Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Today is Sunday. You should take a breather between football games and news of Fannie Mae and her wicked step brother Freddie Mac. Who cares if the federal government is bailing them out, anyway? Didn't the federal government create them in the first place? And don't they hold several trillion dollars worth of home mortgages and mortgage guarantees? And isn't my home value sorta dependent on these guys and their friends staying afloat? But isn't this the wrong administration to be cleaning this mess up? Didn't they cause it with their fatuous notion that banks are good guys and really know how to give a resounding "No Way in Hell" to borrowers without jobs and no credit? Whoops!
Yes, women do vote. And the women's vote has been what has elected most of the President's we have had in the last few decades. But if the Republicans think that women who vote are generally stupid, or vote simply as their husbands or significant others do, then they are sadly mistaken. The placing of a woman in the VP slot on the Republican ticket, in the hopes that that will lure those who were Hillary supporters away from the Obama Biden camp, is also a flawed mindset.
Yes, it was Hillary but more to the point it was about those things which she stood for. Those things which women have striven for for years and some of which they have attained, and some they are still fighting for. They saw that Hillary was in that fight with them. and that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are continuing in that fight. They want the right to choose. They want equal pay for equal work. They want healthcare which will protect the lives of their children. The Republicans can offer nothing to the vast majority of women in this country. For a woman who has benefitted from those things which have been hard fought for and won by other women, to speak against the majority of those things, is hypocrisy.
This piece, by Gloria Steinem in the LA Times speaks volumes to the differences between Hillary and Sarah Palin. In Steinem's words, they share nothing but a chromosome.
Bob Herbert's column in the NYT today is a well-written impeachment of the RNC and its Bottom Gun headliner. McCain is a failed warrior, a man who got shot down, a man who argued beyond his rank and billet to bomb civilian areas in Hanoi and Haiphong, a chip-on-his-shoulder firecracker personality likely to go off at anyone, anytime, anywhere: his wife, fellow Senators, campaign staff (all attested), during caucuses in the Senate (completely attested), and on the campaign trail (yes, attested). He is not a populist; he is the son of an admiral whose progress on this planet was planned for him, coaxed, nurtured, and made to come true, and yet ... McCain was shot down and for failing his mission he thinks he can make it up to his father and grandfather by getting himself elected President and Commander-in-Chief. He is a dangerous and unreliable man in a mass transit bus. In the White House he would be an absolute disaster ... and the majority of the voters know it.
Bill Moyers Journal Friday featured a conversation with Kathleen Hall Jamieson on the effects of the RNC and a vignette of the relationship of National Guard troop deployments and the security of the states from which they are taken.
As Will Bunch writes in the Philadelphia Daily News , Sarah Palin gave a heck of a speech the other night and it is getting more air time and ink than anything else these days. Personally I am sick of it, and if she is the right's answer to Hillary, they have a LONG way to go.
She did not write it herself, McCain's handlers did that for her, and anyone can read a speech from a teleprompter. I was upset at the time that I had not been able to watch it, however, I am rather glad now that I did miss it, as apparently, even with all the hoopla, it was a speech to nowhere.
One might also want to really take a long hard look here and here at those credentials which are so highly touted by her running mate and those in her party.
I am not about banning all guns. I think we need much tighter control on them so they do not manage to make it into the hands of those who have serious mental health issues. The recent shootings in Washinton state bring this point home,once again, as this editorial in The Boston Globe points out.
And from NOLA we have this editorial in the Times Picayune on the recent evacuation of the city's residents ahead of Hurricane Gustav. Gustav proved to be pretty much of a dud when one considers the aftermath of Katrina, and although they expected the same this time around it luckily did not materialize. However, hurricane season is not over, yet. And from Counterpunch we have this story from a teacher who was not in NO's pre Katrina but is now teaching there. Her observations about the post Katrina city and the fears of the children she teaches.
For those wondering how and why McCain picked Sarah Palin, this editlorial in the Madison Wisconsin Capital Times gives you a good idea of how much thought and effort went into it.
Stratfor is a small "intelligence" organization operated out of Austin, Texas, I believe, that provides "expert advice" for a fee to people who have busy schedules and need backup on world events and trends, particularly those world events that will possibly eventuate into military problems. I do not subscribe, but occasionally someone bootlegs a copy of their stuff to me, particularly the stuff about Russia.
In a recent article on Solzhenitsyn the author, George Friedman, suggests that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is responsible for teaching Russia the anti-liberalism that it is currently manifesting, that is, the penchant for autocracy rather than a rule of law. Friedman suggests in what is essentially an aside that Lenin would have been impossible without the Enlightenment. These are basically crack-pot ideas and, if major movers and shakers are being taken in by them, we are in for some rocky days ahead.
"As for that VP talk all the time I tell 'ya I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day."
Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska
Republican Vice Presidential Nominee.
For those of you who KNOW that the Bush years have been nothing but one disaster after another, but have a hard time remembering which horror came first, Nick Baumann and Dave Gilson over at MOJO News (Mother Jones News) have a timeline for you. Read it and weep for these lost eight years.
As I have posted before, there is still plenty of gender bias as well as racial intolerance left in this country. I imagine that there is some everywhere, but it seems particularly evident here.
The recent Republican National Convention seemed to be not so much about nominating John McCain for President, with his "cutsie" little gun totin' side kick, but about how much anti-Obama rhetoric could be spewed to stir up the masses. Robert Parry, of Consortium News , writes about it.
Once again, Mark Morford who writes brilliantly for the San Francisco Chronicle, has taken on the task of responding to a stupid Republican slogan, the Angry Left .
With all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin as John McCain's pick for VP, I keep going back to the question she asked..."tell me just what is it that the VP does all day, everyday?" Well Sarah I thought I might be able to give you some small idea.
It is not a job, really. It is a bit like being the Prince of Wales, a lot of meet and greet but not much substance unless you are required to attend those functions where it is not important enough that the President be in attendance. The job, in the words of John Nance Garner, a Texan who was FDR's Vice President, was "not worth a pitcher of warm piss." and even John Adams, our first Vice Presdent, described it as "...the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Are you getting the picture?
Woodrow Wilson's Vice President was one Thomas Marshall, from Indiana, and he delighted in telling the story of two brothers one of whom went to sea and the other of whom became Vice President. "Nothing was ever heard from either of them again." It was also Marshall, in his capacity as President of the Senate, who declared that what the country needed was "a good 5 cent cigar."
Rufus King, Vice President under Franklin Pierce, was the only Vice President who managed to escape the boredom of the office by dying of tuberculosis shortly after taking the oath.
Tom Englehardt's essay yesterday in TomDispatch raises quite a few questions. Some of them lead off into directions that deserve dedicated websites to discuss and analyze. Other questions double-back into studies of contemporary government and the principles upon which this country was founded. Almost none of what he discussed falls into the usual baskets of American Liberalism, but clearly the rapid ramping-up of military bases in thirty-nine countries across the planet should be a topic for discussion, if for no other reason than the purposes of these bases.
National security, of course, is the reason stated for asking for an appropriation or budget category within already appropriated funds. National security is the be all and end all of government, the one thing that conservatives and liberals agree is the essential function of central government. Obviously someone has been taking advantage of the accord on the general issue. The long deliberate path into the realm of the military-industrial complex (MIC) is now, with bases all over the place, given a new texture and meaning. The MIC has bases, for whatever is military is also MIC.
"Never give in. Never, never, never, never,
in nothing great or small, large or petty,
never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Never yield to force; never yield
to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of England
Anne K., a long time resident of Wasilla, AK, knows Sarah Palin and her family and her parents. Wasilla is, after all, a very small town. You would be unlikely not to know a person like Sarah.
Anne decided, after being asked several hundred times who Sarah really is, to write some of it down. It seems like a fair and balanced account to me, and certainly it puts some of the "facts" into perspective. Sarah is a go-getter and a "born politician" ... with all that implies.
I was in Fairbanks for an academic conference a few years ago. I had gotten detached from the herd and missed the boat ride down to a fake gold panning establishment and restaurant slightly outside of this very northern city. Instead, my companion and I took a Fairbanks taxicab and learned a lesson about Alaskans that Tim Egan's article recounts concisely. The taxicab driver was the Mad Hatter, a refugee from Idaho where things had gotten "too crowded," he said. He launched into a diatribe about the Lower Forty-eight that left us wondering whether we would ever get back in one piece.
This particular Alaskan was literally a refugee, not because his ego was too large for Boise or Coeur d'Alene, but because his personality was shaped by a relatively mild case of schizophrenia ... or so we thought when finally deposited at the mine/restaurant. Before we understood this we asked him a couple of questions and got back paranoia and seething hostility. My companion was Jewish and voluable and used to civilized conversation so she probably set off one of his favorite things. The g.d. Jews and their running of sinful Hollywood, their manipulation of the American's government, and their creeping into Alaska under the cover of the big petroleum corporations.
I agree with Egan completely that some, perhaps much of Alaska is inhabited by barely social mavericks, people who really cannot exist elsewhere without ending up in jail or the boobyhatch. The notion that Alaska is the last frontier is partly true and partly a function of how inhospitable a place it is. It is the American equivalent of Siberia.
Linda Grant writing in the UK Guardian taps into some of the essential iconography of the American "culture wars," that disparity of basic homilies and perspectives that seems to be separating small-town and megapolitan Americans from one another. At the root of it all, according to Grant is a scaled disdain for unsophisticated, slighly puerile, homespun parochialism, on the one hand, and ostentatiously sophisticated, slightly bombastic, technomodern, deconstructed Weltanschauung, on the other. It seems impossible, given the ecological dynamics of the situation, that there will ever be a friendly handshake and search for commonality.
Well, Grant is right, but not completely. Sarah Palin proved it Wednesday night. She was intelligible to everyone. Her cutting humor cut. Her assumptions about human nature and human relationships were intelligible. Her recitation of the goals of American culture and the ills of the Democrats were intelligible. Yet, she is being cast as the absolute symbol of conservatism. The culture wars would suggest that she would have come off merely as a freak, a carny sideshow, a yahoo with pitchfork and straw hat.
Hockey moms. Yes, they are like pit bulls, just as Sarah Palin said last night in her speech. I have seen these women in action and they are vicious. If their behavior is to be emulated, well, I pass. Lots thought this was a wonderful thing, and what a cute story about the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom was lipstick. One can only imagine what sort of "hockey mom" her daughter's boyfriend has. I wonder, just how would a pit bull look wearing lipstick?
The following is Oliver Burkeman's take on the speech as he writes about it in The Guardian . Please bear in mind that Barack Obama wrote his own speech. Sarah's was written for her.
Remember, friends, the point of politics and policy is to get as many wins from an event or a position as possible. Karl Christian Rove was a master of this. Cheney gave the marching orders and pointed out the major goals while Rove found all manner of little wins along the way. Now we have a charming little lipsticked hockeymom from smalltown Alaska telling us that being mayor of Chit'lin Switch is better and more complex than organizing thousands on the south side of Chicago and giving them the tools to find jobs for themselves that corporate America—the mayor's constituency—has outsourced to cheap labor overseas. The irony was lost on the Republicans, I am sure.
Sarah Palin was, last night if you were a Republican, a breath of fresh air in a campaign that smells of double-crosses and blatant pandering to the hodge-podge of factions that make up the modern Republican Party. The fresh air came as a surprise and, if only she had had a hairy wart on the end of that very nice nose, could have been as easily dismissed as the Governor of Hawaii's palid drone. But she did have such a wart and she killed Obama with a thousand cuts. She mocked Biden quickly and gave him no more opportunity to strike back. She lied Republican lies and told half truths with amazing precision. The crowd in the police state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul loved every minute.
