TW3 — more, and an announcement

Well, dearhearts — my computer is fried, and just limping long enough for this last post. I will have to do major surgery on it; so just when it looked like I could jump back in, I’m jumping back out. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Life is one long series of Oh Shit Oh Dear’s, lately. So consider this notice of going dark for a few days — I’ll be back soon as I can. Meanwhile, a couple of good reads by Morford and Friedman … sadly, only two links to the protest information that I could get to; but DO NOT MISS the last piece, a diary entry over at Kos that you will want to see — and …

That Was The Week That Was … disturbingly hard on children.

Be well, be blessed in the meanwhile …

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
September 2, 2008

One million people fled New Orleans to avoid Hurricane
Gustav, which landed in Louisiana as a weakened category-2
hurricane and caused relatively little damage. Mississippi
officials ordered people still living in the FEMA trailers
erected after Hurricane Katrina to evacuate, and John
McCain canceled opening-day ceremonies for the Republican
National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint
Paul, Minnesota. “This is a time when we have to do away
with our party politics and we have to act as Americans,”
said McCain. “Not as Republicans.” McCain picked Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin, 44, as his running mate. Palin, an
evangelical Christian, supports the death penalty,
believes that the “jury’s still out” on global warming,
opposes abortion, and is mother to five children: Track,
Bristol, Willow, Piper, and five-month-old Trig, who has
Down syndrome. Rumors arose that Bristol, 17, was the
actual mother of Trig; in response, Palin announced that
Bristol was actually five months pregnant with the child
of a man named “Levi” and would soon marry him. 1.2
million people were left homeless by monsoon floods in the
Indian state of Bihar.

Foreclosure rates were rising in the Dallas-Fort Worth
region. “We’ve got a housing issue, [but] evidently not in
Dallas,” said President George W. Bush to a recent
gathering of Houston G.O.P. donors, “because Laura’s over
there trying to buy a house today… I said: ‘Honey, we’ve
been on government pay now for 14 years. Go slow!’”
Citibank, facing huge losses, asked its bankers to stop
making color photocopies and to start printing internal
presentations on both sides of the page, and hip-hop mogul
P. Diddy announced that the rising price of fuel had
forced him to give up private-jet travel. “Can you believe
this, I’m actually flying commercial!” he said. “Gas
prices are too motherfuckin’ high. I want to give a
shout-out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and sisters and
all my brothers and sisters from all the countries that
have oil. If y’all could please send me some oil for my
jet, I would truly appreciate it.” Japanese Prime Minister
Yasuo Fukuda resigned, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin saved a television crew from attack by shooting an
escaped Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun. Putin also
announced a ban on poultry imports from 19 U.S. companies,
explaining that their chicken failed to meet sanitary
standards and that the ban had nothing to do with ongoing
political tensions over Georgia. A pregnant woman sued
Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Dennis Northcutt, claiming
he arranged for his cousin to beat her up in an attempt to
harm her unborn child, and the attorney for a nearly
half-ton Texas woman said she could not have beaten her
toddler nephew to death because her obesity limits her
movement. An Ohioan named China Arnold was convicted of
microwaving her one-month-old baby, Paris Talley, to
death.

A United Nations investigation of last week’s coalition
airstrikes in Afghanistan found that the United States had
killed 90 civilians, including 60 sleeping children, and
Nigerian religious leader Mohammadu Bello Abubakar, who is
84, accepted an Islamic decree that would force him to
divorce 82, or 95 percent, of his 86 wives. An Australian
plastic surgeon who received oral sex from a patient
before providing her with a nose job was fighting to keep
his medical license. “Knowing her nose better than anyone
else,” said Dr. Martyn Mendelsohn, “I was in a unique
position to take care of the problem.” A man concerned
that he had injected air into his veins while shooting
cocaine tried to amputate his own arm with a butter knife,
and then a butcher knife, at a Denny’s Restaurant in
California, and European officials warned that Botox
injections could have dangerous side effects, including
death. Nearly half a million people in developing nations
were manufacturing virtual weapons and mounts to sell to
players of online video games such as World of Warcraft,
and the Pentagon launched a program that aims to create an
artificial brain within the next decade. NASA confirmed
that laptops in space had been infected with the virus
Gammima.AG, and Australian scientists determined that
sponges have the genes necessary to express
nerves. Scientists studying the Permian-Triassic Mass
Extinction, which annihilated much of life on Earth 251
million years ago, attributed the die-off to floods of
reeking Siberian lava, which released carbon dioxide and
created a greenhouse effect, thereby starving oceans of
oxygen and poisoning the atmosphere. “In the late
Permian,” said geoscientist Lee Kump, “Earth itself was
the villain. But today we’ve stepped in as the villain.”

– Gemma Sieff
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/WeeklyReview2008-09-02

God ditches the GOP
This just in: Even the Lord has abandoned the desperate, shameful Right
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, September 3, 2008

This just in: Hurricane of delicious irony slams Republican National Convention, flooding the streets of Minneapolis/St. Paul with rivers of savage hypocrisy as levees of evangelical denial and sexual confusion overflow into the streets, leaving stunned party members scrambling in vain for shaky moral high ground.

Meanwhile, clever looters smash windows of opportunity and steal valuable quips about underage sex and teen pregnancy, as everyone gets a very unsettling if not downright weird taste of warped pro-gun anti-choice elk-kabob conservative Alaskan family values. YouTube at 11.

Yes, the rumors are true. The cosmic votes have all been tallied, and I do believe we can now say, with some measure of happy certainty, that God appears to be just as sick-to-death of the Republican Party as the rest of us.

But let’s back up for a moment, just to be sure. Let’s imagine the hot ‘n’ febrile reaction if, say, an enormous storm had come thundering through Denver during DNC ‘08, if some gale force winds or bowel-shaking rainfall had shut the city down, prophetically timing itself just right to thwart the Democratic Party’s biggest party and stop Barack Obama from making all sorts of stunning history as he delivered his record-breaking speech to a wary and Bush-ravaged nation.

Let us, in other words, imagine that “rains of Biblical proportions” had slammed the DNC to a halt, just as those nutball pastors from Focus on the Family prayed it would.

Can you imagine the joyful outcry? The righteous outpourings of “Praise Jesus!” from the scandal-plagued evangelicals from Orange County to Colorado Springs, with the corpse of Jerry Falwell itself rising from the depths of Hell’s own restroom to yelp “Ha! God smites the gay-loving heathens once again! Now, who wants to come down here ‘n’ wash my back?”

Funny, then, the ironies of nature and time and God, no? For there was Gustav, roaring through the eastern seaboard and shutting down a large, sweaty chunk of the Republican National Convention as he conjured all manner of painful Katrina-esque nightmares, reminding anyone with the slightest sense of integrity of just how inept and dangerous the Republican Party has been lo these past eight insufferable years. Ah, cosmic irony. Sweet like candy.

Perhaps God has shifted political allegiances? Perhaps She has finally revealed her true liberal colors? Or perhaps She’s simply indulging in a bit of the same cosmic Schadenfreude as the rest of us, enjoying the various miseries, scandals, humiliations, missteps, gay-outings, meth addictions and unmarried teen pregnancies of the crumbling GOP as they writhe and squirm and attempt to make this McCain/Palin ticket seem even the slightest bit palatable, as opposed to downright frightening. You think?

How else to explain the latest smack of GOP shame, the lovely news that Sarah Palin’s unwed 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant? Even in Alaska, that’s still considered “a little young” to be knocked up, despite how the Palins say the father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, a self-proclaimed “f–in’ redneck” who “lives for hockey” and doesn’t want kids, will “do the right thing” by Bristol, which certainly seems like sad shorthand for “sham marriage to lock down desperately needed evangelical support for John McCain.” Oh, you poor kids.

To be sure, it’s moments like these that make it difficult not to take some delight, not to sit back and feel the ironic righteousness melt over us like hot Cheez-Whiz over an Alaskan mooseburger. After all, Sarah Palin is anti-choice, pro-abstinence, anti sex-ed, religiously fundamentalist, a creationist, about as friendly to feminism and women’s reproductive rights as John McCain is to his beloved “gooks.”

But here’s the saddest part of all: Governor Palin knew. She absolutely had to realize that her daughter’s unfortunate condition would come to light when McCain offered her this bizarre gig. To which we can only say: Way to shove your own daughter under the wheels of the GOP Machine, Governor Palin. Ultimate sacrifice indeed.

Ah, but perhaps it’s all a bit too much. Perhaps you think this perspective is just too negative, ugly, far too similar to how the right itself operates, full of low-vibration energy and fear and abhorrence of the Other, all topped by a cheerless belief in a cruel, micromanaging God who is so petty and small as to actually care about who you love, or how you vote, or what kind of sex you enjoy. Let me say this: I agree completely.

So let’s flip it around. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past eight years, it’s that the cavalcade of wanton scandal and hypocrisy among the GOP is never-ending, unstoppable, far more the rule than the exception. We could be here all day.

So, on to the good news: A staggering 40 million Americans watched Obama deliver his spectacular, rain-free speech in Denver. That’s more than the opening ceremony of Olympics. More than “American Idol.” Half again as much as Kerry or Bush earned for similar speeches from years before and an all-time record for any televised political speech anywhere. What a thing.

And let’s recall, for a moment, Obama in Berlin back in July, where nearly a quarter million locals turned up to see a man who wasn’t yet even a world leader, but merely a candidate. Recall those stunning images of cheering throngs at the Victory Column, hundreds of thousands of eager, curious foreigners, all there to catch a glimpse not of Mick Jagger or the Pope, not of the Dalai Lama or Brad Pitt, but a brilliant young American senator.

That’s not middling celebrity. That’s not merely good PR on behalf of Obama’s team. That’s something else entirely, a world electrified by new possibility. Hell, McCain would be lucky to draw 100 onlookers to the airport Sheraton, and most of those would be EMTs.

Even Bill Clinton, with his effortless charisma and fantastic oratory skill, could never draw like Obama. This man fills stadiums. Electrifies not just Democrats, but entire nations. He has that rarest of political power, the ability to make people want to get out there and feel it, be part of the shift. Bush gave the world hives. McCain gives the world the creeps. Obama gives the world goosebumps. Simple as that.

You gotta admit, amidst all the GOP scandal and meltdown and Obama’s revitalizing, meteoric rise to international beacon of change — a guy who, in Joe Biden’s words, has “grabbed the lightning” like no one he’s ever seen before — it’s tempting to say even God has abandoned the religious right.

Then again, it’s probably far more accurate to say She was never really over there in the first place. ++

And Then There Was One
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
September 2, 2008

As we emerge from Labor Day, college students are gathering back on campuses not only to start the fall semester, but also, in some cases, to vote for the first time in a presidential election. There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.

With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.

Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate.

So please, students, when McCain comes to your campus and flashes a few posters of wind turbines and solar panels, ask him why he has been AWOL when it came to Congress supporting these new technologies.

“Back in June, the Republican Party had a round-up,” said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “One of the unbranded cattle — a wizened old maverick name John McCain — finally got roped. Then they branded him with a big ‘Lazy O’ — George Bush’s brand, where the O stands for oil. No more maverick.

“One of McCain’s last independent policies putting him at odds with Bush was his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” added Pope, “yet he has now picked a running mate who has opposed holding big oil accountable and been dismissive of alternative energy while focusing her work on more oil drilling in a wildlife refuge and off of our coasts. While the northern edge of her state literally falls into the rising Arctic Ocean, Sarah Palin says, ‘The jury is still out on global warming.’ She’s the one hanging the jury — and John McCain is going to
let her.”

Indeed, Palin’s much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits, not how to end our addiction. Barack Obama should be doing more to promote his green agenda, but at least he had the courage, in the heat of a Democratic primary, not to pander to voters by calling for a lifting of the gasoline tax. And while he has come out for a limited expansion of offshore drilling, he has refrained from misleading voters that this is in any way a solution to our energy problems.

I am not against a limited expansion of off-shore drilling now. But it is a complete sideshow. By constantly pounding into voters that his energy focus is to “drill, drill, drill,” McCain is diverting attention from what should be one of the central issues in this election: who has the better plan to promote massive innovation around clean power technologies and energy efficiency.

Why? Because renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

So, college students, don’t let anyone tell you that on the issue of green, this election is not important. It is vitally important, and the alternatives could not be more black and white. ++

bonus

At the RNC, Starhawk’s permaculture bus was seized by the cops, some of her people arrested and tazed without reason … read the entries here:
http://www.starhawk.org/

Preventive Detention
Howard Rodman, HuffPo
8/31/08

Biden: Criminal charges against Bush Admin. on the table
by Devin
Wed Sep 03, 2008

Holy crap. Boy howdy, did Political Radar bury the lede in a big way. I direct your attention to the 9th and 10th paragraphs of their blog post about Biden ripping into Bush today:

Looking to the future but with one eye on the past, Biden also promised that an Obama-Biden government would go through Bush administration data with “a fine-toothed comb” and pursue criminal charges if necessary.

“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation,” he said, “they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution - out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law.”

The man who is very likely going to be the next Vice-President of this country just said that they are going to undertake a detailed review of the last eight years of Bush Administration conduct and pursue criminal charges where they are warranted.

Wow. Just….wow.

[...]

Update #2: As pointed out in the comments, Obama himself has said something similar recently. I must have missed that when it first appeared. But I would like to point out that Biden’s statement is much more aggressive than Obama’s, and that in itself is noteworthy. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have
fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the
fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get
through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell
those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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