A Little Hope With That Pee in Your Wheaties

On days like this, I join my friend Chris Bowers in feeling a certain sense of despondency about how much can be accomplished just by electing more and better Democrats. We didn’t just do poorly on the Cramdown Amendment, we got our clock cleaned. We could see this coming in last night’s press conference when Obama said he had been most humbled so far in the White House by his inability to control the banks.

OBAMA: Humbled by the — humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life. And there are a lot of different power centers, and so I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want, or turn on a switch and suddenly Congress falls in line. And so what you do is to make your best arguments, listen hard to what other people have to say, and coax folks in the right direction.

On the campaign trail, Obama said he wanted Cramdown. In the Oval Office, he has to deal with twelve Democrats that put campaign contributions from the mortgage lending industry ahead of their own struggling constituents who are losing their homes.

I was concerned that I didn’t see more visible effort from the White House to fight for Cramdown, but now I know why. No Republicans supported it. Even a united Democratic Caucus could not have passed the amendment. So, the administration let members vote however they wanted to. And now we know who the real cowards are.

But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get discouraged. These were votes taken by senators that knew the amendment couldn’t pass. If the amendment had had the support of even one Republican, every Democratic vote against would have been the decisive vote against. In that case, the White House might have whipped this vote. Even without any Republican support, if Al Franken had been seated as a U.S. Senator, every Democratic vote against would have been the decisive vote against. While it’s true that some Democrats actually enjoy putting on kneepads and bowing down to do the mortgage lenders favors, most of them are simply acting out of fear and a desire not to needlessly alienate powerful potential adversaries.

We can still turn these defeats into victories as long as we increase our numbers and we have the support of the President of the United States.

Thursday Dog Blog (the little red hen edition)

Our latest acquisition, a little red hen and her six chicks. Apparently they have never seen a pear before.
A few months back we moved Imogen’s mum’s chickens to her brother’s house, where we hoped they would settle in with his other chickens.  We wanted to replace them with some less “feral” chickens, and to that end went to a large poultry sale on Saturday.  It was a zoo, and we left chicken-less.  Plan B was asking a friend if he wanted to sell any of his birds.  He offered us the above “package deal”.

The hen is an ISA Brown (ISA stands for Institut de Sélection Animale), which are a hybred between a Rhode Island White and a Rhode Island Red, bred specifically for maximum egg production (about 300 eggs per year). Since she has black tail feathers, I suspect a little something else slipped in her linage somewhere. The father of the chicks was a White Leghorn, and given the chicks’ current coloring I think they’ll eventually range in color from buff to speckled red.

Since we only keep ducks and chickens for their eggs, we’re hoping that at least half the chicks are hens.  Any boys will be passed along to non-vegetarian family members.

RNC Wants Out of Consent Decree Prohibiting Them from Voter Caging

Cross posted at Project Vote’s Voting Matters Blog

On the eve of the Presidential election, facing an historic defeat, the Republican National Committee quietly filed a motion to dissolve an existing consent decree in which they’d agreed not to engage in voter caging or other types of voter intimidation. Since 1982, the RNC has been restricted from conducting so-called “ballot-security” measures that have historically been used to deter thousands of Americans–largely low-income and minority citizens–from voting. Now, the RNC wants to be free of these restrictions. A hearing on the RNC motion is scheduled for next Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.
The case began in the early 1980s when the Democratic National Committee sued the RNC for voter suppression tactics that targeted about 45,000 people in low-income and minority areas. The RNC subjected minority voters in New Jersey to misleading election notices, the intimidating placement of off-duty police around polling places, and the unlawful practice of “voter caging” whereby unfounded voter challenge lists are compiled from returned mass direct mailings.

The case, DNC v. RNC, resulted in a 1982 decree in which the RNC agreed not to engage in voter caging and intimidation activities or to target minority voters.

Despite the consent decree, the RNC began using similar tricks in Louisiana in 1986. Under the guise of fraud prevention, the RNC facilitated voter caging programs and other tactics. Commenting on the program, Kris Wolfe, the Midwest RNC political director, sent a memo to Lanny Griffith, the Southern RNC political director, saying “I would guess this program will eliminate at least 60,000 to 80,000 folks from the rolls…If it’s a close race…this could keep the black vote down considerably.” The DNC filed a contempt motion to reopen the case and enjoin the RNC from conducting the Louisiana programs. Once again, the RNC voluntarily agreed to a consent decree rather than fight the claims in court. The result was a 1986 decree in which the RNC agreed not to do any ballot security programs anywhere in the country without prior court approval.

More than 20 years later, on November 3, 2008, the RNC moved to terminate the 1982 and 1986 consent decrees. The RNC claims the consent decrees hamstring their efforts to combat voter fraud, despite the fact that voter fraud is less common than death by lightning.

“The RNC claims that the lack of evidence of voter fraud is due to liberal voting laws that make fraud hard to detect,” said Project Vote election counsel, Teresa James. “Yet legislatures in the past decade have pushed through the most restrictive voting codes we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era. Complicated voter ID rules, barriers to voter registration, and arbitrary rules on verifying provisional or absentee ballots all disenfranchise qualified voters, especially minority voters. Despite this frenzy of allegedly anti-fraud legislation, this political party wants carte blanche to also use questionable tactics that suppress targeted voters, all in the name of mythical voter fraud.

The GOP’s history of “ballot security” programs hardly constitutes an argument that the consent decree is unnecessary; while the RNC has been officially restrained from conducting voter caging operations, the state parties have taken up the slack, most notably in 2004, when state Republican parties staged the most egregious and large-scale voter caging program to date, with caging operations that disproportionately targeted minorities in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. (During a 2004 Detroit election campaign Michigan State representative John Pappageorge told a meeting of Oakland County Republican Party members that “if we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.”

In 2008, only public outcry and media attention prevented further targeted challenges, with threats of partisan caging surfacing in Michigan, Ohio, and Montana, among other states. In fact, the same day that the RNC filed its motion to dissolve the dissent decree, the DNC filed a contempt motion alleging RNC violations. The DNC cited RNC involvement in the 2008 New Mexico “caging” of Latino voters, wherein private investigators were hired to obtain “Social Security numbers and other confidential information about voters for the purpose of alleging that the voters were illegal aliens and/or were impersonating other individuals,” according to the DNC’s brief in support of the contempt motion. “The hiring of private investigators by the RNC to investigate voters clearly does not constitute a `normal poll watch function’ within the meaning of the 1987 Consent Decree but rather constitutes a `ballot security’ effort within the meaning of that Decree, which the RNC is prohibited from undertaking without a determination by this court that such program complies with the terms of the 1982 Consent Order.”

After several postponements, the hearing on the Republican National Committee’s motion to terminate the consent decree will be held Tuesday, May 5 at 9 a.m. in the court of Judge Dickenson Debevoise, the judge who heard the original case.

“There is no basis to terminate the consent decree that prohibits the Republican National Committee from engaging in tactics that suppress the vote in targeted populations,” said James. “The unfortunate truth is that the Committee has engaged, and continues to engage, in self-styled ballot-security programs that have the effect of restricting ballot access to eligible voters, particularly minority voters.”

12 Worthless Democrats

In the most demoralizing vote since the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, eleven twelve worthless Democrats just earned my undying enmity by voting against cramdown.

Max Baucus (D-MT)
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
Tim Johnson (D-SD)
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Arlen Specter (D-PA)
Jon Tester (D-MT)

Honorable mention: Evan Bayh (D-IN)- who did all he could to kill cramdown in committee and then thought he could be cute and vote for it on the floor.

I am especially pissed off at Dorgan and Tester who are both normally much better than this. This is one of the most disgraceful least defensible votes I have ever seen.

What Values? Fundies and Torture

Who knew atheists had higher morals than fundamental Christians? Uh, a lot of us, actually, and now we have more poll results to prove it:

Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis. […]

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did.

I’m not shocked by that result. It fits with what I’ve heard from people who claim they are Real Christians, and that punishing or killing “evil doers” is perfectly acceptable behavior according to their interpretation of the Bible. The same folks who promote the idea of a “Christian Warrior” at their Jesus Camps. The Pastors who publicly proclaimed at Republican rallies last Fall that “Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists around the world are praying for an Obama victory that if Obama wins, they’ll think “their god is bigger” than the Christian god.” The US General and self proclaimed evangelical Christian, William Boykin who claimed he led an “Army of God” in Iraq, and who helped Gitmo-ize Abu Ghraib vastly expanding the Bush administration’s use of torture and abuse to thousands of Iraqi detainees many of whom were swept up in mass arrests by American soldiers merely for the “crime” of living in a Sunni neighborhood.

So, no I’m not surprised that the people who most loudly proclaim their “Christian values” have no moral qualms when it comes to killing and torturing people who don’t share their faith or have the exact same beliefs that they do. I’ve known for many years that many, many of these so-called “Christians” are hypocrites when it comes to issues of morality and human rights. You know what does surprise me? That CNN had the guts to actually use the word torture in their article. But then maybe the details of the survey conducted by Pew Forum of Religion & Public Life made it impossible for them to avoid the word that must not be named. At least by the US media, anyway.

How much do you want to bet this survey result is prominently reported by the traditional “liberal media” over the next few weeks rather than buried or ignored as soon as possible? No takers, eh? Don’t blame you. Don’t blame you one bit.

390 Years Minus 100 Days, Pt. 1

Many people — including the president himself — have mentioned the absurdity of judging Obama’s success at cleaning up messes that were decades in the making, based on his first 100 days in office. It’s equally absurd to expect the first 100 days in the administration of our first African American president to change 390 years of racial history in this country. But it’s at least an opportunity to assess where we really are, where we’re headed, and how far we’ve yet to go.

Racism and the social construct of race itself are much older than the United States, with deep roots European colonialism. But its beginnings in this continent can be traced back to August of 1619, when the first Africans in America — 20 or so, stolen from a Spanish ship — were traded for food by a ship’s captain, upon arrival at the Jamestown colony, in Virginia. Categorized as “indentured servants,” but without vital dates indicating the end of their bondage, some were almost certainly slaves. By 1640, as least one African was listed as a slave, and slavery was underway.

The space between here and there is covered by enough history books to fill entire libraries. Suffice it to say that the election of a person such as Barack Obama reflects much that has changed for the better since then. The spectacle of our first African-American president, though not a descendant of slaves himself, being sworn in on the Lincoln bible — held by his wife, who is a descendant of slaves — was a “pinch me” moment for many of us. Reality, on that day, took on a dreamlike quality.

As I watched the inauguration from home, sitting on the carpet in our family room with our two sons — both African-American — I looked up at my bookshelf. There, pictures of my father and grandfather seemed be to looking down at the scene. I sensed a division in time was born at that moment. On one side was the America they’d known all their lives. On the other, my family and I — along with the everyone else — were carried along by history into an America forever changed by what was unfolding before our eyes.

The past 100 days in this new America revealed how much has changed. There have been a surprising number of moments, days, and even weeks — many of them consecutive — during which Obama was not “the black president” but just the president, whose policies don’t necessarily satisfy everyone, and irritate some, but whose missteps or debatable decisions are not attributed to on his race.

Not even three months have passed since President Obama’s historic inauguration, and already it tends to slip the nation’s collective mind that the first black president of the United States is, in fact, black. There may be hope for us after all.

In the cacophonous commentary about the president — he’s a breath of fresh air, he’s too liberal, he’s too moderate, he’s being far too generous to the banks, he’s some kind of closet socialist, he’s restoring the nation to greatness, he’s leading us to perdition — it’s striking how seldom race is mentioned as an issue or even an attribute. That’s only natural, since race could hardly be more irrelevant to the multitude of urgent problems Obama wrestles with every day. Watching him in action, as he shoves out the chief executive of General Motors or exchanges small talk with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, we witness a daily demonstration of the irrelevance of race. And that, potentially, is nothing short of transformative.

There’s evidence that the transformation continues. Despite criticism that he hasn’t engaged enough in or attempted to lead the “national discussion on race,” Barack Obama has altered the course of that discussion, and altering the public perception of race relations — with nearly two thirds of Americans, and twice as many blacks saying race relations are good, according to a recent poll — simply by being the president. First Lady Michelle Obama has made an impression as well. Pegged as a potential “loose cannon,” race-baited, and stereotyped as an “angry black woman” during the campaign, Michelle Obama proved one of the campaign’s best assets and most popular surrogates. She now enjoys a higher approval rating (79%) than her husband (65%).

I get the sense that the Obamas know more will be conveyed by the way in which they carry out their new roles, than any amount of discussion. As Obama’s campaign could not be about race neither can his presidency. At some point, he decided he was running to be president, not “the black president.” What’s most significant is that, finally, a candidate such as Obama could run for president, and not just to be “the black president.”

Obama’s candidacy and electoral victory both raised the bar for African Americans, and placed it within reach. My six-year-old son was excited about Obama’s campaign from the moment I told him what it would mean if Obama won. The best I could do was to say that it would be the first time “someone who looks like you or like Daddy”” would be president. Fortunately, he didn’t ask why it would be first time or what took so long, sparing me the task of having to explain racism to my child. For now. But Obama has changed that conversation already, because I can say to my son “You could be the president, if you want be,” and point to Obama as an example.

For the record, Parker has no plans on a political career right now. He doesn’t like being in the spotlight and having all eyes on him. He says he doesn’t want to be president, because “the president has to give too many speeches in front of people.” But then he considers his 15-month-old little brother and says “Dylan could be the president!” And maybe he could, now. The ceiling on my sons’ aspirations was raised on January 20th, as it was for many African-Americans.

Nothing will change for black Americans on Tuesday, when the first black president takes office. They will wake up in the same homes, go to work at the same jobs, face the same obstacles.

And yet, some Triangle residents say, everything will be different. Many say that Obama’s success has prompted them to re-examine what is possible in their own lives, or given them a nudge to pursue ambitious goals.

Many also say they have hopes that their children and grandchildren — whose history books will forever be changed — will see their horizons differently. They will never look at a black candidate for president and think that the color of his skin will assure loss.

Much changed for the better on day one of Obama’s “first 100 days” as president. It was a brief respite. For reality the day before and the day after was, and remains, an indicator of how far we are from “The Dream” so often referenced on that day.

In the journey from the America that was to the America that will be, 390 years minus 100 days, is a good start. But only just a start.

My Neck of the Woods – Attack on Queen Beatrix

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Deadly attack on Queen’s Day

(RNW) – A car that drove straight through a crowd of people in Apeldoorn at the moment the royal family was passing by, did so deliberately. That was confirmed by the authorities at a press conference. The drama cost the lives of four members of the public, and a further 13 were injured, five of them severely.

The town of Apeldoorn was this year’s setting for the traditional Queen’s Day festivities. An open-top bus with the royal family on board was close to the monument `The Needle’, when a black Suzuki appeared at high speed out of nowhere.

[The car crashed from behind through rows of spectators. Some 24 people were injured and had to be treated by doctors at the intersection. At the present FIVE persons have died. The car was severely damaged as it moved in the direction of the royal family. – Oui]


Members of the royal family express shock as they witness the incident.

The car hit the monument with a bang and came to a stop. The royal bus continued to drive on. Live TV pictures being broadcast to millions of homes showed a shocked Princess Máxima put her hand to her mouth. By then, 17 people who had been in the car’s path lay wounded and, as it turned out, four of them were dead.

Driver arrested

A planned action, said the Public Prosecutor at a press conference following several hours of chaos. In order to arrive at the monument, the car must have gone through a roadblock. Furthemore, the car was driving into the crowd at high speed.

The driver survived the impact. He was arrested, but due to the seriousness of his injuries he had to be taken straight to hospital for an operation. Nevertheless, Chief Public Prosecutor Ludo Goossens could confirm that it was indeed not an accident:

    “At the moment, I can tell you that from our first contact with the accused, there are indications that this was a deliberately planned action. As a prelude to this action, there are indications that there was earlier contact with officers from the military police, after which the incident we all witnessed took place.”

According to Mr Goosens, the contact with the accused took place before he was cut free from the seriously damaged vehicle. He’s a 38-year-old native Dutchman who wasn’t known to the police, and it also isn’t known whether he has mental problems.

[The suspect had recently lost his job as security worker. He was a quiet persons who didn’t chat much with his neighbors. He is one of the severely injured and according to the latest news suffered brain trauma with no chance of survival. – Oui]

SHOCKING NEWS VIDEO OF INCIDENT

On the sidelines of today’s Dutch news:
First confirmed case of Mexican H1N1 virus infection in the Netherlands

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Condi goes to the Mattresses

If anyone needed one last example of what a cancer a policy of torture becomes to a society, Condoleezza Rice gave it up. It’s not just the acts of inflicting painful and psychological damage to people, or getting taxpayer paid lawyers to explain it all away, or that our media then insists it was all OK, so lets forget all the felonies. It’s not only that the perpetrators will be joining our police departments and bringing their techniques with them, or that the taxpayer paid lawyers then become judges defining morality for society.

To show that the cancer has finally metastasized,all you need to see is a professor at one of the best (well, maybe not so much anymore) universities in the country make the final argument, that nothing is against the law if the POTUS says so;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdigbysblog%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&
feature=player_embedded

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