Month: May 2008

Today the Democratic Party Leaders, The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, meet to decide whether the Michigan and Florida delegations will be seated in Denver. Will it be half a vote or another formula?

At mid week, Party leaders signaled the end of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton duel.

Hillary Clinton, who began the race for the Democratic nomination as the seemingly unstoppable choice of the party establishment, is ending it as an outsider railing against the perceived injustices that have taken her to the brink of defeat.

Busloads of her supporters will converge on Washington today for protests outside a meeting of a party rules committee. Bill Clinton has adopted the language of conspiracy theorists as he attacks a “cover-up” by unseen hands intent on wrecking his wife’s chances. Aides mutter darkly about media bias, sexism and double standards.

The candidate is unrelenting, telling rallies: “We have not gone through this exciting, unprecedented, historical election only to lose.”

Mrs Clinton highlights polls showing that she is best placed to win the White House and statistics that, by some counts, put her ahead of Mr Obama in the popular vote. Her campaign has invited journalists to stay on the trail with Mrs Clinton next week, even after the final primaries on Tuesday.

However, the Democratic leadership is starting to gather around Barack Obama’s standard as he prepares for battle with John McCain in November’s general election.

The Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid, the House of Representatives Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Dean, the party chairman, have sent out clear signals that they expect the race to end in a matter of days.
“We agree there won’t be a fight at the convention [in August]. The time has come to make a decision,” Mr Reid said. “By this time next week, it will all be over.”

Mr Obama is said to have up to three dozen super-delegates waiting to announce their support next week, pushing him ever closer to, or even over, the finishing line for the nomination. At least one big name, the House majority whip, James Clyburn, is expected to announce his endorsement on Tuesday morning even as primaries take place in Montana and South Dakota.

Today, on the eve of a primary in Puerto Rico that Mrs Clinton is expected to win, the Democratic rules committee will meet in Washington to consider what to do about her disputed victories in Florida and Michigan. [.]

But as the larger focus is on the winding up of the primaries, one of the “memorables” of the campaign is being etched in history:

Hillary’s drinking and the sense that perhaps she over stayed exiting.

There are these photos of Hillary making the rounds in the world media.  The London Times, UK has this header and photo captions of Hillary Clinton seen as drowning her sorrows – considered in some quarters as not very flattering for a former first lady:

A drink before You Go?  Hillary Clinton in the last chance saloon.  (saloon is Brit speak for a bar or pub)

Here is Hillary Clinton enjoying a drink with a claque of journalists on a campaign flight. Has she finally given up on becoming the next President and resorted to drowning her sorrows? Or has has the senator come up with an ingenious last-ditch ploy to invoke the glory of a past victory?

Legend has it that four years ago, during a meeting of congressional delegates in Tallinn, Estonia, the former First Lady challenged Senator John McCain to a drinking contest and soundly beat him.

She may have traded Eastern European vodka for a glass of decent whisky but Mrs Clinton has reminded us that, despite Obama’s lead in the delegate count, there is only one candidate who can drink McCain under the table.

Hillary began the campaign wishing she’d be hailed as another Margaret Thatcher, the iron lady. She succeeded in being labeled ‘tougher than one of the boys’ who will break all the rules to win at all cost.

Reminder: Hillary’s argument for remaining in the campaign was that she’s the stronger candidate best able to beat McCain. Now we know why and it has nothing to do with electoral votes…because Obama drinks orange juice instead of coffee.

Just imagine…Hillary could have departed on a high.

Well in one sense she did, but many were hoping she’d take the moral, gracious higher road.

You can watch the Rules and Bylaws Committee live on CSPAN. James Roosevelt is discussing Florida now.

The view from Australia:

FRANCIS Fukuyama is the American public intellectual who pronounced the end of history 19 years ago and was a neo-conservative, an idea and an ideology that both suggest he is out of date.

To the contrary, his visit to Australia this week demonstrated that he has a great deal to say that is incisive and challenging. Now a supporter of Barack Obama, the Johns Hopkins University professor of international political economy epitomises the great shift taking place in American democracy, one that this year may swing the most aggressively conservative and unilateral US administration in modern history all the way to one led by a black president who advocates engagement with Iran, American enemy No.1.

Well, when you put it like that…

But how did Iran become our number one enemy?

Welcome back.

This week we will be continuing with the new painting of the Cape May Victorian started in last week’s installment.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I am doing this piece in my usual acrylics in an 8×10 format.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

Unfortunately, I did not get as much done as I would have liked.  I’ll attribute that to a certain 9 year old boy that has this habit of monopolizing my free time.

What I have done is paint in the blue of the sky, or at least the first layers of what will be the sky.  The brown still shows through at this point.  I’m still deciding exactly how I want the sky to appear when it’s all done.  I’ll need to make that decision before going any further with it.

I’ve also started to paint in the shadowed areas of the house.  This was done with paint left over from the sky.  Those areas will be more of a blue-gray when complete.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s about it for now. I’ll see you next week with more progress on this piece. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Sometimes things go wrong because no one could have anticipated how events would unfold.  Sometimes they do because of severely stunted powers of anticipation.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

I spent two years in Tanzania teaching secondary school math as a Peace Corps volunteer.  The only Swahili left in my head is greetings and curses (one of the latter is substantially more offensive than anything we’ve come up with in English) along with a few memorable phrases.  One phrase is “bahati mbaya” which literally translates as “bad luck.”  The reason it’s memorable is because it was also used to describe completely predictable bad outcomes.  If you started drawing a bath, for some reason left the house for a few hours and came back to a flooded living area…bahati mbaya.  It is a wonderfully diplomatic way to avoid saying, wow was that stupid.  It is in that spirit that I write:  This is the bahati mbaya President.

His unwillingness to change course has been a major source of such misfortune.  He came into office championing tax cuts and got them.  Initially the argument was that we ought to reduce rates since we were running a surplus, and would be able to continue to do so even if the cuts were enacted (a position that became politically acceptable in large part due to its endorsement by Alan Greenspan).  There were two problems.  First, in 1998 we had just gotten back to surpluses after decades of deficits.  Since it took so long it may have been prudent to leave the tax structure in place for a while and see if the new surpluses were ephemeral.  Second, the surplus was helping us pay down the national debt, so even if they proved to be durable – and even if we paid it off even sooner than expected – there was real good coming out of it.  Instead we plunged right back into deficits and now have a devalued currency as a result.  The corresponding loss of confidence in the dollar as a store of value may have even greater impact down the road.

Another foreseeable disaster was the Iraq war.  You did not have to be Sun Tzu to recognize that Donald Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” strategy was not designed for a long occupation.  He clearly wanted to go in, decapitate the government and get out.  There was no intention to leave soldiers there for years and therefore it was never part of the design.  The military is breaking beneath the strain of a burden it was not supposed to carry.  It did not become overtaxed and overstretched because the stars aligned against it but because those in charge deliberately ignored the implications of moving from major combat operations to occupation.  In fact, the administration and its supporters have made looking away a political strategy.  David Brooks wrote last year of us being in a postwar period.  This week Tom Coburn wrote an analysis for one of the most important newspapers in the country and never once mentioned the Iraq war, except as a budget item.  The problem is, as long as our nation’s blood and treasure continues to be spilled in the sands of the Middle East we will be very much aware of it.  This election season it will be the (dead) elephant in the room.

I began thinking about unsurprising terrible results this week because of immigration policy.  Along with tax reform and Social Security reform, immigration reform stands as a failed second term policy initiative.  The President appears to have been surprised at his inability to keep his base in line, and as President he can do more than just stamp his feet when he has a fit of pique.  In what appears to be his only case of actually changing a policy due to a negative response, he appears to have decided on a policy of draconian enforcement.  Dave Neiwert has an invaluable summary of an immigration raid in Iowa last week that included the menace of federal helicopters hovering overhead and using a meat processing plant as a detention facility (the administration may have an unrealized gift for brutal symbolism).  The President, denied his legislation, decided to begin applying the law in as punitive a way as possible.  The result was chaos and cruelty, and no one should pretend it happened like that because this particular operation was cursed by the gods.  Of course, it could also have been the preferred outcome.  Having federal agents round up people into a makeshift holding pen in the middle of the heartland is an impressive display of executive power.  We have been complacent so far in the face of audacious new claims of authority; presumably we will allow this to go unchallenged as well.  And as we do so we knowingly take that many more steps into this new, unhappy territory.

Or in other words, bahati mbaya.

Here is how Iraqis celebrated Suck on This Day:

Thousands of Iraqis filled the streets of Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood this afternoon to demonstrate against a long-term United States presence in Iraq, the first significant anti-American rally in the massive Shiite slum in more than two years.

As American helicopters hovered overhead, young and old men and even children flowed out of their weekly Friday prayers and began burning American flags and chanting “no, no to America” and “yes, yes to independence.”

The U.S. invasion of Iraq removed a Sunni dictatorship and replaced it with a Shi’ite dominated popularly elected puppet regime. The Shi’ites of Sadr City, who suffered immeasurably under Saddam, would be the prime beneficiaries of our invasion. But they have nevertheless decided that they no longer want to suck on this.

I can feel the end of this primary season. I can feel the breakthrough in the dam that has held up progressivism for 40 solid years. You wanna know what we’ve got coming for John McCain? Here’s what.

That’s RFK campaigning in California. He’s got Deacon Jones and Rosie Greer in his ride. How cool is that? But we all know that even all that protection couldn’t keep him safe. They were facing what Richard Nixon called very terrible forces:

The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had also been a ferocious critic of F.D.R. and the New Deal, welcomed the possibility that, as he put it, “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his [Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies,” and J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy Clyde Tolson remarked offhandedly, “I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”

Hopefully, our country doesn’t have the same violent streak it clearly suffered from in the 1960’s. We shall see. When the Deputy Director of the FBI openly hopes for the assassination of a Democratic candidate for office, a mere five years after his brother was gunned down, you know you’ve got some serious problems with political violence in the country. I am not detecting that level of hate this time around. I’m thinking that, this time, we’re gonna make it to the promised land.

When, if ever, do you think Clinton will concede? And, how do you think she will do it?

…on New York (NYT) station.

Muzzlewatch, a subsidiary of Jewish Voice for Peace, tracks efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy, and by extension censorship and propaganda efforts by right wing pro-Zionist factions like the AJC intent on covering up Israel’s military occupation/colonization of Palestinian lands, and furthering the notion that Palestinians are terrorists rather than an occupied and subjugated people.

This post bearing the above title by Cecilie Surasky is one example of its work.

The American Jewish Committee, the group known for efforts to oppose congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide, has this VIDEO about the refusal of New York Times-owned radio station, WQXR, to run their ad raising money for an emergency fund for the people of Sderot, Israel.

AJC head David Harris, in criticizing the refusal of the station to run the ad, doesn’t do his cause any favors when he compares the situation of the residents of Sderot to the London blitz in 1940 and 1941 (and by extension, Hamas to Nazis) in which over 43,000 were killed. He asks if an ad about the London blitz would also be refused by the station “on the grounds that we failed to refer reciprocal British military actions against Nazi Germany.”

In fact, according to the UN, from 2000 through the beginning of 2008, 11 residents of Sderot were killed by Qassam rockets, while 2,677 Gazans were killed by Israeli rocket fire and incursions. It is likely the one-sidedness and sensationalism of the ad which caused the station manager to reject it. (Other writers will likely give the ad the detailed critique it requires.)

Nonetheless, the ad should have been accepted-and also, any ad which talked about the Gazans who have also endured. It is in the nature of wars and conflicts, in which people on both sides endure real and terrible suffering, that people only tell the story from their side. Can more really be expected? And can a free and open society withstand that kind of speech? I think so. Watch the video here: AJC video about Sderot ad.

The video notes that 400 CBS affiliates did broadcast the AJC ad. The reasons for WQXR’s refusal are obvious. No where does the AJC admit that Israel is carrying on a military occupation/siege of the Palestinian people, that it daily confiscates Palestinian lands while throwing out its legal owners, or that Hamas militants offered a cease fire on numerous occasions during the past year and voluntarily ceased firing rockets for one month twice to no avail. Israel forces continued to bomb and carrying out military incursions into Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, most of who are civilians including innocent children like these:

The photos above were only the latest atrocity that Israeli defense forces have perpetrated against the Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians will apparently not terminate their fight for freedom and self-determination until Israel terminates its colonization of what is left of original Palestine. The stalemate is only leading to further unnecessary deaths on both sides.

On the 26th of this month, Memorial Day, at 12:21 AM, Mia Farrow posted the following on her blog. The ‘What For?’ is her subject title, and one many of us have been asking for these 5plus years.

We have just learned that my nephew, Jason Deane,  died in Iraq yesterday

His mother is my sister, Tisa Farrow. His dad is Terry Deane.

Jason loved and was loved by his parents, his sister, Bridget, his brother, Mitchell, his wife Judi and their three small children. He was my God-son and much loved by all of us in this large family.

He also loved his country and he was proud to serve.

But I honestly don’t know why Jason died. There was never any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie. So people speculate — was it the oil? Or the old grudges of an old man — Cheney and his Halliburton? Or the unfinished business of the father — some haunting of the son? Saddam was bad — but by then a sleeping dog. Not making threats. The world is full of brutal leaders, some are worse than Saddam Hussein.

This war is as incomprehensible as it is unacceptable. In a cloud of confusion politicians, generals and ordinery people have come to see that it is a disaster. Exit plans are being discussed but Iraqi citizens and young Americans like our Jason are being killed.

For four years my sister has lived in fear of this day.

She is a nurse and was working at the hospital when the two uniformed men came to her home. Jason’s sister, Bridget opened the door. They went to the hospital to give Tisa the most terrible news a mother could hear.

I hope I never see George W Bush.

I could not shake his hand. He and his cabal have killed my beautiful nephew just as surely as if they had shot him. May God, if there is one, forgive them. I cannot.

Today Tisa and Terry, Bridget and Mitchell, Judi, and the three little ones – have been given a life sentence of grief.

How many more must die before this atrocity is stopped?

Three hours later she posts a photo site link of her nephews Infantry Division with the following

A photo site run by his infantry division.
Jaspn’s father Terry said “Jason loved the army and would want to be remembered as a good soldier.”
certainly he was that, and much, much more.

I ask the same question as Mia:

How many more must die before this atrocity is stopped?

Not only the Atrocity of Iraq, as well as that which has quickly turned into, Afganistan, but the Atrocities occurring as these military personal come home after Multiple Tours and once again are pushed aside, in their care and by a Nation more intent on a presidential campaign than the Reality of what this country will be facing!

This country that now Accepts Torture, Accepts the Lies that led to the Slaughter of Tens of Thousands of it’s own and innocents of Iraq and Afganistan, thinking zero about the reason for going into Afganistan in the first place, Accepts the Blank Checks of Corporate War Profitteers, Accepts the Blank Check of a Paid Mercenary Army, Accepts the Destruction of Law and the Constitution!!

I Light A Candle with Sadness but Memory of another Fallen Brother

For Mia’s Nephew, Jason and his Family, RIP Brother RIP, and in Memory of your Fallen Brothers and Sisters and Mine as well!

And I Ask The Question

Asked So Long Ago by a Gold Star Mother in Crawford Texas

Still Unanswered!!

And I would ask, Why was Mia’s Nephew Serving this Country but not the sons and daughters of those who sent them into these Occupations, especially the New Husband of a certain First Daughter?

Who’s ‘Patriotic’?

Who Serves the ‘National Defense’ of this Country?