Does this mean I'm not a liberal? ...

This appealingly funny quote made me laugh out loud:

"We're liberal Democrats -- we have a Buddha on our table."

Now since I don't have a Buddha on my table, or anywhere else, does that mean I'm not a liberal?

Yesterdays' quotes ...

Today's QUOTES:

I don't understand the mentality that dictates that these groups must continue supporting a politician once he's given them lies, lies and more lies. Oh, I forgot about the champaign (and the money). Political organizations (and non-profits) become self perpetuating and entrenched just like large corporations and large media. In other words they become, or rather join, the problem. And at this moment in time, Obama has become a problem and not a conduit for improvement or change of any kind. --gail MoveOn has been running strong ads in Louisiana against Mary Landrieu, who -- as Chris Bowers notes -- is against anything resembling a public plan. Obama wants them to stop: [...] These groups have acted as firewalls to shield Obama from liberal critique. As the traditional institutional liberal validators and stakeholders, their silence on a variety of issues -- from financial regulation to the escallation of the war in Afghanistan to energy and beyond -- have acted as insullation for the administration as it breaks one campaign promise after the other. We saw it last week with the hastily arranged cocktail party for LGBT leaders last week -- the way Obama mutes liberal criticism is by reaching out to those at the top and rewarding them personally with access. But it's clear that on the issue of health care, they can't have it both ways any more. And everyone is going to be watching to see what happens. -- Will MoveOn Cave To Obama’s Pressure? by Jane Hamsher, firedoglake.com ... American education has deteriorated inversely with the rise of right wing politics! An example is 'Texas' and every child that Bush left behind. Texas beats out Mississippi for DEAD LAST in high school graduations at the same time that it LEADS the nation in executions due to the state's extremely high crime rate! -- Texas: The Gulag Wasteland Bush Left Behind by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowbow Wish I'd written this. We would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to just keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Yet the GOP does that repeatedly, mistaking the illness for the cure and making it worse with greed and incompetence. Confronted with rising crime and swelling prisons, the GOP will propose even newer programs guaranteed to raise crime rates even as they enrich cronies which privatized prison systems, privatized Blackwater storm-troopers, a robotized surveillance system. -- Texas: The Gulag Wasteland Bush Left Behind by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowbow But the Democrats and the Press cooperate and even conspire with the Republicans. Does that make them the same or worse? -- gail

Yesterdays' quotes ...

Today's QUOTES:

Ah yes, America is so "exceptional" and free that it takes us decades to do common sense things that other countries do all at once. And even then it's two steps forward one step back a good part of the time. -- How It Happens by digby, Hullubaloo I am an American, it is my RIGHT to die on the curb outside of the hospital WITHOUT being disturbed. It is my right! Unless of course I am darkly complected in which event I may be arrested for SOMETHING first. Or maybe shot. I’m reminded how ordinary things seemed in the very civilized, pretty Berlin in the 1930’s, the clean parks, brilliant operas, stately museums and orchestras. Seasons passed so normally as one year the books burned, the next year more Jews were hounded and gone. Total political failure seemed so ordinary, plain and slow, with much of everything else appearing exactly the same. Is that what where going through now, watching some insane Republican rant global warming is a hoax while Arnie the Hoover god smashes California? I don’t know, of course not. It’s extremely upsetting and terrible for the country the question has to be asked at all. -- Failed States by paradox, The Left Coaster

Yesterdays' quotes ...

Today's QUOTES:

... it would be a strange conspiracy considering that Obama dodged the question. -- Nico Pitney in YouTube video at Hullubaloo (Pitney vs Milbank) The Mark Sanford Extravaganza: I care that Mark Sanford has once again revealed the rot at the core of Republican "values." I care that he abused his office. I care that the career of another right wing asshole is over. All of it is good. But I don't care about the details of his most private moments. Even Mark Sanford deserves his right to privacy. Even Richard Nixon had soul. -- "Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul" by Turkana, The Left Coaster Really, really well said. --gail

A rare kind of courage ...

Fronzo West Jailed for Telling Authorities "Fuck the Police"

Phoenix civil liberties activist Fronzo West is currently doing time in the Maricopa County jail for exercising his freedom of speech rights as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Folks like to say we have freedom of speech in this country, and in theory, we do. But in practice, it's a whole 'nother matter. West, 65, challenges that theory nearly every day of the week here in Phoenix by riding around in a car emblazoned with the slogans "Fuck the Police" and "Stop Police Brutality." He goes further than that. Everything he wears, from the cap on his head to his loafers also bears the same anti-cop messages.

... read on ...

Yesterdays' quotes ...

Today's QUOTES:

The reasoning behind The Obama Adiministration complicity in the hiding of the BushCo crimes really does illude me. Obama has chosen to become part of the coverup. He has chosen to become complicit in the whole dirty mess that Bush left. Why? --gail From yesterday's New York Times: Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles. The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material. -- Not That It Matters by Turkana, The Left Coaster ... Bush declared "I'm the decider" and he meant it. [The Obama] administration obviously believes it has that right as well --- they just pretend otherwise. -- Transparent Obscurity by digby, Hullabaloo

So you think it's not getting warmer? ...

Krugman writes:

What this tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the last decade or so. But the direction of change is unmistakable if you take the longer view. The fitted line in the figure is a 3rd-degree polynomial, but any sort of smoothing would tell you that there is a massive upward trend.

Of course, trend-spotting is no substitute for causal modeling; and the models are getting truly scary in their implications.

The only reason I can figure for political recalcitrance on this matter is that politicians hate their children. Could there be another reason?

I thought Obama was sane ...

The Obama administration is rushing towards a unilateral plan to imprison people without trial, according to a huge, new joint article from the Washington Post and ProPublica. The proposal would completely cut Congress out of the process by using an executive order to essentially bring Gitmo stateside: ... -- Obama Courts Disaster With New Detention Plan by Ari Melber, 06/26/2009

This is not the action of a sane American president.

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Glenn Greenwald writes today:

There has now emerged a very clear -- and very disturbing -- pattern whereby Obama is willing to use legal mechanisms and recognize the authority of other branches only if he's assured that he'll get the outcome he wants. ...
[...]
As The New York Times columnist (and Obama supporter) Bob Herbert put it this week: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

What we have now is not a stupid wanna-be tyrant like with George W. Bush, but a very intelligent wanna-be tyrant. A lack of principles is a lack of principles. A tyrant is a tyrant.

Yesterdays' quotes ...

Today's QUOTES:

The White House Press corps loves to laugh condescendingly at Helen Thomas because, tenaciously insisting that our sermons to others be applied to our own Government, she acts like a real reporter ... -- The "Neda video," torture, and the truth-revealing power of images by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com Krugman comes up with a much kinder broadside than I can muster, as I see Obama throwing away all the progress we could have made without even bothering to expend any effort to do things right. --gail My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh. And now he’s done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he’s willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it? -- Obama messes up on health care, big time by Paul Krugman, NY Times This is extremely serious stuff, the question is not facetious in the least, why can’t the fucking Democrats possess the ability to learn Negotiation 101? ... -- Why, In Fact, Can’t Democrats Learn? by paradox, The Left Coaster This assumes that they want to negotiate, that the health care 'debate' is not all a charade, that they do not already have some undocumented 'understanding' that they will not attempt to rock certain boats. Is there really any other explanation. Those who believe never get close enough to do anything. Those who are primed to subterfuge and non-action are always in the way. It happens over and over again ... just tell me there's no pattern to be seen here. --gail I realize that anecdotes are not data. However, I have never personally met a woman of menopausal age — and I’m past that point myself — who blew off her life because of hot flashes. But I’ve known, and have known of, a number of men aged 45-60 whose lives crashed and burned because of sex. -- Should Middle-Aged Men Hold Public Office? by Barbara O'Brien, open.salon.com Ha, ha. Shoe met other foot. --gail

Cardinals, as in birds, and things ...

The resident cardinal family appears to have two young ’uns right now, instead of the usual one at at a time of past seasons.

I no longer provide bird seed in the yard because having little baby mice doing acrobatics under the bird feeder was just way too much. If they had had the sense to stay mostly out of sight, well maybe ... but really to flaunt and caper in front of anyone who walked by was more that I could take. Though the mouse population did entice an owl family and once I was even visited by a baby or at least juvenile horned owl (which is NOT a small bird, by the way) who stayed in my yard near the bird waterer for several hours.

Anyway, I was writing about the cardinal family. Instead of feeding the birds generally I put out a few walnuts in the morning for the cardinals (and since they are real busy right now feeding the youngsters I sometimes also put a few more out in the late afternoon, specially if papa cardinal comes up and looks in the window). The nice thing about cardinals is that they know where those walnuts are coming from, or at least they know who provides them. Doves, now, doves know nothing, nothing. Like rabbits they have to reproduce lots and lots of themselves in order to survive. I won't get into where humans fit in this continuum between doves and cardinals.

What I was thinking about when I started this post was that one of the young cardinals is very fixated on playing with little flowers --when it's parent isn't close by at which point it goes into baby bird mode shaking its feathers and saying feed me, feed me, now, now. So I was wondering, is this baby's behavior playing with flowers, behavior I've observed frequently over the past two or three days (and, no matter how it may appear, I am not always sitting here in front of the window) ... is this behavior, interest in, or fixation on something other than food happening because they have, in addition to their usual diet, a few extra and easy to obtain walnuts to provide a little bird leisure for the contemplation of their environment? ... or is it genetically defined pre-nesting behavior?

Ain't life interesting.

Lord, what fools these mortals be! ...

Puck:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

We are fools for putting up with strictures that require that man and woman behave in their private lives in ways that, apparently, a majority of men and women do not behave and, even more, do not want to behave specially in the face of certain, and unspecified, inducements.

I really don't want to see or read about the details of other peoples love affairs (except for a few really endearing ones, whether real or literary).

I feel really sorry for Governor Sanford (and his family, that is Sanford's real family not some mafia-sounding entity called The Family). I felt really sorry for John Edwards (and his family). Neither of these situations should have generated the kind of spectacle we are now so used to in this country.

It's even possible if we lived in an environment that didn't attempt to force private family relationships in ways that go against the human grain Sanford would never had committed such a deriliction of his duty to his position as Governor. Any responsibilities he has to his wife, to his children and to his God should mostly stay between those parties as long as there is no abuse involved. Setting up such impossible performance strictures on men and women, with scandal as the prize for what could either be a miss step or the following of one's heart (a verdict that is often decided many years after the event) could be compared to the former (I assume this is mostly behind us) blackmailing of secret homosexuals who held prominent positions, though I doubt that Sanford or his defenders have the wherewithal to see the similarity.

Really, how could we have imagined that Obama cared about anything ...

... to do with the good of the populace once he installed Rahm Emanuel as his personal enforcer?

Rahm: White House Open To Dropping Public Option

In a few short months, Obama's words and his actions have become diametrically opposed.

Don't let your children grow up to be Republicans. Like Killer Jon Kyl they could become models of ...

... hypocrisy, dissimulation, false virtue, cant, posturing, affectation, speciousness, empty talk, insincerity, falseness, deceit, dishonesty, mendacity, pretense, duplicity; sanctimoniousness, sanctimony, pietism, piousness; informal phoniness, fraud. antonym sincerity.

Paul Krugman points out some of the torturous inconsistencies in thinking that is involved in a bill introduced by Jon Kyl and some of his worst groupies. The bill prohibits "Medicare or Medicaid from using “comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.""

How bad is it? Let me count the ways.

1. Politicians who rail against wasteful government spending are taking action to prevent the government from reining in … wasteful spending.

2. Politicians who warn that the burden of entitlements is killing the federal budget are stepping in to block … the single most painless route to reducing the growth of entitlements.

3. They’re doing it in the name of avoiding “rationing of health care” … but they’re specifically addressing taxpayer-funded care. If you want to go out and buy a medically useless treatment, Medicare won’t stop you.

4. These same politicians are, of course, opposed to efforts to expand coverage. In other words, it’s evil for government to “ration care” by only paying for things that work; it is, however, perfectly OK, indeed virtuous, to ration care by refusing to pay for any care at all.

Sad as it may be, inconsistent thought processes are quite consistent for the Killer.

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Today's QUOTES:

... The U.S stands for freedom, democracy and human rights -- even when we don't. People who advocate unprovoked wars of aggression, torture and mass violence are irredeemable monsters -- except when they're American or our allies. -- Contradictions that aren't seen as contradictory by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com

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What will Obama do ...

Digby writes:

Fixing the health care system is the first real test of whether or not the Democratic Party understands the new political era in which it's governing. The next couple of months will tell the tale.

What will Harry Reid do ...What will Nancy Pelosi do ...What will Obama do ...

I think they will implement what the modern day Robber Barons want; that they will fail the people and fail the Democratic Party and end the Democratic Party's resurgence. Using past Democratic legislation as a model the bills they pass will be worse than what the Republicans would have been able to pass were the majorities reversed. The Democrats continually give everything away BEFORE they even begin to negotiate. Or rather Democrats make a habit of reassuring moronic media hacks that they are not really, you know, liberal or very much of a Democrat and continually whittle down into uselessness, or worse, any contentious proposal before they even begin study or negotiations on the legislation. They do this again and again and over again.

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Nancy Pelosi I can't figure out. She appears powerless. Harry Reid is a nonentity and it says a lot about the Democrats in the Senate that they placed this zero in 'charge.' Obama? Obama appears to be a liar. Where George Bush was a stupid liar, Barack Obama is an intelligent liar. But a liar is still a liar. And nothing, absolutely nothing, a liar says can be depended upon nor trusted.

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Please, please prove me wrong ...

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Today's QUOTES:

The question is why Democrats are inviting [GOP messaging expert,Frank Luntz] to advise them on how to use his patented fraudulent conservative propaganda and methods? You wouldn't be crazy to wonder if they may just share his goals. -- Sleeping With The Enemy by digby, Hullabaloo

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