RussBLib - what the ....

Happy Birthday, CD

2012-02-12T00:00:00.002-06:00

Celebrate Darwin Day Feb 12 - do a search here to see if there are any events in your area. There is not one single event scheduled in Texas! Eh! I wish I'd thought of it sooner! Next year, we'll see what we can do.

Charles Darwin

On this date - February 12 - in 1809, Charles Robert Darwin was born in England. He prepared for the Church at Cambridge, but his passion was natural history. During his work as a naturalist for the Beagle, he began documenting and formulating his theory of evolution. At the time he wrote the monumental On the Origin of Species (1859), he still accepted the "First Cause" argument. Gradually he threw off his religious beliefs. In his Descent of Man (1871), Darwin wrote: ". . . For my part I would as soon be descended from [a] baboon . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies . . . treats his wives like slaves . . . and is haunted by the grossest superstitions."

He wrote the Rev. J. Fordyce on July 7, 1879, that "an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." Darwin penned his memoirs between the ages of 67 and 73, finishing the main text in 1876. These memoirs were published posthumously in 1887 by his family under the title Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, with his hardest-hitting views on religion excised. Only in 1958 did Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow publish his Autobiography with original omissions restored (see excerpt below). D. 1882.

“I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
— Charles Darwin, Autobiography

Learn more about the International Darwin Day Foundation by clicking here.

Learn about other famous freethinkers

Harry Potter!

2012-02-11T23:45:00.000-06:00

Daniel Radcliffe! I had no idea! There ya go, 'Arry! Good man!

Daniel Radcliffe - militant atheist

Daniel Radcliffe believes it is important to separate religionand education because he thinks sex lessons are important.

The 22-year-old "militant atheist" was brought up in aChristian/Jewish household and told Attitude magazine he's notreligious.

"I'm an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion startsimpacting on legislation.

"We need sex education in schools. Schools have to talk to kidsfrom a young age about relationships, gay and straight. In Britainit's better - more of a conversation is being had."

Radcliffe is interested in politics, but having supported theLiberal Democrat party in the last UK election he now thinks he ismore of a Labour follower because he believes they stand up formore left-wing values.

"I will probably be going to Labour. From what I've seen of EdMiliband I really like him and he speaks for what I believe in. Ithink he's genuine, genuinely left wing and will act as such if hegets in."

Original.

Life Savers

2012-02-11T00:20:00.001-06:00

Funny February

2012-02-10T12:18:00.002-06:00

You ever wonder why you almost never find any conservative comics? Could it be that conservatives just don't have a sense of humor? It must be that, because, in my experience, conservatives are hilarious.

"Mitt Romney lost all three of the primaries. Today, he begged Donald Trump to take back his endorsement." –David Letterman

"It was a big setback for the Mitt Romney campaign. Even the very poor said they felt bad for him." –David Letterman

"People on the inside tell me that the first thing Romney's going to do if he's elected president is he's going to outlaw casual Friday." –David Letterman

"Rick Santorum was the big winner. He is feeling very cocky. He already is being fitted for an inaugural sweater vest." –David Letterman

"Since yesterday's primaries, Rick Santorum's campaign has received $250,000 in donations. When Mitt Romney heard this, he said '$250,000? Oh, that's cute.'" –Conan O'Brien

"A mother in China gave birth to a 15-pound baby. Chinese officials say it's so big, it can do the work of two babies." –Conan O'Brien

"Rick Santorum scored a hat trick winning in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Newt Gingrich scored a hat trick eating at KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut." –Jimmy Fallon

"Rick Santorum says that he is what the Republicans really want. Mitt Romney says now that he knows what Republicans want, he can change to those positions." –Jay Leno

"Romney was at a loss to explain why he dropped the ball. In fact, his wife is now blaming it on the New England Patriot receivers." –Jay Leno

"Donald Trump announced he is building a new hotel four blocks from the White House. And with any luck, that will be about as close to the White House as Donald Trump will ever get." –Jay Leno

"Part of me thinks that Rick Santorum is running for president just to show his high school crush she should have gone to the prom with him." –Jimmy Kimmel

"He even called global warming a hoax, which is no surprise, coming from a guy who is clearly in the pocket of big sweater vests." –Jimmy Kimmel

"There's really no reason for anyone to drop out of the race. If you wind up in fourth place, you become a regular contributor on Fox News. You come in third, you get your own show on Fox News." –Jimmy Kimmel

“Congratulations once again to the world champion New York Giants. They played a great game. Eli Manning now has two rings. Two! But that's still one less ring than Newt Gingrich.” –Jay Leno

“In a huge victory for gay rights, a federal appeals court today ruled that California cannot ban same-sex marriage. If you want to respect the sanctity of marriage, ban Kardashian weddings, okay. Why don't you ban those? Those do more damage...” –Jay Leno

“According to a study from Match.com, Democrats have sex more often than Republicans, but Republicans have better sex. Who cares? It's always the voters who get screwed - right?” –Jay Leno

“Former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is on the show tonight. If you know anything about this guy, he dropped out. But he's a former governor, Ambassador to China, honest, kind, ethical, a good husband, and a good father. He never stood a chance.” –Jay Leno

“I like Mitt Romney. He looks like the guy on a package of underwear.” –David Letterman

“Romney is so confident that he’s getting cocky. He’s already putting the dog on the roof of his car.” –David Letterman

“To undo the negative publicity Mitt Romney received from tying his dog to the top of a car on a cross-country vacation, Mitt responded by tying the car to the top of his dog.” –David Letterman

“Mitt Romney said he doesn't really care about poor people. Now he's backtracking, and he's saying he connects with poor people. Yeah, the same way Tom Brady connects with Wes Welke.” –David Letterman

“Newt Gingrich says that people who ride on subways here in New York are the elite. I was on the subway today and one of the elites sitting next to me was smoking crack.” –David Letterman

“Newt Gingrich didn’t bother to campaign in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota. But he’s vowed to stay in the race until the Republican convention. However, Newt doesn’t have a great track record as far as sticking to his vows go.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Because of large crowds at his campaign events, Mitt Romney will now receive protection from the Secret Service. Not to be outdone, Ron Paul will now receive protection from a mall cop on a Segway.” –Jimmy Fallon

“The Obama administration has been slammed for a health insurance rule that forces Catholic organizations to provide contraception. Even more controversial, the church would also have to provide dim lighting, wine coolers, and an R. Kelly mix tape." –Conan O'Brien

“President Obama has ordered new sanctions against Iran’s central bank for engaging in deceptive practices. I’ve got a better idea, how about sanctions against OUR banks for deceptive practices?” –Jay Leno

“One of the most talked about commercials was the one with Clint Eastwood, where he said, ‘It’s halftime in America, and our second half is about to begin.’ The bad news? China has the ball and we’re down $15 trillion.” –Jay Leno

“Here's a very bizarre story that was online; a woman in England was born... she's 25 now and very attractive... the women was born with two vaginas. Two vaginas! See, this is the woman who should marry Newt Gingrich! Then he could have a wife and an open marriage at the same time.” –Jay Leno

“After winning the Super Bowl, the Giants will get to meet President Obama at the White House. Meanwhile, the Patriots will get to meet Newt Gingrich at the Waffle House." –Jimmy Fallon

“Newt Gingrich has criticized ‘New York elites’ who ride the subway. One of those subway elites threw up on my pants this morning.” –David Letterman

“It is Mormon in America again. What a week Mitt Romney had. He won Florida. It looks like he’s on the way to the nomination. If only he could stop talking.” –Bill Maher

“Apparently being the frontrunner gave him the confidence to announce that poor people can kiss his white ass. To be fair, they did take his comment out of context. What he said was, I’m not very concerned about the poor, they have a cushy safety net. And I’m concerned about the rich because they’re rich like me. What I’m concerned about is the middle class, because they could slip down the economic ladder and become poor again and then fall into that I-don’t-give-a-s**t about you category.” –Bill Maher

“He complained of course that the liberal media made him sound like he was an out-of-touch rich dick. His point of view was. ‘You wouldn’t treat Obama this way. I’ll bet you $10,000 you wouldn’t treat Obama this way.’” –Bill Maher

“I think I can prove that Mitt Romney is the whitest man ever because he won Florida, became the undisputed front runner and then the next day, the host of Soul Train killed himself.” –Bill Maher

“Newt Gingrich jumped on Romney’s gaffe. He said he does care about the poor people, he loves the very poor. In fact, under his plan, poor black people would be the first ones he’s sending up to the moon colony.” –Bill Maher

“The working girls from the Bunny Ranch Brothel are showing up at Ron Paul rallies because he’s a libertarian. What a strange world it is when a presidential candidate can accept an endorsement from a whore...but enough about Romney and Donald Trump.” –Bill Maher

“Pfizer recalled a million birth control pills. Nothing wrong with them, except they won’t stop you from getting pregnant. Or as the Palin family calls them, Skittles.” –Bill Maher

“At a rally at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Donald Trump endorsed Newt Gingrich by endorsing Mitt Romney.” –Seth Meyers

“Romney won the Florida primary with 47 percent of the vote. Or as it’s known in Florida schools, a B minus.” –Seth Meyers

“President Obama spoke at the national prayer breakfast. The president said that his Christian faith is the driving force behind his economic policies. So I guess instead of blaming Bush, it’s now all Jesus’ fault.” –Jay Leno

“Obama said that he says a brief prayer every morning, but then Joe Biden shows up anyway. So I don’t know if it would really work.” –Jay Leno

“Mitt Romney is taking a lot of heat for saying he’s not concerned with the very poor. I don’t think he helped himself, either. Like today he says he does care about the homeless — especially the summer home-less.” –Jay Leno

“The House of Representatives has passed a bill that prohibits people from using welfare money in strip clubs or liquor stores. I agree with that. Strip clubs and liquor stores should be off limits for people who get government funds — you know, like congressmen.” –Jay Leno

“Sad news for Mitt Romney. He drove out of Florida with a live gator strapped to the roof of his car.” –David Letterman

“Donald Trump announced that he’s endorsing Mitt Romney for president. It was really nice. Trump was like, ‘There’s only one man with the brains, the skills, and the charisma to be president — but since I’m not running, you might as well vote for Mitt Romney.’” –Jimmy Fallon

“It was a busy day for Trump, because just this morning, his hair popped out of the ground and predicted six more weeks of winter.” –Jimmy Fallon

‎"Rocky is an obvious parallel for Newt. He's an underdog, a born scrapper, and he is fighting for the chance to be smacked around by a black guy." –Stephen Colbert

‎"I will not be satisfied until super PAC means, 'a frothy mix of lube and campaign funding that is sometimes the byproduct of politics.'" –Stephen Colbert

‎"To all the worryworts out there who said super PACs were going to lead to a cabal of billionaires secretly buying democracy: wrong! They are publicly buying democracy." –Stephen Colbert

“Mitt Romney said he is not concerned with the very poor. That statement worked out well for Marie Antoinette, didn’t it?” –Jay Leno

“The next caucus is this Saturday in Nevada. See, Nevada has something for all the candidates. It's got legalized prostitution, which is part of Ron Paul's campaign; it's got a large Mormon population, which is good for Mitt Romney; it welcomes losers, which is perfect for Rick Santorum; and it's got no-fault divorce, which is tailor-made for Newt Gingrich.” –Jay Leno

“I guess you heard Mitt Romney is now getting Secret Service protection. That's just to protect him from the poor.” –Jay Leno

“Donald Trump has now endorsed Mitt Romney. Imagine that, a billionaire reaching out to a millionaire. The two classes are coming together.” –Jay Leno

“Actually, Romney is the only guy who says, ‘You're fired!’ more than Donald Trump. Did you know that?” –Jay Leno

“This week, Mitt Romney went to a McDonald's restaurant to show that he's a normal American... just a regular guy. You can tell he hasn't spent a lot of time there. Like when he walked in, he asked to see the maitre d'.” –Jay Leno

“Romney knows how President Obama thinks. Because when he was governor of Massachusetts, he thought the exact same way.” –Jay Leno

“There are signs that Newt Gingrich’s campaign is starting to run out of money. He’s dropped Tiffany and he’s buying all of his jewelry on QVC now.” –Jay Leno

“After losing in Florida, Newt Gingrich is campaigning hard in Las Vegas. Gingrich says he loves Las Vegas because it has two of his favorite things: buffets and wedding chapels.” –Conan O'Brien

“It’s a great day for Mitt Romney. He was endorsed by Donald Trump. Unfortunately it was a split decision. The thing on Trump’s head endorsed Gingrich.” –Craig Ferguson

“It’s Groundhog Day. A groundhog knows as much about weather as Mitt Romney knows about poor people.” –Craig Ferguson

“Newt and Hillary are very similar. Both spent the ‘90s trying to figure out who Bill was sleeping with. And they have the same tailor.” –Craig Ferguson

“Mitt Romney said he’s not concerned about the very poor. What he means is people making less than a million.” –David Letterman

“Romney said the poor ought to get together and go to Best Buy to watch the Super Bowl on the wide screen.” –David Letterman

“Romney was endorsed by Donald Trump. You know what that means, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing.” –David Letterman

“Donald Trump made a surprise endorsement of Mitt Romney for president. And Mitt climbed into Donald’s golden helicopter and they flew around the country, dropping silver dollars on the homeless and unemployed.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Mitt Romney is getting some heat today for something he said on CNN. He said he's not concerned about the very poor. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to say that out loud. Romney said the quote was taken out of context. And that he absolutely cares about the poor. In fact, his campaign bus runs on the tears of the poor.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“In Florida, Mitt Romney won the Republican presidential primary election. He beat Newt Gingrich handily. Political analysts believe that elderly voters in Florida rejected Newt Gingrich because of fears that he would eventually leave them for a younger state.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.” –David Letterman

"Romney won Florida. Have you taken a good look at Romney and his wife? They look like a couple in a Levitra commercial." –David Letterman

"Mitt is the guy you think you look like. Newt is the guy you actually look like.” –David Letterman

“Not a great day for Mitt Romney. He put his foot in his mouth. He said in an interview, quote, ‘I'm not concerned about the very poor.’ Is anybody even trying to win this thing?” –Craig Ferguson

“To be fair, to Mitt Romney the ‘very poor’ means anyone who doesn't use a solid gold toilet.” –Craig Ferguson

‎"Mitt didn't just beat Newt Gingrich, he stomped him by a devastating 14 percent margin. Fourteen percent! That is higher than Mitt's tax rate." –Stephen Colbert

“A woman in Illinois is auctioning off a 2005 Chrysler that once belonged to President Obama. You could tell it was Obama’s car because it gets off to a fast start and then stalls for the next three years.” –Jimmy Fallon

“A new report found that Facebook has created more than 450,000 jobs. Unfortunately, photos posted on Facebook have ended 550,000 jobs.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Newt Gingrich is not conceding Florida. He said that Florida has made it clear that this is a two-person race. Yeah, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.” –Jay Leno

“Mitt Romney's campaign will start getting Secret Service protection this week. That's just to protect him from Newt Gingrich.” –Jay Leno

“More problems for Newt Gingrich; he's now been told that he cannot legally use ‘Eye of the Tiger’ anymore, so he's switching back to Viagra.” –Jay Leno

“This is real; Newt Gingrich is being sued by the guy who wrote the song, ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ He's using it in his campaign. Gingrich says he wants the song because he's a big fan of Rocky. He loves Rocky. Did he see the movie? Didn't Rocky lose to the black guy? Hello. Isn't that what happened? Am I wrong?” –Jay Leno

“According to USA Today, more Chinese tourists are coming to America. They get to see things they've never seen before: the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, adults working in factories.” –Jay Leno

“The agriculture department says we now have the smallest cattle population in 60 years. That shows you how fat we're getting. We're close to putting cows on the endangered species list.” –Jay Leno

“It's being reported that California needs to raise $3 billion by March. This according to California State Treasurer Nicolas Cage.” –Conan O’Brien

“The government may be legally required to release a video of the Osama bin Laden killing. For some reason it co-stars Katherine Heigl.” –Conan O’Brien

More here.

New USDA Zones

2012-02-09T22:56:00.000-06:00

The USDA has published a new "Plant Hardiness Zone Map." This one is interactive, with much greater detail than before. There are two new zones added, and new maps for Hawaii, Alaska (ha!) and Puerto Rico (guess!).

There's so much detail it's kinda hard to see much difference between all the shades from green to brown and red, or the chilly way, from green to white.

You can click the pic, but that's not the "clickable" map. Find that one here. The "Interactive Map" link needs some work.

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

The 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. The map is based on the average annual minimum winter temperature, divided into 10-degree F zones.

For the first time, the map is available as an interactive GIS-based map, for which a broadband Internet connection is recommended, and as static images for those with slower Internet access. Users may also simply type in a ZIP Code and find the hardiness zone for that area.

No posters of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map have been printed. But state, regional, and national images of the map can be downloaded and printed in a variety of sizes and resolutions.

another snip

Climate changes are usually based on trends in overall average temperatures recorded over 50-100 years. Because the USDA PHZM represents 30-year averages of what are essentially extreme weather events (the coldest temperature of the year), changes in zones are not reliable evidence of whether there has been global warming.

Compared with the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new PHZM is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous PHZM throughout much of the United States, as a result of a more recent averaging period (1974–1986 vs. 1976–2005). However, some of the changes in the zones are the results of the new, more sophisticated mapping methods and greater numbers of station observations used in this map, which has greatly improved accuracy, especially in mountainous regions. These changes are sometimes to a cooler, rather than warmer, zone.

y mas.

Here's the map for our area.

Late Nite fire

2012-02-08T21:36:00.003-06:00

FIRE!

Dammit! Our favorite pizza place, Late Nite Pie, burned down Wednesday morning.

As if that isn't bad enough, we had to watch it burn! The restaurant is only a block away from our home.

We woke at 5am this morning to a blazing inferno across the street. A little scary, yes. Fortunately for us, the winds were blowing from the north, so all the smoke and burning embers were blown away from us, giving us a birds-eye view.

Pizza eatery burns in Midtown

Fast-moving flames gutted a midtown Houston pizza restaurant early Wednesday morning.

The fire erupted about 4 a.m. at Late Nite Pie, 302 Tuam near Baldwin, and took two hours to extinguish,Houston Fire Department officials said. No injuries were reported.

Firefighters were dispatched to the scene after light smoke was seen coming from the building, said Capt. Ruy Lozano, an HFD spokesman. Lozano said firefighters who went onto the roof looking for the fire reported that the roof had softened.

Officials then ordered firefighters out and off of the building because of unsafe conditions. Large flames soon erupted.

Firefighters used three towers to spray water on the roof. Lozano said the fire appeared to have been burning in a crawl space between the roof and ceiling. He said investigators were trying to determine what sparked the blaze.

Workers who had heard about the fire on news reports came to the eatery to watch crews battle the flames.

The general manager, Raymon Pecher, said he had helped other workers close up the restaurant at about 3 a.m., the normal closing time. They didn't notice smoke or anything else out of the ordinary.

"I'm still in shock," said Pecher.

C.J. Camp, a bartender at the pizza parlor, said everything seemed fine when she left after finishing her shift about 11 p.m. Tuesday. She was saddened as she watched flames rip through the eatery.

"It's not a good feeling," Camp said.

The building was destroyed in the fire. The cause remains under investigation, HFD officials said later Wednesday.

Original.

Damn! Their Stanky Whore pizza was the best!

Or was it the Boss Man? Waaaahhh!

Vog!

2012-02-07T06:30:00.000-06:00

Vog = Volcanic Fog. Oh yeah, of course.

Vog!

Kilauea Volcano, on the island of Hawaii, has been erupting continuously since 1983. This image, taken by the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis (after completing the capture of the Hubble Space Telescope), shows volcanic plumes from Kilauea rising up from three locations: Halema‘uma‘u Crater, Pu‘u ‘O‘o Crater, and from along the coastline where lava flows from the East Rift zone were entering the ocean. The plumes have created a blanket of volcanic fog, called vog, that envelops the island.

The Hawaii Volcano Observatory maintains a website (including webcams) where staff continuously monitor and provide reports on the volcanic activity. Recent maps indicate expanded lava coverage along the coastal plain. In addition, Hawaii’s Department of Health maintains daily vog alerts and publishes advisories for vog conditions around the “big island” of Hawaii and the state. When this image was acquired, the region west of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (downwind from the coastal plumes) had a vog advisory for people with respiratory sensitivities.

The Volcano Observatory also reported that “Lava from east rift zone vents continues to flow through tubes to the coast and is entering the ocean at two locations west of Kalapana. Sulfur dioxide emission rates from the Halema‘uma‘u and Pu‘u ‘O‘o vents remain elevated. Sulfur dioxide emission rates remain elevated and variable; the most recent rate measurement was 1,200 tonnes per day on May 12, compared to the 2003-2007 average rate of 140 tonnes per day. Small amounts of mostly ash-sized tephra continue to be produced consisting mostly of Pele’s hair, irregular pieces of vesicular glass, and a few hollow spherules.”

Astronaut photograph STS125-E-6569 was acquired on May 13, 2009, with a Nikon 2DXs digital camera fitted with a 200mm lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the STS-125 crew. The image in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Instrument:: Space Shuttle - 35mm Camera; Original

The very poor

2012-02-06T21:27:00.003-06:00

Aaak!! Is SOPA gonna git me?

This column by Paul Krugman is too good to chop up! The mendacity coming from the Republicans is just stunning.

Romney Isn't Concerned

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.

Similarly, food aid programs help a lot, but one in six Americans living below the poverty line suffers from “low food security.” This is officially defined as involving situations in which “food intake was reduced at times during the year because [households] had insufficient money or other resources for food” — in other words, hunger.

So we do need to strengthen our safety net. Mr. Romney, however, wants to make the safety net weaker instead.

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.

So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?

And we’re talking about a lot of money. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would actually raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, while sharply cutting taxes at the top end. More than 80 percent of the tax cuts would go to people making more than $200,000 a year, almost half to those making more than $1 million a year, with the average member of the million-plus club getting a $145,000 tax break.

And these big tax breaks would create a big budget hole, increasing the deficit by $180 billion a year — and making those draconian cuts in safety-net programs necessary.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

Original.

Romney fix safety net?

2012-02-05T22:40:00.002-06:00

Planned Parenthood

2012-02-05T21:45:00.001-06:00

It's not only abortions that the fanatically religious right is going after, it's information about CONTRACEPTION! After all, women are supposed to SUBMIT to their husbands. (That's Bible-speak, not me-speak) Of course, the Bible also says you can sell your daughter into slavery, among other absurdly ludicrous things. It's way past time to ditch the Bible.

What Planned Parenthood actually does, in one chart.

(snip) As you can see in the chart atop this post, abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities. That’s less than cancer screening and prevention (16 percent), STD testing for both men and women (35 percent), and contraception (also 35 percent). About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s users are over age 20, and 75 percent have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

So though the fight over Planned Parenthood might be about abortion, Planned Parenthood itself isn’t about abortion. It’s primarily about contraception and reproductive health. And if Planned Parenthood loses funding, what will mainly happen is that cancer screenings and contraception and STD testing will become less available to poorer people. Folks with more money, of course, have many other ways to receive all these services, and tend to get them elsewhere already.

The fight also isn’t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money. It’s somewhat cold to put it in these terms, but taxpayers end up bearing a lot of the expense for unintended pregnancies among people without the means to care for their children. The same goes for preventable cancers and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. You can find a lot more information about Planned Parenthood and its services here.

Original.

Free Bradley Manning

2012-02-03T23:56:00.003-06:00

The long jailing of Bradley Manning without trial is one of the blackest marks on Obama's presidency. Some will say that the Patriot Act authorizes Bradley's mistreatment, but if we had a reasonable Supreme Court, it would be thrown out.

I recently watched an episode of William Shatner's "Aftermath", a TV series on the Biography Channel where Shatner interviews newsmakers several years after they made news, to see how things have worked out in the "aftermath." The guest was Daniel Ellsberg. It's a good interview You should find it and watch it. One thing that Ellsberg said during the show has stuck with me. He said that Bradley Manning, like himself (Ellsberg), has said that he was "willing to go to jail for the rest of (his) life to get the truth out." Wow.

The Assange case means we are all suspects now

343 Comments

JOHN PILGER

This week's Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies.

This is Assange's final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were originally dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm and constitute no crime in Britain.

The consequences, if he loses, lie not in Sweden but in the shadows cast by America's descent into totalitarianism. In Sweden, he is at risk of being "temporarily surrendered" to the US where his life has been threatened and he is accused of "aiding the enemy" with Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of leaking evidence of US war crimes to WikiLeaks.

The connections between Manning and Assange have been concocted by a secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, which allowed no defence counsel or witnesses, and by a system of plea-bargaining that ensures a 90 per cent conviction. It is reminiscent of a Soviet show trial.

The determination of the Obama administration to crush Assange and the unfettered journalism represented by WikiLeaks is revealed in secret Australian Government documents released under freedom of information which describe the US pursuit of WikiLeaks as "an unprecedented investigation". It is unprecedented because it subverts the First Amendment of the US constitution that explicitly protects truth-tellers. In 2008 Barack Obama said, "Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". Obama has since prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers as all previous US presidents.

With American courts demanding to see the worldwide accounts of Twitter, Google and Yahoo, the threat to Assange - an Australian - extends to any internet-user anywhere. Washington's enemy is not "terrorism" but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state and those journalists brave enough to tell their stories.

"How do you prosecute Julian Assange and not the New York Times?" a former administration official told Reuters. The threat is well understood by the New York Times, which in 2010 published a selection of the WikiLeaks cables. The editor at the time, Bill Keller, boasted that he had sent the cables to the State Department for vetting. His obeisance extended to his denial that WikiLeaks was a "partner" - which it was - and to personal attacks on Assange. The message to all journalists was clear: do your job as it should be done and you are traitors; do your job as we say you should and you are journalists.

Much of the media's depiction of Bradley Manning illuminates this. The world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, Manning remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to a "moral choice". But according to the New York Times, he is weird or mad, a "geek". In an "exclusive investigation", the Guardian reported him as an "unstable" gay man, who got "out of control" and "wet himself" when he was "picked on". Psycho-hearsay such as this serves to suppress the truth of the outrage Manning felt at the wanton killing in Iraq, his moral heroism and the criminal complicity of his military superiors. "I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy," he reportedly said.

The treatment handed out to Assange is well-documented, though not the duplicitous and cowardly behaviour of his own government. Australia remains a colony in all but name. Australian intelligence agencies are, in effect, branches of the main office in Washington. The Australian military has played a regular role as US mercenary. When prime minister Gough Whitlam tried to change this in 1975 and secure Australia's partial independence, he was dismissed by a governor-general using archaic "reserve powers" who was revealed to have intelligence connections.

WikiLeaks has given Australians a rare glimpse of how their country is run. In 2010, leaked US cables disclosed that key government figures in the Labor Party coup that brought Julia Gillard to power were "protected" sources of the US embassy: what the CIA calls "assets". Kevin Rudd, the prime minister she ousted, had displeased Washington by being disobedient, even suggesting that Australian troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

In the wake of her portentous ascent to power, Gillard attacked WikiLeaks as "illegal" and her attorney-general threatened to withdraw Assange's passport. Yet the Australian Federal Police reported that Assange and WikiLeaks had broken no law. Freedom of information files have since revealed that Australian diplomats have colluded with the US in its pursuit of Assange. This is not unusual. The government of John Howard ignored the rule of law and conspired with the US to keep David Hicks, an Australian citizen, in Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured. Australia's principal intelligence organisation, ASIO, is allowed to imprison refugees indefinitely without explanation, prosecution or appeal.

Every Australian citizen in grave difficulty overseas is said to have the right to diplomatic support. The denial of this to Assange, bar the perfunctory, is an unreported scandal. Last September, Assange's London lawyer, Gareth Peirce, wrote to the Australian Government, warning that Assange's "personal safety and security has become at risk in circumstances that have become highly politically charged". Only when the Melbourne Age reported that she had received no response did a dissembling official letter turn up. Last November, Peirce and I briefed the Australian Consul-General in London, Ken Pascoe. One of Britain's most experienced human rights lawyers, Peirce told him she feared a unique miscarriage of justice if Assange was extradited and his own government remained silent. The silence remains.

John Pilger is a journalist, author and film maker. View his full profile here.

Original.

Graham Nash

2012-02-03T18:51:00.000-06:00

Drones!

2012-02-02T18:30:00.000-06:00

February Stargazing

2012-02-01T19:52:00.002-06:00

Keep looking up.

Anyone who has spent any time in space will love it for the rest of their lives. I achieved my childhood dream of the sky.
Valentina Tereshkov

Stargazing Summary

The stars of winter reign through the long February nights. Orion is in the south at nightfall, with Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, twinkling fiercely to its lower left. Venus reigns as the "evening star," although Jupiter gives it some competition in the evening sky. The two planets move closer to each other throughout the month. Mars is in the evening sky as well, climbing into good view in the east by around 9 p.m. early in the month, and by nightfall at month's end. Mars grows noticeably brighter during the month.

More stargazing information »

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February 1-5: Stellar Opposites. The brightest star in the night sky has a companion that's a bare cosmic ember -- a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. Join us for brilliant Sirius, its faint companion, and much more about white dwarfs.

February 6-12: Planetary Pointer. The planet Venus shines as the brilliant "evening star" this week. And it points the way to a faint planetary giant. Join us for this planetary encounter, plus some cracklin' displays in alien skies.

February 13-19: Winter Wonderland. The Moon is a minor presence in the night sky this week, allowing another wonder to shine through: the winter Milky Way. We'll have details on this thinly settled region of the galaxy plus much more.

February 20-26: A Bright Demise. The brightest exploding star of the last four centuries erupted into view 25 years ago. We'll have details about the explosion and its aftermath, plus a giant stride in the Space Race.

February 27-29: Leap Day. One of the oddities of the modern calendar is Leap Day -- a day added every fourth year to keep the calendar in line with the seasons. We'll talk about the history of Leap Day, plus the colors of the stars and more.

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StarDate Magazine

In the March/April issue, astronomer and historian Barbara Ryden celebrates the centennial of a discovery that revolutionized how astronomers measure cosmic distance. We'll also talk about how joining a local astronomy club can enhance your skywatching fun and skills.

News From The Observatory

UT/Hubble Study Challenges 'Cosmic Fireworks' as Largest Driver of Galaxy Evolution
A Hubble Space Telescope study of massive galaxies two to three billion years after the Big Bang has uncovered two remarkable results that challenge the common lore that major mergers play a dominant role in growing galaxies over a wide range of cosmic epochs. Astronomers led by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Tim Weinzirl and associate professor Shardha Jogee presented their findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin.

Mirror Casting Event for Giant Magellan Telescope
On January 14, the second 8.4-meter (27.6 ft) diameter mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, was cast inside a rotating furnace at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab underneath the campus football stadium. The mirror lab hosted a special event to highlight this milestone in the creation of the optics for the telescope. McDonald Observatory is a founding partner of the GMT collaboration.

Gebhardt Honored by The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas
In recognition of his discoveries regarding the formation of black holes and galaxies, astronomer Karl Gebhardt received the 2012 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Science from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. The O'Donnell Award honors outstanding young Texas researchers in medicine, engineering, science and technology innovation.

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Crackpot Agenda

2012-01-31T22:04:00.000-06:00

Recent excellent piece by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone....

The GOP's Crackpot Agenda

The top Republican candidates share a single, radical vision: to trash the environment, shred the safety net and aid the rich.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gops-crackpot-agenda-20111207#ixzz1l6DVCXLj

Hyperbolic? No. Not when you actually listen to the circus otherwise known as the field of GOP Presidential candidates. Willard wins Florida tonight and he gives another speech, just making shit up about Obama, as usual. It's so obvious he's lying. You can SEE him lying, complete with goofy facial expressions. So it looks like the GOP's standard-bearer will be a charter member of the 1% club.

Insider trading?

2012-01-30T22:31:00.001-06:00

I can't believe that "insider trading" by the U.S. Congress is still legal! For some reason, I assumed it had been outlawed when most other forms of "insider trading" had been outlawed.

But nooooo, it's going to take a new law to "...require members of Congress and high-ranking staffers and federal employees to abide by insider trading rules that apply to everyone."

Link

That doesn't sound too good. Making Congress obey the same laws that everyone else has to!!?? Where will it end?!

Surely there must be some rules already in place? Ethics, conflicts of interest?

Skype/Google/Qik

2012-01-29T22:28:00.001-06:00

Do you Skype? The wife and I have just recently signed up for the service. You can make Skype-to-Skype video and audio calls for FREE. Now, I know that this is not exactly a new technology. We're not first-adopters. We let the technology get settled and refined before we dive in.

We hooked up with my nephew, his wife, and their 3-month old baby girl recently. We were in Arkansas, they were in D.C. The immediacy of a live video signal is pretty cool. That was a decent video signal, and we weren't really on a very high-speed internet signal. Now, back at home, we clock at 25Mbps, and the signal should be much better.

Do I know you? Do you Skype? E-mail me. We might just be tempted to pay them a few bucks to be able to have a group video.

The only real drawback to Skype that I see is that it is ultimately owned by that ultimate of sleazebags, Rupert Murdoch.

Alternatives are Google Talk (all you need is a Gmail account and a webcam) (and of course a high-speed internet connection) ...

and Qik Video (an Android app), also free and they don't benefit Republicans. (I think)

Award-winning carrots?

2012-01-29T22:13:00.002-06:00

Hey, this is kinda cool. It just "might" get me to visit the Rodeo this year. Might. I know that our carrots are awesome. Hmmm...

Fundraising opportunities

Do you think you have the best collards around or maybe your carrots are just outstanding. Here is an opportunity to prove to the world what you already know. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo has added a horticulture competition to their event and they are inviting gardeners to enter their best fruits and vegetables. This is a new competition with cash prizes. 1st place $1000, 2nd place $750 and 3rd place $500. You can find the rules and entry form here. The rules for the cut edibles (vegetables and fruits) are still being written so don't worry to much about what is in the rule booklet. What is listed is a copy of the floral arrangement rules. Entry deadline is Feb 3, 2012. Please send questions to Linda.

And they're off!

2012-01-27T15:54:00.001-06:00

Funny and strange

2012-01-26T22:56:00.001-06:00

The creativity continually bubbles up from humanity in different places and different forms

Ken Lay's condo

2012-01-26T20:11:00.001-06:00

A couple of years ago, Swamplot, a Houston real estate blog, started a series of posts about Ken and Linda Lay's condo penthouse that had gone on the market for sale. This choice piece of real estate was the last of 18 properties that Ken and Linda owned. Poor babies.

The asking price was a lofty $12.8 million. That's a lot of coin for me, but not for the 1%. They held a "private sale." Perhaps not surprising, it didn't sell.

The price was soon cut to $11.9 million. Then to $10.25 million.

Then it disappeared from the real estate listings. What happened? Did someone buy it?

Nope. It just reappeared on the market, now listed at $6.395 million. Whatta bargain!

What's not to like?

Some highlights of the property:

360-degree skyline views
4 corner balconies
12,287 square feet
5 bedrooms
4 full bathrooms
5 half bathrooms
6 elevators
10 parking spaces
$10,182 monthly maintenance fee
The entire 33rd floor of The Huntingdon, a condo hi-rise at 2121 Kirby Dr.

A little rich for me, still. Is there any lesson to be learned?

See the entire real estate listing here, and read the entertaining and informative posts about it on Swamplot here. Ken better be dead.

SOTU

2012-01-25T21:28:00.001-06:00

Yes, I watched President Obama's State of the Union address last night. Stepping back a bit, I have a hard time seeing how anyone can disagree with much of anything he said last night. The opposition to Obama's policies has simply become reflexive, no matter what Obama might say, and this is an absurd thing to be doing.

President Obama has bent over backward further and more often trying to compromise with "the other side" than any President I've ever seen, but all he gets in response is vitriol and the back of the hand. It's so mindless, it leads me to believe that a lot of it must be because the man is "black." He's really only 1/2 black, but even that leaves no room for Republicans to compromise.

The text of the entire speech can be found here. It's a good read, and reading it this way makes the speech a whole lot shorter than being interrupted 50 times by cheers, jeers, and standing ovations.

Or, you could watch the whole thing ....

Immediately after the speech, I heard a couple of Republicans mindlessly repeat, "Obama is taking the country in entirely the wrong direction." The wrong direction? Stupid fucks. WTFU. Here's a short snip:

Let's remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren't, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people's money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn't have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we've put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

Poor Mitt

2012-01-25T19:29:00.001-06:00

Stephen Colbert

2012-01-24T21:52:00.001-06:00

This guy is a genius. A comic genius too.

Mitch Daniels

2012-01-24T20:25:00.001-06:00

Hey, I forgot all about Mitch Daniels serving in Duhbya's OMB. D'oh!

(snip) from Consortium News article by Robert Parry...

A New York Times’ article about the choice of Daniels noted that “the sight of Mr. Daniels on national television is sure to raise wistful ‘if onlys’ in a Republican establishment that had put the governor at the top of its wish list for a White House run.” But that article – like others about Daniels – leaves out a salient fact about his alleged “fiscal conservatism”: as President George W. Bush’s original budget director, Mitch Daniels helped create today’s fiscal mess.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels

Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its historic reversal from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time Daniels left the Office of Management and Budget in June 2003.

Plus, because of proposals developed on Daniels’s watch – such as tax cuts favoring the rich and unpaid-for projects, including the invasion of Iraq and a new prescription drug plan – the fiscal situation of the federal government continued to deteriorate over the ensuing years, becoming a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit by the time Bush left the White House in 2009.

Read the rest here.

Year of the Dragon

2012-01-24T10:30:00.002-06:00

Newt wins S.C!

2012-01-23T21:29:00.002-06:00

Click the pic to make it larger.

Revisionist History

2012-01-22T22:00:00.000-06:00

I've been wondering if someone was going to address the pure fabrications that I hear coming from the pieholes of the GOP presidential "candidates." Do they think they can just say anything in the world and not have it questioned? Can you just make up any old shit you want, regardless as to whether or not it's true?

GOP Campaign Trail Filled With Revisionist History

by Peter S. Goodman

I've just returned from a sojourn in an alternate historical universe, which is to say I've been in South Carolina, listening to the Republican presidential candidates.

These people have managed to distill modern American times down to a deliciously accessible account that goes something like this:

In the beginning there was Ronald Reagan. He was so awesome! He slashed taxes and fired pencil-necked bureaucrats, whose sole function was to antagonize salt-of-the-earth business folk. Money rained from the sky. Then Barack Obama arrived and screwed up everything. He wrote new rules designed to tie the economy in knots and kill jobs so he could realize his true aim, expanding food stamp dependency, as part of his plot to turn America into a socialist, nanny state-governed Loserville.

If you're wondering what happened to those years when the country was run by a pair of guys named Bush (and someone else named Clinton in between), they have been airbrushed out of this updated Republican history. So have a few seemingly pertinent events connected to their tenures: the dismantling of key financial regulations (particularly by Clinton), a massive redistribution of wealth to the richest households engineered by George W. Bush, and a failure to address stagnating wages and lost job opportunities for most workers all along the way.

Oh, and a nearly apocalyptic financial crisis that arrived on W's watch, prompting taxpayer bailouts of behemoth Wall Street firms while delivering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

On the Republican campaign trail, none of these little details have been making it into accounts of recent times, because they collide with the narrative guiding the proceedings. Though Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Perry (before he dropped out) have been sniping about all sorts of tedious little things, in the main they have been reading from the same script: Everything bad that ever happened resulted from too many taxes and too much regulation. Everything good comes from deregulation, and handing gobs of money to rich people and corporations.

If you think I'm exaggerating, you have clearly been intelligent enough to occupy your hours watching something more enlightening than the Republican debates (a list that might include both "Jersey Shore" and reruns of people smacking other people with chairs on the "Jerry Springer" show). But my cartoonish account is really only a little more cartoonish than the things Republicans have been saying about what has happened to our economy as they wander South Carolina in pursuit of votes.

The other day, at a candidate forum in downtown Columbia, the state capitol, Newt Gingrich looked out at a room full of business people and boasted about the supposedly key role he played in forging supply-side economics, the school of thought that says tax cutting is the answer to every policy question. He burnished this "credential" by noting that he had been right there alongside Reagan and Arthur Laffer in the engine room of supply-side thinking.

This is a little bit like saying that you were the guy on the deck of the Titanic, hollering, "Full speed ahead!" long after the iceberg loomed. Laffer is the economist who popularized the notion that cutting taxes increases government revenue, a doctrine that has stood the test of time about as well as drowning people to find out if they are witches.

Rare is the credentialed economist who still asserts that cutting taxes generates additional revenue, an idea so patently at odds with common sense that only someone with a doctorate could have suggested it. Greg Mankiw, a conservative economist who served in the George W. Bush administration as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (and who is now an adviser to Romney), uses a chapter of his widely assigned economics textbook, "Principles of Economics," to challenge the idea that lower taxes produce higher revenues.

But never mind the theory. Take a look at actual history, as distilled in a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Reagan, leaning on advice from Laffer, slashed marginal personal income tax rates by 25 percent between the fall of 1981 and the summer of 1983. Tax revenues subsequently dipped, and the federal deficit expanded. During the sweep of Reagan's presidency -- an era now held up as a paragon by the same crop of candidates who claim to be fierce deficit hawks -- federal spending outstripped revenues by more than $1.4 trillion.

Taxes and deficits are not the only subjects that have come in for wholesale revision in the Republican account. Four years after speculative excesses on Wall Street nearly brought down the financial system, the candidates appear to have forgotten all about it. How else to explain their repeated vows to immediately repeal Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory reform law adopted in an effort to prevent a repeat, while offering no alternative?

Rick Perry and Gingrich, the candidate Perry endorsed as he dropped out of the race on Thursday, have both made repealing Dodd-Frank a primary talking point. Romney has said he would do the same, though he has expressed some desire to retain portions of the law.

Like perhaps every piece of enormous legislation to emerge from Congress, Dodd-Frank is a fat mess of a law, one seemingly understood by no one in its entirety. It is filled with contradictory provisions inserted by one lobbyist or another, presenting federal agencies with a dog's breakfast of regulations that must be written to implement it. The law will not prevent another crisis, because it is so mind-bendingly complex that the financial industry will game it to suit its proclivities.

But does anyone not paid to do so seriously maintain that Dodd-Frank is so flawed that the circumstances that existed pre-crisis would be better? Do we really want to double down on market fundamentalism and let Wall Street have another go in the casino, unsupervised, while playing with taxpayer money?

Don't ask the Republican candidates, because they have eliminated the crisis from historical memory, skipping all the way back to Morning In America, when everyone worked, no one was poor, the stock market only went up, and taxes existed only in the Soviet Union.

Original.

Golden Loves Guitar

2012-01-22T21:25:00.003-06:00

Ah, the silly things they put on YouTube these days.

Chris Bonno

2012-01-21T10:53:00.000-06:00

Chris Bonno is an old college buddy of mine from my days (years) at the University of Houston. We had a lot of fun running Channel 6 on campus. I have some fond memories of one of our shows called, "Sex on Six."

After graduating, Chris moved to Hollywood, where he began a stand-up comic career. He's been traveling lately with Hal Sparks. Chris is also an artist, has created several short films, had some bit parts in TV shows, and now, a lead role in a movie, "Guns Don't Kill People."

Guns Don't Kill People Trailer from Ivan Ehlers on Vimeo.

Hooray Jessica!

2012-01-20T19:54:00.005-06:00

Hooray for Jessica Ahlquist of Rhode Island! She protested a "prayer banner" hanging in her high school, and won!

And so we see yet again what happens when someone stands up for separation of church and state. They get screamed at, insulted, and threatened. It would seem that church people are just not comfortable enough with their own religiosity; they insist on openly displaying their religion and ramming it down everyone else's throat, too. Sounds to me like they are insecure in their own faith. They don't have much faith so they insist on outward displays of belief. It's pathetic.

And what part of Matthew 6:5-6 do they not understand?

The Freedom From Religion Foundation warmly congratulates 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist, whose federal challenge against a prayer banner hanging in her high school in Rhode Island prevailed when U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux ruled the banner must be removed immediately. The banner is titled “School Prayer,” addresses “Our Heavenly Father” and ends with “Amen.”

Lagueux not only ruled in Jessica’s favor, but noted in his decision that she “is clearly an articulate and courageous young woman, who took a brave stand, particularly in light of the hostile response she has received from her community.”

The petite Jessica, a shy teenager with backbone thrust into a huge controversy, was named FFRF’s Thomas Jefferson Student Activist awardee last year. She wowed and charmed the 34th annual national FFRF convention in Hartford, Conn., on Oct. 8, when she accepted her $1,000 scholarship in person and recounted her experiences. (Read or listen to speech, “Teen stands fall for First Amendment,” November Freethought Today.)

In her speech to FFRF, Jessica noted that many students and parents reacted angrily from the start to critics of the school’s unconstitutional prayer banner. When she and others spoke up again the banner at several meetings, reactions ranged from angry glares and murmurs to gasps when she identified herself as an atheist. “Someone’s trying to destroy God,” was one reaction. Classmates would scream “God Bless You” in her face if she sneezed, and she lost some former friends. When her town’s mayor, at an unrelated event in the school auditorium, pointed to the prayer and said, “I would like to see that prayer stay exactly where it is,” the entire auditorium erupted with ovations, cheers and applause. “I sat there and tried not to cry,” she recalled. One day she and a friend were removed from class after rumors of violence. Another day she remembered, “I went home crying.”

Jessica noted that despite the hostile climate and the fact that “people don’t want to be associated with me,” last fall she started a secular student club.

Lagueux ended his decision:

“Over the many years of its history, the Supreme Court has turned to the words of the Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution to support varying interpretations of the Establishment Clause. Many chapters have been devoted to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln, and what their expectations were for the public religious practices of this nation. This Court has tried to resist the temptation of injecting lofty rhetoric into this opinion, but nonetheless was moved by the words, as quoted in Schempp, of Roger Williams, the founder of our state, who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony in pursuit of religious liberty.

There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or human combination, or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked on one ship; upon which supposal, I affirm that all the liberty of conscience I ever pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges, that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ship’s prayers or worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any."

“We warmly congratulate Jessica for standing up for our Constitution. This is a lawsuit that should not even have been necessary. What Jessica endured in order to bring an end to this obvious First Amendment violation shows how essential it is to keep religion out of our public schools, where it creates only mischief and divisiveness,” said FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor.

It's Viral!

2012-01-19T21:00:00.002-06:00

Romney's tax returns

2012-01-18T21:28:00.002-06:00

Gee, what COULD Mitt Romney be hiding by not releasing his tax returns? The final proof that he is of, by and for the 1%, perhaps? Or something even more nasty?

King of Bain

2012-01-17T22:21:00.002-06:00

This video is "paid for" by the "Winning Our Future" PAC, which backs Newt Gingrich. Pass the popcorn!!

Click here. The entire video is only 28 minutes.

I'm glad to see Romney getting tarred with the 1% tag. He deserves it.

Carlsberg

2012-01-12T23:19:00.002-06:00

Arian Foster

2012-01-11T20:33:00.001-06:00

Yes, I have been caught up in "Texans Fever" like many fellow Houstonians. I haven't watched this much football since I was a kid growing up in East Texas, when we idolized the Dallas Cowboys.

One vivid memory from that time is sitting impatiently through church on Sunday mornings (brainwashing!), knowing that we were going to jump in the car as soon as services were over and head to Dallas to watch a game live in the Cotton Bowl. Those were the longest sermons in history!

Here's a nice profile of Texans running back Arian Foster. Sounds like a really cool guy.

Texans' Foster proves he's no ordinary NFL player

by Steve Campbell

Arian Foster arrived in the NFL almost unnoticed, with a point he was willing to go to great lengths to prove. One of the telltale signs that Foster was well on his way to proving he wasn’t the crazy one for believing he could flourish at football’s highest level came during a December 2010 game against the Baltimore Ravens.

Undrafted out of college, relegated to the practice squad for much of his first professional season, Foster was on his way to leading the league in rushing. During the second quarter of a Ravens victory at Reliant Stadium, All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis cornered Foster to say, “I love the way you play the game.”

The two struck up a friendship at the Pro Bowl and met up again at the ESPYs award show, talking for hours afterward. They have gone back and forth on the phone this week, knowing full well they’ll meet again on Sunday when the Texans face the Ravens in an AFC divisional playoff game.

“H’s driven by a different burning inside,” Lewis said. “He was an undrafted guy with a lot of talent, so he’s fueled by something different. Any time you add that type of fuel with talent, you get Arian Foster.”

Many sides to him

It turns out Foster, 25, is fueled by something different to be something different than the cookie-cutter NFL star. Here’s a former University of Tennessee philosophy major whose name is an abbreviated form of Aquarians. Foster is half African-American, half Mexican-American, and he dabbles in poetry and writing song lyrics. He is an unmarried father of a 2-year-old daughter, Zeniah, whose mother speaks German. He embraces yoga and New Age teachings, bowing after touchdowns as an ode to Eastern culture.

When the Texans had an open date in November, Foster visited New York to examine first-hand the Occupy Wall Street movement. He raised some eyebrows during an offseason talk with high-school students when he told them, “There’s always going to be somebody who says you can’t do something. Usually that somebody didn’t do what they wanted to do with their life. I tell kids all the time, ‘Don’t listen to adults.’ ”

He frets about the perils of conformity, yet his chosen profession – the one a seventh-grade teacher mocked as too unrealistic to contemplate – is one that frowns on free thinking and individuality.

“There are laws you have to abide by, and I acknowledge those laws,” Foster said. “But more often than not, people let the laws define them rather than really asking questions and pushing the limits. That’s how we grow as people, as a human race, really: We push limits of those boundaries.”

Tweet’s the word

Arian Foster is a Twitter devotee, reaching out to more than 130,000 followers to initiate discussions that can range from lampooning fantasy-football fanatics to discussing the meaning of life or the importance of money. When Foster did a reenactment of the “Dream Shake” move of Rockets icon Hakeem Olajuwon to celebrate the Texans’ first touchdown of the playoffs, it was the result of a discussion he’d had with his Twitter followers earlier in the week.

“There’s really not one thing you can describe him as,” said Foster’s brother and personal trainer, Abdul. “He’s not just a football player. He’s not just a father. He’s not just a brother. He’s not just a hard worker, a creative mind and spirit. He’s all of those, and some more. He’s not just bound to the football field, those 100 yards. That’s why I say he’s a great human spirit.”

Just don’t mistake Foster for some sort of float-through-life gadfly who stands for or commits to nothing. When somebody in the Twitterverse asked last week what the key is to success, Foster offered this answer: “Defining what success means to you, then being willing to die for it.”

“People think I’m joking when I say I’m willing to die for it,” Foster said. “I’m not joking. I’ll literally run until my heart stops. My training, my preparation, it doesn’t seem that serious to somebody else. But it is to me. The name on my back means something to me – the legacy I want to leave not just on the field, but off the field.”

Texans offensive coordinator Rick Dennison describes Foster is studious and inquisitive in team meetings, saying, “To say Arian is a quick study is an understatement.”

That would be the same Foster who one day alarmed receiver Andre Johnson with an unexpected text-message. Figuring there must be something serious at hand, Johnson got treated instead to a picture of Foster feeding some ducks.

Some people say he’s different,” Johnson said. “He’s a cocky guy, but I don’t think he’s cocky in a bad way. He has always had a chip on his shoulder because he wants to prove he’s a great player. I think he’s doing that.”

The Twitter profile of @ArianFoster offers a succinct summation of the many layers to him: “I am an aspiring human being. I don’t take life too serious, none of us make it out alive. Understand the universe, you’ll understand me.”

Foster has more than 2,300 tweets to his name, offering glimpses as to the assorted place his minds go. Sometimes he’ll hint of the inner struggles of trying to make a name for himself in the NFL: “I have such an addictive personality. I’m either all in, or all out. What a beautiful curse.”

Embracing the city

Four days before the first playoff game in franchise history, Foster tweeted: “Houston, you’ll never know how much love I have for you. You’ve changed my life forever. And I am forever indebted.” Houston is where Arian Foster, who once saw his divorced mother pawn her wedding ring to feed the family, began to make a name and place for himself.

“I’m a believer in spreading a lot of positive light,” Foster said. “Some people, I feel like are put here to help out other people. I’m in a fortunate position to have people’s eyes and people’s ears on a small scale. Any chance I get, I just try to spread any kind of positive light I can.”

steve.campbell@chron.com
Twitter.com/CampbellChron

Original.

Founding Fathers

2012-01-10T20:36:00.000-06:00

This country is not, nor I hope will it ever be, a "Christian" nation. All these religious extremist Christian fanatics need to just STFU.

5 Founding Fathers Whose Skepticism About Christianity Would Make Them Unelectable Today

Thomas Jefferson believed that a coolly rational form of religion would take root in America. Was he ever wrong.

January 10, 2012

by Rob Boston

To hear the Religious Right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike many of today’s candidates, the founders didn’t find it necessary to constantly wear religion on their sleeves. They considered faith a private affair. Contrast them to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who says he wouldn’t vote for an atheist for president because non-believers lack the proper moral grounding to guide the American ship of state), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who hosted a prayer rally and issued an infamous ad accusing President Barack Obama of waging a “war on religion”) and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (whose uber-Catholicism leads him to oppose not just abortion but birth control).

There was a time when Americans voted for candidates who were skeptical of core concepts of Christianity like the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. The question is, could any of them get elected today? The sad answer is probably not.

Here are five founding fathers whose views on religion would most likely doom them to defeat today:

1. George Washington. The father of our country was nominally an Anglican but seemed more at home with Deism. The language of the Deists sounds odd to today’s ears because it’s a theological system of thought that has fallen out of favor. Desists believed in God but didn’t necessarily see him as active in human affairs. The god of the Deists was a god of first cause. He set things in motion and then stepped back.

Washington often employed Deistic terms. His god was a “supreme architect” of the universe. Washington saw religion as necessary for good moral behavior but didn’t necessarily accept all Christian dogma. He seemed to have a special gripe against communion and would usually leave services before it was offered.

Washington was widely tolerant of other beliefs. He is the author of one of the great classics of religious liberty – the letter to Touro Synagogue (1790). In this letter, Washington assured America’s Jews that they would enjoy complete religious liberty in America; not mere toleration in an officially “Christian” nation. He outlines a vision of a multi-faith society where all are free.

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation,” wrote Washington. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Stories of Washington’s deep religiosity, such as tales of him praying in the snow at Valley Forge, can be ignored. They are pious legends invented after his death.

2. John Adams. The man who followed Washington in office was a Unitarian, although he was raised a Congregationalist and never officially left that church. Adams rejected belief in the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, core concepts of Christian dogma. In his personal writings, Adams makes it clear that he considered some Christian dogma to be incomprehensible.

In February 1756, Adams wrote in his diary about a discussion he had had with a man named Major Greene. Greene was a devout Christian who sought to persuade Adams to adopt conservative Christian views. The two argued over the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. Questioned on the matter of Jesus’ divinity, Greene fell back on an old standby: some matters of theology are too complex and mysterious for we puny humans to understand.

Adams was not impressed. In his diary he wrote, “Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”

As president, Adams signed the famous Treaty of Tripoli, which boldly stated, “[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”

3. Thomas Jefferson. It’s almost impossible to define Jefferson’s subtle religious views in a few words. As he once put it, “I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.” But one thing is clear: His skepticism of traditional Christianity is well established. Our third president did not believe in the Trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, original sin and other core Christian doctrines. He was hostile to many conservative Christian clerics, whom he believed had perverted the teachings of that faith.

Jefferson once famously observed to Adams, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Although not an orthodox Christian, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral teacher. In one of his most unusual acts, Jefferson edited the New Testament, cutting away the stories of miracles and divinity and leaving behind a very human Jesus, whose teachings Jefferson found “sublime.” This “Jefferson Bible” is a remarkable document – and it would ensure his political defeat today. (Imagine the TV commercials the Religious Right would run: Thomas Jefferson hates Jesus! He mutilates Bibles!)

Jefferson was confident that a coolly rational form of religion would take root in the fertile intellectual soil of America. He once predicted that just about everyone would become Unitarian. (Despite his many talents, the man was no prophet.)

Jefferson took political stands that would infuriate today’s Religious Right and ensure that they would work to defeat him. He refused to issue proclamations calling for days of prayer and fasting, saying that such religious duties were no part of the chief executive’s job. His assertion that the First Amendment erects a “wall of separation between church and state” still rankles the Religious Right today.

4. James Madison. Jefferson’s close ally would be similarly unelectable today. Madison is perhaps the most enigmatic of all the founders when it comes to religion. To this day, scholars still debate his religious views.

Nominally Anglican, Madison, some of his biographers believe, was really a Deist. He went through a period of enthusiasm for Christianity as a young man, but this seems to have faded. Unlike many of today’s politicians, who eagerly wear religion on their sleeves and brag about the ways their faith will guide their policy decisions, Madison was notoriously reluctant to talk publicly about his religious beliefs.

Madison was perhaps the strictest church-state separationist among the founders, taking stands that make the ACLU look like a bunch of pikers. He opposed government-paid chaplains in Congress and in the military. As president, Madison rejected a proposed census because it involved counting people by profession. For the government to count the clergy, Madison said, would violate the First Amendment.

Madison, who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, also opposed government-issued prayer proclamations. He issued a few during the War of 1812 at the insistence of Congress but later concluded that his actions had been unconstitutional. As president, he vetoed legislation granting federal land to a church and a plan to have a church in Washington care for the poor through a largely symbolic charter. In both cases, he cited the First Amendment.

One can hear the commercials now: "James Madison is an anti-religious fanatic. He even opposes prayer proclamations during time of war."

5. Thomas Paine. Paine never held elective office, but he played an important role as a pamphleteer whose stirring words helped rally Americans to independence. Washington ordered that Paine’s pamphlet “The American Crisis” be read aloud to the Continental Army as a morale booster on Dec. 23, 1776. “Common Sense” was similarly popular with the people. These seminal documents were crucial to winning over the public to the side of independence.

So Paine’s a hero, right? He was also a radical Deist whose later work, The Age of Reason, still infuriates fundamentalists. In the tome, Paine attacked institutionalized religion and all of the major tenets of Christianity. He rejected prophecies and miracles and called on readers to embrace reason. The Bible, Paine asserted, can in no way be infallible. He called the god of the Old Testament “wicked” and the entire Bible “the pretended word of God.” (There go the Red States!)

What can we learn from this? Americans have the right to reject candidates for any reason, including their religious beliefs. But they ought to think twice before tossing someone aside just because he or she is skeptical of orthodox Christianity. After all, that description includes some of our nation’s greatest leaders.

Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Original.

8.5%

2012-01-06T10:45:00.000-06:00

The national unemployment rate has dropped to 8.5% after 200,000 jobs were added in December. Oh, no! That's 11 months in a row of jobs being ADDED! Republicans want to go BACK to the good old days of Bush when the U.S. was LOSING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS PER MONTH!

One can only imagine how much better the economy MIGHT be if Republicans didn't try to thwart every single thing that Obama has tried to do.

And then you have the issue of Obama finally using recess appointments to fill the new Consumer Protection agency and the National Labor Relations Board. Obama did this before the Republicans could set up a "pro forma" session in the Senate. But of course we had Bush using recess appointments when the Democrats actually HAD a pro forma session in place, but Bush made the recess appointments anyway! Did Democrats threaten to sue? Not hardly.

Geez, I don't think I've EVER seen a more despicable group of people than the current-day Republican elected "leaders."

Kale chips

2012-01-05T19:04:00.000-06:00

And now, one of the awesome recipes from the wife. And a special thanks to D&J for originally finding this on GardenAndGun.com

Kale Chips (or whatever)

Ingredients:

1. Olive oil

2. Lemon pepper

3. Raw leaves torn into “chip” sized pieces.. any of the following will work but curly kale is the best.

Kale

Broccoli

Brussels Sprout

Chard

Beet Greens

Place torn leaf pieces into large glass bowl. Add enough olive oil to cover the leaves. Add lemon pepper liberally and toss around to make sure all the torn leaves are covered with oil & spice.

Place on a large cookie sheet or pizza pan. Make sure the pieces aren’t touching as this will make them soggy. Bake at 350 – 375 degrees for about 15 minutes. Halfway through the cooking, turn the pieces over & continue baking. This will make them nice and crispy.

Enjoy!

Death!!

2012-01-05T08:52:00.000-06:00

Ain't religion grand?

On this date in 1527, heretic Felix Manz was drowned under sentence of the Zurich city council. As an Anabaptist, Manz was killed for believing in baptism for cognizant adults rather than in infant baptism.

Link.

Iowa nice

2012-01-04T20:55:00.002-06:00

I'm not from Iowa, but I know some nice people who are from there.

New Yorker toon

2012-01-04T16:29:00.000-06:00

Beyond elections

2012-01-04T16:26:00.000-06:00

You know he's right.

Beyond Elections: People Power

by Mark Bittman

The presidential election may be grabbing headlines, but the true rallying cry for 2012 is to struggle and organize around those issues that a president might take seriously, to stake out positions that would benefit what used to be called the working class (and now goes by “the 99 percent”) and to garner enough political will and power to pressure the president and Congress to move resolutely on the issues that matter.

Tall order, and one that’s of more than passing interest to those who think of themselves as part of the food movement.

Or the environmental movement. Or the Occupy movement, or the foreclosed homeowners movement, or the indebted students movement, or the unemployment movement, or pretty much any movement you can name that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that there is a class war in this country, one that the wrong side is winning.

It doesn’t matter what you call the movements, or the people behind them. What matters is forcing the government to act in the interests of the sometimes-silent majority rather than its corporate paymasters. That struggle, probably as old as representative democracy itself, most notably dates from the consolidation of corporate power that began after the industrial revolution.

It’s a struggle that’s causing more and more Americans not just to see that something’s wrong with the system but to find the will needed to change it. Again, these people go by a variety of names, though it’s interesting that a recent Pew poll found that just about half of all young people now have a more positive view of “socialism” (whatever that is) than “capitalism” (we know what that is), as do nearly a third of all Americans.

Whatever. We should be able to agree on this: there is an oligarchy in this country, one that uses financial strength to gain political power, one that fights and bullies for its “right” to make money regardless of the consequences to the earth or anything on it. Exxon will do all it can to prevent meaningful climate change legislation; Cargill and Pepsi will fight any improvement in agriculture or diet that threatens their profits; Bank of America would rather see homeowners go under than discuss changes in financial structures. And so on.

There are two ways to fight this oligarchy: by making personal and local changes that counter its power, and by joining mass movements that protest that power. The first can be as simple as light-bulb changing (which Republicans famously detest) and salad-eating [1], though obviously it can be far more involved. The second begins with voting, but it takes more than a president, however well-intentioned, to bring about real change. Does anyone believe that Lyndon Johnson wanted to combat racism, or that Richard Nixon cared about American troops or Vietnamese citizens? No: they were forced, respectively, to support civil rights legislation and to begin ending the Vietnam War. Forced by masses of Americans marching, yelling, demonstrating, sitting in and more — Americans driven by their conscience, not by profits.

Only if there is collective action by large numbers of citizens will politicians — even principled ones — have the support they need to resist the power of corporate lobbyists. It’s not an easy process, and it’s one that’s often met by violence.

I focus on the effect the oligarchy has on the food system — and in turn on our health and that of the environment, farm laborers, animals and so on — but in 2011 I was most inspired when thousands of people sat in front of the White House to protest the approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which the climate scientist Jim Hansen called the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” More than 1,000 people were arrested, but the pipeline’s approval, supported by the State Department and taken for granted, was subsequently delayed, possibly forever.

Why? Certainly not thanks to the pipeline’s 234 supporters in the House of Representatives, who collectively pocketed $42 million (Speaker John A. Boehner’s office alone took in more than $1 million) from the fossil fuel industry[2]. No, it was delayed because President Obama was responding to pressure from normal people, rather than pressure exerted by the energy industry.

A system that allows what amounts to direct payments to congressmen from corporations may be technically legal, but as the journalist and activist Bill McKibben — one of the organizers of the Washington Keystone protest — said to me last week, “Not only does it offend the notion of fairness, it leads to irrational outcomes.”

The most “irrational outcome” is permission to poison air, land, water and living things in the name of profits and without penalty: a hefty subsidy for the products of both the fossil fuel and big food industries. The relatively paltry sums these corporations pay to members of Congress are nothing compared to their profits. (Because $42 million isn’t much when you consider that the total profits of Exxon, for example, were more than $30 billion in 2010.)

That’s oligarchy in action, and the lesson of Keystone is as old as protest itself: only by uniting people who are willing to fight for a cause can we change things. (Do I need to bring up Egypt, Tunisia, and the American and French Revolutions?) And whether the food movement finds a representative issue of its own (food safety? the casual poisoning of the earth or our bodies?) or it joins with other movements of people victimized by the oligarchy, it will take dedicated protest — lots of it, by lots of us — to compete with corporate dollars.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] I can’t find evidence that House Republicans are anti-salad but I feel in my heart that it’s true. We know that they’re anti-compostable serving plates.
[2] I’ll do the math for you: about $180,000 per “representative” (they’re not representing you or me), with the implied promise of more to come.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please visit my blog and join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Original.

New year chuckles

2012-01-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year, everyone. In the first day of work in the New Year, speaking with co-workers I heard of a murder-suicide, an ugly death by a very aggressive cancer, and a car crash. It sorta takes the wind out of the "Happy New Year!" wish. As usual.

Amidst all the good cheer will always be some bad news, and among the bad news are some who are just having a great time. New Year, SOS.

But on the lighter side.....

Wine Does NOT Make You FAT

It Makes You LEAN..

Against Tables, Chairs, Floors, Walls and Ugly People.

Have a wonderful day and laugh often.

Another new Illness to watch out for... Anal Glaucoma

A woman calls her boss one morning and tells him that she is staying home because she is not feeling well.

"What's the matter?" he asks.

"I have a case of anal glaucoma," she says in a weak voice.

"What the hell is anal glaucoma?"

"I can't see my ass coming into work today."

January Stargazing

2012-01-01T10:12:00.003-06:00

Moon Phases

First quarter - Jan. 2, 12:15 am
Full - Jan. 9, 1:30 am
Last quarter - Jan. 16, 3:08 pm
New - Jan. 23, 1:39 am
First quarter - Jan. 30, 10:10 pm

Apogee: Jan. 2; Perigee: Jan. 17

Stargazing Information

Venus, Jupiter, and Mars — three of our four closest planetary neighbors — adorn the evening sky as the new year breaks. Venus is the dazzling “evening star” in the west at sunset, with only slightly fainter Jupiter high in the south at the same hour. Orange Mars rises by around 11 p.m. as January opens, but about two hours earlier at month’s end.

This Week's Stargazing Tips

January 3, 2012
The Quadrantid meteor shower is at its best tonight. It typically reaches peak rates of about a hundred “shooting stars” per hour. The peak typically lasts no more than a couple of hours, though, so it’s a tough shower to watch.

January 4, 2012
Sun and Earth are closest for the entire year today. Earth is at a point in its orbit called perihelion, which means “closest to the Sun.” We are about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) closer to the Sun than average.

January 5, 2012
The Moon stares into the face of the bull tonight — the V-shaped pattern of stars that outlines the face of Taurus. It is below the Moon as night falls. The brightest star in the V is Aldebaran, the bull’s orange eye.

January 6, 2012
The expanding cloud of debris from an exploding star is to the lower right of the Moon this evening, and the Moon sits almost directly in front of it a couple of hours before sunrise. It is known as the Crab Nebula because its outline resembles a crab.

January 7, 2012
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is retold in the stars in the fragmented remains of the constellation Argo Navis. Parts of the constellation are visible from the United States just above the southern horizon on winter evenings.

January 8, 2012
The Moon is full at 1:30 a.m. CST tomorrow, as it lines up opposite the Sun in our sky. The full Moon of January is known as the Old Moon, Wolf Moon, or Moon After Yule.

January 9, 2012
The Summer Triangle, formed by the brilliant stars Deneb, Vega, and Altair, shines in the wintertime as well. In January it lights up the northwestern sky in early evening, then reappears in the northeast before sunrise.

January 9-15
Water Worlds. Earth is known as the blue planet because of its oceans. But water is abundant throughout the cosmos. We'll talk about the water on Earth, on Mars, and around a newborn star, plus much more.

January 16-22
Space Rocks. The man who made meteorites fashionable was born 125 years ago, and we'll have details. We'll also talk about what scientists today know about these bits of cosmic debris, plus much more.

January 23-29
Ripples in the Universe. Some of the heaviest and fastest objects in the universe send "ripples" through space and time. We'll talk about gravitational waves, and the difficult task of finding them..

January 30-February 5
Stellar Opposites. The brightest star in the night sky has a companion that's a bare cosmic ember — a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. Join us for brilliant Sirius, its faint companion, and much more about white dwarfs.

January Program Schedule: http://stardate.org/radio/calendars
Find an Affiliate: http://stardate.org/radio/affiliates

News From the Observatory

NASA Mission, Texas Astronomers Collaborate to find Goldilocks Planet, Others
Recently NASA announced the discovery of the first planet located in the "habitable zone" around a star — the "just-right" orbit that's not too hot, nor too cold for water to exist in liquid form, making life as we know it possible. Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory involved in this and other Kepler research presented their findings recently at the first Kepler Science Conference at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1205.html

Pair of black holes 'weigh in' at 10 billion Suns; most massive yet
A team of astronomers including Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy of The University of Texas at Austin have discovered the most massive black holes to date — two monsters weighing as much as 10 billion suns and threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1207.html

Cosmic Explosion Explained Just in Time for Christmas
An explosion far across the universe rattled astronomers in 2010 on Christmas Day. Called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), it incited a flurry of activity from telescopes in space and on the ground, including the 2.1-meter Otto Struve Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory. This year, just in time for Christmas 2011, astronomers say they now know what happened — and it requires a new model for the origin of at least some GRBs.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1130.html

Much more here.

100 Years

2011-12-31T11:12:00.001-06:00

Oliphant/Fiore

2011-12-29T23:37:00.001-06:00

I don't know how these guys consistently come up with ideas for their toons.....first, Pat Oliphant

...and the year-end wrap-up from Mark Fiore. Click here.

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

Shatner Rules

2011-12-29T23:24:00.001-06:00

Just finished reading William Shatner's latest work, "Shatner Rules: Your Key to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large." It's a quick, funny, highly enjoyable read. Another highly recommended book. It's been a long time since I read a book that I didn't enjoy. I guess that, if I don't like a particular book, I quit reading and don't finish it, and so I wouldn't recommend it anyway. Hmmmm....

I'm noticing that a lot of writers start off their books with a "Congratulations for buying this book, because....." etc etc. Haven't any of these writers figured out that a lot of people read their books that they have checked out of their local library? Shoot, if I bought all the books that I read, I'd be broke!

Give generously

2011-12-28T12:32:00.000-06:00

In this holiday season, I hope that all of you have taken some time to reflect upon how fortunate you are simply by being an American (ok, most of you). Granted, this nation has its share of problems and troubles, none of which cannot be overcome.

We should all be mindful of how unfortunate many others in the world are. Whether the victims of war, poverty, drought, natural disasters, greed, or whatnot, quite a number of people in the world could use some help.

This time of year is the perfect time to lend a hand. There are so many good organizations deserving of your support. Be sure to spread the wealth where you can. One way to be sure that the money you give is going to those who truly need it is to refer to the Charity Navigator. You can get to them by clicking here.

Wishing a happy holiday season to all, and may 2012 be the best year yet. Yeah, I know, a longshot.

Mike Luckovich

2011-12-27T15:37:00.002-06:00

Intolerance

2011-12-25T21:03:00.002-06:00

December Solstice

2011-12-21T23:42:00.000-06:00

The REAL reason for the season.

December Solstice

StarDate
December 21, 2011

Seen from most of the United States, the Sun is a pretty wan companion at this time of year. It stays quite low in the south, never climbing more than a third of the way up the sky for most of the country. And it’s in view for fewer hours than at any other time of the year — as few as eight for those in Minnesota and Maine, and even fewer in Alaska.

In fact, today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere — the winter solstice. It marks the beginning of winter.

Yet it’s also a turning point. After the solstice, the Sun slowly begins to work its way northward. The days get a bit longer, and the Sun scoots a little higher across the sky.

We won’t actually feel the difference for a while, though. In part, that’s because there’s still a lot more darkness than daylight. And in part it’s because the Sun is still so low in the sky that its rays have to pass through a thick layer of atmosphere to reach us. Most of the Sun’s energy is going to the southern hemisphere, where the Sun stands high in the sky.

So it’ll take a few weeks more for the days to start to get warmer, working from south to north.

Incidentally, the word “solstice” means “Sun stands still.” It indicates that the Sun rises and sets at the same points on the horizon for a few days. It takes a while to notice that it’s starting to move again — headed back toward our half of the world. It’ll reach its northern standstill — the summer solstice — on June 20th.

Beam us up.

Robert Ingersoll

2011-12-21T10:32:00.000-06:00

Today, the day before the Winter Solstice (12/22/11), is a good day to celebrate the words and wisdom of one of my personal heroes, Robert Green Ingersoll. In the passages below, he speaks of Christmas.

As an atheist myself, I have been occasionally struggled with celebrating Christmas while divorcing it from "Christ." Ingersoll reminds us that the Winter Solstice and Christmas is a perfectly natural cause for celebration, without the trappings of religion.

I urge everyone to read any of the books and writings published by Ingersoll. If you know of someone who is unhappy and dissatisfied with modern-day religion, have them read some Ingersoll. It will help them to shed that religious straightjacket and come into the light of day.

Chances are good your public library has a collection of Ingersoll's work. Or, click here for an online version of the collected works. I have found no modern-day equivalent to Robert Ingersoll's beautiful and simple command of the English language.

The good part of Christmas is not always Christian--it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human, natural.

Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.

It taught some good things--the beauty of love and kindness in man. But as a torch-bearer, as a bringer of joy, it has been a failure. It has given infinite consequences to the acts of finite beings, crushing the soul with a responsibility too great for mortals to bear. It has filled the future with fear and flame, and made God the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, destined to be the home of nearly all the sons of men. Not satisfied with that, it has deprived God of the pardoning power.

And yet it may have done some good by borrowing from the Pagan world the old festival called Christmas.

Long before Christ was born the Sun-God triumphed over the powers of Darkness. About the time that we call Christmas the days begin perceptibly to lengthen. Our barbarian ancestors were worshippers of the sun, and they celebrated his victory over the hosts of night. Such a festival was natural and beautiful. The most natural of all religions is the worship of the sun. Christianity adopted this festival. It borrowed from the Pagans the best it has.

I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set apart for joy. We in America have too much work and not enough play. We are too much like the English.

I think it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasant object to God than a praying Englishman. We take our joys too sadly. I am in favor of all the good days--the more the better.

Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget--a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds--a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others, with sunshine.”

— "The Great Agnostic" Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), "A Christmas Sermon," Evening Telegram, Dec. 19, 1891

Happy Birthday, FZ

2011-12-21T09:38:00.000-06:00

On this date in 1940, Mothers of Invention musician Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore, and moved at age ten with his family to California. His father was a Sicilian-born meteorologist. Zappa became a rock icon as bandleader, guitarist, composer, satirist and political commentator. His children were memorably named Valley Girl Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva. The London Symphony Orchestra performed "Zappa Volume One" and "Zappa Volume Two." Zappa won a Grammy for "Jazz from Hell," an instrumental album. He released more than 50 albums before his untimely death at 52 from prostate cancer. D. 1993.

“Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.”

— Frank Zappa, cited by Warren Allen Smith in Who's Who in Hell
from FFRF.

Speeding Ticket?

2011-12-20T21:59:00.001-06:00

Thanks, sis.

Two Texas Highway Patrol officers were conducting speeding enforcement on Highway 77, just south of Kingsville, Texas. One of the officers was using a hand held radar device to check speeding vehicles approaching the town of Kingsville. The officers were suddenly surprised when the radar gun began reading 300 miles per hour and climbing. The officer attempted to reset the radar gun, but it would not reset, then it suddenly turned off.

Just then a deafening roar over the mesquite tree tops on Highway 77 revealed that the radar had, in fact, locked on to a USMC F/A-18 Hornet which was engaged in a low-flying exercise near it's Naval Air home base location in Kingsville.

Back at the Texas Highway Patrol Headquarters in Corpus Christi the Patrol Captain fired off a complaint to the US Naval Base Commander in Kingsville for shutting down his equipment.The reply came back in true USMC style:

"Thank you for your letter.

You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Hornet had detected the presence of, and subsequently locked on to, your hostile radar equipment and automatically sent a jamming signal back to it, which is why it shut down.

Furthermore, an Air-to-Ground missile aboard the fully armed aircraft had also automatically locked on to your equipment's location.

Fortunately, the Marine Pilot flying the Hornet recognized the situation for what it was, quickly responded to the missile system alert status and was able to override the automated defense system before the missile was launched to destroy the hostile radar position on the side of Highway 77, south of Kingsville.

The pilot suggests you cover your mouths when swearing at them, since the video systems on these jets are very high tech.

Sergeant Johnson, the officer holding the radar gun, should get his dentist to check his left rear molar. It appears the filling is loose. Also, the snap is broken on his holster."

Politifact, R.I.P.

2011-12-20T10:09:00.000-06:00

from Paul Krugman's blog:

Politifact, R.I.P.

This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

Steve Benen in the link above explains it, but let me just repeat the basics. Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a voucher system to buy private insurance — and not just that, a voucher system in which the value of the vouchers would systematically lag the cost of health care, so that there was no guarantee that seniors would even be able to afford private insurance.

The new scheme would still be called “Medicare”, but it would bear little resemblance to the current system, which guarantees essential care to all seniors.

How is this not an end to Medicare? And given all the actual, indisputable lies out there, how on earth could saying that it is be the “Lie of the year”?

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Way to go, guys.

Original.

Happy Birthday, BP!

2011-12-18T22:53:00.001-06:00

On this date (December 18) in 1963, Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee, Okla. Two credits shy of a college degree from the University of Missouri, Pitt dropped out and headed to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Working as a limousine driver for several months, Pitt enrolled in an acting class and then accompanied a classmate to an audition as her scene partner. The agent signed Pitt instead and he began work in television, including appearing on episodes of "Dallas," "Another World" and "Growing Pains."

In spite of appearing only a few minutes on screen, Pitt's big break came from his role as a hitchhiker in the classic female buddy story, "Thelma and Louise" (1991). With some failed films over the next few years, Pitt established himself as more than a sex symbol, showing off his acting prowess in "A River Runs Through It" (1992), "Kalifornia" (1993), "Interview with the Vampire" (1994), "Legends of the Fall" (1994) and "Seven" (1997). He received critical acclaim and some award nominations and wins for his work in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995), "Babel" (2006) and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008).

Year after year, Brad Pitt's celebrity continues to rise, due to his high-profile public romances (including to partner Angelina Jolie), sex symbol status and award-winning acting abilities. "When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me. It was a discovery of self. I had thought that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I'm responsible," he said to Parade Magazine in 2007. Pitt told BILD.com: "I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic" (July 23, 2009).

“I don't have a chance [on being elected Mayor of New Orleans]. I'm running on the gay marriage, no religion, legalization and taxation of marijuana platform.”

— Brad Pitt, in an interview with Ann Curry on "The Today Show," Aug. 13, 2009

New cabinets!

2011-12-17T15:54:00.018-06:00

We recently hired Valso, the manic Brazilian that built the fence around the Midtown Community Garden, to build some new cabinets for our dining room.

Long ago we ran out of storage space in the kitchen. Now, it will take awhile, but I'm sure we'll fill it up again. We always seem to expand to fit the space we have.

The structure spans the entire eastern wall of our dining room, a full 11' wide. (If you click each pic, they should open to a larger view.)

One of the only things I insisted on including was at least four large drawers into which I plan on putting all of the stuff that we recycle. It's too much hassle to walk everything downstairs to the garage when we have another piece of plastic or newspaper, and piling stuff up in the corner just wasn't very, uh, esthetic. These large drawers can also be used for a myriad of other things.

Valso noticed that we tend to drink a fair amount of wine, so he suggested we add a wine rack to the structure. It wasn't in the original plan, but, hey, good idea. And the three racks also pull outward, so you can see the label. A nice touch.

He also added a space to hang wine glasses from. We basically gave him the master design and let him loose on it.

A close-up of the granite counter-top. It's very similar to the granite in the kitchen.

Eight new waist-high drawers will take some time to fill. Six glass doors for the upper portion...

Valso added some special little design flourishes, no charge.

We used pine, a pretty soft wood, and so it is best to use a "wood conditioner" before staining.

We love it. Merry Christmas to both of us! From both of us! And to all of you too.

Tony Auth

2011-12-16T16:15:00.000-06:00

...one of my favorite "comics."

More.

I Can't Get Behind That

2011-12-15T22:26:00.003-06:00

William Shatner and Henry Rollins, circa 2007.

Gene Lyons

2011-12-14T18:54:00.000-06:00

Hmmm...."smart conservatives"...are we sure this is not an oxymoron, Gene?

Why Smart Conservatives Suddenly Hate Newt
by Gene Lyons

Newt Gingrich is the Jimmy Swaggart of American politics, a confidence man so transparent as to test the faith even of True Believers. Paradoxically, that’s precisely why the disgraced former speaker looks a good bet to secure the GOP presidential nomination.

Not seeing through Gingrich’s bare-faced mendacity requires an effort of the will so profound it can only be accomplished with the aid of strong countervailing emotions — essentially the envy, resentment and fear that right-wing media have fomented among the faithful ever since the election of President Clinton and the 1994 “Contract With America.”

Metaphorically speaking, Gingrich’s candidacy is the love child of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, with Fox News throwing the baby shower.

This only makes the horror of intellectually inclined conservatives at the prospect of Newt’s ascendancy more remarkable. Where have they been all this time? Back in 1994, Gingrich and Frank Luntz circulated a list of hurtful words conservatives should always call liberals. "Traitors” was at the top, also some that sound particularly ironic today: “waste,” “corruption,” “self-serving,” “greed,” “cynicism,” “cheat,” “steal” and “patronage.”

To the Washington Post’s resident Tory George Will, Gingrich “embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.” To his colleague Charles Krauthammer, it’s Newt’s faculty lounge-lizard side — his half-baked intellectual pretentiousness — that’s most disturbing.

Not himself a particularly modest fellow, Krauthammer writes that “Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.” He finds Newt’s “[t]hinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend” downright comical.

Will too lampoons Gingrich’s “intellectual hubris” and “enthusiasm for intellectual fads.” He levels the ultimate insult, correctly asserting that Newt “would have made a marvelous Marxist, [believing] everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”

To his credit, Will focuses upon what’s perhaps Gingrich’s single most despicable moment, a 1994 election eve attempt to blame a South Carolina mother’s drowning of her children on Democrats. Never mind that Susan Smith allegedly turned out to have been abused by her Republican stepfather. Politics had nothing to do with the tragedy.

What Will calls Gingrich’s “grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology” has been his entire stock in trade for years. He made similarly absurd observations about the 1999 Columbine High School tragedy. To him, two teenagers who massacred 13 of their classmates with automatic weapons became somehow the fault of liberal Democrats.

And so it goes. In 2010, Gingrich wrote a book arguing that the Obama administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” Earlier this year, he told a Texas church gathering that he feared his grandchildren would grow up “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Because the president of the United States, of course, is secretly a radical Muslim whose “Kenyan, anti-colonial” views lead him to seek revenge on behalf of the African father he hardly knew. Newt said that too.

Two thoughts: First, it’s a straight line from this kind of intellectual promiscuity to the other kind Newt’s also famous for — serving divorce papers on Wife 1 while she was hospitalized for cancer in favor of Wife 2, whom he subsequently abandoned for the bejeweled Callista, his mistress of the Clinton years, who, as Wife 3, hovers over him relentless as a bird of prey. A 68-year-old Catholic convert, Gingrich once blamed his misbehavior on too much hard work motivated by patriotism. They practically dare you to laugh, those two.

Second, the Chicago Tribune’s estimable Steve Chapman captured the essence of Gingrich’s appeal to the GOP’s propagandized base: “Demonizing adversaries is what he does best. Some on the right don’t want a conservative so much as they want a hater. Gingrich is their dream come true. Romney shows no flair for irresponsible hysteria and crude smears — and many count that as a serious flaw.”

All three columnists agree that Newt would prove a fatally flawed candidate in the general election. “Even if Gingrich can win over most Republicans,” Chapman writes, “he is bound to repel everyone else.”

Indeed, faced with him as the nominee, many conservatives would privately hold their noses and vote for Obama. “Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character,” one anonymous Republican told Washington Post blogger Jonathan Bernstein.

Certainly welcome, this principled scorn comes a bit late. Few on the right have been willing to confront the reality that conservatism in the classical sense scarcely exists anymore in the United States. It’s long been replaced by the Yahoo dogmatism of a huckster like Gingrich, and it looks increasingly as if we’re all going to have to live with the consequences.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.More Gene Lyons

Original.

Invented People

2011-12-13T08:40:00.000-06:00

Steve van Zandt

2011-12-12T18:30:00.000-06:00

No, this isn't a post about Bruce Springsteen's band and Steve van Zandt, Bruce's guitar player. This is an actual post by Steve van Zandt, who takes a much stronger interest in politics than I knew, which I guess is not all that surprising, considering Bruce's interest in politics.

Here, Steve makes eminent sense. He comes up with the same answer that countless others have realized. The real problem becomes HOW to make it happen. It is achievable, certainly.

Let's put this another way. If even rock-and-rollers can see the problem, we need to do something.

There is Only One Issue in America

I was obsessed with politics in the '80s. I've recovered and I'm feeling much better now thank you.

By the time I realized, as interesting as it was, I'd better stop this stuff and try to earn a living, I had discovered many of our social problems and quality of life issues could be traced to the same political source: our corrupt-by-definition electoral system. The solution to the problem was as easy to discover as the cause: The elimination of all private finance in the electoral process.

I was working doing most of my research in the area of our foreign policy since WWll, whatever fell under the umbrella of international liberation politics, but I examined and analyzed a fair amount of local issues as well.

I wanted to know how things work? Where's the power? Who's pulling the strings?

The economy of the world came down to the unholy trinity of guns, drugs and gasoline -- military industry, drugs (legal and illegal), and energy -- and now I would add agribusiness as the fourth controlling commodity, and always with the enabling bankers never too far out of sight making their profits far too often from wars and slave labor.

While that readily explained the suffering of the Third World, it didn't immediately answer why in America it was possible for so many people to be unhappy with our government's decisions, both foreign and domestic, when we're supposedly living in a democracy.

A quick analysis of our electoral process revealed the obvious answer. The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

The corporation has but one obligation, which is to increase profits for it's shareholders by any legal means necessary by the next fiscal quarter.

They have no moral, patriotic, social, environmental, generational or even sustainable responsibility. They have only a short-term economic mandate and their only responsibility to society is to stay within the law to accomplish it.

This doesn't mean corporations shouldn't exist or even that their directors are evil by their very DNA. It has been a legally acceptable basic flaw in the form of our capitalist system that allows corporations to operate without a moral compass or obligation to society -- but that's a discussion for another day.

The law is rarely a problem because the corporations' legal obligations are pretty much designed first and foremost for their maximum profit by the legislation created by the legislators belonging to our two national political parties, both of which are wholly bought, sold and controlled by Wall Street. The banks and the corporations. In other words the game is rigged. Feel like a sucker? We all do because we all are.

The manipulation, aided by a very willing media also owned by the corporations, has made things easier beginning with what has become the amazing Orwellian staple of every newscast, selling the public on the lie that the Dow has somehow become America's scoreboard!

We're all hypnotized, rooting for them like they're our home team at a football game, cheering for THEIR scoreboard mindlessly forgetting WE'RE THE AWAY TEAM!!

You think your congressman is working all day to get you a job? He may want to. He or she is probably not a bad person. They probably want to do the right thing. But they can't. Long-time Capitol Hill staff and campaign strategists tell me the average legislator spends one-third of their time (or more) every day raising money or on activities related to raising money.

Yes, they are "elected" which creates the mass delusion of democracy to keep the masses from rioting, but congressional races are costing millions of dollars and some Senate seats are going for tens of millions each, and they're predicting well over one billion dollars for the next presidency.

That's some democracy we've created there, isn't it?

Of the people?

By the people?

For the people?

What people?

Democracy in America is a sick joke and the masses aren't laughing anymore.

Yes, we can demonstrate. We can march. We can write and sign petitions to our Representatives. We can occupy.

And we should because it's healthy to vent, and we don't feel so all alone. But the truth is, other than the value of venting, we're wasting our time. It is naïve to expect political results from any of these activities.

Our representative can give us lip service. A lot of sympathy. Empathy even. But we don't pay their media bills, gabeesh?

We need to eliminate all private finance from the electoral process.

And let's not be distracted by "reforms." Let's spare ourselves the unnecessary discussions about transparent disclosure, or the conflict of interest of foreign countries buying favorable treatment, or protection after protection being gutted by dangerously diluted regulations, or trying to impose this limit or that limit, etc., etc., etc.

Campaign finance doesn't need reform. It needs elimination.

To accomplish this we must overturn Buckley v. Valeo, one of the two or three worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.

The ruling makes the extraordinary decision that money is protected by the First Amendment.
Presumably Chief Justice Gordon Gekko presiding!

These smartest guys in the room actually decided that spending money is the equivalent of free speech. You might wonder why no one in that smart room stood up and said wait a minute, if money is speech, isn't lack of money lack of speech?

You know, as in the rich get to talk, and the poor don't? How are the non-moneyed classes represented by this decision?

I guess nobody stood up then, but it's time to stand up now.

In fact, I am now introducing a new pledge to be signed by our legislators. Of both parties. Indies too. Everybody's welcome.

THE PLEDGE FOR A DEMOCRATIC AMERICA

(We'll need someone more educated than me to draw it up, or we can copy Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, but it would go something like this.)

I, The Undersigned, pledge to overturn Buckley v. Valeo and eliminate all private finance from the electoral process, thusly restoring America to it's democratic principles. I may take corporate, PAC, SuperPAC, or Chinese money to get elected or reelected (martyrdom accomplishes nothing), but upon my election I will make campaign finance elimination one of my immediate top priorities.

Now somebody should be starting a new Third Party whose platform is dedicated to this one idea. Twenty-five years ago that's what I'd be doing right now.

But the need for a Third Party aside, this idea applies for everyone. Just as much for the Tea Party on the right as the 99 Percenters on the left (the corporate oligarchy actually has no Party affiliation, it just looks Republican).

Both groups should adopt this issue. The Occupiers need not agree on anything else, because frankly nothing else matters, and a bit more focus on the root of our problems for the Tea Party certainly wouldn't hurt them either.

Let's see who's serious about representing the "people."

And you know what?

We might be pleasantly surprised at how many congressmen and senators sign this thing who would rather be doing something more dignified with their lives than spending half their time begging for money.

Original.