cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The Obama campaign is actively pursuing Latino votes.  McSame?  Apparently he’s in a real bind about this, caught between his strongly anti immigration base and his previous, more moderate positions, his previous positions and the 2008 Republican Platform.

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.

painting from Sweep Da Leg

Recently, I needed some money so I could complete a project I was working on.  So I called up my friend, Tom, and I asked him if I could have $10,000.  He said he’d have to discuss it with his spouse, but then called by later and said, “Sure.  Happy to do it.  When can you pay it back?”

It’s the last sentence that’s the issue here.  Can you imagine my outrage that he wanted to be paid back, that he wasn’t just going to give me the cash?  I need a better set of friends.  I need friends who will just give me money when I say I need it.  I need friends who make gifts and don’t appear to expect anything in return.      

Maybe I should have responded to his request for repayment by telling him that very, very bad things would happen not just to him, but also to his family, and that they would all be afflicted for the next seven generations if he didn’t just pony up the cash and drop the repayment talk.  I wouldn’t explain how this would happen, or provide details.  I’d just emphasize how very, very bad things would be for him, etc etc.  It’d just be a strong threat of very bad things.  If I had said that, I think he probably would have thought I was committing a crime, trying to extort funds from him by threatening him and his family.

Maybe if I had been making many big monetary gifts contributions to Tom for the past decade, he would have considered my request for payment a “pay back” of some sort.  But I don’t have any relationships like that, where it’s about me buying a potential, future favor.  I just try to be generous when friends ask for something.  And I always ask when they will pay it back.  And I hope my friends will be generous when I ask for something.  And I don’t ask if I think that there’s any chance that I cannot pay it back.

If I lent my friends money for a business venture, I’d expect them to give me some stock in the company, or a promissory note that paid interest.  I’d expect to be protected and to be paid back. Silly  me.

So evidently, Wall Street has far better friends in Congress than I have in my life.  I hope that’s not true, but if the bailout bill passes, it will prove the point.

Maybe I could have the right kind of friends if I started befriending a new class of people, people I presently disdain for being fools and suckers.  Who else will make a gigantic gift to people who apparently don’t need it and expect nothing in return?

Please tell your Congressperson to vote no.  Not one centavo.  Not one cent.  Not one penny.  Please email and FAX and telephone them.  

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Dear Sir:

This evening while I was reading the proposed “bailout bill,” I realized that there was a terrible omission in the document.  Specifically, you forgot to try to collect any funds for the bail out from the very people responsible for the mess.  I’m not talking about the firms they’ve looted.  I’m talking about the people who have taken money from the firms and made those funds their personal property.  And, I see, you are going to require me and my family, who didn’t participate at all in the financial feeding frenzy that led to the crash depression problem, to pick up the tab.  And that the tab is a whopper.

How lovely.  Just when we need to hear from the candidates about the “financial crisis”, we learn that McSame’s canceling the Friday debate, urging Obama to do the same.  It’s a replay of the Hurricane Gustav “strategy”.  Things are, apparently, too important for politics.  Too important to thrash it out.  No.  What we need is to act presidential, and let somebody else figure out what to do.

The NY Times reports:

Senator John McCain said Wednesday that he would temporarily suspend his presidential campaign on Thursday to return to Washington to deal with the financial crisis and the $700 billion bailout package now before Congress.

Mr. McCain said he told Senator Barack Obama that he was asking the Commission on Presidential Debates to postpone the debate scheduled for Friday night.

“I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself,” he said. “It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”

That’s what we need.  No debates about how we got into this mess and how we get out of it.  No debates about who’s paying the tab.  No debates about Congressional review, reports to Congress, and judicial review of the plan.  No debates about the price of securities and how they’re selected. Oh no.   Nothing about the details.  When it comes to important issues, and in this case, the singular most important issue facing the country, what does McSame propose?  We have a nice meeting with lame duck Bush and the leadership, all of whom are directly responsible on some level for the mess, to make yet another backroom deal.

Give me a break.  What we need is a vigorous, no holds barred, forthright, face to face debate on precisely how the present “financial crisis” is going to be resolved.  Anything else, I bet, is just another smoke filled room and a rescue to the people who least deserve it.

Obama should say no, the debate must go on.  But don’t hold your breath for that.

Update: Another thing. According to Reuters McSame is making the exact, same argument he made about Gustav and the convention:

“It’s time for both parties to come together to solve this problem,” the Arizona senator said. “We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved.”

He doesn’t get that we’re all Americans and Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and/or third party supporters.  The parties are supposed to stand for something, they’re supposed to be involved in finding solutions to problems, in discussing alternatives, in pressing their viewpoints, in debating, in reasoning, in trying to convince others that theirs is the best course.  That’s what Americans do.  That’s what democracies do.  The idea that we drop those viewpoints to solve problems is ridiculous.  And it leads to backroom deals in which The People get thrown under oncoming transportation devices.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

On Friday the nation’s recession, the big, ugly one that so many people feel directly in foreclosure of their homes, at the gas pump, in the cost of health care, in towering credit card debt, in the cost of heating their homes, in job and income insecurity, in lack of consumer confidence, in diminishing retirement funds, paid a personal, uninvited and unwanted visit to the county in the Hudson Valley of New York where I live.

The county’s fourth largest employer, Kaz Incorporated, a maker of humidifiers, announced that it was moving its production facilities from Columbia County, New York to Mexico.  The announcement that about 350 workers were losing their jobs came on the heals of a similar announcement from LB Furniture earlier this year, that it was closing and that 150 production workers would lose their jobs.  That’s 500 production jobs lost in 2008 in a small county with a population of about 62,000. That can modestly be described as an economic disaster.

Join me in Columbia County, New York.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Maybe the Rethuglicans think that no one in America will think about any serious issues until after November if they continue to provide tons of distraction, both intentional and unintentional. If that’s their strategy, it’s working unbelievably well in both Left and Right Blogistan and the traditional media.

Two quick, recent, simple examples of the phenomenon:

Example 1. There has been lots of blogging about Sarah Palin’s not being the mother of her youngest child, the claim being that her daughter was actually the mother.  And now, today, the refutation of the story.  Not that photo of an obviously pregnant Palin.  Oh no.  Nothing like that.  Instead, a story that her daughter is pregnant now, that she’ll marry the baby’s father, and so on.  This is worth at least a week more of distraction, during which we’re not supposed to look at Iraq, the economy, energy or health care.  Instead, we’re supposed to debate and/or scream at each other about whether or not Sarah Palin’s daughter did or did not have access to contraception and compare Sarah Palin to Hillary Britney’s mother.

Example 2.  Hurricane Gustav takes aim at New Orleans.  Embarrassed about Katrina, the Rethuglican’s decide it would be unbecoming to have arch villains Bush and Cheney in public a coronation celebration while a natural disaster strikes America.  They say that on this occasion they should act like Americans rather than Rethuglicans.  Great. So we turn attention to how that will change their planned convention, and how they’re getting briefed in Mississippi and Tejas.  But why is it, if it’s not ok to celebrate a coronation when there’s a natural disaster, that it is ok to celebrate it while there’s a continuing man-made disaster in Iraq, which has left thousands of US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead and tens of thousands more maimed or seriously wounded.  It’s ok to celebrate when thousands of nation’s youth are dying, but the mere chance of deaths or injuries or loss of property from a storm makes the celebration inappropriate.  Does this make any sense?  Only if you care about providing innocuous material to discuss instead of real issues.

Enough, I say.  Enough.  

Now I’m going to an American barbecue.  I’m going to drink lots of globalized beer.  I’m going to celebrate what labor in America has brought the nation.  Things like the 8 hour day and the weekend. I’m going especially to celebrate the triumphs of the UFW and Cesar Chavez.  And the IWW. I’m going to think about Big Bill Haywood and Woody Guthrie.  I’m gonna hum labor songs.  I’m taking a break.

While I’m gone, I hope folks will start to figure out how to break the trance.