Oh, by the way, let’s give Obama more money.
please, don’t be worthless.
June 2009 archive
Jun 17 2009
Begging for hope: The new power.
Jun 17 2009
Law Enforcement or Lawless Thuggery?
From the AP, we learn about two men who were arrested in a drug sting in New York City. The problem? The two men arrested committed no crime and the officers who falsified the report and prompted the arrest were, themselves, arrested.
A case of a few bad apples? Not anymore…
Jun 17 2009
The Night that I met Allen Ginsberg 20090616
Dr. Whitehead, Dean of the English Department in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas swung a pretty big stick in his heyday there. He was able to get important persons of letters to come and give free (well, at least to the public) readings of their material. Notable amongst them were Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. Mrs. Translator and I went to both of those.
The fliers had been distributed around town for a week or two. They were pretty much generic, essentially saying “Famous poet to give reading at the U of A on such and such date at 8:00 PM”. Well, Mrs. Translator and I decided to go, as we try to be cultured individuals and I was very familiar with Allen from reading.
Jun 17 2009
A Teach-able Moment for The Left
The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left
by Paul Street, May 30, 2009
Five Key Lessons Beyond the Gnashing of Radical Teeth
LEGITIMATE LEFT ANGER
There has been a lot of left-wing teeth-gnashing over the policies of the United States’ fake-progressive president Barack Obama. Left-progressives’ anger with the Obama administration is understandable given the new White House’s actions to (for example):
* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.
* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]
* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]
* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]
* Revive military commissions.
* Continue the practice of renditions.
* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”
* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]
Jun 16 2009
People let you down – why I’m an “obamabot”
UPDATE: Here’s another interesting take on the “Obamabot” phenomenon. Please read it.
Earlier this afternoon, i read Budhydharma’s diary at Daily Kos entitled “What Happens if Obama Loses the Left?”
There are over 1,000 comments on that diary as I write this here.
As a new member of the community, I have to qualify my statements in this, my first diary, and one that is – gently – disagreeing with the owner of the site. So here goes:
I’m a former Christian fundamentalist.
I’m a former neo-conservative “warblogger.”
I’m a former “pro-life” advocate.
I’m a cynic.
With those qualifiers, I voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. I did so because I saw all that my previously-held beliefs had wrought both within our nation, and in the greater world community.
That said, I disagree with Budhydharma about this statement:
We all have seen the tensions on the blogs between the members of the Center-Left and the Issue-Left. The CL are the people who portray activists pushing for their issues as “wanting a Pony” or insist that Obama has only been in office for __ number of months…..you know, the people who confuse political activism with impatience.
Okay, I’ve actually argued that “it’s too early” to gauge how Obama is doing related to a number of issues, including torture prosecutions, LBGT rights, etc.
Having said that, I don’t like being lumped into a group called the “center-left.” I’m NOT center-left. In fact, on issue after issue, I consider myself to be farther to the left than Obama would find comfortable.
Jun 16 2009
Four at Four
U.S. already impacted by human-caused climate change
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The United States Global Change Research Program, a joint scientific product of the White House and more than 30 scientists across 13 federal agencies, released today “the most comprehensive and authoritative report of its kind” documenting “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States“.
The ten key findings of the report are:
- Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
- Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
- Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.
- Climate change will stress water resources.
- Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
- Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.
- Threats to human health will increase.
- Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.
- Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.
- Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.
In its coverage of the report’s release, the Washington Post observes “Even if the nation takes significant steps to slow emissions of heat-trapping gases, the impact of global warming is expected to become more severe in coming years, the report says, affecting farms and forests, coastlines and floodplains, water and energy supplies, transportation and human health… But the speed and severity of these effects in the future are expressed with less certainty in the report and will depend to some extent on how quickly the United States and other nations move to reduce emissions.”“What we would want to have people take away is that climate change is happening now, and it’s actually beginning to affect our lives,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a principal author of the report. “It’s not just happening in the Arctic regions, but it’s beginning to show up in our own backyards.”
Dr. Karl said that unless the country acted soon to reduce emissions and to adapt to inevitable effects of a changing climate, the costs would be severe.
“Our destiny is really in our hands,” he said. “The size of those impacts is significantly smaller with appropriate controls.”
The Guardian adds the report “provides the most detailed picture to date of the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and extreme weather events: floods in lower Manhattan; a quadrupling of heat waves deaths in Chicago; withering on the vineyards of California; the disappearance of wildflowers from the slopes of the Rockies; and the extinction of Alaska’s wild polar bears in the next 75 years.”If today’s generation acts on climate change, the average US temperature will rise 2.2C-3.6C (4-6.5F) by the end of this century, said the draft, which was finalised in April.
If it does not, average temperatures could rise by about 3.9C-6.1C (7-11F) with catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy.
Four at Four continues with climate changes impact the world’s rivers and water resources, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed said he lied when tortured, Abu Zubaida was tortured but CIA mistakenly identified him as al-Qaeda, and idle factories in the U.S. at a record high.
Jun 16 2009
Solidarity With The Iranian Struggle For Democracy
| . |
| This is a brief essay about solidarity. In this case, it’s about solidarity with the people of Iran who are protesting what appears to be a stolen election, the loss of democracy.
How do we support those people, half the world away, in their struggle for democracy? How do we say just as people (and not a government) that we support their efforts to demand democracy? That they’re right, they deserve their democracy and we want them to have it? We can only do simple things. Things like changing our location and time zone on Twitter to Tehran and GMT +3.5 hours. Things like making our avatar green. Things like reading the posts of those who are there. Things like posting and distributing their videos on youtube. Things like writing blogs and asking others to link arms with them in solidarity. Things like talking about what ideas we might have that could be of help to them. These are things that might be completely ineffective to help Iranians achieve democracy, to get a new, fair election, to overturn the sham outcome of their last election. I realize that. But that’s not what’s important. That’s not what’s important now. What’s important, I think, is our solidarity with their struggle, our saying, however we can say it, “Brothers and Sisters, we’re with you. We want you to succeed. We want you to be safe, and free. We want you to obtain the change you seek.” Will they see it? Will they hear about it? Will they know that we are saying this about them? Of course they will. I say it by posting in green. You might have other ways of saying it. It’s important to me to say, aloud, to whomever can hear it, “I support the struggle in Iran for democracy.” Please join me. Please join me in giving to the Iranian people who are struggling for democracy the same support we’d like to receive in our struggles for democracy and equality and peace.
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Jun 16 2009
President asks SCOTUS Justice to represent USA in war crimes trials
Crossposted at http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of The United States
Robert H. Jackson
Justice Jackson was asked by President Truman to represent The United States in establishing the process for trying German war criminals after Germany’s surrender in World War II. The above quote was made by him in 1945 during the negotiations of The London Charter of The International Military Tribunal (IMT) which established the legal justifications and basis for the trials. He later acted as the Chief Prosecutor for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (IMT) of the major war criminals.
Sorry if I got your hopes up, but the point I want to make is the fact that we did this before, in worse times, and we must do it again. We must bring War Criminals to Justice. Just because the War Criminals hide behind our own flag does not make things any different.
To shrink from condemning and punishing atrocity is, however tacitly, to condone evil.
At the time, President Harry Truman faced many issues that required much of his attention. Fresh from his appointment to the Presidency after the tragic passing of President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman still faced issues outside of a nation’s involvement in war crimes. There was insurgent violence in the still occupied Germany, where remnants of a minority within the region continue to attack American occupying forces on a daily basis for a while.
There was also the issue of Nuclear Proliferation. As the sole nuclear power America faced an entire world that sought their own Weapons of Mass Destruction.
In 1945 the economy was still a big issue. After having just climbed out of the first Great Depression the economy was very much a priority back then, as it still is right now.
There were many important issues at stake during 1945 that could have taken precedent over the investigation and prosecution of War Crimes. None of those issues stopped us from doing the right thing then, and we should do the right thing now.
Jun 16 2009
What Happens if Obama Loses the Left?
No, I am not talking about the Center-Left, I mean the, for lack of a better term….The Issue-Left.
We all have seen the tensions on the blogs between the members of the Center-Left and the Issue-Left. The CL are the people who portray activists pushing for their issues as “wanting a Pony” or insist that Obama has only been in office for ____ number of months…..you know, the people who confuse political activism with impatience.
The people who think that speaking up for a cause you believe in is….rude, or means that you HATE Obama.
Obama obviously NEVER has to worry about losing them. They have no expectations, and thus cannot be dissapointed. They are willing to settle for whatever crumbs Obama will toss them. Or think that if they just wait, patiently and politely and quietly, Obama will eventually get around to GIVING them what they want with no effort on their part.
The people who get annoyed by other folks Yelling about issues that are important or vital to them.
Jun 16 2009
NewsFlash!!! War Supplemental Still in Danger
I certainly HOPE you have all been keeping up with the efforts of Jane Hamsher over at FDL…
…and her stalwart efforts to stop the War Supplemental, which is teetering on the edge of failing.
We’ve managed to hold 36 progressives (and shoot down a couple of trial balloon defections). Rahm threatened, bribed, cajoled, browbeat, threw tons of pork in to pay everybody off — and he failed. Obama had to come in and clean up his mess.
More than one person has told me that Rahm overplayed his hand. He packaged the IMF and the supplemental together, and proceeded to browbeat progressives that the White House has been snubbing from the get go. He was too cute by half when he threw in Lieberman-Graham so he’d have something to deal out for progressives in the House. Even Barney Frank got mad and refused to be played like that.
RIGHT NOW, She is waiting to liveblog the vote….
IF the vote takes place!
If the pull it off of the floor, that means that the effort has succeed….temporarily. Which would be a SIGNIFICANT victory in stopping Obama and Rahm from strong arming the GOOD Democrats in the House.
AND signal that it is time to fight even harder!
Head on over for the developments and lend a hand!