Sep 30 2008
And editorial original to All Over the Board:
So bailout plan A failed. All well and good, but you know that there will be a bailout plan B, C, D, etc. until the bosses get what they want. My guess is it’ll take tomorrow’s session on the stock markets around the world and the failure of another big bank.
Sep 16 2008
Wheeee!!!
It’s been an interesting few weeks, actually maybe a few months, although the storm has been brewing for quite a while. Bear Stearns was just a precuser, wasn’t it? So, what to make of where we are today?
Sep 10 2008
Note from GH–this probably applies less to the DocuDharma crowd, who don’t get so easily distracted by bright, shining distractions
These are serious times, and they call for a serious debate about where we need to take the nation.
–Barack Obama
Now, I admit to having a few guilty pleasures in life. Watching back episodes of “What Not To Wear”. Buying earrings at the Kohl’s in the 80% off clearance section. Getting that chai tea latte at Panera. Doing that powerwalk through Ikea and promising myself that someday, somehow my house really will be this organized.
Sarah Palin, over these last fun-filled days since the announcement that she would be Old Man McCain’s Vice President, has been one of these guilty pleasures. But like all guilty pleasures, it doesn’t take a whole lot of exposure to just get, well, a little tired of seeing it day in and day out.
Sep 01 2008
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.
Aug 18 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
Pardon me. I’m not a Christian. Never was, never will be. I don’t believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he died for my sins. I don’t have a personal relationship with him. I haven’t been saved. Or redeemed. I haven’t been re-born. I don’t believe the Bible is the literal word of God. And I was simply and utterly infuriated that both the presumptive presidential nominees decided to attend Rev. Rick Warren’s forum so they could show him and his many co-religionists that they were, well, just like them. That they were all good, moral Christians, and they all believed very much in a particular kind of Christianity, and that they were willing to prove it. I was outraged that they decided to make a spectacle of their “faith.” But I was even more outraged that they would seek to prove they had the right kind of faith to this particular audience.
That’s right, prove it. They weren’t going to refuse the invitation. They weren’t going to say, “I’m sorry, but what I believe is private. It’s between me and my God. I am not willing publicly to discuss theology.” They weren’t going to say, “I’m sorry, I believe in the separation of church and state, and, therefore, I consider this mega church to be an inappropriate setting for a political discussion about secular, political matters.” They weren’t going to say, “I’m sorry, I’m a very good person, but I don’t believe the same things you say I should believe. I’m nevertheless scrupulously honest and moral.” They weren’t going to say, “You’re free to think about these issues any way you wish, but I don’t want to discuss how my religious beliefs might be related to my policy positions. My policy positions stand on their own merit.” No. No chance. The candidates decided to show up, and they blatantly pandered to these right wing evangelicals. To gain their approval, to gain their votes.
Join me below.
Aug 05 2008
Cross-ranted from WWL
The Rude Pundit has a nice rude piece up about McStain courting bikers in Sturgis… even offering up his wife for a topless/sometimes bottomless Beauty Pageant.
Hell he coulda entered her in the Sturgis Tractor Pull:
‘Sprised he didn’t offer her to pull a * train for them. (* that has whole different meaning, ifygmd..) He has no respect for her, none for women generally, you know, we are Cunts who pack on the War Paint.
Aug 01 2008
Crossposted from The Wild Wild Left and to One Wing Left, Never In Our Names, Docudharma, and Station Charon
Suuuuu-prizzzzzzzzzzze, suprise.
The wingers are going bat-shit crazy about a Ludacris song. A song I found entertaining and poignant at the same time.
Now, am I surprised that the Rich White Boyz Hater Club are pissing their depends and whipping eachother into an ibogene frenzy imagining monsters lurking in low riders waiting to rape their womens and see bling trails pulsing like photon ray guns that murder white babies in vitro?
Nah. I’m more surprised they don’t just wear their hoods on set.
I mean, the wingers have been emailing jokes behind the scenes about “Can we still call it The White House if Obama wins?” for months now.
But god forbid that a rapper turn that joke back on their cellulite-pocked white lard asses.
The video follows… as does rantage.
Jul 10 2008
we tell ourselves we’re on the brink. the world as we knew it is gone. holy shit. oh my fucking god. the polar bears are drowning. frogs are disappearing. we are beyond safe limits of CO2.
fyi: the world as we knew it has always been a fleeting construct… it’s always changing. there is nothing to hang onto. there never was… our lives keep moving forward. our lives will not stop. we, all of us, will eventually fall off cliffs into our own abyss…
in a way, i think then this frees us up. because if life is basically in chaos and out-of-control, why not use that to our advantage? why are we thinking inside the political box when the problems we confront are so outside of it??? i like this kind of thinking…
The resources of a single human cell’s “biospace” are as unbounded as the resources of outer space. Quantum microscopy opens vast new resources that fulfilll Paul Dirac’s criterion for a golden era:
“Golden eras occur when ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions”
why are we tied to barack obama, just for an example? if obama reads like a corporatist. if he voted for FISA… why? if he is the presumptive nominee because he tacked left of Clinton and now pulls right… if he can change direction, why can’t we change the course of this election? why? who determines our actions? do we? or do we allow some monolithic, decaying political system keep us in its thrall? do we have to accept this?
no. maybe it’s not the politics. we haven’t gotten it yet. it’s all temporary. it’s all just beyond our grasp. what lasts timothy? fucking nothing. oh. right. change lasts. and yet maybe that very thing gives me right now. if it’s all i have, then i want to own it.
ha… then i don’t have to vote for obama (or clinton) as the lesser of two evils. i can write to the delegates of New York and urge them to cast their ballots for Dennis or John… I can tell the Super Delegates what I think. And promise them a course of action that will leave them all realizing just how much the world as they knew it has moved way past them…
so… it’s another call to form another party. another call for a systematic campaign of filling school boards, town boards, state houses, and congressional seats with different points-of-view: we can tell the old ones, still stuck in the world as they knew it, that the Real Life Party is here. the Resistance Party is here. the Green Party is here. the Common Good party, here!!! and i have to ask myself, what is really progressive? voting for the lesser of two evils or abandoning that path? even when that path takes us further to the brink? or do we, at some point, have to risk being pulled over the brink? and how do we know that is really the worst thing? how do we really know what the brink is? and maybe that changes all the time too… or, and i’m not sure who first said it but: who the fuck really knows…
we have in us the power for drama and daring and doing great things. this is the time. we have, in front of us, another wild west to explore. uncharted ocean to cross. this trek is to reclaim the territory of our minds. our souls.
we are still fighting to be free. we will always have to fight for our freedom. because the world as we know it will always change, will often fall into the wrong hands… and yeah, life as we know it will always leave us with tough choices.
Jun 26 2008
what does that mean… freedom of speech. does it mean say what you want? does it mean say what you want within limits? within constructs and conventions?
or does it mean: say what’s on your mind. in the way it is in you to say…
is there something deeper here? freedom of speech brings me to ask you: what about freedom of ideas? doesn’t it start there? the way we think. how we think. and then expressing those thoughts and ideas.
it makes me wonder what we progressives really want… do we want a clash of ideas? a messy debate? or are we just plain folks, yearning for unity in our ideas?
do we have room for a poster like stu piddy? or lasthorseman? or pfiore8? pinche tejano… the blogosphere would be poorer without his ideas disrupting our brain rhythms.
and good god. what happens when a guy like stu piddy becomes mainstream? when what he’s been saying turns out to be right? that obama will be a big let down. that obama is just another corporatist jerk who sells it better.
how incredible can any idea be after these seven years of absolute crap in America? what have we learned? when we are still reactionary to outside ideas… challenging visions of others that don’t fit what we WANT to happen. and while we can’t really dismiss these outliers, we can blame it on their delivery. the way they say it. how they say it. why the fuck are they saying it?????????
yeah. because we want. i want. obama to be the next coming of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Ghandhi.
but what if he’s not? what if he’s like Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? What if he’s another Bill Clinton. Makes you feel good as he strips your freedoms by allowing, as Clinton did, a concentrated media and beginning a stepped up version of outsourcing our tax dollars…
but back to the point. the last seven plus years have been so incredibly outlandish that it seems absurd to the nth degree to marginalize anyone’s paranoid concerns about the next phase in country.
so here’s my perspective. as i left in a comment to Robyn. i am going to say what i say the way i say it. because, as i look back on what i’ve said, i think i’ve been fucking right. i’ve been bashed a bit… but, hey. i’m not going to back down. i say it again: change the game. change the board. change the rules. it is time for third or fifth parties. target the essential congressional seats in 2010 and Nancy Pelosi in 2008. get outside of DEMOCRAT… they will hold us prisoner to their empty promises… but but but find those in Washington, whoever they are and whatever party, who want to wrest control from the corporatists and get our country functioning again. stop the fucking outsourcing. kick the wingnuts off the school boards and the developers off planning boards. shop local and pay cash. we need to come up with armchair strategies and release the power of citizens to understand they have power in this play.
i’m not going away. so stu, pinche, Jay, Night Owl, Balzac, LastHorseMan, and all the other outliers… keep singing. i don’t always like your song choice, but i am so awfully glad you’re out there. On the fringes of conventional thought… seeing truth in a slightly different way.
Jun 25 2008
Ta dah……… another stunning assessment of George W. Bush, his policies, and what a real president would do from Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Time’s column. Yeah, the inescapable Tom Friedman: a cheerleader of the war in Iraq. A public intellectual and New York Times Columnist… part of that liberal media about which we hear so much.
You do remember Thomas Friedman? The man who brought us such great catch-phrases as the Arab street and Generation Q? Yes. It’s the same one. The exact same one who made the Iraq war sound grand in a 2005 talk:
This is not about oil. This is about something really noble, crazy noble. It is the first attempt in the modern history of the Arab world for Arabs in their own country to forge their own social contract, their own constitution.
Not only would democracy become rampant in the Middle East, but “a successful Iraq is our Iran reform policy.” In his droning, self-assured, and utterly annoying manner, he told his audience that “The Shi’ite Muslims who will assume the majority of Iraq’s government posts are the same Shi’ites who live in Iran.” According to the newspaper account of the speech, Friedman said if Iraq succeeds it will ratchet up the pressure for democratic reform in Iran.
Well, today’s column is really a gas. And what I really loved about it, Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave (besides the side-splittingly funny lede), is it’s real he-man muscular language. Here’s a sample…
What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines . . . without subsidies.
That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans – sorry to say, with the help of John McCain – have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.
Of course, we’re going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I’d prefer – for geopolitical reasons – that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn’t be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He’d be telling the country a much larger truth:
“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy – particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”
That’s what a real president would do. He’d give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn’t be using his last days in office to threaten Congressional Democrats that if they don’t approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.
I loved how he slipped in the for geopolitical reasons that we get as much as possible from domestic wells while encouraging Bush, if Bush wanted to be a real president, to tell the country larger truths.
From what fucking planet is Thomas Friedman? Talking about George Bush telling truth to anybody is ridiculous. To try to appear like you’re a cool environmentally friendly liberal columnist guy and set us up for drilling the arctic is going a tad too far. And oh my god, you’re sorry to say John McCain is leading Republicans in defeating incentives for renewable energy.
Jun 22 2008
When I was younger, I used to believe a lot of things I now find remarkably stupid. For years, I dated a beautiful woman who was just a couple inches shorter than me. For reasons I find baffling now, I had the notion in my head that in a couple, it was important for the man to be taller than the woman. So I didn’t like it when she wore high heeled shoes or boots when we went out together. I can’t pinpoint the moment that I got over this particular prejudice, but it retrospect, it baffles me. We actually fought about this once or twice.
Before reading below the fold, read this post by Micha Ghertner.
Jun 06 2008
Each and every day we read or hear something new from our favorite News sources about how the economy isn’t doing so great. In fact we are either in a recession or about to go into a recession or something.
I’m here to tell you, people
WE ARE IN A RECESSION AND HAVE BEEN FOR HALF A YEAR NOW!
I hope that was loud enough to hear in the room next to your computer, because it cannot be said loudly enough until EVERYONE gets with the program and really understands what 7 plus years of “Neo-Con-tax-middle-class-into-oblivion-while-sending-jobs-overseas-so-corporations-can-profit” economic genius has produced.
The trickle down theory is working! Only the liquid trickling down your leg is from a Neo-Con 1%’er pissing on you once again. Well, at least it is working for the 1% of the richest Americans, anyway.
Check this out.