Obama passed over a possible second Democratic female on the Veep side of the ticket (who is needed to show the Senate how to drive a stake into the WSP's heart) in favor of a male who can do an immense amount to restore a measure of trust to our foreign relations. It's about the job, and who Obama thought best for it.

McCain chose a cross between Cheney's viciousness and Dubya's whackjob world view instead of a serious vice presidential candidate. He chose yet another beauty contestant. Instead of a Veep, he chose the only working fantasy he has left, a VILF.

He's already gone through his consultant phase, all that's left besides this is going goth. Having thought on this and his "Ms Cowchip" remark I am forced to make a recommendation to Sen McCain. I do this not out of a desire to aid his candidacy which is its own worst enemy, but as a man to man suggestion.

John, just because you are too infirm, don't vilify the women in your life because they can and do bop. Many women like to get to get the plumbing worked on from time to time, to add a bit of spice. As a former beneficiary of this fact of life, it is unseemly for you to now bag on it or stare too longingly at its ass. At least on stage.

Just sayin, guy to guy...

I applaud the idea that the elderly making less than 50K a year would pay no taxes. In a nation where fully 2/3rds of corporations pay no taxes, holding up seniors who have little ability to work a third job, and who cannot simply sell off assets which comprise what little security net Murika has left, we either find a way to become *humane* to our people again, or we will earn our sobriquet "generation kill."

I would go even further and apply this to the disabled, who pay more for medicine and health care. Not just the totally disabled, but anyone who has a chronic condition requiring chronic treatment.

Why? Because we are either a national community, or we aren't a nation at all, merely a tool of corporations to secure profits for the investing class.
And as far as I am concerned, the investing class has a big fucking bill due for abetting the destruction of the middle class. And the invoice has been sitting in the mailbox for a while now.

Because I have been for so very long worried about the period we are now entering, the actual election period.

Some of my fears revolve around the actual election itself. Certainly our national experience with elections in the last decade has been dubious. I fear both RICO activity on the part of the GOP, and the works of less entrenched actors.

Some of my fears are tied to the economy, and how hard it is going to fall. Anyone watching the market today surely realized that the situation is extremely bad and unlikely to improve soon.

Some of my fears are tied to the vectors of the actors on the world stage. I get the chilling feeling that we are entering a "Guns of August" period where things could fall apart with savage rapidity. And into that situation, we have Dubya being a mouthy jerk to China, our big creditor, at their party. He is there for comic relief, and he knows it-- watching his media getting punked by the PRC, he knows his role.

There are few things meaner than a dry drunk, unless it is a dry drunk being mocked. I can imagine the sorts of things pencil-dick is saying to himself, and in my imagination, they are dark and Oedipal.

This is supposed to be China's big moment. China, as we remember, was the pet project of GHWB, and here his son will be in motley, having lost face for America in the Asian world. And lest we forget, China became the Pacific dragon selling us crap and turning the Kingdom of Xin into a toxic ashtray to become the sort of economic engine that makes the boyz at halliburton and bechtel hot.

I fear that China is going to actually change the balance of world power at this olympic games. Not because they will be shown triumphant, but because they will be shown to have raped their corner of the earth for no real gain. Rising fuel costs are already destroying the global economy they were a linch pin of. In the face of that, Xin can and will turn inward.

The winner of the Olympic games is India, whose strategy to corner global services and knowledge industries was based on the profoundly intelligent idea that information would be cheaper to move than automobiles or cheap power tools.

I doubt they will get a single medal, but they will be more and more important to the Chinese as they spend the peoples currency on the people's new materialism. China's academic output is not adequate to the need of that society, and India is there.

Nowhere in this economy is the US needed, or wanted.
I fear that we will be hired to stand outside and keep six foot four Saudis out.

And I fear that America is going into a really scary period.

In a year when hope is the watchword, I hope that we can somehow have an election, and not a civil war.

If, for no other reason that it pleases the government to do so, it can criminalize the use of a manifestly beneficial substance that is not only fundamentally benign, but a cultural byproduct of a racial group or two you want to suppress as well as undesirable political activists-- you make marijuana illegal, and jail its users by the millions, you are doing so to thwart the liberties of millions.

And if you can sustain this, you can sustain other things against the best interest of the American people.

The war on drugs started out as the war on *some* drugs, and by extension, *some* people.

Turn drug usage into a medical problem, and you threaten all other irrational policies our government, and the industries that control it have foisted upon us. You know, medicare *reform*, Bankruptcy laws, Credit card laws, bailing out Bears Stearns mess.

The usual goes on unopposed because hey, we can't even smoke pot, how we gonna stop Cheney?

The frame under which the nation is being governed is a police state with full powers of virtually unlimited detention (even with habeas corpus, your lawyer may have a hard time consulting with you in Kazakstan) control of media, privatization of the commons, predatory capitalism based on debt instruments, no bid contracts, political control of justice, and terror as an instrument of policy, foreign and domestic, is because we are in a time of unprecedented danger.

Yes, we are. But it is from within, stupid!

NO DEMOCRAT SHOULD SAY A GODDAMNED SENTENCE THAT SUPPORTS THAT FRAME! GOT IT?

That goes FUCKING DOUBLE for congressional votes and further surrendering the bill of rights to the police state.

If you support the frame of the terrorized state, you are beyond stupid.
You are complicit in the conversion of America to Amerika. I hope you never sleep another night without prophetic dreams.

Sociopaths have no empathy. No argument based on a respect for humanity can suffice to constrain their id. Only that which creates pain and horror at the prospect of some punishment occuring to *them* can thus affect them.

Six in one hundred humans suffer from such a disorder to one degree or another, as I understand it.

The actual purpose behind medieval criminology, that is, ritualized terror directed at the human body was, in my opinion to discourage those -for whom social and religious strictures were inadequate- with the prospect of unendurable pain. Even sociopaths understand that, indeed perhaps better than anyone.

Healthy humans do not giggle about putting someone to death, nor do they insist on using Willy Pete on a town. 21st century has proved more adept at inhumane behavior than our predecessors, and more technologically capable of inducing horror on innocents. Those who are willing to use technology and the prestige of a nation-state to increase the level of human misery of a whole society for personal gain deserve none of modernity's moiety.

I'd be okay with an exception to the whole 8th amendment cruel and unusual amendment for those who start wars of aggression and/or use specific types of weaponry on a populace. Such things as depleted uranium, white phosphorus, napalm, cluster bombs, torture, etc.

So jail the underlings, sentence them to daily waterboardings for their term of imprisonment. And afterwards deport them to Iraq and deprive them of citizenship, so that they are subject to being beyond the protection of the constitution. (this last was considered worse than torture, and was found previously unconstitutional punishment)

But as in Nuremberg, hang those who promulgated such policies so that their horrible deaths may instruct the next generation of little sociopaths.

I think it would also have the effect of reducing blowback from those whom we invaded, incinerated, and tortured.

Wants Justice.
Wants government to represent the people.
Wants honest, straightforward, and transparent process.
Want to see America return to democracy under the Constitution.
Wants to think of himself as a good Democrat.
Wants to be at the table to restore the Democratic party to prominence.

Not all these things may be compatible.
I do not want to appeal to the angels of your better nature, because I believe you already suffer from enough frustration holding back the desire to castrate the rogue elephants with a dull spoon.

What I want to say is that when the party does not respect its mandate, it will not much achieve, or long maintain majority. You know what your speaker desires, and you know what mandate you were given in 2006.

Being true to the former is that makes Republicans great. Being true to the latter is what makes Democrats great.

Please consider which sort of politician you wish to be.
That mandate honored will respond with influence and greater control of your sphere of influence.

If so called centrist politics is only polling 66% in rural Oklahoma, when do we get to bury it?

I mean, if his own father in rural Oklahoma is supporting Obama, then someone needs to wrap the third way in yesterday's newspaper.

No one wants to march under Lieberman's banner anymore.

to suggest that the ninnies leave the tent.

The eternally lurching rightward third way followed by the new Amerikan Century has lead us onto the rocks. America, the Reagan version is broken, beyond repair.

Now is the right time for those who worship the past to become part of it.

The wave that is rising in America is bigger than the DLC, The Blue Dogs, and the concern trolls in the party. It is the progressive wave, and those who want to create a better future are riding it.

The rest are going to be under it. They want to build more beach cabanas while the tsunami looms over the US. Soon, there will be no center where the old center stood.

Stress kills.

My SO says that if you cannot be an inspiring example, be a horrifying lesson. So here goes.

At forty five I had a stroke and two heart attacks on the same day, two years before that I had my gall bladder perforate and give me peritonitis.

Before all that I had not be diabetic, today I take four shots of insulin a day.

I take four different anti hypertensives. Three medications for chronic nerve pain. I cannot understand speech if there is any noise at all. I have a visual deficit, panic attacks, and I cannot do math anymore.

And I still can't get Social Security to believe I am disabled.
I can't get health insurance.

I think it had to do with those sixty hour weeks, the stress of flying to a different city every week, and solving expensive problems involving software.

And I know it had to do with the stress of being away week after week from my beloved, and feeling our relationship strain against my absence.

Like when my boss canceled our life's dream to visit Europe on vacation for more work...

When I was castigated for having to abandon a contract site to bury my brother...

When I wrote 120 pages of documentation in 4 weeks and was told I was not being productive...

When they sent me to a six week boot camp and I had to pass a certification test on a new product every week to retain my job...

When I thought I was going home, and they sent me across the US for another two weeks of teaching programming...

All that happened in sixteen weeks, and I had the stroke the day I got home. I am a fragile fifty two.

Yes, a broken heart can kill like a glock. Stress can kill like an improvised roadside device.

The moral of this rant. If you can, de-stress your life. I know, many cannot.

Please consider taking a low dose aspirin regimen at the very least. I sincerely wish I had.

Who warn about some nebulous Obama weakness that McCain will exploit in the GE.

The facts of life are that the wide stance party is about to self-destruct in a Wagnerian fashion. John McCain == Winfield Scott, last Whig to run for president.

John McCain is the best they've got, and they are poised to be trashed in congress to the tune of veto proof or near veto proof Dem majorities.

Fox news is heading for the basement.

This latest bit of shit about Obama and coke is an example of a doomed political movement thrashing about because the hind brain hasn't died yet. And if it can happen to the third way, can the neocons and theocons be far behind?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/... /

So, how likely is McCain to bring up drug use?
Not bloody likely.

That's strictly third way property.

In her never ending stream of un-snopes checked revelations, and simple (in every sense) neo-theo-cro-magno-thuggery, my sister forwarded me this lovely bit sent to her by a serious Widestance Hack. Afterward is my response...

>
>
> This guy wants to be our President and control our government. Below are a few lines from Obama's books " his words:
> Pay close attention to the last comment!!
>
>
>
> From Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
>
> From Dreams of My Father : "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mothers race."
>
> From Dreams of My Father: "There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."
>
> From Dreams of My Father: ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
> < BR>From Dreams of My Father: "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa , that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela."
>
> From Audacity of Hope: "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
>
>
>
>
>
>

Perhaps it is the perspective of a bastard child, but I have absolutely zero problems with any of those snippets.
I have no expectation of religious morality from my president. But I do expect rigorous ethics, and a personality that analyzes the world with a certain clinical detachment, such as we see in the above out of context snippets. None of my preferred qualities are present in GWBush, but lots of religiosity, for sure. I think even the most forgiving analysis of his two administrations still in the end must conclude that his watch was a cosmic Charlie Foxtrot.

Read this as a narrative of a progression, a coming of age and self identity. It is not a half white identity because without doubt, white society in the main did not say to themselves, what a nice young, half white man there.

These are the obvious ruminations of a man trying to come to terms with his biracial identity. Most whites in this society don't have to struggle for acceptance and identity. These sentiments, coming from who they come from, are quite inspiring.

Barack might well be the first actual middle class American president since Eisenhower, and more in the image of Truman. But I, who never felt much like I belonged anywhere after the age of 6 or 7 until adulthood, understand what young Barry must have been feeling as he puzzled out his place in a world that did not start out with a place marked out for him. To think that his association with his father, and even perhaps his father's faith is somehow suspect betrays a far too simplistic understanding of Islam. John McCain calls a racist, xenophobic anti-semitic, anti catholic mouth breather his spiritual mentor. Where is the concern about that?

If George Walker Bush could have written a lucid narrative regarding being the child of indifferent, sadistic and alcoholic parents, struggling with fetal alcohol syndrome-- his own sexual confusion, cocaine addiction. alcoholism, and its causing him to be in derelection of duty from the Alabama Air National Guard, we might be in an entirely different world right now.

It's not like he doesn't have problems unresolved from childhood. Richard Nixon said "Nobody can hate like Barbara Bush.'

We need to stand with the Muslims, just not the whackjob Muslims. You know, those would be our current so called allies in th one hundred year's war on an abstract noun. The state of Israel (as opposed to Jews in general) is NOT our ally. The Royal House of Saud is not our ally, no mater how many times the titular head kissed Dubya on the mouth.

The Saudis and the Israelis are playing ping pong with American foreign policy. I think we need to be standing with Syria, Iran, Turkey and Lebanon. The other three besides Iran are semi secular to totally secular states. They have common interests and enemies. They all need to deal with the Kurds newfound wealth and enhanced ability to create a Kurdish state in northern Iraq .

Together they would moderate Iran AND figure out a common U.N. acceptable policy regarding the Kurds. But those who use internet sources like BBC online for news know all this.

Between the Israelis, Kurds, Saudis and the Pakistanis, we are in a very bad place, vis a vis not being in the middle of a nuclear war. Ironic that we are rattling our sabers at the Iranians, who are not at the moment nuclear according the the CIA, and not at the above, who are*, whether they admit it or not. India is also a big nuke power, but they have only one real target and it ain't us.

BTW, having an oilman pres and veep is not providing us with the promised cheap gas. Wholly unexpectedly, the electing of two charlatan oil industry execs funded directly or indirectly by Wahabbist money has resulted in profit so obscene for the oil industry that Jabba the Exxon CEO now requires a prosthetic brace for his additional three chins. It is rumored that to celebrate this years windfall profit he ate an entire Angolan village, goats and all.

The Iranians currently are ambivalent about us not because the have been smokin too much sharia law, but because when they decided they owned their own oil, not BP, the CIA deposed their president and set up a brutal dictator, the Shaw Reza Pahlavi, who terrorized them for two generations with our aid and blessing.

Their civilization under its old name, Persia, fought a protracted land and naval war with the Greeks at a time when our ancestors were mostly naked, gathering coal off the beach, and tin to sell to the Phoenician traders who in good weather sailed as far as Erin with trade beads and tomahawks in essence.

We were worshipping the Tuatha de Danaan and hacking our inventory of cows on the edges of rocks at the point they were reading Homer AND the Bahavad Gita.

We are about to nuke them for no damn reason at all. Or rather, no reason we can admit to the rest of the world. Or ourselves, for that matter.

So what I gather from the forwarded post is that I should fear the black man lusting after the white house.

And the white boie sings, 'Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran...'


love,
RealP
* not 100% sure about the Kurds, but I assume that AQ Khan has nuclearized much of the Sunni Islamic world by now.

the name Clinton was synonymous with the word inevitable.
Ms. Clinton brought her own negatives with her.
She then fought a typical Republican campaign.

So what if they demonize Obama?

They are whores. They are the mouthbreathers in the body politic.

This is the election year the wide stance party made, and their embedded enablers. It is going to eat them alive with fava beans and vinaigrette.

John McCain is going to make the Repugs look enviously at George McGovern. I mean at least we got a good elder statesman out of the disaster.

The cost will be that Obama will have to embrace the horror, and start getting ready to be F.D.R. on day one. It is more than he thinks is doable now, but he will find that in 2009, it is not just possible to provide universal healthcare, but that it may be near impossible to hold on to the private healthcare system.

We are in the Long Emergency. It is no longer deniable, and the old rules no longer apply. Progress is no longer suburbias ten miles farther out, and a thousand more square feet of living space on another 5 acres of lot.

Progress is what keeps society together through the storm.

The ruling that gives corporations the power to contract is a deeply flawed one.

To consider a corporation a sort of person for the purpose of law is such an inexact metaphoric fit that it needs to be addressed.

Rather than consider a corporation a person who cannot die, be imprisoned, or swear on a deity who created them, corporations are more like countries without sovereignty. Their actions are like the action of a state, rather than a person, in that they are collective actions. Their crimes are more like war crimes in nature than felonies, in that they are, well, corporate...

Therefor, we should consider corporate charters as being treaties, and that corporations operate on the sufferance of the *people* upon whose land they sit.

This places corporations on a more constrained level, whose existance carries no implied protections under the constitution of the united states.

Much of the worst damage corporations do is indemnified by their state as a fake person. Remove that, and redefine the nature of the American economy for the better.

The DLC has been bringing the fail.

Some people want that to stop. The DLC won't get a chance to run this country if it can't get the White House. It can't get to the WH because their candidate has higher negatives than positives, and is getting her ass whipped by a black guy whose middle name is Hussein and whose last name rhymes with Osama.

Why? Because he represents the traditional Democratic values and voters the Clintons left behind in their third rail way. The voters who gave up on the party because we were harshing the corporate bizz-buzz with our rust belt poverty and bitterness.

But don't feel bad, he's going to do the same thing to the other Rove candidate, John McSame.

The DLC candidate has decided on a scorched earth policy in this election, and because of that, the DLC's star is falling. The problem with wanting to win in the worst way is that you generally wind up losing in the worst way.