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Blago and Burris vs. The Senate - Former attorney-general warms his hands on a chunk of plutonium

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

The main problem the Democrats face right now is that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s nomination of Roland Burris, a former Attorney General for the State of Illinois, is perfectly valid. Blago, while about as radioactive as a politician can get short of trying to pick up a vice cop in a public toilet, hasn’t been convicted or even indicted, and isn’t presently being impeached. The present Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, tried to get the state Supreme Court to rule that Blago could be restrained from appointing a successor to Obama’s Senate seat, to no avail. The court collectively shrugged, noting that since no criminality was involved, it was out of their jurisdiction.

Until he’s impeached and/or convicted of something, he’s still the governor with all the powers and prerogatives of his office.

But he’s radioactive. The Senate Democrats already said they would reject any appointment he made to the Senate, since the accusations made against him have hopelessly tainted the process. In the eyes of the law, he may be pure as the driven snow, but politically, he stinks worse than Bigfoot on a NY garbage barge. Read more

The “Bush Effect” – Hopefully for a Third and LAST Time

by Mary Lyon

Third time’s a charm, maybe?

I’ve compiled three of these lists now. In 2006, I issued the first one, looking back on everything George W. Bush has adversely affected since he first arrived in the Oval Office. Just a damage assessment, really. At the time, I thought it would be instructive to look back, at year’s end, over what many Bush critics have come to refer to as his “Reverse Midas Touch” – everything he touches turns to something far more foul, germ-laden, and smelly than gold. It ran at least nine pages. Last time I looked, the page count had expanded to 17. Read more

Killing the Messenger

by Larry Sakin

In a colleagues’ recent editorial, the mainstream media was taken to task. According to the writer, corporate-owned news outlets are attempting to tie the albatross of the Blagojevich scandal around the neck of the incoming Obama administration. The writer further asserts that big media favors attacking left-leaning administrations for their so-called new ideas over investigating the spurious activities of the right.

This is not a new opinion among the liberal oriented side of the blogosphere. Everyone from “911-Truth” seekers to stolen elections and Bush impeachment advocates have condemned the major news outlets because these outlets don’t investigate what advocates think they should. But what these progressively minded opinion swillers fail to mention is how often big media does critique those on the right. Read more

Reframing Greed to Make It a Virtue

by Jerry Lobdill

I recently wrote an essay condemning the Mayor and City Council of Fort Worth, Texas as partners with the gas drilling industry in the rape of the electorate of the city. In that essay I said,

“When confronted with these issues by concerned citizens the City Council behaved as if they had never been told of them, and yet in every case they defended the promoters of greed and profit over safety and health and refused to declare a moratorium while appropriate studies and investigations are conducted.”

One of my chosen reviewers, an ally in the gas wars, took issue with my use of the word, greed. Now, I need to tell you a little about this fellow so you will know where he is coming from. He is a man of about 60 years of age, a lawyer who until a few years ago was a chief executive of a major pipeline company. He is steeped in the philosophy of mainstream business, that is, he subscribes to the notion that you either have totally unfettered capitalism or you have socialism, and socialism is a very dirty word that connotes communism, dictators, and the absence of freedom. This notion is an article of faith that is inculcated into every business person to such an extent that they cannot explain where or when they first came to believe it. It is at the core of their belief system. Read more

Stop Backing Genocide - Even a tiny, little genocide is wrong

Suppose, for a minute, that it’s World War Two. You’ve just heard that Germany has responded to Resistance attacks against them in occupied France by bombing the hell out of several villages near where the Resistance has struck, slaughtering hundreds of French men, women, and children.

If you were American, British, or Canadian, you would heartily condemn the German actions, and hope mightily for the day when Hitler and his evil regime are wiped from the face of the earth.

Of course, if you were an American conservative, you would probably blame the French for concealing terrorists among the civilian population, and make little simpering noises about how Mr. Hitler really ought to try avoiding civilian casualties. A more courageous Republican might add, “no matter how much provocation the French have given Mr. Hitler, who, after all, has a right to exist.” Read more

Valkyrie Reviews Panned

by George Thomas

I don’t get it.  Reviewers in both the New York Times and the Austin American Statesman panned Valkyrie.  I don’t know what movie Chris Garcia screened for his review (Statesman, Dec. 25, D-8), based on actual events of 1944.  Col. Claus von Stauffenberg led the last of several attempts on Adolph Hitler’s life, failing six months before the Reich’s defeat and Hitler’s suicide.

To read the review, one might suspect that Garcia palled around quite a lot with early skeptics in Germany who feared the film would not live up to an adequate portrayal of the German Resistance.  “Cruise…plays a tin soldier with an unfashionable eye patch….  Shellacked in martial decorum, the actor is ready for duty, sir, all range and individuality squeezed out of him.  If only he could loosen that high choking collar.  But then his halo might slide off.” Read more

Chill - The latest from the front on global warming

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

One of the bright spots in print journalism is Tom Knudson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Sacramento Bee, who has had a brilliant ongoing series about how humanity has affected California’s splendid Sierra Nevada range. Since much of what he writes about the Sierra pertains to where I live in the Mount Shasta region, I’ve read his work with considerable interest. His latest deals with the effects of global warming on the Sierra. It’s a must-read.

Knudson concludes what we had already noticed here. The snowpack is diminishing, decade by decade. Quite often we get rain instead of snow here at the 3,500 foot level, and as a result we often have winters with less than five feet of snow. When I moved here nearly 20 years ago, the annual average was 14 feet a year. We’ve matched that only twice in twenty years. Read more

Christmas at the Edge of Depression

by Norla M. Antinoro, PhD

I baked all day. Sugar cookies for a woman who is trying to get through her first Christmas without her children - seems Dad, her ex, offers a richer experience during these holidays having a larger family for the kids to play with. I bake and she decorates saying every now and then “There are no kids here.”

Her mother helps me shape the dough for the next batch. At the next table playing Rummikub are older people whose families have made one excuse or another for not coming to pick them up today. All of Portland is drivable except, it seems, the cul de sac where their children and grandchildren live…seems they all just happen to live on unplowed cul de sacs. They neither realize that no one came to get them because no one wants to have them over for the holiday. They are both rather obnoxious in the eyes of most people - I have never heard a group of people complain this much about anyone as about these two. I feel so sorry for them because they really do not know why they are being left behind - like the poor kid who ends up at school for the xmas break when the rest get to go home for the holidays. Read more

Dark Prayer

by Robert C. Koehler

The water churned and pushed against the ice with a dark seriousness that reminded me of prayer.

Subzero Chicago night at the edge of the year, the edge of change, the edge of what’s bearable. I stood on an old breakwater, a long, crumbling construction of concrete and steel that jutted into Lake Michigan — just stood, feeling the wind scrape my face. Whatever thoughts came to me were honest ones. Or maybe I just needed to grieve.

“Courage grows strong at the wound.”

Someone said this to me earlier this year and I felt a rush of reverence as I contemplated wounds and war, a wrecked economy, a wasted planet, hope, illusion, the holidays, the human condition. My niece just got married; the same day, a friend was mugged in the alley behind her house. The dark water undulated beyond the ice, gurgling, whispering. Dear God . . . Read more

Food for Fought - How to win the battle against overpopulation

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Back about 35 years ago, a science fiction writer named Philip José Farmer wrote a novella called “Seventy Years of Decpop.” The premise was that a mad-scientist sort released an aerosol that blanketed the entire earth and rendered 99.999% of humanity sterile. The story covered, in jumps, the seventy years following this action, at the end of which humanity’s population was reduced to some 200 million (from nearly five billion at the beginning), and was looking forward to a bright new future on a clean earth with lots of resources and incredible high tech. Read more

Next Page »

• Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

  Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.

• Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm

  

• Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

  For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.

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  read more at Mother Jones

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• How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely

  

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