Tuesday/Wednesday

Tuesday June 2, 2009

. . . . . .Interesting developments today, to say the least.

. . . .One note that I need to put in here up top. The good folks at Gibson, Dunn, Crutcher in New York, the band of lawyers that monitors the Internet for columnists, bloggers and writers download this every morning right now, God knows why. So, to keep everything legal, the music that you hear in the playlist and podcast is music that I've bought and the artist received compensation for, it's for your enjoyment while you're reading, and not for download, which you couldn't do anyhow. Any opinions expressed here are strictly my own, and do not represent any other person or legal entity. All quotes that I use are linked and attributed to their original author and are set aside in block quotes. (Yes, guys, I have code programmed in that tells me when someone likes you, a law firm, downloads this)

. . . .I'm going to put my plug in here for the folks down at Hawkwind and the Rev Charla at the Blue Star Times. They've been living sustainability down in the mountains of Alabama for a long time, and helping people find healing and personal transformation for over two decades. Charla has a new program up and rolling, with a book, webinars and bridge calls. It's worth your time to check out.
. . .And while I'm at it, of course a shout for Tarwater and Lulu over at the Red Queen in Chattanooga for killer ink.

. . . . .I said it last week, and he's sticking by it. I notice that the President has not made Tiller's murder an issue, at least an Administration issue. He is refusing to entertain the "culture wars" and the issues that drove the extreme Right and the so-called "values" voters. Remember them from 2000 and 2004? He's sticking to policy issues, to economic issues, to issues of education, health care and energy independence.

. . . .Now the reality hits. GM is starting to lay off 1/3 of it's workforce. In Michigan alone, which is already a battered state, this will only hurt worse. There's no work here, no matter how good a face the Governor and Jeff Daniels try to put on it on the News Channels.

. . . CNN provides the what, the why and the when behind GM's bankruptcy, the 4th largest in U.S. history, here.

. . . . .Once that ball gets rolling, it's going to be hard to stop and it will have widespread effects. To go along with that, Shell Oil in a surprise move, switched CEO's at the top, forced a couple of people out and the new CEO is not wasting any time. As of today, reports from London and U.K. Guardian report that Shell could cut up to 25% of it's existing jobs under the new restructuring plan being unveiled over the last 72 hours.

. . . . .Despite the promised help from the Government, and it's companion website, Making Home Affordable, the New York Times reports that many homeowners are finding out that the promised help with their mortgages and payments just isn't forthcoming.

. . . .Add to that the fact that Los Angeles Times reports that Bank of America, one of the largest TARP recipients, and one of the largest members of the pool of banks who contributed to this crisis, can now legally take Social Security funds to cover overdraft fees.

. . . And people wonder why and how there's no confidence in the economic recovery plan.

. . . .Leads right to one of the coolest things I've seen and read in a while. Over at Vote.org, former Rep. Mike Gravel lays out The National Initiative For Democracy, the same thing as ballot inititiatives on a State level, only in this case, on a National and Federal level, as they refer to it on their website - "A Plan B for when our representatives don't represent us". I interpret it as true representative democracy. From their website:

Led by former US Senator Mike Gravel, the National Initiative empowers us to check and balance representatives, similar to ballot initiatives in 24 States, but at all levels from local to national and with major improvements. It gives us a "Plan B" whenever representatives don't represent us. (Do torture, perpetual wars and debt, domestic spying and bailouts for the rich represent you??)

A few Congress members have tried to get us this power from Congress since 1907, without success. Gravel discovered the Founders had the same problem: the existing 13 Legislatures refused to share their power with the USA. The Founders found a way: The People ratified the Constitution at the Constitutional Conventions. James Madison said "The people were in fact, the fountain of all power, and by resorting to them, all difficulties were got over."(His 2nd response in the 1787 Debate)

Now we resort to you to read and vote to ratify the National Initiative, to make real the promise of "government by the people." The National Initiative consists of the brief Democracy Amendment and the more detailed Democracy Act.

. . . .I encourage you to check it out, read more at the jump here.

. . . What is the deal with Spring in the Midwest. 47 in the morning in June? Ya gotta be kidding me.

. . . .The President leaves for the Mideast, and delivers one of the major speeches of his Presidency so far from Egypt in a couple of days. This is trickier than anyone knows or realizes. It's not clear cut and and one thing can't be separated from the other. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the two true major players in the region. Israel, led by Netanyahu, is back on a hard line, and Iran is making noise. We, and the rest of the world, are in a major economic recession. The Arabians, the Egyptians, and Iran all control the world's heroin, oil. The world can ill afford the members of the Middle Eastern Oil cartel shutting off the valves and driving the price per barrel up and shortening supplies, not at this point. The world cannot afford to have Israel getting a wild hair up it's ass and going ballistic, and it can't afford at this point to crank off Ahmedinejad. This is a fine line that needs to be trod here, and this trip and this speech have to go well.

. . . .But it really doesn't matter to the House Republicans, according to Eric Cantor, as reported today, Obama's Mideast policy is "misguided" and "dangerous".

. . . .Oh yeah, for those Obama detractors, who before the election were certain that somehow he was a secret "Muslim" or somehow had some sympathetic allies in the Mideast. The Al-Queada second-in-command called on Eqyptians to not allow Obama into their country as he was "an enemy".

. . . .As well, the President's trip brought Bin Laden out of hiding. He released a tape to Al-Jazeera when Obama hit the ground in Saudi Arabia threatening Americans and claiming that President Obama inflamed hatred towards the U.S. by directing Pakistan to crack down on Taliban militants in the Swat Valley.

. . . .In terms of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Reader Kay sends this one along, which is a conference call being sponsored by United For Peace and Justice, and is a report from Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan:

Eyewitness Report-Back: Kabul and Jalalabad
Tonight, June 3, 9-10 PM ET (Click here for the call details -- phone number and access code)

Tonight, UFPJ invites you to take part in a conference call briefing with David Wildman, a UFPJ Steering Committee member, who has recently returned from a 10-day visit to Afghanistan. David has traveled to the country four times and will provide a detailed overview of the facts on the ground, along with a deeper historical perspective of the conflict.

The conference call briefing will be tonight, Wednesday, June 3, from 9-10 PM ET. Please click here to view call details (phone number and access code).

Public education about Afghanistan and the effects of the U.S. troop presence is a crucial element of our work as peace activists. This work takes on even more importance in light of the lack of media coverage about the conflict. Last week, Peter Rothberg wrote in The Nation that "...there's so little media coverage of what's actually taking place in the country -- recent estimates of coverage by major news outlets report that a scant 0.6% of reporting has been devoted to Afghanistan."

We have much to do to shift public opinion and to change the narrative of the conflict. But to do this, we must educate ourselves and heighten our own sensibilities towards what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan.

That's why UFPJ invites you to tonight's conference call briefing with David Wildman at 9 PM ET. Please join us!

UFPJ

. . . I suppose it's a good thing, but Dick Cheney finally admitting that there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq? Talk about too little, too late.

. . . .Cody is promising me a review of the Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction Concert on Sunday night, but I'm looking forward to his review of Tom Morello and the Street Sweeper Social Club, he said they flat out rocked.

. . . .What's disgusting to me about the current incarnation of the Republican Party and it's fringe leaders, those non-elected ones like Gingrich, Cheney and Limbaugh? The fact that the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, that it was a party that was born in a "free" state, Michigan, away from the whips of the slavers, and was the party of equality, liberty and freedom for all. How they have betrayed their founding principles.

. . . .The current one being their treatment of Judge Sotomayor. It was refreshing to see Michael Steele on CNN on Tuesday morning grow a set and declare that Gingrich and Limbaugh weren't elected officials and didn't have a seat on on the Senate Judiciary Committee, those people whose job it really is to "advise and consent".

. . . . Conservative talk show host John Batchelor on the GOP's treatment of Sotomayor in today's Daily Beast:

The whimpering of the Republican officeholders at the rants of Limbaugh, Gingrich, Tancredo, and Cheney is now so panicky that it is no longer sufficient to presume it is because the politicians fear the Hispanic vote over Sonia Sotomayor or the generic party polls about torture and the bailouts. Rather, it is because the Republican remnants in Congress are arrogant adults who have, by their wordless toleration of the demagogues, become the thing they fear more than losing. They have become cowards.

After hearing out 100 hours of indecency hurled at the ardent and articulate Sotomayor by the Nouveau Demagogues and their choir, and hearing nothing in passionate rebuke from the GOP leaders on the Hill, it is time to accuse each and every one of the Republicans in Congress of betrayal. It is time to say they have abandoned the people who elected them to represent a political party that was built, at the heroic moment of its birth under the guns of the slavers, upon a belief in liberty for all. It is time to challenge them to speak up loudly for our better angels in the face of the conjurers or else confess their lack of interest in the history of the party and find another, less-demanding vocation.. . . . . . .

. . . . .Where are the Republicans of Congress to challenge these two giddy character assassins as unacceptable cranks, immediately and loudly? Are they afraid of a couple of middle-aged multimillionaires? Are they ashamed of their own impotence? Don’t they see that their silence encourages the rascals? Don’t they have a Twitter page? What do you think Joe Welch meant when he told Joe McCarthy, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator?” Does the party’s history have no meaning to you on the Hill?

. . . .Read the rest at the jump here.

. . . .I have absolutely got to get some pots of annuals for this place. The Land of the Lost look of the ferns has absolutely gotten to me.

. . . Now as of Wednesday afternoon; Gingrich had issued a written apology for calling Sotomayor a "racist" but Limbaugh says he "won't back down". Catch both of them here.

. . . .Former top Bush Strategist Mark McKinnon: "If Republicans make a big deal out of opposing Sotomayor, we will be hurling ourselves off a cliff. Death will not be assured, but major injury will be."

. . . .Crooks and Liars turned up a C-SPAN video of Pat Buchanan criticizing Sotomayor for learning English, and the way she learned it.

. . . .From Bob Herbert, in the New York Times, in his op-ed piece:

One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.. . . .
. . . .It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing! . . . . .Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

. . . .Read the rest of it here.

. . . .Mona Charen takes on the overt racism being demonstrated by Gingrich, Limbaugh and Rove here.

. . . . More solutions around the upgrading of the national electrical grid. Again, the smartest, highest return on investment and most efficient work we could do to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, our dependence on oil period, and put money back in everyone's wallets. Sticking with Wired.com, here's another one:

Problem Building wind turbines and solar farms in the middle of nowhere sounds great. But it's not easy to move all that clean energy to the people. Obama just signed into law $6 billion in loan guarantees for energy projects, including new transmission lines. But constructing those lines will require the approval of landowners and city planners, who want the electricity but not the unsightly high-voltage wires strung across their property.

Solution Go underground—or underwater. The Trans Bay Cable will link San Francisco to 400 megawatts of power—some from the Altamont Pass wind farms near Livermore, California, and the rest from other sources throughout the state. Set to open in 2010, it's a $500 million project that everyone in the area wanted built ... somewhere else. As a result, the planned route looks like the path an escaped convict would take if he wanted to minimize contact with humans, especially of the activist and bureaucratic kind.

. . . .And just one of the coolest, unexplained things that I've read in a while. What the picture here depicts another one of the unexplained phenomena in the Universe. Gizmodo reports on this one, which shows a "picture" of what NASA released back in October of how the entire universe, every galaxy, is unexplainably swirling towards a tiny slice of space towards "dark matter", which up until now, has been only a phase in Sci-fi novels and episodes of Star Trek.. . . .Outta here for today. Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they slip through your hands. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right here, right now. This isn't a dress rehearsal. Change your world, change yourself and change the world around you.

. . . Got your back, somewhere out there in the night.

The Desolation Angel
[where: Hell, Michigan 48137]