Nov 09 2007
Updating this with a great comment from Alma
I’m tired of the media, and parties telling us (4.00 / 1)
who is electable. It’s time we told them who is electible, and acceptable, to us. It’s time to move the party to the left and the best way to do that is for the far left (Me & many here, I think), to go even farther if possible, as loudly as we can.
Nov 09 2007
there are times for anger. and action. there are times for confusion and catastrophe. there used to be… time for love.
yet is seems much of my time has been spent feeling overcome by the weight of so many bad things happening all at once that it….
… makes me forget why i’m so angry… because i love.
or why i feel this need to fight against changing winds, rising seas, cultural hatred, and eve_vree_thing else that darkens the sun… because i love
Nov 03 2007
One of the breed of bonkers, I wouldn’t dare to lecture
I don’t know how to lead, there’s got to be somebody better
Weak in the kneesy species, dreaming of future faded
Seen where the suture stiches nitted, slipped? I’m with you baby,
Let’s get obnoxious with it, I wanna know what brave is
I’m tired of sitting here pretending I’m not fucking dangerous!~El-P, Run the Numbers
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
~Adolf Hitler
Most of us can agree that all signs point to coming electoral success at every level of the Federal government for the Democratic Party in 2008. The polls are there, the Republican incumbents are stepping down, and the money edge is nearly insurmountable.
At the same time, the current Democratic Congress, holding narrow majorities, is expected to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. This is after the nominee suggested he did not know what waterboarding entailed, that the President has the power to disobey the direct language of Federal statues, and that the Office of the Legal Counsel can advise that Executive Branch employees to disobey a Congressional subpoena and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia should refuse to obey a citation for contempt.
This compels us all to contemplate that no matter what the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, many dire threats to our liberty will persist.
Nov 02 2007
Oct 31 2007
So everyone with a blog or a newspaper is writing about the “debate” held tonight by the Democratic candidates for their party’s nomination for President. But I’m not. I didn’t watch it. Sure, I was at work while it was going on, and could not have done so. But I have been home for several of them, and proudly ignored them. Because the “debates” are a sham, about little of substance, and won’t make much of a difference anyway.
We can all remember the vast attention paid to the Presidential debates in 2004, as well as many of them previous. But the “victories” of Kerry over Bush in the debates then did not matter, and no matter how much we venerate the “You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy” moments of debates, debate results don’t matter much, except for in a single area. The Swift Boat ads trumped whatever success from the debates Kerry had.
The only way that debates matter, particularly in the primaries, is that it can help determine not who any of us will vote for, but who gets major financial supporters. Because you can blow it by having a terrible debate performance, and the money will not go to a candidate who has blown it. And you can maybe pick up some money from a surprisingly strong debate showing; Mike Huckabee has finally seen an uptick in donations after repeated “strong” performances in the eyes of the press.
Oct 26 2007
love.death.love.death.love.sex
before my 16th birthday, my dad took me out for dinner. he said he figured it was time for the “sex” talk. whoo boy.
so we’re at dinner and i say, dad i know about sex… haven’t had it yet, but like i know about it.
he says i only wanted to tell you this one thing: don’t ever let anybody fuck you. if you want to fuck them, that’s fine. but don’t EVER let anybody fuck you.
holy shit. what did he just say?
and then we both started laughing.
my father gave me one hell of a gift: the knowledge and confidence to own myself. to own my decisions. to be my own person.
yeah, you own yourself and you give yourself… don’t ever let anybody take anything you are unwilling to give.
but when you let go, let giving yourself be a completing act. because it’s love we all want, so make it about loving somebody.
then sex is a playground, an archeological dig. it’s absurd, a comedy, a vacation of hours… it’s making poetry in grunts and groans. it’s about that slow reveal… the getting there…
maybe, when we stop letting others define us
maybe, when we stop letting life define us
maybe, when we start defining ourselves
we’ll stop creating worlds in which we hate to live
Oct 25 2007
there are two very good essays on the front page examining the ways in which your mortgages or home equity loans can explode in your face. what can be done about this? do we unleash this info and get our state legistlators enacting some kind of laws, even temporary, that prevent such a thing from happening?
there are so many great commentaries at this and other blogs about the tough and dire straits in which we find ourselves.
but i find myself shrinking away from reading anything more. i can barely open a blog for fear of what i might read next.
Oct 24 2007
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.
Oct 20 2007
i am so bone-achingly tired of how we insist on going back to strategies that do NOT work. we have been conditioned to worry about what we say and show deference and respect to those with power who are, imnho, among the most ethically bankrupt and meaningless of human beings and creatures on this earth.
the old “might is right” methods of keeping us in herds (communities) and regulated needs to be overturned. period.
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update: h/t to Tigana for those two wonderful words together… blessed unrest… a way to define this thing we are doing… bravo, Tigana!
Oct 19 2007
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???
Oct 12 2007
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.
Oct 11 2007
cross-posted at dKos
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The most buzzworthy story on the right side of the blogosphere this weekend concerned young Graeme Frost… propped up by Democrats desperate to avert the president’s veto of S-CHIP legislation, which would have massively expanded the government health care entitlement.
It appears that Ms. Malkin is concerned about massively expanding the government’s health care entitlement. So I’m pretty sure that Ms. Malkin simply wants to make sure that our taxes dollars are not diverted to something so mundane and middle class as health care. I’m pretty sure she just wants to protect the worthy entitlement programs described below the fold…