Sunday, October 22, 2006
We are more free to speak than to hear
Whether flattering the listener, assuaging their guilt, defending or reinforcing their identity or numbing the sting of some overt or unadmitted anxiety, emotionally appealing claims get less scrutiny than any other things one hears.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
[A Bomb a nation] Conflict of disinterest: the fourth branch of government
Having forged a one-party government [not to mention a lot of evidence used to take us to war] has been a great boon to the fierce, though quiet, inclination toward venal and vengeful dictatorship that has plagued Republicans since the days when Nixon fired Archibald Cox. Their ham handed grasp of the reins of political power has led Bush and Cheney to effectively suspend the checks and balances between the three branches of government that our Constitution's drafters knew we needed. In an age when the Republicans have done their utmost [for instance] to break the constitution, what, beside kicking them out of office, has kept or will keep power in check?
Investigators and prosecutors, even though they are acting under the direction of DoJ or state Attorney's General or special legislative mandate, have shown a brave and commendable streak of independence.
I would suggest their independence has often worked like fourth branch of government to save us from pure despotism and corruption. But that independence is precarious and under great threat from the desperation of the culpable powerful. Do not sit by while the last hope of having a goverment that abides by its own laws is taken from you. Write the media editors who ignore the story, phone your congresspersons to complain their governing sleeps through corruption, blog, vote and support those who make sure your vote is not miscounted or discounted. If and when an honest vote count occurs and the one-party rule has ended, I will still prefer the watchful eye of a fourth branch of government to the roiling of laws and the mistrust that cramp our civil lives and discourse just now at this Republican-flavored juncture in our history. Republicans have demonstrated that they cannot rule democratically. But I trust no party any more.
There might be a fifth branch of government, while we are numbering them. It is the sad defualt, the desperate fall-back even though its power is claimed to be the source of all power: it is you and I. But how can we wield power if not through a government that was designed to express the collective will of us all? Shall we withold our taxes? Shall we take to the streets with pitchforks and placards? Shall we stay home in protest and do no work? None of these third world options is showing much sign of success where they have been tried so far. No, let us insist that our government be run as specified by its laws and let us keep an eye on it.
And who IS keeping an eye on things? Lewis fired 60 investigators, leaving only 16. By digging back through the attributions in TPM, TruthOut and Majikthise, I found two original $ources. Google news/US didn't have it anywhere in the top 20 stories and a general search only digs up stories about how investigations were starting to point toward Lewis. Maybe I should give Google a little more time to crawl for that story. I think there should be a more of a stink when you hear that Congressman Lewis has just shredded all pretense that he knows or cares what the term "conflict of interest" means. I don't understand the disinterest.
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Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/21/2006 08:32:00 AM
Investigators and prosecutors, even though they are acting under the direction of DoJ or state Attorney's General or special legislative mandate, have shown a brave and commendable streak of independence.
I would suggest their independence has often worked like fourth branch of government to save us from pure despotism and corruption. But that independence is precarious and under great threat from the desperation of the culpable powerful. Do not sit by while the last hope of having a goverment that abides by its own laws is taken from you. Write the media editors who ignore the story, phone your congresspersons to complain their governing sleeps through corruption, blog, vote and support those who make sure your vote is not miscounted or discounted. If and when an honest vote count occurs and the one-party rule has ended, I will still prefer the watchful eye of a fourth branch of government to the roiling of laws and the mistrust that cramp our civil lives and discourse just now at this Republican-flavored juncture in our history. Republicans have demonstrated that they cannot rule democratically. But I trust no party any more.
There might be a fifth branch of government, while we are numbering them. It is the sad defualt, the desperate fall-back even though its power is claimed to be the source of all power: it is you and I. But how can we wield power if not through a government that was designed to express the collective will of us all? Shall we withold our taxes? Shall we take to the streets with pitchforks and placards? Shall we stay home in protest and do no work? None of these third world options is showing much sign of success where they have been tried so far. No, let us insist that our government be run as specified by its laws and let us keep an eye on it.
And who IS keeping an eye on things? Lewis fired 60 investigators, leaving only 16. By digging back through the attributions in TPM, TruthOut and Majikthise, I found two original $ources. Google news/US didn't have it anywhere in the top 20 stories and a general search only digs up stories about how investigations were starting to point toward Lewis. Maybe I should give Google a little more time to crawl for that story. I think there should be a more of a stink when you hear that Congressman Lewis has just shredded all pretense that he knows or cares what the term "conflict of interest" means. I don't understand the disinterest.
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Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/21/2006 08:32:00 AM
Friday, October 20, 2006
[A Bomb a nation] When powerful Republicans talk honestly...
...nobody else gets to listen. Its kinda like the tree falling in the forest. My theory is that they often talk about Dick because, though he's nowhere in sight, he scares them almost as much as he scares you and I. If only they spent more time talking about [or even understood] foreign policy that would do what was promised for security. If only the values they have practiced matched their pompous talk. If only they knew or cared what their spending will do to our economy and what it already has done to our capacity to heal, house or rescue our own citizens. If only they asked the CIA for facts instead of telling them what the facts should be. If only Bush could tell competence from confidence. If only they listented to constituents instead of Jack Abramoff, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Dodson, Pat Robertson. If only they had done some of these basics of decent political leadership, they would not be having their heads handed to them on a poll. When the people talk, when will the Republicans get around to listening?
The more energetically you go about "solving" problems that are mostly imaginary, the more effectively you make problems that are real.
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Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/20/2006 12:24:00 PM
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
[A Bomb a nation] Aaw C'mon you guys!
I want to write a little essay, to set beside the hundreds of others, about how the "culture of corruption" is endemic to conservative politics...But oooh noooo,we can't have it that simple! Now we have dems sucking up lobbiest bucks. The Democrats are not exactly "my team". More of my animation as a political animal comes the fascist tendencies of the Republican party, their evil priorties, biggoted backers, transparent hypocrisy and corrupt doings. But let me tell you, I'd vote for McCain if he'd stuck by his campaign finance reform efforts. The guy who stood up to Hanoi's torturing can not stand up to the lure of money...and now we see, neither can some Democrats. Power corrupting? The prospect of rising power attracting influence seekers? It discomforts me.
I share the misgivings of Mr. Singer at myDD and he expresses them better than I could. It is naive to imagine politics can be done without cash for campaign advertising, traveling to the many rallies and other engagements and provisioning of phone and polling operations. And it is equally naive to hope that those who have paid the candidates bills will not have the candidates ear, will not have their wishes well known to the candidate. If there are as many liberal voters, or disgusted Repbulicans as we like to tell ourselves, then the little that we could each give to honest candidates who haven't screwed the country, and have sensible reforms they want to legislate would be enough. Every news source you check will tell you the Republicans are shaking down their donors in desperation. They will spend like crazy to stave off a congress that could mount investigations or impeach. We don't have to match the fat cats, just chip in enough to counter the expensive smears and scare tactics. Voting is not the only important thing I will do. I cracked open my little purse for Senator Bryd, and will do so for a few other candidates who need to put up a few ads. Don't let some industry own your representative or senator. In the present climate, an individual or PAC liberal donation probably enjoys a healthy multiple of effectiveness over the money of an oil or telecommunication or coal company or evangelical churh.
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Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/18/2006 07:24:00 PM
I share the misgivings of Mr. Singer at myDD and he expresses them better than I could. It is naive to imagine politics can be done without cash for campaign advertising, traveling to the many rallies and other engagements and provisioning of phone and polling operations. And it is equally naive to hope that those who have paid the candidates bills will not have the candidates ear, will not have their wishes well known to the candidate. If there are as many liberal voters, or disgusted Repbulicans as we like to tell ourselves, then the little that we could each give to honest candidates who haven't screwed the country, and have sensible reforms they want to legislate would be enough. Every news source you check will tell you the Republicans are shaking down their donors in desperation. They will spend like crazy to stave off a congress that could mount investigations or impeach. We don't have to match the fat cats, just chip in enough to counter the expensive smears and scare tactics. Voting is not the only important thing I will do. I cracked open my little purse for Senator Bryd, and will do so for a few other candidates who need to put up a few ads. Don't let some industry own your representative or senator. In the present climate, an individual or PAC liberal donation probably enjoys a healthy multiple of effectiveness over the money of an oil or telecommunication or coal company or evangelical churh.
--
Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/18/2006 07:24:00 PM
A footprint bigger than a continent.
Have you ever wondered why the geese and other migratory birds fly thousands of miles a year? They're winging their way over my house this month with their haunting cries as if to escape the falling leaves. Have you ever wondered why the salmon leave their spawning waters for a year of wide ranging travels in the ocean? One reason given by your grade school science book is that these migrations take animals to where the season gives them the best food.
Eh, maybe. Another reason will show up in that book in a few years after we dump the pro-industry and anti-science administration: they migrate so they won't become food for parasites. Just as our beef and pork feedlots feed us meat but pollute the environment, the burgeoning ring of fish farms around our coast are breeding grounds for marine parasites that escape to kill anywhere from 10 to 90% of the young fish in salmon schools with which they come in contact.
We suppose the rivers and forests and skies still look similar to the day europeans first set foot in America. But don't be fooled. Our footprint leaves no square inch of the country untainted. We will constantly discover yet more ways in which our excess consumption, by an inappropriately celebrated excess of humans*, has wiped out whole species or made them, and therefore our whole world, less healthy. You won't like soylent green.
*Hate to appear to disagree with a fellow progressive. Amy , I am solidly with you on what a social catastrophe this nation has bought by letting immigration law ooze forth from a collision of greed and phobia...but to look at our numbers as if only humans mattered will eventually hurt even the humans.
Eh, maybe. Another reason will show up in that book in a few years after we dump the pro-industry and anti-science administration: they migrate so they won't become food for parasites. Just as our beef and pork feedlots feed us meat but pollute the environment, the burgeoning ring of fish farms around our coast are breeding grounds for marine parasites that escape to kill anywhere from 10 to 90% of the young fish in salmon schools with which they come in contact.
We suppose the rivers and forests and skies still look similar to the day europeans first set foot in America. But don't be fooled. Our footprint leaves no square inch of the country untainted. We will constantly discover yet more ways in which our excess consumption, by an inappropriately celebrated excess of humans*, has wiped out whole species or made them, and therefore our whole world, less healthy. You won't like soylent green.
*Hate to appear to disagree with a fellow progressive. Amy , I am solidly with you on what a social catastrophe this nation has bought by letting immigration law ooze forth from a collision of greed and phobia...but to look at our numbers as if only humans mattered will eventually hurt even the humans.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Alley Gory
Through a divine computer foul-up, I was briefly dispatched to heaven when my heart monitor flatlined. I was there perhaps an hour, just being shown around by an angel who was sort of like a real estate agent. Upon discovering I had loudly and frequently expressed profound doubt that any such place as heaven existed, St Peter shoved me into the first express elevator down.
I then spent about an hour in hell shuttled between a series of clerks who searched their records in vain to see which rung and precisely which torment was destined to be my eternal repayment for 50-odd years of screwing up.
Then POP! I was back in the hospital bed, the orderly who plugged the electrodes into the wrong connection was being marched off for retraining and the priest who had been summoned to perform last rites was asking whether I'd experienced any "near death" phenomenon. I had to say yes, I'd accidentally gotten the grand tour. The priest begged for my fullest recollection.
Well, it was strange I must say. Both places were physically identical. The weather was a little warm and their were palm trees. The skies were a cloudless blue. It reminded me of Los Angeles on good smog day. "WHAT?" exclaimed the priest, "How can they be exactly the same?"
No, they were not, I assured him. It was most decidedly south central LA in both cases, but in heaven, no one pulled the trigger, they just looked at me and shook their heads with a smile. In hell, nobody dies before the ambulance gets there despite gallons of spilt blood and shattered limbs. Doctors, being punished for being too good at hiring lawyers when they were alive, work out their eternal damnation in permanently busy ERs and never lose a patient. But many are discharged with amputations and disfiguring wounds. Even those with hideous head wounds are not allowed to become unaware of where they are and how much they owe the hospital. And then they go on about their business until they get shot again. But I didn't get assigned a rung of hell, that was just the waiting room of hell's bureaucracy. Under presumption that you belong in hell, you are made to read newspapers while you wait as a foretaste of your final punishment.
I then spent about an hour in hell shuttled between a series of clerks who searched their records in vain to see which rung and precisely which torment was destined to be my eternal repayment for 50-odd years of screwing up.
Then POP! I was back in the hospital bed, the orderly who plugged the electrodes into the wrong connection was being marched off for retraining and the priest who had been summoned to perform last rites was asking whether I'd experienced any "near death" phenomenon. I had to say yes, I'd accidentally gotten the grand tour. The priest begged for my fullest recollection.
Well, it was strange I must say. Both places were physically identical. The weather was a little warm and their were palm trees. The skies were a cloudless blue. It reminded me of Los Angeles on good smog day. "WHAT?" exclaimed the priest, "How can they be exactly the same?"
No, they were not, I assured him. It was most decidedly south central LA in both cases, but in heaven, no one pulled the trigger, they just looked at me and shook their heads with a smile. In hell, nobody dies before the ambulance gets there despite gallons of spilt blood and shattered limbs. Doctors, being punished for being too good at hiring lawyers when they were alive, work out their eternal damnation in permanently busy ERs and never lose a patient. But many are discharged with amputations and disfiguring wounds. Even those with hideous head wounds are not allowed to become unaware of where they are and how much they owe the hospital. And then they go on about their business until they get shot again. But I didn't get assigned a rung of hell, that was just the waiting room of hell's bureaucracy. Under presumption that you belong in hell, you are made to read newspapers while you wait as a foretaste of your final punishment.
[A Bomb a nation] What if they torture people and nobody cared?
Blogging the vigil for a lost freedom...
Today, there were to be demonstrations against the "military commissions" act signed by a man who probably hasn't even read what he signed let alone read the constitution it violates. On NPR I heard report of the Washington DC protest...google news knows nothing of it at this hour.
Four of us made it to the post office on a busy street out in a "metro west" Boston suburb. Last minute messages to several area churches and the mosque were probably too late for anyone to respond. Nobody called us any names, 6 people signed the National Religious Campaign Against Torture petition. A small number until you know that was around 50% of the people we actually got to talk to in the parking lot of the post office. We tried to take up more visible spots but people in cars should not be mistaken for people who are actually present. A cop [the police station was just across the street] chased us away from the intersection. His gruff "I know what's good for you" mien probably meant he figured we'd get run over trying to talk to people stopped for the light. What?! A professor of computer science and a software engineer can't handle a situation hundreds of homeless people hawking papers and flowers do every day?
On second thought, don't answer that. You are all a bunch smartasses and I don't want to hear it.
One of us is quite resourceful and whipped my "holloween costume" into a proper placard:
Some people did read the sign if the traffic slowed but all the rest had a phone or a cup of coffee in hand and remain, even now, doggedly unaware the world is going to hell around them. That is worse than being called names. After an hour, the P.O. manager came out and told us we were on government property and would have to leave. No lawyers here, just tax payers, end of vigil.
How do you tell a nation it no longer wears the crown of "conscience of the world" and is in fact, far from it? What a change there has been here, even in my lifetime.
The data entry from the petition, which I also signed, is world class and I got an email back from them by the time I got to work:
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Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/17/2006 07:25:00 PM
Today, there were to be demonstrations against the "military commissions" act signed by a man who probably hasn't even read what he signed let alone read the constitution it violates. On NPR I heard report of the Washington DC protest...google news knows nothing of it at this hour.
Four of us made it to the post office on a busy street out in a "metro west" Boston suburb. Last minute messages to several area churches and the mosque were probably too late for anyone to respond. Nobody called us any names, 6 people signed the National Religious Campaign Against Torture petition. A small number until you know that was around 50% of the people we actually got to talk to in the parking lot of the post office. We tried to take up more visible spots but people in cars should not be mistaken for people who are actually present. A cop [the police station was just across the street] chased us away from the intersection. His gruff "I know what's good for you" mien probably meant he figured we'd get run over trying to talk to people stopped for the light. What?! A professor of computer science and a software engineer can't handle a situation hundreds of homeless people hawking papers and flowers do every day?
On second thought, don't answer that. You are all a bunch smartasses and I don't want to hear it.
One of us is quite resourceful and whipped my "holloween costume" into a proper placard:
Some people did read the sign if the traffic slowed but all the rest had a phone or a cup of coffee in hand and remain, even now, doggedly unaware the world is going to hell around them. That is worse than being called names. After an hour, the P.O. manager came out and told us we were on government property and would have to leave. No lawyers here, just tax payers, end of vigil.
How do you tell a nation it no longer wears the crown of "conscience of the world" and is in fact, far from it? What a change there has been here, even in my lifetime.
The data entry from the petition, which I also signed, is world class and I got an email back from them by the time I got to work:
--
Posted by GreenSmile to A Bomb a nation at 10/17/2006 07:25:00 PM
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