Internet muse.
Daring, bold, never sold.
My daily weblog of politics, humor, philosophy...and a constant and nagging reminder of the existence of universal love....
The massive article in this week's [Rolling Stone] focuses on the impossible contrast between exit polls showing a clear and overwhelming Kerry victory versus bogus "official" vote counts giving George W. Bush four more catastrophic years in the White House. It also details some of the horrific intimidation, manipulation and outright theft used by Ohio's GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to deny hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters their right to a ballot. And it discusses in some depth the fact that Diebold and other electronic voting machine and software producers make it possible for any inside operator to use a laptop and a few keystrokes to flip an entire election in a matter of seconds.The media hasn't totally blacked out coverage, but the authors of How the Gop Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008 say the media hasn't produced nearly enough investigative or revelatory journalism. Structural changes to electoral laws alone may assure Republicans of more shady victories in 2006 and beyond.
It reminds us that the one good thing that can be said about George W. Bush is that the American people have never actually elected him president of the United States.
In the past month, some coverage has finally surfaced in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek and other big media outlets on the vulnerability of electronic voting machines.
But we're still seeing just the tip of the iceberg. Most importantly, STRUCTURAL changes have been made to the electoral laws in Ohio and nationwide that virtually guarantee the ability of the GOP to steal our elections now and in the future.
A TASTE OF SYRACUSE
__That's me near one of my personal favorites - Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.
Mr. Hevesi's remark occurred on the same day that Republicans nominated J. Christopher Callaghan, the Saratoga County treasurer, as their candidate to challenge Mr. Hevesi this fall. Mr. Hevesi is expected to win re-election easily.
"..the FAA declared an impasse in contract negotiations with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) on April 5. Unless Congress acts by June 5, FAA Administrator Marion Blakey will impose the agency’s last offer, which could result in as many as 4,000 controllers, about 25 percent of the workforce, choosing to retire."
“If we want to protect marriage the answer is not in discriminating against a class of people. The answer is in putting our energy, our resources, and our effort at ensuring a decent public education for all citizens, decent health care for all citizens, and economic opportunities for all citizens. To discriminate against a class of people is wrong because a threat to justice anywhere is still a threat to justice everywhere.”
We're pouring hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention thousands of troops, into the quicksand that is Iraq.
- Millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Millions more can't afford the health care they need.
- Gas prices are hurting every level of government, every business and every individual except the oil barons (in and out of the White House).
- The government can't seem to stop spying on us or lying to us.
- Our borders are about as secure as a screen door in New Orleans.
-Mother Nature is getting hotter and testier with every passing storm.
We've got big problems.
So, naturally, some of our political and religious leaders have something more important on their minds:
Gay marriage.
Must be an election year.
Stop obsessing about the specks in the eyes of gay people who want to get married.
First deal with the planks in the eyes of child-bearing straight people who don't.
The problem isn't that conservative Christians -- generally speaking -- don't understand where the left is coming from; it's that they do. They have expressed open contempt for certain traditional values, even though many Democrats are Christians, too.My problem, as a 'social-justice Catholic' is that, for twenty years, the Religious Right has walked all over many of my own closely-held values....or walked OVER them in their rushed obsession to co-opt the GOP with their two pet issues. (Abortion and homosexuality). Mr. Limbaugh can poke fun at Howard Dean all he likes, but it won't change the fact that there are millions upon millions of Christian Democrats, or that the GOP's public reputation is sinking. If the GOP thinks they'll recoup any kind of lasting popularity with the majority of American voters while pandering to a group who thinks "two issues a set of moral values makes," they are sadly mistaken. Methinks they are hustling in order to avoid electoral disaster in November.
Despite U.S. expressions of hope that a new gambit by the chairman of the Palestinian Authority could pave the way to negotiations with Israel, fears persist in Washington and Jerusalem that the maneuver could backfire and end up strengthening the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas
Excerpt:
The Natalie Gulbis experience: It's not polite to stare, but it's also hard to miss the Natalie Gulbis galleries around the course. Golf fans admire her solid game. There are others who just like to look.
"I see this town as a microcosm of Heartland, U.S.A."
- Mario Rossi, writing about my own village of Camillus, N.Y.
Mayor Ed Fletcher
"Careful, cautious people, always casting about to preserve their reputations, can never effect a reform."
Hear Al Gore talk about global warming at NPR. He discusses the melting of the North Pole. Definitely not good news for Santa Claus."A government has been formed in Iraq. It is a defective government, in the sense that it does not yet have a defense or interior minister. It is an ineffective government, insofar as the ability to govern directly is at this point limited institutionally, politically and functionally. Ultimately, what exists now is less a government than a political arrangement between major elements of Iraq's three main ethnic groups. And that is what makes this agreement of potentially decisive importance: If it holds, it represents the political foundation of a regime....If it holds. If it holds, the rest is almost easy. If it doesn't hold, the rest is impossible..."
The watchfire begins.
