Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Historically after every armed conflict the United States has sent her sons (and now daughters) into, once they return they have had to fight their government in some fashion or other to receive compensation, something which was promised to them when they enlisted. Especically enticing to most of them was the promise of monies which would allow them to attend college after their military service.
The following article by Barbara Barret explores what the fight is all about over the new GI Bill .
Way back when it was rumored that originally Operation Iraqi Freedom had been named Operation Iraqi Liberation untl some bright spark realized it spelt OIL. True or not, as it turned out, that was the major reason for going into Iraq. OIL. That black gold that surely has become dearer than the yellow stuff, and is threatening to put the automobiling American public into a chronic state of meltdown.
This is the stuff which was going to pay for the War. The stuff that was going to reconstruct Itaq, the country which we have bombed into democracy. John McCain would have you believe that we need to contiune our presence in Iraq and our ecnomic trials and tribulations be damned! Robert Scheer wants to know why we should keep paying for this war at the pump.
Perhaps I over-reacted to Ms. Cocco's article in the Post recently. I am not the only one, however, who's getting a little annoyed with the implications that not supporting Hillary is tantamount to blatant sexism and projection from a severe case of misogyny. Jonathan Chait, writing for the LAT (an article noticed by our correspondent in NYC) has a few things to say about feminism and Hillary and her thinly veiled notions about ethnic candidates. The point, Ms. Clinton, is to begin the hard process of mending the Democratic tent through which you sent several really incendiary remarks over the past two months or more. You can be sure that if Obama fails in his attempt to win the White House, you will be blamed and you will be excused from power in the Party ever afterward. Yes, I know we have barely heard from the Republican slime machine so far, but the fact remains that you have done no good for Party and our candidate and you have precious little time to make up the difference.
My colleague in Massachusetts found this website which is replete with the latest of polls about who could win and where. For what it is worth, have a look. But, please understand that polls are only as good as the pollsters' and respondants' honesty and the pollsters' methodologies. Both my colleague and I have been taking polls for years now and clearly college courses in polling are deficient ... or the poll supervisors already know how they are going to come out. Caveat emptor!
I do not believe that there was an American yesterday who did not take the news of Senator Kennedy's medical diagnosis with a heavy heart. This possible death knell conjured up all those images from the past which have haunted the Kennedy family for decades.
During the primary coverages last night, to a man, those interviewed had nothing but praise for Kennedy and said they were standing by him in this fight. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a long time friend, was especially passionate about Kennedy's work and career in the Senate.
The following is a retrospective of that career and some highlights from a lifetime of service to his country.
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!
Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself
in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on
his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery
than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
by: Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786
In ths essay from The American Prospect , Matt Yglesias writes how Democrats need to embrace liberal internationalism with a vengeance. Everything that American statesmen had worked so hard to build up internationally from 1945 until Bush took the helm, has been debased and destroyed by this administration.
Marie Cocco (sic) writes in the Washington Post today about the rampant misogyny that has overcome the hapless Hillary Clinton in her quest for the opportunity to loot the White House again. Ms. Cocco is, as nearly everyone can see, an unrepentant 1970's feminista ... and so far out of touch with the facts of Clinton politics she does not understand that the reasons people—including Howard Dean and a host of former Clintonites—do not like her is because of (a) her baseline politics, and (b) her completely nasty, overweaning, smarmy, cynical, and hubristic personality, with emphasis on the former—her politics.
The editors of the Washington Post this morning are calling for relief to the millions of Burmese and ignoring the wishes of the Generals. I like this idea because it is sure to provoke an armed and hostile response from the Myanmar junta. The world has had enough of these thugs and their supporters. The problem, of course, is that there are supporters.
Wherever you go and there is a thug dictator or group of thugs, kleptocrats, murderous Amins and the like, you will find troops, thousands of troops whose actions suggest loyalty to the regime. How we peel these soldiers away from their generals is a very serious problem, but I am sure that it can be done. Each individual soldier sees himself powerless to affect change, but in coordination they see themselves privileged to commit atrocities and not worry about retribution.
Retribution will come, some know, but they hope they can survive it. The rest of the world needs to make an example of sufficient numbers of soldiers that the rest lose confidence that their way of life will continue. They will flake away and the generals will find themselves holed up in the mountains with nothing but sycophants upon which to feed.
Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, is one of the eldest statesman in the Senate (Edward Moore Kennedy of Massachusetts being the other). Elected to his office more times than any other candidate, Senator Byrd's endorsement of Barack Obama may have come as a surprise after Hillary Clinton so handily won the state.
What on earth will we do when there are no more primaries to look forward to on a Tuesday? Will we even know what day of the week it is? This is a very exciting Tuesday, however, as this is the "down to the wire" contest which will make someone a definite winner. As we have been saying all along, it certainly seems as though Obama will be the victor.
Being only 17 delegates away from victory it surely looks like this is one of those cannot miss situations. But, as Opera buffs know, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings", or in this case, Hillary Rodham Clinton yells uncle. The following article in the LA Times , written by Nicholas Riccardi and Stuart Silverstein explain why Oregon and Kentucky are about to make Obama's day.
"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right."
Quote by: William E. Borah
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
Jim Webb, a veteran himself, has worked long and hard on his Bill for the GI's. First, there should be absolutely NO question about benefits for those who have served their country. Those ultimate patriots of whom Bush is so eager to tell the rest of us we do not support.
Appearing with Tim Russert yesterday on Meet The Press Webb is having a hard time trying to understand why ANY President would veto a bill which would give those men and women who have sacrificed so much for their country. Nothing about Bush should surprise anyone anymore. After all those who are in uniform are not his corporate buddies, and those are the only Americans that he is concerned about
The Obama campaign says the Portland fire department puts its crowd at 75,000 -- a mark that, even if junkies are used to Obamamania , we're only just entering the reality of the general election.
Also that the Northwest is somewhat friendlier turf than Appalachia.
It appears, barring any unforseen challenges, that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. But what of those who have steadfastly stood by their woman ?
A man reaches his limits in the fury of forces unleashed by nature and relies on a tenuous thread of logic overextended from his basal system of cause and effect. So, James Carroll in the Boston Globe this morning reflects upon and accurately describes the devastation and the loss of over a hundred thousand lives in the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, and now the loss of perhaps a hundred twenty thousand in the cyclone in Burma and another fifty thousand, perhaps, in China's recent earthquake. But, James Carroll, committed to a theological explanation for root and branch turns to poetics and meaningless ironies. He suggests that some see an "evil nature" has attacked the moral order.
The thought of the Senate without Mr. Kennedy of Massachusetts should send a shiver down the spine of every Democrat. He has been the link to the Kennedy legacy, and so often the embodiment of the Kennedy curse.
When the first inaccurate reports of his "stroke" came in Saturday, there was a flurry of emotions, memories of his brothers shot down in '63 and '68, his nephews in trouble or tragically departed, and of course the fear of what this will/could mean for the political race of the year-in which he has engaged with his typical passion and energy. And then there's the balance of power in the Senate where his seniority has made him the champion of health care and so many progressive causes for so long.
Yet, in sense, his age and vulnerability makes the case for why its time to let the next generation in which may be why he endorsed who he did and why his long time operatives like Ted Sorenson are doing what they are for Obama.
Unfortunately, in a country where personalities matter so much more than organized parties or movements, politics freezes when the big names are in trouble, afflicted or gone. Happily, he has survived to fight another day.
Back by popular demand of those who know they can hoodwink alot of people with lying rhetoric, are the Swiftboaters of 2008.
This time they appear in the guise of the Tennessee GOP who have chosen to try and make Michelle Obama look bad. It is almost like kicking the child's dog or drowning his kitten to attack the person by way of his family. As Senator Obama said, it is "low class". But then what would one expect from the GOP and their modus operandi which we have seen in full force for the past eight years.
They play, unfortunately to the lowest common denominator.
Neville Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland to Hitler on the promise that that was all Hitler wanted to "round out" 1938 Germany. There were reasons to want to believe it was true and Chamberlain was depending politically on these domestic war-weariness threads for his act of appeasement. All of history knows that Hitler had bigger ideas that he had written down in Mein Kampf and that Chamberlain should have understood this and held his ground, even though that was not likely to bring credit to his political party and might, indeed, stir up enough trouble in Parliament to unseat him. Clearly, in hind sight, Hitler learned the better lesson from Munich: that the Brits clearly were not ready for nor did they want war with the Germany they had brought to Versailles twenty years earlier.
Every American high schooler knows the "lesson" of Neville Chamberlain, but few indeed understand the mood of his nation or the immediate perils that crowded out good sense in those fateful days. As Chris Matthews demonstrated on Hardball last week, even political pundit water carriers for the truculent neocons do not know the story, but George W. Bush understands the knee-jerk side of the story and attempted to bash both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama with it last week. It was a two-fer for Bush—a shot at the old Carter and at the new Obama, neither of whom he respects ... largely because he does not understand even the elements of diplomacy.
"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."
Quote by: Saul Bellow
(1915-2005) Canadian author, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976
CommonDreams is publishing today an excerpt from Bill Moyers's new bookMoyers on Democracy. We happen to agree with Bill that we are on thin ice now unlike some of the treacherous places we have been in the past. The confluence of strong forces may be too much for an array of generations so easily seduced by material comfort and lazy thinking. If so, the end game may prove to be anything but comfortable.
A fellow named Randall Stross has a piece in the NYT this Sunday that is a classic of (I hope) slightly tongue-in-cheek pseudo-economics and "management science" explanation for the reasons Microsoft Corporation is, according to Mr. Stross, losing ground to the new-comer on the block—Google. If this Stross's article is not meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it is a classic of a different genre, the class of ideas that rest on reification of unseen and hypothetical forces in nature as causal agents in the real world. You will recognize immediately that "the hidden hand" of the Libertarian market is another of these moronic ideas that emerge from the half-educated brains of modestly endowed writers.
If Microsoft fails to shift with the advance of technology it is not because Nature abhors a company that spans two paradigms, it is because within Microsoft there is a culture that resists impulses to fly off in new directions, wasting precious resources, and (above all) introducing into the corporate family people who think along unfamiliar lines. Sound familiar?
Why Mr. Stross took the Mother Nature approach is possibily because he is still in awe of the massive collection of brain-power in Redmond and cannot imagine that so many synapses would arrive at erroneous conclusions. Here we see that Stross does not really understand organizational behavior and the power of vesting and sycophancy. Microsoft is certainly not impervious to stupidity and short-range thinking, but it has to gauge new approaches carefully. Technology is the smallest matter involved. In the case of Google success is based on revised marketing principles not the successor to microchips or dual processors.
Here is a relatively short essay on how Barack Obama got his groove. He writes ... about himself and his thoughts on life, and people pay to read it. Janny Scott's piece in the NYT is good background material for the autumn campaign wherein you will be asked why you are for Obama by friends and neighbors. Might as well be prepared.
