November 2, 2009 archive

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

Now with World and U.S. News.  52 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Abdullah pulls out of Afghan run-off election

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

Sun Nov 1, 7:10 pm ET

KABUL (AFP) – Challenger Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday pulled out of Afghanistan’s run-off election, plunging the country into fresh political chaos amid international pressure for the one-horse race to be scrapped.

Two-and-a-half months after Afghans went to the polls to elect a president for the second time, Abdullah’s move appeared to guarantee President Hamid Karzai a second term but flung his legitimacy into doubt.

After Karzai snubbed a series of demands promoted by his rival as a chance to avoid a repeat of massive first-round fraud, Abdullah said he saw no point in standing, but stopped short of calling for a boycott.

Apathy and Attack

I have been involved in lots of groups. In all of these groups there have been people who insist that just about whatever we are trying to get done….simply cannot be done.

Among these people there are a subset who actually get angry at the idea that we are going to do something. Some are so adamant that this thing cannot be done that they actually start to attack the people who say it can be done, who have worked hard to plan this thing, prepared for this thing, and are asking/telling (in a work venue) other people to help do this thing.

They do this…in some if not most cases….because they feel hopeless and powerless.

And asking someone to do something that they feel helpless to do or powerless to do is VERY upsetting to most people. They have been told all of theor lives that they are hopeless, powerless and in many cases, worthless. To challenge them to go beyond that conditioning is running right into a wall of belief that has been built since the earliest days of childhood.

Which brings us to politics …and blogging.

Nowhere…nowhere in our lives do we as a People feel as hopeless or as powerless as we do when we address the political realm. We have had that helplessness and powerlessness hammered into our consciousness since birth. “You can’t fight City Hall” is just one of the powerful and obvious rhetorical bludgeons used to keep people from participating…and particularly participating Loudly…in politics.

Bad education, (hell they don’t even teach civics in High School anymore) various forms of voter suppression, a comfortingly dishonest news media and a slew of cultural messages from the movies and particularly the teevee shows that make up the circus side of the ages old bread and circuses strategy of politics that USED TO allow those in power to do what they wish without the spotlight of their pesky citizens/consumers being shined upon them all have produced a feeling of apathy and hopelessness and powerlessness that is precisely what allows our political system to be indemnified from the scrutiny participation by We, The People.

We have been told repeatedly, resoundingly and continuously throughout our lives that we are powerless, and we believe it.

And so we settle into our specifically engineered little lives, going to work everyday to produce the tax revenue that allows our government to kill and torture our Brothers and Sisters, pick up some unhealthy prepackaged Corporate food product on the way home to our little ticky tacky boxes, to sit in front of the teevee and let the very Corporations that are using us as revenue generating units program our minds some more….

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Into thinking we are powerless to change their world.

Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November: An Opportunity for Leftist Activist Infiltration

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

V for Vendetta Pictures, Images and Photos

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is urging Americans to come to Washington, D.C., next week to roam the halls of Congress and lobby lawmakers against the House Democrats’ healthcare reform plan.

The strategy aims at resurrecting the momentum Republicans enjoyed during the August recess, when many critics challenged their members of Congress on healthcare reform. Since then, Democrats have regained their footing and have captured some political momentum to pass a bill.

__________

She said the plan on Thursday afternoon will be to walk through the House office buildings to look for lawmakers: “We can walk through Cannon, Longworth and Rayburn [office buildings], walk through the Capitol …”

http://thehill.com/homenews/ho…

No comment

The Approaching Muni Bond Implosion

   New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch made a statement last week that should have gotten headlines, but didn’t.

 “I believe that the states across the United States will face deficits a year after stimulus ends of $300 billion to $500 billion a year,” Ravitch told about 200 people gathered at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “You’re going to begin to see cracks in the municipal bond market well before then, because that’s an inexorable casualty of unfundable state deficits.”

 To put this into perspective, the total state budgets for 2010 was about $1.4 Trillion. If his predictions are anywhere close to being true then the budget problems of the states are essentially unfixable.

Racist “the Atlantic” cover: Sept. 2009

UPDATED. NOW, with new, technicolor FACTS, er, DATA, detailing what in the heck the author is RAVING about.

The sleezeballs at “the Atlantic” magazine have (once again?) printed a cover that’s racist, sexist, and attacks Obama.

Did I miss this? Was there a tempest about this when it came out? I dunno, seemed I was reading more news then, and heard nothing. Maybe it was a day I was busy.

What sells in advertising? Hey, we all know, it’s association. You associate your soft drink with young people partying… and  young people drink it. You associate your beer with guys having fun in their all-boy-fun sports bar… and guys drink it. You associate your car with beautiful hot young women looking at a camera as though they’re pining to have sex… and old men buy it. (Maybe some young ones, but hopefully most of them are actually having sex….)

Remember this one? And how the New Yorker was raked through the coals for days over this?

http://tinyurl.com/ykjvu4r

or

http://iamthelostgirl.wordpres…

Check out this despicable thing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc…

If no one screamed about it at the time, I’m screaming FOUL FOUL FOUL  now.

Worse: if no one screamed about it at the time, they got away with it. The association was made in thousands or 10s of thousands of minds… and no one paid a price.

The slimeballs.

Team In Training update

Cross posted at Daily Kos

In a diary from yesterday I noted that I had signed up with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Societies Team In Training program.  Basically I’ll be running the NJ marathon in Long Branch NJ on May 2nd as a fundraiser for LLS.  In essence if you’ll donate to the Leukemia & lymphoma Society I’ll run a marathon for ya!!.  

Heres the link http://pages.teamintraining.or…

I demand PURITY!!!!!

Crossposted at Daily Kos

     Demand purity? “But that’s crazy talk!” you say.

     Of course it is! I’m not talking about purity for the Democrats, you sillies. I’m talking about purity for the Republican party.

    I demand MORE of it! MORE Republican purity is the BEST thing the Democratic party and the progressive movement could possibly hope for.

     There is NO possibility of recalling The Wing-nuts-          

     You see, there is no such thing as liberal purity. Put 100 random liberals in a room and you will have 100 different views of how the world should be.

     Conservatives, on the other hand . . . .

     More below the fold

The Third Estate Wants Its Way Again

This morning’s Politico attributes the death of centrism in the Republican party to the overwhelmingly insatiable demands of the far-right riffraff.   The sans-culottes throngs certainly have pitched some pretty parades over the past few months, haven’t they?  Heads have, metaphorically speaking, rolled and more are almost certain to take their place underneath the unforgiving guillotine.  Yet, to insist that this was a movement spearheaded by the party itself would not be correct.  This summer the GOP establishment tried to harness the energy of the rabble and found that it marched to no one’s orders but its own.  

“I don’t give a crap about party,” said Jennifer Bernstone, a tea party organizer for Central New York 912, which helped to lead the anti-Scozzafava charge. “Grass-roots activists don’t care about party.”

Says Everett Wilkinson, a tea party organizer in Florida: “We are not going to allow our [movement] to be stolen by the GOP or by any political party.”

CHANGE: Do We Make it or Take it?



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Okay. Okay. Let’s get this straight. Pelosi strips the House bill of a committee-passed amendment by Kucinich to allow individual States to create their own single-payer (Medicare) health care programs. Yet the House bill allows States’ to op-out  of the ‘public option’. So local governments are prohibited from creating options to the public option and can instead opt out of the public option thereby sentencing the people of the States to the slavery of insurance companies.

Message to the ‘chickenhawkette’ and her daddy

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to put together my thoughts on the recent claims by one liz cheney, she don’t deserve caps for name. But as this royally pissed me off when it first aired I kept getting madder and madder trying to write something, not being a writer adds to that, and I just had way to much hitting my mind to say to her and anyone else. But low and behold I found a piece by another Veteran that says allot of what I wanted and figured I can link to his while adding the links I wanted to.

This is what I first started out with and kept changing:

Docudharma Times Monday November 2




Monday’s Headlines:

With Karzai, U.S. Faces Weak Partner in Time of War

Britain Sets Tough Laws for Texting While Driving

Climate bill faces hurdles in Senate

GOP ex-candidate endorses Democrat in New York

Taliban blamed for deadly Rawalpindi bombing

N Korea urges US nuclear talks

Lorca’s grave awakens other ghosts

Berlusconi ally launches challenge in leadership manifesto

Palestinian anger as Hillary Clinton praises ‘settlement concessions’

Iran police to confront ‘illegal’ Nov. 4 rallies

Africa’s urban farmers

South Sudan leader calls for south to secede

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