12/30/2008:   Only 21 more days of the Bush regime.
Only 3 more weeks of the worst president in history.
In less than a month we'll finally, FINALLY, break Bush's grip on the highest seat in the world, and at least the continual and gradual acceleration of pure, evil, insanity will finally begin to slow and reverse course.

I can hardly wait.

12/30/2008:   Okay, so Hamas fired rockets into Jewish settlements. Israel had every right to react. But now we've got one of the mightiest militaries in the world pounding a bunch of irritated guys with rocks and garage-sale rocket launchers and indiscriminately killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Several Arab states have beseeched the United Nations to use their political might to pressure Israel to stop the bombing.

I think there's a very real danger for the United Nations and the United States in not responding or, in response, deciding to do nothing as a means of siding with Israel. The Palestinians need to be convinced that Hamas will never give them peace and to force Hamas to submit to the will of the people and allow peace to happen. Israel needs to allow that process to occur. Everyone needs to stand down, and typically the big guy stands down first. And if the United Nations does not act, what use is it? This is a dire situation, and the relevance of the U.N. going forward will be defined in how it reacts to the pleas of the nations surrounding the war.

It's not enough to ask Bush to do his job; it's not enough to wait three more weeks for Obama to take over and hope he's effective where Bush was useless. There are innocent people dying, life-long hatreds birthing, fanatacism growing. The United Nations has to act now, act decisively, and stop the violence immediately, even if that means putting in ground troops. The world needs to make its voice heard. Hamas brokered the violence, but both sides need to stop the escalation.

12/29/2008:   Chip Saltsman, Republican congressman and racist, distributed a music CD among the party faithful for Christmas entitled "We Hate The USA" and which contained the song "Barack the Magic Negro."

For Christmas!

While the RNC leadership scrambled to distance themselves from him, Saltsman excused the CD as "political satire." He thought it was funny, and figured the rest of the anti-PC (code for "racist") sheep would think it was funny too.

The sad part is, he's probably right. The Republican Party has become the safe harbor for racists, misogynists, nationalists, and fascists. And yes, I actually do know what each of those words means and I'm using them on purpose, thank you.

I applaud Michigan RNC chairman Saul Anuzis for stating, "...Anything that paints the GOP as being motivated in our criticism of President-elect Obama by anything other than a difference in philosophy does a disservice to our party," but if you think that the RNC as a whole is taking the "right" stance, you're wrong. All it takes is the allure of power and greed for political currency that has Ken Blackwell, a candidate for party chairman, to pretend that, as a black man, he's not completely offended by what the song represents. He said, "When looked at in the proper context, these concerns are minimal. All of my competitors for this leadership post are fine people."

Um, no. Racists are not fine people. Sorry. Your attempt to suck up is transparent.

"When looked at in the proper context." When you squint up your eyes real tight after having a whole bunch of beers and moonshine with your hunting buddies, sitting on the tailgate of your 4x4 truck with the gunrack, the Confederate flag painted on top, and a set of rubber testicles hanging off the hitch, I'll bet it seems real funny. If you're a racist, that is. Because no matter how hard you squint, no matter where you're from, no matter what your sensitivities, to pretend that Sarah Palin was qualified to step in as president following McCain's demise and at the same time pretending that Obama only got elected because he's a "magic Negro" is racist.

Go ahead. I want see someone squint hard enough to make that funny. I've never seen someone's eyes shoot out their ears before..

12/29/2008:   "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."

12/29/2008:   A while back, Electrasol ran a commercial in which a woman takes a plate with an entire cake on it, puts it the dishwasher, and turns it on. Flash forward, she removes the sparkling clean plate. I partially credit this commercial with the rationale my kids use when they stick plates with various foods into the dishwasher. Right now, as I write this, they are in the kitchen digging pale chunks of bacon, noodles, and other unidentifiable globs of muck from the bottom of my dishwasher. It's true, it's a Maytag, arguably the worst manufacturer of junk kitchen appliances in history, but that's not why my dishes aren't getting clean.

So now that they've cleaned the pale, flacid chunks of waste, I've explained to them that the Electrasol commercial was a LIE, that food doesn't go into the dishwasher, and that from now on cleaning the bottom of the dishwasher will be a regularly scheduled Saturday morning chore. They put food in, they can dig food out. Simple.

Thanks Electrasol, you freakin' jerks...

12/29/2008:   Over one billion gallons of toxic post-processing sludge have polluted 300 acres, wiped out 15 homes, and poisoned two rivers after a retaining wall failed and allowed a lake of retained ash to spill.

While the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) gave a patriotic press release about taking responsibility and cleaning up the mess, they are trying desperately to spin the damage, claiming that mounds of dead fish along the river have nothing whatsoever to do with the spill or the heavy metals, including mercury, and arsenic found in the affected river water.

If I lived anywhere near there, I'd move. Period. Screw the housing market, I'd get my family out of there and deal with the financial consequences later. Even if you buy bottled water for your home, publicly accessible sources of water at schools, parks, and businesses are outside your control and quite likely derived from the water tables under that town, which will be soaking up and concentrating the arsenic from the spill for years to come.

But my point in writing about this is simple: Coal isn't clean. It isn't clean to mine, process, burn, or dispose of. There is nothing clean about using coal to generate power. You'd have to have a super-sealed straw to suck it out of the ground, total usage of the extracted product, 100% carbon sequestration during energy release, and pushing the post product back through the same super-sealed straw back into the ground in order for coal to truly be clean or "green". And since that simply won't happen, coal is a dirty form of energy. Nuff said.

I don't recall any toxic fallout from solar or wind power. None. I know that certain chemicals are used in the production of certain types of solar cells, but the chemicals can be recycled almost indefinitely, not all solar cells use those production processes, and not all solar power is derived from conversion cells.

When I picture a safe, clean, well powered future for my kids, coals just doesn't figure in.

12/29/2008:   Section 8 of the original $700 billion bank mortgage bail-out covers review of decisions made by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reads: "Decision by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency descretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

So he wanted to legally do what Bush et al have been doing illegally for the last 8 years -- he wants to spend obscene amounts of money without oversight on anything and everything he wants. Without oversight, he could buy the mortgage on his NYC condo. He could buy up the mortgages of all the top contributors to the GOP without getting authorization or giving justification. Isn't that nice?

The Democrats slapped him in the back of the head and removed that section, of course. But I bring it up because this is the mindset of the administration that's on its way out, even after they've completely screwed up the economy and screwed future generations with the staggering debt load they've created.

Imagine if someone convinced a huge bank to loan him enough money to buy all of Las Vegas. Was it a necessary purchase? Or even a wise investment? And then he pulls all of the money out of the casinos, pockets it, then turns to the bank and says, "My casinos are failing. I can't make my mortgage payment. I'll tax the citizens of Las Vegas and cut their services for the next 100 years to pay off the loan." That's kind of what Bush has done. He made horrific choices that the citizens of the U.S. didn't want him to make, he borrowed ungodly amounts of money to finance those decisions, he made sure he and his elite "base" got rich, and now he's walking away from it all.

It's a great gig if you can get it.

And now the liquidator has to come in and set things straight. It's going to be ugly, and he's not going to be popular with most people for a while, but if he does the job right, he'll save this country from receivership.

There were never any WMDs in Iraq.
No links to Al Qaeda.
No ties to 9/11.
Bush, Cheney, and Condie lied to you.
You ignored the facts.
You re-elected a liar and a murderer by proxy.
But now it's time to show your support for the troops.

12/29/2008:   Condoleeza Rice was quoted as saying that the people will soon "start to thank this president for what he's done."

If by "thank" she means "arrest for war crimes and violations of the Constitution," then yes, I would have to agree...

There is a particularly onerous brand of koolaid being distributed by the GOP and aggressively pushed by the Bush cabinet, and it goes something like this: "Bush did what he did for our own good, and we're just too dumb to see it right now." Rice refuted the statements of diplomats, world leaders, and citizens of the world that the United States' image has suffered and that we are generally disliked the world over. She stated that animosity is her measure of success.

And if other people's hatred of the United States and her personally is the metric she's using, than she and the administration she served must seem like a smashing success!

She didn't comment directly on how history might view Bush's economic failures, but she did say that after Bush is out of office, she intended to return to the Hoover Institution at Stanford to try to rewrite history with a couple of books. The Hoover Institution. As in Herbert Hoover. How appropriate...

12/19/2008:   "The Republican Revolution has been erased."

Talk about an early Christmas present. Those words were spoken by CNN's Bill Schneider. I hated Gingrich for his pay-to-play corruption of the federal legislature and his bald faced greed for political and hard currency. He bent our Congress to the will of the elite ideologues, and for 16 long years we've felt the effects of that power grab. The abuses of power, the gerrymandering of districts, the oppression of the minority party and thereby its consituents, the Congressional and popular polarization, the flaunting of the spirit of the Constitution itself; all these were not just unfortunate consequences, but the actual aims and goals of the "Contract On America."

Republicans lost a total of 52 seats in the House over the last two elections (21 this year, 31 in '06). And as soon as Al Franken is declared the winner of the still running Minnesota Senate race, Congress can settle into the job erasing the effects of the "Republican Devolution".

Senator Lamar Alexander excuses the poor standing of his party with the warm and fuzzy fallback line, "We have had a failure of imagination." What crap. Lammy, you've had a failure of ethics, and failure of priority, a failure of patriotism, a failure of humantiy, a failure of equality, a failure of fairness, and a failure of your moral compass. But NEVER has the GOP had a failure of imagination. They have been HIGHLY imaginative in their efforts to rob Americans now and in future generations in order to serve themselves and their elite base. So screw you, Lammy, and you imagination malfunction.

12/19/2008:   Scott Ritter was lambasted for blowing the whistle on the Iraq War. He explained to the best of his ability to spread the word that there were no nukes in Iraq, no chemical weapons, no connection with al Qaeda. He was excoriated on Fox News, called a traitor by Bill O, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

And he was right. He was an expert on the subject and he wasn't a liar. Why did the right wing koolaid drinkers go to such lengths to nail him to the cross?

Because that's how they make their money. They'll say anything that gets their followers' blood boiling because they've figured out that there are millions of idiots in the country who enjoy nothing more than calling intellectuals names. They want to be told that the smart guys are really stupid after all. They want to hear that Saddam and Al Qaeda were buddies, that Iraq had nukes, that global warming isn't real, that African descendents are mentally and socially inferior, that colleges turn people into pansy communists, that evolution is wrong, that cutting down all the forests and strip mining every inch of earth is ecologically healthy, that cigarettes don't cause cancer, that beer is really good for you, that more guns make society safer, that homosexuality is a choice, that the world's resources are infinite, that the earth is flat, and that God is going to save us all from the liberals and Islamofascists Real-Soon-Now.

Scott Ritter is a patriot. He stood up publicly, loudly, and exposed the lies the Bush administration used to convince Congress, the American people, and the United Nations, that Iraq needed to be invaded, committing us to a bloody, endless occupation. Scott Ritter should receive the Medal of Freedom for his efforts to make the truth known.

The following people voted against the Constitution, against the Fourth Amendment, against your rights, freedoms, liberties, and protections. A version of the FISA reform bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that broke the law at the president's behest and gives the president the ability to grant immunity without oversight or further authorization, has passed the United States House of Representatives on Friday, June 20th, 2008. These are the people that voted for that measure. Included among them are Democrats that have betrayed their constituencies, including my own Jerry McNerney. Let us not forget these traitors at election time.