Category: Politics

I verbalized some concerns that Pete Stark would somehow end up apologizing for remarks that we were all cheering on. Here is what I said.

My why is simple: when will I learn? I knew Stark was going to qualify himself, Dems have been doing it consistently. Naturally, he just handed the Republicans a chance to blather about troops.

Facts… silver bullets in the war against the ignorant, the uninformed, and the intolerant.

Facts. That’s all we need. Forget love, faith, religion, God, even reason or logic. It’s all about the facts. Why can’t these damned neocons and wingnuts just ACCEPT the fucking FACTS???

No, that’s not an exaggeration.  This is not a satire.  Larry Craig has just been inducted into the Idaho Hall of Fame.

It was announced on the local TV news a couple of days ago that since the nomination, “Had already been in the works for a few months”, they would continue to go forward with giving the award to Craig. 

I just saw on the TV that the award was given to him today.  This is the same award given to Frank Church–the best (imo) statesman Idaho has every produced.

i don’t have much tonight. i thought i’d write about writing on the blogs. like how to structure these essays or diaries. how to make them work better. but suddenly, i don’t want to anymore. I want to jam about Jay Elias’s essay, Of Politics and People

Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year.  I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best.  Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them.  And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather.  So, I’ll tell you why.

I post those quotes to remind us about people, and to try to get people to think about them, often in a different way than usual for politics.  Because it is easy to speak of political policy and strategy without thinking about these things, about the crucial role that people will have in them.

It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind.

emphasis mine (and also a bit out of order of the original)

And I want to go on about Delivery in jessical’s Pony Party: Oh Superman, In a Box.

As Ehud Olmert busied himself shaking hands with Abbas and correcting uninformed journalists from calling the Annapolis summit a “peace conference”, the IDF yesterday ordered the expropriation of over 1,100 dunams of land from four Palestinian villages (Abu Dis, Arab al-Sawahra, Nebi Musa and Talhin Alhamar) in the West Bank, between East Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim. The land will be used for a new Palestinian road connecting East Jerusalem with Jericho, thereby freeing up the so-called E-1 area for Israeli development.

This follows a recent report that Israel’s police force in the West Bank is moving its HQ to the E-1 area.

Horror happens every day… and it can shrivel your very soul. This is dedicated to those among us defying the horror.

This link  http://www.bpf.org/h… crossed my path and I was struck by this quote:

“The Buddha emphasized the importance of transforming the three unwholesome motivations: greed into generosity, ill will into loving-kindness, delusion into wisdom. Today we also need to address their collective versions: our economic system institutionalizes greed, militarism institutionalizes ill will, and the media institutionalize delusion. The problem is not only that these three poisons now operate collectively but that these institutions have taken on a life of their own, as new types of collective ego. Any personal awakening we might have remains incomplete until it is supplemented by a “social awakening” that motivates us to find ways to challenge these institutionalized causes of widespread suffering.”

As a consultant  whose practice (http://www.wheelwrig…) has been to assist organizational leaders to become more effective through increased (non)-self awareness,  I find the above to be spot on.  The three poisons are, for me, at the center of every ill this world is currently dealing with.  In our own mess, we can clearly see hatred (fear), greed (desire), and delusion (ignorance) operating at every level and on each side of the current debate.  Not only are these poisonous mind-states pervasive, they have become so enmeshed as to present as an nearly impermeable membrane against which our multi-lateral charges seem to have little effect.

I’m thinking primarily now about how this plays out within the Democratic party as it struggles to come to grips with its lack of spine, purpose,  and direction.  I wonder how the party would look if it was dedicated to reducing or minimizing the grip of the poisons on our society, relationships, foreign policy, and economic structures.  Would it even survive?  Sadly, I don’t know if any existing ‘party’ is up to the job of confronting what has become  nearly universal obsessions with terror, money and ideology.

Dr. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. He has written extensively on a range of foreign policy issues, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, non-violent struggle and nuclear proliferation. He is the author of 2003’s acclaimed Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, is a regular contributor to Tikkun magazine and the Common Dreams website, among other places. He serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus think-tank and as an associate editor of Peace Review. His articles can be viewed here, and information about his books is available here.

I asked Dr. Zunes a few questions about the current ‘Iran crisis’, the situation in Iraq and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The second part of the interview, dealing with Iraq, is published below. The third and final part will be published shortly.

Novels tell a story lived by characters. These characters? They pull us into their worlds. They show us what their worlds from the inside.

Some fictional characters stick with us for a variety of reasons. Characters like the Wife of Bath, Captain Ahab, the white whale, Alice, Holden Caufield, Gandalf, Jay Gatsby, Celia Garth, Beowulf, Hamlet, and so many others inspire us to ask questions about the worlds that exist both within and around us. Some, like Rosencrantz and Guilderstern offer us bits of humor amidst the darkness and tragedy. Others, like Peter Pan, Charlotte, and D’Artagnan, offer us insight into our better angels while still others–Voldemort, Big Brother, Cardinal Richelieu remind us of the darker shadows that surround us.