I was holding a sign for a school committee candidate along with a friend of mine. With us were sign holders for other candidates - for school committee and selectmen. One of them was obviously a Fox News devotee. He was bad mouthing Obama, saying he didn't keep his campaign promises. Three of us who had voted for Obama were defending him. One guy quickly listed at least 8 things Obama had accomplished that he said he would. We added others. The Fox guy would have none of it. He said that Obama had said nothing about going into Afghanistan or Pakistan during the campaign. We said, "Whaaaaa?"

All of us attested that we had heard Obama say just such a thing. He got irritated and said he would donate $100 to the charity of our choice if we were right. Of course, our declarations were not "proof" enough. He never heard it.

We all went home. The results came in and my candidate won. I was still mulling over the way in which this Fox guy could just spout of misinformation and be so arrogant as to bet that he was right and get away with it. On Monday, I found a bunch of articles supporting our position. I printed off one from a July 2008 issue of Time Magazine. I mailed him a nice letter explaining the attached article confirmed that Obama had said that, if elected, he intended to increase our presence in Afghanistan and root out al Queda and the Taliban in Pakistan. I included two links to other articles and one to a video of Obama's actual speech.

I then reminded him of his bet and said that he could contribute to either Feeding America or Habitat for Humanity. I sent him a postage paid envelope with Feeding America's address and information on how to contribute to the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. I thanked him in advance for his donation and congratulated him on the victory of his candidate.

Now, I realize he may not make the contribution. I really don't care. That's a matter for him and his conscience. What I really wanted to accomplish was to remind the part of his brain that may still be salvageable that he is being fed false information and that he should do his own thinking. And I wanted him to know that the next time he speaks out in public with crap he picked up on his talk radio and Fox TV shows, there may be people there that will call him on it and hold him accountable.

I was respectful. I didn't get angry. I just wouldn't let him go home and think that he could get away with spreading lies. There are more of us than he was led to believe. We just haven't been speaking out. We must speak out.

It is over 30 years old and every spent fuel rod that has ever been used there is still on site. It is guarded by Wackenhut and owned by Entergy and sits right on the Atlantic Ocean. We, in the 3 nearest towns, have been given evacuation plans which make no logical sense. In the 80s, we successfully fought to stop the building of a second plant on the same site, but they still keep this dinosaur running without updating the plant or the disposal methods.

Today, I was listening to an NPR report on what is happening to the nuke plants in Japan and the anchor asked why a country so prone to earthquakes would rely so heavily on nuclear power. The reporter said that powerful energy corporations in Japan have influenced the government to push oil, coal and nuclear while squelching solar photovoltaic, wind and other clean energy sources. They do this because they are alternative energy is small, decentralized and can't be so easily controlled by large companies.

I'm hoping that this disaster will stop the ridiculous claims that nuclear power is "safe" - it is safe until it's not and then the disaster is epic. It is also really dirty - spent fuel remains radioactive for over a million years. After Chernobyl and 3-Mile-Island, there was a surge of anti-nuke activity. That is gone now. More and more "environmentalists" are touting nuclear power as a clean energy option. IMHO it is not a viable option.

From Blue Mass Group DailyKos picks up David's call to draft Warren to defeat Brown.

Here's an excerpt from Chris Bowers e-mail petition:




Here's my recent post citing 5 reasons Warren would make a good replacement for Scott Brown from Boston Globe Blog.

Edit to fix link

The New Deal created a middle-class. The boomers were the product of that middle class. The rich tried to stop the New Deal from happening and have been working to kill it ever since. It has been a long slow death but it is almost here.

We are taught that we are the greatest country in the world. We are taught that we can all pull ourselves up from poverty by sheer will and talent and become wealthy and successful. We are taught that those who don't are losers.

I was brought up middle-class - not upper middle, maybe even lower middle. I noticed right away that people who had well-to-do parents became successful, no matter how they performed in school or on the job.

Here's the problem. We all feel like losers when we are not successful because of the mythology that if we were smart or talented or industrious, we would be. Get over it. We are on our own. We should be working outside the government and forming our own co-operative food, shelter, and care systems. We will not. Americans pride themselves on competition and "independence." The death of unions, the lack of sharing and of common causes, our wary mistrust of each other, these all work to prevent organized cooperation to meet our own needs.

Boomers (or "hippies," a relatively small percentage of boomers) were right about group living and alternative energy and homegrown food. But finding out what happened to those back-to-the-land-ers may offer clues about why Americans have so much and do so little with it.

Hate talk radio goes back to the Roosevelt years. Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had a radio program during the late thirties entitled "Golden Hour of the Little Flower." Here is a sample program: Jews Support Communism. There are whiffs of Beck and O'Reilly and Limbaugh in this smarmy, Christianoid spiel. He was insanely popular in his day - reaching, at one point, from between 30-40 million Americans.

I did a thesis on him in college and listened to hours of his tapes at the library. It was nauseating - a weird mixture of populism, religion and hate. As part of my research, I interviewed older people who had heard the original programs. More than a few of them told me that they still thought that Coughlin had made a lot of sense. I admit to being a bit freaked out by that. I was hoping that, with the passage of time, they had just forgotten how creepy he really was.



Father Coughlin: Radio Priest, Depression Demagogue

 
A musician friend just sent me this and I thought I'd like to share it. Old school satire.

and it occurred to me that things have not really changed all that much since 1994 - the tea baggers have always been with us. The film is a documentary about the Senate race between Chuck Robb and Oliver North. North was definitely the superior candidate in terms of media savvy, enthusiam of supporters and photogenic good looks. On the other hand, Robb was squirrelly and uninspiring and probably won by 3% only because of Wilder's endorsement and the black vote. North's supporters were militant and very upset with the status quo. His strategists were the old Lee Atwater crowd - vicious but smart. The movie shows how really nasty and adolescent these guys were, but the public only saw the results of their advice, not the sausage being made. The film also depicts the sub rosa racism of the supporters and the campaign.

Anyway, I was thinking about the Scott Brown campaign here in Mass. It was a special election which changes the dynamic, but the themes were familiar. Of course, Scott Brown had no background of lying to Congress or much of any background actually - a blank slate. He had some celebrity association because of his daughter and connections to local colleges and sports. He had the same kind of outside money coming in that North did - right wing money and there is lots of it. He did not play the religious card as much as North did, but the states of Virginia and Mass. are different that way. Coakley ran her campaign or rather didn't run any campaign like she'd already won. It puzzles me why or where she spent so much money in the primary race, but supposedly she didn't have any money left afterwards. She ran the final leg of the campaign like she was an incumbent ignoring the young upstart. Unlike Robb, she was not the incumbent.

But despite the differences, there were enough similarities in the film and the recent special election to make it instructive.

The two variables that North did not have in '94 were Fox Cable News and a huge network of local right wing talk radio shows. Coakley lost by about 6% and I think she might have lost even if she had shaken every hand and had more than one debate. I was holding a sign outside my polling place for Coakley and was chatting with two local Brown supporters (not the ones that came in buses from Texas and elsewhere before election day). They both were Fox News watchers and cited weird trivia about Coakley that was played over and over on Fox and regurgitated endlessly on local talk radio.

IMO, underestimating the power of this media and having no counterbalance for the progressive side of the scales, is very, very dangerous. It will only get worse with the new corporate money that will be flowing in for attack ads.

As long as Congress can be bought and paid for by corporate interests, working people are screwed. They don't listen to us because money talks and working people don't have enough resources to compete with the sugar daddies in the insurance, oil, pharmaceutical, financial, weapons, etc. lobbies. There are no renegade Republicans because they are comfortable with being corporate whores and have a base that will always vote for them as long as they wave the guns, babies and marriage flag. But why were there always enough Democrats to vote for Bush's corporate agenda to get things passed? Because they distance themselves from their base. Now the Republicans stand as a bloc and they have enough Democrats to join them in their obstruction. It's time to make the filibuster a thing of the past. Now it is never used by the "little guy" a la Mr. Smith, if it ever was. We need to get back to requiring 51 votes to pass bills in the Senate. The small population states are already over represented by having the same no. of senators as the larger states. (This makes them a very cheap buy for the lobbyists, eh, Baucus, Lincoln?) The passage of laws that are not corporate-approved should not be further hampered by requiring 60 votes.

On Morning Joe - Peter Schill, I mean, Schiff, (Crashproof) was making a Republican talking point about "socialized" medicine when O'Donnell asked him if he liked Medicare. Schiff said no, that Medicare was detrimental to the "market" or some foolishness like that. Then, O'Donnell went in for the kill. "Are your parents on Medicare?" Schiff started ummming and errrrring and said his father was on Medicare but he was "a special case." Scarborough went immediately to a break.

Link to video - health care begins @ 8 minutes

I would call this electronic Greek chorus of corporatists - whores, but most of the whores I know are pretty honest and unhypocritical. I prefer to call them subsidized liars.

Cramer brought this on himself. He decided to start this little fake war with Jon Stewart over all the CNBC clips shown on the original Daily Show segment. What an outrage! There they all were - being held accountable for whoring for the Wall Street greedheads.

Then, Cramer, fearless defender of his fellow whores, wrote his little rebuttal and made himself the central figure - no doubt with visions of ratings dancing in his head. He follows up his inane commentary with a trip around the talk show circuit. Meanwhile, a bemused Stewart clarifies that Cramer was only part of the problem - it was all about the urgency and lies of the entire cable network money "advisors." In other words, it wasn't personal. It was about the underlying idea that frenetic stock activity could bring money for nothing to those who were "smart." It was about infotainment. It was about fake financial news and the impostors who pretend they are experts.

The coup de grace? The re-surfacing of the damning video of Cramer admitting to his own gaming of the system was the direct result of his drawing the spotlight to himself with his grandstanding outrage. By the time he's on The Daily Show for the much touted interview, Cramer is really scared. It dawns finally on him. He put himself out there and now he is probably going to have to crawl back under the rock he emerged from as CNBC's sacrificial lamb. Maybe that was the plan. Offer Cramer up to the masses and everyone will forget about the rest of the whores. Maybe he has a golden parachute for taking the heat.

But I have absolutely no pity for this little piggy. Cramer is a clown and he had the audacity to accuse Stewart of being "just a comedian." I have never been able to bear watching this pathetic man's little cable act, or the silliness of any of the other stock market gurus who blather their unsolicited and self-serving advice on the idiot box 24/7. Now maybe more people will turn these jackasses off.

I have experience with sustenance farming and living in a large family. I grew up in a teeny house with 8 people and lived in Maine on a small farm for many years. Here's the problem I see with the survivalist mentality - you don't just need stuff, you need social capital. The American culture worships the loner, the independent, the "maverick." My experience tells me that to make it through tough times, you need a village. One person or small family cannot handle all the work, knowledge and social interaction people need. If there is going to be a dramatic economic downturn, we have to develop a new culture - a cooperative, all-in-it-together model. Right now, most Americans have difficulty living together, sharing and working as a group. We have overdeveloped egos and underdeveloped community-building skills.

Let's face it, there are enough resources in this country to provide for all of us and enough creativity and knowledge to make whatever we need, if - and this is a big if - we learn to share and take care of each other. Look at some of the immigrant communities for examples. They often pool their resources and help each other.

I'm just as guilty of this as anyone. It's so easy to cocoon in your own little (or big) shelter and wait until everything collapses. I think some of the survivalist gear is warranted, but I also think that there is power in unity. I hope that we all begin to look around us and see if we can build real communities, not based on just politics or special interests or religion or ethnicity, but on taking care of each other, taking care of our planet and surviving the hard times. My belief is that this cultural change would serve us well no matter what happens with the economy.

From the Huffington Post:



The Israeli press is more tolerant of debate and alternate opinions than the U.S. Why is that? Why is our press so cowed by the Israeli government? Here are a portions of Haaretz editorials quoted in Greg Mitchell's piece:



The problems between Israel and the Palestinians will never be solved until there is a balanced and fair discussion of the problems there. I am sick of the portrayal of Israeli atrocities as being defensive actions while Palestinian atrocities are exaggerated and deemed without provocation. The Israeli government should listen to its own people. Many of the Israeli people recognize that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances that must be addressed before any lasting peace can be achieved.

In his rambling, erratic debate performance, John McCain presented as one of his gimmicky solutions to our education problems the "Troops to Teachers" program.

Here is what he said that made me nearly fall out of my chair:



Say what? Bring anyone from the military into the classroom without certification or examinations required by the state? Is this true?

No. As usual, without his keepers, McCain just makes up facts to fit into some kind of weird mythological world where hockey moms can be vice presidents and soldiers can come off the battlefield into the classroom.

Below is the actual description of the Troops To Teachers program. It sounds like an interesting idea. I'm glad I investigated it myself instead of listening to McNutty's bizarro take on it.



McCain is a clueless airhead. He even distorts good programs to make them fit into his deluded world view.

What you saw beamed from St. Paul across America was a highly disciplined gathering of aliens trying to project the outward appearance of human enthusiasm and diversity by dancing badly, chanting pre-programmed slogans, emitting belch-like cheers, contorting their expressions into facsimiles of emotion and nodding constantly. It is very difficult for this particular breed of self-absorbed, greedy, and thuggish humanoid to imitate real joy and hope. But the group in St. Paul were somewhat successful. From a distance and without close scrutiny, the conventioneers could be mistaken for real human beings, although mostly of the white and old variety. (Note: On the ground, or viewed on hi-definition television set, the illusion was less successful.)

Humans should not dismiss these creatures lightly. They are very powerful and have many resources. They have the power to create images and memes that attack the "lizard-brain" and interfere with rational thought and decision-making. They have infiltrated and/or threatened much of the electronic media into echoing their cynical message, without regard for facts or contrary evidence. They are going after the most vulnerable - low information, wedge voters, Wal-mart shoppers and American Idol watchers. They have access to the resources of fundamentalist churches, organizations like the NRA and Aliens for Life, and well-funded think tanks to further their cause.

So what can a mere human do against these creatures?

The first step is to set your phasers to "Melt", aim them at your TV sets, and pull the trigger. (Note: You may also go low tech, e.g. sledgehammers, chainsaws, wirecutters, etc.) Using your newly acquired free time, you must leave your homes to seek like-minded humans who will join you to work hard to do whatever it takes to get Obama and Biden elected.

Right now, in every state, networks of alien fighters are forming. Join one of them today. These aliens must be driven back to their respective spider holes so we can start cleaning up their mess and regaining our sanity.