Politics or Poppycock

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Archive for November 11th, 2008

Plotting Bush’s Undoing

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com

Monday, November 10, 2008; 12:48 PM

It looks like the Obama White House won’t be wasting any time when it comes to rolling back the Bush agenda.

Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith write in Sunday’s Washington Post: “Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

“A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition. Read the rest of this entry »

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Obama’s Cabinet: Start With Al Gore

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Washington Post

If there is a single appointment Barack Obama could make to signal how dramatically things will change in Washington, it would be to name Albert Gore Jr. — former House member, former senator, former vice president, former presidential nominee and current Custodian of the Planet — as secretary of state. For all the other aspirants to the job, sorry — this is an inconvenient truth.

Can you imagine a bolder statement about a new direction when it comes to global warming and the general care of our abused planet? Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in this area (and an Oscar, to boot), and his appointment would signal a dramatic shift from the indifference of the Bush era with its cold shoulder to the Kyoto treaty. In one stroke, the United States would emerge as the leader of nations in the effort to save the planet from ourselves — and could prepare for the consequences of a changed world. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Energy Challenge of Our Lifetime

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 10, 2008.
Of all the challenges facing President Obama, none is likely to prove as daunting, or important to the

future of this nation, as that of energy.

Of all the challenges facing President Barack Obama next January, none is likely to prove as daunting, or important to the future of this nation, as that of energy. After all, energy policy — so totally mishandled by the outgoing Bush-Cheney administration — figures in each of the other major challenges facing the new president, including the economy, the environment, foreign policy, and our Middle Eastern wars. Most of all, it will prove a monumental challenge because the United States faces an energy crisis of unprecedented magnitude that is getting worse by the day.
The U.S. needs energy — lots of it. Day in and day out, this country, with only 5% of the world’s population, consumes one quarter of the world’s total energy supply. About 40% of our energy comes from oil: some 20 million barrels, or 840 million gallons a day. Another 23% comes from coal, and a like percentage from natural gas. Providing all this energy to American consumers and businesses, even in an economic downturn, remains a Herculean task, and will only grow more so in the years ahead. Addressing the environmental consequences of consuming fossil fuels at such levels, all emitting climate-altering greenhouse gases, only makes this equation more intimidating.
As President Obama faces our energy problem, he will have to address three overarching challenges: Read the rest of this entry »

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Al Franken Continues to Narrow the Gap in Minnesota

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly at 5:28 AM on November 11, 2008.

Long story short: Franken has a pretty good shot at coming out on top.

It’s tough to walk away from obsessive interest in campaign coverage cold turkey, isn’t it? Fortunately, we have some fascinating, unresolved Senate races, which are akin to nicotine patches.

With that in mind, what’s the latest out of Minnesota? The gap gets narrower all the time.

Al Franken’s deficit just keeps on shrinking as the state adjusts the unofficial tally in the U.S. Senate election last week.

Today’s latest results show the DFL challenger is now trailing Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by 204 votes. That’s down from 221 over the weekend.

As of 12:10 p.m., Coleman has 1,211,560 votes to Franken’s 1,211,356. Read the rest of this entry »

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This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say ‘Stop the War’

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

By Benjamin Lewis and Brandon Neely, AlterNet. Posted November 11, 2008.

An open letter from war resisters calls for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On this day, Veteran’s Day, we would like to express to the American public why we, veterans of the Global War on Terror, have chosen to refuse orders to reactivate into military service. We are direct witnesses to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and we have decided that we can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies.

We believe that veterans and active-duty GIs are in a key position to stop illegal and unjust war, and we are inspired by the resistance of troops who stood against the war in Vietnam. One of the preeminent reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was increasing dissent among the active-duty troops stationed abroad and at home. By the end of the war, there were entire units refusing to participate in combat, many going as far as outright mutiny.

The United States learned a lesson from the Vietnam War: that it is unlikely, except in the event of self-defense, that regular civilians will execute the life-threatening orders that are given to them by military authority. The solution of policy makers was to create an all-volunteer force that negated the need for a draft. This translates into a mercenary force composed of America’s disadvantaged: a sector of the U.S. demographic that is particularly susceptible to military recruitment for lack of other options and finding themselves with deployment orders again and again. Read the rest of this entry »

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Impeach Bush Before He Pardons Himself

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

According to Seymour Hersh there is a conga line of insiders waiting until January 20th to spill the beans on the gross criminality of the Bush/Cheney administration.  Waiting .  .  .  because if they did it now the two of them would be tarred and feathered on the way out the door.

But we the people do not have to wait.  We can and must demand the immediate impeachment of both Bush and Cheney for what is already known.  At the very least the defiance of congressional subpoenas at the behest of the White House is an open and shut case for accountability now.

Impeach Now Action Page:  http://www.usalone.com/impeach_now.php

Because as his final constitutional insult, his final spit in the face to the American people and all rule of law, it is transparently obvious that Bush is planning the most wholesale and wrongful pardon of the worst political criminals in American history, his whole criminal gang, INCLUDING himself.

And don’t think that is not their precise plan.  Please, what power has Bush NOT abused?  What heinous, self-serving, shameless and dishonest act has he ever shied away from, when he was torturing and eavesdropping and lying us into wars of corporate aggression.  Does anyone doubt that is what he is planning on doing?

And when you submit this action page, you will have one last chance to get one of the “Impeach Both!!!” caps, which after January 20th will no longer be available from us for love or for money.

Impeach Now Action Page:  http://www.usalone.com/impeach_now.php

Will Congress now act?  That is not the yardstick of the worth of our activism.  We speak out because we must speak out, whether we are heeded or not.  Let history record that we spoke out until the last minute to the eternal shame of those who did not.  Because when enough of us speak out at once, the worst thing that can possibly happen is that we are building the progressive base for the REAL change of the future.

So Bush most certainly is planning on pardoning himself.  And all the right wing lock down ideologues in the corporate controlled media will call it “healing”.  Let’s all make nice with war criminals?  Shall we all make nice with the gang rape of our economy, our environment and our Constitution?  We think not.

And one more thing.  You know that come January 20th the right wing will start calling for the impeachment of our new president, over a endless litany of the most ridiculous of trivial trifles.  In fact it has already started even though he has not even taken office.  If they are so hot on impeaching someone, let them speak out now, when it truly is called for, or shut the hell up in 73 days.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

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America Is a Center-Left Country No Matter How Much the Corporate Media Say Otherwise

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted November 10, 2008.

Outside of a few social issues, Americans are firmly in the

progressive camp, but that hasn’t prevented a lot of bloviating to

the contrary.

The American people are center-left (or at least firmly in the center) on the primary matters over which government presides: taxation and debt, public services, the regulation of the economy and America’s role in the world.

But that hasn’t stopped a lot of bloviating to the contrary. Only moments after the networks declared Barack Obama the winner of a dramatic realignment election, William Bennett, the conservative icon, declared on CNN that “America is still a center-right nation, no matter what anybody says.”

Implied was that it also didn’t matter what exit polls, mountains of public opinion data, shifts in partisan identification and changes in the country’s demographics say. That stuff’s apparently for the “reality-based” community to worry about.

Reality: an Election Day poll by the Center for American Progress and the Campaign for America’s Future asked whether Republicans had lost because they were too conservative or not conservative enough. By a twenty point margin, voters chose “too conservative”, including independents who agreed by a 21 point margin. Seven out of ten said they wanted the Republicans to work with Obama and “help him achieve his plans,” while fewer than a quarter of respondents thought the GOP should try to keep him from implementing a progressive agenda. Read the rest of this entry »

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The final statistical breakdown

Posted by James O'Rourke on November 11, 2008

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By Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart

(Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart are the authors of “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes)

November 9, 2008

NOW THAT the voting tally is in, we at Statitronics are getting down to analyzing the real numbers: Who actually voted for Barack Obama? What are their do-or-die interests? Whose president is Obama anyhow?

It’s not all black and white, gay and straight, the disabled and the non-disabled. It goes far deeper than that, straight into the heart of Niche America.

The numbers:

Surprisingly, plumbers named Joe preferred Senator Obama by a margin of five to one. Unfortunately, this statistic was not captured in 2004. It should be noted, however, that car salesmen named Smiling Al voted overwhelmingly for President Bush that year.

Although it is clear that the composite nonwhite-gay-disabled voter polled 100,000 to 1 for Obama (the sole outlier being Sandy Gomez, a one-armed Hispanic cross-dresser who hit it big with his Palin routine), white straight voters with at least two arms also favored Obama, 51.638 percent of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

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