Cocoa Beach, for those who don't know, is/was the bedroom community for the space center. It is a barrier island four miles off the Florida mainland, separated from the coast by Merritt Island and the Intracoastal Waterway. Much of the town was dredged up from the Mosquito Lagoon (like the way they built Boston). My stepfather was a director of the Delta Missile program -- I've been to the fortified concrete "blockhouses" where the launches are directed, I've been into the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building, that giant structure you've seen on tv in which the rockets and Space Shuttle were built), my wife and I attended the first two shuttle launches at the official press site. This is all very dear to my heart.

Most of the kids in town also had parents who worked for NASA, or some branch of the space industry. When I was in high school, many of my friends worked summer jobs at the space center, gluing heat tiles onto the Space Shuttle. Sure beats serving burgers.

A lot of people are flip about this because they don't realize the impact the entire space industry had on their lives. Everything from microwave ovens to modern medical research is a result of what NASA accomplished. Today, we're willing to piss it all away, years of investment by way of our tax dollars, and Americans scoff -- "What has going to the moon done for me?!" Try nuking your frozen pizza without the research done by NASA, just for starters. An entire town, actually several towns, have been destroyed by Bush's decision to out-source our space program to for-profit foreign companies.

It's not an unfair question to ask....What the fuck is left for Americans to do? We've sold the soul of our country to China and India, and now Russia. Get your degree in Gourmet Burger Flipping, my friends. It seems our only remaining industry is serving the nouveau riche.

And tragedy it is, because it didn't have to happen. This morning as I sipped my coffee and scanned the worldwide news headlines on my smartphone, the always self-important Joe Scarborough fought back against his panelists to assert that the problem with the current war situation was the total apathy of the American people. He held up a copy of a Monday morning newspaper -- NYT, WP, I don't remember, nor does it matter -- and the headlines were about the debt crisis, the S&P ratings, other standard fare. Then he raged on against the American people for their apathy about the war. "Look," he said, "Saturday when this happened, it was headline news! Now, only two days later, it's not even on the front page anymore. After Somalia, it was front page news for weeks, but now, the American people just don't care!"

Uhm...excuse me, Mr. Scarborough...I don't recall being invited to sit in on an editorial board meeting of any of the major newspapers, nor of MSNBC, for that matter. I don't recall being given any choice about what bullshit you and your corporate masters feed me each day. Apathy? Millions marched in the streets in protest before Bush got us into this mess, and you didn't cover one minute of it. YOU set the narrative, not me. When people opposed to the corporate wishes march and protest, we get NO coverage from you. When 27 Tea Baggers turn out for a barbecue at the county fairgrounds, it's national news.

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, Joe Scarborough. FUCK YOU for blaming the American people for not caring, when it is the American Corporate Media, largely invested in perpetuating every current crisis, who is publishing the front pages, NOT me, not my neighbors, not even the Republicans and the Tea Baggers. It is the defense contractors, bankers, hedge funders and AM radio scam artists who are getting the air time, telling America what is important, ignoring what Americans actually want. FUCK YOU, Joe. Just, fuck you.

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I just don't get why the for-profit nature of our health care industry isn't part of the discussion. It is the biggest driver of costs. It's not Doctors' reimbursements, they've gone down every year. It's not fraud, though I don't deny fraud exists. In retail, it's called "shrinkage" or "loss control," and you deal with it. The insurance companies now deal with health care claims as "shrinkage" or "loss control," there is NO INCENTIVE for them to pay out claims. They are in it to make a profit, not to help anyone. They should be the first pillar we knock down, not the Medicare program you've paid into your whole life, but is now about to be pulled out from underneath you. Fuck Ryan and his "plan."

Okay,actually I do get it, from the standpoint of who owns the media and how much advertising dollars they get from Big Pharma, the Insurance Industry, etc. I get that, they're whores. Expensive whores. Escorts to the trough. Whores by any other name.

But why isn't there a Democrat up there saying roughly what I just typed (without the PG13 rating, of course)? Why isn't a there one serious person among a nation of 300,000,000+ willing to stand up and give this speech and address this issue? Unless, of course...they're just as bought and paid for as the media.

*sigh*

Never mind.

How difficult would it be for even the poorest of our Congressional Reps to just accept and pass a nominal tax increase on the only people who have benefitted from the Bush/Obama tax breaks? Boom -- a huge part of the debt paid off before you can say "Trickle Down." And the unfortunate wealthy WILL NOT FEEL ONE FUCKING BITE. They won't lose a house, they won't have a car repossessed, they won't lose their health insurance. Solving our current economic crisis won't "cost" them anything but a different number on their tax return. Yet still, taxing the only people who actually have something left to tax is somehow off the table.

There is something much larger going on.

As I said in one of my previous posts...There's a fire just waiting for fuel.

Holy shit...what an ad. Didn't see who is "responsible" for it. It showed Main Streets full of empty storefronts with the message that it is Obama's failed policies that caused all of it. Ends with a sad child waving an American flag, imploring voters to send a message.

We need to send a message, alright. Democrats need to turn out and VOTE. We can't let the corporate media do this to us again. The GOP has become expert at turning the world upside down, and it is the Democrats who need to stand up and save America...from the GOP. We can't let these amoral, greedy, lying bastards get back in power.

We just can't. The ramifications are too serious. Don't let the GOP-controlled media turn Obama into their next Carter. Don't let the corporate masters turn the next two years into another baseless impeachment circus. There is too much real work to be done.

I posted this on a private message board which has nothing to do with politics -- except for when it does. I can't link you to the site because it requires a membership password, but I'm happy to post my response to a Repub on the site who tried to make the case that while global warming might be bad in the near-term, eventually many people could benefit (gosh, I wonder who those people might be?). I left out the names here, but otherwise it's as I ranted originally...

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{NAME}, you need to take all these posts and aggregate them, then process the results. For instance, I've stated in previous posts that a) I understand that the global climate has varied wildly over the last billion or so years, and that b) when a million years of change show up in a hundred years of data -- data which happens to correspond to the "progress" of industry -- that maybe the information should be taken seriously. Skeptically, sure, but seriously.

Predictably, you always get back to the "who is going to make money" angle. And we keep trying to tell you that only a very, very (very) small percentage of the population of the entire planet is concerned with your fucking stock dividend. OF COURSE at some point in the future things will be different and possibly "better" for a particular real estate developer or farmer. But that doesn't offset the need to fulfill any society's obligation to its people NOW.

IOW, just because I happen to live about 510 feet above sea level doesn't mean I should accept global warming simply because one day it will make my heirs beachfront property owners.

I get all this stuff, {NAME}. I've found myself, on occasion, leaning toward the cyclical theory: that this climate stuff just happens in cycles. We're in a warming cycle. The planet has warmed and cooled in the past. The trouble is, those passed ice ages took tens of thousands of years to occur. But we're watching things happen in real time now, not through illustrations in Time-Life books.

The core samples taken by anthropologists and climatologists show that climatic changes have taken place before, sure. No one denies that. What we're talking about is the dramatic acceleration of such events, corresponding to man's Industrial Enlightenment.

COMMON SENSE, man. Common sense. Maybe you've never traveled to the other side of the globe, maybe you've never looked down on the earth from 40,000 feet and realized -- "holy shit, it's not that huge after all!" Common sense should tell anyone that you can't just keep pumping CO2 and sulfur and whatnot into the Zip-lock bag which is our atmosphere without it having some sort of impact!

You can only justify the profit motive for so long. Eventually you have to realize that you will have sons and daughters and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, and that they didn't have a vote in your political affiliations. They just hope to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water. There is NO REASON not to accept and embrace reductions in the pollutants which scientific evidence has proven to be harmful to human health.

Unless it's money.

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I'm in Crazy Town!

I defy ANY DUer to try to organize a concert such as Woodstock. So many of you kids keep talking about how it meant nothing, it was just a big concert. Yeah, cuz YOU know. YOU went to Bonnaroo or Lollapalooza.

Yeah...YOU went to big corporate ad-fests that charged you $8 for a bottle of water. YOU went through metal detectors and got patted down, then got sent to a big field with corporate-sponsored tents selling you cell phones and sneakers. YOU know better. Not like Woodstock, with half a million people showing up spontaneously and making the best of it, creating a community, no one making any money...yeah...us old folks are the idiots.

We didn't sell out to the corporate whores like you did. We didn't have to have a brand logo on our fucking underwear to be cool. We lived in shit and mud for days and danced to some of the most incredible music of all time. Music your current idols are still covering.

You kids...tell your own kids about the awesome concert you went to where they treated you like a criminal -- AFTER paying $140 for a ticket. Then charged you a week's pay for a t-shirt and a beer. YEAH MAN! You kids RAWK! Woodstock sucked. Free music...free dope...free love...oh, and lots of mud. Wow. These anti-Woodstock threads are fucking priceless.

Now dammit...get off my lawn!

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While I completely agree that taking the lazy, politically convenient way out is, well...lazy and politically convenient, I don't consider very many of our Senators and House members to be any sort of "leaders." Most are purely followers. Followers of polls, followers of money, followers of anything that will allow them to keep their seat on the Congressional Gravy Train for the rest of their lives. Or at least until they land a sweet deal as a lobbyist for one of their corporate benefactors.

So the question deserves to be asked: do you really consider any of these people to be leaders? They were elected as representatives of their districts. This is a large part of why they always get re-elected; everyone hates every Congressperson except their own rep or Senator. Because they bring home the bacon. The crap that watchdog groups hold up as pork and earmarks, to a local constituent whose job depends upon the special earmark given to the turtle zoo or toothpick museum or even struggling manufacturing plant, those earmarks are his rent.

And he understands that in the end, the man actually paying his rent is one of the guys on that list.

Any one of them could easily call a town hall and try to explain to his constituents that homophobia and racism are outdated relics of a dark chapter in our history. Work to change habits, not excuse them. But that would require leadership. And bravery. These people aren't leaders. They're Washington teat-suckers.

Once you get all that free health care, the private subway system, the fancy office and kick-ass parties, the taxpayer funded junkets, it's pretty difficult to return to the lowly level of those whom you lead. Er, represent.

Too late to cut it short, but my point is fairly simple; is it really an excuse to say they couldn't get re-elected in their districts if they voted for this bill? After all, if they are representatives, shouldn't they be representing the people who voted for them? Even if those people are racist, homophobic assholes, if they live in a racist, homophobic district in a racist, homophobic state, doesn't our system of government provide them representation, too?

If they're still so uneducated, perhaps that is a larger indictment of our system. But I'm not so willing to brush off a vote against this bill as pure homophobia over old fashioned political expediency. Not all people are strong. Some are spineless, clueless and stupid. But if they can find people to represent them before Congress, well, sad to say...that's what our system is based upon.

Everything going wrong is Obama's fault now. No mention anywhere, by anybody (except the American people, of course, but we don't count) about who caused this mess and why we're not doing anything to bring him/them to justice.

Make no mistake, Bush and Grover "Drown the economy in a bathtub" Norquist and the rest of the election-stealing neocon cabal CAUSED THIS. Intentionally. A third grader could have told you you can't give every dime of a nation's income to it's wealthiest 1% by way of tax cuts -- while fighting two off-the-books wars of choice -- and survive it economically. If you go back and read the rantings of Norquist and his ilk in the early days pre- and post-2000, it's all there. It's all laid out for us, even before that, including the infamous PNAC documents. They spoke of cataclysmic social upheaval needed to bring about a "New World Order" (gosh, where have we heard that before? Oh, yeah...Bush 1).

The GOP's friends own the media, and they're trying their damnedest to protect Bush and pretend the world began on November 4, 2008. We're being totally fucked. We know where the money is (at least, what's left of it), but will we ever be able to muster the collective backbone to demand the criminals repay even a dime of it? Doubtful. Not as long as the media is used a brainwashing tool by the GOP.

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I'm not a defender of GM or Ford. I owned a Ford Windstar which I literally had throw away after a few years because it was such a piece of crap. My GM S-10 truck was rugged, but it was heavy and sucked gas. We did buy our son a 2002 Saturn L200 which seems light years ahead of either the Windstar or the S-10 in terms of quality. We'll see how long it lasts, though. Now that I've made the disclaimers, on to my sub line...

It is disingenuous to say "no one wanted" or "no one bought" Detroit cars. That's crazy talk, often uttered by people whose last American car experience was a Chevy Monza or an AMC Pacer. To see who that "no one" is who isn't buying American cars, all one has to do is look out their car window next time they're out for a drive. You will have Fords, GM's and Chryslers in front of you, behind you, next to you. LOTS of people wanted them and bought them. LOTS of people bought other brands, too. Me among them.

But I think some people are really projecting with the whole "Crappy cars that no one wanted" meme. Even if you hate American cars, the fact is, millions and millions of people didn't hate them, wanted them, and bought them. In addition to millions of GMC trucks and construction equipment. Millions and millions of people bought them. The trouble wasn't the cars, per se, it was the HORRIBLE GM AND FORD MANAGEMENT. Their failure to push true innovation over gee-whiz gadgets like OnStar, which seems more like it was designed to help cash--flow by signing people up for monthly subscriptions, without really offering much to car owners, helped bring them to their knees.

Did GM and Ford really have 80mpg cars in 2000? Probably. And that's what I mean by poor management. The cars they WERE making may not have been you cup of tea,...which is why you purchased something different. But let's stop saying that "no one bought American cars." Just look around you.

Oh, btw...part of GM's financial trouble has nothing to do with their supposedly crappy cars...they also own DiTech, the cheesy online mortgage huckster of the Bush years. I wonder how that's working out for their bottom line? Again...more bad management, taking the eyes off their core business.



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While I'm celebrating this historic day (but not prematurely!) with the rest of you, I'm also reminded that nothing that is happening in the world today was truly unforeseen or accidental. Everything that we are hearing about today, from the economic collapse to the amazing shifting demographics in America, were well documented and discussed back in the waning years of the Clinton presidency.

I don't know the name of the book, but I will attempt to find it; I first heard it discussed on NPR, back before the Bush administration stacked the Board of Directors and turned it into yet another GOP mouthpiece. The discussion was about the shift in demographics in America to a predominantly Hispanic nation. There was no stopping it, the story went. Between our employment policies, our immigration policies, and our simple physical attachment to the Mexican/Central American land mass, combined with birth rates, the Hispanic population in America will outnumber the non-Hispanic population by about 2025. Leading up to that, the growth in non-white demographics would make it impossible for the GOP to hold on to power.

They knew this back in the nineties, and I would guess well before that. That is the reason the last twelve years unfolded as they did. By design. The pathologically-wealthy Bush and Cheney families had a New World Order on their minds, and The Families were very methodical in setting up a structure which would enable them to pull off one last final coup for the Rich White Guys, draining the treasury and writing laws which would fuck virtually everyone who didn't have at least a couple of houses and offshore bank accounts.

They've got contracts to rebuild Iraq, rebuild our spent weapons, build new weapons, man the new bases and super-embassy, run the new phone systems, everything. They're set forever, and the country will not be able to spend a penny on those god-damned brown people. There is little wonder in why George Bush refused to even consider repealing any of his tax breaks; doing so would fund the very programs he and the neocons were trying to destroy. Besides, they were well aware of the coming of the economic crisis we're now facing. Shit, they were counting on it. They tried Social Security in the stock market first, remember? It was all by design to drain the government, pillage and burn it all before the heathens and dark skinned people and the atheists and the godless liberals took over.

We won!

Uh...yay?

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When I was a kid in the sixties, my folks (my dad, specifically) was a civil rights activist. My best friend was Reggie Mims, a black kid, and our families hung together a lot. When I drove to Florida from Massachusetts with my grandparents, my dad stuffed a biography of Martin Luther King in my travel pack, and I read it the whole way.

My parents, my dad, taught me well. He raised me not to fear others just because they're different. He taught me to help people who need help, fight people who are trying to fuck you over.

My dad died in 1977. And today, finally, I got to cast the vote he never could.

Love ya, Dad! Thanks.



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That's the morning talking head theme. But it got me thinking...why not? If we were able to pull eleventy-brazillion dollars out of our collective ass (actually, China's ass) just to give it to Bush and Paulson and their buddies, why can't Barack say that it's also vital to our survival and the greater good of the country to borrow another eleventy-brazillion for infrastructure projects and alternative energy research and other jobs-producing measures? I mean, seriously, which will actually do more to HELP "real" Americans?

At this point, the amount of money is so obscenely large as to be almost abstract. It's simply too much, too big a stack of bills, to even comprehend. Trillions of dollars. It will take trillions of years to ever pay it back to anyone. China, the U.S., none of these nations will even be around as we know it, and that debt will still be on the books. For-fucking-ever.

So WTF...borrow a few hundred billion more, bring back the marginal tax rates of the Clinton (and even Kennedy) era to offset part of it, get people working. It's amazing what happens next...when people are working (and getting paid a fair wage), they go out and buy fancy new fridges and add a deck to the house and spend their money, exactly the same way the rich people did when Bush gave them the keys to the treasury. Except, instead of taking money from their right pocket and putting in their left pocket, working Americans, put it into Joe The Plumber's pocket, the hardware store's pocket, the appliance store's pocket.

And it goes from all those pockets, to the next pockets, and all these people are able to buy the stuff the big fat-ass corporate greed-mongers produce. We get new roads, new schools (or at least, updated and maintained), and they get profits and divends. Everyone wins.

Unlike the way it is now, where only the very rich realize any benefit, and don't feel the slightest bit of pain because they're the ones who took all the money in the first place.

Whew.

Rant off.

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I'm speaking of what happens to Skinner, EarlG and Elad after next week. I'm sure DU will spike for a while, but after the dust settles, then what? I'm sure they must have thought about it, too. Your business plan addresses it, right guys? :wink: H

Having once been a DU front-page contributor, after a post count that I would find embarrassing if were not for so many of the even more voracious DU keyboard commandos, after practically surrendering my life to the fight (as the DU3 have done), there's going to be a lot of decompressing a week or so from now, in the event that Obama wins. So brothers Skinner, Elad, EarlG...thanks (I think) for creating such a user-friendly (I'm speaking of the GUI, not the posts), diverse yet concise, active, fun, blah blah blah (that's McCain-speak -- I'm just trying to be fair and balanced) place to spend a few years.

I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to consider this in the bag -- fool me once, can't get fooled again -- but I think it's not too early to take a break, take a breath, and thank the DU3 for making this tea party happen.

Thanks, Skinner, EarlG and Elad!



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