August 5, 2008 archive

Amid skyrocketing oil, gasoline, coal, and electricity (coming to a neighborhood near you) prices, 2008 offers Americans quite serious and stark choices between knowledgeable, impassioned, and thoughtful candidates when it comes to finding paths toward a prosperous 21st century economy, on the one side, and Fossil-Fool candidates focused on tightening our shackles to the ever-more costly (pollution, financial, otherwise) and archaic oil-coal based energy system.

One of these stark choices comes in Nebraska , where Scott Kleeb is facing down with Mike Johanns.

Scott was an easy choice for membership in the ranks of the Energy Smart Act Blue page. Join me after the fold for some indications as to why.

As Oil Peaks, supply chains stretch and the New Economy fails, there are going to be some major changes in the life of Average Americans.

The future is wide open as far as ‘how bad’ it’s going to get. There are many possible dystopic futures: Mad Max, 1984, A Brave New World, Harrison Bergeron, to name a few, but let’s not focus on the doom and gloom, let’s take a look at the opportunity for community, friendship and cooperation – there is no law that says the bad guys are going to win.

Let’s take a look at a possible future that I don’t think is on many people’s radar.

Sure.  Let’s pick a fight at another blog.

ray charles 1966:

~♥~ sorry this is late. don’t rec the pony. ~♥~

Glenn Greenwald has been doing some important reporting on the Anthrax investigation this past week and if you haven’t seen it yet I think it’s well worth checking out.

In chronological order his pieces are-

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News

Friday Aug. 1, 2008 05:36 EDT

We now know — we knew even before news of Ivins’ suicide last night, and know especially in light of it — that the anthrax attacks didn’t come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government’s scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government — from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role — I’d argue a very major role — in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue — including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework — were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and — as importantly — to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They’re allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

Like many of you, I came to blogging as a way of fighting back.  Before I found this avenue through which I could channel my dissent, I felt powerless to do anything about the outrages being visited upon our nation and virtually all the rest of the world by our own intractable and illegitimate government.  

People often question what good it does to rant into the ether.  We hear it all the time right here.  ‘Preaching to the choir dude.’  But time has proven that we in the blogosphere are a force to be reckoned with.  The pols and the pundits would be ignoring us otherwise…just like they used to.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Mahatma Gandhi