a clear message: no more politics as usual.

The Super Bowl ad will cost $1.6 million to place nationally, but we can afford this if we can complete our $10 million dollar grassroots campaign, which now stands at $7.5 million. Can you help?

To make an instant, secure contribution, by credit card or check, go to:

http://www.moveonvoterfund.org/superbowl/

Remember, for every two dollars you give, a dollar is added by a matching grant, so your contribution goes even further.

[Update]

Child's Pay, not Play. I've been misreading it this whole time. Clever naming ;)

Clark appears to be emerging as TNR's popular vote choice for the nomination. Considering Lieberman's chances in the primary season, it's certainly one of the more realistic choice (as is being discussed in an internal debate over the endorsement). In any case, here's another take on Clark for President that again addresses some of my commentors unfair and uninformed charges that Clark would put multilateralism before real threats to national security.

That leaves one candidate who has made restoring America's position in the world a major theme of his campaign. It's unsurprising that it's also the man who led an awkward, 19-nation NATO coalition against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Clark is alone among the Democratic candidates in having had to negotiate with foreign leaders, both friends and enemies. He has spent much of his life abroad as a soldier (and Rhodes scholar), as compared with Bush, who had barely left the country before taking office. Clark understands that it matters what the world thinks of America, and has promised to act accordingly.

An easy, and patently false, charge against Clark is that he is a reflexive multilateralist and NATO fetishist who would not protect America without asking permission first. But nothing in his record suggests he'd feel the need to consult Luxembourg before dealing with an imminent threat. If anything, the opposite criticism of him, also widely made, is probably truer--that he is intensely hard to dissuade once he has made up his mind. (Witness his doggedness in urging NATO to go into Bosnia earlier, and to intervene in Kosovo.)

Clark's opposition to the Iraq war is easily caricatured as putting him in the "antiwar" camp. But, unlike Howard Dean, Clark openly expressed jubilation at the liberation of Iraq. And, as J. Peter Scoblic's endorsement of Clark shows, his positions on the war are both far more consistent and more sophisticated than he has been given credit for: Simply put, Clark's instinct is that some elective wars--which few can now doubt Iraq was--should be fought, but only with as much forethought, and as much international support, as possible. Going into Iraq may have been justifiable, but the Iraq war that George Bush fought did not meet those tests, particularly not at a time when the war on terror loomed as a higher priority.

Good sense prevails: Child's Play wins! Incidentally, 2 of the 4 award winners are from Colorado. We rule.

A 30-second TV ad that focuses on George W. Bush’s trillion-dollar debt legacy to America’s children is the winner in the MoveOn.org Voter Fund’s nationwide search for the best spot to tell the truth about the Bush Administration’s policy failures. The ad also got the highest rating from members of the public, who gave it the “People’s Choice” award as well.

"Child’s Pay," by Charlie Fisher, 38, of Denver features young children working in difficult service and manufacturing jobs – washing dishes, hauling trash, repairing tires, cleaning offices, assembly-line processing and grocery checking – followed by the line: “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?”

The overall winner is an advertising executive who was a registered Republican until the end of the first Bush administration, in 1992.  He is currently on assignment in Denmark and flew in to attend the awards ceremony with his camera man, P. Dreyer.  The ad he produced will run nationwide January 17-21 sponsored by MoveOn.org Voter Fund, coinciding with the President’s State of the Union address on January 20.

Wesley Clark unveiled his plan today for closing the pay gap for women. The highlights:

Today, women still earn only 73 cents for every dollar men earn.  The statistics for women of color are even worse: African American women earn only 64 cents, and Hispanic women earn only 55 cents, for every dollar earned by white men. Wes Clark has a three-part plan to close the pay gap:

1. Increase penalties on employers who discriminate
• Allow women who have been discriminated against to recover compensatory and punitive damages
• Make it easier for women to build a case against employers who discriminate
• Enhance data reporting to eliminate discrimination
2. Improve pay for women
• Increase the minimum wage to $7 an hour by 2007
• Promote Families First Tax Reform to benefit women
• Expand continuing education and job training
3. Support working women
• Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to business with 25 or more employees
• Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover routine school and medical appointments and appointments related to domestic violence
• Provide paid leave for employees
• Increase funding for child care and provide pre-school education for all children

Gregg Easterbrook over at TNR breaks down the costs and lack of scientific justification that make Bush's latest plan to distract the electorate from his previous plan to distract the electorate the most ridiculous plan yet.

I'm sitting here trying to figure out what possible reason--other than science illiteracy at the White House--there could be for George W. Bush to announce a plan to build a Moon base. Manned exploration of Mars is even crazier.

As this space pointed out last month, minimum weight at departure from low-Earth orbit for a stripped-down, austere Moon base might be 600 tons, and at current NASA launch prices, it costs $15 billion to place 600 tons into low-Earth orbit. Fifteen billion is NASA's entire budget--and that's just the cost to launch the Moon thing, not to build it, staff it, and support it.

An Apollo spacecraft at departure from low-Earth orbit for the Moon weighed about 45 tons, and the manned part was tiny--astronauts could not stand up or move inside--as most of the weight was fuel. Considering that Moon-base weight would also be mostly fuel, numerous launches firing 600 tons toward the Moon for the purpose of making a base would actually result in little more than a couple of metal huts, some supplies and some antennas. Program cost for the International Space Station, currently losing air pressure, is about $100 billion, and it does not leave orbit. A rough guess would be that to build something about the size of the International Space Station (ISS) on the Moon would cost at least twice as much, $200 billion. And the ISS itself is mainly cramped modules, supplies, and antennas.

Things are looking increasingly bad for the Administration's "Iraq as Imminent Threat" story.

O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind. Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall, including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil. "There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'" A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

Let's send Bush back to Texas. Put Wesley Clark in the White House.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace unveiled a comprehensive report today contrasting the Administrations case for war with the truth. The findings summarized:

Iraq WMD Was Not An Immediate Threat

• Iraq's nuclear program had been suspended for many years; Iraq focused on preserving a latent, dual-use chemical and probably biological weapons capability, not weapons production.
• Iraqi nerve agents had lost most of their lethality as early as 1991.
• Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed Iraq's large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities.

Inspections Were Working

• Post-war searches suggest the UN inspections were on track to find what was there.
• International constraints, sanctions, procurement, investigations, and the export/import control mechanism appear to have been considerably more effective than was thought.

Intelligence Failed and Was Misrepresented

• Intelligence community overestimated the chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
• Intelligence community appears to have been unduly influenced by policymakers' views.
• Officials misrepresented threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missiles programs over and above intelligence findings.

Terrorist Connection Missing

• No solid evidence of cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda.
• No evidence that Iraq would have transferred WMD to terrorists-and much evidence to counter it.
• No evidence to suggest that deterrence was no longer operable.

Post-War WMD Search Ignored Key Resources

• Past relationships with Iraqi scientists and officials, and credibility of UNMOVIC experts represent a vital resource that has been ignored when it should be being fully exploited.
• Data from the seven years of UNSCOM/IAEA inspections are absolutely essential. Direct involvement of those who compiled the more-than-30-million- page record is needed.

War Was Not the Best-Or Only-Option

• There were at least two options preferable to a war undertaken without international support: allowing the UNMOVIC/IAEA inspections to continue until obstructed or completed, or imposing a tougher program of "coercive inspections."

In response, Colin Powell sputters

“I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed,”

In the same article covering Powell's faith in Feith-based intelligence, we find that David Kay, head US inspector, is resigning without issuing a report, following on the heels of the quiet withdrawal of the WMD hunters.

Senior U.S. officials told NBC News on Thursday that David Kay, head of the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group hunting for weapons, was planning to resign, without issuing a final report.

Kay’s team, which has been scaled back since it began work last year, has found illegal missiles but no stockpiles or ongoing production of chemical or biological weapons, sources told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Only a rudimentary nuclear program, which had not started, has been found, they said.

“I think Mr. Kay and his team have looked very hard. I think the reason they haven’t found it is it’s probably not there,” Charles Duelfer, former deputy chairman of the U.N. weapons inspection agency, said in an interview.

This was a war of choice, not an imminent threat. Make them pay, let Wesley Clark at 'em.

Sealing their move to the middle (somewhere to the right of the DLC, but the Left of the Republican mainstream), The New Republic has endorsed Joe Lieberman out of principle.

However, in keeping with their well-earned reputation for fairness, they provide dissenting editors opinions, including "The Case for Wesley Clark: Credibile Threat"

But all the talk about how Clark's biography makes him electable has overwhelmed the more important point: It would also make him a good president. In the last decade, the specter of genocide arose twice in the Balkans; both times, Clark was instrumental in beating it back despite tepid support among political and military elites. In Bosnia, in 1995, Clark fought to continue bombing Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's forces--a move that forced their withdrawal from Sarajevo and enabled the Dayton peace process, which yielded a successful peacekeeping and reconstruction operation. And, in 1999, with the world sitting idly by as thousands of ethnic Albanians were slaughtered in Kosovo, Clark--by then nato's supreme allied commander of Europe--repeatedly bucked his Pentagon superiors and pushed for intervention. He then proceeded to hold together the fractious nato alliance through a 78-day air war that succeeded in stopping the atrocities and ultimately resulted in Milosevic standing trial for war crimes.

More than just an asset for Clark's political campaign, this diplomatic and military experience provides the brains and the brawn behind a worldview that prioritizes threats to U.S. security without sacrificing humanitarian imperatives, that seeks to solve problems through negotiation but is bolstered with a proven willingness to use force. Unlike Democratic rivals who try to demonstrate their foreign policy bona fides by showcasing their Senate votes, the retired general has actually waged the "muscular multilateralism" that his opponents use as a catchphrase. For this reason, Clark is the best solution for a Democratic Party struggling to prove it can protect the United States from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction--not only because Americans will sleep better with a general, rather than a politician, in the Oval Office, but because they'll sleep safer.

And to address the nuance-impaired in the comments that claim Clark would bow to foreign pressure against military intervention, the article has this to offer:

Clark's multilateralism is pragmatic, not fetishistic. His foreign policy puts self-interest first while allowing for humanitarian interventions, emphasizes diplomacy and international institutions while reserving the right for unilateral action, and endorses the value of nonproliferation treaties while acknowledging their weaknesses. His take on the use of force is pitch-perfect: "We always have the right of self-defense, including inherently the right to strike pre-emptively," he writes. "But force must be used only as a last resort--and then multilaterally if possible." In these respects, Clark again stands out not so much for the uniqueness of his philosophy as for the fact that he has actually put it to use. While many of the Democratic presidential candidates might agree with the tenor of Clark's broad policy guidelines, it's not clear that they would be willing to back up the soft side of U.S. power with its harder edge. With Clark, on the other hand, there is little doubt. It was Clark, after all, who during the Bosnian war demanded--to the point of hectoring a furious superior officer--that bombing continue until Milosevic withdrew from Sarajevo. And it was Clark, together with a handful of Clinton officials, who pushed for military intervention in Kosovo when the Pentagon brass and many nato leaders preferred to do nothing. Clark, unlike his rivals, has actually led wars, not just voted for them.

Read the whole thing. It's the best summation of why Clark must be President I've yet read.

Try and attack this, Howard "turned Vermont into an Enron tax shelter" Dean.

Wes Clark's Families First Tax Reform will crack down on corporate loopholes that benefit special interests, making the tax code simpler and fairer. Wes Clark's plan will save, conservatively, at least $10 billion annually. These saving will go towards paying for Families First Tax Reform, which eliminates taxes for a family of four making up to $50,000 and cuts taxes for all taxpaying families with children making up to $100,000. As President, Wes Clark will fight to simplify the tax system by cracking down on corporate loopholes and tax shelters. He will end corporate welfare as we know it.

Specifically Wes Clark will:

Outlaw tax shelters.

From 1996 to 2001 Enron paid only $63 million in taxes despite reporting billions of dollars in profits. As soon as one tax shelter is shut down, companies set up a new one to take its place. Wes Clark will end that practice by passing a law that will prevent companies from taking advantage of artificially generated losses in tax shelter transactions. The definition of a tax shelter-as an artificial transaction whose only purpose was to avoid paying taxes-will be codified in law. Outlawing tax shelters will not only make the tax code simpler and fairer, but will also promote economic growth by encouraging companies to pursue productive activities rather than tax avoidance.

Double fines for abusive transactions - and quadruple them for repeat offenders.

Wes Clark will double the fines and penalties on abusive tax shelters - and quadruple them for repeat offenders.

Close corporate loopholes, including the janitor's loophole.

Currently companies get tax deductions when they take out life insurance policies for their non-executive employees, like janitors. When the janitor dies, his or her family doesn't see a penny of the benefit - the company pockets all of it. Wes Clark will end the practice of companies deducting life insurance policies for non-executive employees. In addition, he supports closing loopholes along the lines of legislation championed by Senator Baucus.

Recapture taxes from individuals that renounce their U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes

Ultra-wealthy individuals can renounce their U.S. citizenship, ship their assets overseas, and avoid taxation entirely. Wes Clark will apply capital gains taxation to individuals who renounced their citizenship.

Don't miss the finalists for the Bush In 30 Seconds contest, sponsered by Move On. My favorites, and the only ones that effectively target anyone who doesn't already agree with the ad makers - which after all is the point of a political ad, are Child's Play and Desktop. Also, don't miss the right wing "flapdoodle" over the contest.

The opportunistic flapdoodle that Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie has made of the two Bush/Hitler comparisons on the left political-action group MoveOn's Web site is a slyly convenient ploy. If Gillespie can convince the media that the ads, two of more than 1,500 submitted as part of MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad campaign contest, are typical of all the responses, he'll be able to divert attention from other, first-rate entries.