This Woman is Brilliant

Rachel Maddow is so exceedingly good at exposing the empty rhetoric of conservative bloviators. She is perfect at dealing with these kind of idiots playing a game of exquisite corpse with the conservative movement's exponentially incoherent talking points, bankrupt ideologies, and increasingly exposed hidden agendas. What a creep and a hypocrite and a liar Frum shows himself to be:



I hope we are going to see much, much more of Maddow. I always liked her radio program on Air America, but TV is really her medium. Her presence, poise, and command of the situation, as it unfolds, makes her one of the best journalists working today. It's really too bad she could not be the moderator for any of the debates. Someday, perhaps.

Newclipping of the Day :: Watch This

Why isn't this man running for President? Oh yeah, that's right. He tried too many times.

"...enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses."

"...enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand."

"When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills, we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home."

Newsclipping(s) of the Day

I've encountered a few new movements and organizations in the past few days, many of which lots of you may be interested in. They are all added to my "Politics and Culcha" links on the right sidebar.

I saw "intelligence blogger" R. Jill Hillhouse on Democracy NOW! promoting her book Outsourced, a "novel" (in quotes because she says most of it is really fact, but she is afraid to publish as such, she says. She'd rather be a Michael Crichton than a Salman Rushdie i guess.) that sketches out how all intelligence-gathering apparati of the U.S. Government have been taken over by the corporatocracy, thus making our Executive a sort of uber-CEO who doesn't give a damn about anything but corporate profits. Fiction. Yeah. She has a nice blog called The Spy Who Billed Me which seems to document her rising stardom in this truth-starved world of gazillions of media minions... and her incredible investigative prying into the CIA, the Pentagon, the PDB (not peanut dutter and belly...presidential daily briefings), and how it has all come to be handed over to corporations. They own our government. And they demand we buy their products. While collecting our tax dollars. I think that might qualify as the failure of the American Experiment?

Next is MOMs rising. I signed a petition here earlier this week that my friend KJ sent. They are worthy of your attention, even if you are not a young single mom like KJ was. She told me that when she was hired, the man hiring her said to her that he didn't think she could do the job because she was a single mom. Since then, 13 years have passed and she has come to be a very well respected designer where i work, and has since had another son. All the while, cranking out excellent design work.

And number three is The Great Turning. This guy is brilliant. He writes about the myth of the ever-expanding economy and talks about how, if we become concerned with quality of life and the consequences of our actions and refocus ourselves on caring for the earth, the economy will follow. Much in the vein of Willam McDonough and The Next Industrial Revolution. I haven't read the book yet, but i plan to. I saw him on a show on FSTV, Free Speech TV. Any of you ever watch that channel?

Newsclipping of the Day :: The Lessons of 2004 are STILL Not Understood

THIS BIG WHOPPER is another restatement of the train wreck of criminal Republican control of the Ohio vote in 2004--control that the public at large has yet to give a rat's ass about. Some choice bytes:

*on Election Night 2004 , Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website—which gave the world the presidential election results—was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites.

*In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout.

*In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively.

*In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president.

*In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in.

There is so much more fishy bullshit to report, if only Katie Couric knew how to do that. John Conyers was SO on top of this in December and January of 2005, but no one listened and no one gave a damn.

If voter will doesn't even matter in elections anymore, we've entered a new fascist phase of our history friends. Everything about our government is so dirty, tainted, and corrupt. Who knows what it will take to clean it all up?

I would love to see some real effort to do many things, not limited to these thoughts off the top of my mad head:

* a complete and thorough clean up of our election system. This means no electronic voting, no proprietary software, no outsourcing to any private pols, public funding of candidates, abolition of all money--soft or hard--from lobbies and interest groups. If we only make office available to the richest--and most corrupt--among us, we can expect more corruption, collusion, criminal deeds, and outright fascism. Casting and counting and tabulation of votes must always be open and transparent and performed by citizens. Not suits in service to idealogues with suitcases of cash.

* a first, realistic and sweeping legislative effort to codify the limits of Executive power, overseen by the people and reviewed by the Supreme Court. Bush has gotten away with so much by basically declaring the entire Executive branch one big grey area. No more grey. I expect our legislature to make laws that make limits on Executive power and privilege crystal clear, and that force future executives to abide by clear laws. This Congress needs to declare war on this goddamned reckless administration and fight back now.

* a real effort to limit the extent of control ANY party in power has to put pols in positions of power within our government infrastructure. I'm sorry, it is just not acceptable to have right wing nut jobs in charge of the CDC or the EPA. It is beyond the power of any executive to sabotage our government and our collective systems for caring for one another to the extent that Bush has. It is treason, and it should be treated as such. Every agency of our federal government should be run like any company, with professionals being hired, fired, and advanced according only to merit and professional accomplishment. I'm sorry, but kissing right wing ass is no qualification for heading the entire Federal Emergency Management Agency, and I don't need a Yale MBA to tell me that. It's dispicable how much loss and sheer attrition we've seen happen in the last few years in our government. The Bush Administration has deliberately broken it, and they must pay.