i feel like summer school just ended and despite the great year ahead, reality hits that we still have to say goodbye.
it's a strange and sad feeling.
but we'll always have 6th avenue.
onward, captain!
Charlie Rose To Host First Live Online Presidential Debates
Yahoo!, The Huffington Post and Slate announced today plans to host two online-only presidential debates during the 2008 campaign. These first-of-their kind debates will be hosted on all three Web sites and give voters the opportunity to ask questions directly to the candidates, participate in the debate in real-time, and even determine which candidate is giving the best performance. The debates, scheduled to take place after Labor Day, will be hosted by PBS' Charlie Rose. The Democratic debate will feature opening remarks by DNC chair Howard Dean.
"We intend for these debates to be a groundbreaking mix of old and new traditions in politics," said Charlie Rose. "2008 will be a momentous year for the electoral process in America, thanks in large part to technology and politics connecting like never before. I am proud to host the first ever online only debate, which will reach and engage the voting audience in a whole new way."
"With presidential candidates announcing online and with campaign ads and fundraising increasingly online, presidential campaigns are moving to the Internet at breakneck speed. Online debates are the inevitable next step," said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. "We are thrilled to be joining with Internet pioneers Yahoo! and Slate to host the first online presidential debates, and to have Charlie Rose as our moderator. These debates represent a further merging of new media technology and politics, and are a great opportunity to bring more people into the political process, and engage the new generation of young voters who spend so much of their time -- and get so much of their information -- online."
There will be two online-only debates, one for Democrats and one for Republicans, with invitations extended to candidates who have formally announced their candidacies. These online debates will allow the candidates to participate from whatever location they choose, brought together live via the Internet, and will feature real-time questions sent in by the online audience, as well as viewer questions uploaded on video.
"The 2008 campaign is going to unfold on the Web in a way no previous election ever has," said Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate. "We hope these first online debates will be a breakthrough, both in terms of technology and political communication. The candidates will be able to have a real discussion in real time -- but without having to be in the same place. We think the Internet can bring the same kind of immediacy to presidential debates that it has to other aspects of the political process."
"We're opening the doors of democracy for American voters to participate in the Presidential debates like never before," said Scott Moore, head of news and information, Yahoo!. "Armchair politics will take on new meaning this election season, as we're offering voters the opportunity to ask the candidates what's on their mind."
About Yahoo! Elections 2008
Yahoo! Elections (http://elections.yahoo.com) is a destination for voters to connect with the people, candidates and communities most important to them this election season. The site is made up of key Yahoo! social media properties, including Answers, Groups, Flickr, News, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Video and Upcoming.org. The site also features a comprehensive election news offering, including breaking news, opinion and commentary, and video reports from the nation's leading news providers. Yahoo! Elections is working with the campaigns for all officially announced candidates on ways they can interact with voters on the Yahoo! Town Hall platform, offering a valuable platform for reaching millions of voters on a daily basis.
About The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post has become, according to The New York Times, "a well-known, oft-cited news media brand in the blink of an eye." The Web site has over 3 million unique users and over 70 million page views. Later this spring, the site will expand its original political reporting. Also, in conjunction with newassignment.net, The Huffington Post will be adding an entirely new dimension to coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, deploying hundreds of volunteers to report and blog on the race and add their unique perspectives on American politics. The Huffington Post continues to provide breaking news and opinion from more than 900 contributors from the worlds of politics, entertainment and media.
About Slate
Slate Magazine is an award-winning Web site that offers fresh angles on stories in the news and innovative entertainment coverage. Slate won the 2006 and 2005 EPpy awards for Best Internet News Service (over 1 million monthly visitors) and the 2005 EPpy award for Best Internet Entertainment Service (over 1 million monthly visitors). Slate can be found on the Web at www.slate.com and is owned by The Washington Post Company. Slate attracts over five million unique visitors each month.
Please watch these videos and tell us which one you think is most compelling. Academy Award winning director Oliver Stone will take the video you choose and turn it into a TV ad—spreading this message even further. Believe me, once you get started watching these you won't be able to stop.
Click below to watch now:
http://pol.moveon.org/videovets
Every day at MoveOn we get letters from military families and veterans who're outraged that the president hides behind the troops to justify his policy—a policy that's leaving tens of thousands of them stranded in the middle of an unwinnable civil war. We talked to our friends at VoteVets.org about their members, who felt the same way. We realized we had to help give these folks a platform to speak out.
Over 700 MoveOn members around the country volunteered their time to interview and videotape the veterans and military families. Then we put them up on our website—and on YouTube—for you to watch.
Today, we have over 20 interviews, each less than 2 minutes long. Here are just a few examples of the moving stories we heard.
This is really powerful stuff.
The administration tries to call anyone who criticizes their policy in Iraq 'anti-troop,' but these stories show that 'supporting the troops' does NOT mean supporting an endless war. The voices of these veterans and military families are missing from the debate in Washington. Together we can make sure they become a vital part of the national dialogue around ending the war.
Click below to watch the videos and tell us which one Oliver Stone should turn into an ad.
http://pol.moveon.org/videovets
Thanks for all you do,
–Nita, Laura, Karin, Patrick and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
PS. The views expressed in these interviews do not necessarily reflect the views of VoteVets.org or MoveOn.org Political Action. They are the views of interview subjects only.
P.P.S. We will close the rating process at midnight PST, on Wednesday, April 25th.
Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you'd like to support our work, you can give now at:
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Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
first and foremost, thank you to everyone who came out on tuesday night. it was a fantastic experience for us to see so many people filling the Canal Room. i don't know about the rest of the band but i was floored and honored by the turnout. thank you to Megan Bienstock, without whom the show would have never happened, and thank you to the awesome organization GenArt for plugging us and getting so many of their people out to see us. i am going to be posting a clip from the show shortly, as soon as i have time to load the concert footage that honorable mayor (as he's known) Christopher J. Scott took. thank you CS. as usual, you're our hero.
Vonnegut's Apocalypse
He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother
to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it
took George W. Bush to break him
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
In the annals of American literature, Vonnegut has been categorized
as a black-humorist -- a post-Hiroshima novelist who encouraged
readers to laugh at the ghastly absurdity of the modern condition.
More than any other fiction writer, Vonnegut has been unafraid to
peer into the apocalyptic abyss of our lives. This is likely why,
after five and a half years of the Bush administration, Vonnegut's
signature bleak wit seems more relevant than ever. His most recent
book, A Man Without a Country, a collection of essays, was a surprise
best seller last year, spending more than eight weeks on the New York
Times best-seller list and selling more than 250,000 copies. It would
be simple enough to say that Vonnegut is having a major late-career
resurgence, except for the fact that he never really went away.
Vonnegut is that rare literary figure who never stopped being cool.
Ever since he rose to prominence during the 1960s, Vonnegut -- with
his Twainian mop of curly hair, bushy Bavarian beer-hall mustache and
carbolic-acid smirk -- has been dubbed a prose shaman with a trick
bag full of preposterous characters. Harper's deemed him an
"unimitative and inimitable social satirist," and The New York Times
anointed him the "laughing prophet of doom."
On this day, though, as Vonnegut sips coffee and his tiny white dog,
Flour, yaps in the background, there is no wry amusement or social
satire in his repertoire. There is only burning dissent about the way
modern technology and global capitalism are usurping the last gasps
of goodness from honest laborers' lives. And deep sadness that
everyday humans are butchering their most civilized impulses. But
then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm,
grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee
table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether
he worries that cigarettes are killing him. "Oh, yes," he answers, in
what is clearly a set-piece gag. "I've been smoking Pall Mall
unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I'm going to
sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them.
And do you know why?" "Lung cancer?" I offer.
"No. No. Because I'm eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On
the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their
cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names
like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'"....
"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us,"
novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the
parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us
killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's
going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum,
and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses.
There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This
is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on
hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the
gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going
crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course,
the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world
as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."
For the most part, this sort of apocalyptic attitude is to be
expected from Vonnegut, who, after all, in his futuristic novel Cat's
Cradle (1963) created Ice-Nine, a substance with the capacity to
obliterate the Earth incrementally, like the "great door of heaven
being closed softly." The naive protagonist of the novel -- a
character named John/Jonah -- actually struggles to write a book
titled The Day the World Ended. (Cat's Cradle also includes a
hilarious faux religion known as Bokononism, whose religious texts
carry the warning "All of the true things I am about to tell you are
shameless lies.") In the interview collection Conversations With Kurt
Vonnegut, he even dismisses the notion that his fourteen novels, six
essay collections and dozens of short stories have a long shelf life,
saying, "Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go
up like a celluloid collar by-and-by." Add to that doomsday scenario
Vonnegut's notorious bouts of chronic depression, daily doldrums and
suicidal longings, and you get a literary Cassandra of the first order.
Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I
telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about
whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know
what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion."
Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if
he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly
vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he
bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."