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So it isn’t monday, but I went to a Rhett Miller concert last night and I realized I had the perfect song dedication. This one is called “Our Love,” and goes out to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

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I have switched my focus over to Bleeding Heartland, which is more of a community-based blog with a lot more features than this thing. You have to create an account which is kind of lame but does protect from spammers, and then anyone can post diaries, and eventually events and such when I figure out how to use it. It has lots of neat features like threaded comments and user pages, and I think that Iowa could use something like it instead of just me and chris and john and t.m. and whoever else posting our thoughts on stuff. I’ll still keep this guy around for non-political stuff and maybe the occasional patently offensive post, but I would bookmark BH if you are one of those obsessive blog-reading types. I also have a personal blog which is not really top secret or anything, but it is mostly just my friends reading it and I’m probably better off keeping it that way. If you are my friend and don’t know about it though, shoot me an email or something.

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I think Hillary might be going a little too far on the gender identification thing:

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John Deeth has what can only be described as a ramble about gender and race in the caucus. And I mean ramble in the best way possible, because it’s probably my favorite post on the caucus all year.

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Steve Kagen, (D-WI).

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Read all about it on Kay Henderson’s blog.

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Some might question why I put Tom Vilsack as Hot on my hotlist, and tend to be relatively supportive of him. Is it that it’s the right thing to do and that other people are coming around? Is it that my old boss’s boss and boss’s boss’s boss work for him now? Nope! I just have a general rule about not talking bad about people who have me in their top 8. Compare that to John Edwards, who apparently loves himself so much that he’ll put you in his top friends if you have him in your picture.

They’re both better than Wes Clark though, who is the #1 friend of the anti-vilsack MySpace profile. Not very classy, general!

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I’m for it!

As Chris notes, the Iowa Senate version of the bill provides for cost-of-living adjustments, which would more or less negate the need for future minimum wage increases. This is an obviously good idea, but I doubt that it will end up happening.

Like abortion for conservatives, the minimum wage is a gift that keeps on giving for Democrats. Once every decade we get a really easy issue that also makes Republicans look bad. If we attached an automatic adjustment, the issue would be off the table forever. Imagine if Social Security were set up to have no cost-of-living increases, and the only reason they got bumped every now and then was that Democrats voted on party line to increase it - we’d never lose any elections.

Still, linking the minimum wage to inflation is good policy and I support it. I hope our legislatures will too.

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In honor of Bush declaring that he doesn’t need a warrant to open our mail or tap our phones, here is a song from Citizen Fish called “Get Off the Phone.” I saw a lecture by Thomas Frank (the What’s the Matter with Kansas guy) where he namechecked the Subhumans. These guys used to be the Subhumans. Enjoy!

Citizen Fish - Get Off the Phone.mp3

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Unsurprisingly, every Democratic Senator considering a Presidential run who voted for the Iraq war would have voted against it, knowing what we all know now. It is perhaps worth noting that with Russ Feingold dropping out of the race, every single Presidential contender in the Senate voted for the war in the first place.

As far as I know though, only John Edwards and John Kerry have admitted that voting for war in the first place was a mistake. There is a big difference between “Well geez things sure turned out bad so of course in retrospect it was a bad idea” camp and the “It was a bad idea in the first place and we should have known it then” camp. Considering that most Democratic activists were against the war from the start, it’s going to take more than just acknowledging that Iraq is a shitshow now to win our support.

It’s also interesting to note that no Republican current or former Presidential candidate would have changed their mind. I’ll bet some of them will come around by 2008, though!

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