May 2010 archive

Excellent News !!!

No Effort Has Been Spared in Massive Operation !

The USS Gravely (DDG-107) an arleigh burk-class guided missile destroyer sits in the Port of Pascagoula, Mississippi surrounded by oil containment booms to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon from reaching it’s hull while in port. Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater oil rig that sank April 22, causing an oil spill threatening the waters near the U.S. Gulf Coast. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class (EXW/SW) Corey Truax/Released)

The USS Gravely is Safe !

Safe I tell you.

What could be better.

     I think Al Franken is writing jokes for his fellow Democratic Senators, and I like it.

Witness teh funny

     “We have some Republicans who would automatically oppose anybody who was nominated,” Leahy said. “The President could nominate Moses the Law Giver. In fact I told the President, I said you realize if you’d nominated Moses the Law Giver, somebody would raise, ‘but he doesn’t have a birth certificate! Where’s his birth certificate!'”

talkingpointsmemo.com

   The bigger news is Senate Judiciary chairman Leahy’s statement that Kagan should get confirmation vote before August .

But for more of teh funny and the reality deprived GOP’s reaction, just go below the fold . . .  

From the article: Obama Supreme Court Nominee Endorses Indefinite Detention:

Elena Kagan told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) last year she backed the Obama Administration’s policy of “indefinite detention.”

From the article: Shafting progressives:

For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some progressives have favored denial — even though, if the name “Bush” or “McCain” had been attached to the same presidential policies, the same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder.

But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups and individuals who pretend that Obama’s policies merely need a few tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are whistling past a political graveyard.

If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens — and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it’s part of a pattern.

The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist “wisdom” [Neocon/Corporatist]. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf.

One can almost hear those exact same words of absurdity tumbling (or bumbling) out of the mouth of George W. Bush.

On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a Neocon/Corporatist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles.

“During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration’s bogus category of ‘enemy combatant,’ whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right,” University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle noted last month. “Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S. federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Boyle added: “Kagan has said ‘I love the Federalist Society.‘ This is a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the Federalist Society.”

The departing Justice Stevens was a defender of civil liberties. Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the nation’s top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power.

Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise, history will judge us harshly — and it should.

From the article: Kagan Pro-Tribunal, Anti-Justice Record

Kagan opposed legislation designed to prevent terrorists convicted in military tribunals from using civilian courts to challenge their arbitrary convictions.

She even compared Congress’s effort, on a bipartisan basis, to clarify the laws governing the War on Terror to the “fundamentally lawless” actions of a “dictatorship.”

This is going to be a judge with a Cheney-esque, authoritarian, pro-detention, anti-Habeaus Corpus, pro-Torture(?), illegal Worldview.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Well how the frack d’ya like me now?

I’m not going to say “toldya so”, since many who will be reading this diary said much the same during the “Drill, Baby, Drill” absurdity in 2008 … but the undersea oil volcano underlines, boldfaces and highlights in red the basic facts of the situation that we face:

• Our country produces about twice as much crude oil per person as the world average
• Our country consumes about five times as much crude oil per person as the world average
• And we have been producing oil a long time, have passed our peak of domestic oil production, and aint ever getting back to it.

And, anyway, we already tried Drill, Baby, Drill. Its played itself out already.

Obviously, the direction to go to insulate ourselves from oil price shocks and the recessions they cause is to cut our consumption. Which means, in part, Train, Baby, Train.

Sibelius is frequently grouped with the ‘Romantic Nationalist’ composers (think Wagner or Tchaikovsky).  Certainly Finlandia is one of his best known works though contrary to some opinions it is not the National Anthem of Finland (that would be Maamme), but was used as the melody of the National Anthem of the short lived African country of Biafra (Land of the Rising Sun).

But rather than point you at the short (7 to 9 minutes) and cliche, I’d much rather bore you with the obscure and trivial.  The piece I have selected, Nightride and Sunrise, is a tone poem meant to evoke the emotions of an actual experience, in this case a night time ride and the rise of the sun (duh).

This recording is not the famous 1956 version by Boult and the London Philharmonic but the rather less famous undated performance of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra posted by billystewart4.

Sibelius lived quite a long time despite an early diagnosis of throat cancer.  He died in 1957 at the age of 91.  However after his 7th Symphony in 1926 his published output was very slight and in 1945 he destroyed many personal papers, presumably including the score of an unfinished 8th Symphony.

While he’s considered a national hero by the Finns, his music has received uneven reviews in other quarters with many critics calling it ‘conservative’ and ‘simplistic’ (among less kind opinions).

His reply?

“Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic.”