October 28, 2007 archive

Senator Barack Obama has finally decided to forcefully take on the enemy!

Bush?

“I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breaches, and intentional breaches of the president’s authority,” he said.

USA Today

As opposed to the trivial breaches committed by Bush.

The war?

The leading Democratic White House hopefuls conceded Wednesday night they cannot guarantee to pull all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of the next presidential term in 2013.

“I think it’s hard to project four years from now,” said Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in the opening moments of a campaign debate in the nation’s first primary state.

CNN

Maybe for someone who is not ready to lead.

FISA?

Obama said only that “if the bill comes to the Senate floor in its current form, he would support a filibuster of it” — a transparent hedge given that it is virtually certain that the bill (being marked up this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee) will not come to the floor in its “current form.” That makes Obama’s statement virtually worthless, filled — as intended — with plenty of room for him to vote for amnesty if and when the Senate votes on it.

Glenn Greenwald

Following in Dodd’s footsteps, but not following all the way.

Bigots?

“First, Pastor McClurkin believes and has stated things about sexual orientation that are deeply hurtful and offensive to many Americans, most especially to gay Americans. This cannot and should not be denied.

At the same time, a great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin’s beliefs. This also cannot be ignored.

Finally, we believe that the only way for these two sides to find common ground is to do so together.”

Huffington Post

Common ground? With bigots?

Well, okay- not those enemies. This enemy…

This is an Open Thread: Don’t Be Shy.

USA

Father gains sense of son’s last moments in Iraq

By James Ricci

Los Angeles Times

Darrell Griffin Sr. has gotten down to work on his final collaboration with his son and namesake.

The book taking shape is a compendium. It will blend an account of a father’s melancholy journey to Iraq with the dire experiences and searching meditations of a son, the latter written down by Darrell Griffin Jr. before a Sadr City sniper’s bullet pierced the back of his head in March.

Darrell Jr. was a Fort Lewis-based Army infantry staff sergeant, 6 feet 2 inches of muscled warrior. Married, with no children, he had been an emergency medical technician in Compton, Calif., before finding his life’s work as a soldier.

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(Last weeks episode)

She finished her flakes, did the dishes, and poured the rest of the coffee into her Teenage Mutant Ninja travel cup. She went to the wall safe and loaded up her belt and her bag and her boots with the tools of her trade. Since their surveillance of Tan’s henchmen was over, she was headed downtown to HQ to fill out paper work and wait for her next assignment. At least it was warm. She grabbed her shades and her car keys and headed out the plastic front door.

‘ya hang around some of the less savory places I do on occasion and you’re bound to bump into this sweet-smelling bad actor named, Trichloroethylene, or TCE. You might recall that this bad actor had a lead in the book and movie “A Civil Action”, about contaminated wells in Woburn, MA. Well, if you do bump into this character in a dark  alley, grab your kidneys and liver and get outa town. Or maybe not…

TCE lingers like a bad houseguest, especially if handled carelessly. It accumulates in soil and can persist for years in groundwater. In a report last year, the National Research Council found that TCE was a potential cause of kidney cancer; it’s also associated with liver problems, autoimmune disease and impaired neurological function.

Enter King Midas–usually known as Michael Wong–with his miracle gold nanoparticles dusted with palladium.  According to The Smithsonian Magazine in a piece by William Booth of the Washington Post, Mr. Wong has discovered somewhat of a cure that even he doesn’t fully understand.

And just what is it? “We don’t know!” says Wong. “We don’t understand the chemistry. But we don’t understand it in a good way,” meaning he believes that his team will figure it out soon. “Our catalyst is doing something really goofy.”

No expensive endless inefficient pump and treat? That’s just positively goofy.

I headed off to the “staging area,” which was Judkins Park, in a quiet area of town mostly populated by minorities.  Participants organized with their respective groups, mostly “usual suspects” (ie. committed and brave and patriotic in the best sense of caring truly about humanity) BUT with a notable lack of community participation.  If 60% or more oppose the war nationally, and 90% or so here in Seattle before it even started, where were the rest?

Why was it that I counted ONE BUS (belonging to “Pastors for Peace,” who travel to Cuba, Mexico, Central America – though not necessarily in the bus) but on the way home I counted MORE THAN NINETY busses of University of Washington football fans?  I know that football is immensely popular in the fall and tailgate parties are a tradition, along with Jack’o’Lanterns but what about our country?  Our future?

The rally was intended to go from Judkins Park down (or up) Jackson Street to Occidental Square, which may not mean anything to someone who doesn’t live in Seattle.  To me though, it is a traditional labor march route, much as the one from Place de Nation to Place de Republique has been in Paris, via the site of the storming of the Bastille.  In both cases, the routes are now off to the side of the zones of commerce, and the populist marches for justice no longer seem to strike fear in the hearts of the bourgeoise.  In both instances, the media appears to be aligned with the increasingly more right-leaning government, contrary to what the far right says.

It seem, like Tom Hayden warns, that the antiwar movement was discouraged from developing after 9/11, through the use of fear.  Once it developed, a huge PR campaign has been forged on the right, to try to marginalize protesters as “goofy.”  Indeed, I did a “search” for antiwar at MySpace and found military spouses who wanted protesters to impale themselves on the sticks of their protest signs.  Pressed further, some of them still appeared to believe the 9/11-Saddam link or that civil warring factions were intending to somehow head through the skies to attack rural America.

More pictures below- ek