Yes, you!!

Thanks to http://www.comicstripoftheday.com/ for including this on Nov 5, 2011, and
for all his other wonderful posts.

Wonderful post by Minnesota Matron

Minnesota Matron's current post with sterling advice for Herman Cain came in over Google Reader this evening, and it's too good to keep for myself.  I especially like the part where she says, 

So The next time you have the bully pulpit, forget Congress, forget Wall Street, forget those angry bankers. Save that rage for the sex offenders and you have a sure-fire strategy for success.

You, Mr. Cain, are the Reform Candidate. Starting with yourself.

Bye, Rock Creek Free Press--I'll miss you!

Rock Creek Free Press (RCFP), a local newspaper distributed via paid subscription and free from vending boxes in the DC metro area, has printed its final issue this September. If you open the preceding link to its online edition, you can download a more legible .pdf copy of RCFP's "Tenth Anniversary 9/11 Special Edition."

Matt Sullivan, RCFP's editor and publisher, is a former computer industry worker. Sullivan finally got tired of working with machines and opened his own skylight installation business to support his family and the RCFP. For the past five years Sullivan, who lives in Bethesda, MD, has spent roughly three weeks out of every month on the skylight business and the remaining 4th week on the newspaper. Sullivan and volunteers distributed RCFP's first issue of 5000 copies free at D.C.'s huge antiwar rally on January 27, 2007. Sullivan jumped right into the fray in the first paragraph of an article top right under the banner:

In a world where the “paper of record”
can print one article after another touting
imagined WMDs while it beats the drum
for war; where the primary news outlet
of the nations capitol acts as the stenographer
of administration propaganda; the
launch of a newspaper not afraid to print
the truth is big news.

Virtually every month since then, the RCFP has gone after the multitude of illusions and falsehoods spewing from the Big Important Newspapers and served up thoughtful articles on

9/11 truth
Loss of constitutional rights
Vaccine dangers
Government corruption

The big Wall Street-approved rags continue to tout the case for #1 Wall Street, #2 the War, and #3 Ike's "military-industrial complex" in general. Good luck to us if that's all we can read or hear about. Where else will we be able to "Read the Stories Others Fear to Print"?? Dang! I'm going to miss the Rock Creek Free Press!

Attention: 42 Republican Senators and those who elected them.....

My grandnephew Steve says,

If I showed up to work and said that I have no intention of doing anything for the next 2 months and would prevent everyone else from doing anything as well, then I would be fired in a heartbeat. Why should senators be treated differently?

More good reads on Wikileaks

DemocracyforCalifornia hits another home run.   The post "Cablegate and the Little Website that Roared" is another treasure trove for people looking for information you can trust. 

 If you have time for just one of DfC's resources, check this out:

An invaluable resource: http://wlcentral.org/ 

Best reads on Wikileaks

Don't know what to think of the Wikileaks bombshell? Try these essays.  Thanks to today's Hullabaloo by Digby for putting us on their trail.

1.  This essay is by Glenn Greenwald in Salon, and it makes the most sense of anything I've read.

2.  This essay is by Julian Assange, and it explains his philosophy--why he's doing this. Before we accuse him of anything sinister, we owe it to ourselves to find out just what he intends.

Hope...and resistance

Today's Truthout arrived with Real Hope Is About Doing Something, by Chris Hedges. It's long and thoughtful. I especially liked the last paragraphs:

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

W.H. Auden wrote:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Gaza or a child in the blighted pockets of Washington, D.C., diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing.

I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot assure you that thousands will converge on Lafayette Park in solidarity. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. I cannot say that anyone in Congress or the White House, anyone in the boardrooms of the corporations that cannibalize our nation, will be moved by pity to act for the common good. I cannot tell you these wars will end or the hungry will be fed. I cannot say that justice will roll down like a mighty wave and restore our nation to sanity. But I can say this: If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our resistance will be successful. Hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Also from Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

P.S. I especially liked "Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think." What was he talking about, do you suppose???

President Announces Pay Freeze for "Most" Federal Workers?

And a Happy Thanksgiving/Merry Christmas/Happy New Year/Happy Valentine's Day/Happy Mothers and Fathers Day/Happy Independence Day/Happy Columbus Day/Happy Birthday to you, too, Mr. President! You saved us from the distasteful task of electing McCain and She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named--but we got a new manifestation of Scrooge all the same. You promptly announced there will be no COLA for Social Security recipients (code: old and disabled) for two years, and now you're telling us there will be no pay raise this year for federal workers (code: anyone left with a job). The disastrous Republican tax rates and tax cuts will remain the same, however--unless one of your pet financial geniuses (code: holdovers from W) can find a way to shovel even more $$ to the very rich.

Also, please don't send me emails thanking me for my hard work and financial sacrifices in getting you elected. It's too tempting for me to say you're not welcome.

You pour your heart and our treasure (I'm thinking more of our young men and women, but also our dollars) into keeping the diabolical wars going. I see you even made phone calls to soldiers, wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving. Nice. Beats W's theatrical turkey dinner visit to Iraq. It seems to me to be about the same thing, though.

Why not bring our military home alive and call off our wars? And please try not to fan the flames in Korea, North and South. Cancel the war games and pretend missile practice at sea. Why not get us OUT of Afghanistan, OUT of Iraq, and OUT of the business of stealing from the poor and giving to the rich that has taken over this country.

That would be a change, don't you think?

Get out your crayons.....

This caught my eye on Hullabaloo this morning:

It appears that the NY Times made a major error which, so far, it's refusing to correct. I understand that the ombudsman may take it up if enough people draw it to his attention. This one's important. If you have a chance to read the article I linked and send a quick, polite note to the Ombudsman at public@nytimes.com it could make a difference. It's bad enough that people are relying on projections 75 years into the future to destroy the New Deal, but the least they could do is correct numbers that are clearly incorrect today. Social Security is not going broke in 2015.

You don't have to be paranoid to know they ARE out to get us....

The Book on Bush....

Have a thought to buying or reading W's new "memoir"/collective writing project, Decision Points? It perches on top of Amazon's best-seller list today, but a better book about Bush and his family is Family of Secrets, by Russ Baker. Subtitled, "The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Past 50 Years," Baker's book is full of eye-openers.

Before I say anything else, I wish to say regarding George W. Bush--and even more his family--that we, the American people, do need eye-openers and not the kind that come in glasses or with ice cubes. Sad to say, we are not going to get this from either Bush's new book OR the American media, and I leave it to your imagination--if it hasn't already been blown by the events of the past 10 years--to tell you why.

Here's a hint. In Chapter I, "How Did Bush Happen?" of Family of Secrets, author Russ Baker begins,

This is the story of a family we thought we knew--and a country we have barely begun to comprehend.
George Bush, father and son, are vastly more complicated, and their doings are vastly more troubling, than the conventional wisdom would have it. This book reveals the story behind their story, documenting the secrets that the House of Bush has long sought to obscure.
These revelations about the Bushes lead in turn to an even more disturbing truth about the country itself. It's not just that such a clan could occupy the presidency or vice presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years and remain essentially unknown. It's that the methods of stealth and manipulation that powered their rise reflect a deeper ill: the American public's increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.

Intrigued? By all means, buy or borrow Family of Secrets and prepare to lose yourself in its almost 600 pages of substantiated revelations that at the very least clearly illuminate the transfer of America's vast wealth to the very few.

Role Model for Snoozeville

The exemplary blog, DemocracyforCalifornia, has been posting what looks to be a thorough rundown of the California state and local elections this year. I don't know enough about the politics of that huge state, but the way DfC has broken it down makes me yearn for something like this here in Maryland.

It's business as usual here in Snoozeville right now...Our outgoing county executive was arrested with his wife, whom we just elected to the county board of supervisors, as they tried to get out of their house with a bunch of payola from developers. The wife, when taken into custody, had nearly $80,000 in US currency stuffed in her bra. (Her name on the ballot was "Jane Doe"(D)--should have been (DD)!) She earlier had been recorded on tape while flushing a check for another $100,000 down the toilet. (Dang! Why don't these developers give these bribes right to the voters instead of to crooks??!!!)

My point is that we don't have anything we can rely on when we're preparing to vote in our local elections. Our yards are full of signs foisted on us by door-to-door campaigners, and we get reams of flyers every time we leave the house, but they don't tell us much. They don't tell us who is in whose pocket. The newspapers aren't going to tell us this.

Great job, DemocracyforCalifornia. You're a shining example of democracy in action.

Go Away, Shrub

Will we ever be rid of this American virus? Is there any limit to the damage this one family plus the CIA can do to our country? William Rivers Pitt in Truthout says it all.

George W. Bush was all over my television this past week, all over the newspapers, and the feelings inspired by his sudden reappearance are almost beyond my capacity to describe. There was the story about his hearty approval of waterboarding. There was the story that had him contemplating dropping Dick Cheney from the administration. There was the story that had him describing himself as a "dissenter" on the Iraq invasion. He did interviews, and excerpts of his new book dribbled out, and it was all too much to endure.

This is the guy, I thought to myself when I saw his face or heard his voice. This is the guy.

This is the guy who took a massive Clinton administration budget surplus and gave it away to his friends at the top of the tax bracket, a move that laid the groundwork for our current economic calamity.

This is the guy who breezed past a pointed warning about Osama bin Laden, terrorism and airplanes on August 6, 2001, because he was on vacation and couldn't be bothered.

This is the guy who parlayed that massive failure into a constant goad of fear to be wielded with impunity against the people he purported to lead. Plastic sheeting and duct tape, anthrax under your pillow, and of course, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This is the guy who, not even a month after the Towers came down, looked into a television camera and said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."

Oh yes, this is the guy who stood before the American people in January of 2003 and proclaimed that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger for use in a "robust" nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq enjoyed connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

This was the guy who presided over the outing of a deep-cover CIA agent after her husband had the temerity to call him a liar in the public prints. That agent was running a network for the purpose of thwarting any person or group that might try to deliver weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

This is the guy who strutted like a bantam rooster under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," bragging about the end of a war that was to grind on for seven more years, and grinds on even to this day, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

This is the guy who said "Bring it on" and put a target on the backs of tens of thousands of US troops. This is the guy who is personally responsible for the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. The body count from his administration is breathtaking in size and scope.

This is the guy who allowed the intelligence services of this nation to violate the Constitutional rights of its citizens in a way never seen before.

This is the guy who turned the entire world against America after that same world embraced us so completely after September 11. World leaders could not stand to be in the same room with him, and openly mocked him, thus humiliating us all.

This is the guy who literally fiddled while Hurricane Katrina devoured the city of New Orleans.

This guy actually said he considered dropping Cheney from the administration? It would be comic if it were not so pointedly fraudulent. Cheney ran the government, ran roughshod over every right he found meddlesome, and Bush sat by and let him do it with that same simpering smirk on his face.

This is the guy who set stem cell research back more than a decade because of his overarching fealty to "snowflake babies" over living, breathing, suffering people.

This is the guy who unleashed all the horrors of the torture chamber because the lawyers said it was OK. If the president does it, it's not illegal, right? Nixon came up with that line, but this is the guy who took it farther than it has ever been taken before.

This is the guy, and now he's back on my television again, and it makes me want to eat my own teeth. I endured him for eight long, brutal years, and have often thought since that no matter how bad things get - and they have, indeed, gotten pretty damned bad - I don't have to endure his face or his voice or his abject serial failures anymore.

But now he's back, and it is like returning to a nightmare.

I don't know what this George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour will actually accomplish in the end. The same 20% of the country that kept his approval ratings from slipping into single digits - said group now being known as the "Tea Party" - will go out and buy his book. They will lap up his mealy-mouthed pabulum like cats into the cream, and some of our "mainstream" commentators will try to shoehorn the idea that he is missed into the national conversation.

He is not. George W. Bush was, and likely will forever be, the single worst American president in the nation's history. To outstrip his remarkable record of failure, criminality and disgrace, a future president will have to personally cause the Earth to crash into the sun.

All I can do for now is avoid the TV, stay away from the newspapers, and pray to God on High that this small fraction of a man will soon retreat back into the ignominy from which he has emerged. There is no salvaging him, and thanks to him, there may be no salvaging America in his aftermath.

We are all children of this bastard fool now. The least he can do is stay in the shadows where he belongs, while we toil and sweat to repair what he wrought.

Thank God, It's SENATOR AL FRANKEN, D-MN!!!!

I googled "Al Franken's best quotes," and here's a remarkable collection from "Al Franken Sense, the Al Franken Forum." Al is the kind of Democrat I can relate to. He's also funny.

A sample of the wit & wisdom of Chairman Al:

In many ways I'm still a Hubert Humphrey Democrat -- someone who believes in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. A society is judged by how it treats the elderly, the sick, the impoverished. To me it's a matter of ethics and compassion.
- Al Franken, Playboy interview

No Child Left Behind is the most ironically named act, piece of legislation since the 1942 Japanese Family Leave Act.
- Al Franken, in response to the 2004 SOTU address

Oh, What Doesn't Kill You Can Have Lingering Aftereffects!
- Al Franken, Oh, the Things I Know, chapter title

Read the rest, too....

Yeah, them too....

The "Money" section of the NYTimes today has a great headline: "Et tu, AARP? Good Guys Cut 401(k)s, Too". The article, by Ron Lieber, may be good, but the headline stopped me in my tracks. It's clever, but the headline writer was too charitable.

AARP sold us out to Big Pharma with the Medicare Drug Act. My prescription prices DOUBLED way back when that little piece of legislative jiujitsu passed, and I quit AARP on the spot. "Good guys"? I don't think so. I haven't been able to bring myself to forgive them, either, despite their wonderful magazine.

But that's ok. Clarissa Pinkola Estes has a great section on forgiveness in her intriguing book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. Without trying to find the book in this place so I can look it up (a three-day job), this is the main thing I remember her saying about forgiveness: It happens in stages. You can't just "forgive" someone and feel all better all at once. Estes says the first stage of forgiving an injury is to quit obsessing over it. Just quit thinking about it endlessly. Makes sense to me. I guess I was getting past stage one with AARP, too. I'd pretty much forgotten all about them.

Except, since retiring, I've started to notice all the goodies you can get now with an AARP membership. About all an AARP card used used to get you was senior rates on movies and a 10% discount at certain hotel chains. Nowadays the senior rate on movies is the same as the matinee rate for everyone else. You have go to go a movie after 6 p.m. if you want the old folks' discount. That's too LATE!! I rarely go out after supper.

Still, there's lots more now for anyone with an AARP membership: you can get special prices or discounts on everything from cruises to cell phones to tow trucks.

Well, too bad. They still sound like their main goal is watching out for #1, never mind their constituents OR their workers. Fooey.

Same old same old

Nobody wants to pay for a transit system in DC, especially the pols who love to meddle in our business--like the gun nuts making sure DC can't ban handguns. Meanwhile, nine people, including the young mother driving the train who fought valiantly to stop it with its worthless brakes, are dead because the Metro put off not just replacing the cars but fixing the brakes.

And the bullets are flying where I live, but that doesn't bother them. They don't live here, and neither do their constituents (who nevertheless flock to DC with their chidren whenever school is out--and ride our metro).

Robert McCartney, reporting in the WashPost, has a great column this morning. Salient sentences (love the sound of that....ha):

There's no good alternative to renovating Metro, given the need to reduce traffic and greenhouse gases, and to move around the 2 million new residents that the region is expected to attract by 2030.

...

Last year, Congress authorized $150 million a year for Metro after the District, Virginia and Maryland promised to match it: $50 million from each jurisdiction each year.

Maddeningly, however, the Obama administration's budget for the fiscal year starting in October did not include the money. One factor was federal unhappiness with squabbling among the three jurisdictions over an issue regarding the Metro board. Getting that money this year should be a top priority for the region's congressional delegation.

Hey, Mr. President....You live here, too. We can't all send our kids to school in cars driven by the Secret Service. The rich bankers got theirs, and the Pentagon gets billions to kill people, other countries' and our own. What about the rest of us? Please get with it on public transportattion.

Stand with Dr. Dean

Let me quote from the email he sent this afternoon:

Even while Republicans fight tooth and nail against allowing Americans the choice of a universally available public healthcare option; the American people continue to show overwhelming support -- 8 out of 10 Americans in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

But for-profit insurance companies and HMO's are working hard to strip it from any upcoming healthcare bill. They don't want Americans to have a choice because they know they'll have to lower costs and provide better care. They will stop at nothing to kill real reform and there are a lot of Senators in Congress looking for ways to help them.

Republicans have insurance companies on their side. We have the American people on ours. Now that we have the momentum for real reform, we need to make it clear we won't accept anything less than a strong public option.

Pleaee add your name to the petition.

Single Payer Health Care!!

Darlene sent this today. Marcy Winograd is co-founder of the L.A. chapter of Progressive Democrats of America.

Pass this along!

Bye, WaPo

The Washington Post appears to be going the way of its Moonie counterpart across town. Word has it they've fired Dan Froomkin, easily one of their top writers and most quoted bloggers. Glenn Greenwald in today's Salon has the story

As Greenwald notes, Froomkin stands apart from the Post's darlings of the rightwing, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, as a real journalist.

It's no secret that I have disliked the Post. But now I refuse to even READ it, even if it's lying on the table at Starbucks, left behind by a previous coffee drinker. Or on the dining table at my best friend's house!!!! (yes, you, dear...)

Wotever is in the DC water these days? Even George W. Bush has come out of his self-impossed silence on his predecessor to criticize President Obama's handling of the cleanup of Bush's mess. Memo to former president: STFU, Dubya. Stuff the WashPost in your mouth if you get another urge to say anything.

God is great!

I am proud of the Iranian people. After it seems they have had an election stolen from them, they are rioting in the streets, marching, shouting, braving gunfire and death so that their votes may be counted.

In 2000, our elected president was taken from us, and a miserable puppet installed in his place by none other than the U.S. Supreme Court.

And what did we do? MANY of us marched in protest in subsequent days, but at the time, everyone was very polite. Even our elected president, Al Gore, demurred when the imposter told him "you don't have to be snippy about it."

History would be very different if, in that far off yesterday, we had shown the passion and courage the Iranian people are showing today. One news commentator earlier today said that the students and elderly and women were not alone in their protest. That several of the most influential Ayatollahs were backing them. This is why Ayatollah Khomeini has asked for an investigation of the election. This is why they have not been herded into prisons.

There is hope. And until they have satisfactory answers, the residents of Tehran have spilled out into the streets and told the world what they think.

God is great! And God bless the Iranian people.

WHEN WILL THE BANKS GIVE LOANS? Who is Joe Nocera? (hint: he ain't no plumber)

Well, enough of the singin and dancin....Jim in Florida has sent another key post. Here it is:

This morning at breakfast, Sandy said - "Wait 'til you read Joe Nocera?"

His analysis today is "SO WHEN WILL BANKS GIVE LOANS?"

Here are a half dozen excerpts from his"Talking business" column in Saturday's NY Times that should get your attention.
---------------
In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who’s been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.
----------
It is starting to appear as if one of Treasury’s key rationales for the recapitalization program — namely, that it will cause banks to start lending again — is a fig leaf, Treasury’s version of the weapons of mass destruction.
-------------

Indeed, Mr. Landler’s (NY Times) story noted that Treasury would even funnel some of the bailout money to help banks buy other banks. And, in an almost unnoticed move, it recently put in place a new tax break, worth billions to the banking industry, that has only one purpose: to encourage bank mergers. As a tax expert, Robert Willens, put it: “It couldn’t be clearer if they had taken out an ad.”

--------------------------

On Thursday, at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, the chairman, Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, pushed Neel Kashkari, the young Treasury official who is Mr. Paulson’s point man on the bailout plan, on the subject of banks’ continuing reluctance to make loans. How, Senator Dodd asked, was Treasury going to ensure that banks used their new government capital to make loans — “besides rhetorically begging them?”

--------------------------

But they are doing no such thing. Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead. And those pleas, in this environment, are falling on deaf ears.

---------------------

and finally:

Late Thursday afternoon, I caught up with Senator Dodd, and asked him what he was going to do if the loan situation didn’t improve. “All I can tell you is that we are going to have the bankers up here, probably in another couple of weeks and we are going to have a very blunt conversation,” he replied.

He continued: “If it turns out that they are hoarding, you’ll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay.”

Let’s hope so.

----------------------------

Sorry to do two in one day, but this seemed to be particularly relevant.

Jim