In my dream, I was an undercover reporter. My job was to infiltrate a new prison built in secret right here in the good ole US of A as a replacement for Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp. I was able to get inside and tour the facilities. It was cavernous, like a warehouse, but it was still under construction and yet to be populated with the prisoners it was intended for. The McCain team was crawling all over the place. What I didn’t expect was the first detainee. Sarah Palin had been taken there, tied to a pole and presumably beaten. She still looked great, all things considered. The rumored rift between McCain and Palin was worse then I thought, but in the end, cooler heads prevailed and Sarah Palin had been released. Spunky as ever, she winked at the men and women who’d fought so hard for her freedom, telling them “you’ve got to exercise your right to torture”.
I’d seen enough. It was time to go. I left through the front gate, just barely getting clearance to leave from the commanding officer. Fortunately for me, an explosion disturbed the uneasy peace. The enemies of freedom were on the offensive. As I made my way to the awaiting driver, a helicopter began circling overhead. I noticed the laser site as it danced on the ground around me. I’d seen this movie before–I was the target. I ran to the car and we made our escape. The helicopter joined us in hot pursuit. As I tried to get a shot out the car window, I saw a group of Hispanic men in work clothes packed into the helicopter. It was a crack squad of undocumented assassins. I’d been mistaken as a Republican operative. We made our way into the Hollywood hills, where we finally arrived at the lair of one of the Liberal Hollywood Elite, Peter Fonda. As I tried to explain the imminent danger we were in, the helicopter found us and began circling overhead. Despite my urgent pleas, Peter Fonda just couldn’t accept that he was being targeted by the working class. It was up to me. I fled to the basement, readied a rocket launcher, and stepped outside. I took aim at the helicopter and fired…direct hit. The world was once again a little bit safer for democracy.
I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!Will Rogers
This primary, I’m a Democrat. I’m also not a member of an organized political party. After voting in the Texas Democratic primary, my lovely wife and I participated in the primary caucus at the neighborhood elementary school in Austin, Texas. The turnout was astounding. The line went out the door several people deep maybe for a block. After getting through the doors at a local school, our neighbors entered an auditorium, filling it to capacity and then some. The volunteers were overwhelmed by the turnout, and didn’t have enough sign up sheets for everyone who showed up. Plan B was to have people fill blank sheets of paper out by hand. Stations were set up for people to fill out forms, volunteers chosen, and people were called up to the front. First to go were people with disabilities, then parents with small kids, and then University of Texas basketball fans. There was a game on. One Texas A & M alum took umbrage with this clear display of partisan favoritism, and called for people to sign in table by table, to a sincere round of applause. Then the behind the scene organizers got busy. They went to the stations, got the papers and distributed them to people at the tables. At our table, we talked about how someone should write down how to do this. I joked about trying to find the piece of paper with the instructions at the next historic caucus, maybe in 30 years or so. After a brief scramble for pens, the people happily filled in their information, including demographic data and their preference for the presidential nominee. The room cleared out pretty quickly after that, except for the hard-working volunteers left to tally the votes signatures. The Texas Democratic party has a unique nomination process. I’m not even sure how to quantify our participation in the caucus, but there were a lot of people who thought it was important to be there and give their candidate an extra push.
My wife said this was like watching an Oracle that had lost his way.
An interviewer asks Dick Cheney why the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq in 1994.
Do you think that U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?
No.
Why not?
Because if we’d gone into Baghdad, we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Uh, once you got to Iraq, and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in it’s place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over [it] for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds. If the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire. If you go that far and try to take over Iraq. Another thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our jobs with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the President, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam Hussein worth? In our judgment it was not very many and I think we got it right.
We went to see Michael Moore’s Sicko. It’s an accessible look at the dysfunctional American health care system. The film points out problems with the system in real human terms. Despite spending more per capita on health care then any other nation, health care in the U.S. doesn’t compete with outcomes achieved in other industrialized nations. This shows up in how long the average American lives, the numbers of infants and children who die, and even how tall Americans are.
Why do Americans put up with it? Maybe we’re suckers. Maybe we’ve been led to believe that having the government provide decent health care to everyone somehow threatens the American way of life. Maybe we’ve fallen for a market-driven fantasy that would have us believe that one glorious day, everyone will be really rich and able to get the same nip and tuck jobs reserved for Paris Hilton. The price for preserving our hopes? The uninsured line America’s overcrowded emergency rooms. Meanwhile those in the insured middle class can be just an illness away from bankruptcy and destitution.
If you’re lucky enough to still have medical insurance, you probably have had first hand experience with the red tape that keeps our system free. If you get sick, you probably have to make sure to see a physician that your insurance company approves of. Make sure the insurance company approves of your doctor before you get sick. They can provide you with a list. If you’re really sick, and need to see a specialist, you may have to get a doctor’s note to see another doctor, if your insurance company preapproves. Of course, the insurance company has to approve the treatment and the medication. At every step of the way, be assured that insurance company bureaucrats will keep their watchful eye on the bottom line. If you get well, you can look forward to letters from the insurance company which will let you know if they’ve shelled out ridiculous amounts of cash for the treatment you received, or if you have to spend the rest of your life paying off the debt you may have accrued in the few hours of surgery you had to get from, say the car accident you were in while dashing off to work. Not to worry, you can rest at ease if you just keep $100,000 or so in the bank. Best to start at birth.
Compare this with other countries with national health care. If you’re sick, just go to the doctor. Need medicine? Go get it. No complicated bureaucracy making relatively arbitrary decisions about who gets their care paid for and who doesn’t. With single payer systems, taxpayers also benefit from collective bargaining power to get better deals from the giant pharmaceutical companies. The numbers are in. American health care is a ripoff. We pay too much for too little and it shows.
I’ve spent a good portion of today feeling angry. It must be a coping mechanism. At the beginning of my day, I was angry that I can’t ride a bicycle to work without being terrorized by people completely oblivious to their surroundings aka. me. I’m angry that the state agency that I love working for is, from what I’ve been told, paying twice as much for the same services that we’ve been providing inhouse to a multi-national corporation due to a mandate by our mostly republican state legislature. With all due respect, to hell with ya’ll. By that I mean our state legislators and the multinationals that are lining their pockets and funding their campaigns. I’m angry that the President of the United States of America has been responsible for the killing, maiming, and torture of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of human beings not much different from me. I’m even more angry that I have to pay for it through my taxes. Despite all the lies I’ve been told about what America is supposed to stand for, we pay for crimes against humanity through the force of law.
The entertainment industry is completely out of control. In a misguided attempt to increase their profit margin, they ruin their own business. They’ve already destroyed the movie-going experience, wasting our time with advertisments for products I boycott on principle. The industry needs to get a clue and take a look at the popularity of Tivo, home theatre, internet video and other homegrown mediums that let consumers take control instead of letting the industry take control away. I don’t buy fewer CDs because I listen to music on the radio, I buy more as I get exposed to new music that I like. As if losing habeus corpus, the right to a free trial, freedom from torture at the hands of the state, and any privacy that once were my American birthright weren’t bad enough, now corporations that I choose to give money to are exercising their monopoly powers to take away what remains of the American freedoms of intellectual consumption, one by one.
According to an article from the Independent, Lohachara, a formerly inhabited islet on the Sundarban delta in the Sundarban National Park in West Bengal, India, was wiped off the map due to climate change.
Scientists discovered that a 41-square mile ice shelf in Canada has broken off and fallen into the sea in a collapse violent enough to have been detected 150 miles away.
In what seems like another dramatic reversal of course, the Bush administration’s appointee at the Interior Department proposed listing polar bears as a threatened species in response to a lawsuit filed by three environmental groups. From scanning the headlines, it looks like the Bush administration was doing a good thing, but it looks to me like a shrewd public relations maneuver that won’t necessarily result in any immediate federal action. It’s playing off pretty well in the press, some reports make it look like the polar bear has already been listed.
Hopefully, if polar bears do get listed, corporate welfare federal funds won’t be provided to help fund Perry’s bid to mess with Texas by rushing 17 new coal plants into production within 4 years. There’s plenty yet to be done to stop the coal plants.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that promotes sensible solutions to social programs, pursuing science in the public interest. In an A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science, they’ve organized a number of examples of how policy makers have distorted scientific findings into a Periodic Table of Scientific Abuses. As part of their going-it-alone strategy on forging a new reality, the White House has had a heavy hand in modifying the findings of key scientific studies, including rewrites on an EPA study on the state of the environment as reported in the New York Times.
As global climate change threatens life on earth, Governor Perry has fast tracked hearings for eight coal-burning power plants. With conservation and use of some of the best real estate for wind generation, Texas has other options. You can object to the fast track permitting by sending a fax and have your objections be made part of the official record by printing a hard copy of the fax and mailing it to:
It takes an economist to state the obvious and make it compelling for the ultra-rich—global climate change is bad for the global economy. From the BBC, this article states that
…if no action [against climate change] is taken:
Floods from rising sea levels could displace up to 100 million people
Melting glaciers could cause water shortages for 1 in 6 of the world’s population
Wildlife will be harmed; at worst up to 40% of species could become extinct
Droughts may create tens or even hundreds of millions of “climate refugees”
This would be bad for the economy.
Steve Martin once said, more or less, that he had learned enough philosophy to screw him up for the rest of his life. I feel that way about environmental studies. I’ve learned enough to know that, in a geologically short period of time, we’ve messed things up enough for it to take a very long time to repair.
We live on really great planet. I can’t think of another planet I’d rather live on. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to stop screwing it up before it’s too late.