The Godless Liberal

Represent! (the Public Option)

2009-09-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

We are supposed to have representative government here in this country, aren't we?

That's what I thought. So why are our elected officials so willfully ignoring public opinion? Apparently, our senators think they know what we the people want better than we know ourselves. Apparently, what they deem 'political suicide' is what polling calls 'public support'. Not only does a majority of the American public support a public option, according to recent polling - a majority of physicians do, as well. If our representatives aren't supporting the views of the masses, and they aren't acting on behalf of doctors to protect our health, there's only one interest left that they could possibly be pulling for...

... and that, my friends, is the insurance industry.

Is this what we elect our officials for - to legislate in favor of the all-powerful insurance companies, who long have enjoyed monopoly control over our lives and health, who rake in profits by denying us treatment for our illnesses and injuries, who are the only real example of "death panels" this country has?? I certainly don't think so, and it's time for these so-called "representatives" of ours to be called out for their shady behavior.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this, however, is Obama's glaring failure as a leader. Republican opposition to health care reform was a given from the very start, and instead of standing up for what he allegedly believes in, for a major part of the platform the American public elected him on, for the course of action a majority of the country supports... he is throwing himself at the feet of Congressional Republicans, sacrificing the will of the people and of the base of his own party in attempt to score a few measly votes from the GOP. All this, just so he can call whatever pathetic excuse for a bill that passes an example of "bipartisanship", and claim to have ushered in a new era of peace, harmony and shattered party lines. It's a joke, and he's rapidly squandering what political capital he had, with the result being only to alienate his Democratic base, turn the majority of the American public against him, and show the Republicans - who last time I checked, Mr. President, were the MINORITY PARTY - that he will go out of his way to cater to their interests, even at his own expense. I'm sorry, but that's just plain pathetic. As I've said before, when the Republicans are in power, they may completely ravage our economy, our international image and our individual liberties -- but at least they know how to get stuff done. They get what they want, because they take the popular mandate and use it to exert their authority. When Democrats are in power, all they seem to be able to do is to sacrifice their own supposed political ideology in an effort to please the other side.

Now, the fate of the public option - and thus, the fate of the American health care system - seems to be up to the White House. With two consecutive public-option amendments being voted down in the Senate finance committee, with public-option supporters vowing to continue the fight and the opposition refusing to budge, with a House bill likely to contain a public option but a Senate unlikely to push for reconciliation in the face of an anticipated lack of 60 favorable votes... Congress is looking to Obama to step in and mediate. The President needs, for once in his term, to show some leadership. It is time for him to look the nation in the eye and state unequivocally what he championed on the campaign trail - the necessity of a public option to reforming our health care system. Any bill without a public option would be worse than doing nothing at all, because once Obama's got another legislative feather to stick in his cap, he's going to declare the health care problem solved and move on, and we Americans will be stuck with this woefully inadequate system for the rest of our foreseeable future.

So please, Obama, show us just one example of that "change" we've been hearing so much about. Do what I really believe you know is right for the American public. Forget about appeasing a minority party who is going to find a way to oppose you no matter what you do. Just in terms of tactics, start acting like a Republican and just "git 'er done". Because unlike the last Republican President... the majority of the American people support what you want to do. It's time to start acting like the leader of the free world you supposedly are.

Take charge in support of a public option, and maybe, just maybe... our nation will have something we can believe in again.

The Change We Can Believe In?!?

2009-08-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

There's really nothing I can add to this... the headline says it all.

"U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, But With More Oversight"

The Audacity of Nope

2009-08-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Well, folks, looks like President Pushover is at it again. The past several weeks have heard a level of debate, accusation, misinformation and scare-tactic hyperbole that has achieved sheer lunacy over the issue of health care reform. For a while, it seemed as though a plan with a public option was pretty much a given; most Americans seemed to support it, many members of Congress seemed at least open to the possibility of its inclusion in legislation, and Obama pitched it at every public-speaking opportunity he could. It should have been a sure thing - with all in its favor, there should never have been any doubt that whatever neutered legislation finally emerged from Congress would at least have a public option as an available choice. The public desperately wants, and needs, health care reform. Nobody - except those with a financial interest in their continued monopoly - is satisfied with the insurance companies and their death grip (literally) on the American populace. Medical professionals have spoken out time and again about the brokenness of the current system. Obama, whose campaign rhetoric frequently referenced health care reform, was elected with a strong mandate, and his approval rating is still tremendously high for a new president. The Democrats have control (theoretically) over both Houses of Congress. They have the ability to pass practically any legislation they want without one vote from the Republicans. Skyrocketing health care costs are bankrupting the citizenry, and insurance companies are signing Americans' death warrants by denying coverage overall or refusing to cover potentially lifesaving procedures.

So WHY is Obama falling over backwards to cater to the Republicans?! Why is he doing everything in his power to please a minority party with record-low approval ratings?!? Why is the Democratic leadership, supposedly the champion of the common man, supposedly not deep in the pockets of the rich, the powerful, the insurance company CEOs, doing their damndest to neuter whatever reform legislation comes their way to the point of utter uselessness?

There is absolutely NOTHING audacious about this administration thus far. Obama is playing to the center while alienating everyone even remotely on the outskirts. The Democrats in the House and Senate are proving themselves, once again, to be just another bunch of shady politicians, no better than any other party they denounce at election time. And the worst part is, they don't even have anything to show for this behavior. When the Republicans are in power, they may piss a lot of people off, but damn it, they get what they want. They get legislation passed, they make policy, they issue bold and definitive statements about ideology political and otherwise. I may not like the Republicans - but at least I feel like I know where they stand. With Obama and the Democrats, I just feel like I've been had. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and time and time again this proves a tragic mistake.

I think it's time for the President and the Democratic leadership to really let us know where they stand. If all they're doing is looking out for themselves, fine - just let us know about it. In my mind, they are thoroughly in the red in terms of their political capital; next time, I'll be voting for Nader. If they want to completely bungle their one shot at real power, at the time when it should have been so easy for them to establish their agenda it's laughable, then they don't deserve to hold on to any of it.

But please, for the sake of all Americans, just don't bungle this one. Let us have the health care reform that we so desperately need and deserve. Let us join the ranks of every other civilized nation in the world and actually provide for our citizens, for a change.

Just this one time, stick to your original principles... let us hear one final "yes we can". It was a good slogan. It's just a shame it only applied as far as election day.

Resistance is Futile

2009-07-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

Obama and pals are going to get a health care reform bill passed before the sun sets on 2009, and they're going to do it whether the bill turns out to be an ineffective turd that will squelch the chances of passing any meaningful health care legislation within our lifetimes or not.

Rahm Emanuel said as much - "failure is not an option". And "failure", to this administration, is characterized solely by an inability to pass a piece of legislation this year. "Failure" has nothing to do with the actual effectiveness of said legislation, nothing to do with this so-called reform's ability to provide universal, affordable and effective health care coverage to Americans. The administration is so dead-set on getting something, anything passed, that they don't care what it's going to do to the greater cause of health care reform in the future. They're going to destroy whatever small chance might exist for a single-payer system in the future; they're going to rally Republicans everywhere to decry the evils of socialized medicine; they're going to run the national deficit even further through the roof, and despite all this, they're going to end up with some neutered piece of all-too-familiar looking legislation, stuffed with Republican amendments that completely change the original intention in some half-assed attempt at "bipartisanship" that still leaves too many Americans without access to the care they need, and when this bill fails to have any tangible positive effect on individual and national life, the Republicans are going to come back with guns blazing in 2012 or 2016 and set us back to a worse situation than we were in to begin with.

Obama is so focused on not becoming Hillary Clinton, he's becoming George W. Bush.

He's going to pass something just so he can check it off his presidential to-do list. It doesn't matter if it actually accomplishes its intended goal - it's fulfilling a campaign promise by just doing something he can point to when it comes time for re-election. This is the health care version of No Child Left Behind - it sounds great, it ostensibly fulfills an intended goal of meeting a pressing social need, but at the end of the day, it accomplishes absolutely nothing, except maybe making the problem even worse.

Keep a close watch on this developing political battle, America... because if they fuck up this one, we're all going to get left behind.

P.S.

Where is John Edwards when we need him? Oh, right... his career was decimated because Democrats aren't allowed to survive political sex scandals, whereas Republicans just make a public apology, promise to be good, and stay put in office (see Larry Craig, John Ensign, and Mark Sanford, to name just a few).

More Light Shed on the Prince of Darkness

2009-07-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Machiavelli would be proud.

Kicking the Habit

2009-07-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

Two of the biggest recent news headlines - the death of Michael Jackson and the resignation of Sarah Palin from the Alaska Governorship - are interrelated in a way that is perhaps not readily apparent. Both the corporeal departure of the King of Pop and the political death of America's Hockey Mom represent the inevitable denouement to the pursuit of power and fame. Both were, in the end, the agents of their own destruction... and yet the blame is largely deflected to the media these erstwhile celebrities courted themselves.

Michael Jackson was thrust into the limelight at a young age via his early success with the Jackson Five. As his own star rose brightly and rapidly, Jackson sought the publicity that kept it soaring upward; he purposely attracted the media, courting a blossoming paparazzi culture that would evolve into the gossip-soaked, reality-synthesizing, exploitation-obsessed behemoth it is today. It has been argued that Jackson's love affair with this sort of celebrity caused a shift in tabloid media "reporting" from fantastical yarns about the Loch Ness Monster, alien autopsies and the ghost of Lincoln to the more ambiguously believable scoops on celebrity sex scandals, drug overdoses and eating disorders, and Jackson needed the paparazzi to survive as much as they needed him. In fact, probably more; there will always be new celebrities for the tabloids to gobble up, and thus Jackson became a master of weird, fringe-media attracting stunts over the years - naming his son "Blanket", dangling said Blanket out of a third story window above throngs of reporters, molding himself beyond recognition with plastic surgery, building a ranch called "Neverland" at which young boys just may have found out a little more than they'd like to about Peter Pan... the list goes on. In the end, the personal destruction that naturally accompanies an unrivaled quest for power and fame got the better of him, and Jackson's body, no longer able to stay up without prescription painkillers or go to sleep without anesthesia - anesthesia, for Chrissakes!! - simply gave out on him, in the midst of rehearsing for the pop world tour that would supposedly, at age 50, give the King his crown back.

Sarah Palin also seemed to stumble into the national spotlight after John McCain, deep into the 2008 campaign against superstar Barack Obama, made her his surprise pick for the vice presidential position. Much like Jackson, however, Palin and her surrogates had been making passes at the media early on, and this attraction only blossomed when the public began eating it up. She was coining catch-phrases, bumbling ignorantly through television interviews, proselytizing to crowds of rabid Republican fans, and hurling attacks at every oppositional demographic faster than you could wink an eye, and she handily stole the spotlight from that old guy who was supposed to be running for president. She single-handedly changed the terms of the debate, the tone of the campaign and, ultimately, the tide of support for the Republican presidential ticket. Moderates who previously had rallied to McCain's cause began drifting towards the Democrats; liberals became reinvigorated in their opposition; thinking Conservatives everywhere cringed at the Thrilla from Wasilla's painfully obvious ignorance and lack of experience. And Palin obviously was loving every minute of it. She bucked campaign advisers (remember that whole "going rogue" business?), continued to hold disastrous interviews - even went on Saturday Night Live after Tina Fey had made a career out of damningly impersonating her. It became quite apparent that the only person in the race Sarah Palin cared about was Sarah Palin, and since she first left Alaska, her constituents have only noticed that trend increasing. She has hardly even been in the state during the eight months post-election, opting instead for speaking tours, media and party events and visits to the lower 48. She has accomplished practically nothing politically, either, passing only one of her proposed bills; what bipartisan relations she had maintained with state Democrats in the passed completely evaporated after months of the Governor's partisan haranguing. Scandalous ruminations on her family and business relations have circulated constantly in the press. And, perhaps most tellingly, she has spent a fortune of her personal finances and millions of dollars of the state of Alaska's money on some fifteen ethics complaints that have been filed against her during only two and a half years in office. She eroded her credibility, destroyed her ability to govern, and made a fool of herself and her family in front of the entire nation; and, after resigning the Governorship, the one credit she could point to as qualification for higher elective office, before finishing her first term, she killed her political career and buried whatever chance she might have had at the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination. She got a taste of fame and power, she couldn't get enough, and became another instance of the brightest star burning the shortest time. Lucky for all of us - but a downright embarrassing fall for the woman once hailed as the next leader of the GOP.

Of course, both Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson are getting the truckloads of press coverage they love(d) so well. Unfortunately for them, it's the kind of publicity that only happens once. Soon enough, the media will move on to more sensational headlines, to the next rising stars of the political and entertainment scenes, and their stories will fade from the hot topic of the moment to the stuff of dusty legend. Because as long as the public eats up substanceless infotainment, and as long as narcissistic celebrities throw themselves into the spotlight, the press will keep up this enabling relationship. Maybe someday we can all learn better. Maybe someday we can break this cycle of addiction. Maybe someday celebrities, consumers and reporters alike can kick the habit of sensational obsession.

Maybe. But probably not.

Hurry Up and Wait

2009-06-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

In keeping with the double-talk that has characterized the administration thus far, President Obama, speaking on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, delivered another subtextually-condescending snippet to the gay community (many of whom had helped elect the so-called candidate of change, and many of whom dropped out of a recent DNC fundraiser after the White House released its offensive statement likening homosexuality to incest, and supporting that Republican stalwart, the Defense of Marriage Act). Even the flowery rhetoric of our generation's Great Communicator couldn't hide his administration's patronizing and hypocritical stance.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about this speech is that Obama makes it clear he sees the double standard he is perpetrating, saying "it's not for me to tell you to be patient anymore than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago." And yet, in the next breath, he tells the gay community exactly that - to just be patient, that the administration has other priorities, to hurry up and wait for their civil rights. This admission thoroughly implicates Obama in active discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans; by himself drawing the parallel between the struggle for gay equality and the civil rights battles of the 1960s, he admits that gays and lesbians are treated as second-class citizens, that they do not currently have the liberties promised to all American citizens - and that they must continue to sit idly by while this treatment continues, sanctioned by the highest levels of government.

Obama's remark that "by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration" left the sourest of tastes in my mouth. 'By the end of the administration'? 'You guys'? In one sentence, he reveals that gay rights is of the lowest priority on his presidential agenda, and emphasizes the 'otherness' of the LGBT community. The subtle condescension of this remark is exemplary of Obama's whole attitude towards gay rights - indeed, towards many of the progressive causes he seemed to advocate when he was on the campaign trail. On the surface, it seems reasonable; to those who are not passionately invested in the issues, it sounds fair, pragmatic, bipartisan. But dig a little deeper, read the fine print, and you will find a conservative, corporatist politician who's just, like all the rest of them, trying to play it safe with an eye to the next election.

To quote Joe Biden, from a stump speech for then-candidate Obama himself: "That's not change. That's more of the same." It's time for us all to start paying attention to the discrepancies between who it is we voted for, and who ended up in the White House, after all.

All the World's a Stage...

2009-06-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

I have to preface this post by noting that I haven't written in a long time, due to the chaos of an impending move halfway across the country to a state I've never been outside the airport in. Yep... my better half and I are moving to Austin, TX, to add a little more blue to the big red state. Wish us luck. And now, back to politics.

Almost five months in to the Obama presidency, and my disillusion has long since set in. Sure, I'm glad that he won, it's great that the first black President is in the White House... but I have to say, I think I was right the first time about our friend Barack. My initial perception of him as being long on charisma and short on conviction; as being a master of rhetoric, but an ineffective policymaker; as being a champion of the masses only so long as the cameras were rolling; as being a successful peacemaker, but a blatant panderer... all of this, which I myself forgot in the fervor of the campaign and the excitement of historical milestone-setting, has unfortunately come to bear.

What irks me the most is that, really, I don't think he's a bad guy, and I don't generally think he has bad intentions. The problem is, we never know what his intentions truly are; we may never know what Barack Obama, the man, really believes. Everything about the President is a carefully crafted persona. A public facade. He aims to please, and he aims to please whomever the moment deems politically advantageous. Often, I think he's trying to please the right people - for example, worldwide Muslim populations, the international community - but almost as often, I think he's not, and the whole thing is beside the point anyway, since he should really be trying to promote what he thinks are the best policies, regardless of whom they may or may not appeal to. It's no coincidence he's always name-dropping Ronald Reagan - Obama is a panderer in the tradition of the master himself.

Like his Republican predecessor, Obama uses religious rhetoric and references to sell himself and certain of his agenda items - but I don't even get the impression that he's all that into religion. Sure, I think he believes in a Judeo-Christian traditional-type model of god, but really, I just don't think he cares that much. His past church attendance was spotty at best (his claim to have never heard most of the infamous Reverend Wright's sermons was true - he wasn't there); the Obamas still haven't found a church in the DC area, to the best of my knowledge; and when he speaks of god and religion, he tends to do so in general, broadly appealing terms... I doubt you'd ever hear this President cop to talking policy with the Almighty. He also is the first post-evangelical-revival Prez to directly reference atheists and agnostics in his public addresses (though, betraying his ever-present attempt to have it both ways, he did so using the heavily loaded term "non-believers").

God-fearing folk aren't the only ones to whom Obama has spoken out both sides of his mouth. He rails loudly and frequently against the banking industry, credit card companies and other powerful financial institutions - then throws trillions of taxpayer money at them whenever the opportunity arises, imposing only meager regulations. He says that all Americans deserve affordable health care - then backs down from the public option, the only option that would be truly affordable and accessible to everyone. He speaks in support of gay rights - then has Rick Warren speak at his inauguration, ignores his campaign pledge to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, and signs on to a White House memo supporting the Defense of Marriage Act and likening homosexuality to incest. He swore up and down the campaign trail and back again to end the war in Iraq and finish what we started in Afghanistan - then throws tankloads of defense dollars at both quagmires, and deploys an ever-increasing number of additional troops to the wage an unwinnable battle in the poppy-covered country no foreign power has ever emerged from victorious. This President talks a big, beautiful talk - and while I'm more than happy to have a Commander-in-Chief who can formulate a coherent sentence, words without deeds are unfortunately rather meaningless.

Basically, Obama acts like he's for the little guy, and then rolls over for the powerful interests that be time and time again. I admit it... I bought into his populist rhetoric in the heightened passions of the final months of the campaign season. And he sounded like he really believed it. I actually think that he does, deep down... that underneath the slick facade is a true egalitarian, a man of the people, a man with firm convictions and policy prescriptions. The problem is, he's bought into his own hype, and now seems more concerned with appearing on television, on building his media brand, than he is with bringing those buried convictions to bear in his own government. Obama has delivered a whole hell of a lot of speeches in the past several months... but what has he really accomplished? He promised that change was coming to Washington - and I'd like to see a little of that change actually occur. Let's get some things done. To quote Bill Maher: "We're done with the audacity of hope. Now I'm hoping for a little more audacity."

Play a part long enough, and eventually, you won't even be acting anymore. Here's hoping that one of these days, we get more than just a performance.

Comfortably Numb

2009-03-19T15:24:00.001-07:00

Maybe I'm alone on this one, but I have to admit that, as disgusting and reprehensible as AIG's use of taxpayer money to pay unwarranted executive bonuses may be... I just can't really care anymore. I've become so desensitized to the news of Ponzi-schemers stealing millions, financial-sector bigwigs lining their own pockets with our bailout money, spectacularly-failing Wall Street firms getting government aid only to continue to plummet flaming into the night, that honestly, I've become too numb to react anymore. I feel about as much tangible outrage about the most recent AIG scandal as President Obama actually expresses in his public statements... which is to say, yeah, in theory I'm angry, but it's not really worth the energy required to express it. Nothing's changed, and nothing will, as long as the government keeps attempting to solve the neverending catastrophes of the financial sector by throwing exorbitant sums of money at incompetent institutions staffed by greedy bourgeosie who haven't felt effect one of this supposedly capitalism-crippling recession.

You sort of lose the right to be "outraged" about a situation that you were essentially responsible for creating - or at the very least, should have seen coming a mile away. These organizations are failing for a reason. The people in power on Wall Street are not about to have a sudden philanthropic epiphany just because you tell them their practices are hurting ordinary Americans. They're not going to have an attack of conscience because you wag your finger at them.

So here's an idea for the Obama administration. STOP GIVING THEM THE MONEY. They've already had their chance at subsidized reformation. If this is how they think a business should be run - then that business should be allowed to fail. Put the taxpayer dollars where they might actually make a difference - in health care reform, in green-infrastructure development, in funding renewable energy distribution, in helping Americans get an education, in making sure the Social Security dollars we're paying in are still going to be there when we need them, in protecting the environment and supporting scientific innovation, in making rent more affordable and stemming foreclosures... I can think of an endless number of uses for that money better than bailing out Wall Street tycoons. That's the kind of change I want to see in this country.

I don't know about the rest of you... but I'm starting to think Jon Stewart is more qualified to run the Treasury than Tim Geithner. It's time for a populist revolution... who's with me?

Anyone?

Yeah, I know. You don't care anymore, either.

Do The Right Thing

2009-03-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

President Obama has found his administration faced with yet another opportunity to either forge a new direction for national policy, or to kowtow to the opposition in another ineffective attempt at finding the middle path. The most recent issue involves whether to award full benefits to same-sex spouses of federal employees, as outlined in the New York Times today. So far, when Obama finds himself publicly caught in the middle (as he so often does, given his self-designation as the national moderator), he has cast out a halfhearted attempt at pleasing both sides - which usually ends up as both sides getting pissed off and nothing new really being accomplished. Here's hoping that President Obama can, on at least this one issue, look at the evidence and see the clear choice that should be made; denying same-sex spouses of federal employees benefits, spouses legally married in their home state and thus entitled to all the matrimonial rights the state allows, is nothing short of discrimination. To strip these spouses of their rights based purely on their sexual orientation, based on some sick and arbitrary conception you have of what they ought to be doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms, is pure prejudice. It is no different than denying a spouse of a federal employee benefits because the spouse happened to be black, and Obama, of all people, should recognize this, should see the blatant hypocrisy between his stated ideals and some of his official rhetoric. Interracial marriage used to be illegal; such is the state of gay marriage today. But in those few states that have managed to inch forward in this stale debate, the federal government should recognize the rights these local governments designated and stop trying to legislate the national morality based on the personal convictions of a powerful few. The administration needs to cash some of those social-justice checks its campaign has written.

In short: President Obama, do the right thing.

The Silver (Embryonic) Lining

2009-03-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

Within the cloud of disappointing half-measures President Obama has brought to the political forefront lately, today reveals a silver lining. Obama's repeal of President Bush's ban on using federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research is a breath of progressive fresh air in an increasingly stagnant moderate atmosphere. This action, and the memo released in conjunction with it, reveals a glimpse of the open-minded rationalist we saw on the campaign trail, what seems like an eternity ago, before the depressing realities of compromise and acceptance of the system settled upon the shoulders of our fearless leader. Obama's firm stance on the separation of science and ideology is a refreshing reminder of why we voted for him - a reminder I wish we'd get more often. We know he is capable of standing up for his beliefs, for the preservation of scientific integrity, for the triumph of pragmatic truth over unthinking ideology, for the well-being of all Americans over the interests of the priveleged few. All we can do now is hope that he will take such a stand when the battles over health care, energy and the environment are brought to the front lines. So far, he hasn't given much sign that he will. But maybe, just maybe, he'll lead us in that now-familiar chorus: "yes we can."

Half-Measures Avail Us Nothing...

2009-02-19T16:49:00.000-08:00

I think, as usual, I'm in the minority here, but early as it may be, I really don't think I either love or hate the Obama administration. So far, it seems like everything Obama has tackled has amounted to a nice try... but just not quite enough. And I think it's pretty safe to infer that this is and will continue to be the Administration of Half-Measures. Obama's not going to do anything horrible (no illegal wars or warantless wiretapping here, I daresay)... but he's not going to do anything great, either. Just as I feared in the beginning, now-President Obama is just too eager to please, has too much of that kum-ba-ya congeniality to really take a stand for a liberal agenda, is just too "post-partisan" to really act on progressive legislation.

Which is a shame. Because desperate times call for desperate measures, and after eight years of eroding civil liberties, increasingly compromised ideals of equality and justice, snowballing deregulation, flagrant cronyism and influence peddling... we need bold, progressive legislation like never before.

But so far, we have gotten nothing but the half-measures typical of Democratic leaders (see Clinton), only with an insanely elevated emphasis on the (obviously failed) idea of "bipartisanship". Obama tried to bring Republican leaders into his cabinet - and he was made the naif by would-be Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg's belated coming-to-Jesus moment. He called to mind images of the New Deal with his proposed stimulus package, promising renewed investments in infrastructure, promising real progress in alternative transportation and green energy - and we got some token allocations with the same old majority emphasis on roads, with infrastructure repairs many deem insufficient, and with a huge bone thrown to the opposition in the form of tax breaks and slashed budgets for science and education (and for what? In the end only 3 Senate and zero House Republicans voted for the bill). He spoke in sweeping generalities of a new era of inclusiveness and equality - then had Rick Warren give the invocation at his inaugural, and increased the funding and scope of George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. We were promised the dawn of accountability and oversight - and we got Cabinet nominees who were tax cheats and an almost completely useless government website. We were promised and end to America's foreign crusades - and we're getting a repositioning of the front lines from Iraq to Afghanistan (as evidenced by Obama's quiet commitment of 17,000 additional troops to the region). We were promised a new and improved health care system - and we're getting the same old health care system, only available to more people at the same abhorrent social and financial costs (where's John Edwards when you really need him??). We were promised redemption, and we're letting the Bush administration scuttle back to their caves, consultantships, think tanks and hedge funds, 100% scot-free.

He told us he wouldn't let a crisis go to waste. And so far, it looks an awful lot like he's letting a crisis go to waste.

Enough with the pandering. Enough with the fruitless attempts at bipartisan compromise. Enough with trying to have it both ways. America is in crisis, and the last thing we need is to prolong our inevitable descent into irrelevance. This is a time for bold action, a progressive agenda, for - what's that word again? Oh, right - change. So far, I haven't seen a whole hell of a lot that I can believe in... except the grim realization that old politics never dies - it just gets better marketing campaigns.

I'm not giving up on Obama yet... I just think he's on a current path to Clintondom. Which maybe was all he ever wanted from the beginning... but he made me think he'd be so much more.

Yes We Did... Now What?

2009-02-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

Now that the confetti has settled, the inauguration day parties have faded into hazy memory, and the awe of seeing the first African-American face behind the White House podium has subsided, the realities of governance are coming home for President Obama and the American people who elected him. During the transition, the leadership team Obama was assembling was lauded for its talent, pragmatism and integrity. Obama spoke with his trademark romanticism about the upcoming era of responsibility and bipartisanship, a time when officials would be held accountable and ideological differences would fall away to reveal a common pragmatism. Upon taking office, he maintained an expectation of Republican support for the upcoming stimulus legislation, boldly suggesting the possibility of an 80-vote passage in the Senate. Optimism was high among the electorate; excitement over the election of the first African-American president was palpable.

And then, reality set in. First came the House vote on the 'economic recovery and re-investment' package - a crushing defeat of Obama's bipartisan dreams, as not a single House Republican voted for the bill. Then came the scandals; following the earlier news of Bill Richardson's withdrawal came the tax woes of Tim Geithner, Nancy Killefer and, dramatically, Tom Daschle. Geithner's confirmation in the face of these revelations, along with widely-supported criticism that William Lynn skirted the no-lobbyists rule in his position at the NSC, along with Leon Panetta's claims that in his capacity as CIA Director the organization would strictly follow guidelines in the Army Field Manual except when it wouldn't... well, it all started to sound an awful lot like that old campaign-trail slogan, "more of the same". Obama, criticized during the election for being too inexperienced, seemed to have attempted to compensate by filling his cabinet with the very "old Washington insiders" he had previously decried. And, whether by way of a godawfully sloppy vetting team, or hubris on Obama's part in thinking that his popularity would overshadow any criticism against his Cabinet, the grand and admirable pre-election ideals of integrity, accountability, consistency, and renewal were dashed before the presidency reached its first 30 days.

I voted for Obama, but now, I'm starting to worry that the "inexperienced" attacks may have held some water, after all. It seems like, under the cool exterior, the new president is flailing, unsure of how to proceed. I find it telling that he is retreating to the familiar territory of the campaign trail, traveling to states like Indiana and Florida to push the stimulus package through his old standby: impassioned speeches to ordinary Americans. Obama may very well redeem himself, but he began this 44th Presidency with some serious mistakes. First and foremost, instead of displaying the leadership the new President himself insisted we needed after eight years of denials and retreats to Crawford, instead of taking an active role in crafting a bill that would ensure achievement of his promised goals and avoid much of the inevitable criticism from the opposition, Obama passed the stimulus-legislation buck to the Democratic Congressional leadership, resulting in a bill laced with pet projects and characterized by a lack of cohesive vision. Equally damaging was Obama's insistence on bipartisan cooperation above all else; by making this the utmost legislative priority, he put the ball squarely in the Republicans' court, because after all, bipartisanship depends entirely on their cooperation. He gave the Republicans the floor, allowing their criticisms of the stimulus (as expected, a demand for increased tax cuts and decreased spending, claiming that anything they didn't like 'wouldn't create jobs') to dominate the national discussion. Why Obama ceded the floor in the first place to the party largely responsible for getting the country into its various dire straits, why he is validating the opinions of those whose ideology ran us into the ground for the past eight years, why he is even giving the appearance of consideration to failed policies and flawed ideologies, is entirely beyond me. And in the end, all this bipartisanship got him was, well, a lot of intensely partisan legislative scuffling. There is absolutely no reason the minority should still be calling the Congressional shots. The Democrats are in control, and they need to act like it - most importantly, Obama needs to lead, on both sides of the aisle, with a firm hand. He cannot rely on the Democratic leadership to guarantee his administrative goals, and he cannot yield control of the debate to the opposition. If there was one thing the Bush administration could do well, it was message control - and so far the message we are getting from Obama's White House is one of weakness.

So, please, Obama, stop this rising tide of disillusion, not by making sweeping speeches and grand promises that will ultimately only disappoint us, but by leading boldly and deliberately. You are the Commander-in-Chief; command this legislation you keep telling us we so desperately need, command your White House team to act with integrity, command your own message and public persona. We voted for you because we believed in your ideals - so don't compromise them before your first month's even over. Think outside the Beltway box with your remaining Cabinet appointees, and ensure that they are people whose integrity meets your own ethical standards. Do not make compromises on that which you promised you would remain true. And do not sacrifice good governance for the sake of bipartisan pandering. I hate to break it to you, but the American political system is not going to change, at least not anytime soon. So operate within the framework that is actually in place, and use that pragmatism to make a difference.

Remember... the American people like a leader who can admit his mistakes, but we don't want to spend the next four years listening to the President apologize. Our country can't afford many more "screw-ups".

Whither Now Goes Health Care Reform?

2009-02-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

It was a sad day in Washington yesterday, as Tom Daschle, whom Obama not only named as director of Health and Human Services but also created a special "health care czar" position for, joined the rapidly-growing ranks of disgraced would-be Obama Cabinet designees and withdrew from consideration. Daschle withdrew over his failure to pay $140,000 in back taxes and interest from the use of a car-and-driver service granted to him by a media mogul/politico friend over the years. This announcement came right on the heels of Nancy Killefer's withdrawal from the newly-created post of Chief Performance Officer, over a much smaller amount ($900) but a more malicious-seeming intent (she refused to pay employment security taxes on a former nanny and had a lien placed on her house, whereas Daschle believably claims he thought the car service counted as a gift, not as income). And, of course, Tim Geithner came under fire during his own confirmation for failing to pay $100,000 in income taxes while he was employed at the IMF - though he managed to dodge the bullets and claim his post as Treasury Secretary.

The most unfortunate part about the recent realization of Obama's tax-evasion triumvirate is that the wrong guy made it to confirmation. One scandal-ridden Cabinet member could be dealt with, the administration and the Congress seemed to agree, but three was unacceptable. Geithner's hearing got underway first, due to the perceived urgency of his nomination in light of the economic crisis; he met significant opposition during his hearing, but the Democratic majority handed him an albeit tarnished victory. However, by the time Daschle's confirmation rolled around, the Obama administration was fast acquiring a reputation for hypocrisy, for being that nasty old more-of-the-same they so decried on the campaign trail. As member after member fell under scrutiny (besides the aforementioned, Bill Richardson and William Lynn were ethically called-out), Daschle's tax problems (as well as some questionable psuedo-lobbying activity in his recent past) seemed like too much fuel for the fires of those who felt betrayed. In light of Geithner's tainted confirmation, Daschle, many felt, couldn't also be allowed to slide. Of course, if Obama knew he was only going to get to keep one of his three top Cabinet nominees, you better believe he wouldn't have picked Geithner. Daschle truly was uniquely qualified for the HHS position (and, of course, the position Obama created for him); a passionate advocate of universal health care and systematic reform (one of our nation's most dire needs), he is one of the only public figures with both the issue advocacy and expertise as well as the political connections and governmental savvy that will be required, if health care reform has a prayer of a chance of getting passed. Not only was Geithner a much less vital personality, but, for the love of god, he was up for Treasury Secretary. Overseeing the IRS. AND HE DIDN'T PAY HIS TAXES. What could be more direct grounds for dismissal than that?!?

Regardless, the future of health care reform in this country looks, at the moment, bleak. The only other names that immediately come to mind in regards to health care are Ted Kennedy (dying of brain tumor) and Hillary Clinton (already tapped for an inappropriate spot as Secretary of State). The administration never so much as contemplated anyone but Daschle for the position, according to the Washington Post. While Daschle, like other idiots, should have just paid his damn taxes and avoided this whole mess in the first place, and while the whole situation is a disgrace to him and to the new President - he was still the best man for the job.

Perhaps Obama shot himself in the foot by setting standards too high for any Washingtonian to possibly meet. But, then again, he did promise us, during the campaign, that he wasn't going to fill his White House with the same old Washington insiders. His campaign attracted attention and praise due in large part to its preponderance of Beltway outsiders - it was what gave it the grassroots appeal that carried the junior Senator to the top of the polls. And yet, no sooner had Obama been declared the winner of the election than he began to pick his staff members straight from - you guessed it - the same old pool of seasoned politicos. The Clinton connections go way beyond Hillary Clinton herself - so how, exactly, did Obama expect to bring a brand new day in presidential politics when the fundamental personnel had not changed? Either Obama should have stuck to his promise, and picked from a pool of rookies, or he should not have set the goal so high as to be unable to achieve it. Now he just looks, well, naive. (And Jesus, who picked that vetting team, anyway??)

Obama must take this opportunity to seriously evaluate where he wants this nation to go, and how he means to achieve it. There is way too much at stake to be making gambles at this stage in the game.

Mr. Sims Goes to Washington

2009-02-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

It has recently been announced that our very own Ron Sims, long-serving King County Executive, has been tapped by the Obama administration to fill a deputy position in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If confirmed, we here in the Puget Sound will be losing a strong, progressive voice, a supporter of equal rights and an advocate of much-needed infrastructure improvements. But I suppose Obama's White House is a good place for him to go. Goodbye, Mr. Sims, and thank you for your service to our humble County of King.

Oh, and here's hoping we don't all find out HE hasn't paid his income taxes, either... heh...

Return of the Rule of Law

2009-01-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

The image speaks for itself. So far, Obama is putting his executive order where his mouth is, signing memorandums ordering the closing of Guantanamo within a year, reviving the Freedom of Information Act, and reversing legislation that prevented foreign governments accepting US aid for family planning from providing assistance for abortion services. Let's hope this is just the beginning of a new era in which the rule of law prevails, human rights come first, accountability is the standard and the US is a less bombastic and more respected partner on the international scene.

The Day We Painted the White House Black

2009-01-20T16:08:00.000-08:00

This morning, at 12 p.m EST, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America - and, of course, as our nation's first black Commander-in-Chief.

The enormity of the day speaks for itself, but I felt I had to add to the bustling blogosphere my own sentiments of pride, awe, respect and a skeptical optimism for the future. I am proud that my country has taken such a step forward in progressive politics and equal rights; I am proud that the rest of the world is finally looking at America in celebration, and looking towards the White House for leadership and guidance. It feels so good to be able to look to my President in awe of his intelligence, his rhetorical skill and his leadership abilities. His speech was impressive, even in the context of his soaring campaign rhetoric; it was at once academic and accessible, realistic and hopeful, referential to America's rich and varied past while looking towards the future. It harkened back to the good old days of political oratory, and I must say, it was downright inspiring to listen to.

I once again have respect for the executive office, and while I know President Obama will disappoint me with more than one of his policy decisions over the next four to eight years, I at least know that I will be able to respect him and his judgment. He is not going to save us from all our problems; he is not the Messiah. But he does have all the qualities necessary to be a great President - intelligence, a thorough knowledge of the Constitution, rhetorical skill, political savvy, an eerie capability to remain calm under pressure, a progressive nature, an openness to new and competing ideas, a desire for bipartisan cooperation (and so far, the ability to achieve it), and a vision for a better America. To even be able to look to the new Presidency with a skeptical optimism is an amazingly welcome change, and I do believe that our 44th President, our first African-American President, will be a good leader. We the people must not fall into complacency - we must remain vigilant, holding Obama and his administration accountable for every decision. But we can rest assured knowing that there is, at last, a steady and capable hand at the helm. The image of the departing executives was a perfect visual summation of the moment at hand - Dubya shuffled, hands in his pockets, onto a helicopter at the far side of the Mall; the decrepit monster Dick Cheney was pushed towards a black sedan by his wife in a wheelchair. The Obamas, young, black, full of life and the excitement of the day, stood on the steps and bid them farewell.

Best of luck, Barack Obama. Today we are all living in history.

Today is the day that America, in the words of the prophet Luda, painted the White House black.

We May Be Through with the Past...

2009-01-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

President-in-five-days Barack Obama has recently expressed his perspective on whether or not Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for the atrocities committed over the course of its increasingly-Orwellian 'War on Terror'. Calls for such prosecutions have focused on war crimes charges for "enhanced interrogation techniques" (read: torture), extraordinary rendition, abuse of prisoners (and the law) at Guantanamo and warrantless wiretapping; such prosecutions, were they to be pursued, would target not the grunts on the ground (who eerily say they were "just following orders", but I suppose one can only blame them so much) but the upper-level decisionmakers who authorized the measures - and based on recent statements by unfortunately-still-Vice President Cheney, the cloud goes all the way to the top of the chain of command.

Now, given all the rhetoric we've heard for the past two years about "change", about making a "clean break from the past", one would think that as President, Obama would want to right the wrongs of the past administration, would want to bring to justice those who have so flagrantly violated the law and pissed on the Constitution for the past two terms. One would hope that a President who claims a high moral standing, who claims to want to restore ethics and accountability to our nation's disgraced executive branch, would not let war crimes go unpunished, would not want to continue the shameful and Nixonian precedent that the President is above the law.

Unfortunately, one would be wrong.

Obama has been deliberatley oblique in response to questions about the possible prosecution of Team Dubya members, but he has said, in quite a bit more words, that he will not direct anyone in his own administration to pursue such a track. He says that he does not want to dwell on the mistakes of the past, but to move forward and focus on the challenges that lie ahead. He wants to change without emphasizing how bad things were before.

This would be all well and good if we were talking about, oh, for example, prosecuting a blow job. But we're not talking about some sex scandal or some of the old run-of-the-mill politicking, here. We are talking about war crimes. We are talking about the systematic destruction of the Constitution, the flagrant assertion that the executive branch is above the law, the denial of human rights, the abuse of prisoners, the unwarranted spying on our own nation's citizens. These accusations are not something that can be simply swept under the rug. This isn't something the American people just need to "get over". This is criminal activity, and it needs to be brought to justice.

If Obama truly wants to make a fresh start for the White House, if he truly believes in his own mantra of 'change', then it is imperative he lead by example. He needs to prove that the moral integrity is being restored to this country's leadership, and he needs to prove that crimes will not go unpunished simply because they were committed by people in power. If he wants his own as well as future administrations to behave justly, lawfully and in the best interests of the people, if he believes in the Constitution he will soon swear to uphold, he needs to show us just what that's worth. The precedent that will be set by allowing the Bush administration to laugh all the way to the bank with our nation's honor, integrity and power in tow is more dangerous than any Republican boat-rocking Obama could possibly be fearing at the moment.

"The book says we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

The only way to truly and honestly move forward is to properly deal with the wreckage of the past eight years. And if Obama can't see that... well, then we may have declared him a visionary just a little too soon.

Refreshingly Corrupt

2008-12-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have to admit it. The flagrant, idiotic arrogance with which Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich engaged in systematically corrupting his already blighted public office is, in a weird way, sort of refreshing. He brazenly discussed extortion and bribery on phones he knew were likely to be tapped. He threatened his opponents and sought openly to enrich himself and his family before even considering his constituents. And he made it so entertaining! Blagojevich's conversations sounded more like Tony Soprano than that other star of the wiretap, Richard Nixon. Rod the God even had the brass cojones to call the President-Elect of the United States a "motherfucker" , for refusing to participate in his evil scheme to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.

So why, you ask, do I find this gubernatorial "crime spree" (in Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's words) a refreshing occurence? Well, quite frankly, it's kind of nice to see good old-fashioned dirty dealings back in political news. After eight years of Orwellian power grabs and constitutional subversions by Bush and pals; the increasingly horrific costs paid in civil liberties, American and Iraqi lives, the US' international reputation; financial and domestic stability; two terms of being lied to about everything from the origins of the 9/11 attack to the pretenses of the Iraq War to the goal of national unification... well, a scandal as clear-cut as this bumbling Mob goon of a governor, complete with an '80s bouffant and dollar signs for eyes, seems downright quaint. No wars were unjustly launched, habeus corpus was not suspended, nobody was tortured in a secret military prison, nobody died for what proved to be a false cause. The guy wanted money. Lots of money. And he was prepared to engage in any form of bribery or extortion necessary to get that money. Plain and simple. Far from engaging in a conspiratorial plan for Middle Eastern domination, this dude wasn't even coordinated enough to avoid a word-for-word exposure of his criminal plans to the FBI.

So, really, the Blagojevich corruption case is a throwback to the good old days of political scandal... days when cash was king, blatant power plays were the norm and elected officials were dumb enough to explain their nefarious plans on tape, like some sort of soon-to-be-foiled Bond villain. Thanks, Mr. Blagojevich, for reminding us what a scandal is really all about.

The Great Divide

2008-12-10T22:44:00.001-08:00

While I consider former governor, failed presidential candidate and successful Fox television host Mike Huckabee to be pretty much the antithesis of everything I believe in... I have to give the guy credit. He is starting the dialogue that we so need to have in this country - the conversation between religious devotees and atheists, agnostics and the secularly inclined. While ignorant monsters such as Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter make it their mission to wage cultural warfare against non-Christians everywhere, Huckabee has proven himself more than willing to sit down with even the most vehement detractors of religion (read: my hero, Bill Maher) and have a sane, rational discussion about faith, politics and the nexus of both. Huckabee's reasoning may not make any logical sense outside of a staunchly evangelical framework, but at least he's not screaming his righteous head off at his ideological adversaries or calling them 'godless' (though the latter is a label that some of us, of course, wear proudly). Until religious believers and secularists alike are able to sit down at the same table and have a calm, engaged and intelligent discussion about faith, our society and political system will remain stalemated.

Well, okay, it'll probably still be stalemated after that... but at least maybe we'll all have our dignity intact.

Check out the last six or seven minutes of December 9th's episode of the Daily Show to see a great example of a constructive religious and political debate (oh, and it doesn't hurt that Jon Stewart delivers a rousing series of gentlemanly knockout punches to Huckabee's circular arguments, either!).

The Best Christmas Ever

2008-12-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

In an unusual display of holiday cheer, Governor Chris Gregoire has allowed, for the first time, an athiest message to be displayed next to the nativity scene in the state capitol. Citing first amendment rights of free expression, the Governor rightly discerned that it was just as fair to allow our friends at the Freedom From Religion Foundation to put up a sign as it was to allow a diorama of the most famous Christian myth. However, the message the FFRF chose to display was unfortunately worded; during the time of year when even us secular types are celebrating the Christmas season, the deliberately provocative (albeit true) message about there being no god and that religion 'hardens hearts' is obviously being less than well-received. As provocation begets provocation, our humble state of Washington has made national news, making the shit of none other than the master hatemonger, Bill O'Reilly.

While it is par for the course, the Christian reaction really, to me, begs the question, is the faith of these people so weak that it can be threatened by a sign proposing an alternative viewpoint? If they truly believe in their faith, why should they care what anyone else believes in? Especially at this time of year, I am constantly bombarded by Christian imagery, spokespersons and institutions (to say nothing of its involvement in our political and legal system, but in no way does it weaken or undermine my atheistic belief. I do not demand that the nativity scene be removed from the capitol (though without the FFRF sign to counter it, I might, seeing as that could be seen as state endorsing church). I don't care if someone is a Christian, as long as they don't try to force me to accept their beliefs. The point, really, is that they want the Judeo-Christian viewpoint to be the only accepted viewpoint. It's not about freedom of religion or diversity or the so-called sanctity of the church... it's about rewriting history, about making the USA a de facto Christian theocracy. You better believe there would be almost as big a stink about an alternative Islamic display in the Capitol, only the bigotry in that case would be veiled in a semblance of respect for diversity. Anyway, I don't think that putting up a sign constitutes forcing one's belief on another. It's simply exemplifying a perspective... just as the magical baby in a manger is exemplifying another viewpoint, albeit one that requires a much greater stretch of the imagination.

I don't think anyone has the right to demand the removal of the FFRF's sign, just as no one has the right to demand the removal of a nativity scene (unless it is presented as a direct endorsement by a state authority). However, as I said before, I think the wording of the message was unfortunate, was merely provocative for provocation's sake. The message was obviously designed to piss people off, to dump on the Christmas holiday that is celebrated by a diversity of people, including athiests (and anyway, most of its modern incarnations are based on paganism). That sort of behavior is no better than the Bill O'Reillys of the world who are constantly trying to piss off the left. And most harmful of all, it perpetuates the stereotype that all athiests are bitter, hateful people with no ethical fiber and no regard for others' feelings. That is the last thing our cause needs. I think religion is, as Bill Maher says, batshit, but that doesn't mean I'm going to insist it be eradicated. People can believe what they want to believe, and they must extend me the same courtesy. I wish more people subscribed to my way of thinking, but the way to persuade people is through positive publicity, through intelligent discussion and constructive argument rather than senseless provocation. On all sides of this conflict, we need to retain our composure and engage one another like civilized human beings (are you listening, O'Reilly??). There may be a lot of Christians in this country, but we are not a theocracy. Nor are we a nation of atheists. Nobody should be so ignorant as to assume that their word is law for everyone in the United States. That is not what the Founders wanted, and it is not appropriate for a democracy today.

Brand New Colony

2008-11-28T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'll be the first to admit that I've been less than enthusiastic about many of Obama's Cabinet appointments, which have largely seemed to be less "change we can believe in" than "change back to where we were eight years ago". But one aspect of the President-Elect's nascent domestic policy is refreshingly truly progressive, not only in its long-term orientation, but in his persistence to keep it at the forefront despite the plummeting economy. That aspect is what the pundits have dubbed "The Green New Deal".

Throughout the long campaign season, Obama talked frequently about the creation of a "green jobs" sector, about necessary investment in alternative energy sources and tackling climate change. Such priorities, in the past, have fallen by the wayside once the promising party was sworn into office, and many of us environmentalists have been waiting for Obama's other green shoe to drop. On the contrary, however, I have been pleasantly surprised to hear his progressive environmental rhetoric become more prominent since he won the election.

With the economy in a seemingly endless downward spiral and gas prices at a low I never thought I'd see again, most assumed the president-elect would put the Green New Deal on the backburner, but Obama has shown true leadership and insight in his insistence on the necessary of green restructuring now, before it becomes an even more dire problem. After so many years of presidents who couldn't see past their 4-year term and re-election, it is unbelievably refreshing to have a Commander in Chief who is - gasp! - forward-looking, concerned with the long-term security of the nation and the world. It shouldn't be such an amazing achievement - but in this country, unfortunately, it is a sea change in leadership style. The economy is in the tank, but Obama appears unwilling to let that prevent him from championing what will be an admittedly expensive undertaking - the conversion of the entire nation's infrastructure to a "green energy" system, the implementation of alternative fuels, the replacement or conversion of fossil-fuel based transportation to renewable energy power. Despite the price tag, President-Elect Obama actually seems to grasp the concept that we cannot wait to make these changes until we desperately need them; that the environment is already in grave danger and cannot survive another presidential term of unrelenting destruction; that a sacrifice in the present is an investment in the future, and that ultimately we will all be vastly better off for having made the change. Not to mention that in a period of rising unemployment, the opportunity to create the thousands of "green jobs" that will be needed to convert the American infrastructure and develop and produce new technology and product cannot be overemphasized.

Obama's long-term vision, grounded realism, and pragmatic idealism are precisely what this country needs if we are to turn our environmental and energy policy around. Before even taking the oath of office, he has already shown the path to a much-needed progressive future for America, and a dedication to the hard work that will be required to make the Green New Deal a reality. Here's hoping that commitment stays with him all the way to the Oval Office.

Just When He Thought He Was Out...

2008-11-17T21:43:00.000-08:00

And so it begins.

With President-Elect Obama's transition team fully up and running, pundits, national and global leaders and political junkies alike are eagerly anticipating the rollout of cabinet appointments over the next 66 days. The only selection made public thus far, volatile Clinton-era veteran Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, has already raised its fair share of eyebrows. As names of potential picks for such prominent posts as Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury circulate in the media, the flurry of accolades and criticisms being launched at these mere mentions make apparent the challenges President Obama will face. The problem with bipartisanship, with making nice and bridging the gap and so forth, is that suddenly, you find yourself with a whole hell of a lot of people to please. Broad appeal is essential on the campaign trail... but in the Oval Office, that just means a broad spectrum of the populace feels like you owe them.

A subset of this greater problem is the Clinton conundrum, which is itself multifaceted. Despite all his calls for a change in government, Obama must obviously select more than a few old hands for the prominent White House positions, staffers who know the system and how to work it. The problem is, to get experienced executive-branch Democrats, you have to go back to the last time the party held the presidency... which essentially means The Clinton Administration: Redux. So part of Obama's challenge will be balancing the mandate for change with a need for experienced staffers (who just happen to be relics of the Clinton dynasty). All that isn't even counting the still-disgruntled Hillary supporters, or those public officials who turned "Judas" on the Clintons in the primaries and want to be rewarded for it.

The other side of the challenge is the Clintons themselves. The Clintons are sort of like the Sopranos when it comes to loyalties - once you're with them, you're with them for good; you don't want to owe them, and if you cross them, you will regret it. Like Carmela Soprano, Hillary reaped the benefits of Bill's politicking and has the power of threat-by-association, without having to have gotten her own hands dirty. Now, Hillary - and, perhaps even more vehemently, Bill - believes she is owed something major by the new President-Elect. He owes her for stealing her mantle of inevitability, her "historic" moment, for stealing what was probably her only shot at reclaiming the White House... and, of course, he owes her for her post-nomination stump support, and he owes Bill big time for his rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention (which was pretty convincing, until you heard him on the talking-heads circuit a few days later glowing over none other than John McCain). Whether in the White House or not, the Clintons are still the most powerful force in the Democratic party, and they still have a wide-ranging support network. Many people feel like Obama owes Hillary a plum position in the Cabinet... and the Clintons (usually) get what they want.

However, this idea of Hillary being named as a candidate for Secretary of State is utterly ludicrous. She'd be a stupider choice for the office than John Kerry - and I thought that was the stupidest choice they could possibly make. Hillary may have been Ms. Experience on the campaign trail, but when it comes to foreign policy expertise, she has no real credentials to boast. Sure, she tagged along with Bill during his presidential globe-trotting, but she wasn't exactly in a position of power. The extent of her resume for this job pretty much consists of her being sniped at on the tarmac in Bosnia - oh wait, except that didn't happen.

Furthermore, the influence of Bill's Clinton Global Initiative should not be underestimated. Essentially the multinational corporation of philanthropy, the CGI has its own agenda abroad that any thinking person would cite as a potential conflict of interest. Who's to think Hillary wouldn't move to benefit the organization at the expense of a presidency she feels she herself deserved? I understand wanting to throw her a bone, but for god's sake, throw her one that actually makes sense, one that actually might make a positive contribution to your administration, not just one that the public has heard of before. Make her the new Health Care Czar. Put her in charge of Education (because honestly, the only fantasy appointment that makes less sense is the notion of Colin Powell in that spot). Put her in charge of something that she actually knows about - there are plenty of titles Hillary Clinton would be a great fit for, but Madame Secretary sure ain't one of them.

So, come on, President-Elect Obama. Everyone promises to be a different kind of politician... but the American people actually believe that you mean it. Don't start off making the same mistakes the rest of the guys have. You made it through the primaries against the Clintons, and now that you're out, don't let them pull you back in. Be your own man - you're the one we voted for, after all.

A Brief Aside

2008-11-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

As I am currently in my own personal hell studying for the GRE on Friday, I regret that blogging has been put on hold this week. I just felt I had to make a brief aside, based on what I've heard on NPR and my numerous political podcasts lately.

Please. No more metaphors for the failing economy. It's not a car. It's not a hospital patient. It's not an animal in a zoo. It's an economy, and you all shall refer to it that way. And if you absolutely, positively must use a financial metaphor, for god's sake, don't make it a mixed one.

Learn to speak English, people. That is all.

... And Yet So Far

2008-11-06T19:53:00.000-08:00

Now that the initial excitement of the historic Obama victory has started to wear off, reality has started to creep back in. While we came a long way as a nation this past Tuesday, we have still only come so far. There were still winners who shouldn't have been, people who are still being oppressed, liberties that are being withheld. In terms of becoming a progressive nation, we came so close... and yet we are still so far.

An issue in this election that is being conveniently ignored is the fact that while one group of Americans were expanding their rights, another group was losing theirs. California's passage of Proposition 8, the reactionary ban on gay marriage, was a resounding example of the bigotry and ignorance that still persists in so much of the electorate (and was echoed in Arizona, Arkansas and Florida). While one minority was electing its own to the highest office in the nation, another minority was being systematically denied one of the most fundamental citizens' rights. The support for Prop 8 came out of fear, archaic religious beliefs, ignorance and secular intolerance, and persuasion by an ad campaign so dirty and misleading it made McCain-Palin's spots look like Sesame Street. Flying in the face of an inspiringly progressive Supreme Court ruling that had legalized gay marriage just a few months before, the California electorate decided that gay and lesbian couples were separate and unequal citizens, and that their right to marry should be stolen away. A black man may have finally made it to the presidency, but rights such as marriage, adoption and legal and social benefits are still firmly labelled "straights only".

Though I am proud of our country for making a major step past racism on Tuesday, I am disgusted by the level of ignorance and intolerance that still remains - and it is vital that we not stop and pat ourselves on the back just yet. We cannot become complacent, we cannot think for a moment that our work is done because we now have a black president. Gays and lesbians are still not equal citizens under the law. Hate crime legislation is necessary and has improved recently, but civil unions, where they even exist, are modern-day segregation, "separate but equal" institutions for second-class citizens. Athiests are still publicly and vehemently hated and discriminated against, and it is a national axiom that an "outed" athiest could never be elected president. In fact, polling data reports that athiesm is the number one quality of a presidential candidate that would lose them peoples' vote; more people would vote for a Mormon, a Muslim or an openly gay candidate than would pull the level for one of the 'godless'. In this very election, hate-spewing, corrupt and despicable candidates were still elected to prominent offices; the modern McCarthyite Michele Bachmann kept her seat in Minnesota, and the seven-times-convicted felon, "Uncle" Ted Stevens, looks like he will be re-elected in that backwater horrorshow known as Alaska. Oh, and let's not forget... nearly half the electorate still voted for McCain-Palin.

So, America, don't rest on your laurels just yet. We achieved something in this presidential election, but our work as a nation is far from over.

We are still so close, and yet so far away from being the just, fair and equitable society we like to think we are.

Maybe under President Obama, we can all roll up our sleeves and really, truly get to work. But that is up to us.

Morning in America

2008-11-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

It is a beautiful day, ladies and gentlemen. Please visit my article on the Huffington Post, show it some love, and celebrate the dawn of a new era!

Let the Reckoning Begin...

2008-11-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the day of reckoning is finally upon us. After nearly two years of campaigning, a hotly contested primary season between the potential first female and, ultimately, the first African-American major-party presidential candidate, after the death and resurrection of John McCain's campaign, after hurricanes and the Georgian invasion and the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, after the selection of the most shockingly unqualified vice-presidential candidate in history with Sarah Palin's addition to the Republican ticket, after the smears and stump speeches and the conventions and the SNL parodies... we have finally arrived at this most historic of days.

It is November 4th, 2008, and it is election day in America.

On this day, we will make history.

The question is, will we be on the right side of it, this time?

Both the beauty and the terror of the thing is, it's up to us. I am not typically one to posses much faith in the American electorate. But I am choosing today to be cautiously hopeful. I will give our nation one last chance. We can make a real change in the direction we are headed; we can set our country on a better path, a path towards rebuilding our image abroad, towards improving the care of our citizens at home, towards ending corporate dominance, towards passing progressive legislation, towards protecting the civil liberties of all Americans.

Do I think Obama is the magic solution to all our nation's problems? Of course not. But it's a big step in the right direction. And today, each one of us gets the chance to take that step.

So, get out and vote. And think very carefully about the way you cast your ballot.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Vote for Obama/Biden. This election is too important to throw away on yet another white Republican - and the thought of letting Sarah Palin anywhere near the White House should be enough to send chills down any thinking person's spine.

As for me... I'll be glued to the election coverage tonight, awaiting the results like a kid on Christmas Eve.

Let the reckoning begin.

Does He Know Something We Don't Know?

2008-11-03T16:24:00.001-08:00

In the last day of campaigning, John McCain has been telling supporters and the media not to believe the hype, that the election night results will not reflect the polling data, almost all of which predicts a solid win for Obama.

Am I the only one who is really, really suspicious of these statements? Call me crazy, but when I hear remarks like that, coupled with the reports that have already come in of problems with early voting machines switching votes from Obama to McCain, I start getting nasty flashbacks from the stealing of the 2000 presidential election.

My question for McCain is, what do you know that we don't know? What inside information have you kept hidden from the pundits and the pollsters? Is there already a national conspiracy set in place to switch votes, lose ballots and intimidate voters on the Democratic side? It is not a far-fetched idea when you recall that Karl Rove had a hand in the McCain campaign...

All evidence seems to be pointing to an Obama win, but I won't believe it until I hear it called unequivocally on all the major news sources, until I hear his acceptance speech - hell, I probably won't believe it until Inauguration Day 2009. Republicans are skilled at stealing elections, and Democrats are the masters of losing elections that should have been impossible to let slip away. So don't any of you rest on your laurels, out there. Make sure that, if you haven't already, you get off your duff and vote tomorrow, because as has been made painfully clear in the past several elections, every vote really does count. If Obama is to safely win this race, if he is to secure the presidency and to take office and govern effectively thereafter, he needs a clear mandate. He can't just squeak by with a handful of legally-contested votes. He needs a landslide, or at least a healthy margin of victory.

It ain't over til it's over, America. It's been a wild ride... and we've got just one day to go.

We are living in history. Now get out there and make it happen.

Let Alaska Secede, Already

2008-10-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

The way politics out of our Northernmost state have been playing lately, I'm starting to think Todd Palin had a pretty good idea, one that the country would be better off supporting. We should let Alaska secede from the Union.

The verdict cast Monday finding Alaska Senator Ted Stevens guilty on seven separate counts was a particularly damning moment for the senior Senator's constituency, who oh-so-adorably refers to him as "Uncle Ted". Stevens obviously has reason to believe this affection is strong enough to re-elect him, and is absurdly proclaiming his innocence on the campaign trail. Even more preposterously, the Alaska Department of Law announced that Stevens will still be allowed to vote next week, seven felony convictions notwithstanding, since his pending retrial constitutes an 'incomplete' case.

Unlike the man I presume is still her running mate, John McCain, Sarah Palin has not thus far issued an outright condemnation of Stevens, nor called for him to step down. Apparently, the "maverick" with a career history of "reform" and "taking on the old-boy network" is okay with the fact that the oldest boy of all might nab one of the state's highest offices despite his flagrant now-public history of corruption, greed and deception while serving. But hey, for the champion of the Bridge to Nowhere, seven felony counts is small potatoes.

Indeed, Palin doesn't seem terribly interested in a whole lot right now except, well, Sarah Palin. Her own 2012 presidential ambitions have become widely accepted in the media as well as within her own campaign (is it a coincidence that the Mayans predicted the world would end in the year 2012? I think not). She has repeatedly gone off-script in her stump speeches, despite explicit instructions from the McCain campaign to the contrary. The thought of a major-party ticket being topped by the likes of this woman, someone with no experience, no ability to conduct a substantive conversation, no knowledge of foreign or domestic policy, no real familiarity with current events in the world, who can't even name a goddamned newspaper or a court case other than Roe v. Wade when pressed, who says "you betcha" and drops her g's in campaign speeches, who shoots wolves from a helicopter for kicks, who makes James Dobson look like a flaming liberal when it comes to social issues... well, let's just say the Mayan apocalypse sounds like a day at the fair by comparison.

So I say, if these are our shining examples of Alaskan political leadership... let the godforsaken place secede, already. Palin can be dictator-for-life, wage war with Russia and teach her nation's children that dinosaurs and humans lived on earth Flintstone-style in her ass-backwards creationist educational system. Ted Stevens can receive all the weird "gifts" he wants without the pesky U.S. legal system breathing down his neck about it. They can drill the place full of holes, shoot everything that moves and basically destroy everything of beauty and value that once existed in the ex-state. Hell, they can have all the retarded babies they could ever want.

We'll see just how long they last without that cushy handout all Alaskans are used to receiving, courtesy of the U.S. government. Let's be clear - this free money being given to Alaskans just for the mere fact of their existence in a certain geographical locale is totally not socialism. It's just a really nice capitalist perk.

So the next time Sarah Palin says she only wants to visit the "real America", that the majority of us who are voting for Obama don't share her "values", we should send her, Todd and their six thousand children back to the land from whence they came, cut all our ties, and let them have at the place however they want.

Because if Alaskan leaders are the future of this country... we'd better start praying the Mayans were right.

What's the Matter With Socialism?

2008-10-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

These days, the term "socialism" has been applied to a vast array of people, policies and institutions that are quite unlikely targets. For wanting to eliminate the Bush tax cuts and give a tax break to the middle class, Barack Obama is accused of being a socialist who wants to - gasp!! - "spread the wealth around", as he told the now-infamous Joe the Plumber. For bailing out criminally stupid investment bankers and reluctantly buying a partial ownership stake in ailing firms, the government is called socialist. Neither of these representations comes anywhere near actual socialism. And frankly, if we were a country that, at the very least, would accept the idea of socialist-leaning leaders and principles without launching the next wave of McCarthyism, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.

Perhaps the strangest part about these attacks is that they are picking and choosing the aspects of government and policy that they want to label "socialist" while ignoring others. John McCain is spending $84 million dollars of taxpayer-provided federal funding in his presidential campaign, while Barack Obama's campaign is 100% privately-funded - but Obama is the "socialist". John McCain wants to continue Bush's federal favor to the super-rich by maintaining the tax cuts, while Obama wants to give the tax break to the middle class, instead - and yet, Obama is the one "giving a government handout", and so he, not McCain, is a "socialist". Both Obama and McCain criticized the lack of regulation on the financial sector, and the legally fuzzy psuedo-governmental powers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - but only Barack Obama is the "socialist".

Let's be perfectly clear, here. There is hardly a facet of our economy that is not, in some way, regulated by the government. We do not have, nor have we ever had, a purely capitalist system. This artificial dichotomy between socialism and capitalism that is being painted by the media and the political parties is a complete fallacy. There is no battle between economic ideologies going on here, nor has there ever really been. We are a mixed economy. We always have been, and we probably always will be. The only question is in regards to the balance of regulation vs. privatization... and I think it's pretty clear where a heavily-skewed privatization balance has gotten us.

The fact of the matter is, every Western democracy has a significant degree of government control - and those nations with higher degrees of socialist tendencies, the Scandanavian social democracies that provide a broad safety net, government-funded health care, extensive public transportation etc., are the nations consistently rated the highest in terms of life expectancy, health and well-being, economic and political stability, access to resources and services, and so on. When people in America are hurling the "socialist" label as an insult, what they're actually referring to is Stalinism. Soviet Russia. Maoist China. They are regarding socialism by only its perversions, its exceptions, rather than its rules, or even its pure ideological form.

Here's the kicker. The free-market-ophiles demand that we all consider the current financial crisis the exception to the privatized, capitalist rule. They insist that this is not how the market is supposed to work, that this is some sort of mistake or malfunction. And they present the most skewed, perverted and untrue example of socialism as the only other alternative to their ridiculous faith-based free-market capitalism. It's misleading, it's untrue, and if you just stop and think about it, it's entirely unconvincing.

Sarah Palin has become fond of saying on the campaign trail that "this is not the time to experiment with socialism". Well... why?? Privatization and deregulated capitalism has failed us. Inflation and unemployment are up, the gap between rich and poor is higher than ever, food and gas prices are skyrocketing, our health care system is a crumbling disgrace, our Social Security and retirement funds are threatened, the housing market is in the toilet, credit markets are tanking... the list of free-market failures is practically endless. The way we have been doing things has quite obviously NOT been working.

So, Palin, honey? What better time to "experiment with socialism"? It's time to educate the public about what socialism really means, about the successes of other European countries, about the vast chasm of difference between Stalinism or Maoism and social democracy.

It's time to stop making "socialism" a dirty word, and start dirtying up "capitalism", already.

The Fall of the Right

2008-10-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on today's edition of Meet the Press solidified the trend that has been slowly building throughout the later stages of this presidential campaign: the collapse of the right. The formerly-unstoppable political juggernaut that was the Republican Party is being crushed under the weight of its own ideologically-driven strategies, and it seems increasingly obvious that the run to the far-right is going to cost them the election.

Many high-profile Republicans have been speaking out against McCain's campaign in recent weeks, including Christopher Buckley, who made a dramatic exit from The National Review with a politically treasonous endorsement of Obama and a denunciation of the party his late father built his reputation upon. The criticism lodged against the party and the McCain campaign has been echoed across the political spectrum, but Powell's endorsement is, for many observers, the final nail in the Republican coffin. A revered figure to both Republicans and Democrats, former Secretary of State for the Bush II administration, and a retired General with extensive foreign policy credentials, his support for the Democratic candidate could assuage the fears of moderate Republicans unsure about Obama's international expertise. For a high-profile military man to deny his support to Mr. Country First is a blow the Republican candidate may not recover from.

The most telling facet of Powell's endorsement, however, is his criticism of the GOP as having lost its way by retreating to the far right. McCain's campaign has come to symbolize the natural conclusion of the party's deference to the social conservative base, beginning with Ronald Reagan and reaching a fever-pitch with the George W. Bush administration. With Reagan's successful appeals to the religious right and his portrayal of America as the "shining city on a hill", the GOP realized it could attract a large and extremely loyal base. From then on, the party's platform and the focus of its candidates and elected officials has been increasingly based on social conservatism, and thus, on abstract concepts such as "character" and "family values" instead of on substantive issues and policies. For George W. Bush, the mere fact that he was a born-again Christian was enough in itself to win the support of many otherwise-undecided voters, his announcement of Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher in the 2000 presidential primary debate a blatant shout-out to the "values voters" the party had come to rely on.

In 2008, John McCain's campaign has come to represent where this political pandering ultimately leads, and it's not a pretty sight. The Republican candidate has centered his faltering campaign on character assassinations of Barack Obama, and in stump speeches, rallies and television advertisements has not-so-subtly insinuated to his constituents that Obama is not 'one of them', doesn't share their 'values', is an unknown quantity who is not to be trusted. Referrals to the Democrat candidate as "Barack Hussein Obama" obviously speak directly to the religious right and their 9/11-fueled fears of Islam. The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate, besides being a cheap and misguided attempt to win over disillusioned Hillary supporters, was the ultimate play to the social conservative base, and was unabashedly announced as a rallying cry to the party faithful. Result: a second-in-command who firmly embodies the so-called "family values" and affinity for guns and canned beer of middle-American Joe Stereotype, but whose grasp of domestic and foreign policy is about as well-formed as that of a moose.

And thus, the angry mobs may be grabbing their pitchforks, the most ideological of the social conservatives may be enthused, but thinking people all along the political spectrum have had enough. The Republicans have finally seen the complete abandonment of ideals the party once stood for in favor of hockey moms and Bible-thumpers. The moderates and liberals have seen the last straw in an increasingly fundamentalist governing creed. Just as the excesses of Wall Street have made painfully clear the dangers of unregulated capitalism, the extremes of the conservative right have exposed the dangers of unadulterated ideology. John McCain played to the base - and the base responded only too well. The moderates he once appealed to have been scared away by dirty politics and a vice presidential candidate who can't even hold her own against Katie Couric.

I'm sure this is nothing so dramatic as the end of the right, but the party as we know it today has collapsed under its own weight. This could have been the year for John McCain - but it sure isn't the year for the Republican party. Luckily for the rest of us, the "maverick" decided to play it safe... and the country decided to think for itself.

The Real Question Is, Who the Hell is Joe?

2008-10-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

As I'm sure you're all well aware, candidates on both sides of this presidential campaign have inexplicably been obsessed with guys named Joe. While John McCain and Sarah Palin have devoted much of their stump speeches recently to the question, "Who is the real Barack Obama?", the question I think Americans are really wondering is, "Who the hell is Joe?"

Various Joes have been evoked, again and again, to represent the Average American that everybody thinks they can pin down in a caricature. It started with Palin's oh-so-charming reference to the concerns of alcoholic middle America, 'Joe Six-Pack'. She claimed that she had an intimate familiarity with the needs and priorities of Bud-loving voters everywhere, due to her executive tenure in the substance-abuse capitol of the nation. This strange, subtly patronizing term only served to reinforce my perception that you'd have to be wasted to think that Sarah Palin was qualified for national office or was representative of anyone with the mental fortitude for rational judgment. I mean, come on. Does anyone, save maybe college freshmen, actually want to be referred to by their choice of alcoholic beverage? Maybe she'd be more effective targeting her message at Joe Meth Lab. But I digress.

Our next Joe experience came during the Vice Presidential debate, when that other Joe, Senator Biden, mentioned a conversation he'd had with someone named Joey Danko (or something to that effect), a Delawarian who couldn't afford to fill up his truck's tank at the gas station. I don't know if Biden had ever actually had a full conversation with this guy, if they were friends or if he was just some dude at the gas station, but suddenly Joey D. represented every American with a gasoline-powered automobile. If you have ever driven a car, or are affected in any way by rising gas prices, you are Joey, because Joey is the Average American that is identical across the board in every state outside of Washington D.C.

And, of course, last night's debate featured a whopping 26 inferences of the now-infamous 'Joe the Plumber', a relatively ignorant middle American who thought Obama's tax plan would make it financially prohibitive for him to fulfill his dream of buying a plumbing business. McCain first brought the latest Average Joe up in a continued effort to pin his tax-and-spend-liberal label on Barack Obama. From that point on, almost every tax-related response out of either candidate's mouth was directed either generally or breaking-the-fourth-wall directly at Joe the Plumber. Mr. Middle America, because all any of us really want is to start up our own plumbing business and have a little money left over to pay and insure our employees. Just scraping by, PBR in hand and soccer team piled in the minivan - that is every single one of us.

So, come on, guys. Knock it off with this Joe Everyman stuff. Let's focus on the diversity of the American experience, instead of the homogenous stereotype of the middle-American drunken truck-driving plumber. If you really want us to think you understand who we are... don't imply that you think we're all the same.

Racism is Alive and Well, Parte Deux

2008-10-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

Much news has been made of the startlingly hate-filled mobs in recent attendance at McCain and Palin campaign events. One of the most frequently-aired clips has been the following, an unbelievable example of middle-American stupidity in which an elderly woman claims she cannot trust Barack Obama because "he's an Arab":

McCain has been commended for correcting the woman, as well as for complimenting Obama and emphasizing that he's not a bad person, McCain simply disagrees with him. There are multiple things wrong with this situation. For one, McCain did not start rebuking his unruly mob until now, when the backlash from the media and the public horror became too great to ignore. Further, McCain may have stated in this instance that he respects Obama and that he a good "family man", but all the while, his campaign has been lobbing repeated assaults on Obama's character - not his policies, not his political ideology, his personal character - through negative advertisements. Supporters and affiliates of his campaign have been referring to the Democratic candidate as "Barack Hussein Obama" since the primaries, not-so-subtly propagating the myth that he is a Muslim.

But the biggest problem with this is the reaction to the ignorant McCain supporter's remark - it was taken as an insult.

Let me pull a Biden and repeat that: calling Barack Obama an "Arab", or a Muslim, is taken by both sides of the campaign as an insult, a smear, a character assassination.

What's wrong with this picture?

I have yet to hear anyone, on either side of the ideological divide, criticize the idea that there is something wrong with being Muslim or of Arab ethnicity. Everyone seems to accept that this is an assault, that to be someone of this religion or heritage is wrong, evil, subversive, and that an accusation of such is defamation. Why hasn't anyone said, "no, he isn't a Muslim, he is a Christian, but even if he were,that wouldn't reflect anything negative about his character, and that shouldn't disqualify him from the presidency. There is nothing about his religious affiliation that makes him a better or a worse candidate for office." Those Americans who are Muslim or of Arab ancestry should be offended - but then again, they're probably used to it by now.

It is incidents such as this that serve to underscore just how far our society hasn't come. We like to pat ourselves on the back for being a tolerant nation, for being pluralist and celebrating a freedom and diversity of religion and ethnicity... but we're not, and we don't. The Islam example is just one of many prejudices still widely shared across our nation. Bias and discrimination against African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latin-Americans and immigrants, LGBTs, Communists, Socialists, members of non-Judeo-Christian faiths, and - the most widely reviled - athiests like myself, are a distressingly prosaic cultural component. Since George W. Bush singlehandedly reinvigorated the Clash of Civilizations in post-9/11 America, Islam and the Middle East in general have been irreversibly labelled the enemy, one of those "against us", as the evil Other, terrorists every one. Being Muslim - like being gay or socialist or worst of all, athiest - has become a political death wish.

Some say that the mere fact that a candidate with Hussein as a middle moniker could even make it to nomination for the highest office in the land is a sign of progress. That the incredible rise of this minority star means America has repented of its sins. But public comments like the now-infamous "he's an Arab" line remind us just how far we still haven't come. It's time to get past the antiquated notion that some prejudices are okay and some are not. It's time to get past the idea that a candidate who is a Christian is a better and more qualified individual than one who is Muslim or Arab.

Because, in the words of Bill Maher, I think all religions are equally batshit.

But I'm not voting for a candidate's eternal soul. I'm voting for who I think is the best political leader. Maybe someday, we'll all learn to tell the difference.

**Amendment: I just saw last night's episode of the Daily Show, and now feel the need to add that I did not copy Jon Stewart, since I posted this blog before I watched it.**

Apparently, Voter Fraud Is Only a Crime If You're Liberal

2008-10-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

The hypocrisy of the conservative right in this country never, ever ceases to amaze me. The latest blatant contradiction to hit the headlines is the "voter fraud" accusations being lodged against ACORN, an activist group that primarily seeks to register low-income voters. So far, it seems that the Republicans have been successful in painting a relatively minor community-organizing group, in the media, as some sort of sinister, radical-leftist national conspirator. While charges have been made, ACORN has never been found guilty of any intentionally fradulent actions. Most of the 'fradulent' voter registrations that were filed, it turns out, were never intended to be filed in the first place; group members, going to significant lengths to get under-resourced voters on the books, submitted registrations which seemed questionable with an attached cover sheet stipulating their concerns, yet the election boards ignored the cover letters and filed them anyway. However, nothing significant ever seemed to come of the actual wide-ranging conspiratorial election fraud committed on the part of the Republican party in the 2000 election; despite hanging chads, suspiciously malfunctioning machinery, the same faulty-registration scenarios as ACORN is now being accused of, and blatant admissions of tampering on the part of voting-machine distributors, somehow the 'radical right' got off scot-free, after ACTUALLY stealing an election - an election that unequivocally changed the course of global history, no less - but some minor-league left-affiliated organization gets labelled as Public Enemy No. 1.

Things like this are what make the Democratic party the most ineffective institution in American political history. The only thing they're winners at is losing elections. Things have to get so bad that nobody with a functioning nervous system would vote for a Republican for the Democrats to come out ahead.

Luckily... or not... I think we're just about there.

The Politics of Hate

2008-10-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

In the era of the internet- and television-based 24-hour news cycle, negative campaigning has become a fixture of any major political race. People say they don't like it, but as we all know, it works, and regardless of our opinions, we've come to expect it. Now, negative campaigning is one thing. There are still certain standards to meet and parameters to stay within, and though some of these attacks can be personal and fairly nasty, there's still a line in the sand they do not cross. These rules of campaigning extend not only to media advertising, but also to public appearances. The McCain campaign's character-assassination TV and internet ads have been toeing this line already, with accusations of misleading information and even outright lies being lodged from both sides of the political aisle. But where the line of moral, ethical, social and political acceptability has unabashedly been crossed is in McCain/Palin's public appearances.

The angry mobs that have been flocking to the embattled Republican candidates' rallies lately harken back to the early, less PC days of modern American politics; you practically expect the attendees to carry pitchforks and burning crosses. This is not merely a crowd of people fired up for their candidate and passionate about partisan ideological differences. This was a crowd seething with hate, and the hate was personal. Cries such as "kill him!" and "terrorist!" were literally hurled from the undulating masses at a recent Palin rally - and instead of dismissing such violent rhetoric as inappropriate and dangerous, the Republican candidates not only reveled in it, they affirmed it (McCain responded to one such bitterly vocal constituent, "the man is right").

This sort of behavior is not only horribly distasteful and inappropriate, it is deeply disturbing. Equally disturbing is the fact that there hasn't been a condemnation from McCain/Palin; partisan or not, as candidates for the highest offices in the land, they should be expected to adhere to certain standards of not only campaign-trail conduct, but human decency. It has become painfully apparent throughout this campaign that not only is racism still a prominent factor in many American communities, but the culture wars, too, are still raging. And despite primary-season claims of running a "clean" campaign, the McCain/Palin strategy has been, unashamedly, to re-ignite the culture wars. Bush's post-9/11 claim that "you're either with us or against us" extends beyond al-Qaeda, Muslims and global insurgencies; "Us vs. them" mentalities are rampant within our own borders, and in a country that, a mere half-century ago, witnessed the public murders of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., JFK and Malcolm X, we should be afraid of where that mentality can lead.

The 'culture wars' go beyond mere boundaries of partisanship and policy positions. They aren't about opposing political ideologies or differing perspectives on social issues. They are about fundamental, unalterable differences between those who live, look and behave like you do and those who don't. This primitive psychology may have been helpful in tribal, foraging societies, but in a modern civilization, it has exactly the opposite effect. In a society that is by nature a diversity of ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds, tolerance and empathy are fundamental to proper functioning. Our vast and varied nation does not work when we do not, at the very least, agree to disagree; hatred, classism, sexism, racism and other divisions serve no purpose but to stagnate progress and create (usually violent) conflict. Unfortunately, the idea that there are "two Americas" is still fundamentally true, and each of the divisions has its own complex subdivisions. Nothing mobilizes people more than stoking the deep-seated, tribalist, self-preservationist instincts of one of these classes, and just as in the run-up to the Civil War, just as in the pre-Civil Rights era, riling up the lower-middle-class white Christian conservatives is a surefire way to mobilize hatred, conflict and violence - oh yeah, and votes.

This despicable behavior needs to stop, and it especially needs to be condemned by the McCain campaign. At a time of such instability, of American involvement in unwinnable wars and a home-grown global financial meltdown, the last thing we need is another civil war within our borders. Playing to the culture war is a cheap and deplorable ploy, and pushing for increased social instability in this hour is a far cry from putting "country first". The McCain/Palin crowds don't have to agree, they don't have to convert their votes to Obama - but they do have to act like civilized human beings in a 21st-century democracy.

Oh, and McCain? If I were you, I wouldn't be ragging on voters who have publicly insinuated their desire for you to die so that Queen Sarah can reign.

Don't Get Too Comfortable

2008-10-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

Another day, another debate where pretty much nothing of substance was said, campaign talking points were the standard, John McCain personified the crotchety, contemptuous old man and Barack Obama showed unflappable cool and composure. Yesterday was another day of pundits saying the debate was a "political Rorschach test", that McCain failed to achieve his much-needed "game-changer" - Politico was even so blunt as to call it "the most boring debate ever". One thing is for sure: in this time of international instability, America's involvement in two unwinnable wars, two historic presidential candidacies, record-low approval ratings for government upper-management, and the biggest financial roller-coaster ride since the Great Depression... the candidates didn't give the American people a lot of answers, nor act as if we had much of a reason to demand them.

That being said, I did think that Obama pulled a few good punches ("you're right, there are some things I don't understand..."), and McCain made even less of an effort to hide his contempt for the young Democrat upstart than in the previous debate ("that one" is already liberal shorthand for McCain's bitter-old-man syndrome). The Nixon-Kennedy effect continued to go strong, and was even more painfully obvious in the town hall forum, where the candidates were free to stroll about the stage and speak directly to members of the audience - or, in McCain's case, to shuffle around like an angry turtle (I know he was in a POW camp, but seriously, the man has no neck, and is stiffer than a freakin' cadaver) and invade audience members' personal space to the point of visual discomfort. Obama was the picture of cool composure, of the youthful promise of change, of a new direction for American leadership. He looked downright presidential, and McCain came off like the bitter old man desperately clinging to his fading status quo.

But this contrast also exemplifies the dilemma currently facing Democrats - they absolutely cannot get too comfortable. The race is desperately close, and what will kill the narrow gains the Democrat candidate has made in recent weeks is a healthy dose of voter complacency, of people thinking that 'he's got it in the bag, so I don't need to worry about voting'. The Democrats must never, not even for a second, let the voters forget what is at stake in this election, that every last vote counts, that the voters must above all remain mobilized and passionate about their candidate right up through November 4th. We're so close to the end; we cannot afford to get apathetic now.

Obama's cool and calm is reassuring, and a smart tactic in the current climate of panicked uncertainty; as the New Yorker recently pointed out, McCain's erratic campaign painfully mirrors the turbulent nature of the current American economic and political environment, and Obama has come to personify the "safe vote", the calm consistency people need to cling to in this domestic storm.

But Obama must not get too comfortable. There's a fine line between measured calm and cozy complacency, and the difference could make or break the election. This year, the stakes are too high for anyone to kick back and enjoy the rising poll numbers. The Democrats must fire on all cylinders right up until the last vote is punched in 27 days - and if they lose, they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

Take This Bailout - Sorry, I Mean "Rescue" - and Shove It

2008-10-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

I was extremely heartened when, on Monday, the House of Representatives surprised me by voting down the bailout plan. It seemed to be an actual, real-life example of democracy in action - a bill was proposed, the public didn't like it, the public actually called and wrote to their Congresspeople and told them they didn't like it, and lo and behold... their representatives listened, and the proposal failed to pass.

And then... they tacked on a bunch of annual-favorite tax provisions, sent it to the Senate, and it passed overwhelmingly. Today, the proposal was in the House once again, and before you could say "popular revolt", it had passed through Congress, landed on the president's desk and been signed into law.

I felt like, for a moment, the voice of the people was actually heard. And just as quickly, Paulson and pals hopped on all the major news outlets, vehemently insisted that the bailout - er, sorry, I mean rescue plan - was actually a great idea, not to mention totally 100% necessary for avoiding across-the-board financial Armageddon, and the American people, meaning all of us who had called our Congresspeople and protested outside the Capitol, were just too endearingly simple-minded to comprehend this. Somehow, the appeal to popular stupidity took root, and after the landslide passage in the Senate, the bailout rather quietly slipped through the House and past the raucous public disapproval that had accompanied version #1.

Which begs the question... why? Is it simply that our Representatives really wanted to adjourn for another of their seemingly unlimited vacations, so the will of the people be damned? Were the Senators and their Congressional counterparts after them seduced by the charisma of the Presidential candidates and their passionate appeals for the bailout? Or was it because we all stopped putting up a fight?

Maybe we gave up, settled for being quietly perturbed by the Paulson plan instead of taking to the phones, the internet and the streets, because we believed them. We stopped and said, "y'know, Paulson's right; I really don't understand how the economy works. I guess they know better than I what to do with $700 billion of my money." Maybe this bailout plan got rammed through because our representatives in government confirmed what we already know - we're stupid. The ignorant, unwashed American masses cannot be bothered to know how the economy works or how policy is made. So who are we to protest when our tax dollars are commandeered for the biggest injection of popular cash into the private financial sector in history? They're smart, and we're dumb, so we're supposed to shut up and pay up.

I'll be the first to announce that for the most part, this is true. The American people ARE stupid - how else do you explain two terms of George W. Bush? Our willful ignorance and passivity are as much a factor in the political and financial quagmire our nation has found itself in as is the contribution of any public official. But what was so great about the initial popular bailout-backlash was that, for at least a while, we stood up for ourselves and said that even if we didn't understand every little intricacy of the Paulson plan, we knew we didn't like it, and we weren't going to stand for it - and Washington listened. The bill's passage the second time - touted as new and improved but primarily just stuffed even fuller with pork - is as much a failure on our part as it is a failure of leadership.

We learned from this experience that, apathetic and disillusioned as we generally may be, we have the power to make a difference in Washington. If we speak loud enough and forcefully enough, if we take to the streets and get on the phone and actually make ourselves heard, we can be a catalyst for higher-level change. The problem is, we also learned that we are ready and willing to believe in our own stupidity, to be willfully ignorant, to not only believe but espouse the charges of apathy and laziness so often leveled against us. As long as we believe that, the status quo will remain firmly in place.

So, I'm not holding my breath. Things have a way of staying the same the more they change. Maybe things just have to get totally unbearable before a popular revolt actually sounds like a good idea to the American public.

But believe me. That time will come, eventually. So what are you going to do in the meantime?

The Knockout That Wasn't

2008-10-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

You know the expectations were rock-bottom when people are saying you did a "good job" just for being able to form a coherent English sentence. In that sense, in the sense that she didn't stumble spectacularly over her own unintelligible verbosity like she did in the Couric interviews, yes, Palin performed well in last night's debate. But that shouldn't be considered an achievement. We should expect those vying for the second-highest office in the government to not only be able to form a coherent sentence, but to be able to clearly articulate their policy positions and to argue successfully for what is right and wrong. Sarah Palin didn't, as I was hoping she would, crash and burn last night... but all she proved was that she was very, very well rehearsed. She memorized her flash cards and had her sound bites ready, to be sure... but she didn't truly debate Joe Biden, and she certainly didn't win. As is par for the course with Palin, she completely avoided answering any questions she didn't like or couldn't parrot an answer for. The one time she attempted to answer an off-the-cuff question, she slipped into the same verbal Dick-van-Dyke-on-the-ottoman pattern of the now-infamous Couric interviews (though since this slip-up was near the end of the debate, most viewers will probably not remember, if they noticed it at all). She did not provide any answers of substance - and I was irritated to no end by the disgusting degree of "folksiness" her answers were peppered with. The Washington Post pointed out that, mysteriously, Palin talks with a Midwestern accent, sounding eerily like Frances McDormand's character in "Fargo" - and there's absolutely no reason for it! She's not from the Midwest, she was raised in Alaska, and nobody in her family has such an accent! Is she making it up? It seems like she must be. Anyway, the whole shtick disgusts me, and is totally insincere... just because she's as unintelligent as the average "Joe Six-Pack" (a demeaning term in itself, if you ask me) doesn't mean she's as blue-collar. She's the governor. She's got plenty of financial security. Our leaders should be intelligent; I absolutely cannot stand the thought of 4-8 more years of a president who mispronounces words like "I-ran", "I-rack", and "nuke-u-lar".

What was perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the night, however, was Biden's performance. Granted, he didn't make any major gaffes, so I suppose we should all consider that a victory in itself. But where was the "attack dog" we've been hearing so much about? Where was "Joey the Shark"? I'm sure that everyone and their mother was telling Biden to, no matter what, not let himself be perceived as attacking Palin lest he risk the ridiculous and unfair "sexist" label. But that didn't mean he had to be so nice! Regardless of the image you're trying to keep up, you ARE still trying to win a debate, here. I was sickened when he so resoundingly agreed with Palin on gay marriage, specifically the definition of marriage as "being between one man and one woman". Regardless of his Catholic beliefs, Biden IS one-half of the ticket that's supposed to stand for equality and fair representation; groups such as the Human Rights Campaign must have felt more than a little uncomfortable with their endorsement after that one. He also harped to no end about "clean coal" - a ridiculous concept in itself, and though I'm sure they have to be at least lukewarm on it to win the moderate vote, I don't think Obama is too enthusiastic about it, and it's totally beside the point, anyway - the way forward is through renewable energy and the creation of green infrastructure. Obama has made this clear, and Biden needed to do so, as well... but alas. To his credit, Biden was very strong on foreign policy, and made effective display of his vast experience in that arena. He didn't do poorly, and as I said before, he didn't make a major gaffe or tell Palin she was hot or anything so disastrous.

But, as with the first presidential debate, the knockout blow never came. He was just too restrained, too dialed back, didn't sink his teeth into the statements of the opponent that were just begging to be ripped apart.

Obama/Biden cannot get too comfortable. They're ahead by only a small margin, and as we've seen, this election can turn at any time. They need to stay on the offensive, never let their guard down, fight for this to the bitter end.

They need to deliver the knockout blow to the McCain campaign. And so far, it's been the knockout that wasn't.

Why Talk Like Reagan When You're Being Compared to Kennedy?

2008-10-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

I wish someone would offer me a good explanation as to why Barack Obama seems to taking every opportunity as of late to talk about cutting taxes. I'm sorry, what party is he running for, again? Last time I checked it wasn't the party of Ronald Reagan, so why is he trying to sound like him? I understand that he's refuting one of McCain's many false accusations, in this case that Obama plans to institute a sweeping raise of taxes - but what neither candidate is saying is that taxes are going to go up either way. Let's be realistic, here; it's inevitable. We're spending millions of dollars a day in Iraq, with an increasing number of forces going to Afghanistan. The economy is in the toilet and the stock market is hitting record lows. We're already sunk into a massive deficit, and now we're talking about getting $700 billion further in the hole. There's pretty much no logical way to get out of this without raising taxes at least somewhat.

But that's not even the point. Taxes are not what is important right now. Our country is in a sorry state, and there is a lot of work to be done if we're going to even be able to see the way out of it. What Americans really need is universal health care; infrastructure repair; educational investment; alternative-energy development and the green infrastructure necessary to support and distribute it. We don't need some sort of Reagan-era throwback tax-cutting plan. Especially not if your audience is composed of Democrats.

I'm sure he's playing politics and trying to appeal to the moderate-right and undecided voters with this one. But does he have to keep harping on it so much? I thought he was supposed to be bringing us change. Something different. The future instead of the past. And if that's the goal, then focus on the future, already. Let's hear about your health care and energy and environmental protection plans again. We get that you intend to lessen the tax burden on 95% of middle-class Americans. Now tell us what we're going to gain, instead of what we're going to lose.

Oh, and by the way... if I hear McCain spout that disgustingly hypocritical "me-first-country-second" line about the Democrats again - I'll give him a cut of my own.

Racism is Alive and Well

2008-10-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

The recent backlash against Gwen Ifil, who will be moderating tonight's reaming - er, excuse me, debate between VP candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, is being packaged as a partisan complaint. But what it really is, is an ugly example of the racism still present in our mainstream society.

Ifil is being criticized for the book she's currently writing, a history of black politicians since the Civil Rights era. Not surprisingly, the book is to contain a chapter on Barack Obama. Republicans are complaining that because of this, Ifil is biased in favor of the Democrat in the debate, and should be forbidden from hosting. That this complaint is not only ridiculous, but racist, should be readily apparent. Ifil's text is not an advocacy piece; she told the AP that it is a historical account, and that she hasn't even penned the piece on Obama yet, anyhow. Why should a historical text that happens to include a current presidential candidate be considered partisan? If a white moderator was writing a book about, say, presidents since the Reagan era, and this happened to include a section about George W. Bush, would anyone accuse the white moderator of being a partisan advocate? I highly doubt it. A historical piece about black politicians in the post-Civil Rights era should OF COURSE be expected to include information about the first African-American major-party presidential candidate; it's only the biggest development for African-American politics since equal voting rights were granted. To imply that because Ifil, a journalist, has taken note of this historic development, she is somehow biased in favor of the candidate - this is pure racism.

Nobody would ask these questions of a white moderator. This is simply the only criticism the pro-McCain camp can make, since they can't very well accuse a female moderator of being sexist.

So shut up and just watch the debate, already.

Fight Club Politics

2008-09-30T06:18:00.002-07:00

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected..."

The meltdown on Wall Street has been lent a certain apocalyptic bent by many of the bailout's proponents, and with yesterday's rejection of the latest Paulson plan, the rhetoric is sure to ramp up even further. But despite the warnings of financial meltdown and another Great Depression from the likes of President Bush, I, like many ordinary Americans, was glad to see the bailout fail to pass.

Frankly, I am not concerned about the failures of big investment banks, about the stock holdings of fabulously wealthy individuals and corporations on Wall Street go plummeting. No matter how hard the powers that be push this idea that the collapse will "move from Wall Street to Main Street", I just don't buy it. I don't believe that it is going to affect people like myself that couldn't even dream of having anywhere remotely near $100,000 in the bank, much less a stock portfolio. So to be perfectly honest, I'm sort of happy to see the fat cats fail. They've been getting rich on the backs of people like me, and people much worse off than me, for decades now, reaping the benefits of our blood, sweat and tears. We've all been suffering while they've been lining their pockets; it's time for them to hurt a little. And the last thing I want to do is spend more of my hard-earned tax dollars towards benefiting irresponsible corporate blowhards. The last thing they need is to be bailed out by the American people for their risky financial decisions and greedy profit-maximization. If we were talking about actually buying something for our money, that'd be a different story - but, oh yeah, the Republicans call that 'socialism', and god forbid we ever adopt that. If we the people were going to get a controlling interest in these companies, actually nationalize our own financial sector - which supposedly controls our entire economy - then I'd be all for it. But the Paulson plan is a corporate handout, and apparently I'm not alone in saying that is unacceptable.

"If you erase the debt record, everyone goes back to zero."

So, I'm glad the bailout proposal failed. I'm glad that Wall Street is imploding. The structure of our financial system is unsustainable, irresponsible and disgustingly corporatist, and it needs to change. We the people need to step up and take a little control of our own lives, for once. Revolution does not happen when the public is complacent. Systemic change does not occur when consumer spending is high and people are getting ever-richer.

"You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not your fucking khakis."

We've been told for so many years that everyone can have the American dream, can have bigger, better, faster lives, now. We can all have fast cars and fancy clothes and a big house and five kids and a high-paying job, while still having plenty of time to shop and pursue leisure activities. This is simply not true, and it is certainly not attainable for everyone. People are starting to find this out in a serious way, from the SUV they can no longer afford to drive to the big house they couldn't afford that is being foreclosed on.

"We've been brought up to believe we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars... but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we are very, very pissed off about it."

Sadly, we need a complete collapse in order to build something better for ourselves, because the current system is just too entrenched, too powerful, for change to happen while it is still in place. The American Dream is a myth for all but the upper-crust of our society, and they've had control for far too long.

"Only after we've lost everything... are we free to do anything."

So, let it fall. I won't be any worse off. And if those at the top can feel a little of what the rest of us feel... maybe we can truly bring populism to power.

"I say, let's evolve. Let the chips fall where they may."

Back to the Future

2008-09-30T06:16:00.000-07:00

I don't really understand why the news media is generally portraying Friday's debate as a draw. I thought Obama scored more points, and I don't really see the analysis where they both come out even. With the economy the looming issue, Obama addressed the problem point by point, criticized the failure as based on the disastrous free-market ideology espoused by his opponent, and was commanding and forceful in calling for a new way forward. McCain seemed tired and depressingly old-school in his address of the problem, which pretty much consisted of him saying he was going to fight earmarks (a whopping, what, $16 billion of our grotesquely inflated budget?) and cut spending, cut spending, cut spending. Which maybe isn't what people who are losing their jobs and can't afford health care want to hear - but maybe that's just me.

On foreign policy, Obama was more hesitant; I know his plan is to seem tough by taking up this Afghanistan mini-surge as a sort of personal crusade, and granted, the more he can remind people that the "war on terror" didn't even capture the guy it was supposedly about in the first place the better, but personally I just think it completely misses the point. People don't want to hear about a different war - they want to hear about troops coming home. And assuming that we can parade around Afghanistan and catch all the bad guys without negatively affecting Pakistani sovereignty at some point is just ignorant, with all the cross-border cooperation these days. Still, I don't even think McCain sounded any better here - if I hear him accuse Obama of not using the word "victory" in regard to Iraq one more time, I'm going to punch him; he's not using that word because THERE IS NO VICTORY POSSIBLE IN IRAQ, or indeed in an existential war against an ideology, and if you'd been listening to your darling General Petraeus, you would have heard him say so, in an interview with the BBC. I'm sure in this arena, people will hear what they want to hear from both candidates - but can we PLEASE talk about the fact that McCain made an absolute fool of himself in his repeated butchering of the pronunciation of "Ahmadinejad"?

Most importantly, however, as I've been predicting all along, was the "Nixon-Kennedy effect" here. I would bet if you polled radio listeners versus television watchers on this one you'd get some telling results. Standing next to each other, the choice seemed clear - the crotchety, bitter old man, the figure of the past, opposed to the young, handsome, commanding young newcomer, the figure of the future. With the chaos swirling around the American atmosphere these days, I think that, in the end, people will defiantly forge a new way forward. We can't afford to look back anymore.

We Don't Need a Maverick, We Need a Sheriff

2008-09-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Throughout this entire campaign, McCain has touted his reputation as a "maverick" who has stood up to his party throughout his 26-year career in the Senate. While standing up for your beliefs is certainly a desirable trait in a leader, that trait is not all that the "maverick" label applies to. McCain's leadership style has been described this way, as well - the kind of shoot-from-the-hip, gut-based decisionmaking (accompanied by the refusal to back down from said positions) that has characterized the presidency of one George W. Bush. The kind of instinctual impulsiveness that has landed us in the quagmire of the "War on Terror" and the current financial crisis.

McCain's selection of Sarah Palin for the Vice President is a perfect example of this decisionmaking, and a frightening portent of the gunslinger governance we can likely expect should the Republicans win the White House. Luckily for America, the fallacy of that selection is already starting to publicly unravel, as she stumbles over her words on the few interview spots the campaign allows and reveals the vast depth of her own ignorance. McCain may think it's a benefit to advertise his as the "maverick" ticket in this election - but we've had eight years of a maverick. What we really need now is a sheriff.

We need a sheriff, a cool, levelheaded man of the law, to mosey in, thumbs in his beltloops, and clean up the one-horse town known as the District of Columbia. The gunslingers and theives who have seized control of the town for the past two terms have stolen their share of loot from the townspeople and terrorized us quite enough. Somebody needs to ride in on a white horse, take control and give us peace, prosperity and the rule of law we so desperately need. We need someone who will assess the situation, deliberate carefully, and act according to his best rational judgment.

I think it's clear who I'm referring to. It's time for a new sheriff in town.

In the Market We Trust - Except When We Don't

2008-09-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

In a world where the only certainties are death and taxes, competing philosophies and ideologies abound to offer explanations and guidance. Ideologies of economics, as well as religion, are firmly purported and defended by their followers, often to extreme lengths. Sometimes these beliefs are helpful in making policy, provoking debate, and providing guidance and consolation to their followers. But sometimes, when carried to their natural end, the result is sheer disaster.

In his Wednesday night national address, President Bush clearly expressed the view, held by neocons and die-hard fiscal conservatives, that the answer to all economic conundrums is that the market "just isn't free enough", that it is somehow being restrained, that if it were only allowed to be truly liberated and manifested in its purest form, everything would work itself out to the benefit of the greater good. This ideology has driven the massive deregulation mission that has guided American economic policy since at least the 1980s. And if there is anything the current crisis has shown us, it is that deregulation is a recipe for disaster. Yet there are still conservatives proclaiming that the economic crisis is "the market not working properly", that this is some sort of weird deviation from "normal" market behavior, and that if we truly had a free, unfettered financial system, the private sector would sort itself out. Yet with every regulation that has been stripped away over the years, the situation has been exacerbated. This is the free market reaching its natural end - when you remove restrictions, human greed is allowed to run rampant. To assume that people will not exploit the system to maximize personal profit, whatever the cost, is naive, and to continue to cling to the privatization/deregulation belief in the face of this is just plain ignorant.

And this is the problem with faith-based finance. It's the same as religious followers who defend their faith by pointing to fundamentalists as deviants, perverters of the "true" religion. But the very nature of the term "fundamentalist" should be an obvious refutation of that point; if they are literal adherents to the fundamentals of the faith, how can you claim they don't count, that they are exceptions to the rule? This economic ideology is an example of the same thing. If you are truly a free-marketeer, a privatizer, a believer in the Reaganomics that have dictated our economic policy for the past several decades, how can you claim that the financial environment in which the crisis has taken place is anything but the pure, fundamental expression of that belief? Just because you don't like where it's gotten you DOES NOT mean that the market "isn't working". That doesn't even make sense; if a truly free market is one the government is removed from, and that is essentially the condition in which it has been operating, how can you claim that what it is doing is "wrong" or "malfunctioning"? The market is always right, isn't it? It always self-corrects and operates in optimal fashion when it is left alone, right? If you're going to adhere to this ridiculous ideology, at least stick to it - don't run crying to the federal government when the market doesn't act the way you want it to.

The taxpayers are not responsible for your ignorance. If we're going to pay, we should get something for our money. But, oh yeah... that'd be socialism, which as we all know is the most mortal of sins (never mind the fact that the Scandinavian social democracies are infinitely more stable than our great nation is right now). That is the reason nobody is seriously discussing, for example, paying off the faulty mortgages of individuals or bankruptcy protection legislation, even though such consumer-oriented measures would not only address the root cause of the crisis, but would also be infinitely cheaper. In the market we trust - except when we don't, and we need the government to step in and give it a hand.

Faith is a funny thing. And economic faith, just like religious faith, seems to be immune from criticism in the national discussion.

God Help Us All.

2008-09-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

I'd appoint George W. Bush Dictator-For-Life before I would elect to let this woman get anywhere near the White House. This clip from Palin's interview with Katie Couric says it all:

Excerpt posted on The Daily Kos.

McCain's Economic About-Face

2008-09-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

So, last week, McCain's saying "the fundamentals of our economy are strong". Today, the fundamentals of our economy are not only weak, they're apparently so bad that McCain has decided to suspend his campaign to focus on the financial meltdown and Paulson's proposed $700 billion bailout. Oh, and did he mention that necessarily, Friday's debate will have to be delayed, too? Yeah, the economy is way too troubled for us to worry about some silly presidential debate.

This is such an obvious political stunt, I can't believe that anyone would see it as otherwise. McCain has personally stated that he doesn't really understand economics. He has championed the deregulation cause throughout his entire career. And suddenly he cares so much about governmental intervention in the economy that he's incapable of simultaneously running his campaign? Give me a break. This is nothing but a stunt to make Obama a) seem like he cares less about the financial crisis than McCain does and b) be forced to adopt a copycat campaign-suspension, making McCain look like the economic visionary.

And I'm sure none of this has anything to do with the fact that McCain is a terrible debater.

Socialism with a Capitalist Face

2008-09-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

These are strange times we're living in, indeed. What began as the now almost quaint-sounding "credit crunch" has snowballed into the biggest financial meltdown since, according to most experts, the Great Depression. One after another, financial behemoths such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have toppled like dominoes, their remains either gobbled up by more stable institutions - or, in the case of Fannie/Freddie, Bear and AIG, bailed out by the federal government. As it currently stands, the last giants left wobbling unsteadily declared a switch to commercial-bank status, leaving literally no major investment banks remaining on Wall Street.

Now, at first, I didn't think any of this was necessarily a big deal; as far as I could tell, the collapse of some big-money paper-pushers in New York had no direct bearing on my life as a poor Seattle bike shop employee. But as the crisis has unfurled, those of us who never paid attention to Wall Street financial markets have had a harsh awakening to the frightening level of interdependence between high-powered financial institutions and the whole of our global and domestic economies. We have repeatedly heard that these private institutions, many of which your average citizen had never heard of before this crisis, were "too big to fail". Apparently, the entire economy not only of the United States, but of the larger nations of the world, were crumbling rapidly and would indeed collapse if these Wall Street firms didn't get a massive injection of capital, stat. Apparently, a large percentage of faltering U.S. mortgages would have reverted to ownership by foreign governments who had purchased a stake in the market if Fannie and Freddie weren't taken under the government's wing. That is the disturbingly volatile nature of the American financial market in the post-Reagan era of cowboy capitalism - some Wall Street CEOs take too many unregulated financial risks, and suddenly, China owns your house.

But what's really the insulting part about all this is not just that a couple of rich bankers control every aspect of our economic lives. It's not just that global financial stability rests with a handful of private and heretofore unregulated institutions. It's that, after decades of unrestrained profit-maximization, after the limitless greed of the corporate decision-makers has run these institutions into the ground... they're turning around and asking the government, their supposedly avowed enemy, the antithesis to their sacred ideology of free-market profiteering, for a handout. They cry for the government to keep its hands off their businesses, for the Fed to stay as far away from their finances as possible; they maintain that the golden path is deregulation, that the answer to every economic problem is that the market 'isn't free enough'. But when they've run out of capital to fund the golden parachutes their management was planning to sail away from the wreckage on - suddenly, then, the government is the solution. Really, the government under George W. Bush starts with a much bigger 'G' than it ever did under his Democrat predecessor. Just like it pushed through the Iraq War resolution under the auspice of an urgent crisis, just like it swept the Patriot Act and Homeland Security into Big Brother-esque omnipotence over ordinary American lives, the administration is attempting to push through this bailout - and to do so once again without any oversight or review, judicial or otherwise, as stipulated in the already-infamous Section Eight of the bailout proposal.

See, when we're talking about policies that would actually help the average American, such as universal health care, that's socialism. Obviously the first step on the path to becoming Soviet Russia. Individuals are responsible for the decisions they make, and private enterprise knows best what to do with its money - except when it doesn't. When we're talking about bailing out failed billion-dollar Wall Street firms and paying the severance packages of their CEOs, that's sound economic policy. To echo a now-common phrase: socialize the losses, and privatize the profits.

It's disgusting. It's socialism with a capitalist face.

And how dare these Republican politicians, individuals who have spent their entire careers shouting the glories of unfettered free-market capitalism from the rooftops, turn around now and say the problem is a lack of regulatory oversight? How dare they say they care about the $700-billion-plus burden on American taxpayers during a recession when they supported the privatization-and-deregulation ideology that got them into this mess in the first place? How dare they say our economy is so at risk that we need to plunge ourselves this much further into deficit when they know that a significant amount of the bailout money will go to corporate golden parachutes? How dare they still maintain that Reagan was a golden god when the whole deregulation craze really kicked into gear on his watch? How dare John McCain denounce the "old-boy networks" and corporate cronyism of the Wall Street firms when he has spent nearly his whole political career championing deregulation and has staffed his campaign with Washington lobbyists?

How dare they act like they care, now? They can't have it both ways. This is their ideology in its truest form, and the consequences of allowing it to dictate our economic policy for so many years. They can't demand that the taxpayers exhume them from the graves they dug themselves into, only to be handed the capital to do it all over again.

But then again... they've gotten away with worse. Why would they expect us to challenge them now?

When the Could-Be-Vice-President Talks To God

2008-09-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

As if we needed another reason to be frightened of Sarah Palin, I present to you my latest terrifying tidbit: Palin's faith. Specifically, her membership while in Wasilla - the town where she held a mayorship equivalent in scale to being student-body president of my high school - to the Assemblies of God, a premillenialist denomination. Now, I am not using this example to merely suggest that Palin is scary because she subscribes to a wacked-out belief that we are in the End Times and that at any moment, she might spontaneously vaporize in Rapturous glory (though I do believe that). What's really the cautionary-tale part of this is the effect her beliefs are likely to have on foreign policy decisions, should McCain win and subsequently kick the bucket (or even were she to remain in the recently-empowered position of Vice President).

See, for all the ranting and raving the GOP likes to do about Ahmadinejad and the "rogue nation" of Iran, the premillenialist ideology is really not all that dissimilar. They believe that we are in the End Times, as prophesized in the Book of Revelations. They also believe that it is their Christian duty to hasten the Apocalypse and thus, the Second Coming of the Son O' God. Coincidentally, one of the signs of said Apocalypse is death and destruction in the Middle East; forget a peace deal, a premillenialist would want to stoke conflict between Israel and its neighbors as much as possible, though of course this would never be revealed in public. The Axis of Evil would suddenly get a whole lot larger, as this faith tradition takes Bush's "with us or against us" mentality to a whole new level, believing those that don't follow their way of thinking are not only 'sinners', but may in fact be demons in disguise (see ).

And you thought Bush was bad. If God was advising our disgraced Commander-in-Chief on foreign policy all these years... you don't even want to know what he says when Sarah Palin talks to him.

Fall of the Empire (Or, It's the Neocons, Stupid)

2008-09-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

You always hear that history repeats itself, but you never really think you'll see its extreme revolutions in your lifetime. I suppose that willful suspension of belief lent a great deal to the situation we're finding ourselves in today - even when one sees disaster bearing down from a mile away, one still believes that, somehow, it'll swerve at the last minute.

In the past several weeks, the former titans of American finance have found that disaster stayed perfectly on course, this time.

If we examine the history of global civilizations, we find that when power and wealth in a society are concentrated among a small group of elites at the expense of the masses, the excesses of the aristocrats causes varying degrees of societal collapse. Sometimes the desperation of the under-privileged leads to a violent redistribution of resources. Sometimes everyone has to lose. Once-mighty civilizations such as the Aztec and the Maya are widely believed to have fallen due to their populations outstripping their natural resources. The lust of the elite for continued territorial expansion in these societies as well as ancient Greece and Rome resulted in an empire so vast it could not feasibly be governed, controlled and adequately provided for. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the greed of the empowered leads to an imbalance that is entirely unsustainable. This fundamental concept has been outlined by thinkers from Malthus to Marx, and to ignore it is to fall once again into the trap of history.

And ignored it has been by the neo-conservatives, who have infiltrated the ranks of every level of government over the past decades. The imperialist ambitions of these officials provides the perfect parallel to the rulers of empires past, the current slow disintegration of the American and thus, the global financial system symptomatic of the possibly-impending collapse of our own modern-day empire. This is not to say that America is on its way to an apocalyptic meltdown; it does mean that the deregulated, free-trading, greed-rewarding, power-concentrating, privatized empire of globe-spanning crony capitalism may be on the brink of total failure. Globalization has come back to bite its subscribers worldwide in a major way with the current crisis on Wall Street; the intricately-interconnected nature of the neo-conservative politico-business model means that once the first domino is hit, there is no stopping until they've all fallen over (AIG's bailout being the latest such evolution).

The problem here is not, as the McCain campaign would like you to believe, high taxes or government spending (unless you're talking about spending on the war, which he would probably prefer not to) or a market that's just not free enough. The problem here is the entire neo-conservative philosophy that has hijacked our government and economic system. This is capitalism run amok on a global scale. This is about a small group of rich businessmen deciding that they could impose their greed upon the planet's masses by entering government, working to expand their economic, political, territorial and cultural empires across the globe while reaping the benefits purely for themselves. The result is the domination of mammoth commercial monoliths, the collapse of one of which has the power to bring the entire global economy to its knees. And the best part for the neocons behind this system is that they suffer absolutely no consequences. They were free to be as reckless, greedy and ignorant as they wanted in their business dealings, because they risked no consequences whatsoever - when their irresponsibility begins to bring everything tumbling down, it is the American taxpayer who is left to pick up the pieces. The CEOs of these institutions climb out of the rubble with multi-million-dollar golden parachutes, while their hourly employees (who actually depend on their monthly paycheck to survive) are left with nothing, not to mention the financial burden shifted to the nation. The last thing we taxpayers need, in the midst of a recession and two unwinnable wars, is billions of dollars in corporate-bailout debt to pay off.

This is an outrage, and none of us should stand for it. The neo-conservatives have had eight years of systematically destroying our economy and our international diplomatic standing with their self-serving, imperialist designs. The corporate titans have had their decades of undermining working people worldwide and consuming every aspect of cultural, political and economic life. History will prove these people wrong - the question is, will it be because those of us in the suffering masses rise up? Or will it be because we let ourselves be consumed until the aristocratic system collapsed under its own weight?

One way or another... the empire will fall. So what are you going to do about it?

The Death of Dignity

2008-09-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

At one point, it seemed that just maybe, this campaign would be different. Both major candidates were calling for an end to negative campaigning, for keeping things out of the gutter. And now, 60 days from the election, here we are again. Nobody is focusing on the issues. Hell, nobody's even really talking about the issues. Depressingly, this race has yet again become a popularity contest, with all the substance of a high school student-body election. For the past several weeks, all we have heard is cycle of name-calling, finger-pointing, not emphasizing who has the better position on the issues or plans for policy or directions for a new administration, but rather attempting to tear down the character and personality of the other side. It's disgusting and depressing, and I blame it upon the Republicans. This all started with the "celebrity" digs McCain's camp started running a month or so ago, and kicked into high gear with the unleashing of the now-cliched made-up pit bull at the bottom of the ticket. From Giuliani's condescension at the beginning of the convention to every public appearance Palin has made sense, the bitter venom, the hateful name-calling, the derision and belitting has spiralled out of control.

It's not only offensive, disrespectful and uncalled-for, it's downright childish. In the era of reality TV and daytime soaps, we all know that conflict plays, that negative attacks work, they embed themselves in peoples' minds the second they hear them regardless of whether or not they're actually true, and they persist no matter how many news organizations publicly debunk the myths. But why do we have to prey upon this American ignorance? Why can't we actually enlighten people, actually tell them about the issues and show them the substance and let them decide for themselves, instead of deciding for people that they don't care and spoon-feeding them sophomoric schlock instead?

I guess I shouldn't expect any differently. But one can always hope, right?

Hate to break it to you, Obama... we ARE stupid.

2008-09-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

Every time I think I've seen the worst example of my fellow Americans' ignorance... they go and amaze me all over again.

With Palin's addition to the ticket pretty much totally derailing the McCain campaign's whole "experience" angle, apparently, they've decided that the best course of action is to just... copy Obama. Blatantly, flagrantly, they have hijacked almost all of the Obama campaign's talking points - points on which the Republicans have absolutely NO ground to stand on - from focusing on small-town America to calling for "change", even to accusing Obama of representing "old Washington politics"! This is not only completely disingenuous, it is an outrage; a Republican with a 26-year Senate career and a voting record 90% identical to Bush's, and a right-wing extremist governor who might as well be Pat Robertson in a pantsuit, is NOT, under any circumstances, an example of change or of being a "maverick". Why can't they get their OWN goddamn campaign? But a better question is, since they have adopted this copycat strategy, why is McCain suddenly tied with Obama in the polls?

Obama has been calling attention to this on the campaign trail, almost laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of McCain/Palin's new "I know you are but what am I?" message. He seems assured that everyone will see right through this, telling crowds, "They must think you're stupid!"

Well, I hate to break it to you, Obama. We ARE stupid.

The Republicans may be completely ignorant on a whole range of social, environmental and political issues, but if there's one thing they know, it's how to win elections. They win elections because they are shrewd politicians and keen observers of the behavior and thinking of a vast swath of the American electorate. They win elections because they know we're stupid, and they know better than anyone how to exploit that stupidity, and capitalize on it. And maybe that's the Democrats' whole problem. They overestimate people. They assume that people are a whole hell of a lot smarter than they really are. They assume that people will be able to see through the paper-thin arguments and the flip-flopping and the opinion-engineering and the flat-out lies of the other side. And that's why Kerry lost. They don't work hard enough to defend themselves, to get the alternative message out, to change public opinion, because they assume that "the American people are smarter than that".

Democrats, listen up: We are stupid. So treat us like we're stupid. Take us by the hand like a small child and lead us along the path to the truth. Loudly and unequivocally refute every bunk claim that is made against you. Loudly and unequivocally point out every lie and half-truth and hypocritical position of McCain and Palin. Do not, under any circumstances, assume that we'll figure it out on our own. You are speaking to the electorate that voted George W. Bush into office not once, but twice, even while in the midst of the illegal, belligerent, bloody ethical and political quagmire that is the Iraq War. Never forget that. And never let US forget that.

Because maybe, just maybe, if we can manage to have a Democrat in the White House when the election dust settles... we can begin to turn back the tide of the American idiocracy.

What Sarah Palin isn't.

2008-09-08T15:02:00.001-07:00

First, and most importantly: Sarah Palin is NOT a good speaker. So stop saying she is. Just because she's loud doesn't mean she's a skilled orator. Just because she takes bitterly sarcastic, hateful jabs at the Democrats doesn't mean she's witty or comes up with "great lines". Just because she can rupture a crowd of the Republican hardcore into thunderous applause doesn't mean one bit of actual substantive dialogue or policy prescription passes her lips. I, for one, am baffled as to why rousing a group of the GOP's faithful rank-and-file is being touted as some sort of watershed political Moment; let's face it, that group would've given a standing ovation and one of those simian "U-S-A!" chants to a ham sandwich if it stood at the mike and said, "the surge worked, cut taxes and drill everywhere immediately".

What's truly frightening is the fact that McCain seems to have gotten a healthy bump up in the polls post-convention. It seems that we Lefties may have underestimated the staying power of the Republican base... perhaps the far-right and the Evangelicals aren't as scattershot as they seemed to be before the conventions. If there's one thing the Right has down pat, it's falling in line (more on that topic later). Unlike the Democrats, who time and again become so tunnel-vision-focused on their own little pet causes and personal favorites that they fail to rally to the cause come election day, the GOP accepts the fact that to hold onto power, they need to rally behind their candidates and pull that lever no matter what. We should all be very, very afraid of this power, and act appropriately.

But I digress. What else Sarah Palin isn't:

Sarah Palin is NOT a feminist. Her selection is not representative of an achievement in womens' rights. In fact, it's just the opposite; she's a rabid pro-lifer who would singlehandedly undercut the progress made towards reproductive rights and personal freedoms for all American women post-Roe v. Wade. Listen carefully: choosing your own subjugation is not an example of empowerment. More than any specific career achievement, she talks about being a "hockey mom" (as if anyone outside Alaska actually plays hockey) to her five kids - one squeezed out within the last year, to boot! As a proponent of abstinence-only education, she indirectly promotes the condemnation of more young women like her daughter to the cycle of poverty and struggle that is generally teenage motherhood (because most teenage mothers don't have the economic, political and social protection of the Alaskan governor and her friends to save them). As a creationist (and a supporter of teaching this fairy tale in public schools), she promotes an image of blinding ignorance and willful stupidity that should insult women, Christians and conservatives alike, and she publicly supports a worldview in which women are portrayed as created from men, for the sole purpose of serving men and bearing their children. We all know she's fond of doing that, but it doesn't mean she has to force it on the rest of us.

Finally, Sarah Palin is most definitely not a viable alternative for disgruntled Hillary supporters who wanted desperately to vote for the first female president. I would have loved to fill in that little ballot bubble for my own gender just as much as anyone - but that just wasn't in the cards this time. Barack Obama proved the stronger candidate and the more skilled politician, and he would be an excellent leader. His positions on the issues are so close to those of Hillary's - the initial Iraq War vote aside, in which case his position was actually more favorable - that the difference is practically nonexistent. Any woman who was prepared to vote for Hillary had to agree with these issue positions, at least enough to put a candidate in office who would enact them. If this is the case, there is no other possible candidate for these voters than Obama. Palin represents the complete antithesis of everything Obama stands for; there's a reason she was picked to be second-in-command with the man who voted with Dubya over 90% of the time. It is demeaning to women everywhere to suggest that they should vote for Palin just because she shares their gender. The REAL feminist candidate in this race is Barack Obama - he is the only one talking about reproductive rights, personal freedoms, and equal pay for women. Just because Palin is technically female does not mean she supports womens' rights.

And finally, it is extremely insulting to suggest that Palin should not, or cannot, be criticized or attacked in the upcoming debates because she is a woman. Again, the campaign can't have it both ways - they can't talk about how she's some tough buster of the old-boy barriers, and then turn around and call any criticism lodged against her "sexism". That's not only false and hypocritical, it is demeaning to women, and a step backwards for women in power. If women are to hold positions of equal political power with men, we are liable to the same attacks any man in our position would face. Calling anti-Palin sentiment 'sexism' implies that women are too weak to handle the rhetorical and media pressure of a presidential campaign, and that is just plain insulting.

So, thanks but no thanks for your "historic" candidacy, Sarah Palin. I wouldn't call you a pit bull with lipstick... but I would call you a bitch.

The Audacity of Hypocrisy

2008-09-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Un-be-lievable.

Listening to various speakers and delegates at the Republican National Convention this week, I am shocked anew at the audacity with which they make blatantly contradictory statements of belief and policy prescriptions, with which their platform is a shining bastion of hypocrisy. How can they possibly reconcile these things in their own head, much less incorporate them into their platform and broadcast them on the national stage, is utterly incomprehensible to me. If they don't see the hypocrisy, how can they possibly be so blind?! If they see it and they just don't care, how can they possibly not care?!

During this convention, I have heard the GOP faithful state their support of abstinence-only education, followed by a dismissal of Palin's daughter's pregnancy as "kids will be kids" in the same breath. I have heard repeated calls for less government, for the Feds to "stay out of our way", followed by an insistence on restricting the private sexual behavior of individuals, their choice of a marriage partner, and the right of a woman to decide what to do with her own uterus. They cry constantly for less spending, lowering taxes, but then declare that we should throw any and all resources at our armed services. They claim to want to help people, but then denouce funding for universal health care, comprehensive education, mass transit, or fighting poverty. They claim to want to kick foreign-oil addiction, but then support a drilling proposal that would have literally NO tangible effect on prices at the pump, especially not in the remotely-near future. They claim to be Christians and have strong "family values", but spew hate towards anyone who doesn't live like them. And I could go on forever just about Palin. She supported the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, then denounced it when a political backlash arose (and now is championing this 180 as "standing up to the old-boy network" on the stump!!). She voted to slash funding for Alaskan teenage mothers, but now that her 17-year-old is knocked up, seems to think it's the greatest accomplishment of all time. She claims to "stand up to the oil companies", but supports drilling in the ANWR, which would do nothing to relieve average Americans' gas expenses, but would nicely line the pockets of Big Oil. The Republicans all claim to put "Country First", as opposed to, in John McCain's words, the "me first, country second" attitude of the Democrats, but then focus their sights on private entrepreneurship, crony capitalism, political favors, and the bootstrap-tugging they're so fond of championing - not to mention the fact that Sarah Palin once supported the Alaskan separatist party her husband was a member of (which country are you putting first, again?). No matter how loud they scream for it, they can't have it both ways. The audacity of their hypocrisy is truly astounding.

And what's perhaps even more maddening is the ugly trend the Republican candidates have adopted of copping the Obama camp's rhetoric, while viciously mocking him in the same breath. Suddenly, now that McCain has a Veep who is embarrassingly unqualified to be No. 2, the insistence on "experience" is gone, and now it's the Republicans who are the candidates of "change" and "reform". Not only is it completely nonsensical for the incumbent party to be running as the candidates of change, it's an utter fallacy that McCain the Presidential candidate and Palin in any form are presenting a contrasting alternative to the current Washington power structure (which begs a quote from the Coen brothers: "We gotta get us some of that ree-form, Pappy!"). Out of nowhere, the candidates are talking about unions and the working-class, when their party's entire history is of vehement union opposition, of strident support for big business and globalization-friendly trade agreements, when their ranks are composed of the wealthiest capitalist tycoons in our nation's history. And the party faithful is buying into it. I just don't get it. But what's even worse is the degree of venom that Palin, in particular, is spewing at the Democratic candidate. She mocks his history, policies and experience with the ferocity and childishness of a high-school student. Her criticism is not only uninspired and unintelligent, it is false and unfounded. Does she even know what being a community organizer entails? No, why would she? She doesn't even know what the Vice President does. Well, it requires a hell of a lot more involvement, outreach and experience than being the mayor of Nowheresville, Alaska, population <7000.>pure unfiltered hatred that spills from their mouths. I, for one, am disgusted, and anyone that considers themself to truly have "values" should be, too.

I suppose all I can hope for is that the Democrats don't pull their routine of lying down and taking it. The only way they are going to win this is if they grow themselves a backbone and fight back. That doesn't mean lowering themselves into the gutter with McCain and Palin, but it does mean publicly, passionately and loudly refuting the false criticisms lodged against them. It means making sure the American public is not confused about the truth, and about the real history, policies and motives of the GOP. It means asserting themselves, and not allowing the McCain campaign to terrify Americans into voting for him with their 'Fatherland First' scare tactics the way Bush did in 2004. Nobody in this country can afford to lose again. Not this time. There is too much at stake. Obama needs to continue to channel his inner MLK (and a little Malcolm X wouldn't hurt, either). He needs to stay mad, and get the American people mad. Change is not some ethereal unifying force that is going to float down from heaven upon is - it is something that has to fought for. The Obama we saw in that Denver acceptance speech is the Obama we need to see for the next two months (not to mention the next four years). He needs to be firm, to be strong, to make us want to fight for what we believe it, without resorting to the petty insults and lies of the other campaign.

I guess what I'm saying is, you need more than hope to battle the audacity of Republican hypocrisy.

The general election officially begins today. It's time for us all to get serious.

I think we actually might win this thing...

2008-08-29T10:55:00.001-07:00

I can't believe it. I think we actually might win this thing.

Not only was Obama's acceptance speech spot-on perfect, but the McCain campaign this morning made a Hail-Mary play in every sense of the term in its choice of Vice Presidential running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. They just made their first big mistake.

The strongest attack McCain had against Obama at this point, the issue of experience, is suddenly no longer an issue. When a 72-year-old man with a health record so checkered he hesitated to even release his medical records picks a politically-infantile first-term governor (oh, and excuse me, mayor of a town with probably less people than the student body of my college alma mater) for his second-in-command, he sends a clear message to the American people - 'hey, remember all that stuff I said about experience being the most important quality for a national leader? Yeah, I was just kidding'. Suddenly, the Obama-Biden ticket looks a whole hell of a lot safer.

It is entirely obvious that the solitary reason McCain picked Palin is because she is a woman, and he is counting on disenchanted ex-Hillary supporters to carry him in this election. Not only is it a sad, desperate ploy to bank your whole campaign on the fallen-off enthusiasts of a losing Democratic candidate, it is an insult to women all across this country, that they would ignore the fact that Palin's beliefs are the polar opposite of everything Hillary stood for and pull the lever, fill in the circle, choose your voting illustration, for someone just because they have a vagina. McCain certainly grabbed the headlines he was looking for to steal the thunder from Obama's amazing acceptance speech last night, but once the novelty has worn off (and it will, quickly, in this 24-hour-news-cycle culture), I think people will realize what a grave mistake the old man has made.

As for Obama's acceptance speech... wow. I consider myself far too cynical to be easily impressed by much of anything, especially anything in American politics. But that was one impressive piece of oratory, not to mention, a massive, paradigm-shifting, action-inspiring Moment in History. I am truly excited to be living in this period in time, something I never thought I would say. An African-American being nominated for the first time to the top of a major-party presidential ticket is undeniably huge, and it is meaningful not just to the thousands of black Americans, it is meaningful for us as a society, it means that at least a significant number of us are ready to step up, to open our historically-blind eyes and take our place in the international community. This is a movement in action. This is electric. This is history.

And finally, for the first time, I am hearing the kind of rhetoric out of the Democratic Party, traditionally just as nepotist and convention-bound as the other guys, that I have believed in my whole political life. They are sounding more like Nader than like Bush these days, and to me, that is HUGE. They actually sound like populists; they are actually calling out corporatism and cronyism and the corruption of the American system; they are actually talking about unions and working people and tugs on bootstraps; they are actually talking about action.

And people are responding.

And I really, really hope that the times are, in actuality, a-changing.

Why I've Decided I Actually Kind of Like Barack Obama

2008-08-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been quite some time since my last post; I have been too busy with graduating college, working and following the election coverage so obsessively I haven't even had time to rant about it. This really is an absolutely fascinating election, boundary-shattering in so many ways... for probably the first time since 1968, the American electorate actually seems to care about the campaigns, is passionate about politics, is hungry for a change. For maybe the first time ever, every last primary and caucus mattered, and was followed with an intensity by the media and the public almost equaling that of Iowa and New Hampshire. States broke the rules and were forgiven. Record numbers registered and - believe it or not - actually turned out to vote in these typically-forgotten early contests. The two major Democratic party candidates were a black man and a woman (and the immensity of this moment cannot be downplayed). And that woman stayed in the race through every last contest, winning more votes than any losing candidate in American politics.

And, of course, the historic milestone tonight, when an African-American became the first major party candidate in the history of the US Presidency.

Listening to the choked-up testimonies of those African-American delegates and elected officials old enough to remember the pre-Civil Rights era, to have witnessed the Martin Luther King Jr. phenomenon, to have grown up in a time when a black president seemed about as likely as electing the Easter Bunny... it really hit me. We are living in history. This is a capital-m Moment in America, one which not only means so much emotionally to black citizens and officials, but which is of immense significance for our national identity and our standing in the international community. Maybe, just maybe, America will arrive on the global scene as a progressive, equal-opportunity democracy. Maybe we can move forward for once instead of running headlong into backward-looking disaster. I really, really doubt it... but maybe.

I think I get it now. It is not really about Obama. It is about what he represents, to Americans and to the world at large. It is about the dream - albeit a near-impossible one - of becoming a nation that is actually diverse, at least attempts to be an honest broker in domestic and international affairs, that forgoes bellicosity and all-consuming greed for diplomacy, stability, and peace. It is about maybe at least attempting to leave the WASP-filled corporatist culture of politics and larger society behind and modernize. It's not about the man... it's about the idea of a movement, about being part of something greater and more important than yourself, and sadly, that's not a phenomenon most Americans have any real experience with. People need causes that are larger than their menial everyday lives, and this election, fueled by the anger, emotional suffering, economic hardship, political stalemates and social and environmental degradation of the past eight years, has given them just that opportunity.

And y'know what? I've decided I don't actually think the guy's all that bad. At first, I was really put off by the slick marketing campaign, the image, the seeming cockiness in his earlier public appearances of the primaries. But after witnessing his ability to more or less stick to the high road as the Clinton campaign descended deep into the mud, after marvelling at the political, economic and social juggernaut that the Obama campaign has become, after listening to some undeniably impressive speeches (soaring rhetoric though they mostly may be) from a seriously skilled and intelligent orator... I still wouldn't call myself a huge fan, but I have to admit... I can't help kind of liking the guy. He is an inspiring political leader to many and appears thus far to be a balanced, diplomatic statesman. I still don't agree with everything he says - primarily the religious rhetoric, and by the way, I was pretty put off by his willingness to be interviewed by Rick Warren, Master Evangelical, on his own stomping grounds - but I have developed a real respect for him, and I do actually think he would make a pretty damn good President.

Especially when, as is the norm in this stage of the horse race, you listen to him juxtaposed with the condescending bitter-grandfather rhetoric of one Mr. John McCain. Not to mention the fact that he is so closely aligned with Dubya and his neocon cronies that it's become frightening. And that he has so many houses he can't even count them. Did I mention that, to quote Paris Hilton (which I never thought I'd do), "he's, like, super old"? But I digress.

The bottom line is, we as a nation cannot afford any longer to be the Republican Party's bitch. We need desperately to put someone in the White House who at least has some of the interests of everyday people in mind. We need to start doing things differently, before - if it isn't already - it's too late. We have dug our own grave in electing and re-electing a President who has systematically acted to enrich himself and his friends while destroying the environment, running the country into an economic and housing crisis, involving us in an illegal, unwinnable and horribly destructive war, deepening anti-American sentiment abroad, and allowing crises of poverty and health care to run rampant. I have a feeling the American Empire may not be long for this world, that I may even be around to witness its spectacular fall. But electing another ultra-right-wing Republican is going to guarantee it.

Do I think that electing Barack Obama is going to save us all, to turn the country around and fundamentally change the nature of deeply-entrenched social, political and economic systems? Of course not. Have I become a blind devotee of the modern messiah? Not a chance. Do I still listen to his speeches and policies with a highly critical ear? Most definitely, as should everyone; we should never stop questioning our leaders and elected officials. Do I wish like hell that Nader could pull more than a 5%-at-best margin? You bet I do.

But do I know what's at stake in this most historic of contests? Without a doubt.

It's everything.

So you heard it here first, folks... I'm voting for Barack Obama.

Plight of the Rabbit

2008-07-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

We recently adopted a rabbit from the local branch of the Humane Society, so I thought I would take the opportunity to address the oft-overlooked plight of the pet rabbit and represent my furry friends.

Everyone knows that bunnies are cute. As in, ridiculously, cartoonishly cute. They're extremely soft, and look very cuddly. Thus, many ignorant parents decide to buy their kid a bunny from a pet store for their birthday, or Easter, or just because they're so darn special. Kids have short attention spans, and don't exactly make the best caretakers for animals with delicate health and dietary needs. As a result, the kid often gets tired of bunny long before bunny's 8-14 years on this earth have run their course and, sadly, often sets the pet "free" in a park, 'cause rabbits live in the wild, right? Of course, a domestic rabbit hasn't the faintest idea how to survive in the wild, and is likely to die from a predator, exposure, lack of food or dietary problems (there are many plants rabbits' fragile digestive systems cannot handle). Feral rabbit populations have become, unfortunately, a rather common phenomenon in many local parks (such as Woodland Park in Seattle), which endangers not only the rabbits, but the native creatures who have to compete with their new neighbors.

Even if the pet isn't abandoned, the young owner and his or her parents are often not aware of rabbits' sensitive health and dietary needs; a rabbit is not a cat or dog or hamster, and it cannot be cared for as such. It is not always easy to tell when rabbits are having health problems, and the pet may needlessly suffer for most of its life if it is ill and symptoms are not detected. It also may become malnourished and health-deficient if it is fed an all-pellet diet, which ignorant owners often do, assuming that pet rabbits eat just like hamsters or cats do.

Rabbits make wonderful pets; they are house-trained easier than cats, and will use litterboxes, feed themselves on hay and roam your house like any pet would. They are adorable, lovable and make great companions (just make sure to bunny-proof your house thoroughly - rabbits LOVE to eat electrical cords!). There are many rabbits out there that need homes - just make sure that you patronize your local animal shelter instead of going to a pet store. Sure, it's tempting to want to take a baby bunny home from a shop, but there are probably hundreds of rabbits already out there who will be just as loving a pet, and who need a home with someone who'll love them back. I am a strong advocate of rabbit ownership, as long as you know what you're doing. Be aware that rabbits have different health and dietary needs. They need fresh leafy greens to eat, and there are many foods they cannot have. Rabbits often show their symptoms subtly when they are sick or in pain, so you must pay attention to your bunny's behavior. And if your rabbit does need to go to the vet, make sure you visit a doctor who specializes in rabbit and/or 'exotic' animal health (such as , if you live in my neck of the woods). Regular dog-and-cat http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gifveterinarians may be fine for routine check-ups, but they are usually unaware of health issues that are unique to rabbits and other small animals. Trust me - I learned all this from experience with our rabbit, who has had her share of health challenges.

So, if you are thinking of getting a pet, consider a cute and cuddly bunny - but consider one who needs to be rescued, not one from a pet store. Check out your local branch of the Humane Society to find a shelter near you that has rabbits for adoption, and for a great informational resource on bringing a bunny into your home, visit the House Rabbit Society. Remember - our furry friends need loving homes just like we do!

And the People All Said Amen: A Nonbeliever’s Account of the Obama Phenomenon

2008-02-29T21:29:00.000-08:00

“Jesus Christ, let me off this fucking bus!”

That is the first reaction I hear to the crowds of people making their pilgrimage to see aspiring presidential candidate Barack Obama speak at Seattle’s Key Arena, the day before our humble state is to vote in the suddenly-important February 9th caucus.

The #13 bus is packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Every space that could be possibly filled by a human body is occupied by a man, woman or child. A white twentysomething next to me asks if everybody’s going to see Obama. An affirmative chorus arises from the crowd. Three young African-American children, sitting with their white mother, squeal, “I’m going to see Obama!” as excitedly as if they were going to Disneyland.

We see the line from several blocks away. “Looks like the Beatles are in town,” the bus driver, a grandfatherly African-American with a short, graying beard and a baseball cap remarks. “You think maybe America’s sick of Bush? 8 years long enough?” His captive audience echoes our ‘amens’ after every point he makes. “You think people’ve had enough of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice?

“You know, I’m just the bus driver,” he says, glancing up at his starry-eyed riders in the rearview mirror, “but I think America’s ready for a change.”

I can’t help but wonder if the driver was a plant by the Obama camp as the bus doors open and we are released into the flood of humanity pooling around the arena. The line winds so many times around the street that you can’t tell where it ends, begins or leads. An SEIU representative collects a group of middle-aged women from somewhere near me in the human morass and they disappear back into the crowd. Groups of teenagers that look like they’re maybe just old enough to cast a ballot run up and down the lines of people, attempting to start a wave. As the news crews push through the crowd and begin to set up their equipment, the reader board outside the stadium flashes an advertisement for a Bruce Springsteen concert; judging from the spectacle, you’d think that’s where we are. There are even vendors trolling the lines, hawking T-shirts and buttons with messages such as “Hot Chicks Dig Obama”.

Interestingly, even the supporters, waiting in line for hours in the windy February cold, talk about being torn between today’s main event and that other contender, Hillary Clinton. An on-the-fence, late-middle-aged woman in front of me says, “Well, the youth are here now, but what if Hillary gets the nomination? Will they be here in nine months?” Her similarly-aged counterparts say, no, say, the Obama support is a generational thing. I resist the urge to butt in and interject my ignorant youthful opinion.

Finally, the doors open, and the herd slowly mills into the arena. Inside, the rock-concert atmosphere is only amplified. A giant banner proclaiming “Change We Can Believe In” is draped behind a stage on the stadium floor. The seats are packed, and I chuckle to myself upon noticing that music featured in early Spike Lee films is blaring from the speakers. The music is periodically switched off to play Obama-propaganda films on the giant screens above the crowd. In a bit of foreshadowing, a clean-cut aide in a suit and tie hands out “Chris Gregoire for Governor” signs to the volunteer crowd standing in front of the stage. They are waved enthusiastically by a bunch of kids who don’t even seem to know what the signs say. The woman next to me, a large, aging African-American who has been blabbing my ear off about how she’s been voting in elections since dinosaurs roamed the earth, even though people my age haven’t cared about it until now (that offensive viewpoint again!), starts muttering that if Gregoire isn’t going to endorse Obama, she doesn’t want to see any of her signs.

After a near eternity of waiting, watching a cross-stadium dance-off between a young African-American boy and an elderly, very white man, it seems like something is about to happen – but alas, it is just the opening acts. They seem to drag on forever. Mayor Nickels speaks, looking, as usual, like his head is about to pop off of his rotund body. The drummer from Pearl Jam is trotted out to introduce a way-too-long video of what appears to be Obama’s official campaign song being recorded. The lyrics are “fired up, ready to go”, but after sitting and waiting for an hour and 45 minutes, I don’t think I’m the only audience member whose patience is wearing awfully thin. Apparently the champion of the people doesn’t care that us working-class folks have to show up at our jobs at some point today. They’ve already run through their entire playlist of hope- and change-themed tunes and are now starting it over again. I wonder to myself if the campaign staffer who chose the Eric Clapton song heard the lyric, “It’s only in my dreams that I can change the world…” Apparently, Gregoire is making her first official endorsement of Obama. She’s rather freakish looking in person, and it’s an unsettling image to see her up on stage, doing a stiff, awkward sort of dance-thing to the bass-heavy beat blasting from the speakers.

And then, at long last, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The guy is a rock star, I have to give him that. When he finally makes his way towards the stage, fans clamor to shake his hand, nearly pitching over the railings to reach him. A girl that can’t be more than twelve, with “Obama” written in face paint across her forehead, looks like she is going to burst into tears when he stops and takes her hand. What was that the bus driver was saying about the Beatles?

Obama starts off his speech by talking up Mayor Nickels – not a strategy I’d recommend if I were trying to galvanize support among Seattle voters. He delivers a string of sound-bite ready lines I’ve already heard, in that tone that is apparently supposed to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr., but sounds to me more like Joel Osteen. As usual, he is not explaining any of his actual policies; not stating how, precisely, he plans to implement these sweeping proposals, full of flowery rhetoric, in a Congress still largely seated with Republicans. Does he honestly think the GOP, the party of business, big money and friends in high places, is going to allow negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to make prescription drugs affordable? Lowering of insurance premiums across the board? Giving out $1000 breaks in the income tax for seniors and the lower two-thirds of the income bracket? $4000 college tuition breaks with mandatory community-service or Peace Corps volunteer stipulations? Fining companies for all their emissions and bringing the troops home in 2009? Issues of support aside, from where is the financing for all this going to come? It’s a good thing your campaign theme is “hope,” pal, ‘cause you’re certainly going to need it.

Obama talks about his childhood like somehow, he had it rough, and so he can relate to disadvantaged blacks and children of ‘broken homes’. Let’s see… your single mom was still white. Your grandparents were white. You grew up in Honolulu. Your apartment was probably filled with cane furniture, African masks and Tibetan meditation bowls, overlooking a white-sand beach and surrounded by palm trees. Does this sound like the experience of our country’s poor, inner-city African-Americans? You went to Harvard law, for crying out loud. How disadvantaged could you possibly be?

And then comes the statement that is case-in-point for my main protest against Obama: “They say all I do is talk about hope all the time… I’m a ‘hopemonger’… I’m all talk and no action… Well, you know what? We are gonna act! We are gonna make change!”

Apparently, nobody in the wildly cheering crowd sees the irony in the fact that HE'S STILL. JUST. SAYING. THAT.

* * * * * * * * * *

Well, nearly 5 hours of waiting around for 45 minutes of speaking. I’m glad I got the chance to witness this once-in-a-generation sociopolitical phenomenon – but it all seems more than a little bit excessive. Is this what politics has become? Just another big sound-and-light spectacular? One more flashy, substance-free performance for the unwitting masses? The appearance felt like a combination of a benefit concert, a movie premiere and a Baptist revival tent… but not like it had anything to do with governance.

Mostly, I feel about Obama like I used to feel about religion. I almost wish I could believe, because these people are all just so happy. They’re so excited. It must be nice to have a candidate - who actually has a chance of winning - whom you can believe in so passionately. It must be nice to be able to take solace in ethereal promises of hope and change and positivity. It must be nice to be able to wrap yourself up tight in the comfortable illusion that one guy can make everything all right and hide from the big, scary world.

But I just can’t do that.

And unfortunately, like in so many cases, I’m pretty much alone on this one.

Environmental Policy and... Dungeons and Dragons?!?

2007-04-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

This is just TOO good to be true. Not only do we have the now-ridiculously-fairly-typical leaking of classified information by Bush administration employees... now, we also have the delicious tidbit that sometimes, those documents are linked to kids playing online role-playing games in their parents' basement. No joke. Check it out:

The Bush administration: Bringing you third-party scientific reviews from online roleplaying pals

Posted by David Roberts at 12:47 PM on 30 Mar 2007

On Wednesday, the Inspector General's office at the Department of Interior released a report showing that a Bush appointee who lacked any background in natural science had "bullied, insulted, and harassed the professional staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to change documents and alter biological reporting regarding the Endangered Species Program." She had been "heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping ... scientific reports from the field."

This all sounds familiar, of course. Shades of Philip Cooney. Shades of Steven Griles. Hack Bush appointees corrupting the scientific process for ideological ends. This is a particularly ham-handed example, but ho hum, right?

But wait. The investigation also turned up evidence that the same appointee had "disclosed nonpublic information to private sector sources." A closer look at the report (PDF) reveals that this particular appointee -- Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks Julie MacDonald --was a truly ... special case.

I direct your attention to a remarkable passage on p. 21. Keep in mind that being discussed here are scientific documents, and that it is illegal to share these documents with people outside the agency (bolding of text is mine):

MacDonald confirmed that she also sent the Delta Smelt document [about a controversial endangered species in Northern Calif.] to an on-line game friend through his father's e-mail account. MacDonald said she is acquainted with the on-line friend through internet role-playing games. She said she engages in these games to relieve the stress created by her job; however, she said she has not played while at work. When asked why she would e-mail an internal DOI document to a private citizen, MacDonald replied, "I was irritated [with what was happening regarding the subject of the document] and tried to explain my irritation over the phone; however, I sent it to him to read for a better understanding."

Agent's Note: The on-line game friend is not professionally or personally affiliated with DOI or any of its entities. MacDonald continues to play games on the internet with the on-line friend; however, she has not sent any internal DOI information to him since her first interview last summer.

Yup, she sent an internal DOI scientific review document to a roleplaying buddy she met online -- through the buddy's dad -- for "better understanding." She said she "likes to have third party reviews of these documents," don't you know. I'm sure Fraggerz0952 will issue some perceptive scientific judgments from his parents' basement.

Trust me that this is the tip of the iceberg. You really should read the whole report. Here's another nice bit:

MacDonald admitted to sending "Watershed proposed draft rule by the EPA: proposal of a new framework for accomplishing the water quality planning and management provisions of the Clean Water Act" via government e-mail to a personal friend, whose e-mail address ended in chevrontexaco.com. She said she did not remember why she sent the document as an attachment to the friend but stated, "It probably wasn't releasable." When MacDonald was questioned about the second e-mail, containing a large EPA file, sent to another e-mail address ending in chevrontexaco.com, MacDonald could not recall whom this e-mail address belonged to.

A "personal friend" indeed. She also (illegally) shared confidential agency documents with "personal friends" that included an attorney at the right-wing Pacific Legal Foundation and lobbyists at the California Farm Bureau and Building Industry Association of Southern California. She loves her some third-party reviews!

Astonishing. As always, when we see an up-close example of the pervasive corruption in the Bush administration, our question should be: what are we not seeing?

Can you imagine?

At least SOMEBODY learned something from Scooter Libby...

2007-03-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Kyle Sampson, former chief-of-staff to our favorite embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, seems to have been paying attention to the news lately.

It was pretty damn obvious right from the start what was going on - Sampson resigned once news of the prosecutor firings first started to bubble to the surface, and Gonzales quickly started setting him up as a pawn. After all, that's the modus operandi of the whole administration - to quote a certain favorite show of mine, "Deny Everything". The entire Bush administration is constantly in the process of a Great Forgetting. It's like freakin' 'Memento' over there, the way they talk - everyone completely and totally erases from their memory everything they do or say five minutes after they do or say it. Cheney's fat, failing body is probably covered with tattoos with phrases about WMDs and how to use the "safety" feature on a gun. Anyway, should the Forgetting tactic fail to convince, the next step in the plan is: have a fall guy. Somebody's gotta go when the going gets really rough, and it sure as hell ain't gonna be the big dogs.
'
It worked for Cheney - Scooter Libby took the fall, the jury didn't fall for the "memory-lapse" routine, and dude is getting hauled off to jail while Cheney didn't have to so much as raise his right hand.

So Gonzales thought he could do the same. Just plead ignorance, blame everything on Sampson - hell, the guy already quit, anyway - and you'll be home free!

-- That is, assuming the fall guy's actually going to take the dive.

Sampson, thus far, is not. Somebody actually took notes at the Libby trial, recognized what was happening, and decided to burn the big guy before the flames engulfed him personally. Testimony thus far has contradicted everything Gonzales has claimed about being "absent" from any decisions regarding the employment (or lack thereof) of federal prosecutors - on the contrary, not only has he said that Gonzales knew about the firings, but he was physically at a meeting deciding what to do with them, and had set up the plan right from the start! And what's even better, the orders to kick-start this evil plan into gear trickled down from none other than the good people at our friend Mr. Rove's office.

Oh yes. It is sweet.

Gonzales is going down. King Bush the Second has made his usual flagrantly dictatorial declarations that his buddy Al is safe in his position, but everyone knows the man is done for. If he doesn't step down, he'll be forcibly removed. And frankly, I'd like to see a bit of the latter.

Silly Gonzales... you should know better than to trust a Conservative.

They just make it so EASY!

2007-03-24T14:01:00.001-07:00

It's pretty hilarious, really, just how easy it seems to be to unearth massive quantities of documents explaining in detail how high-ranking White House officials plan to carry out their various dirty deeds. It's kind of ridiculous - you'd think that when masterminding a high-level government conspiracy, you'd want to keep it under wraps, meet secretly, not document it in writing, and for chrissakes, at least empty the trash on your email account if you absolutely must do so.

But no. That'd be just TOO smart.

These government "Bushies" are like a bunch of Bond villains, conveniently (for us) outlining every step, in detail, of their evil plans, so that it can come back and bite them in the ass later. I mean, that's how the bad guys get caught in cheesy action movies! Nobody ACTUALLY writes out a detailed analysis of a devious scheme they're about to pull, just HOPING it won't fall into the wrong hands!

Nobody, that is, except, oh, every high-ranking Bush administration official thus implicated so far in a scandal. It's never, you know, some rat witness exposing the plan, some mole on the inside. It's always "documents" that surface and blow the lid right off the scandal-of-the-week. There was the Abramoff thing, then the "game plan" for exposing Plame that Cheney drew up for Scooter Libby. And now we have the literally hundreds of documents, including emails and memos, outlining in step-by-step, damning detail the plan Attorney-General-For-Now Alberto Gonzales cooked up with Harriet Miers, his chief-of-staff Kyle Sampson, and our good buddy Karl Rove, among others, to fire eight federal prosecutors and replace them with ones who were, to quote Sampson, "loyal Bushies".

It's true, they just make it too EASY, these Bushies... they seem to have all taken a page from the Bill Clinton playbook, publicly and vehemently denying any accusations against them, saying they were uninformed, they forgot, and so on - until a bunch of documents surface, just when they're at their most righteous height of self-defense, blatantly proving that not only did they know about said plans, they masterminded them. Gonzales is a shining example of this: he has repeatedly sworn he had no knowledge of the firing-and-hiring process regarding the prosecutors and their replacements, all he knew was that it happened. Then, lo and behold, a memo surfaces from a meeting Gonzales was at in which he approved all of the maneuvers he so fervently denied knowledge of! How do you like THEM apples, you lying bastard? Pinning everything on your aide only works if you're Cheney, Gonzales, and last time I checked, you ain't him.

Gonzales is going down in flames, whether he likes it or not. Rove is going to have to testify under oath about his Puppetmaster role in all of this, as well. Hopefully that'll be two more down...

... one Commander-in-Chief to go.

"In a society run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile." - Hunter S. Thompson

2007-03-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

How apathetic are we?

How passive are our representatives, how neutered the new Congress?

How pathetic of a state are we in, when every time we look at the news there is yet another, brand-new Bush administration scandal unfolding, splattered in catastrophic glory across the headlines like the corpses of so many Iraq War victims --

-- and we do NOTHING.

Again, and again, and yet again the Bush team throws them at us... broad-ranging, espionage-filled, Lone-Gunmen-worthy epic sagas of governmental corruption, scandal and conspiracy, involving everyone, at every tier of the administration - including the utmost and the highest.

And we do NOTHING.

Oh sure, we sit here and we lament the sorry shape things are in, the Democratic Congress talks some big talk about shaking things up, about America 'wanting a change' - but while their lips are flapping, they just sit there.

And they do NOTHING.

You have to give the Republicans credit for at least one thing, and that's the unfailing ability to rally the troops, so to speak. When something pisses off one of their own, the whole fucking party practically jumps on the bandwagon, all seething with fire and brimstone, great vengeance and furious anger, and not only do they talk loud, they make things happen. Bad things, but things nonetheless.

Can we TALK about the fact that Clinton got a blowjob - a blowjob, for chrissakes - and because God's Own Party didn't like the guy, they all whipped out their torches and pitchforks and chased him down and hung him, in the center of town, for all to see. The message, while utterly and unbelievably ridiculous and unfounded (not to mention a tremendous waste of the taxpayers' money), was perfectly clear: Fear the Conservatives! If they don't like you, and you so much as get your dick sucked in the wrong place, at the wrong time, by the wrong broad, they will CRUCIFY you. The man was impeached, for this paltry little misstep that was nobody's god damned business in the first place.

And today, we have Bush, with a streak of abhorrent offenses to numerous to even list; to name just a few: Dude wasn't even elected to begin with; he started a four-years-and-still-going-strong war on false pretenses; he lied to the American public about there being WMDs and about Saddam's 'connection to Al Qaeda'; the whole illegal-wiretapping-thing and other such violations of First Amendment rights; he unlawfully detained many 'terrorism suspects' with no real evidence and without giving them access to a lawyer; the ever-skyrocketing Iraqi and American soldier deaths in the sectarian-violence clusterfuck that is Iraq; Cheney going completely off the foaming, rabid, bloodthirsty and delusional Deep End; the Guantanamo Bay scandal; the Scooter Libby scandal; the Cheney-shooting-a-dude-in-the-face scandal; the Karl Rove scandal; the Tillman scandal; and the latest freak show in this three-hundred-ring circus, the Gonzales scandal.

I cannot emphasize this enough: EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE INSTANCES, ON ITS OWN, CONSTITUTES MORE THAN VIABLE GROUNDS FOR IMPEACHMENT. Especially given what apparently passes for "viable" these days.

AND WE. HAVE DONE. NOTHING.

Congress promises a 'new direction', but they're all bloated rhetoric and zero action. They could barely even get it up enough to have a debate on a non-binding troop-withdrawal resolution that was, in essence, just the exact same spineless rhetoric they've been saying all along, only in official-statement form. If the shoe was on the other foot, the Republicans would've had the president and his administration tried, impeached, imprisoned and burned at the stake before you could say 'Compassionate Conservatism'. But the chicken-shit, pandering, middle-of-the-road, Moderate-Democratic-leadership of this godforsaken country has been given chance, after chance, after chance, after chance, after chance to stand up and dispense a little fucking justice on this theocracy, and has shat all over it with their hopeless inaction and bullshit appeasement.

And so the cycle of scandal, corruption and destruction on a massively immeasurable scale continues. Cheney should be burned at the stake, Gonzales should be sentenced to life on a strawberry farm, Bush should be sent to federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison for life, and Rove and all the other little Bush cronies - and hell, while we're at it, let's throw Ann Coulter, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Bill O'Reilly on there - should be put up on a hill and crucified as a warning to all future presidencies to come. The current administration's exploits are like Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Japanese internment, the Kennedy assassination, and The X-Files all rolled into one - and yet, the Bush administration continues to do whatever it fucking pleases, because honestly, who's going to stop them?

Not us.

We have done nothing.

We need to get up and fucking fight, before we lose every last shred of anything resembling dignity we have left.

Who's with me?

Why I Don't Like Barack Obama (And No, It's NOT 'Cause He's Black)

2007-02-21T10:02:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, with the 2008 Presidential race picking up steam, potential candidates are already starting to make their rounds, launch their websites, and pack up the cross-country campaign caravan. So I'm sure that by now, all of you are at least moderately familiar with one particular candidate: Oprah's best buddy; author of the oh-so-touchingly-titled book "The Audacity of Hope"; inadventent killer of Biden's day-old presidential campaign; men's-magazine cover model of the year; the Moderate-Left's Great Non-White Hope, Senator Barack Obama. The big deal: he's the first truly viable black presidential candidate this sad, backwards country has ever had. He's a good-looking dude, a family man, a coherent public speaker, and, c'mon guys, he really, really just wants us all to get along. Aren't we all tired of fighting? Shouldn't we all just hold hands, sing Kum-Ba-Ya, and welcome Obama with open arms? Shouldn't we all just LOVE him?

That's what a lot of people seem to think. And of course, that's what HE wants you to think. Because, you see, Barack Obama is your friend. He doesn't want you to be so negative, to get so depressed about life and the state of the nation, to argue with people of a different political persuasion than your own. Barack Obama just wants us all to be happy, and his "platform" thus far is perfect evidence:

1. He's against the war, but he's really, REALLY supportive of our veterans, and using his plan of sunshine, rainbows and magical fairy dust, he's going to persuade "the Iraqi government to make progress on forming a political solution" and "[engage] the international community, particularly key neighboring states and Arab nations, to become more involved in Iraq", so we can clean up that mess and get out. Whew! What a relief THAT'S gonna be!

2. Obama is a family man, so he loves kids, and he hates bad politicians; that's why he plans to "shine sunlight into the earmarks process and promote open government". See? The bright, shiny rays of happy sunlight will make all the corruption go away!

3.Being a political young'un, Obama also understands college students - that's right, people like YOU. He has his own Facebook group, and you can join his MySpace-esque online community at my.barackobama.com, where you can make a profile, blog, network, event-plan, and of course, donate money. See?! He's MY Barack Obama, and he's yours, too! His website even says so!!! What's NOT to like about a candidate that lets your create your own online identity within the realm of HIS online identity? It's SO RELEVANT.

4. Barack Obama doesn't like nuclear weapons. That's why he formed a superhero crimefighting team with his Republican pal Richard Lugar, and passed a law that's gonna catch ALL the bad guys smuggling nuclear arms around the globe. Think that a measly piece of legislation isn't going to stop professional black-market smugglers and terrorists and others who make their LIVING avoiding the law, especially in such still-kinda-lawless places as the former Soviet Union? Well, that's because THIS legislation is enforced by angels and forest nymphs, so it's totally unstoppable. So you see?? Obama is a nice guy, but he's still tough enough to fight terrorists!

5. Obama also hates dirty pollution! That's why his crimefighting duo is, uh, investigating oil companies to make sure they're not resisting the potential installation of ethanol pumps! 'Cause if they are, the Duo will, y'know, give them a firm talking to, 'cause Obama isn't a violent dude! He's also going to promote research into the use of clean coal! That's right, clean coal, the magical coal that's made out of fairy turds and actually makes you HEALTHIER when it burns!

6. Finally, Barack Obama may be running as a Democrat, but he's no heathen - Obama loves Jesus, just like you! That's right, Obama's a Christian, so Righties, Moderates, and psuedo-religious libs can all rest easy with the knowledge that good ol' Barack loves our Lord and Savior. However, that shouldn't scare away all of you athiest/agnostic college types, because Obama doesn't love Jesus quite as much as Bush does. He's one of those rational Christians - sure, he reads the Bible and goes to church on Sunday, but he only lets religion dictate SOME of his political preferences. You see, we just need to find a balance in the degree to which we mix church and state. 'Cause really, MOST people are religious, so naturally we should have SOME amount of religion - er, I mean, "spirituality" - in the White House. Right? I mean, it'd only be a LITTLE bit un-Constitutional.

So you see, boys and girls, the moral of the story here is that My Barack Obama is ALL KINDS of Bridging the Gap. He was anti-Iraq War before there even WAS an Iraq War, but he admits that war is often necessary and thinks our troops and veterans are kick ass! He's a squeaky-clean nice dude, but still tough on the bad guys! He's old enough to have a family, but he's all about marketing to the college demographic! He's well-schooled and well-spoken (just don't you DARE call him articulate), but he's not a snob! He's a Democrat, but he's still religious! He's religious, but he's not THAT religious!

And, of course - he's black, but he's not THAT black. He appeals to the African-American community, and assuages that nagging sense of White Guilt - but gee, he's just so very non-threatening, isn't he? Oh, and plus, the celebrities just love him, so he's got the hip factor, too. Besides the aforementioned coziness with The Almighty Oprah, at a recent fundraiser, Obama raked in the donation dough from such Hollywood hotshots as Tom Hanks, Ben Stiller, Steven Spielberg (who hosted the event, no less), Spielberg's production-company buddies Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, Barbara Streisand, George Clooney, and, the other white man's black man, Eddie Murphy.

So, as should be obvious by now, Barack Obama is the second coming of the Messiah. Every man, woman and child can rally around his platform of Let's All Just Get Along, and if he's elected president, every American citizen will join hands, forget their differences, and sing Kum-Ba-Ya under a giant rainbow that will stretch over the entire length of the nation and will rain down money for the next four years (and beyond, once we appoint him Commander-In-Chief-For-Life). Ladies and gentlemen, we need to just forget this silly debate business (so what if democracy is contingent upon it?), forget that there are two separate parties ('cause let's face it, there really aren't anymore), and come together for the Common Good (but, uh, y'know, not the Communist kind).

God, you know, I think I've changed my mind... I don't hate Barack Obama; I LOVE My Barack Obama. Because, you know what? He has the audacity to suggest that we all just compromise our true beliefs, already.

Oh... and don't forget... if you don't support him... you're a racist.

Fool me once, shame on me...

2007-02-14T18:06:00.001-08:00

Bush himself will be the first to admit that, once previously fooled, one "can't git fooled again". But, as usual, his rhetoric is contradicting itself. It takes a lot for political happenings to surprise me these days, but this is really unbelievable, that at this point in time, with this Congress, with these approval ratings, with these headlines, he would pull a fucking stunt like this.

With Iraq a shattered, civil-war-ridden, catastrophically embarrassing jumble of a mess, Bush is starting the build up for War on Terror II: Kicking Iran's Axis of Evil.

The gunpowder trail is already leading straight to World War III, and here he wants to throw in the match. This is outrageous. Where does he get off making threats like this?! Where are we supposed to get the manpower? Where is the evidence? Where is ONE FUCKING BIT of support for his ideological crusades, anywhere, among ANYONE anymore?! We're already the laughingstock of the world. Everyone already thinks we're as big a threat as Obama these days, that any foreign policy we touch turns to shit. And he thinks people are going to fucking get behind this?? Think again. The details, from NPR's website:

"There has been an ongoing debate within the administration regarding the role of the Iranian government in Iraq, and the growing number of roadside bombs that are killing Americans at a rapid rate. U.S. intelligence has linked the bombs to the Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The conclusion by the White House is that the Quds Force is getting its marching orders from the leaders in Tehran, but Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said he was not ready to make that connection.

Mr. Bush said Wednesday that whether or not it can be proven that the Iranian government was directly involved, the fact remains that the weapons are in Iraq and are killing Americans, and that he, the president, is "going to do something about it." A more pointed question, whether the administration was getting the same kind of faulty intelligence about Iran that it got during the "weapons of mass destruction" debate in Iraq – and whether the intelligence was being manipulated as a "pretext to war" — was also dismissed by the president as missing the point.

"What's worse," Mr. Bush asked, "them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and it happening?"

Asked about the fact that many of America's allies are involved in major trade deals with Iran, the president shrugged and said, "Money trumps peace sometimes." But he said he still expected allies to stand together in resisting Iran's ambitions as a nuclear power."

Dream on, Dubya. Starting a war based on bullshit premises and faulty evidence may have saved your presidency once - but just how dumb do you really think the American people are?

Oh wait - they elected you (the second time).

Never mind. We're all gonna die.

Bloggers: Enemies of the State; and, the REAL DoMA

2007-02-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

Well, HERE'S some interesting news. First, I'll start with the ridiculous and unfounded double-standard attack on a couple of left-wing blogger chicks working for the Edwards presidential campaign; namely, Edward's "blogmaster", Amanda Marcotte. Apparently, Marcotte, like a certain someone else I know (*insert self-effacing grin here*), has a personal blog on which, prior to joining Team Edwards, she routinely posted explicit and vehement rants against Christianity, religion in general, and American right-wing fundamentalism. Let's emphasize that this was her personal blog. Now that she's Edward's campaign "blogmaster", naturally people on the other side of the fence have been investigating her previous work, and found a lot there they could get all fire-and-brimstone about. But what's really absurd is that Marcotte isn't just pissing people off; her personal right to free expression is under attack, and she's being accused of promoting "hate speech" for saying things that Christians consider offensive.

Let's stop and think about THAT one for a second. Is it labelled "hate speech" when Ann Coulter calls liberals "godless", when Bill O'Reilly screams like a banshee about the left's "destroying culture", when Rush Limbaugh spews hatred like a fountain into his microphone on a daily basis? Nobody does a god damned thing about THAT, but when some liberal blogger - a BLOGGER, for chrissakes, not even a major public figure - rips on Jesus on her personal site, suddenly she's a hatemonger and should be burned at the stake. This is just more of the fucking double standard bullshit the "compassionate" right pulls out every time somebody says something they don't like. We liberals are insulted CONSTANTLY, called evil and godless and irresponsible and promiscuous and accused of all sorts of horrible misdeeds, and what happens to the right when they do the same thing? JACK SHIT. You know, "hate speech" has a specific definition: "...to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action" against a person or group of people. I do not believe that what Marcotte wrote was hate speech by definition. Sure, it wasn't exactly friendly - but it wasn't hate speech. It was her free expression of her own beliefs, as protected in the constitution. Basically, my point is, what she said was free speech, not Hate Speech, but, IF you're going to label what she said "hate speech", then you also need to label what Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and friends say as hate speech, and punish them accordingly.

Edwards himself even went so far as to issue a public statement criticizing Marcotte's bloggage, saying "that's not the way I talk to people". Shame on you, John Edwards. I think you need to have a little sit-down with the ACLU before you start running lines like THAT one. Besides, it wasn't as if she wrote that on his campaign blog; it was separate, personal, and before her hire, anyhow. By issuing this apology-of-sorts, Edwards is basically condoning the ludicrous right-wing backlash as valid criticism. My respect level for him is down a notch - though I guess I do have to give him props for hiring campaign staff like that to begin with (and for keeping her on staff).

In other news, some very impressive news in the local gay-rights arena: a group has been formed by equal-rights activists called the "Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance". This group is using a fucking brilliant tactic to attack the bullshit 'Defense of Marriage Act' -- take that act to its fully-realized and totally absurd end. The group is bringing the pain with Initiative 957, which would flesh out the DoMA by ruling that any married couple file "proof of procreation" within 3 years of marriage would have their marriage annulled (out-of-state couples would be "unrecognized"), and add the phrase, people "who are capable of having children with one another" to the legal definition of marriage.

Ingenious!

Hopefully this will initiate the kind of discussion we REALLY need to be having about this subject and won't just be brushed aside. This is a very hopeful development on the gay-rights front, if you ask me; this sort of militant and political action is absolutely necessary if the movement is to progress at all. They need to be throwing the Right's tactics right back in their smug little faces. Check out the details: http://www.wa-doma.org/

Much ado about a dude with a sissy nickname...

2007-02-10T16:03:00.000-08:00

Written on: 2.3.07

I regret that I haven't had much time for blogging as of late. I listen to a ridiculous amount of news, and had I the time, would rant ceaselessly about what I've been hearing. Damn school and work. Anyway, while I don't have much time for analysis, I have to at least comment on the sheer fabulousness of the three-ring-circus-clusterfuck that the whole "Scooter" Libby perjury/obstruction-of-justice trial has become.

First of all, there's the names of these characters. We've got handles such as "Agent Debbie Bond" and "Lewis 'Scooter' Libby" in this production (and can we talk about what a stupid-ass nickname that is? "Scooter"?! Anyone with a sissy little nickname like that just HAS to be a rat). Second of all, the thing is pure entertainment gold: everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else, every witness they call to the stand has miraculous, "Memento"-esque periods of memory lapse-and-recovery regarding conversations they had with Libby or Cheney or Tim Russert which may or may not have involved Valerie Plame and her chosen profession. Third (and best) of all, the accused in this case are high-ranking Bush administration officials, people you may have heard of such as Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and Karl Rove, to name just a few. Ol' Scoot himself had a cushy government job before this nasty leak spectacle got the best of him. And these people aren't just suffering from some mere slings and arrows, some floating accusations - they are being directly implicated, called to the fucking stand to testify, potentially being faced with actual criminal charges, if all goes properly (insert sign-of-the-cross here).

This is our Watergate. This is history in the making, folks. I don't know if anyone realizes how important this is - but it's huge. This is incredibly significant for journalism, politics, and history in general. And seeing as I've hated Bush and Pals with an intense and deeply-burning passion since they first moved into that nice house, it's also terribly exciting from a vengeance sort of standpoint.

Despite how fucked-up everything seems to be at the moment, this is a very important time. This is our generation's Vietnam Era. People will look back on this and say, "you were there? What was that like?"

And I want to be reporting from the front lines every step of the way. Anyone have a spare job in political correspondence floating around?

Anyway, the point is, this trial is not only one for the record, it's good for a laugh, as well. Since I can't be there myself, check out the dispatch on Slate.com for an entertaining glimpse into this theater of mass destruction.

Note: Not that I'm surprised, but how disappointing is it that the prosecution has rested without calling Cheney himself to the stand?! That would have been incredible. And he's the "missing link" in all this, anyway. I'm sure he threatened to kill the prosecution's firstborn or something should he be called to testify... but it's a nice fantasy... he'd probably have another heart attack up there...

The latest link to Al Qaeda is... Meatwad?!

2007-02-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

Written on: 2.1.07

Well, kids, the "War on Terror" has reached a supremely hilarious new low. Everyone's so on-edge these days, they've now reached the point where they cry "Osama" over any little thing that looks even remotely out of their familiar surroundings - apparently, even over a fucking Lite Brite .

That's right. Yesterday, all of Boston basically went to Panic Level Orange over some blinking-light display boards. For those of you who haven't heard the ridiculous tale of the "Boston Two" yet, here's what basically happened: As part of a marketing promotion for Adult Swim's cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force (one of my favorite shows), a couple of dudes from a third-party promo company scattered blinking LED-display circuit boards, with pictures of the Mooninite characters flipping the bird, in random places around Boston. This marketing campaign had already been underway for several days in about ten different cities across the country, without incident. But apparently, the fucking geniuses in Boston saw the ad boards, which quite literally look like black-and-silver Lite Brites forming a Mooninite picture, and decided that they were bombs. So, the Boston Police sends out a freaking terrorist task force to collect and destroy the boards in their various city locales, spending a huge amount of time and a disgusting amount of money diffusing this "terrorist threat", until someone finally clued in and told them, "Uh, guys? That's from a TV show. It's just an ad."

Consequently, the Boston Police not only wasted a shitload of time and money, but have made first-class asses of themselves. The mayor issued a statement later on not admitting that they had fucked up and mistaken an AD CAMPAIGN for a deadly weapon, but that the campaign had been a "bomb hoax". The two guys who placed the ads were arrested and charged with alleged "disruption of the peace" and planting a "bomb scare".

Now, do I have to tell you what a colossal load of BULLSHIT these charges are?! First of all, the dudes were just doing their jobs, and their jobs were to put up pieces of promotional material around the city. It happens every day. Ads are everywhere you look. You can't even sit down in a fucking bathroom stall in half the places out there anymore with some marketing promo staring you straight in the face while you pee. But this one, what, had some blinking lights?! What the fuck kind of bomb HAS blinking lights, anyway?! I think the Boston Police Department has been smoking a little too much crack and watching a little too much Michael Bay. Second of all, the campaign was already installed in cities all over the country, and nobody there thought terrorists were attacking them with Mooninite pictures. And most importantly, they committed no criminal act. IT WASN'T THEIR FAULT THAT THE BPD CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A LITE BRITE AND AN EXPLOSIVE DEVICE. The Boston Two didn't disrupt the peace, the Boston Police did. They didn't create a bomb hoax, the Boston Police did. I mean, we didn't blame the victims of 9/11 for causing a natural disaster by dying in those buildings, did we? (Extreme example, I know, but you get the point.)

Really, though, the whole incident is pretty much the greatest thing that could've possibly happened for Adult Swim and Turner Broadcasting. This fiasco is all over the national news. Old dudes listening to public radio now have the phrase "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" in their vernacular. Housewives know what a Mooninite looks like. This is the sweetest dose of free advertising the show could ever have hoped for. The Two are treating it like the joke it is, which is even better - upon release from prison on bail, they responded to reporters' questions with an endless attempt to divert the conversation to the topic of '70s hairstyles. Fabulous.

So, the point? People need to chill the fuck out, stop looking for Osama when he ain't there, accept responsibility for their own mistakes... and, of course, watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force, weeknights on Cartoon Network.

Jesus, JFK, and you

2007-02-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

Written on: 1.22.07

The question at hand, per the aforementioned NPR blurb:

"How much of a role will religion play in the new Congress? In a special live broadcast from Capitol Hill, congressmen talk about how their religion factors into their thinking and voting."

And, as I also stated before:

WHY THE FUCK IS THIS EVEN CONSIDERED A VALID QUESTION??!?

Think about it for a second. The question is, in its very essence, in the very fiber of its composition, un-fucking-Constitutional. Would you ever hear the headline, "Live from Capitol Hill - The Debate Over Re-Instituting Slavery" or "Murder: Just How Wrong Is It?". Well, with this administration, anything goes - but you get my drift. You wouldn't (probably) hear those headlines because issues such as slavery and murder are unconstitutional - they are hard, fast and simple tenets of which this country was initially founded on.

Another such fundamental doctrine, one which, in fact, was THE NUMBER ONE REASON those Brits bailed and staged a hostile takeover of this nation in the first place, is.... drumroll please...

THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND FUCKING STATE.

Sure, the founding fathers were Christian, the settlers killed a lot of Native Americans because it was their "Manifest Destiny" - and then, oh yeah, there was that whole slavery thing. A lot of shit went horribly sideways right from the get-go, I'm not denying that, and I'm certainly not one to think two shits of the founding fathers. But regardless of what I think of them, they created this mess of a country, and they wrote down some things on a piece of paper for all future citizens of this land to unfalteringly abide by. And some of those things were pretty fucking good ideas. Things such as murder, robbery, and kidnapping sort of get in the way of people pursuing that happiness thing they promised us. And the most important thing that paper said was that everyone in this country would have the freedom of religion (which includes the freedom NOT to be religious, if that's what stirs your cocoa). Without that choice, what would America be but Tyrannical England: The Sequel? What would be the point of defecting if they were just going to establish the same goddamn thing on this side of the pond? The settlers didn't want anyone else telling them what to believe or forcing them to abide by laws governed by one man's religious beliefs. So they stated that church and state were NOT TO FRATERNIZE , because, come ON, folks, the two are mutually fucking exclusive. You cannot HAVE a secular government when major policy decisions are made on a religious basis. Because otherwise, what do you have?

A THEOCRACY.

Welcome to the United States of Jesus Christ. Forget the eagle. Our mascot is a big fucking cross. And anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves.

Back in the day, they knew how to keep things separate. Sure, pretty much every President has claimed some sort of religious affiliation or another - but until recently, they didn't legislate according to it. Fucking John F. Kennedy, while Catholic, not only didn't let his faith guide his politics, but gave a whole speech on how vital this separation was, for god's sake - JFK, the ..1 ultimate American icon!! The man says it best himself, so I'll let him tell it like it is:

" I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim--but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

The man understood what this country was SUPPOSED to be about - what today's "leadership" (I use that term loosely) has, obviously, completely cast aside. Today, we have a President who used his Christian faith as an election platform, who tried to pass off a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage because "God told him" homosexuality was a sin, who is openly anti-choice because he thinks we should all spray every square inch of the planet with our respective seeds just like our Daddy wants us to.

It's fucking disgusting. And everyone, on both sides of the ideological divide, on what passes for separate ends of the political spectrum, is fucking validating it.

So is ANYONE going to fucking stand up for what this place is supposed to be about? Is ANYONE going to say, enough is enough??

Or are the only people that see the hypocrisy just helpless little lefty bloggers like me?

'Cause if that's the case... we're done for.

From Your Friends at the Iraq Study Group

2007-02-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Written on: 12.6.06

It's officially 1000% inarguable. The war in Iraq is an unwinnable, unextractable, ungodly freakin' mess. At a recent news conference called on Capitol Hill (the one with the big white building, not the one with the hipsters), members of the Iraq Study Group delivered the findings of their recent report - and it served as a metaphorical bitchslap for dear ol' Dubya. Basically, the group told the Christian Cowboy that his current strategy, which hails straight from Fantasyland, is not working; that they have a diplomacy-based and detailed solution that must be followed if he's to avoid fucking this up any further; and, that "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating", so some major things need to change.

It's not the impeachment that SHOULD be happening right now, but it's a step in the right direction, and a possible precursor if Bush continues to be the complete effing moron that we all know and hate. The panel called for Dubya's administration to start doing everything it said it wouldn't - work with Iran and Syria towards a diplomatic solution; work towards a diplomatic solution for the Israel mess; withdraw troops ASAP, regardless of whether this elusive "victory" is ever achieved; and tell Iraq it needs to stand on its own two feet, instead of trying to force a democracy in the midst of a civil war - oh, excuse me, I mean "sectarian violence".

Who knows whether or not God will come down from heaven and tell Bush he ought to listen to the panel. At this point, it would be a pretty stupid idea not to. But hey. Crazier things have happened. To quote the New York Times:

"The findings left Washington awash in speculation over whether Mr. Bush would embark on a huge policy reversal. To do so would mark an admission that three and a half years of strategy had failed, and that his repeated assurances that "absolutely, we're winning" were based more on optimism than realism."

Yes, I can personally vouch for the fact that it's always hard to admit that you've fucked things up entirely, especially when you've been adamantly insisting otherwise for years. Hopefully Bush will get the idea that to continue his blatant denial is to walk the path to impeachment.

Of course, the panel's mandate may contain its own brand of delusion (diplomacy and the Middle East are historically not the best of friends, to put it lightly). Still, the public chastising of Bush and the directive for a serious and real change of policy direction is an important step. This Iraq debacle has gone on wayyyy past long enough. It's starting to make Vietnam look like fucking Sesame Street. So, seriously, enough already. At this point, any change is a good change.

And when I killed her, it was so easy, that I wanted to - hypothetically - kill her again...

2007-02-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

Written on: 11.21.06

Okay, this is a few days delayed, but I couldn't let this event come and go without making some sort of comment on it, however belated.

I'm sure by now most of you have heard about the sick manifestation of all that is vile and depraved in the human spirit - "If I Did It", by OJ Simpson. The subject of this book, recently penned by the ex-football star and sociopathic nutjob, is so outlandish, so disgusting and ridiculous and unbelievable, that I couldn't even invent a more moronic PR move.

"If I Did It" is the step-by-step account of how, in morbid, graphic detail, Simpson brutally murdered his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend --

--that is, if he did it.

As rarely happens in my life, I find myself nearly speechless over this deplorable and inconceivable work. "If I Did It"?!? Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of obscene fuck would actually publish a book about "hypothetically" killing his wife?!? I mean, Jesus, we all already knew he did it, but this whole debacle is basically OJ's big "neener, neener, you can't get me" to the world.

There can no longer be any doubt in anyone's mind that the man is not only a murderer, but is completely, certifiably, off his fucking rocker. I hope those jurors lie awake at night tortured by the thought that they let this man go free into the world. I hope their every dream is haunted by spectres of OJ at their bedroom window with a grin and a knife.

I mean, come on. Since we're already being hypothetical, let's pretend we have a man who was accused of killing his wife, but was really innocent. The trial alone makes him a monster to the world, forever associating him in the minds of his former friends and family with the death of this woman and her friend. After his name is finally cleared, the man will obviously go to great lengths to distance himself from the whole mess, to let the memory fade and hope people can forget the awful accusations. The last fucking thing he would ever do would be to publish a "hypothetical murder confession", a decade after the fact, when people are finally starting to forget about it, just to remind everyone that he may or may not be a remorseless killer.

And here we have OJ, not only writing this vomit-inducing "theoretical" memoir, but releasing the thing just in time for Christmas, as if Santa Claus should be putting it under the shining tree of every good girl and boy, and - this is the best part - plugging the book on your friendly FOX News Network. Apparently, FOX canned the interview at the last minute - not before it was shot, but before it was aired. (Anyone smell an internet-leak sensation?) Distribution has also been halted on the blood-spattered pages.

One might say, this goes to show you that people still have some sense of conscience left, that the public's appetite for filth doesn't go that far, that network execs do have a line they will draw. But the point isn't that it all got cancelled. The point is that it was written, it was produced, it was scheduled and shot to begin with. The execs and the publishing company don't have a conscience; they just got scared. And what's really scary is, you know this is only going to pique peoples' curiosity even further. People are sick. People are filthy and depraved and bloodthirsty, and somebody out there thought OJ's book was a good idea.

Personally, I think this should be enough evidence to drag OJ's sorry ass straight back to the courtroom - or better yet, skip the judge and jury and go straight to the execution. I'm anti-death-penalty by default, but in this case, I think Nicole's family should get their chance to have at him with a knotted rope and some bamboo shoots. Jonnie Cochran, too, for that matter.

Unfortunately, things don't really work that way. So my only advice to the departed's family is: I'd be asking the Tony Sopranos of the world for a favor right about now.

Hypothetically, of course.

Jesusland - Foreign Policy AND Family Theme Park!

2006-11-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

It's a busy day for news, folks. I keep finding articles that I just HAVE to share with you. This one concerns a newly-gestated evangelical group called, self-explanatorily, Christians United for Israel. The 3500-strong organization is headed by Reverend John Hagee from the Promised Land of Texas, and has received the support of Bush and other Republican leaders.

To quote David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times: "At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.
He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.” The next day he took the same message to the White House.
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming."

Okay. Hold on for a second, here. Are we really saying that what is being considered in this case a valid argument for a specific course of foreign policy is one of preparing for the second coming?! Are you fucking kidding me?! U.S. international affairs are being determined by preparation for the Apocalypse?!?! This is fucking insanity!!

Now, of course the administration's official report insists that its meeting with the dear Reverend was just a "courtesy for a political ally" and that the Bible does not determine their policymaking. But THAT'S a paper-thin argument if I ever heard one. First of all, they admit that Hagee is a "political ally". What could a Christian Reverend possibly have to do with secular politics?! Second of all, as Kirkpatrick also reports, "white evangelicals make up about a quarter of the electorate". Bush's administration has been pretty forward about their pro-Israel agenda, and God's Own Party has always voiced their support of the Jewish state. They may say they don't make policy decisions in line with evangelical organizations, but their rhetoric is eerily the same.

When people such as Dr. James Dobson, of good ol' Focus on the Family, start talking about annihilating the publicly anti-Israel Iranian prime minister, you know something's up. Christians and Israeli leaders alike are rallying around the anti-Iran cause, comparing Ahmadenejad to Hitler and Pharaoh from the Bible. Per Kirkpatrick: "Dr. Dobson read a statement on his popular radio program expressing “heartache” at the civilian casualties but comparing Israel’s fight to “the Biblical skirmish between little David and mighty Goliath.” He explained, “There sits little Israel with its five million beleaguered Jews, surrounded by five hundred million Muslims whose leaders are determined to drive it into the sea.” "

Yes, folks, what you are witnessing here is the construction of a mighty Judeo-Christian coalition, aimed at global domination, political power, and maximum tourism and marketing dollars:

"The Israeli government and its American allies have been building their alliance with evangelicals for decades. Israeli officials began working closely with Mr. Hagee and his church, for example, a quarter century ago, when he met several times with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper, recently started an edition for American Christians.
The Israeli government temporarily cut off ties with the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson after he suggested that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke might have been God’s punishment for withdrawing from territory that belonged to the Biblical Israel. But then Mr. Robertson flew to Israel during the fight with Hezbollah. In a gesture of reconciliation, the Israeli government recently worked with him to film a television commercial to attract Christian tourists.
“Israel — to walk where Jesus walked, to pray where Jesus prayed, to stand where he stood — there is no other place like it on earth,” Mr. Robertson says in the commercial, according to the Jerusalem Post."

Jesusland. And Jesusworld. Coming soon to opposite coasts of a Middle Eastern country near you.

The dawn of a not-so-dissimilar era...

2006-11-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

I can hardly believe that not only did the Democrats win the Senate AND the House, and the local initiatives pass or fail according to my desires -- but that, on top of everything, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ol' Rummy, Grand Wizard of all things Iraq and pre-emptive striking-related,

resigned yesterday.

I mean, holy shit, right? Who would've thought, over the theocratic, militaristic, conservative tyranny of the past six years, that all this would be possible again?? It's pretty amazing.

HOWEVER.

I don't think that Democratic majorities necessarily mean a whole lot of anything. Many of the new elected officials are just middle-of-the-road panderers, so I think the year ahead will be one rife with "bipartisan" pussiness. In other words, a year full of civil unions instead of a year full of constitutional amendment proposals. I know it's better than the alternative and we sort of have to take what we can get and all that... but "taking what we can get" isn't necessarily cause for widespread celebration, right?

Also, it's far from a guarantee that what passes for US foreign policy these days will be immensely affected by the Defense Secretary changing-of-the-guard. The new guy, Robert Gates, was the CIA director under Bush Senior, and of course, spouts a nearly identical rhetoric on Iraq to that of dear ol' Dubya. Bush on Iraq policy from here on out: '"I'd like our troops to come home too, but I want them to come home with victory; and that is a country that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself," he said. He added that he had chosen Mr Gates after finding him to be "of like mind ... He understands that defeat is not an option in Iraq."'

Yes, folks, it looks like our governmental mantra will continue to be one of sheer blinding denial. So, the bottom line of all this is, yes, of course I'm very happy about yesterday's events. Obviously I'll probably never live to see the day when the Greens control, well, much of anything, so I am well aware that this was the best possible outcome. And even if the new guy is another minion of the Antichrist, at least he's a little less unbelievably evil than Rumsfeld, so the resignation is welcome news. I just think we all need to continue to be vigilant and politically aware; we cannot kick back, put up our feet and let our guard down just because we have a bunch of Democrats in office.

After all, to quote the new Defense Secretary himself:

'"The more things change, the more they remain the same" .'

Call Mulder and Scully - it's an alien invasion!!

2006-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently a group of white Texans, known as the Texas Minutemen, have recently taken it upon themselves to assist US Border Patrol officials in keeping the Texas-Mexico border safe from those dangerous Mexicans. NPR quoted one of them as saying "we're trying to protect the border from this illegal alien invasion."

Oh PUH-LEEEEZE. Do you want to pick strawberries, mop floors or work at McDonald's?

Didn't think so.

So shut the fuck up already.

"Freedom Camps" - Coming soon to a Middle Eastern country near you!

2006-08-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

The terms "terrorists", "insurgents", "rebels", "freedom fighters", "fringe groups", "peacekeeping forces" (a contradiction in terms, but beside the point) and other such adjectives are thrown around pretty freely these days. They are constantly being applied to different religious, ethnic, political and social groups all over the (predominantly Middle Eastern) world - but are always applied to non-whites. Never is an American labelled a "terrorist", even when they undeniably commit heinous acts of violence worse or equivalent to those of their Arab counterparts. Ohhh no. We're always the victims and never the criminals. We only act with a real good reason, never just out of bloodlust and spite. US soldiers are just trying to maintain order and stability, and, well, sometimes entire households full of women, children and the elderly just need to be murdered execution-style because the officers were having a bad day - exemplified by the most recent Iraq War abhorrence, the Haditha massacre.

Of course, I'm sure Dubya and Pals will spew forth all kinds of PC bullshit about how this sort of behavior isn't the norm, how all the troops really want is to bring order, peace and freedom to the Iraqis. Yeah. Right. I'm sure the troops ONLY have the Iraqis' best interest in mind. I'm sure they're not being drilled every day on how all Arabs are their enemies and that their deaths are inconsequential. Fuck, how can these people claim to maintain Iraqi stability when they can't even control their own troops?! It's completely disgusting.

I'm surprised we're not sticking Muslims in concentration camps. Yet. This whole thing is fast becoming WWIII, especially now that Bush has declared it a war of ideologies, of "freedom" vs "terrorism", of Islam vs Judeo-Chrisitianity, of the Near East vs the West. This mentality of cleansing, of purging the world of skewed ideologies, is precisely the sort of thing Hitler said to Germany.

We said "never again"... and then we started putting the Japanese in camps. Just wait... only this time, of course, they'll call them "freedom camps".

Anyway, this article says it all:

US troops accused of Haditha cover-up

David Fickling and agencies
Friday August 18, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

US marines involved in the alleged massacre in the Iraqi town of Haditha last November may have destroyed or covered up evidence relating to the killing of 24 people.
A report in the New York Times this morning claimed that the marine unit's logbook was missing pages from the day of the killings and that videotape taken by an unmanned drone aircraft was withheld from investigators until senior officials intervened.

The paper reported that the defence department report had not been publicly released, and said that officials who believed the information deserved a public airing had leaked details of its findings.

A criminal investigation into the incidents was only ordered in March this year after Time magazine went public with details of the alleged massacre, reportedly carried out by US troops enraged at the death of a comrade in a roadside bombing.

Initial military reports of the incident in the insurgent-held town claimed that 15 civilians were killed in the initial roadside bombing and eight insurgents were shot dead in the ensuing firefight.

But prosecutors and Iraqi human rights groups say that the marine group went on a revenge rampage through the streets of Haditha after the death of their colleague, invading homes and shooting 24 people, including women and children.

Videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student within hours of the incident showed shrouded bodies lined up in bullet-riddled buildings, and death certificates suggested that many of the dead had been killed execution-style with point-blank shots to the back of the head.

Part of the video showed a child called Safa Younis telling of how she survived by hiding next to the bodies of her mother and siblings and pretending to be dead.

"The Americans knocked at the door. My father went to open it. They shot him dead from behind the door, and then they shot him again after they opened the door," she said.

The New York Times reported today that 10 women and children were among the dead, as well as an old man in a wheelchair.

According to the unreleased report, the logbook which was meant to detail all activities by the marine unit was missing all its pages for the day of the killings. The leader of the marine squad being investigated over the incidents was on duty in the building where the log book was being kept shortly after the November 19 killings.

The report also allegedly contradicted claims that at least one of the shot Iraqis had been brandishing an AK-47 machine gun. No such weapon was recovered at the scene or turned in to headquarters, according to the newspaper.

The incident was one of several that emerged recently in which US troops reportedly killed Iraqi civilians in cold-blooded attacks.

Iraqi investigators are still looking into claims that US troops killed 11 Iraqi civilians and blew up their house in the town of Ishaqi just a week after the alleged Haditha cover-up was exposed in the media. US military investigators have concluded that troops did not act improperly in the incident.

In June reports emerged claiming that US troops had raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl and murdered three members of her family in the village of Mahmudiya, an incident that is alleged to have happened just days after the reports of the supposed Haditha cover-up.

In the same month the US military announced charges against several US soldiers accused of kidnapping and executing an Iraqi in the town of Hamdaniya before attempting to make the death look like an accident brought about as he tried to plant a bomb.

Apocalypse: Now.

2006-08-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

It's always been painfully obvious that our pal Dubya doesn't exactly think his actions through. But you'd think that he would've learned just a little something from the Iraq War fiasco; after having to reveal that there were no weapons of mass destruction; after the massive fatalities, on both sides; after the impotent puppet government failed to prevent civil war; after increasingly Western-focused attacks of terrorism worldwide; after the utter depletion of our troops, falling polls, dissent at home and no end in sight.

But no.

No, Dubya does not, as one would think, want to try to clean up the Middle Eastern mess he's created. Instead... he wants to do it all. Over. Again.

Target: Iran. Lock and load.

Now, the problem is, of course, that if you want to conquer an entire geographical region, you're going to need the manpower to do it. US forces are already spread paper-thin in Iraq and what's left of Afghanistan. So naturally, we're going to need an ally with a healthy-sized military. One who might share our vision of Judeo-Christian Mesopotamian domination. Now, where, pray tell, might we find someone like that?

But of course! Israel! After all, did we not create them in our own image? Do they not, for lack of a better term, owe us one? They want to go after Iran. WE want to go after Iran. Together we can send the bombs of freedom rocketing into the civilian dwellings of the Axis of Evil. It's just so perfect.

Sure enough - a report issued in the latest issue of the New Yorker asserts that American and Israeli officials met in the spring to formulate plans of attack on Hezbollah, to reduce the group's retaliatory impact if and when the God Squad attacks Iran, and to also serve as a "test run" on the effectiveness of said military proceedings. The report comes from a credible source: long-time investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who previously got the jump on such scandalous news items as Abu Ghraib, the Iraq War buildup, and the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

So now everything begins to make sense. Israel's bombing of Lebanon in response to two prisoners being taken seemed like a massive overreaction - but that's because it wasn't a reaction. It was an offensive. As The Guardian Unlimited reports: "Quoting a US government consultant, Hersh said: "Earlier this summer ... several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, 'to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear'.""

Apparently it was a match made in heaven (the Judeo-Christian variety, that is); The Guardian wrote further: ""A successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign ... could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations," sources told Hersh.

Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel's attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran."

An unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh: "It was our intention to have Hizbullah diminished and now we have someone else doing it.""

Apparently Israel is more than happy to do our bidding, to take the fall for ol' Georgey. And Bush has the audacity to publicly announce that Israel is defending itself?! Against what, the existence of conflicting ideologies?!

Actually, that's precisely it. Bush is getting pretty ballsy with his speechwriting lately (perhaps due to the exit of his former speechwriter; perhaps due to his seeming infallibility through scandal after scandal; perhaps because 2008 campaigning will soon begin and he hasn't found a way to become President-for-Life... YET). He is no longer speaking of a war against dictatorships. He is no longer even speaking of the ridiculous concept of a war on terrorism. He is now speaking of a war on radical Islam by Judeo-Christian Western forces.

This is most definitely NOT GOOD.

The reasons are endless: Such a statement draws a parallel in everyone's mind between the whole religion of Islam and bloodthirsty terrorism. Bush is breeding hatred even further between Westerners and an ethnic group he's already made them automatically suspicious of. He's also making the fucking foolish and potentially fatal mistake of basically declaring war on all Muslim nations, because almost every Middle Eastern country has an active fundamentalist fringe group, often one which is tied in some way to the national government. He's alienating the few allies we DO have in the region, such as Saudi Arabia. And how the fuck can you declare war against an ideology, anyway?? How the fuck are you supposed to win that?? It's not like people are going to change their religious beliefs if you bomb them, especially when they're already strapping dynamite to their chests for their beliefs. You can't end it with a treaty or a ceasefire.

It's entirely obvious that Bush wants World War III. He wants the Crusades: Volume II. He wants the apocalypse: now. Honestly, what the hell does he expect when he makes a declaration like that? If you're asking Middle Easterners to pick which side they want to be on, that of the Judeo-Christian West or that of Islamic fundamentalism, which do you think they're going to side with?! He's not fighting terrorism, he's hand-crafting more terrorists. All the Arab nations see of the West is fire and brimstone, curfews and bombed-out roads and military presence in their hometowns. But many of the "terrorist" groups actually have social service sectors that provide for civilian victims better than the national governments. Hezbollah, for example, has promised to repair homes damaged by Israeli air strikes and to pay compensation for a year's rent to the owners of levelled houses. Which is not to say they're great guys or anything. But who the fuck do you think they're going to choose? The American soldier standing outside their door with an AK-47? Or the fundamentalist leader handing them a fat stack of cash?

So look out, world. Nobody stands in the way of the God Squad. It's time to carpet-bomb for Jesus. It's time to light the menorah of freedom under some Arab ass.

It's time for the Apocalypse.

Now.

The irony of it all...

2006-08-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

According to the Guardian Unlimited:

"A poll published in Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper showed approval ratings for Mr Olmert's government had fallen to 48% from 75% in the opening stages of the war.

A similar poll in Yedioth Ahronoth showed approval ratings falling from 73% to 66%.

The influential political commentator Ari Shavit wrote in Ha'aretz that Mr Olmert had "failed shamefully" and should resign. "You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power," he said."

Oh really? You can't lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power?!

Have you ever heard of guy named George W. Bush, perhaps?! A guy whose approval ratings dropped to less than 30%, and is still in power??

Oh, the irony of it all...

Virtual Insanity...

2006-08-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

The utter permeation of the internet into all facets of everyday culture is a fascinating sociological phenomenon. Every man, woman and child with access to a computer can enter a seemingly neverending informational sphere, can explore the experiences of others all over the world. There are also a great variety of forums where they can create a virtual representation of their own personal experience. They can create a virtual identity with words and pictures; they can project whatever image of themselves they want the world to see. They define themselves by their headline and background and blog titles. The age-old longing for fame and recognition seemingly within their grasp. The most mundane life in technicolor and surround sound. Presenting the images of your daily existence to the link-clicking, Google-searching idlers on the information superhighway, whether you're a middle-schooler, a McDonald's worker, or...

... a military man.

Yes, war has taken on a new personal dimension thanks to the increase in information technology. Because, for the first time, ordinary citizens can step inside the life of an ordinary soldier, unfiltered, direct from person-to-person without passing through the biased lens of the government or the media. For the first time, soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere are posting videos of their daily experience on the web, just like a high school kid might post a video of themself doing a snowboard trick. The difference being, of course, that while the latter video consists of wipeouts and "sweet dude"'s, the former depicts insurgents having their heads blown off and severed limbs littering the ground after a blast. One daily life to another. The Carnage Webcam. The Disembowelment Podcast. Some soldiers are strapping cameras to their helmets as they gun down rebel fighters and watch suicide bombers blow themselves apart, narrating the action like some sort of fucked-up reality show, editing the footage with a heavy-metal soundtrack.

And of course, this is all making the government really, really nervous, especially in the wake of the Abu Ghraib photo leakage. They call it "war porn". Some sites have been shut down, and laptops have been banned on some military bases in Iraq. But of course, the rabbit hole of the internet is too vast and varied, the soldiers are too many for officials to track it all.

It's war truly uncensored, it's the military mind unedited, and this has vast implications for the way current and future generations will consider combat. The dawn of television first opened American eyes to the true horrors of war with the footage of Vietnam, and people got fucking angry. The internet can literally take us right to the front lines, can show us what we're really voting for when we vote for a warmongering president, can reveal to us the REAL Operation Iraqi Freedom: the liberation of Iraqi limbs from their earthly bodies.

Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is what war looks like, brought to you by Internet Explorer. This is truly uncensored coverage, and not uncensored in the Fox News sort of way, in the "unedited" war footage of the same Saddam Hussein statue toppling over and over again, puppet Iraqis hitting the statue with shoes, US troops valiantly pursuing an unseen enemy so we look like we're winning sort of way. This is Lebanese childrens' mutilated corpses strewn amidst the wreckage of an Israeli bomb attack. Iraqi insurgents' heads being shot off by American snipers. Suicide bombers blowing blood and tissue and vital organs towards the cloudless blue stratosphere.

This is what war looks like. And this, really, should make people fucking angry.

Or at least make people lament the state of the nation a little, before they go to check their MySpace.

Defense of Ignorance Act

2006-07-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

They say that bad news comes in threes. Well, for the past six years or so, it's been more like the three-millions. It seems like every day there's some new conservative bullshit action or legislation splattered across the headlines.

Today's news particularly enraged me. Today the Washington State Supreme Court ruled to uphold the Defense of Ignorance Act and thus continue the unconstitutional and discriminatory ban against gay marriage.

The sheer hypocrisy and prejudice evident in this legislation is particularly fucking unbelievable because of the language in the official ruling. The fact that this kind of backwards logic and archaic thinking can actually stand up in a court of law - the Supreme Court, no less - completely shatters all remaining faith I might have had in our judicial system. The official ruling actually has the brass cojones to say "the Legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by children's biological parents."

Wait a second. So they're actually arguing that allowing same-sex marriage limits procreation? Have they ever heard the incredibly common tale of gay couples using artificial insemination and surrogates to conceive a child? Or - and I know this is a hard prospect to grasp - adopting a child?! God forbid somebody actually take these poor, abandoned children into their homes! And since when is marriage an institution solely based on producing children, anyways? Isn't marriage supposed to be fundamentally about committing yourself to the person you love, and legally being able to care for them? Do we have a fucking law that requires all marriages to produce children?! Are you forbidden from getting married if you're unable to conceive?! I think not. Secondly, gay marriage goes against children's well-being?! Gay marriage could actually provide more opportunities for children to be adopted! Not to mention that gay couples are in no way inferior to straight couples as parents, and no adequate study has ever proven otherwise. And while we're at it; the world has over 6 billion people. Poverty, famine, homelessness and disease run rampant. Development is out of control trying to provide sufficient housing for an increasing population and the world's finite resources, such as fuel and potable water, are becoming increasingly limited. Since when, exactly, is procreation fucking in danger?!?! Oh shit, everybody, we're not crammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the surface of the earth yet, better start poppin' out those kids! Longview still doesn't look like Tokyo, so we must not be doing our job!

But that's not even the worst part. The ruling goes on to state that the "DOMA does not violate the state Constitution's privileges and immunities clause, which requires that any benefit granted to one group must be granted equally to all", and that "the plaintiffs did not sufficiently show that gays are members of a suspect class, a reference to groups entitled to protection against discrimination by virtue of characteristics such as race". Interestingly enough, the biased and ignorant ruling was written by a Justice with the last name of Madsen - but I digress.

So, let me get this straight... the ability to marry freely is a benefit granted to U.S. citizens. But it is a benefit granted only to heterosexual U.S. citizens. This means that marriage is a privelege not granted to homosexual U.S. citizens, and therefore is a privelege that is being withheld from a specific social group. How does that not violate the clause requiring that any benefit granted to one group must be granted equally to all?!? It completely boggles my mind!! Was every member of the legal representation a Bible-thumping Christian?? Was every witness of the plaintiff a drug-addicted, AIDS-ridden, irresponsible asshole that drops babies on their heads for fun?!? How was this allowed to happen in a supposedly free and equal nation?!? How can people make such blatantly hypocritical statements and think that they're making perfectly logical sense?? And furthermore, just how precisely the fuck can they justify the statement that homosexuals are not a group entitled to protection against discrimination by characteristics such as race?! Or such as gender?! Where the fuck do they get off saying that, for example, religious preference is constitutionally protected from discrimination, but sexual orientation is not?!?!? By making such a statement they are condoning the horrific hate crimes that have been committed against gays and lesbians; they are taking the sides of the murderers who attack people simply because they are homosexuals. By implying that people "choose" to be gay, that it's not a part of their inherent personal makeup, they are essentially making an argument based on religion, a Judeo-Christian ruling, and that is fucking unconstitutional. Any talk of the "separation of church and state" is simply laughable. We are living in a fucking theocracy. Our president was elected largely because he is publicly Christian. They might as well just start ripping the corresponding page out of the Bible and handing it out as the official ruling in court cases. They might as well just write scripture on the wall of the Supreme Court - oh wait. They already have.

As you can see, I am unbelievably enraged by this egregious violation of justice. I'm sick of fucking right-wingers turning this country into the United States of Jesus.

Is there any hope in sight??

God made mistakes, so we threw rocks at the sky...

2006-07-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

Bush's got a lot of balls, criticizing Lebanon/Hezbollah/whoever else he's currently blaming for the current chapter in the neverending story of the Middle East crisis for 'killing innocent people' and acting 'pathetic'.

All the innocent Iraqis that have been slain by U.S. military forces during the war for their "freedom" aside, Bush is sitting here defending Israel's actions, blaming the Lebanese government and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran and Syria and probably the gays and the abortion activists for spreading fear and carnage to Middle Eastern civilians, when Israel is the biggest fucking terrorist the region has experienced in recent memory. We're all familiar with the Israel-Palestine conflict, but are we all familiar with stories such as, oh, the Israeli government's bombing of a Palestinian civilian beach? Chances are, you've probably heard a lot more about Palestinian resistance groups bombing buses than about the Israeli government murdering families relaxing surfside (and then denying it, basically claiming that hospital records showing the admittance of the Palestinian men, women and children injured in the attack were false).

But no, nooo, Israel's our buddy, right? They're our pal! Their government is composed of good, honest, oil-producing, God-fearing people, and they'd never do anything to hurt innocent civilians! It's everyone else in the Middle East who are the terrorists! As Bush said in a recent press conference, "My attitude is this: there are a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace. Those of us who are peace living must work together to help the agents of peace."

And now, in the current battle with Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, how have the "peace living" (whatever the fuck THAT means) Israelis responded to the capture of two of their soldiers? By bombing the shit out of a Lebanese area full of civilians, killing an entire innocent family (including seven children) as they lay sleeping.

The Lebanese government claims it didn't even have anything to do with the abductions. True, Hezbollah does have some representation in the government - 2 members. So to me, that makes Israel's reaction pretty much like bombing New York because of the actions of a couple of Green Party members. Hezbollah is not the Lebanese government. Lebanese women and children are not Hezbollah or the Lebanese government. But they're being indiscriminately murdered.

Not that Lebanon is totally innocent in this; they're responding by bombing the shit out of Israel without regard to civilian collateral damage. I'm just saying, Israel isn't the good-times buddy our government seems to claim it is. Their hands are as bloody as anyone else's in the region, maybe even more so.

But, hmm, Bush is now claiming that Iran and Syria are to blame for the abduction of the Israeli soldiers. Well, isn't THAT convenient... considering they're our next targets in the 'War on Terror'.

Fuck Bush. Fuck the Middle East. Fuck all these war-mongering, rocket-launching, religious-fanatic tribalist nutjobs. Let them all kill each other, for all I care.

Does if feel hot in here to you?

2006-07-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

I always knew most Americans were ignorant, but seriously.

I am completely shocked and apalled by people who deny that global warming is occuring. People who claim that the raising of the earth's temperature, the glacial melting, the string of horrendous weather phenomena, the species extinction, is all part of some vast liberal conspiracy, some Democratic propaganda. People who claim that proven evidence, SCIENTIFIC FACT, is all a lie. That figures are fudged, statistics are faked, scientists are blatantly lying. People who claim to know more than fucking climate scientists, who study this sort of thing for a living, as if they have some authority, as if the businessmen and real estate agents and homemakers of the nation know more than people who study the weather for their career. How are these people so fucking stupid? So ignorant? How are they allowed to exist?

It completely blows my mind, the sheer and utter denial. These people, these patriots, these God-fearin', Hummer-drivin', gas-guzzlin', mass-consumin' Americans who let the water run and leave the lights on and leave the TV on all the time but just turn it on mute occasionally and fill up their SUVs every day to go nowhere because it's their God-given right, they're the ones who are deciding the fate of the planet. Because they raise such a fucking fuss, because they've got their man in the White House, because they run our largest corporations, because they make the biggest campaign contributions, they have the right to decide whether we live or die, whether ecosystems and species survive or not, whether terrible weather patterns increase or decrease. They are our God now. And that's fucking bullshit. That fucking pisses me off. And it should fucking piss everyone off. People should give a shit whether the Ice Caps melt, whether polar bears eat each other, whether New York and the Indian subcontinent and coastal China and southern Florida are completely submerged under a raising sea level, displacing hundreds of millions of people, Katrina times a trillion, times a bajillion, total world chaos. But that's still not enough to make people care enough to even change their ways in the slightest. To even do more than shrug their shoulders and say, "oh well", to even consider the possibility that this phenomena may be occuring. Even if it only seems like a 10% chance to these ignorant masses, a 1% chance even - isn't that a big enough gamble to warrant at least CONSIDERING that it might be true?!

But no. No, driving fucking SUVs and sucking down fossil fuels and massively consuming and shopping and throwing things away and not recycling is so fucking important to them that they're willing to risk all this. Hell, to ENSURE all this. Our fuel emissions standards are lower than fucking China's. CHINA'S. They are in some senses more progressive than we are. Isn't that fucking sad to anyone?! Doesn't that tell them anything?!

And the saddest part is, they're so blinded to the truth that nothing will convince them otherwise until it's entirely too late. They won't believe us until New Yorkers and Indians and Chinese and Floridians are drowning and their displaced masses come rushing inland. They won't believe us until the hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes are constantly raging and the earth's temperature raises, until the glaciers are gone and the groundwater is depleted, until the earth is rife with famine and drought and suffering. Then, and only then, will they look at us and say, you were right.

Say, I'm so sorry.

Say, we didn't know.

And we'll look at them and say,

Fuck you. You did this to yourselves.

The Dictionary According to Bush

2006-07-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Aborting fetuses that will be unable to be provided for as actual children: murder.

Using a bunch of cells and tissue to preserve the lives of actual, living and suffering human beings: murder.

The death penalty: justice.

Iraqi, Lebanese and Palestinian civilian casulties: collateral damage.

Hate crimes against gays and lesbians: Bad PR.

The wholesale destruction of the environment and consequently the entire human race: profitable.

How much of America will be blown off the map, and other things...

2006-07-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

So, I don't know if you all have been following the news, but the latest is, not only does everyone's favorite tyrannical dictator, Kim Jong-Il, have nukes, but he ain't afraid to use 'em. Recent reports of a test missile launch have got American and Chinese hearts all a-flurry; however, each news source seems to have a different version of just exactly how much of our great nation will be blown off the map should our half-assed attempts to shoot a North Korean nuke down fail miserably (as is expected - our strategy to counter-launch nine missiles from Alaska and two from California to shoot the nuke down mid-air only has a 50% success rate in simulations). According to the liberal newspaper The Guardian, Kim's WMD would only obliterate Alaska. More moderate sources such as CBS and CNN report that in addition to Alaska, Los Angeles might also be targeted for destruction. However, master fearmongers FOX News claim that this catastrophic bomb would blow half of America sky-high! Holy shit, everybody!! Build bomb shelters!! Crack out the Bibles!! Cling furiously to George W. Bush's robes for support and guidance!!! The entire unpatriotic, liberal, queer-lovin', tree-huggin', sex-havin', Bush-hatin' West Coast will be destroyed if they don't repent immediately and seek refuge in Dick Cheney's giant subterranean nuclear winter evacuation metropolis, located thousands of miles beneath the surface of Washington DC and guarded by the disembodied hand of Ronald Reagan!!!!

Seriously, though, no matter what your source is, the whole scenario is more than a little scary. The unspoken rules that have kept the WMD-possessing powers of the globe from annihilating each other thus far are pretty much kaput in this situation. All bets are off when the nutty Kim Jong-Il is involved. The man is crazy. He's completely out of his mind. Therefore, the rules of game theory, the concept of mutually assured destruction that has kept the world in balance so far, does not apply when one of the players is totally insane. The reason another nuke-possessing country hasn't attacked us already is because they know that if they did, we would retaliate, and completely destroy them. They don't want to die. We don't want to die. But if someone strikes, someone else will strike back. Mutually assured destruction. But see, Kim doesn't care if his country is blown off the map, so long as he makes a name for himself first. He's off his rocker. Thus, the rules do not apply.

So what do we do? Can we invade North Korea? Can we send a squad out to infiltrate Kim's nuclear arsenal and destroy it? Ohhh, right, we don't HAVE any available troops, because they're all too busy getting blown up in Iraq! So if Kim is such a threat, how come we didn't take him out to begin with, instead of wasting all our time and resources going after the figurehead Saddam Hussein? Ohhhhhh, I keep forgetting - because Kim actually HAS nuclear weapons!!!

God help us. We're all going to quietly *poof* in a giant, fetus-shaped mushroom cloud.

"The others were shitting, Father. So I shat."

2006-07-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hello all. Welcome to my new second home on the information superhighway. I decided to be one of the cool kids and jump on the Blogger bandwagon, so as to have another forum for my seething, semi-psychotic rants and raves; one without Top 8's and random 40-year-olds cruising for virtual pussy and leaving me creepy messages. I'll keep this site free of introspective musings; visit the ol' MySpace site if, for some odd reason, you want to read about the workings of my strange mind. Here you will find blabbering commentary on political, social and environmental issues... maybe with the occasional movie review. I'll duplicate some of my better MySpace blogs on here to start out with... so here goes.