Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

When I saw our cat carrying a bird in its mouth as I took my family out the back door this morning, I tried to redirect the attention of my children, but my oldest son had already seen what was happening by the time I thought of something to say. He rushed out into the grass, and grabbed the bird as it flopped along the ground.

He held the bird just right as he brought it back to show us. It was a baby mourning dove.

I put the bird in a tupperware container so that it wouldn’t jump free, and then took it a few hundred feet out, to some tall weeds at the edge of the woods. “It will be able to hide there,” I told my son.

As we walked downtown, we ran into one of my son’s teachers. “I saved a baby dove this morning, my son said. He told almost everyone we saw what he had done. He told them he was a hero.

When we arrived home, I told my son to go play upstairs for a bit while I cleaned up a mess downstairs. I did not tell him that I had found a pile of mottled feathers from an in immature mourning dove at the top of the basement stairs.

Something simple occurred to me this morning: I don’t see any evidence that Barack Obama has gained any voter support as a result of his decision to vote for the rotten FISA Amendments Act.

I’ve been online a lot, looking at what people have to say. I’ve seen a whole lot of Democrats saying that they’re withdrawing support from Barack Obama. I’ve seen some Democrats say that they’re angry, but that they can’t bring themselves to not vote for Obama. I’ve even seen a few ignorant voters say that they don’t understand what the big deal about the FISA Amendments Act is.

You know what I haven’t seen? I haven’t seen any Republicans or independent voters say that they were going to vote for John McCain, but now, because of the FISA Amendments Act, they’re going to vote for Barack Obama. I haven’t seen one single comment like that.

It seems that Obama has abandoned his principles, broken his promise, betrayed the Constitution, and lost a lot of Democratic supporters - all without making so-called “swing voters” like him any more than they did before.

Stupid move, Barack.

I am freaking disgusted with liberal talk radio. It started on Thursday of last week, with Randi Rhodes making ludicrous excuses for the FISA Amendments Act. Friday Morning, Air America’s Bill Press Show pretended the whole FISA Amendments Act thing didn’t exist at all - though they found time to report that Britney Spears’ sister had a baby.

Then today, I tune in to Stephanie Miller, and when a listener calls in to express disappointment with Barack Obama for supporting the warrantless wiretapping amnesty in the FISA Amendments Act, she cuts the caller off after less than five seconds, reads a long note about how wise it was of Obama to support the FISA Amendments Act, and then went straight to commercial break.

The fix is in. These people aren’t liberals. They’re Democratic partisans, and they’re using their power to repeat the Democratic Party leadership’s talking points, pretending that nothing has happened. They don’t seem to care that Americans have lost one of the most important liberties in the Bill of Rights. They’ll support it, so long as the Democratic candidate supports it.

How unthinking. How predictable. How boring. How so not part of my radio habit any more. It’s time to turn Air America off.

I’m looking for a little quick help in identifying this mushroom.

It’s in the eastern United States, second growth maple-beech-pine forest with some birch and black cherry, along with tulip poplar trees.

Is it edible?

Right wing Republicans keep on saying that it’s okay to deny same-sex couples equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution because same-sex marriages are inherently unnatural. The idea is that anything unnatural is therefore ungodly. Of course, these Republicans don’t spend their time attacking unnatural things like cars, or light bulbs, or chewy granola bars. Their righteous wrath is oddly restrained to just same-sex marriage.

The scientific truth is that same-sex marriages are not really unnatural at all. There are many examples of same-sex reproduction in nature. In fact, in many species, three are no males at all - only females who breed with each other. Then there are hermaphrodites, like snails, and even fruit trees. Oh, the immorality!

Today there’s a report of research by Lindsay Young, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. Her studies have included observations of lesbian albatrosses setting up long-term nesting relationships with each other that involve considerable physical intimacy.

Same-sex marriage occurs in nature, it seems. Therefore, same-sex marriage is natural. By the standards of right wing Republicans, that ought to mean that evangelical churches should start pushing Congress to make same-sex marriage legal across the United States.

How likely do you think that is it happen? Maybe the right wing Republicans’ efforts to deny equal protection under the law to same-sex couples doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s natural. Maybe they’re just jerks.

The presidential primary in North Carolina comes soon, in less than a month, on May 6. So, is it too late for you to register to vote in the primary? Not at all. The voter registration deadline is this month.

That’s an invitation for election manipulation.

North Carolina’s primary is semi-open, meaning that independents can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary, just by showing up at a polling station on the day of the election and saying which party’s primary they want to vote in.

That’s bad enough, but the election deadline just weeks before the North Carolina presidential primary is practically an invitation for people of one political party to re-register as members of the other party in order to meddle in the other party’s election. This year, with John McCain already selected as the nominee of the Republican Party, there is no reason for North Carolina Republicans to go vote in their own party primary.

Instead, those North Carolina Republicans, along with the state’s mostly right wing independents, can flood into the Democratic presidential primary, and vote for the candidate that matches their values. There’s even the possibility that Democratic voters could be outnumbered by Republicans and independents.

Why would any state arrange for such a corrupt primary election system?

Athanase Serombawar isn’t a name you’re likely to read about in the Religion section of your newspaper, but it ought to be. Serombawar is a Catholic Priest who led a mob to trap 1,500 people, including children, inside a church, pour gasoline through the roof, and set the church on fire. The 1,500 people were all killed, and Serombawar had the burned building bulldozed to make sure of the fact. Serombawar didn’t just participate in the mob violence. He led it. He issued to the order to kill all the people trapped in that church.

Athanase Serombawar is only one of many priests and nuns who led murderous attacks during the Rwandan genocide. That’s the power of faith.

Fidel Castro is retiring, and I don’t care.

I won’t go so far to say that it doesn’t matter, and I’m not trying to say that Castro’s release of power, coming on February 24th when the Cuban government shall select a new President, is uninteresting, as far as it goes.

Still, in the larger scheme of things, it isn’t within the larger scheme of things. Cuba is now just an island. It never managed to overthrow the United States from our soft Gulf underbelly. There is no international Communist conspiracy any more, except for the one to have more potlucks.

Castro may be retiring, but outside of Cuba, he was already irrelevant.

Communism only matters politically to the extent that it serves as an insult that right wing zealots can hurl against progressive policies that they do not understand. To our everyday lives, Fidel Castro mattered in the end only to the extent that he interfered with our ability to get good cigars.

The headline was the first thing that struck me as off-target: “So many questions, so little time”. The article was about the 2008 presidential election. Reading that headline, I thought, it’s been over a year since the current presidential candidates declared their intention to run. Who hasn’t had the opportunity to consider questions about the qualifications and agendas of the candidates?

Oh, but that’s not what the writer, NBC News political editor Chuck Todd, was talking about. On the eve of Super Tuesday, Chuck Todd is in no mood to talk about substance. Here are the questions Todd had on his mind:

- Is Hillary Clinton perceived as the defacto incumbent in this race?
- What will have a greater impact on viewers Tuesday night? The dead even delegate fight between Clinton and Obama? Or the potential for one Dem to win a plurality of states by 52-48 while still splitting the delegates evenly?
- What if Obama wins California narrowly plus a bunch of other swing states but trails in the delegate count by, say, 50? Will the media treat Obama as the winner of Super Tuesday because of an upset California win? Or what if Clinton wins a majority of states, including California, Missouri and Arizona but the delegate count is basically even (another likely outcome)? Will Clinton be treated as the winner?
- The question is, who will come out on top?
- In how many states will John McCain break the 50 percent threshold and should that matter?
- How valuable will Mike Huckabee be for McCain?
- What about Obama’s percentage in New York vs. Clinton’s percentage in Illinois?
- Could Obama net a greater share of delegates out of Illinois than Clinton does out of New York?
- Assuming he believes he’s the presumptive nominee after Tuesday night (and he needs a victory in California to lay claim to that title), how will he begin to position himself for the general election?
- Will he continue to try to make the case to conservatives that he’ll look out for their best interests or will he start to make an appeal to the middle?
- And at what point does McCain pick his Democratic foe? Will McCain’s camp attempt to influence the other primary and if so, how?

What a boring, insipid bunch of questions.

Chuck Todd is treating the Super Tuesday presidential primaries as if they’re the Super Bowl, and that it’s just a game, and that the ideas promoted by candidates don’t matter, except inasmuch as they help a candidate win.

How spiritless.

You’d think that the political editor for NBC News would have more on his mind than who wins. You’d think he’d be able to keep in mind what politics means, and consider the likely impacts of the candidates’ proposed policies.

You would think that, if you didn’t know how NBC News and the rest of the mainstream news media work. The last thing they want to do is encourage their viewers to think about things of substance… that might cause them to ignore the commercials.

In the summer of the North, Greenland lost record amounts of ice last year, and the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap was reduced to a small size never seen before. Now it’s the summer of the South, and the same activity is being seen in Antarctica, which is losing its ice at a rate almost as fast as Greenland. The rate of ice loss, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has increased by 75 percent over the last ten years because glaciers are speeding up in their flow to the Antarctic seas. That happens when water from the melting ice lubricates the bottom of the glacier, easing its flow over the ground beneath.

The team’s results do not include data from 2007, the second-warmest year on record. Eric Rignot, who led the study, comments, “Ice sheets are responding faster to climate warming than anticipated.”

There’s an interesting story about people seeing lights in the sky in Texas. Some say that they’re alien space ships. Others say that they saw military jets chasing the lights.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, is on the scene, “investigating”. Helpfully, Kenneth Cherry, the leader of the Texas chapter of MUFON, announced to reporters that “We believe there is some sort of phenomenon in action here.”

What an expert opinion. A phenomenon? A phenomenon in action?

You mean that something happened?

Thanks for the insight, MUFON. We none of us could have figured that out. Keep up the good work.

Thanks to the Associated Press too, for reporting that essential insight.

Never mind the Nancy Grace screeching her outrage on CNN - school shootings are not on the rise. That’s the finding of a new study by the Centers for Disease Control. The study found that the number of people killed in mass killings on school grounds has actually remained very stable over time. In fact, since 1992, the year that George H. W. Bush was voted out of office, the number of incidents of single homicides at public and private schools “decreased significantly”.

What’s increased significantly during that time is the commercialization and consolidation of the news media. The small number of businesses that now exert strong control over much of the news we hear have found that people tend to tune in very reliably for news stories that suggest an out-of-the-ordinary epidemic in school violence, and that means that they can bring in more advertising revenue. They’re cashing in on people’s emotional fascination with the perception of escalating school violence that does not exist.

There is a solution. Turn off the TV news, and get your information from sources independent of the consolidated media giants. Starve them of the profitable attention of your eyes.

At a campaign event today, Fox television personality Bill O’Reilly jumped a barricade, swore repeatedly at an Obama campaign staffer, pushed him aside to get access to Barack Obama. Then, Bill O’Reilly called the Obama campaign staffer “low class”.

Low class?!?

Is that what Bill O’Reilly thinks the 2008 presidential election is about? Trying to keep the lower classes down? Class warfare from the wealthy, like him, against the rest of America?

So now, according to Bill O’Reilly, the Barack Obama campaign is with the working class of Americans, not the wealthy elites.

Did Bill O’Reilly mean to give Barack Obama that endorsement?

Yesterday morning, Senator Joseph Biden was all full of bluster. “You can’t tell me this race is over,”, he said.

Um, yes I can. Senator Biden, your race is over.

Maybe if you had spent less time talking about what a great guy you are, you could have lasted until New Hampshire. Then again, you were relatively clean and articulate… though not as much as Barack Obama.

In one of the most surprising endorsements of the 2008 presidential election, Ralph Nader has thrown his support to John Edwards for President, just a couple of days before the Iowa caucuses. The reason for Nader’s endorsement is very clear: Hillary Clinton is heavily associated with big corporate interest groups, and John Edwards offers the strongest voice in this year’s elections against corporate influence over America’s democratic government.

Nader said of Senator Clinton, “She has experience in the Senate, and what that experience has meant is going soft on cracking down on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse, soft on cutting tens of millions in corporate subsidies.” Yes, Hillary Clinton has experience, but it’s the wrong kind of experience - like her experience on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart.

Hillary Clinton is the wrong choice for the Democrats, and John Edwards is the strongest alternative.

Though some Green Party activists are still trying to draft Ralph Nader for President in 2008, it’s becoming very clear that Ralph Nader will not run, and that, if he does, almost nobody will vote for him. Endorsing John Edwards was the best play for influence that Nader could make.

In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature, but could not give the address. In the speech he prepared, however, he wrote:

“Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth, violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.”

I like the sound of what he says, but is it true? Isn’t violence a brutal form of honest communication? Isn’t any falsification of the violence separate from the violence itself?

If not, where does the falsehood come in, afterwards?

Walking down Michigan Avenue here in Chicago this morning, I had a pleasant experience around The Golden Compass. I was carrying my copy of the His Dark Materials Omnibus, which contains The Golden Compass and three different people went out of their way to compliment the book.

There was a specific theme in their comments. Each person commented to me that I ought not to take things for granted, and that the characters change as the books progress. It wasn’t with disappointment or annoyance that they made this point. It was with appreciation.

There seems to be a trend in the sort of person who appreciates The Golden Compass: They value change and ambiguity, and complexity.

Is this what the religious authorities who send out email alerts against The Golden Compass really have a problem with? Is their true protest against complex understanding of character, as opposed to the tediously simple good and bad split of tales like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

Witch good. Lion bad. Some people like that kind of absolute judgment, and they’re refusing to even read The Golden Compass.

I’ve just finished reading the first 100 pages of The Golden Compass. No spoilers in this review of those pages - you should discover the book for yourself.

I will tell you, however, that if you’re letting some ratty old email church lady email keep you from reading the book, you’re missing one hell of a treat. It’s a great read, with lots of action, really interesting characters, great settings, and rich language.

I have not seen one single “militant atheist” line in the book so far. I am seeing a lot of undercurrents of struggles against social class hierarchies and sexism, as well as xenophobia, however.

If the film is half as good as the book, you’ll really be missing out if you decide to stay home and sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” instead.

That’s your choice to live in an impoverished literary world, all centered around one jealous book, letting other people tell you what to think, I guess.

I’m not trying to tell you what to think. I’m just suggesting that you let the Fox News commentaries take a back seat in your mind for a minute, and read the first hundred pages of the book to see what it’s all about yourself.

Get ready, folks! The Golden Compass is almost here!

The movie, which looks to be an absolutely stunning fantasy, will be released on December 7, 2007 - just a couple of weeks. Of course, I’m just judging that opinion on the trailer and secondary items I’ve read. I have not yet been able to get my hands on the book - stuck in the house with Thanksgiving guests and all that.

So, I’d like to hear from people who have read the book, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. In the United Kingdom, it’s entitled Northern Lights.

What did you think of the book, and what do you think we can expect of the film?

In North Carolina, Democratic candidate for the United States Senate Jim Neal has acknowledged that he is gay. Actually, he has never hidden that he is gay, so it’s kind of like Liza Minelli acknowledging that she has short hair.

The major point of communication from the Jim Neal for Senate campaign is that Neal’s sexual orientation is no big deal. My reaction to the news so far is in line with that. I read the news with a “hmm” and not much more.

What would be a big deal is if the North Carolina Democratic Party now rushes to find another candidate to challenge Senator Elizabeth Dole, because the Democratic Party isn’t willing to support an openly non-heterosexual candidate. That would be a big deal. It would be a sign of craven cowardice.

Looking for the results for today’s special election to Congress between Niki Tsongas and James Ogonowski, I came across the election web page of WCVB - a Boston televison station. There, near the top of the page, was the graphic you see above.

Commitment 2008? It sounds like a punishment, not a chance to be an active citizen. The word commitment may make us feel like we’re being placed in a mental health therapy center, against our will, or we’re being pressured into a premature marriage.

It seems plenty clear to me that the news media just doesn’t expect the public to get excited about elections much anymore.

They might as well come out with one of the following phrases:

Government Class 2008
Conference Call 2008
May I Put You On Hold 2008
Interruption of Your Regularly Scheduled Program 2008

The web site of the Boston Globe did an even more pathetic job. On the front page, there was a live updated tally of the score in the baseball game of the Red Sox versus the Cleveland Indians. No updates on the results of the Tsongas vs. Ogonowski election, though.

What priorities.

By the way, for those who care about the makeup of our federal government’s Legislative Branch, the latest results I’m seeing show Republican James Ogonowski ahead of Niki Tsongas, 51 percent to 46 percent, with 49 percent of the precincts in!

This was supposed to be a cakewalk for Tsongas. What the heck is going on?

I was at an ice cream shop yesterday evening, buying a scoop of ice cream for my son after his first day at school. As I was standing in line, I saw a a row of boxes on the shelf next to me, with a label that read “Traditional Crepe Mix”.

Some people may be too removed from their rural roots to remember the days when the folk would work in the fields by day, and come home at dusk with baskets full of their traditional crepe mixes, to use for the following week’s breakfasts.

Where has that tradition gone? Don’t leave the old ways behind. Show your traditional values. Go buy a crepe mix.

Every time I think of AT&T, I think of that jingle they had back in the 1980s: “It’s the right choice - AT&T!” After today, however, I’m putting new words to that music.

“The Big Brother Choice - AT&T”

This statement comes from an attorney for AT&T, testifying in the US 9th Circuit Court, which was hearing lawsuits by people who have evidence that the government and AT&T have been collaborating to establish a massive electronic surveillance program to spy against peaceful, law-abiding Americans: “The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret. As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals’ communications were ever intercepted or whether we played any role in it.”

Oh, how convenient that AT&T does not have to officially acknowledge its involvement in the electronic spy program. Of course, if there were no such program, AT&T’s attorney could simply say so, right? That wouldn’t be a state secret.

AT&T has, for all intents and purposes, admitted that there is a massive program to spy on Americans as they use the Internet and make telephone calls, and that AT&T is helping the government to make the spy program work. Only, AT&T thumbed its nose at the judge and said that the judge didn’t have the right to know about it, and the American people didn’t have a right to know about the AT&T program to spy on Americans either.

So, AT&T is helping the government spy against their customers - even when those customers haven’t broken any law. That’s not just low down. That’s bad for business, AT&T.

CBS News came out with an article yesterday proposing to shock us with the news that the American military is full of violent gangs. It quotes the mother of a soldier killed in a gang initiation as saying, “How would I have known there were gangs in the military?”

How would you have known there are gangs in the military? Ma’am, the military is a gang. It’s a bunch of young men running around doing disgraceful things like coming up with a variety of ways to kill people, controlled by a small number of older adults. The military has bizarre initiation rituals that are designed to bend the will of members to the group that involve beatings and hazings and shaving your head and getting tattoos and stripping naked in front of other members and all kinds of weird stuff. The military teaches young people to worship guns and value violence. The military teaches people to obey orders without knowing or caring why they are doing what they are doing. The military takes vulnerable young people and transforms them into killers. The military orders people to do things that would be illegal if only they didn’t have a special government exemption.

Parents, if you want your youngsters to become decent, law-abiding grownups, do not let them join the military! The military warps people until they don’t know the difference between right and wrong.

I suppose that military people will come on here and criticize what I’ve said, but that just proves my point. They’ve been made into gang members who are so brainwashed by their cult of violence that they can no longer recognize the antisocial immorality they have been swept up into.

Terrible, terrible news from Xinhua today: Starbucks is planning to raise the price of its drinks by nine cents.

This is unjust! I can’t afford to pay nine cents more for a four dollar cup of coffee! Eight cents, maybe, but not nine cents. I’m on a fixed income, after all.

If Starbucks won’t restrict the increase in the price of its drinks to eight cents per cup of premium venti, then I’ll have to take drastic measures… and make my coffee at home, for between 20 and 50 cents per cup. Don’t make me do it!

CNN is reporting that a squid the size of a bus has washed ashore on a beach in Tasmania.

The size of a bus, huh? Well, not really. The squid was big, but it wasn’t so big as to be particularly newsworthy. It was only three feet wide. Do you know any buses three feet wide?

The squid was the length of a bus, if you count the length of the squid as the distance from the end of its main body to the very tip of its long, thin tentacles, when stretched out as far as they go. Saying that this makes the squid the size of a bus is about as honest as saying that women are on average taller than men because they tend to have longer hair.

Travelling through an airport today, I notice that the Homeland Security alert status is still at code orange. Code orange is supposed to mean that there is a high risk of terrorist attack.

If there’s a high risk of terrorist attack in American airports, how come there hasn’t been even an attempt at one for such a long time?

I think that this definition of high risk has a pretty low threshold of paranoia.

Two weeks ago, Peregrin Wood noted that Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson is a professional lobbyist who has promoted political agendas because he has been paid to do so. That seems to put Fred Thompson in a nasty ethical position in which it won’t be clear, if he’s elected President, who he is really working for - the people, or the clients who are paying for his campaign? For a lobbyist like Fred Thompson, there may not be that much difference.

However, Fred Thompson’s position as the top lobbyist candidate for 2008 is being challenged by John McCain. The Chicago Tribune reports that John McCain has more lobbyists on his campaign staff than any other presidential candidate. John McCain is has so many corporate lobbyists working on his presidential campaign that one could easily question whether the McCain 2008 campaign is really a presidential campaign or just a public relations campaign used by lobbyists to promote the political agendas favored by their clients.

So, which one would you identify as the top lobbyist candidate of 2008 - Fred Thompson or John McCain?

Rahim Faiez writes for the Associated Press this morning, “Suspected insurgents ambushed a U.S.-led coalition and Afghan patrol in the volatile south, sparking a battle and airstrikes that killed 25 suspected insurgents, officials said Monday.”

Here’s what I don’t understand: The people who performed the ambush performed an act of insurgency. So, how come they’re described as suspected insurgents?

I’d write more about this, but a suspected baseball just made a suspected hole in my window, and I see a suspected kid running down the street. Gotta go.

Justifying the White House’s demand that White House officials, including Karl Rove, only testify for Congress without swearing an oath to tell the truth, and behind closed doors, Press Secretary Tony Snow said that “behavior changes when cameras are off.”

Oh, yes, behavior changes when the cameras are off. When the cameras are off, and the doors are closed, and the public can’t see what’s going on, and no one is under oath to tell the truth, then people in the Bush Administration lie, and they break the law, and they make plans to ruin people for political gain.

Then, when they come out of those private meetings, behind closed doors, with no oath to tell the truth, and the cameras off, they tell us that it’s none of our business to know what they’re doing. They tell us to buzz off.

Democrats in Congress, please don’t lose your backbone on this, as you so often do. Demand open, public hearings, with Bush Administration officials testifying under oath, in front of cameras.

We all deserve to know the truth, and if White House officials won’t tell the public the truth voluntarily, then they must be legally compelled to do so, under punishment of going to prison.

Hell, subpoena Bush! We have already waited to long for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

You may not have heard a lot about it here in the United States yet, but over in the United Kingdom, it’s whopping big news: Prime Minister Tony Blair, before he leaves office in disgrace, is trying to push legislation through Parliament that would build a new generation of nuclear weapons for the British government to use.

It’s bizarre psychology, isn’t it? Tony Blair gets so hyper about rumors that Saddam Hussein is trying to develop nuclear weapons that Blair joins with kook-in-arms George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq, even though there is no good evidence to substantiate the rumors, which turn out to be bogus. But then, a few years later, Tony Blair engages in exactly the same behavior that he said made Saddam Hussein an unacceptable danger.

Many Britons are expressing their outrage at Tony Blair’s efforts to build a new generation of Trident nuclear missiles. The outraged include members of Parliament in Tony Blair’s own political party. Two Labor MPs, Jim Devine and Nigel Griffith resigned from their positions in Parliament in protest of Blair’s nuclear weapons plans.

The vote in Parliament’s House of Commons over whether to build new nuclear weapons is scheduled for tomorrow, but today, Greenpeace UK sent a clear message today, unfurling a gigantic banner outside of Parliament today that reads, “Blair loves weapons of mass destruction.”

Among those British celebrities opposing the vote to build more Trident nuclear weapons is Emma Thompson. Golly, isn’t she great?

I have had it up to here with the Democratic wishy washy wimpy whining about Republicans and the war in Iraq.

I read the headline today: Democrats to push for Iraq timetable.

Oh, the Democrats are going push now? Oh really? Gee, but haven’t they been saying that for a long while now? As I remember it, the Democrats started doing what they call “pushing” for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq way back in 2003.

Here’s what the Democratic Party’s version of “pushing” is: Hey, President Bush, you really ought to not have the war in Iraq be quite so big, so could you please not send so many American soldiers to die in a vain cause? Oh, ten or twenty thousand less would be okay with us, and we’d probably negotiate on that. We’re offering a non-binding resolution to officially make this request, not that there will be any consequences if you decide to say no. Did we mention impeachment is off the table? We wouldn’t want to be divisive or anything, after all. We’d hate to actually have to take action to end the war, so we’re writing you yet another mutli-billion dollar check to pay to continue the war. Do you need more? If so, just ask. So, in short, let’s Support Our Troops and Win the War on Terror. Yippee!”

With this kind of “pushing” to end the war, my grandchildren might see American soldiers leave Iraq.

I am sick and tired of hearing Democratic politicians tell me that we can’t really push too hard right now, and that we just need to wait until after the next election. It’s a broken record, and out of tune.

I’m issuing a timetable of my own: A timetable for the Democrats to get some backbone. If the Democrats in Congress won’t actually do something to end the war in Iraq by the end of this month, I’m leaving the Democratic Party.

The man finished laughing at his own joke, took a sloppy slurp from his cup of coffee, and then told me in the straightest voice he has ever used, “What you don’t understand about the plight of the poor is that society as a whole finds their suffering to be worth the overall benefit that it enables. The pain of impoverished people around the world is heard by people in power, but it is felt as the guitarist feels pain in his fingertips at the height of a sold out concert before an appreciative audience. The guitartist gets the message from his fingertips that they are suffering. He feels their pain, but he demands that they continue. It’s the aesthetically-obsessed brain of the guitarist that insists that the music go on. That brain won’t stand up and tell the audience that the performance has ended until it feels satisfied itself. Don’t expect the toes, or the knees, the eyes or the mouth of the guitarist to stick up for the fingers, either. They may not be enjoying the music as the brain does, but neither do they feel the pain of the fingers. They won’t rebel against the controlling brain and its abstract, grand aesthetic visions until they hurt themselves.”

Here’s a link for the Southern readers of Irregular Times: Atlanta Progressive News. I know, it sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. The truth is that Atlanta is a mix of Northerners and Southerners, plus people from elsewhere in the country, and so there is, finally, a real local struggle to establish a genuinely progressive presence.

Atlanta Progressive News doesn’t always go as far as progressives outside Georgia might expect it to go, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. Georgia still isn’t Vermont, but some people are trying to move the culture ahead, at long last.

Does anyone else have some local progressive links to suggest?

I was looking around on the Apple Quicktime video site today, and came across an album entitled, My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

Albums these days tend to have titles that boil down to babble. Lyrics too. It’s as if the musicians know that the songs need a human voice, but don’t really have much to say, just a bunch of chords and notes that sound cool together, so they create the equivalent of lorem ipsum.

The sad thing is that the music itself from My Brightest Diamond wasn’t really that interested. It just kind of wandered around, never getting any place.

Yet, here’s how the musician described the meaning of the album: “Reconciling all the complex emotions found in each of us.” Reconciling ALL the complex emotions found in each of us?!? Nothing could do that, except if the sun exploded and ended all life on Earth. This phrase represents the ultimate in pretense.

It reminded me of a review of Bob Dylan’s new album that I heard a few days ago on NPR. The reviewer seemed to think that the album was a work of genius, with wonderful music combined with poetic lyrics. I was interested. Then, they played a song from the album. The music was boring and unoriginal, and the lyrics were superficial, without much meaning.

If the music hadn’t been produced by Bob Dylan, nobody would bother to give it a second look. There’s too much in the music industry these days of the worshipping of legends, babbling praise without consideration for the real value of what’s being said.

As I write this, I’m standing in the United terminal at the Chicago O’Hare airport, waiting for my suitcase. I’ve been waiting here for 45 minutes, after walking out from behind security, and then going past chain link fences to another terminal from where I arrived, avoiding puddles with suspicious slicks and stinky garbage.

The whole airport seems to be under construction. The thing is that O’Hare has been under construction for years now. It will be ready for renovation when the construction is done, at this pace.

The flight was two hours late, but I wasn’t surprised at that. Flights going into and out of O’Hare are nearly always late.

The seat was cramped, and wouldn’t stay up straight, even though I never pressed the button for it to go back. I could hear the guy in back of me grumbling about it.

I never used to check my bag, but now, out of fear of terrorist attack, I have to choose between traveling without the basics that keep me human and putting my bag below. It seems that I lose either way.

I’ve been waiting for the bag for an hour now, and the conveyor belt upon which my bag is supposed to arrive has just been turned off. It doesn’t seem that anyone from my city will be getting their bags any time soon.

In the background, I can hear the announcement, over and over again, that the Department of Homeland Security has raised the alert level to orange.

Whatever happened to the idea that flying on an airplane is a glamorous thing? I wish I’d taken the train.

So, the New York Times has endorsed Ned Lamont, rejecting Joseph Lieberman’s term in Senate one “in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction”. Swell.

What does this mean? Mainstream pundits are viewing it as a devastating blow to Lieberman’s re-election campaign. But does that mean that we’re supposed to believe that Lieberman’s campaign was doing well until the big newspaper’s endorsement of Lamont?

Washington D.C. pundits just can’t imagine that Connecticut voters might have been making conclusions about Joseph Lieberman’s right wing politics on their own, but that’s just what has been happening. Lieberman has been a stain on the Democratic Party for years, long before the Iraq War was begun. Starting with Lieberman’s preaching condemnation of Bill Clinton’s personal life, and extending through the drag of his religious preoccupations on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, many of the Democratic Party’s most devastating defeats have been due in large part to Lieberman’s insistence in promoting a narrow, restrictive vision of what it means to be an American.

It’s good that the New York Times is finally joining grassroots Democrats in their rejection of Joseph Lieberman. However, it’s not the editorial of the Times that will have sunk Lieberman’s career. Senator Lieberman managed to do that all on his own.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees. A hundred dead people every day. Infrastructure destroyed for years on end, with no hope for repair because of the ongoing fighting.

What makes what’s happening in Iraq not a civil war? Well, President Bush doesn’t want to say it’s a civil war.

The mainstream news media, always dutiful in its obligation to mindlessly parrot what the President says the truth is, have been struggling to find some way to not call Iraq in a state of civil war.

Well, now the mainstream news media are starting to face reality. This morning, Reuters writes:

“Tens of thousands more Iraqis have fled their homes as sectarian violence looks ever more like civil war two months after a U.S.-backed national unity government was formed, official data showed on Thursday.”

I remember back when the Bush Republicans refused to call the occupation an occupation, and told us with a straight face that there was no insurgency in Iraq. Anyone want to bet how long it will be before President Bush admits that there is a civil war in Iraq?

I was walking through the video store in my town today, when I wandered into the video game section, something I don’t usually do, as I don’t have a video game player and don’t have time to play games even if I had one. Yet, my eye was caught by the box for a particular game: The DaVinci Code video game.

I don’t get it. How can the DaVinci Code be a video game? How do you play? Race around Paris, looking at landmarks and competing against other players to see who can come up with the most elaborate, and yet implausible, interpretations for their characteristics?

The Arc de Triomphe… I know it… The ARC stands for Association Revolutionaire Crucifixe, which was a French secret society that worked in the shadows of perfume factories for centuries to disguise the fact that John the Baptist was really the Buddha’s great great grandson.

Fifty points!

Consider this:

1. This week, the United States Senate dropped all plans to hold hearings or any investigation of the gigantic illegal government database of records of the private telephone calls made to and from tens of millions of American homes. Dick Cheney met with Republican senators and got them agree to just forget about that little thing called the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Republican senators agreed.

2. This week, we also found out that a computer hacker gained access to “sensitive information” about thousands of people who work for the American government’s nuclear weapons programs.

George W. Bush has justified his theft of Americans’ private telephone records by saying that the personal information he is keeping about our personal communications is kept secure. Well, if President Bush can’t even keep top secret information about people working on America’s nuclear weapons secure, why should we believe that he can keep his database of our private telephone records secure?

George W. Bush never met a diplomatic effort that he could not turn into pure disaster. Today, the price of crude oil hit $73.10 per barrel, thanks to Bush’s ham-handed efforts to push the Iranians into war.

Last week, the Bush White House actually openly admitted that it only made the offer to talk to the Iranians after their cessation of uranium refinement in the hopes that it would provoke the Iranian government to become more angry and reject the deal, thus heightening tensions. I’m not kidding - the Bush Republicans say that this was what they wanted all along!

So, now the Iranians are threatening to turn off the spigot through which flows 25 percent of the oil used by humanity, and the oil prices are shooting upward at breakneck speed in anticipation.

All of us are going to be paying for President Bush’s purposeful sabotage of diplomacy. We are literally going to be paying for it - at the pump this summer.

More profits for the Bush family and its oil business friends, I suppose.

“They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.”

- Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, talking about the victims of the Haditha massacre by US Marines

Now you’ve got it straight from a Marine: Babies were killed by US Marines at Haditha. Lance Corporal Briones had to take photographs of it all, and clean up the “mess”. That mess included a little girl whose “head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots”. They don’t put that sort of image into the Marine Corps recruiting posters.

So, where are the Pro-Life demonstrators? Why aren’t they protesting this massacre?

Oh, that’s right. They’re too busy engaging in anti-gay protests at the funerals of American soldiers.

Golly, that makes the right wing look bad. So, the President of the United States just signed a new law banning such demonstrations, even though the law is plainly unconstitutional, violating the right to free speech.

It was an odd choice for President Bush, who has refused to attend the funerals of the soldiers he sent off to their death to find weapons of mass destruction that never existed.

No sense to any of it.

I love this statement released by George W. Bush after today’s news about how the Bush Administration has been keeping records of who and when ordinary Americans are calling on the telephone:

“Our intelligence activities strictly target al-Qaeda and their known affiliates”

So let me get this straight: Strictly targeting Al Quaida and their known affiliates includes keeping records on tens of millions of Americans, tracking who they call on the telephone and when they make those calls?

Well, if that’s Bush’s idea of strictly targeting, I guess that must mean that tens of millions of Americans are known affiliates of Al Quaida!

Betcha didn’t know that you are a special friend of Osama Bin Laden, did you?

Impeach. Impeach. Impeach. Impeach.