“Americans strongly oppose giving the president more power at the expense of Congress or the courts, even to enhance national security or the economy,”according the Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll.

“There is clearly a concern about executive power and the balance of power that comes out in a couple of different ways,” said Joseph Torsella, president of the Philadelphia-based organization. The nonpartisan center is dedicated to educating the public about the Constitution.

I’ve been away for a few weeks and now catching up on the blog-o-sphere. I read a story from Glenn Greenwald about protesters arrested for planning protests of the RNC convention.

PLANNING protests. PLANNING to protest… oh my dear good god.

Yeah. Scary men in scary gear with scary big guns busting into homes of people who are vegans. People with slogans like: Food not War. Arresting them with intent to riot.

What is more incredible than even this? That, as Glenn Greenwald notes, there is very little outrage emanating from our fellow citizens, MSM, blogs.

we tell ourselves we’re on the brink. the world as we knew it is gone. holy shit. oh my fucking god. the polar bears are drowning. frogs are disappearing. we are beyond safe limits of CO₂.

fyi: the world as we knew it has always been a fleeting construct… it’s always changing. there is nothing to hang onto. there never was… our lives keep moving forward. our lives will not stop. we, all of us, will eventually fall off cliffs into our own abyss…

in a way, i think then this frees us up. because if life is basically in chaos and out-of-control, why not use that to our advantage? why are we thinking inside the political box when the problems we confront are so outside of it??? i like this kind of thinking…

The resources of a single human cell’s “biospace” are as unbounded as the resources of outer space. Quantum microscopy opens vast new resources that fulfilll Paul Dirac’s criterion for a golden era:

“Golden eras occur when ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions”



why are we tied to barack obama, just for an example? if obama reads like a corporatist. if he voted for FISA… why? if he is the presumptive nominee because he tacked left of Clinton and now pulls right… if he can change direction, why can’t we change the course of this election? why? who determines our actions? do we? or do we allow some monolithic, decaying political system keep us in its thrall? do we have to accept this?

no. maybe it’s not the politics. we haven’t gotten it yet. it’s all temporary. it’s all just beyond our grasp. what lasts timothy? fucking nothing. oh. right. change lasts. and yet maybe that very thing gives me right now. if it’s all i have, then i want to own it.

ha… then i don’t have to vote for obama (or clinton) as the lesser of two evils. i can write to the delegates of New York and urge them to cast their ballots for Dennis or John… I can tell the Super Delegates what I think. And promise them a course of action that will leave them all realizing just how much the world as they knew it has moved way past them…

so… it’s another call to form another party. another call for a systematic campaign of filling school boards, town boards, state houses, and congressional seats with different points-of-view: we can tell the old ones, still stuck in the world as they knew it, that the Real Life Party is here. the Resistance Party is here. the Green Party is here. the Common Good party, here!!! and i have to ask myself, what is really progressive? voting for the lesser of two evils or abandoning that path? even when that path takes us further to the brink? or do we, at some point, have to risk being pulled over the brink? and how do we know that is really the worst thing? how do we really know what the brink is? and maybe that changes all the time too… or, and i’m not sure who first said it but: who the fuck really knows…

we have in us the power for drama and daring and doing great things. this is the time. we have, in front of us, another wild west to explore. uncharted ocean to cross. this trek is to reclaim the territory of our minds. our souls.

we are still fighting to be free. we will always have to fight for our freedom. because the world as we know it will always change, will often fall into the wrong hands… and yeah, life as we know it will always leave us with tough choices.

Ta dah……… another stunning assessment of George W. Bush, his policies, and what a real president would do from Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Time’s column. Yeah, the inescapable Tom Friedman: a cheerleader of the war in Iraq. A public intellectual and New York Times Columnist… part of that liberal media about which we hear so much.

You do remember Thomas Friedman? The man who brought us such great catch-phrases as the Arab street and Generation Q? Yes. It’s the same one. The exact same one who made the Iraq war sound grand in a 2005 talk:

This is not about oil. This is about something really noble, crazy noble. It is the first attempt in the modern history of the Arab world for Arabs in their own country to forge their own social contract, their own constitution.

Not only would democracy become rampant in the Middle East, but “a successful Iraq is our Iran reform policy.” In his droning, self-assured, and utterly annoying manner, he  told his audience that “The Shi’ite Muslims who will assume the majority of Iraq’s government posts are the same Shi’ites who live in Iran.” According to the newspaper account of the speech, Friedman said if Iraq succeeds it will ratchet up the pressure for democratic reform in Iran.

Well, today’s column is really a gas. And what I really loved about it, Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave (besides the side-splittingly funny lede), is it’s real he-man muscular language. Here’s  a sample…

What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines . . . without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans – sorry to say, with the help of John McCain – have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

Of course, we’re going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I’d prefer – for geopolitical reasons – that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn’t be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He’d be telling the country a much larger truth:

“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy – particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”

That’s what a real president would do. He’d give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn’t be using his last days in office to threaten Congressional Democrats that if they don’t approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

I loved how he slipped in the for geopolitical reasons that we get as much as possible from domestic wells while encouraging Bush, if Bush wanted to be a real president, to tell the country larger truths.

From what fucking planet is Thomas Friedman? Talking about George Bush telling truth to anybody is ridiculous. To try to appear like you’re a cool environmentally friendly liberal columnist guy and set us up for drilling the arctic is going a tad too far. And oh my god, you’re sorry to say John McCain is leading Republicans in defeating incentives for renewable energy.