By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

John Kerry blogged this at HuffPo:

The progressive movement had what we want to believe was a seismic win on election day -- but it's really only seismic if it continues to reverberate.

We? When exactly did John Kerry join the progressive movement?

Sure, Kerry has always been a partisan Democrat with a liberal-ish voting record. But he actively supported the invasion of Iraq, thus failing a key test for progressivism. And he never led a single filibuster or other floor battle against Bush's horrible legislation or appointments.

Kerry's record was such a disappointment that Progressive Democrats of America supported a primary challenge against him this year.

By Dave Lindorff

    I remember back in 1970, when I was a student and anti-war activist in Connecticut, watching an ad on TV for Lowell Weicker, who was running for US Senate. The ad was very powerful: It showed Weicker playing in the yard with his son, who looked like he was maybe 10 or 12.  Weicker was saying that when his son was a tot, the US was fighting in Vietnam, and he didn’t want us to be fighting there when his son reached draft age.  

I voted for Weicker, a Republican who went on to win a Senate seat where he played a key role in helping to bring an end to the Nixon presidency.

As it happens, the Vietnam War ended five years later, when Weicker’s son was probably 17. He didn’t get drafted, but I remain struck by the fact that we could, back then, even contemplate the idea of being at war for so long.

I feel strongly that John Kerry should endorse Senator Barack Obama For President in 2008.  John Kerry experience in the Veterans and Military affairs will make the Democratic Team Stronger then ever.

Did Kerry actually win more than 360 Electoral votes?
This analysis shows why he very well may have.

1988-2004 Election Analysis: The Submerging Democratic Majority http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/TruthIsAllFAQResponse.htm#HistoricalElections 

The Democrats actually won all FIVE elections by an average 8.9 MILLION vote margin. That’s the True Emerging Democratic Majority. Don't believe it? Run the numbers yourself.

If John Kerry is thinking about getting into the 2008 race - or ever having a shred of credibility with the American people - he'd better move quickly to "clarify" his shockingly cynical answer to Josh Marshall's question:

Q. What's the Democrats' endgame on Iraq with this confrontation with the President over the funding bill?

A. Our purpose is obviously to change the policy, to get us to a position where we can be successful. We don't believe the current policy can be successful, in fact we think it creates more terrorists, puts our troops at greater risk, worsens our position in the Middle and we want to change that.

There are some things that you just don’t want to read about or watch on a full stomach -- this is one of those.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Tuesday to consider the nomination of Sam Fox, a wealthy St. Louis businessman, to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Belgium. While it is not unusual for big political donors to be rewarded with ambassadorships -- and Fox is a huge donor to all things Republican -- what made everyone take note of this guy is that Fox gave a whopping $50,000 to help fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

And in being questioned by the Senate panel yesterday, Fox had to face one of the senior members of that committee in… Senator John Kerry.

What followed was riveting theater, with Kerry coldly staring down a clearly-nervous Fox and Bush's nominee withstanding a barrage of questions from Kerry that the Massachusetts Senator nicely referred to as questions of Fox's "judgment" while many of us would have just flat-out called him a scumbag.

Written by the author/researcher, James Q. Jacobs:

"Many votes were counted for the wrong candidate or ballot option, and a significant portion of the cross-voting resulted in Kerry votes tallied as Bush votes. The 2004 Presidential election hinged on the Ohio results. According to exit polls, Kerry won Ohio. Instead, with a -3.35 percent differential in Kerry's tally, the results gave the victory and the presidency to Bush. With these circumstances, evidence of miscounted voting and Kerry-to-Bush vote switching have particular importance in determining the actual intent of Ohio voters, the reasons for the exit poll discrepancy, and the validity of the 2004 US Presidential election result. Cross-voting also impacted other races and analysis of past elections may reveal similar cross-voting patterns.

Just as the United States Senate was dominated last week with the fight to raise the Federal Minimum Wage, the next few days will see a heated battle over what sentiments -- if any -- the Senate should formally express in opposition to George W. Bush's plan to escalate the Iraq war.

While that issue will dominate the woefully single-threaded media on Capitol Hill, a Senate resolution proposed by John Kerry (D-MA) is also very relevant to America's national security and should at least get some mention as it waits in the wings.

A couple of weeks ago, Kerry introduced S. RES. 34, which calls on the White House to start focusing on something vaguely related to the attacks of September 11 and beef up "…the efforts of the United States to defeat the Taliban and terrorist networks in Afghanistan."