Matt Drudge is reporting that an anonymous Washington insider is certain Kerry will pick Hillary as the VP candidate. We think the story is either a plant or a trial balloon. While personally, we'd welcome Hillary as VP (see our enthusiastic coverage of her 2000 campaign at Run Hillary Run), we don't see it. We see Edwards.

This is good news. The Supreme Court wrapped up its term today and none of the Justices announced retirement plans. That makes it more likely it will be the next President who gets to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice. There is a huge difference between Bush and Kerry when it comes to judicial appointments. Defeating Bush in November will stop cold the right wing's attempt to install its own ideologues and activists on the bench. For that reason alone, it is imperative that Kerry wins in November.

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Bump and Update: Theresa Heinz Kerry, Al Gore and one of Kerry's primary opponents also will speak. We're thinking the unnamed primary opponent will be Howard Dean.

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Original Post

Sen. Edward Kennedy and former President Bill Clinton will speak at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in late July.

Clinton is scheduled to speak July 26, the opening night of the four-day convention, and Kennedy will address the audience the second day, Democratic officials said Monday. The vice presidential pick will speak July 28, and presumed Democratic nominee John Kerry will close the convention July 29 with his acceptance speech.

The DNC now has a blog just for the convention--check out the bostonDparty, written by Matt Stoller and Eric Schnurer. The latest convention news is here.

This will be an exciting convention. We believe Bush's popularity will continue to decline and Kerry will start picking up speed, big time. The convention can only help.

We'll go on record with a bold prediction. Bush is toast. Here's the latest poll that supports our view. As Iraq descends into further chaos, it will only go downhill from here. Say hello to President John Kerry.

Good for John Kerry. He has canceled a speaking engagement at the Mayor's Conference in Boston Monday because police will be picketing the hotel in which the conference is being held. He won't cross a picket line.

"Senator Kerry will not cross the picket line and therefore will not address the U.S. Conference of Mayors," said spokesman David Wade...."John Kerry has never crossed picket lines in his time in public life," said Wade.

While we're not generally supporters of law enforcement, we will say that it's shameful how little we pay our police--and our teachers. We hope the mayor of Boston reconsiders.

In our last post, we expressed our preference for John Edwards as Kerry's VP candidate. We don't want to be unfair to Dick Gephardt, since we will be supporting the team if he's the chosen one--TL is ABB (anybody but Bush) all the way--so we decided to do a little research on the issues that matter most to us. Here's what we found:

On crime and the death penalty:

• Voted NO on funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons. (Jun 2000)
• Voted NO on more prosecution and sentencing for juvenile crime. (Jun 1999)
• Voted YES on maintaining right of habeus corpus in Death Penalty Appeals. (Mar 1996)
• Voted NO on making federal death penalty appeals harder. (Feb 1995)
• Voted NO on replacing death penalty with life imprisonment. (Apr 1994)
• More funding and stricter sentencing for hate crimes. (Apr 2001)
• Require DNA testing for all federal executions. (Mar 2001)

On Drugs

• Voted YES on military border patrols to battle drugs & terrorism. (Sep 2001)
• Voted NO on prohibiting needle exchange & medical marijuana in DC. (Oct 1999)
• Voted NO on subjecting federal employees to random drug tests. (Sep 1998)

Gephardt was a co-sponsor of the Innocence Protection Act.

The Washington Post nails it on Kerry's fear factor in choosing John Edwards for Vice President:

Among the biggest decisions Kerry faces is whether Edwards could check his ego and ambitions for four or eight years and play the loyal, subservient and rarely glamorous role of vice president, whose greatest concern is supposed to be the president's best interests. Purely in terms of campaigning this fall, the Massachusetts senator also must consider whether Edwards's sizzle would make his own more prosaic style seem unacceptably wooden by comparison.

Our advice to Mr. Kerry: If you want to be President, John Edwards can take you there. The others can't. If you lose in 2004, you don't stand a chance in 2008, and Edwards will own 2008. If you win in 2004, John Edwards can own 2012. Grab Edwards while he's willing. You can choose our father's Oldsmobile, Dick Gephardt, and we'll still vote for you, but our heart won't be in it. Nor will our dollars. Please, choose Edwards, and breathe some life into your campaign and us Democratic voters.

And please, think about Gary Hart for Secretary of State and Oscar Goodman for Attorney General. And abolishing the position of White House Drug Czar. Why Oscar? We'd love to write his biography one day, he's one of our all time defense heros, Do a "google search" or if you don't have the time, here's a fewsnippets:

Update: He's out.

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No surprise here...Illinois Republican senatorial candidate Jack Ryan likely will drop out of the race. The sex allegations made by his ex-wife were too much. Much ado about nothing in our view, particularly since Ryan denies his ex-wife's allegations which have never been proven, but we're glad a Democrat likely will get the seat:

Ryan, 44, a wealthy former investment banker, is running against Democrat Barack Obama for the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Peter Fitzgerald -- a potentially key contest in the battle for control of the evenly divided Senate. Even before the lurid allegations, Obama held a lead over Ryan in various polls.

Just received this email from Andrew in Oregon, who included his full name, email address and telephone number:

This Saturday, there will be a convention in Portland, Oregon to attempt to place Ralph Nader on the Oregon ballot. They will need 1,000 registered voters for his name to be on the November ballot and an independent. A few months ago, they attempted but came up short.

I am a Democrat who, a short while ago, gave my email address and phone
number to the local Republican party to receive updates on what they were up
to. Today I received a phone call from the local Republican party asking me
if I wanted to go the Nader convention. They explained the need to get Nader on the ballot to help President Bush. The name on the caller ID on my phone said “Bush Cheney” implying that they were calling from the Oregon Bush Cheney headquarters.

I found it blatantly sleazy of the Bush Cheney campaign to ask volunteers to attend a Nader rally and contacted the John Kerry campaign and some local
media. Do what you wish with this info, it should start hitting the Oregon news
radar in a few hours.

In December, 2002, one month after the elections, TalkLeft, subbing for Eric Alterman's Altercation (December 4), gave some advice to the Democrats. We're reprinting it because we still believe it. We went looking for it last night after a commenter in another thread suggested we thought the Dems should toe a more conservative line. Wrong. If we were calling the shots, we'd still suggest a sharp turn to the left:

Yesterday I opined here that the Democrats are in danger of losing their potential for a 2004 win if they don't move to the left. With centrism so entrenched, there is little to distinguish the two major parties these days. By not having a forceful and vocal left, we risk becoming a one party nation.

Former President Clinton disagrees. Speaking to a group of 200 gathered for the National Democratic Leadership Council at New York University, Clinton advised the Democrats, "We don't have to be more liberal, but we do have to be more relevant in a positive way." He told them that national security and going after terrorists should be their first priority. After that comes building up the economy. Clinton has been a centrist since founding the DLC in the 1980s. It may have helped him win his elections, but I don't think it will help Democrats in 2004 any more than it did in 2002. We need fewer, not more, politicians like Dick Gephardt .... championing the Bush Administration war plans.

Al Gore, Howard Dean and John Kerry have gotten the message that the Democrats have become one unhappy group of campers since November 5. Joe Lieberman may be the only potential viable candidate still bearing Clinton's "New Democrats" label.

Republicans for Kerry has moved to a new website. They believe that there are indeed Republicans who are standing up to the effort by the right wing to hijack the party. They invite moderate Republicans to help "Take Back the Party", and moderates of all political affiliations to join their effort to defeat George W. Bush and elect John Kerry in 2004.

We would like to see Kerry pick John Edwards as his vice presidential candiate. We think Dick Gephardt is our father's oldsmobile and uninspiring. We'd like to see some youth and vigor on the campaign trail. However, we don't want to see John Edwards as Attorney General. It's not the right job for him.

John Edwards supports the death penalty. Kerry only supports the death penalty for terrorists and has said he would consider imposing a federal moratorium on the death penalty while a study is conducted on its fairness.

Also, on medical marijuana, Edwards has publicly stated that he would not change marijuana laws, and he favors the Justice Department's arresting patients and caregivers who defy federal law. Kerry, on the other hand, has pledged an end to the DEA's raids on medical marijuana patients and providers in states that have reduced or eliminated criminal penalties for medical uses of marijuana.