Category: Politics

I’ve been away for a few weeks and now catching up on the blog-o-sphere. I read a story from Glenn Greenwald about protesters arrested for planning protests of the RNC convention.

PLANNING protests. PLANNING to protest… oh my dear good god.

Yeah. Scary men in scary gear with scary big guns busting into homes of people who are vegans. People with slogans like: Food not War. Arresting them with intent to riot.

What is more incredible than even this? That, as Glenn Greenwald notes, there is very little outrage emanating from our fellow citizens, MSM, blogs.

What exactly was the point of last week’s announcements for vice presidential picks?  On one hand we have a shell of a candidate promoting “change” but doing everything in his power to establish himself as an establishment candidate, picking a Washington, D.C. insider with a record of corporate whoring and unquestioning support for U.S. imperial policy.  Small wonder Barack Obama is either neck-and-neck with or trailing John McCain in the polls; he insists on turning off the very people he needs to put him over the top, including the Clinton supporters.  On the other hand we have the Republican candidate picking a “hockey mom,” with even less political experience than his Democratic counterpart (the very thing he chides his rival for), just so he can pander to the bloc of Clinton supporters inclined to vote for McCain out of spite.

In all the hype and bluster, though, one important question remains: what does either VP pick actually add to the ticket?  Joe Biden, a typical DLC insider with a hawkish foreign policy record and a habit of voting for bills that hurt working Americans, is just the sort of candidate likely to further alienate progressives – the very people Obama needs to put him over the top against McCain.  Assuming progressives will get behind the Democratic nominee simply because he and his followers choose to deny any other alternative exists has always been a recipe for disaster.  Just ask Al Gore and John Kerry.  Obama has done everything he can to blow this election by turning off all those who put their faith and hopes in him thinking he represented a departure from the DLC.  Picking Biden, though it allows for a tough yet compliant attack dog in the general election who makes up for a perceived lack of experience, really does nothing for the Democratic nominee’s chances.

Then there’s Sarah Palin.  I get that she was tapped to be McCain’s veep because of her youth and sex, but those are really the only two things she has going for her as a candidate.  As Michael Moore explained to Keith Olbermann the other night, McCain’s cynical pander is based on the assumption that American women are stupid – that they’ll vote for a woman because of her gender and not her politics.  Her record and positions are typically extreme right-wing: opposed to abortion rights, opposed to gay marriage, supports tax cuts for the wealthy and police state thuggery, among other horrendous policies.  None of those qualities, however, have won a presidential election – not for the past sixteen years, anyway (the last two were rigged, so they cannot be counted on as legitimate examples of right-wing extremism winning anything).  Women who actually care about their reproductive rights and are offended by Stepford wife-type politicians may be galvanized to vote against McCain and his so-called “hockey mom.”  There’s also her firing of Alaska’s public safety director, Walter Monegan, for refusing to fire her former brother-in-law.  This scandal is so outrageous there that the Alaskan legislature is investigating what the Washington Post is dubbing Palin’s own “trooper-gate.”

This may be the first time since George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton that a Republican candidate blew an election by dubious virtue of being dumber than his Democratic counterpart, but don’t count McCain out yet; there are plenty of caging lists, hackable electronic voting machines, and bought state secretaries with which to steal this election, along with a Democratic rival who insists on replaying the Kerry campaign.

VP pick Sara Palin frightens me.

She frightens me because I fully understand the power of ultra conservative, fundamentalist women and I know how many of them there still are. All I have to do is go sit in a diner in any small town in Minnesota, and listen to nearby conversations for a half hour to know that things are not than much different today than they were in the 60’s, for women born and raised there.

Or I can simply stay home and spend time in the Lobby of this large senior apartment complex, and listen to my “good christian neighbors” bemoaning the lack of morals, those “godless gays”, and how “The blacks are everywhere now!”

Obligatory YouTube — Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” (coutesy of Astrotype):

I didn’t watch the entire Democratic Convention, but I watched enough to be very affected by many of the speeches, especially Michelle and Barack Obama’s words and presentation.  I was very impressed by both of them.

But then the production, the media production itself, disturbed me, from the music to the pageantry.  Seemed cheesy like the Academy Awards, which is so strange, because those awards are for some of the most talented directors and cinematographers and set designers and yet it always looks so cheesy on the teevee.

I am growing tired of the television pundits referring to the backbone American families as “working class” rather than “middle class.”  I don’t know who came up with these distinctions, but they don’t seem to me to be accurate, and I think they work to divide this country in ways that it is not, economically speaking, divided.

If someone knows a (quote unquote) middle class family who is not working hard, please alert me.  I am not familiar with any such family.  We need to stop quaking to the Karl Rovian splinter politics — all middle class families are “working class” Americans because ALL of them work for their incomes.  It is time to remind everyone that the divide is not between some illusory group of “working class” Americans and “middle class” Americans, but, instead, between those whose incomes are derived from work and those whose incomes are derived from wealth.  Period.

Michelle Obama spoke movingly tonight about her family life; about growing up in a family whose father had a job with a public utility and whose mother stayed at home to raise the children.

Mr. Obama:

  As one of the relatively few people in this country who saw through your act early on, and for the right reasons, let me first say how utterly ashamed I am to call myself a registered Democrat.  You are a disgrace not only to the party at large, but to the thousands — perhaps, dare I say — even millions of Americans who were and remain so desperate for someone to come and rescue our once-great nation from the fascists that they placed their hope and faith in you.  Hang your head in shame, and then look me straight in the eye and don’t turn away until I’m done.

  According to an article in New York Magazine, the electorate has had about enough of you.  A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has you running in a statistical dead heat with Republican John McCain, FiveThirtyEight.com’s poll doesn’t look good for your chances either, and Zogby has your GOP counterpart five points ahead.  Are you trying to blow this election for us?!?  Because it sure as hell seems as though you are.

  The NY Magazine article gives several reasons for your pathetic performance thus far, but it left out the most obvious: not only your consistent refusal to fight back against the smears of the far right and its tired old champion for this election cycle, but, most importantly, your deliberate alienation of your own political party’s base.  Time and again, you have demonstrated that you do not represent Americans on any issue of importance, and voters realize this.  Long before you secured the Democratic Party nomination to be the ringer candidate against the election sham’s already-chosen victor, you were taking positions including (but in no way limited to):

• Your vile “Harry and Louise” attack mailers, which used the same right-wing talking points against Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals that were used to great success in the 1990s,
• Your purging – quickly followed by a reinstatement after the inevitable uproar from outraged supporters – of roughly nine hundred anti-war delegates from California, probably out of fear that they would defect over to the Clinton camp once they caught wind of your impending flip-flop regarding a pullout from Iraq,
• Your regular, condescending, talking down to Blacks in speeches,
• Your praise of the traitor Ronald Reagan,
• Your betrayal during the FISA battle,
• Your allegedly telling the Canadian government that your initial apparent criticism of NAFTA was “just campaign rhetoric,” which was quickly buried thanks in large part to a denial by Canada that you had said any such thing,
• Your provocative and unnecessary pandering to Israel’s fascist government over the topic of Jerusalem, and
• Your embrace of the horrendous Friedman school of economic policy.

  That’s just off the top of my head, nor is it the most worrisome reason for your refusal to campaign like someone who wants to win.  I have a friend named Dave who has worked on numerous Democratic political campaigns, including yours.  He is witness to the stupid things you’ve got your people in critical states such as Ohio doing, such as:

• Failing to even install a working telephone system in your Lakewood, Ohio, campaign office,
• Sending your people out to register voters — REPUBLICAN-leaning ones at that — whom you MUST know will NEVER vote for you, and
• Deliberately avoiding mentioning that it was under the presidency of Bill Clinton that average American incomes were higher, while it was under the shrub that those same incomes fell.

  This isn’t rocket science, Obama; it’s politics.  You’ve been in the proverbial game long enough to know this.  You seem hellbent on losing this election, and you need to explain why to those who placed their faith and hopes in you before you dash them just a little over two months from now.  It’s that, or pull your head out of your rear orifice and start trying to win this thing.  This race has never been, nor shall it ever be, about you; it’s about this country and the people in it, and turning back from the precipice of fascist empire your predecessors have brought us all to.

  That’s all I have to say to you, Obama.  You have your choice to make, though I am certain you made it long ago.  Just know this: no matter what happens in November, you’ll still be comfortably employed, while the rest of us will have to continue suffering the conservative policies you support.

Sincerely,

Archangel M

What if….

The unthinkable happens and the unstable John McCain somehow is elected President? How would things change? What kind of world would we have? What would life be like? I know, I know, asking you to imagine that is like asking you to imagine having never ending dental surgery with no anesthetic, my very soul cringes at the thought, but hey, it IS a possibility we face. It is up to all of us to do our part to insure it doesn’t happen, and just in case you are thinking of sitting this one out in disgust or using your vote to protest one of the many outrages perpetrated upon us by our current diseased political system, I want to take us down that road, for motivational and precautionary purposes.

Let’s start our nightmare journey with this thought, if McCain does win, it will be because he was able to sell his Maverick image, separate himself just enough from his old and new Republican and Rovian masters and convince the American voter….

….that he does NOT represent a third Bush term and more of the rampant Republicanism that has screwed up the world to the sorry state it is now. That means that the Democratic Congress will feel even MORE pressure to work with (for) the Republicans…as they will be even MORE afraid ‘to be seen as’ weak on terrur, or unpatriotic, or obstructionist, or however it is they justify their current collaborationist tendencies. If McCain is seen as representing some new paradigm to get elected, the Dems will feel the (false) need to play along…..even more. That means that they will allow more Republican legislation onto the floor, even though by all the indicators they will gain more seats in both the House and Senate. Here then, are some of the things we can look forward to.

In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots. Procopius said of the warring factions: “So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin.” Edward Gibbon wrote: “The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors.”

Who were the Blues and the Greens? They were sports fans – the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

~Eliezer Yudkowsky, A Fable of Science and Politics

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved baseball.  Strangely, in America, when you say you love baseball, or football, or basketball, that doesn’t mean you love playing the game, of course, but that you are a passionate fan and spectator of the sport you love.  I do enjoy playing baseball, although I haven’t actually played hardball in at least a decade.  (One issue that people talk about a lot is how fewer native-born Americans are playing baseball, and making it to the major leagues.  I wonder how much the fact that softball, and not hardball, is the recreational version of the sport, impacts this.  Parents sensibly are more concerned about their kids getting hurt, so kids don’t play with a hardball unless they are in Little League.  Everything else is softball.)  But I’m a Major League Baseball fan.  I can enjoy watching any part of any baseball game.  I’ve been known to become audibly excited when a pitcher throws a great series of pitches, or when a hitter has an at-bat where they keep fouling away pitch after pitch of the pitcher’s best stuff.  I can name the top ten minor league prospects for all thirty teams.