September 12, 2008 archive

SE LA: Ike Storm Surge and Call for Help

While a lot of attention is being focused on Texas, SE Louisiana–particularly bayou communities–which are still recovering from Gustav are being affected by Ike already.  This is almost a repeat of Katrina-Rita, and again, they are being ignored.  Please see the bottom of this diary for ways to help.

Get Mad. Get Even. And Punch ‘Em In The Nose

What do you feel when you see this (warning, sick and wrong attack on Obama follows):

Angry? Incensed? Stay with that emotion and watch this next one:

Four at Four

  1. The Associated Press is reporting news of another devastating suicide bombing — Car bomb in Iraq kills at least 32, wounds 43. The last big attack that I mentioned in 4@4 came about three weeks ago where 25 people were killed by a bomb at police station in Diyala. Today’s attack — “a car bomb ripped through a crowded commercial district — came in Dujail, a mainly Shiite town north a Baghdad. The target of the attack was another police station, but instead the bomb “badly damaged a nearby medical clinic”. According to the Iraqi police, “concrete barriers largely protected the police station”.

    Earlier Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a Shiite mosque farther north in Sinjar as worshippers left prayers at midday, killing two civilians and wounding 15, police chief Col. Awad Kahlil said.

    So much of what happens in Iraq is not reported by the Western media because the country is not safe. Bush’s “surge” is permanent until, at least, he leaves office in 2009. The Iraqis know that America is paying off most of the country’s militia groups to keep them quiet. And yesterday, even Gen. David Petraeus said he would not use the word victory to ever describe Iraq.

    The “surge” was to keep the situation in Iraq from blowing up while Bush was in office and to distract Americans from the ongoing occupation so to help select the next Republican for the White House… and it is working.

  2. The NY Times reports Democrats reluctantly embrace offshore drilling. Despite decades of opposition to new offshore drilling, ‘a core principle of Congressional Democrats”, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading the Democrats to moderate their opposition on drilling.

    Under a measure being assembled for a vote in the House next week, oil rigs could go up 50 miles from the shores of states that welcome drilling and 100 miles off any section of the United States coast – a stark reversal on an issue that has been a Democratic environmental touchstone since the 1980s.

    However, this “reversal” is not good enough for Republicans and their friends in the oil industry. The Democrats’ legislation does not “go far enough to satisfy them” and, according to them, “a decision not to share any new oil royalties with the states eliminates a prime incentive for states to say yes to drilling.”

    In a tactical move, Pelosi is attempting to out fox the foxes. What really is at stake is ban on offshore drilling that will expire in three weeks. With $4 a gallon gasoline and Republicans hell bent on drilling makes renewing the ban an impossibility this year.

    So rather than see the moratorium expire and open the way to drilling as close as three miles from the coast, they said they were pushing any drilling at least 50 miles offshore, requiring states to agree to it and tying the whole package to a series of clean energy initiatives that have so far languished in Congress.

    “The reality,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters Thursday, is “if we don’t have something in the bill, it’s drilling three miles offshore.”

    Please read Meteor Blades’ essay explaining the stakes in more detail.

Four at Four continues with weak retail sales, the climate threat posed by nitrogen, and a bonus story about illegal logging in Mexico threatening Monarch butterflies.

True Participatory Democracy

It’s here! It’s about time! This really is wonderful news!

Finally, after all their talk and noise about the mission from God to spread freedom and democracy around the world, and all the complaining over the past eight years from crazed left wing spaced out paranoid disconnected from reality radicals that too many billion$ were being spent overseas and not enough spent domestically, and that totalitarianism was just around the corner, all the ridiculous fears are magically allayed, and bushco is at long last living up to their bright promise, and bringing true participatory democracy to the country.

Finally the people will have a true voice in the affairs of the nation, with the knowledge that everything they say, every opinion they express, every concern and suggestion and profuse thanks to their compassionately conservative dear leaders will go directly to the ears of those who need to know, without delay, mere milliseconds after it’s typed!

And the best part is… you won’t even have to type it.

They’ll come to you!

At last! It just doesn’t get any better than this! Thanks George!  

Blogging the Future of Blogging the Future

Happy Blogoversary!

I will leave the retrospectives of the past glorious year of unremittingly spectacular blog posts and startlingly witty and poignant commenting to others here. People who, sob, actually have a computer right now, (tiny violins play in the background) people who can search for old highlights and stuff without a scary librarian looking over there shoulder making sure I am not looking at the pr0n checking on me.

I want to talk about the future, not the past. The future of Docudharma as a blog entity is not all that interesting. The dedicated team of bloggers who started this place will still be here in another year, with a few natural changes here and there. We will still be the place to publish not just thoughtful essays on current events as well as deep musings on the gestalt, zeitgeist and overview of politics culture and all that stuff, as well as poetry, general silliness and just about anything else you can think of that is creative and original and maybe just a bit off beat. Hopefully we will also be attracting new blood (and other bodily fluids?) to keep the blog vibrant and just a tad surprising. After all, a full year of officially being open is a loooooong time in the blogosphere. We are an practically an institution now! Ivy and cobwebs everywhere, teetering ancient bloggers roaming the venerated halls, etc. As long as there are blogs to be written and The Man doesn’t shutdown the intertubes, we will be here, plying our trade.

Zen Dictator…A Year in the Life (Updated with a request)

I thought a fun way to celebrate a year in the life of Docudharma would be to try and capture the various iterations of our own Zen Dictator over that time. This proves to be a bit of a challenge since, to my counting, he has published about 458 essays since the launch of the blog one year ago. But themes do emerge – at least they did to me. So I take the credit and blame depending on how well you think I may have captured all this.

I’m going to be completely dismissive of all the political essays Buhdy has produced. There are hundreds of them (I didn’t bother to count) taking on the issues of the day as any self-respecting progressive blogger is wont to do. But I’m going to focus on the other sides of our dear leader here. Some are serious and some are just for fun (I’ll let you decide which is which).

 

Bottled honor, the magic elixir of John McCain

Perhaps the saddest thing about the spectacle of folly and degradation that the US Presidential election contest has become is that Obama lacks the courage to deliver the speeches necessary to put the truth before the American people. Out of frustration, I have decided to draft a few of these imaginary speeches and publish them here. The first one concerns McCain’s shameless use of his POW experience as a magically inexhaustible source of honor.

Speeches Obama will never deliver: #1 – John McCain’s Bottled Honor

John McCain does not receive enough credit as a politician. His career has been built upon a feat that is unrivaled in modern American history. Senator McCain took one episode of courage from his wartime experience and transformed it into a permanent claim of exceptional honor. It is as though he filled a bottle with honor during his POW ordeal, and this bottle has never run dry.

But can honor really be stored? Isn’t honor something that we have to validate every day of our lives? How can a man insist that all behavior subsequent to a notably honorable action is irrelevant? Let us consider the honor of Senator John Sidney McCain and consider if what is stored in the bottle marked POW Honor is sufficient to wash away the stains of his subsequent actions.

I ask you to judge if a man who betrays a loyal first wife is a man of honor. I ask you to say if a man ensnared in the Keating S&L scandal is a man or honor. Is a candidate who curses his wife in front of reporters a man of honor? Is a politician who embraces a President who slandered him a man of honor? Is a torture victim who voted to enable torture a man of honor? Is a candidate who accuses me of teaching kindergarteners about sex a man or honor?

John McCain cannot replenish his honor from a bottle that was filled in Vietnam. The shelf life of that bottle expired many, many years ago. John McCain is not a man of honor today; he is a man so consumed by ambition that he will commit one dishonorable act after another to win the glittering prize of Presidential power. Honor is not a preserved and stored attainment that excuses any subsequent action, and it is particularly dishonorable to use past glory to claim permanent exemption from the consequences of bad conduct.

So take a closer look at the bottled honor of John McCain, my fellow citizens, and ask yourselves why Senator McCain acts dishonorably today. Honor cannot be permanently attained by any man before his death. He must defend and preserve his honor in all the acts of his life. Whatever honor John McCain attained in Vietnam has been spilled and scattered in the imprudent and ambitious actions of his subsequent career. Look again, America, and see that the bottle of John McCain’s honor is empty. It is as empty as McCain’s promises for reform and as useless as his obsolete and dangerous views on foreign policy. The highest duty before us is to preserve our country, my fellow Americans, not our nostalgia for the lost honor of John McCain.

McCain Versus Sustainable Energy Independence

Crossposted to Agent Orange … please help make Susan Kraemer’s good work on this more visible. And click through to the article on the original site, vote it up and leave comments, so her boss knows that her hard work is appreciated.

I just read up on John McCain’s 50 Votes Against Clean Energy, on the MatteR Network(1).

The take home message is really straightforward. The only energy sector that John McCain supports is Nuclear Power. When a “clean”(2) vote comes up for any Sustainable Energy Source, McCain’s position is simple: He’s Agin It.

It seems that the claim at the DNC that McCain voted against Renewable Power 25 times has been attacked by a fact checking web site, so what Susan Kraemer has done is go through 50 votes, and the picture is that of one of the dirtiest Sustainable Energy voting records in the Senate:

Summary

McCain voted with Boxer 1 out of 50 times – against signing the Kyoto protocol (vote 14). McCain voted with Inhofe 42 out of 44 times unless Inhofe voted with Boxer (see votes 34 and 35). McCain voted with Republicans unless the majority voted with Democrats  (see votes 9, 10, 12, 15,16 and 36). I will similarly review Senator Obama’s voting record in a future post.

The full tally is 37 votes against, and, during his current run for the White House, Missing 13 times on bills where he has stated opposition.

The Take-Home message is: on Sustainable Energy, John McCain is Inhofe’s twin, and Boxer’s opposite.

Welcome New Users

Wed Sep 12, 2007 at 07:00:00 PDT

Welcome New Users to DocuDharma.  We expect there will be a lot of you today.

Palin As CiC of Alaskan Guard – Bush Doctrine

I’ve wondered why some Governors haven’t come out to speak to what their involvement is as to their States National Guard, when there isn’t a Natural Disaster,  the involvement as the Commander in Chief of those Guard Units, as well as the Involvement when the Federal Government steps in and takes Command, sending them into occupations as regular military units, as right out of the gate Mrs Palin claim was to broad experience in Guard affairs.

Well I need ask nor wait any longer.

Palin put her ‘Experience’ as a Commander in Chief to rest last night in the Interview on ABC with Charlie Gibson, in her answer on the ‘Bush Doctrine’, as a Governor with her States National Guard units being called into National Service and Fighting Overseas, She doesn’t know It and apparently never understood what it was nor the implications to her state and her state guards readiness if she had a need to call them into duty.

Open Thread

 

one thread

two thread

red thread

blue thread

9/11: of Use and Abuse

Cross posted from The Wild Wild Left as yesterday’s Open Thread. My husband opined it was “crass” of me to post this yesterday, but perfectly acceptable today. Hence, the delay.

I have a problem not unlike the one that got KO fired. 9/11 gets dragged out and almost celebrated by the fear-mongering right. It is a tragedy that gets relived over and over by a populace that had rarely know large-scale tragedies on its soil. I find the way they use it is abusive, true abuse in both the misuse fashion and the masochistic type.

2,974 dead. I remember my horror, my tears as it occurred.

4,076 Americans dead due to their being sent to invade Iraq for a crime Iraq did not commit.

1,255,026 Iraqis dead. Where is the horror for their deaths, the remembrance ceremonies for those who had their lives taken in retribution for something they had no part in?

It brings to mind what John Trudell said (not just in Thunderheart, but in real life when Leonard Peltier was framed.) “Sometimes they just HAVE to kill us. They have to make someone pay.”

Iraq is the biggest patsy ever created, created mostly for profit.

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