Oct 04 2008
Democratic Spine ©2008 Emily Duffy Photo by Sibila Savage
Dimensions: 14″ x 14″ x 9″
Description: A mini coffin with a truncated human spine lays in a bed of velvet. The coffin is covered with quotes by Progressive, Democrats both recent and from history.
Materials: Wood, parchment reproductions of the Bill of Rights, burgundy velvet, metal hardware, paper, amber varnish.
Cross-Posted on my BLOG (where you can see larger images) and at DailyKos.
Oct 04 2008
Goodbye to all that
Former Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura hinted that Japan would remove all of its Air Self-Defense Forces personnel from Iraq by the end of the year.The Suntory Museum in Osaka said it would pull three Chagall paintings from an upcoming exhibition because of doubts about their authenticity.
It was reported that Japan’s big three brewers suffered an 8.8 percent decline in beer sales in August compared to a year ago because of “heavy rain and other unfavorable weather.”
Oct 04 2008
I admit it. I’m furious. This evening’s New York Times online has a story with the title, “Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths”. And what’s the article about? It’s about how Obama has crossed paths with Bill Ayers in Chicago, where Ayers is a professor of education, a few times. Check out how the story begins 39 years ago, in 1969:
At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.
Twenty-six years later[that would be in 1997], at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.
Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.
In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”
Notice this. This is a story that is a complete non-story. It’s a long repetition and a detailed examination of facts that definitely don’t support the smear. And the story, when all is said and done, confirms that there is no real connection between Ayers and Obama. As the story itself says in a sixth paragraph that should have deflated the sensational, historical lede,
A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
You can read the entire story to make sure I’m not mischaracterizing it.
You tell me whether there is anything here except the repetition of the rightwing slander and a long, detailed discussion of how the two, who live in the same neighborhood, have connections to various progressive organizations and have, horror of all horrors, spoken to each other. Put simply, there’s nothing here. We knew there was nothing here. We know that it’s just a rightwing smear.
So why is it on the front page of the online Times? I don’t think you have to break out your tinfoil garments to answer the question.
Oct 04 2008
John McCain was out of the torturous grip of the North Vietnamese for approximately one year when Congress passed Public Law 93-531 in 1974. Public Law 93-531 was called the Relocation Act, and was falsely justified by what “Peabody Coal Company’s public relations and lobbying firms” falsely constructed as the “Hopi-Navajo land dispute.” This “range war” was not true. What was true, was lawyer John Boyden with the assimilated Hopi Tribal Council.
Boyden formed a Hopi Tribal Council that consisted of several First Mesa Hopi who had been converted to Mormonism, based on an election in which about 10 percent of the Hopis on the reservation voted. The newly elected Tribal Council then hired Boyden as their lawyer.
John Boyden with his assimilated Hopi Tribal Council wanted Peabody Coal to strip mine Black Mesa after the natural resources had been discovered. More than 10,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi did not want Black Mesa stripped.
Oct 04 2008
I found it surreal that so many people made a point of saying that Sarah Palin’s “performance” in the debate last night was all right, she didn’t make any big gaffes, etc.
What have we come to that it boils down to “performance,” in the literal theatrical sense of the word?
The problem is, to me, that both McCain and Palin and the Republican machine are left only with lies, trying to cover that up with “performance” — and in the meantime our Democratic nominees have no one to really debate with.
What it would have been like had there been a real challenge of ideas? I can hardly imagine it, but I can enough to know that I’d have liked to see both Obama and Biden have to state their case, in specifics, as to why they were the better choice.
At this point, they are the only choice. And the US is not the better for that.
No one brought up Katrina or the over 300 people still missing from Hurricane Ike, or how folks are coping with the floods recently deluging Iowa . No one brought up the poor. No one brought up immigration. And that’s just a few examples. They couldn’t … the entire debates and campaigns now are directed to the desirable “undecided voter.”
I understand that. I understand that’s politics. But there are consequences to this kind of politics.
Oct 04 2008
It has been a strange week. Of course, it has been a strange lifetime, so maybe this past week’s strangeness may just be relative.
There is the economic bullshit, of course. No matter what happens with that, I’m just assuming it is going to suck big green weenies. That last time some economic policy crap actually benefited the people was when? Does anyone have any recollection?
But maybe there are some good things to take away from that. In hard times we sometimes need some of that.
The trouble is that even if we can find a smidgen of good being a comrade with the bad, there always seems to be more bad as a fellow traveler.
And then there is the fence turtle’s story.
Oct 03 2008
With a brilliant smile and a confident swagger, Sarah Palin faced Joe Biden, and America, in the first and only vice presidential debate. But the face she presented was that of shallow Pollyanna with a woefully insufficient grasp of issues and facts.
Brought to you by…
News Corpse
The Internet’s Chronicle Of Media Decay.
Oct 03 2008
The NY Times reports the U.S. sheds 159,000 jobs, making September the 9th straight monthly drop in employment and “the worst month of retrenchment in five years”. 760,000 jobs have been eliminated in the U.S. since the beginning of 2008, according to the Labor Department. “Most economists have concluded that, even in the rosiest outlook, the economy will continue to struggle well into next year.”
“This is an economy in recession, and every dimension of the report confirms that,” said Ethan S. Harris, an economist at Barclays Capital. “This has been preceded by a slow-motion recession. Now we’re going into the full-speed recession that will last somewhere between three and five quarters.”
In their coverage of the drop in employment, the LA Times reports, “The bad employment report was expected to heighten pressure on Congress to pass an economic rescue package designed to ease the credit crunch that has frozen Wall Street and shut off credit flows to businesses across the country.”
A story from Bloomberg news suggests the earlier Paulson-Bernanke Steps Created ‘Big Ripples’ that lead to the rescue. “The $700 billion rescue that the U.S. House considers today reflects the unintended consequences of decisions made by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke since March.“
Each decision to bail out or not created more instability, leading to further runs on securities firms, banks and insurers.
“Every time you tinker with this delicate system even small changes can create big ripples,” said Dino Kos, former head of the New York Fed’s open-market operations and now a managing director at Portales Partners LLC in New York…
The Treasury is gambling that the $700 billion plan now being debated in Congress will kick-start capital markets and lending. If the government is a buyer of mortgage securities, they will trade higher, Paulson told Congress. If the banks are cleansed of bad assets, they will find new capital and the cycle of lending will start again.
Investors say once again the government’s big-footing in the financial markets could create more problems than it solves.
Officials “have designed a financial bailout plan that is not only misdirected, but may further exacerbate problems in the housing market,” says Eric Hovde, chief investment officer at Hovde Capital LLC, which manages $1 billion in financial services stocks. “Just as foreclosure sales are pressuring housing prices today, government sales will only make matters worse.”
The House passed the Wall Street bailout by a 263-171 vote. McClatchy Newspapers report Maybe $64 million for Washington D.C. politicans explain the bailout vote.
Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics…
Both political parties have become beholden to Wall Street.
How the bailout will positively impact job creation and rescue the U.S. economy remains to be seen. Personally, I am highly skeptical.
Four at Four continues with the military consequences to shipping U.S. manufacturing jobs to China, what the Republicans are up to in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Canada’s Green Party, and a rather depressing story about penguins.
Oct 03 2008
It has been a strange week. Of course, it has been a strange lifetime, so maybe this past week’s strangeness may just be relative.
There is the economic bullshit, of course. No matter what happens with that, I’m just assuming it is going to suck big green weenies. That last time some economic policy bullshit actually benefited the people was when? Does anyone have any recollection?
But maybe there are some good things to take away from that. In hard times we sometimes need some of that.
The trouble is that even if we can find a smidgen of good being a comrade with the bad, there always seems to be more bad as a fellow traveler.
And then there is the fence turtle.
