There are 100 days until this November’s election. What are you doing to help?

Today the Democractic Party launched a new project: 100 Actions, a website dedicated to electing Democrats in 2006 through an action that you can take every day.

Each day, a new action will appear that will help make that happen. Some actions may be as simple as writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Others may be things like volunteering for a campaign, organizing people for an event, or mailing postcards with the Democratic agenda printed on them. Whatever the action, meaningful activism through Election Day helps Democrats in every race in the country — from school board to U.S. Senate.

Today’s action is simple. Volunteer. We’ll be closely following this site and other tools that you can use as we approach the all-important November elections.

Last week, in an obtusely worded story buried inside the paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted briefly that the Ohio GOP let go of its “outreach coordinator” for social conservative groups, Gary Lankford. Lankford had waged an e-mail campaign with scurrilous innuendo about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland.

The Plain Dealer, a mediocre fish-wrap always careful not to offend the delicate sensibilities of its humble readers, failed to report in detail on just how salacious Lankford’s lies truly were: claiming that Strickland and his wife were “closeted homosexuals in a marriage of convenience.” Politics1’s Ron Gunzburger tells the whole story.

Republicans calling Ted Strickland and his wife gay is appalling, but hardly unprecedented. This is the same deranged logic that dictates it’s okay to lie and tell South Carolinians Sen. John McCain sired an African-American child out-of-wedlock (the truth: he’d adopted a Bangladeshi child). These “Christian” Republicans would do well to remember the Lord’s Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Clearly, Ohio Republicans will use any Rovian tactic and utter any malicious falsehood to get their way in November. The New Yorker’s Frances Fitzgerald has written a must-read piece on how frightening Ken Blackwell and his Christianist allies truly are.

Luckily, Ohio has a great chance to elect a great governor instead of a reactionary. Help Ted Strickland win today!

A Senate Race in Connecticut
Editorial
July 30, 2006

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Read the rest of the New York Times endorsement

Crazed cop-beater/Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney is once again in big political trouble. A new Insider Advantage Poll has McKinney badly trailing her runoff opponent, DeKalb County Commissioner Hank Johnson.

After publicly suggesting that George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, voters in Georgia’s 4th Congressional District rejected McKinney’s brand of racial demagoguery in 2002 and instead elected Democrat Denise Majette to represent them. Luckily for McKinney, Majette left the House after just one term to wage an ill-advised, losing campaign for U.S. Senate in 2004, allowing McKinney to reclaim her House seat.

This year, the punditocracy thought McKinney would easily vanquish the lesser-known Johnson. The chattering class was wrong: after garnering less than 50% in the primary on July 18, Johnson and McKinney duke it out in an August 8 run-off.

Hank Johnson, on the other hand, promises “to restore respect to progressivism.” That’s a promise DoubleSpeak likes.