It is my responsibility to ocassionally waste people's time. I do this as a public service, and to keep you from going off the political deep end. Today's waste of time is actually somewhat political, but that can't be helped. I do try to keep them as irrelevent and badly spelled as possible, but today just isn't my lucky day.
Remember to answer the poll questions as honestly as you can, and do not be swayed by your spouse, cellmate, or pet Iguana. We have to be able to trust each other here, and I'm already a bit suspicious about you.
Having been captured by the unexpected title of Dems Did Manzanar's piece on torture, I found it to be a facile and well reasoned piece on torture from the point of view which it took. I also found it to be a simplistic and shallow assay of a subject whose implications lay at the very root of who we are as a nation.
I will discuss the place that torture occupies within the context of who we are, how the concept and practice of torture is a refutation of the makeup of our social consciousness and why Manzanar found it impossible to define torture within the boundaries in which he discussed it.
I'm getting more than a little sick of the way black folks get talked about like we're exotic foreigners in our own country-- like there are all of these strange secret customs we have or something-- oh, and anything one prominent black person does is suddenly a "black thing." You see, I don't know anything about "fist bumps" but, I could could tell it was just some cute little thing Obama and his wife do. Is it just me, or is the over analysis of "the bump" as something exotic and foreign something that we would never see for a similar moment between white people?
I recently wrote a letter to New York Sun Times in response to an article they had written about Anton Scalia's position on religion. The letter was published and I am very happy with it as it appears in print. I figured that a diary here would be a good place to further expand on what I have written. The letter is included in full below followed by further analysis on my part.'Scalia Decries Drift of Court Over Religion'
The topic of this diary has been published numerous times, but it can not be stated enough. What Obama's candidacy means to the black community is so difficult to put into words. However, these bright young men do a wonderful job.
BEFORE YOU POST A COMMENT, READ THIS: Kos' latest fumble is more than a waste of space-- it makes us all look bad. If you want to criticize me for writing a post on this when other people already did, make sure you write Kos first, and tell him to clean up his behavior.
It's amazing seeing the party that gave us Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's stagecraft is now so amateurish that they've given us green screen backdrops in major speeches in half-empty gymnasiums and -- yes -- yellow teeth. Image and stage handling are critical components in modern presidential campaigns, and have been so since Nixon sweated it out in his infamous debate appearance against a young, fresh-faced looking JFK. Pretending that it's not something that should be discussed, or that there's something unseemly about it is silly.
Everyone has their flaws. The effective campaigns know how to smooth those over while accentuating their candidates' strength.
Here is the Barack Obama's speech on what is truly an historic political evening. If you had said years ago that a freshman Senator was going to raise $200 million dollars and defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries I would have said you were crazy. If you had added that he was an African American named Barack Hussein Obama I would have asked whether you were sober.
But now - on this night it is finally official. Barack Obama will be the nominee for the Democratic party and quite possibly the next President of the United States. Here is his victory speech given (ironically) at the same location the Republicans are to hold their convention.
The idea that Hillary will be President may be dead, but the fact that "a woman" (I dont think of Hillary as a "woman" I think of her as an amazing American... I couldnt care less if she sits or stands in the restroom)
The whole keffiyeh kerfuffle over Rachael Ray's Dunkin Donuts ad set off a dKos thread (very humorous) that included someone writing about wanting their apple pastries.
Of course we all know that apples aren't native to the western hemisphere--if they were, Johnny Appleseed would have had to find another line of work. But where are they from?
Biblical references are often ascribed to pomegranates rather than true apples. But that might be wrong. Wikipedia points out that one problem with assuming the ancients meant the apple as we know it today is:
Apples appear in many religious traditions, often as a mystical or forbidden fruit. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology and folktales is that the word "apple" was used as a generic term for all (foreign) fruit, other than berries but including nuts, as late as the 17th C. CE.;[6] For instance, in Greek mythology, the Greek hero Heracles, as a part of his Twelve Labours, was required to travel to the Garden of the Hesperides and pick the golden apples off the Tree of Life growing at its center.[9][10][11]
For the next President of the United States, the question of "legitimacy" strikes at the heart of US foreign policy and the idea of "American" as a national identity.
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Douglas Feith. He is a neo-conservative who is considered one of the key planners of the Iraq war. Jon focuses a great deal of his attention on how the war was sold to us, the American public prior to the invasion.
Obviously, it's a little tense since Jon is such an outspoken critic of the pre-war spin as well as the invasion and occupation. Feith is about as polar opposite as it gets and is still trying to make those tired "things changed after 9/11" arguments that drive me nuts.
Anyways, its an important interview for anyone who cares about Iraq:
Obama is my candidate, and has been since he won Iowa, and I started entertaining the possibility of him as president and decided I felt good about it.
Talking in West Virginia yesterday Obama struck a sour note. I am happy to see him wearing a flag pin, or not. I am happy to see him trying to connect with conservatives, even if most of them won't vote for him. When he is president, we'll all have to work together. That is the most appealing idea of his campaign.
But when Obama implies that people opposed to the war in Viet Nam were disrespectful of returning veterans, he is buying into, and keeping alive, a falsehood.
The American people were the same then, as now. The American people, when they oppose a war, do not blame it on the young people sent out to risk their lives for the likes of Dick Cheney or Dick Nixon. There are exceptions, of course, but they are very rare.
I was just reading eve's diary about a woman she called in West Virginia. The woman has an illness that will be terminal and is immobile and her husband helps as best he can but loses hours everyday commuting to his job. Wonderful caring eve did her best to help from long distance by finding and providing this family with phone numbers of people who may be able to help.
Reading the diary and some of the comments is heartbreaking as everyone, regardless of their station in life or political persuasion, deserves better. I couldn't help but compare their circumstances with those of my parents in Canada and it's shameful that American families can't expect the same treatment. More of their story after the jump.
I am a resident of the 6th Congressional District in Michigan. I am trying to collect 1,000 signatures by May 13, 2008 so I can have my name placed on the August primary ballot. I have no money or political ties.
Congress passes its share of boondoggles, but there’s a real doozy on the docket April 18. If the nearly $300 billion Farm Bill passes in its current form, the American public will pay billions of dollars to large-scale farmers and food corporations for the following end results...
This is an update to "The Cult of Popularity" from April 11 about the final ten contests in the Democratic Presidential Preference elections. Since we are just under one week until the Pennsylvania Primary - I thought now would be a good time for us to visit that "popular vote" strategy that Senator Clinton is trying to employ to sway delegates (both superdelegates and elected delegates) to her side.
I will repeat the same response I have whenever someone tries to rewrite the rules. The DNC determines the Democratic Nominee by only one measure: Delegate count in sanctioned, legitimate elections. However, to quell the cries, I've laid out the math of the popular vote scenario. Since the first post, Clinton has made a little headway in the projection (about 11,000 votes) due to a .8% increase in her Real Clear Politics average lead in PA and a new SurveyUSA poll in Kentucky. However, at the same time Obama has tightened the race in Indiana and increased his numbers in Montana and South Dakota while losing a smidgen in North Carolina.
This is not a new concept. FDR and The New Deal. The late Senator Paul Simon's 1987 book by the same title as this post (Which I have a signed copy of - I had Senator Simon autograph it for me when he was in Iowa campaigning for the 1988 Democratic Presidential Nomination).
With a country that has resources and infrastructure in dire need of help, we need to put America back to work fixing these problems. Where could we start? Well, there are 10 pieces of U.S. infrastructure we must fix now!
