KFC Canada tries to do chickens right with their new animal welfare plan. China's air control results. Check out new Alternative Autos: Chevy Volt, Shelby Supercars, Prius, and more.

ZapRoot zaproot.com

Community Site boldurl.com

BuyGreen.com: boldurl.com

More at the www.theuptake.org.

Howard Dean at a BBQ for bloggers on August 26, 2008, was asked if Barack Obama can win John McCain's home state of Arizona. In this video by Len Edgerly, Dean makes the case for maybe. Arizona has a history of going Republican in Presidential elections.

Except for Bill Clinton's win in 1996, Arizona has voted Republican since 1952. In 2004, George Bush won by 10.5% over John Kerry.

At the DNC, Harry Shearer talks with David Kurtz about recovery efforts in New Orleans on the three-year anniversary after Hurricane Katrina. 

For more, check out Friends of New Orleans.

Not only does John McCain have at least 10 properties he can't remember, but he also owns a parking lot in Phoenix Arizona worth between $1.4 and $2.4 million. That's over $1 million more than the average American home!

It's no wonder McCain has said time and time again that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong."  He's living in the land of affluence, and has no concept of just how terrible our economy has become under President Bush.  According to the U.S. Census, 37.3 million people were living in poverty in 2007.  45.7 million (15.3 percent of the population) don't have health insurance—a staggering number that has risen by 6 million since Bush took office in 2001.  And yet McCain extols Bush's economy and proposes his own policies that would sink our country further into debt.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said that when it comes to the economy,

"I think John McCain is wrong. He doesn’t even know how many homes he has. … We’ve seen the McCain position as just a continuation of the Bush Administration. It’s President Bush’s policies that got us into the mess that we have now. And it’s not only a short term crisis, it’s long term and it has to be addressed. Workers are having a tough time. The wage inequality that’s out there is unbelievable, and health care and retirement security are threatened. Those are some of the reasons that we’re not supporting John McCain."

When we launched McCain's Mansions, you recognized that McCain is out of touch with hard-working Americans.  That's why you spread it around and got the mainstream media to take notice and question McCain on this issue.  It exposed McCain for the elitist he really is, and turned our ailing economy into a number one issue for Democrats. 

Now's your chance to keep the economy front and center by spreading McCain's Million Dollar Parking Lot.  Let everyone know that while the majority of Americans are struggling to make mortgage payments and pay for necessities like health insurance and gas, John McCain has a parking lot worth $1 million more than the average home.    

Too funny.

A sprinkler system partially flooded part of the Pepsi Center Monday morning.

The Denver Fire Department, which has a crew stationed at the center all week, was able to respond quickly before 5 a.m. when the sprinkler went off.

The sprinkler was located on the club level in a skybox which had recently been renovated to host a news crew. It appears the skybox belongs to Fox.

Since the beginning of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March of 2003, the war in Iraq has come to symbolize many things: the 'War on Terror,' U.S. unilateralism, conflict between the Muslim world and western civilization, and the American military industrial complex run amok. What frequently gets marginalized in this endless debate is the simple fact that every single day people are losing their lives, lives are being ruined, and the American taxpayer is being asked to foot the bill for these atrocities. This will continue as long as we let it continue. Until the American people display an appropriate level of moral outrage for the actions of our government, we are all accountable.

Produced by Bobby Bender

Edited by Chris Ladegaard and James Gaul 

(My sincere apologies to Portishead for putting their music at the center of so much death and ugliness, but it's one of the saddest songs I've ever heard, and I can't think of anything more heartbreaking than what's going on in that part of the world. - BB)

Nation Magazine Publisher Emeritus Victor Navasky is in Denver, CO this week covering the Democratic National Convention. In this interview with Nation correspondent Ari Berman, Navasky looks back 14 conventions to his first time on the floor in 1956, offering lessons learned and reflecting on the significance of Obama's nomination in 2008. Read his blogs from Denver here.

Live From Main Street: Denver. Van Jones, the Co-Founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, talks about how the pro-democracy, progressive movement made Barack Obama's candidacy. GRITtv is broadcasting all week from Denver.

You can see additional interviews and episodes at www.grittv.org. Coming up tonight, an interview with Barbara Lee.

Your Daily Politics Video Blog: In today's episode of TPMtv, we recap Day one of the Democratic National Convention and explain how we're managing to shoot live (or almost live) video via the web.

Texas residents are relieved that the deadly Category 5 storm just missed them, destroying a horn-shaped land mass beneath them instead.

Think McCain is overplaying his POW past just a bit?  It's baffling how this go-to story is McCain's justification for forgetting how many homes he owns, which McCain's Mansions exposed last week by showing McCain as an incredibly rich, out-of-touch elitist.  The McCain campaign knows it can get out of any jam by playing on the public's sympathies with this story.  What's it going to take to get them to stop?

Klein speaks about Obama and the intellectual and political integrity of the progressive movement.

More at The REAL News.

Van Jones raps with Laura Flanders about green collar jobs. Convention coverage form the working people's point of view at www.seiucope.org.

The idea that social security may soon fall into bankruptcy is just another Republican scare tactic. The programme is sound.

Marta Espinoza just got accepted into UCLA. But like many undocumented immigrants who entered the country with their parents, she will not be able to attend because of her immigrant status. What will she do?

Tune in this week for part one of this short film by NYU alumnus, Stephen Dypiangco and sponsored by the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change. Tune in next week for part two!

Texan progressive Jim Hightower: "People feel like they're being treated like the powers that be are the top dogs, and we are the fire hydrants." Convention coverage form the working people's point of view at seiucope.org

By now, over 370,000 people have viewed McCain's Mansions, a video depicting John McCain as a wealthy elitist whose views on the economy are out of touch with those of hard-working Americans.  And this BBC segment (the full version of which can be found here) shows the far-reaching impact of this video.  Because viewers spread McCain's Mansions with such tenacity, the video prompted Politico to question McCain on just how many mansions he owns.  McCain's now famous gaffe then led the Obama campaign to slam McCain on the economy almost immediately.  A media frenzy ensued, culminating with Joe Biden's comment over the weekend that McCain has so many kitchen tables, he can't figure which one to sit at.

Don't let this story fade.  Don't let McCain hide his elitist ways behind his POW story or Republican talking points.  Continue spreading McCain's Mansions.  Let's continue drawing attention to McCain's support for Bush's failed economic policies, and the fact that McCain's so wealthy his proposals primarily benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else.

This week on Meet the Bloggers, legendary activist filmmaker Michael Moore returns to talk about the broken election system and the first ten things the Obama Administration should do if elected. Joining Mike will be national syndicated author and blogger David Sirota, as well as Cheryl Contee of Jack & Jill Politics.  

And just like last week, Mike will be taking your questions, which you can still submit by text or by video.  Remember, the best questions for Mike will win an autographed copy of his new book or even the baseball cap off his head! 

Be sure to tune into Meet the Bloggers, Friday 1pm ET/10am PT.  And if you missed any episode of the show, you can check them out here: meetthebloggers.org

FOX and the Republicans have gone into overdrive trying to defend John McCain for not knowing how many homes he owns. As you’ve seen on this blog, they’ve attempted to explain it away with made up excuses, deflect it by claiming that calling out McCain’s cluelessness is somehow attacking Cindy McCain, and there’s the ever-popular, way-overused, “But he was a POW!” card that supposedly excuses you for every unethical, stupid thing you’ve ever done, said, or will do or say in the future.

Predictably, the right is attempting to reframe McCain’s cluelessness by saying that Barack Obama is actually attacking people for doing well and owning multiple homes, not people like McCain who are so clueless/obscenely wealthy that they don’t know or care how many homes they own. On Your World, Neil Cavuto claimed that by attacking McCain for having multiple homes, Obama was really “bashing the American Dream.”

The American Dream is not to become so obscenely wealthy that you lose track of how many homes you own and don't know/care how wealthy you are. For the vast majority of Americans, including myself, the American Dream is owning one home, paying it off, raising your family there, and being able to send your kids to college. Having too many homes is the dream of the extremely rich. But McCain thinks the problem with America isn’t that people are losing their homes and their jobs and seeing their wages decrease. No. John McCain thinks America's real problem is that rich people and corporations don’t have enough money.  

Rachel Maddow exposes John McCain's attempts to link his POW status to every issue. We thank you for your service and we sympathize with you for being a POW but stop using the POW card to excuse you from everything!