It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.
On Tuesday, November 13, Republican Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia brought in hundreds of religious and political allies to pray with him for rain in a Christian-dominated official ceremony. Perdue adopted the role of minister as he intoned:
Our Father, as we come before you today, we acknowledge that we are needy people, and we need you. It is you that we need, and it is your power and your miracles that we need.
And, Father, we call upon you today to meet that need. Father, we acknowledge our wastefulness. We acknowledge that we have not done those things that we should. And, God, we call upon you today to meet that need. We do believe in miracles. We do believe that you are the miracle Creator, the Creator that established the water and the land and the air and even us.
God, we need you. We need rain. Father, may we go forth in this place today with bended hearts towards you, acknowledging our total and utter dependence upon you moment by moment for your blessings. Father, forgive us, and lead us to honor you, as you honor us with the showers of blessings.
Thank you, Lord, for the rain to come. Amen.
Perdue has called down God’s power as the miracle Creator to solve Georgia’s water problems with a prayer vigil including hundreds of religious and political leaders and headed by himself. And when 0.21 inches of rain fell on Atlanta two days later, Perdue responded to the news by calling it a “great affirmation of what we asked for…. I am just a person who believes it comes from God.” That’s right: Governor Perdue congratulated himself for bringing on the rain.
Well, is Perdue right about his power to bring rain to Atlanta through prayer? Here’s the empirical test. The average rainfall for the city of Atlanta in the month of November is 4.10 inches. Divided by thirty for each of the thirty days of November, that gives us an average expected rainfall each day of 0.13666 inches. If Perdue and the Gang have succeeded in their prayers, then Georgia should receive an above-average rainfall during the succeeding days. If, on the other hand, Georgia receives less rainfall than average in the remaining days of November, it’s a sign that either a) the power of prayer proved bogus in this instance, or b) God has rejected Republican Governor Sonny Perdue and his politically religious pals.
On Monday, November 26, you could say that God saved Sonny Perdue’s political ass. It rained 1.42 inches in Atlanta, Georgia. Today’s sunny in Georgia, so it’s a pretty good bet that from the day of Perdue’s rain prayer to the end of November, it will have rained… drumroll … 0.06 inches more than average. Go God! Praise Perdue!
One of the things that most people don’t consider when they flip on the lights at night is that the electricity they use to light their way has the power to bring down mountains. In fact, electrical power in the United States has already brought down many mountains: 470 mountains, my the count of the advocacy group Appalachian Voices. That’s the number of mountains that have been destroyed in the USA in order to extract their coal.
Is the electricity in your light bulb responsible for the destruction of mountains? Thanks to the progressive activism of Appalachian Voices, you can find out. At their peripheral web site I Love Mountains, residents of the United States can enter their zip codes and then see photographs taken from the air of the mountains that their power company extracts coal from. It’s a way for people to get a real image of the concrete impact of their energy usage, and to motivate them to engage in more efforts at conservation.
Back in February of 2006, Mother Davis wrote about the absurdity of a t-shirt that Republicans had designed in opposition to Hillary Clinton. Re-defeat Communism 2008, the shirt said, with a picture of Hillary Clinton on it, with the red circle slash over her face.
It was as if Hillary Clinton was responsible for Communism, or promoting Communism, a ridiculous idea.
Unfortunately, ridiculous ideas have never been much of an obstacle for Republicans. The Redefeat Communism shirt against Hillary Clinton has been a top seller among right wing extremists.
if they’re going to sell those shirts, though, we might as well set the record straight with some of our own. That’s the motivation behind this new t-shirt, available starting today: Re-defeat Fascism 2008 - Stop Fred Thompson.
Fascism is the combination of nationalism, corporate power, militarism and restriction of individual liberty. That’s a pretty good description of Fred Thompson’s political agenda.
As you’ve probably noticed, Irregular Times has been suffering from server problems, and the outfit that hosts our server has given us the kissoff for the eighth time in two days. That’s it. Our patience is exhausted, and we’re changing web hosts to a more reliable provider. We won’t be writing for a little bit as we work to move everything over. Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, we’ll be back and in fine outraged form.
How do you feel about the idea of breathing in nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides that are pumped out of the tailpipes of motor vehicles and the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants? The chemicals are linked to ailments such as asthma and cancer in human beings, and to global warming for Mother Earth.
In spite of that, the Bush White House decided that there was no reason for the Environmental Protection Agency to consider new information about the environmental and health effects of nitrogen and sulfur oxides, and revise EPA standards for their emissions accordingly. The policy of the Republicans in the Bush Administration was to just let the old standards, based on old information, remain, and forget about any new research that had been done.
No one in the right wing lifted a finger to challenge this dangerous neglect. It was up to progressives to do something.
A coalition of progressive organizations and individuals, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, challenged the Bush Administration in court, filing suit to force the EPA to take new information about the dangers of nitrogen and sulfur dioxides into account, and to revise the emissions standards for these chemicals accordingly. The suit, essentially, was just trying to force George W. Bush to allow the EPA to do its job.
Faced with a court battle that it could not win, the Bush White House agreed to change its policy in a court settlement. That settlement never would have come without progressive action.
Imagine what good could be done if progressives were at work inside the White House, instead of challenging it from outside.
From 2000, the year in which George W. Bush grabbed the White House, and 2006, the last full year for which data is available, the U.S. trade deficit with China has risen by 277 percent. If you want that trend to stop, you’ll want to vote for a presidential candidate who rejects the economic policies of the Bush White House.
The extent of the U.S. trade deficit is shown in even more humiliating detail when it comes to Azerbaijan. In every year of the Clinton Administration, the United States had a trade surplus with Azerbaijan. That is to say, Azerbaijan bought more American goods than Americans bought goods made in Azerbaijan. However, George W. Bush couldn’t even hold that up.
In 2006, the United States slipped into a trade deficit with Azerbaijan of 485.1 million dollars. In 2007, America’s outperformance in trade by Azerbaijan worsened dramatically. Just by September, 2007, the United States had built up a trade definict with Azerbaijan of 815.6 million dollars.
And what about Russia? Remember how Russia is supposed to have been the country that “lost” the Cold War? Economically, it seems that they’re actually the ones who came out on top.
Forget all that propaganda about how much the Russians love our Pepsi. The United States has a trade deficit with Russia, and since the Republicans took the White House, that trade deficit has almost tripled in size.
For tonight’s Republican presidential debate, CNN chose to spend the entire first 30 minutes on YouTube questions about immigration policy. Immigration is not the most important issue facing the nation. It’s not the second most important issue facing the nation. It’s not the third most important issue facing the nation.
Yet, CNN chose to ignore the top issues, in order to spend time encouraging the Republican candidates to compete over who could be the most xenophobic. It’s a shameful display of how TV news channels have skewed strongly to the right. We need a progressive President to balance out that balance.
In the Republican Party presidential debate of November 28, 2007, Fred Thompson made the comment, “We’ve all had people we’ve hired that in retrospect turned out not to be a good decision.”
What alternative reality of America is Fred Thompson talking about? Most Americans have never hired anyone beyond the level of a babysitter. Most Americans just don’t have the economic power to have hired so many people that they’ve been able to get petulant about unworthy employees. Many Americans have never hired anyone at all in their lives.
No, Mr. Thompson, we’ve not all hired people that we had the privilege to get testy about later.
When I participated in an online chat with a staffer for the Chris Dodd presidential campaign yesterday, it occurred through the Me.Dium social networking chat service. To use it, a person needs to download a toolbar for their web browser, and…
… and your reading should be screeching to a halt right now. What do you bet a toolbar that is downloaded to your web browser is doing while you browse? Yes, it’s collecting data on where you surf the web. And yes, Me.Dium collects and aggregates that data. Oh, but don’t worry, says Me.Dium, because you can always turn the toolbar off. Oh, goody. Me.Dium will use your data to shove ads at you and develop the always-handy “new services.” Strike One.
There’s actually something kind of spiffy that comes out of this obscene data collection and sale routine, and that’s when you use Me.Dium to chat. As you chat, the web page you’re visiting on the side appears to the people you’re chatting with. This is kind of creepy, but it also allows someone who’s making an argument or presentation via the Me.Dium chat to just type “check this out for documentation.” Then, people can just click on the presenter’s icon and voila! … they’ll be sent on to the webpage the presenter has up on their browser. Very nice shorthand. Too bad it comes at the cost of losing your privacy and having your data used to farm you advertisements. I expect you young’uns may be more comfortable with that.
The service is a bit buggy. It shut down three times and wouldn’t restart without me closing my browser all the way down and re-opening a whole new browser session. That’s a bear for someone like me who has a dozen tabs open at any moment for reference purposes. This was a major hassle. Oh, look, I’m trying to open up Me.Dium, and it’s crashed again. And get this — you can’t do the simplest thing like cutting and pasting text out of your chat. Hello? That’s so 1992. Strike 2.
No, I don’t really have a Strike 3, so I can’t tell you honestly that Me.Dium is a disaster to avoid at all cost. No, Me.Dium is more Me.Diocre than anything else. It has some innovative features, but a not-cool approach to data mining and a not-dependable interface. Bye bye, Me.Dium. You’re uninstalled.
Not everyone can go to college. Attending college takes a lot of planning, and a lot of money. However, under the plans promoted by three Democratic candidates for President in 2008, all interested Americans would be able to go to community college.
Barack Obama and Chris Dodd propose plans that would pay completely for community college education. John Edwards has a plan that would pay for the tuition and books for the first year of community college.
These plans would extend the educational opportunity of America’s most economically vulnerable young adults. They would also enrich our country, by making the American workforce more capable of innovation and creation of wealth.
The community college vision offered by the Republican presidential candidates is less ambitious: If you want to go, you figure out how to get the money.
Isn’t it lovely how our government loves to give out important bad news just when people aren’t paying attention? While you were eating turkey last week, the following bit of not-so-cheery economic news was released. Put it next to the cranberry sauce in the refrigerator.
If you were hoping that the crisis of Americans getting kicked out of their homes for being unable to make their mortgage payments would be just a phenomenon of 2007, you were hoping in vain. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that the number of home loan defaults should be even higher in 2008 than it was in 2007.
The dream of home ownership has turned into a nightmare for huge numbers of Americans, and they’re being kicked out into the street. Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and declaring that it’s all somehow part of the genius of the marketplace, we need to elect a progressive President who will act through progressive economic policies to help people get through this crisis.
Pro-corporate right wing politicians get itchy when they see an old growth forest. In their view, all that wood is just an economic resource going unused. People don’t like to hear about cutting down the world’s biggest and oldest trees simply for profit, however, and so these politicians have come up with an environmental veneer for their plans to allow huge areas of old growth forest to be destroyed.
Not cutting down old forests makes global warming worse, they say. Mature forests, they claim, don’t pull as much carbon dioxide out of the air as young forests. So, if you want to protect the environment, you need to allow big corporations to cut down old growth forests and replace them with tree farms of little seedlings.
Could it be true? Could old growth forests be partly to blame for accelerating global warming? Recent research says no.
A cooperative study by the University of Washington and the U.S. Forest Service indicates that big, old trees still grow and act as carbon sinks, in spite of what right wing politicians and their affiliated think tanks have claimed. Old growth forests don’t promote global warming. They help fight it.
Oh, you just know that CNN won’t be putting this YouTube question to the candidates in the Republican debate tonight:
Chris Dodd:
I have a question about the Constitution. Many Americans are concerned that the administration seems to be making a false choice. That is, to be safer we have to give up rights. I don’t believe that; I wonder if you do. And if you believe that we ought not to give up our rights, then what would you do to protect our Constitution?
This makes me think of a great format for a three-hour debate during the primaries. Republican Party candidates, Democratic Party candidates and Third Party candidates sit, each group in a line of seats that together make a triangle so that all candidates can see one another. There’s a podium for each group, and one by one each candidate gets to rise and ask a candidate from another party a question. There’s no moderator, only a referee to ensure a very basic set of rules are followed. There’s no audience; just the three sets of candidates, who can applaud, boo, or moan, just like in the House of Commons.
Back in February of 2006, 
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