it's going to come back and bite him in the butt...

Obama has finally quit his Church after a Catholic priest and close friend delivered an incendiary attack claiming Hillary Clinton’s believes she is entitled to the nomination due to her race.from the pulpit of his Church The problem is the horses are out of the stable. Did the priest and Reverend Wright both have psychotic breaks or were their sermons consistent with the one’s they delivered while Obama was a member? I can understand his choice of congregation. The Church offers the full gamut of social programs and Obama was a social activist and organizer, but does he really think he can write off what was probably a vitriolic environment since he joined the congregation?

photo by Pablito_TR

proof positive...

coffee with cream and a little saccharine for sweetness...

A spokesman for Vets for Freedom is the first I’ve heard say the inevitable, “"You can have your Tiger Woods. We've got senator McCain." This is of course racist and yet it strikes a chord. Miscegenation is no longer illegal but still engenders revulsion on the Right. However, Obama is a bit of a Tiger Woods: neither black nor white: coffee with cream with a bit of saccharine added for sweetness.

photo by kumatank

war on bombers...

China reportedly worries about terrorism emanating from the Kashgar region where Muslim separatists have on a few occasions used terrorist tactics and blown up buses. There has been a Chinese backlash that blows the threat way out of proportion. Hundreds have been executed. The Bush administration crazy War on Terror leads them to support China in this enterprise. Terrorism is a tactic. Declaring a War on Terror would be like during the Blitz in Britain declaring a war on bombers. Further the US through recent history has supported freedom fighters. What is the difference between the two?

photo by NC Jason

it was all a little hazy...

Gail Collin’s of the NTYs takes a look at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s new book, “What Happened” about his days in the West Wing. It is a scathing indictment of Bush’s administration. Her favorite moment took place in 1999 “…when George W. Bush was deeply irritated about questions from the press on his past drug use. “The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,” the future president said. “You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not.”

spirtitual and material in Tibet, China offers both. Hollywood only embraces feudal Buddhism...

“Slavoj Zizek in an article printed in the IHT clears up some misconceptions about China’s treatment of Tibet and what kind of place it was before the takeover in 1950 According to Zizek, “Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (The last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door).
Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India. This did not prevent the elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.”
China has brought Tibet into the modern epoch. Zizek goes on to say, “Our fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don't care about real Tibetans: They want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.”

photo by archer10(dennis)

does rachel ray support hamas?

According to CNN, Dunkin Donuts has pulled an ad featuring Rachel Ray wearing a kaffiyeh which they claim was purposely worn by Palestinian terrorists. It’s true. Yasser Arafat wore one. But the claim is racist in that the headdress is worn throughout the Arab world and to add insult to injury Ray’s spokesmen said the scarf had a paisley pattern. Painting all Arabs with the same brush actually abets the terrorism America is trying to defeat.

all the news that's fit to browse...

Michael Chrichton in 1992 forecasted the demise of mass media by 2002. He thought the Internet would fill the gap with some novel approach to disseminate the news. He is a troglodyte and says, "The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, 'How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama's chances?' 'Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?' 'How will McCain overcome the age argument?' These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling,”
The organization of facts involves as many value judgments as an opinion piece. If this new method of disseminating information only deals in raw facts they will be so overwhelmed that no one will be able to form opinions.
It is a wee bit ironic that the interview with Chrichton appears in The Slate, an online journal.

photo by wallyg

delta blues...

Just when you thought the Burmese regime couldn’t be more repressive and less in touch with reality, it is reported,
“Commentary in the Myanma Ahlin newspaper said that while the country welcomed international aid, “Myanmar people are self-reliant and can stand on their own without foreign assistance. The state-run newspaper said that people in the delta could survive on “fresh vegetables that grow wild in the fields and on protein-rich fish from the rivers” if they could not get “bars of chocolate donated by the international community.”
Burma’s concern is that aid workers come from countries that are its enemies and the West has done nothing to dissuade them by demanding “…the release of Suu Kyi and other political prisoners and opposition members being held.”
Now is not the time to play politics by either side.

justice for all?

An African American man “...was arrested after police found him asleep in his car outside of Palm Springs on April 28. He was allegedly parked on the wrong side of the street with the car's interior light on. ...[he]...was charged with felony possession of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy.”
Nothing new, you would expect them to throw the book at him. But no, all he has to do is “...30 hours of a diversion program... [and]...his case will be entirely dismissed,"
Impossible you say, but I’m leaving something out. The man is Gary Dourdan, a co-star in CBS’s flag ship program, CSI. The only consolation is that he was murdered in the season finale.

photo by kwame bruce

is the genocide in darfur caused by bad karma because the Sudan trades with china who are mean to the dalai Lama?

Buddhism is the religion du jour with the glitterati and has always been associated with pacifism, although monk’s action in Burma and Tibet draw this into question, so Sharon Stone’s comment at Cannes is utterly despicable. She said,
"They're not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a friend of mine. And then all of this earthquake and all this happened and I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice, that bad things happen to you?"
Stone’s cavalier attitude towards the tens of thousands who have died should create a lot more bad karma. Perhaps a piano will fall from a 10th floor window and flatten her.

photo by infancinatorinc

no mantra necessary...

Benedict Carey in an Op-ed piece in the NYT examines the technique known as mindful mediation and its successes in dealing with depression and anxiety, but it is the same old wine just a different bottle. In the late 70’s I suffered from both and was referred to a psychiatrist who specialized in these disorders. He taught me a form of meditation identical to this new phenomenon.
He explained that meditation in Chinese was translated as sitting still. In Western cultures this is as easy, to use the example of Tolstoy’s initiation to a club, as sitting in a corner and not thinking about a white bear. That is all there is to it: simple but effective. What goes around comes around.

photo by fiSh MaAt

electricity comes from a plug in the same way milk comes from the super market...

Thomas Friedman in a NYT’s Op-ed piece looks at high gas prices and at some absurd solutions, “Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.”
His solution is to bring America in line with the rest of the world where gas prices are much higher for the current price is having an effect on driving habits. He proposes prices should never be lowered, and makes the case that during the 1970s American’s began driving smaller more efficient cars, but when the price went up again SUV, vans and pickup trucks proliferated.
His final solution is plug in cars, but electricity doesn’t just flow out of the wall. Can you imagine how much would need to be generated to do so? Where would it come from and in the end would it be greener than other alternatives?
This is all fantasy anyways because no politician is going to artificially maintain gas prices.

bimboing it all the way to the bank...

Vanessa Richmond, in The Tyee, writes about the cult of celebrity and how stories about it dominate the media. She writes,
“Sure, it's true that there's no shortage of real, crucial issues right now. And I do read "serious" stories about them every day. But I am proud to say my reading diet includes far more stories that are considered to be the journalistic equivalent of genetically modified, non-organic candy corn.”
One can feel a certain amount of sympathy for celebrities who are always in the lime light. It was sad to see the paparazzi exploit Brittany Spears melt-down but others exploit the situation as much as the media seemingly exploit them.
I saw a documentary on Paris Hilton. She is as far as you can get from being a blonde bimbo, although that is her persona. She truly is a Hilton. Everything she does in public is calculated to improve her bottom line.

will the fall of bagdad be as bad as the fall of saigon?

Support for the Iraq war is at an all time low. This should mean McCain who believes in staying the course should not stand a chance. However, wasn’t losing the Viet Nam War bad enough? Will all those lives lost mean nothing if Obama brings the troops home too quickly? It depends on how things are on the ground come election day. If it looks like Iraq will be a failed state and Al Qaeda will take advantage of this and gain a foot hold where they had none before the start of hostilities then how popular will Obamas planned withdrawl be? I believe Obama is a little too cavalier when it comes to outcomes and will bring the troops home, regardless. At least Hillary gave herself some wiggle room and what about the vote on invading? The White House was providing some pretty convincing evidence and Saddam wasn’t doing himself any favours.

to close to the truth...

survivor denver 2008

In The Slates blog XX the coverage of the primaries is lumped in with reality TV, the blog questions,“... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.
And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?
I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

photo by maria-cristina

global warmings not so perfect storms...

A meteorologist said of the cyclone that hit the Irrawaddy Delta, according to CNN, "...Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at the San Francisco-based Weather Underground. He called it "one of those once-in-every-500-years kind of things." This is refreshing. Rather than blaming global warming for the event, Master’s puts the storm in context. Five hundred years isn’t even a hiccup in climatologically time. In North America, armchair climatologists see the extreme events of the last few years as proof positive that Global warming is upon us, when its actual effects will be insidious. Worst storm on record needs to be clearly defined. It doesn’t mean worst storm ever.

photo by Antoon's Foobar

platypuses can go more than both ways...

The platypus has long been known as one of the oddest animals in the world possessing traits of mammals, birds and reptiles but one of the oddest is the “... fact that the animal has five X and five Y chromosomes is "the weirdest thing about a very weird animal," said Ewan Birney, a co-author on the paper, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute, near Cambridge. "In theory it means there are 25 possible sexes, though in practice that doesn't happen."
So much for human’s who feel sexually confused.

photo by dolnsike

once burned...

Timothy Gash Ash in an opinion piece in the Guardian looks at the legacies of 1968 and 1986 in Europe and says of 1968, “Revisited today, much of the Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist or anarcho-liberationist rhetoric of 68 does look ridiculous, childish and morally irresponsible. It was, to quote George Orwell, a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot"

photo by jimtsutcliff

perhaps the justice system should be given a lethal injection...

The fight over lethal injection being cruel and unusual punishment that was recently settled by the US Supreme Court was not the right fight to fight according to most who would have the death penalty repealed. There is a new battle and this involves poor people being faced with the death penalty being inadequately defended. The IHT reports that three men on Death Row in South Carolina have been freed due to being offered inadequate defenses and the use of questionable evidence and of improper procedure by the prosecutors. The IHT reports, “The three men released in North Carolina were all convicted in the mid-1990s, before a barrage of criticism of the state's capital punishment system, including an investigation in 2000 by The Charlotte Observer that showed that 16 death row inmates had been represented by lawyers who were later disbarred.”

sweet lady of death wants me to die so she can come sit by my bedside and cry...

Obama naively offers the politics of hope, perhaps not so naively in fact for from Iowa on his notion of a new way of doing things in Washington has resonated. It doesn't matter that he was one of the most partisan liberals in the Senate and supported no bi-lateral prone proposals he claimed a new inclusivness if elected.

There is not much difference between the candidates, but as Jodi Kantnor in the IHT writes, “As the economy has weakened, Clinton's candidacy has strengthened, and like Oprah Winfrey interviewing a tearful guest, she cannot seem to help but exult a little in bad news. At each event, she asks for student loan interest rates.”

photo by dbthayer

hillary's indiana tea party...

We all have those moments when something we believe in strongly turns to dust. I admired Hillary Clinton before the campaign and I know her back is against the wall; that she is desperate. But with her support of McCain’s summer gas tax cut, she has gone too far. It’s over for me. I’m still and political junky and would like to see it go down to the wire but I will hold my nose and go over to Obama. As a Canadian, it makes no difference, except that I am disappointed. I am scared too as I don’t believe Obama can beat McCain. He like so many before him will fall on his pointy-head and before voters realize he is far more white than black it will be too late. I don’t believe America is ready to vote for a real black man.

cartoon Wasserman, Boston Globe

the next thing you know he'll be telling us he was raised in a log cabin..

John Dickerson in the Slate looks at Obama trying to get back to his roots, “America is a place where you can make it if you try," he said before launching into a tour of his own family's history that demonstrated this truth. "This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother—a small-town couple from Kansas—the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government. This is the country that made it possible for my mother—a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point—to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships."
Speaking later in shirtsleeves at a park just outside of Indianapolis, Obama told the crowd shivering in the stiff wind "there is no country in which my story is even possible than the United States of America."
Fucking arrogance, most of the rest of the Western countries are nominally social democratic. There is socialized medicine and education based on merit. There is not the obscene gap between rich and poor. Nobody murders prisoners anymore. Barrack a little humility. Most of us are doing fine thank you and our hackles rise when someone claims, “there is no other country…” Barrack what would have your life looked like if you really were raised black and had to revert to food stamps. I don’t think you would have been editing any Law Reviews. Your arrogance varies little from your foes.

photo by Pam Glew

speaks for itself...

According to Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTs, “Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: We Americans borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build the country.”

photo by vidiot

i'm sorry i don't remember what i was saying...

Katie Hafner writing in the NYTs about mental acuity slipping with age and as it occurs worrying about Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia She quotes a Dr Simon who speaks of the concern about forgetfulness and says in most cases it is unfounded. He also points out, “When you misplace your keys when you’re 25, you don’t pay any attention to it,” he said. “But when you do the identical thing at 50 or older, you raise an eyebrow.” The article also looks at brain ‘exercises’ to regain memory and other mental functions.
I have first hand experience. In the early ‘90s I was virtually catatonic due to a profound mental illness. My doctor prescribed crossword puzzles and I was amazed at how much acuity I got back.
Hafner says, “There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects," Dr. Cohen said. He said the plasticity of the brain is directly related to the production of new dendrites, the branched, tree-like neural projections that carry electrical signals through the brain “Every time you challenge your brain it will actually modify the brain,” he said. “We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it’s impossible.”

photo by leff

a chicken in every pot...

Bob Herbert in an Op-ed piece in the NYts looks at all the time spent during the campaign focusing on Reverend Wright when they are not talking about the issues or are coming up with “a chicken in every pot” strategies like the ‘…proposed gasoline tax holiday, to run through the summer. Hillary Clinton and John McCain favor this dopey, irresponsible proposal, which would save individual motorists a grand total of $28, but which would result in $9 billion in lost tax revenues, much of it targeted for infrastructure needs.

photo by Key Lime Pie (Anna Wiz)

let them eat cake...

In an Op-ed piece in the NTYs Gail Collins looks at MacCain’s plans for dropping the tax on gasoline for the summer to give travelers a break. She writes that it’s a bit “….like announcing that you want to reduce tensions in the Middle East by drilling an enormous hole in Sweden”. She implies that the oil companies will raise prices to fill the void. She goes on to say it’s “…been a tough few months for McCain and the smallish folk, what with all those tax-cut plans for the wealthy. And then there was the health care speech when he told people to take responsibility for buying their own insurance policies and “watch your diet, walk 30 or so minutes a day and take a few other simple precautions” so they won’t get sick. We will think of this forevermore as his Let Them Not Eat Cake moment.”

photo by holiday_Jenny

what is he doing jumping on the couch if psychiatry is bunk?

Scientologist are out there and Tom Cruises statements that “One of Scientology's central codes is to "respect the religious beliefs of others," Cruise said.”That's part of being a Scientologist, and that's who I am as a person...." is patently false. Scientologists make the most devout Evangelicals look like free thinkers.

photo by TheBrazile

Obama dead wright?

Maureen Dowd in an Op-ed piece in the NTYs makes the following comment, something I’ve wondered about too “Obama, of course, will only ratchet up the skepticism of those who don’t understand why he stayed in the church for 20 years if his belief system is so diametrically opposed to Wright’s.”
Wright accuses Obama of ‘political posturing' I think he is dead right.

photo by Force Majeure Studio

don't hold your breath...

An article on the CNN website looks at how taxation may have had an impact on gas consumption, "Gas consumption Europe vs. U.S. There is some evidence Europe's high gas taxes have capped its oil consumption.
Oil use in the United Kingdom has basically stayed flat from 1980 to now, while in France it's dropped 17%, according to figures from the Energy Information Administration.
In the U.S., meanwhile, oil use is up 21% over the same period, although the country has added more people and seen its economy grow slightly faster.
Americans have taken advantage of cheap gas prices to do other things - like buy bigger cars and bigger houses further away from city centers, said Schipper.
On a per capita basis, Americans use three times more oil than Europeans, he said. That means Americans are more exposed to rising gas prices than their counterparts across the Atlantic.
"Five-thousand square feet in the suburbs, that's much rarer in Europe," said Schipper, referring to big homes. "We dug our hole."

In a previous post I quoted a survey that showed that gas prices would have to triple before they had any lasting effect on consumers driving SUVs and pickups and, not as was the case in the '70s when many consumers bought smaller more fuel efficent cars. The price of gas is a hedge, as is the price of grain and corn, a hedge against the low American dollar. At some point it has to come up as it is having an adverse effect on the rest of the world. When that happens it will be business as usual unless some has the courage to have high taxes hoping it will lead to a more fuel efficient and greener America.

photo by beeboo wallace

In this post

when not to make your vote count...

According to a poll featured on the CNN website "Among all Americans, Wright gets a 59 percent unfavorable rating; only 9 percent of the public has a favorable view and a third are unfamiliar with him. Among Democrats, the figures are virtually the same,"
I have never been in favour of compulsory voting. If you don’t know what’s going on don’t vote. Obama’s relationship with Wright is the most important issue of the campaign right now and a third of the electorate don’t even know who is. I hope they are the ones who don’t vote and that includes those who feel it is their civic duty.

photo by rustyrabbit