Okay, I've been saying this for a long time now: before they even consider running for any public office, republicans - officeholders, candidates, and the rank and file - should apologize to the American people. Apologize, that is, for being consistently wrong about everything, and not just innocently wrong, but maliciously, deceitfully wrong.

Take global climate change: it's real. It's happening. It's the biggest national security challenge, the biggest economic challenge, this country will face in this century. Republicans say it isn't real, and why? Because they've been bribed by the oil companies.

Or take family values. They've been trying to scare you for decades with miscegenation and the scary queers. Meanwhile, their own Presidential candidate dumped his first wife (and kids) for a rich beauty queen who subsequently developed a drug problem, one she maintained by stealing from her charity. Their veep nominee, the catastrophe that is Sarah Palin, cheated on her husband, and her teenage daughter got pregnant out of wedlock, apparently while drunk.

Then, consider the economy. They have been preaching deregulation for decades, and they got everything they wanted. If you read newspapers, you know what's been happening on that score. You also got crappy airline travel, crumbling highways, a horrendous railroad system, hedge fund managers making a billion dollars a year (at a 15% tax rate, one might add, which they are now trying to cut to zero), millions of homes in foreclosure, the biggest income divide between rich and poor since Herbert Hoover, horrible schools, the list just goes on and on.

And meanwhile, above-mentioned Presidential candidate, John McCain, is crowing from the rafters that he's suspending his campaign (which is not actually true), because the same economy that he declared to be fundamentally sound three days ago now requires his personal attention. That personal attention took the form of a White House meeting in which he said nothing for forty minutes. He also was not going to debate Barack Obama tonight in the absence of a bailout plan, a plan which had been negotiated and which his appearance derailed. Despite that inconvenient fact, which of course wasn't a lie, just another broken promise similar to the one he made when he said he'd run a clean campaign, he will debate tonight.

Then, of course, there's family-values poster-child Sarah Palin, who claims that physical proximity to a foreign country confers foreign policy experience. Okay, fine. I can see the Goldman Sachs building from my house, please let me run the place. And you know what? I'm pretty sure I could do better than this. Most people could.

Are there any honest republicans who can face up to the scope of the disaster they've inflicted on all of us? Where's that apology?

I am deeply troubled by the blatant hypocrisy of the Republican Party. Shortly after Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate, it turns out that her 17-year old daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. As soon as Palin announces that her daughter will be keeping the child and marrying the father (clearly a shot-gun wedding), Palin is held up as a prime example of “family values” in action.

Ironically, none of the Republicans appear to notice that Palin’s staunch stance against sex education doesn’t appear to have kept her own daughter from engaging in premarital sex.

I am sure that the same glowing accolades would not be accorded the Obama family if they had a teenage daughter who became pregnant out of wedlock. The Republicans would denounce the family, accusing them of loose morals and bad parenting. And, they would probably attribute the girl’s premarital sexual activity to exposure to sex education in school. No doubt there would also be rumblings about how promiscuous African American teenagers are.

Here's the infamous, ghoulish video that ran during the Republican National Convention. This is republicans ripping the remains of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks from their graves and rubbing them in the faces of the electorate in their desperate plea to stay relevant.

Dead Americans, dead New Yorkers, used, dishonored, exploited. It's shameful. Republicans think they died to give them dramatic footage.

They weren't murdered in their thousands, on the watch of a republican administration, to be a tool of sleazy republican operatives. On 9/11 itself, it didn't matter what your party affiliation was; not to the hijackers of the planes, not to the victims in the towers, not to the police officers and firemen who died trying to save lives.

It shouldn't matter now. So what to do?

The best way to stop republicans from dishonoring our dead is to hold them to account. Call them, and demand that they repudiate their nominee's sickeningly cynical exploitation of dead Americans. Contact info for New York City republican Senators and Majority Leader Skelos is over the fold.

One of the stories not getting any coverage in this election season is the one about New York republican infighting, dissatisfaction, and institutional aimlessness. That's part of the systemic media bias against Progressives and Democrats, who are, to pull just one example out of a very full hat, favored with one story after another over how Obama's consistent lead in the polls over months is actually a worrying sign.

What makes this so remarkable is the snarling food fight over a shrinking slice of the pie taking place in the republican party. In Staten Island - part of the raft of once-safe seats up for grabs this time around - the most influential local party grandee has vowed to defeat his own party's candidate for Congress. Upstate, there's a simmering revolt brewing fueled by anger over "downstate liberal" Dean Skelos' apparent strategic decision to throw whatever resources he has into defeating Craig Johnson, along with other races in his immediate backyard. In Joe Bruno's former district, SD-43, some ominous signs - money disparities, candidate quality - point to a possible Democratic pickup that could be devastating for the morale of Bruno's party, while Joe Bruno's once-vaunted machine seems to have dissolved with his departure.

The fighting is probably worst in the Third Senatorial District, where republicans are in open revolt against Caesar Trunzo. The feud became public when dozens of Islip republicans turned out to demand Trunzo's resignation. Today, several younger republican candidates got knocked off the ballot for other races in that district due to ballot challenges; Islip republican dissidents are up in arms and apparently threatening to sit out the November elections in consequence.

There's no reason to be sympathetic to republicans. Their beliefs and policies have proven ruinous for our state and our country. But you can't help but have some empathy for some younger folks trying to wrench their party from the grasp of a septuagenarian octogenarian who spends most of his time in one of his two Florida homes.

The Republican Party is offering America a Third Bush Term. As John McCain nearly swept Super Tuesday, the "vision" the Republican Party is offering America came into focus. John McCain is offering four more years of failed Bush policies. It is as simple as that.

I think this was best illustrated when we remember what Bush and McCain were doing while America watched in horror the destruction of New Orleans when the levees broke after Katrina:

People were stranded and DYING as McCain and Bush parited it up for McCain's birthday. To me this is the ultimate symbol of what both Bush and McCain are all about: eating their cake while Americans are abandoned, left to die, forgotten by the Republican Party.

Missed this when it first came out at the beginning of August. But the National Jewish Democratic Council has brought it to my attention. Mitt Romney has criticized Democrats for being unable to "recognize evil." And yet Mitt Romney ALSO is calling for America to look to Hezbollah as a role model.

...in an article titled “Mitt Romney cited Hezbollah's social network as a model for U.S. diplomacy,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported on recent comments by GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney that Hezbollah’s “kind of diplomacy is something that would help America become stronger around the world …” Today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) strongly criticized Mitt Romney for his praise of Hezbollah and released the following statement from Executive Director Ira N. Forman:

[UPDATE: Rudy's credibility takes another hit as his own former emergency management director, and Bush's 2002 choice to plan for preparedness for WMD attacks, SLAMS Giuliani as being "...a control freak who micro-manages decision, he has a confrontational character trait and picks fights just to score points. He is the last thing this country needs as president right now." Seems NO ONE who knows him likes or respects Rudy Giuliani.]

Rudy Giuliani is, by many accounts, the Republican frontrunner. Ignore for a moment that most Republicans will not like his pro-choice stand. The real question is will Americans like his anti-firefighter and anti-family positions.