Month: October 2008

Pre-launch?

Sneak Preview?

What?

This fine fellow, Jim Minick, helps words work:

Singing the Pebble

At river’s edge, he found
all water, earth and mirrored sky
in one small stone, hazel and round.

He rolled it on his tongue,
tasted springhead and creek,
the roiling river, the sky’s lung.

He carried it between lip and gum
the rest of his life, trying
to sing this one pebble unsung.

Toronto’s Linda McQuaig talks about inequality and elitism in the US presidential election:

Massive Favoritism

A fundamental problem in the last few decades – both in Canada and the United States – has been the relentless campaign waged by the financial elite to overturn postwar social and economic policies that provided significant gains for the middle and lower classes in the decades following World War II.

The campaign has been phenomenally successful.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel is Taking On Inequality:

The richest 1 percent of Americans currently hold wealth worth nearly $16.8 trillion, $2 trillion more than the bottom 90 percent.

According to the Center for American Progress, since 1979 the average income for the bottom half of American households has grown by 6 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners have seen their incomes rise by 229 percent during that same period.

The man on the street would like to panic but they don’t know how to do it. – Wednesday, NPR NewsHour

We all want to fix society.

Here’s Brock’s idea found in the comments:

We need a Draft for Congress. As in, people are nominated for Congress by their neighbors and get drafted. Like jury duty. Anyone who volunteers (or can be shown to have asked someone else to nominate him) is automatically disqualified. Once they’re elected all of their assets are seized and not released until their term of service is over.

Are Narcissists Natural Leaders?
COLUMBUS, Ohio – When a group is without a leader, you can often count on a narcissist to take charge, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that people who score high in narcissism tend to take control of leaderless groups. Narcissism is a trait in which people are self-centered, exaggerate their talents and abilities, and lack empathy for others.

Campaign in poetry, govern in prose, said former Governor Mario Cuomo.

And here’s his year-old scathe:

However good his intentions may have been, President Bush and his Administration have demonstrated an appalling incompetence in handling the machinery of government.

They started a war that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives on false pretenses, produced a fragmented economy and a devastated budget, showed callousness toward people in need especially after Hurricane Katrina and have been guilty of a shocking disrespect for the Bill of Rights and balance of powers which are the heart and soul of our Constitution. The Administration’s awkwardly elite foreign policy and its Iraq catastrophe have lost us the hard won respect and cooperation of much of the world and increased the hostility of many who were already our enemies. Their reckless tax cuts and spending have created deficits and debt that make it more difficult to deal with the undernourished vital federal programs, including Social Security, Medicare and education.

Those failures were so many and so blatant that all the Democrats needed to do to win back power in the Congress in the 2006 elections was to recount them loudly without having to propose significant and persuasive major policy alternatives.

The elections in 2008 will be a different matter: the burden of proof will be on the Democrats. If they want to hold on to control of Congress and win back the presidency, their candidates must spell out in some detail what they propose to do and how they propose to get it done, including how they intend to pay for whatever costs are involved. Many significant questions must be answered: how do we deal with our loss of jobs to other countries, our increasing inequality of wealth, failing public schools, the threatened insolvency of Social Security, the escalating costs of Medicare, the 47 million uninsured Americans, the terribly ineffective health care system, withering pensions, huge trade and budget deficits, the inconvenient truth of global warming, middle class malaise, 12 or more million undocumented immigrants?

For how long will we continue to be distracted from the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and other parts of the world by the debacle we have created in Iraq? When and how will we be able to remove our troops from the front lines in Iraq? How will we know when it is safe to bring back most of our troops? Should we bomb Iran?

It’s hard to recall a time in the modern history of presidential elections when we had before us as many vital issues.

Lisa Rein, Washington Post Staff Writer, finds the error of police too powerful to be restrained by law.

Before you finish this post, try an experiment. Jefferson noticed we are tender and nervous and easily shrink; that a people can waste promise and lose the hope of their times when force and danger is nearby. A child will quiet. A student will tire. A farmer will shrink away from his tinkering at night. A club of men grow cynical and women stop encouraging. Instead, he pleaded, we must regard each other and widen our civility at every blink and greeting. We rely on a hidden tomorrow, he explained, and no one knows who will bring it. We depend on the willingness of each other and this is the most tender thing of all. We cannot march loudly or steer our poor explanations into each other. We are too timid to be struck outside our door and too afraid our walls are thin. He said we would freeze history itself unless we gave a fair and forthright nation to each other. There are thick walls in our law to help us trust and there are unbending rules over our homes to help us trust. Only then will we work for each other and bring our gifts. Our nation risks its existence if it will not protect what might arrive unseen. If we are threatened, too many of us will quit and we can never see what they were bringing.

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists.

The State Police entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.

This Story at the Washington Post

* Maryland Police Put Activists’ Names On Terror Lists

Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

…state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.”

…undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a “deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary” on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance.

“I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” he said.

One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a “primary crime” of “terrorism-anti-government” and a “secondary crime” of “terrorism-anti-war protesters.”

About the experiment.
Are you wondering for a moment if all of us will be cringing soon because these folks in Maryland are cringing now.

Do you feel cooperative toward your fellow citizen at this moment and will you bring your prizes and will you vigorously labor on behalf of your nation? Or are you worried, nervous, distrustful and distracted?

You see? Jefferson wasn’t wanting a perfect State made orderly and pretty and quiet. He wanted a Society made encouraging and restrained or all gifts and prizes and our solutions will hide as easily as activists and protesters who are now the first.

Damn these silly days.

Maybe presidents follow the plow and politicians the horse’s gas, because what frontier has been made in Washington and when did we think so?

Of course this is rhetorical. But no, it’s not a dumb question.

Weak solutions offered in this election say a great deal. I wonder if any people in history have argued so much about so little? None of us could screw together a package to please a nation, none should try perhaps, but if my house was burning, I wonder if I’d fight my way into the kitchen to douse a match?

We’re distracted each four years. If a campaign lasts two years, then we’re moving ahead only half the time. Our fathers and mothers walked in localities and regions and made a world here and there with friends and so and so until we gathered up this thing America. Imagine if we first cranked a phone to see what Washington thinks!

Because our politics are so poor, I’m terrifically hopeful. Our nation has done better when we tire of noise and build America hand in hand. Our progress is each other and what we do, not mere representatives of what we’ve done.

Did I miss something?

Somewhere not long ago we forgot what government is. And in so doing we neglected to march ahead without it.

Politicians are never better than where we take them.

Sorry, no source, but here’s the ripple of today. Think a bit.

Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is retiring Opus the Penguin. “30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.” Farewell old friend.

But please, let us all become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days. They are wicked due our silence and worse without us.

McCodgerheimer’s Messy Goals, typed while viewing the second presidential debate.

McCain: I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy, so I’ll freeze all spending, lower social benefits, build nuclear plants to make jobs and store radioactive waste using the French and Japanese method, invent clean coal and a pipeline array, stop the bailout from going to terrorists, borrow five grand of your taxes for door to door health insurance sales if you post your records on the Internet, keep a trillion for the military in all four corners to secure the world’s normal lives and shopping in tiny democracies, eliminate that fancy tanker or that other waste I voted against, talk with you first, my friends, but not before invasions or when I’m standing outside bin Laden’s cave, stop leaky earmarks into local projects but keep eminent domain for casino hotels and private water and surveillance and jails, buy back your pre-crash appraised equity to help Wall Street sell new credit wrap loans, set up a commission to talk about your retirement and education losses, and consult with you people the way Ronald Reagan made those good deals with Tip O’Neil.

Oh shit America!
No nation is based on this style of junk and none go forward in this cranky swamp.

At the end of the day, my friends, second holocaust or never, McCain knows dark times and he’s running for president.

The Choice?

Be cold. The financial crisis and the trembling United States economy have dealt a hard blow to conservative economic ideology.

Be warmed. Others have written good and grand and great things about Barack Obama.

Washington – October 7, 2008 WB [Without Bush] – Global leaders have unanimously agreed to try again on behalf of struggling Africa. After trillions in surplus have accrued to the United States plus Europe’s revitalized economy, the stability of Asia and the success of South America’s emergent economies, attention has turned to beleaguered African nations. “Millions of children die each year. It’s time the world paid attention to those other than rich.”

What should be the trigger, or should there be a trigger, when nuclear weapons use is ever put into play?

Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet… so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period. Can we talk about Afghanistan real quick, also, though?

[link]

Lira Tskhovrebova,
Christian Science Monitor,
“I survived the Georgian war. Here’s what I saw.”

“My friend’s elderly father tried to douse the flames set by Georgian fire on the home he had built with his hands. His leg was severed by shrapnel from Georgian weapons. He bled to death while his disabled wife crawled from their burning home.”

“I know this because I was in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on Aug. 7 when Georgian troops marched into the city and killed my friends and neighbors. I huddled with my family in terror for three nights while Saakashvili’s tanks and rockets destroyed hundreds of our homes, desecrated cemeteries, gutted schools and hospitals.”

“When I heard the reaction of the international media they told us only about the triangle of great powers, Georgia, Russia and the United States. There was nothing about Ossetia. Nobody said anything about dead Ossetians. It made my heart sick.”

“I know that Americans are a generous and fair people. But Americans haven’t been told the truth about what happened to us.”

“Yes, I would very much like to see an international commission investigate the truth of what happened.”

Area
1,506 square miles
(about the size of Rhode Island)

Population
70,000
Ossetians: 66%
Georgians: 29%
Russians: 2%
Armenians: 1%

Economy
Total – $15 million
Per Capita – $250

It stuns me that jingoist Republicans threaten our nation and remain contenders.

When will these utopian fools stop? By its very definition, a society works together, devising services and rules under sensible government. We are not an agriculture merely open to the winds of commerce. That’s nonsense.

Free market policies under Republicans have become mystical, and dangerous.

McCain’s free-market health care would loose a sales force into every neighborhood no nation could manage or control. Commissions will be added to administrative costs while profits remain siphoned from every family.

Ameriblog notices that top business leaders say the Republican plank will “impose particular burdens on small businesses and old-line manufacturers that are already struggling.”

“To some in the business community, this is very discomforting,” said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the Chamber of Commerce.

“The private marketplace, in my opinion, is ill prepared today with an infrastructure for an individual-based health insurance system.”

Nuts!
Using the one year budget freeze and cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s senior policy adviser, said cuts from Medicare and Medicaid programs serving seniors, poor families and the disabled have always been planned to fund the McCain health care tax credits.

Nutso!
Sarah Palin misrepresenting as usual. Palin Asserts McCain’s Health Care Plan Is Free.

“Maybe it’s radical because we don’t want the government to control it all we want the private sector we want through competition for American families to be able to afford health care. Doesn’t cost the government anything and certainly doesn’t increase anyone’s taxes.”

Competition for American families? When will this robbery end?

Why do we need regulations?

The “health insurance death spiral“, which is a drawback to McCain’s health care plans. How it works is this: As time goes on, people in a given plan get sick, and the cost to insure them rises. The insurance company sets up a new plan, offering cheaper rates, and healthy members of the old plan decide to switch to the new plan.

Those who have developed conditions, however, cannot get accepted by the new plan, so all that’s left in the old plan are people who are costly to insure, and the rates rise for that plan. As rates rise, more and more people find the costs of that plan too high for their conditions, and they drop out, reducing the plan to sicker and sicker individuals over time. Eventually, the company drops that plan altogether.

Normally, this is something practiced by the commercial health insurance plans. You’ve surely heard the ads on television that say “you cannot be singled out for a rate increase” or “rates are guaranteed”.

The death spiral is one trick they use to avoid insuring you if you become an unprofitable customer.

You bet we want our government to control health care.

AP – John McCain has past connections to a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas – a CIA-organized guerrilla force in Central America seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair.

Oliver North was in charge of running arms shipments to the rebels called Contras financed in part by arms sales to Iran!

McCain’s ties are facing renewed scrutiny.

Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group. McCain now says he quit the group. General Singlaud says he didn’t.

McCain has several ties to ‘external’ organizations operating outside of the US Government. And few in the media have accounted for McCain’s ongoing links to criminal thug G. Gordon Liddy.

The lowest presidential approval rating in Gallup Poll history.

How could it be otherwise?

Yet as if a refuge from public rejection, Bush is pumping the military budget while stripping or ignoring all others.

How could it be different?

With few supporters and Dick Cheney making the decisions in an outsourced fiasco that will haunt us for decades, Bush relies on the military.

Foreign relations and the diplomatic corps are underfunded while the military force budget increases to a ratio of 18 to 1.

In this fifth annual edition of the “Unified Security Budget,” as with the previous four editions, a non-partisan task force of military, homeland security, and foreign policy experts laid out the facts of the imbalance between military and non-military spending. The ratio of funding for military forces vs. non-military international engagement in the Bush administration’s proposed budget for the 2009 fiscal year has widened to 18:1 from 16:1 in the 2008 fiscal year. [.pdf here]

Nuts!

From a Boston Globe op ed:

IT IS HARD to believe how far this republic has fallen since President George W. Bush took office.

Eight years ago, the United States had a budget surplus, peace and prosperity reigned, and America was universally respected.

True, Bill Clinton had besmirched the office of the presidency by his self-indulgence. In his memoir, he would put down his dalliance with a White House intern to the worst of all possible motives. He did it because he could.

But that pales in comparison to what Bush has done to the country.

John McCain says, “I did everything I could to get him elected and re-elected.“

McCain’s legislative record shows otherwise.

Michael Neary, president of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, a non-profit trade association, said McCain frequently says he supports renewable energy development, but his deeds do not match his words. McCain has voted against measures that would spur alternative sources like solar and wind.

McCain’s underwhelming support of alternative energy is well known to Arizona’s solar industry leaders, several of whom were surprised to hear the GOP presidential candidate proclaim his strong support for solar during the first debate.

McCain’s renewable energy adverts stating policies that will “transform our economy, create jobs and energy independence” are “completely false and misleading”.

McCain “has a long record of consistently voting against renewable energy” and Sarah Palin exaggerates!

A close examination of Palin’s energy background, however, reveals that the GOP vice presidential candidate has only a relatively short history of studying and working on this issue. Palin served as chairwoman of a state energy board, a position reserved for a private citizen, for 11 months. A year before running for governor, Palin joined a group of other Republicans in TV ads advocating an all-Alaska gas pipeline route, though she eventually didn’t support this in office. As governor, Palin made a series of distinctly populist energy decisions that yielded short-term political gains, rather than policies designed for the long-term benefit of Alaska.

In more than a dozen interviews over the course of a month with Alaska insiders and close observers of state politics, most say Palin does not have a deep understanding of energy policy as she has claimed on the presidential campaign trail. In fact, she’s regularly described, even by those who support her policies, as having little expertise in the area.

There are a number of specific criticisms. Palin’s been accused of taking credit for the work of her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, in pushing through oil tax policy changes; promoting policies that may not actually further her pro-drilling mantra; hiring a personal friend and college drop-out to head a $40-billion oil revenue fund; calling the gas pipeline project a success, though it may never be built, and ignoring the root causes of the state’s consumer energy problems.

The Afterlife: Letter to Stephen Dobyns
Hayden Carruth
American Poetry Review, May/Jun 1999

You live in a sinking nation, Stephen, in a stinking
Time. America is falling apart. We look down in
Astonishment, but mostly in dismay. The other day
When I met Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison
On the plaza they turned their backs on me. I
Understood them. I’m a recent arrival, tainted
With degeneracy, no matter what my personal
State of innocence or guilt. Alas, they say
They can tell it in my speech. They say the spectacle
Of presidents and professors impeached on charges
Of trivial misconduct for patently greedy
And partisan ends is more than they can stand.
Who would have thought America could become
A nation where the putsch, the coup, the revolution
Advertisement
Of the swine could prevail against the common
Will. Stephen, we conclude the common will
Isn’t strong enough, not any more, the corruption
Has reached so deep and spread so far. You
Must learn again to live in the common shame,
As in the days of slavery and the massacres of the
Natives. You must learn to live again in
Dreadful isolation, a castaway. Oh Stephen,
For the first time I’m actually glad I’ve escaped,
Even to the nullity of the afterlife, even in spite
Of all the beauty and comradeship I’ve lost.

Hayden Carruth, In Memory

What single action would do the most to improve environmental responsibility from the federal government.

“Campaign finance reform,” he said.

CLEARWATER — Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn’t permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters.

When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, “Can I help you?” and turn the person around.

When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn’t allowed to mingle, she said that in the past negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday. – Times staff writer Eileen Schulte

Here’s Steve Schmidt, “the driving force behind John McCain” – the Los Angeles Times.

Schmidt is McCain’s day-to-day operations boss.

“The Republican presidential candidate’s chief strategist has shaken up his campaign with an approach that has left many heads spinning,” write Dan Morain and Bob Drogin.

Steve Schmidt ran Bush’s 2004 ‘war room’.

Schmidt selected Sarah Palin.

Steve Schmidt was a counselor and spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney and an accolyte of Karl Rove. “Steve, I meant what I said Thursday. Victory would have been impossible without you. Best, Karl.” Karl Rove’s nickname for Schmidt is ‘Bullet’.

He defended Palin against what he called sexist attacks, and traveled to Alaska to brief her before her first TV interviews. For three days, he was ensconced at McCain’s spread in Sedona, Ariz., helping Palin prepare for her performance on the biggest night of her career: the debate against Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Schmidt managed Roberts as chief justice and Alito as associate justice.

A map of the United States on the wall over Schmidt’s shoulder served as a low-tech tracking system. A photo of McCain was pinned to Ohio, showing the candidate was in the state that could decide the election. Schmidt saw McCain’s appearance at a German restaurant as far more valuable than the international acclaim showered on Obama’s turn on a German stage.

Schmidt was campaign manager for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

With these credentials, we should have learned about this fellow earlier.

Our media is hobbled, but sometimes we see the players.