Al Gore

I supported Al Gore in his first campaign for the presidency. I met the man at a reception, listened to his speeches, and campaigned like a dog for him, including participating in taking polls, stuffing envelopes, making get out the vote calls, you name it.

When he was selected as Bill Clinton's running mate, I couldn't have been more thrilled. I thought he made an excellent Vice President.

Again, I supported him against Bush and was devastated when he did not win the Supreme Court decision.

I had written him off as a "goner". I had even gotten to the point that I was being irritated by so many urging him to run again this time.

However, this man who is before us today, this man as represented on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, this man, I could support again.

I don't think he will run again. I'm not sure that I would support him over John Edwards if he did decide to run. I think that if you want to be president, then it must truly burn in your belly, not be something you decide at the last minute to pursue.

However, I would no longer completely rule out the possibility.

Al Gore on The Daily Show, Part 1

Part 2

Don't tell...

Tinkerbell:

At a recent U2 concert in Dublin, Bono asked the audience for total quiet.

Then, in the silence, he started slowly clapping his hands, once every few seconds.

Holding the audience in total silence, he said into the microphone:

"Every toime I clap my hands, a child in Africa doies!"

A voice pierced the quiet from the front of the crowd with a broad Irish accent.

"Well, feckin stop doin it, then!"

Immigration

Recently, I've modified my views on immigration. I've come to the conclusion that the only answer is to actually put illegal immigrants on the fast track to citizenship. In fact, to make citizenship mandatory.

Why? Because once they are citizens, their employers must pay them at least the minimum wage, offer them benefits if their other employees are offered benefits, and they will be required to pay taxes and their medical bills along with the rest of us. All of which will solve the disparities of having so many millions of illegal immigrants in our society.

It's not the "illegality" of their presence that is the problem. The problem is that their status as "illegals" allow them to be both taken advantage of and to take advantage of available services.

So, I was especially interested in this additional Krugman column (excerpt):

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population — in general, the poorest and most in need of help — denied any political voice.

That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn’t have the right to vote. Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully enfranchised working class.

But now we’re living in the second Gilded Age. And as before, one of the things making antiworker, unequalizing policies politically possible is the fact that millions of the worst-paid workers in this country can’t vote. What progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.

Now, the proposed immigration reform does the right thing in principle by creating a path to citizenship for those already here. We’re not going to expel 11 million illegal immigrants, so the only way to avoid having those immigrants be a permanent disenfranchised class is to bring them into the body politic.

h/t Tennessee Guerilla Women

Bush's Betrayal

Paul Krugman, Trust and Betrayal:

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

INTERNATIONAL THINKING AT ITS BEST!

My mother just emailed me this, and ya gotta admit, it's amusing.

What is the truest definition of Globalization?
Answer: Princess Diana's death.
Question: How come?
Answer: An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky, followed closely by Italian Paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines. This is sent to you by an American, using Bill Gate's technology, and you're probably reading this on your computer, that use Taiwanese chips, and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant, transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals..... That, my friends, is Globalization.

What Keith said...

Here.

As for me, I'm sorry to say I was not surprised. I mean, really. Did we expect them to grow a spine? It's just sad. Sad, that just before Memorial Day, our Congress has signed the death warrants of who knows how many more of our soldiers, not to mention civilians, contrary to the wishes of over 70% of the American people, all to appease a spoiled brat who would piss his pants if a watergun were aimed at him by a two year old.

I've never seen my 80-something mother, a devoted lifelong Democrat, ever be so disgusted and enraged with her party and her government.

John Edwards Speech

John Edwards speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:

"As all of you know, we need a new strategy for rebuilding a strong military for a new century.

Any new strategy must include new preventive measures to win the long-term struggle and fuel hope and opportunity. This includes strong and creative diplomacy, and also new efforts to lead the fight against global poverty. I've proposed a plan to lead an international effort to educate every child in the world. As president, I would increase foreign assistance by $5 billion a year to make millions of people safer, healthier, and more democratic, and by creating a cabinet-level post to lead this effort.

Any new strategy must improve how we gather intelligence. From my years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know how difficult this can be. We must always seek to protect our national security by aggressively gathering intelligence in accordance with proven methods.

Yet we cannot do so by abandoning human rights and the rule of law. As two former generals recently wrote in the Washington Post, "If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable ... we drive ... undecideds into the arms of the enemy." And we must avoid actions that will give terrorists or even other nations an excuse to abandon international law.

As president, I will close Guantanamo Bay, restore habeas corpus, and ban torture. Measures like these will help America once again achieve its historic moral stature -- and lead the world toward democracy and peace."

This kind of speech, plus his healthcare plan is why I support Edwards.

Native or Indian?

Okay, I'm still here for the time being and I have a question. American Indian or Native American?

I'm watching Tavis Smiley interview Dick Wolfe on PBS and he just said that that the "politically correct" terminology was now American Indian instead of Native American.

Who says so? When did this happen? He says it's settled because the Smithsonian opened a museum named The Museum of the American Indian.

So what? I'm part Cherokee and part Catawba and I'm sure that my great(+)grandmothers had nothing whatsoever to do with the West Indies, or India.

I don't know that either offends me personally, however, we are referring to peoples native to the continents of the America's, so Native American simply sounds more correct.

Sorry, folks, but I am dealing with serious issues surrounding my illness and the devastating financial repercussions ensuing from this most rich of all nations inability to provide healthcare for it's citizens in need.

The only bright spot in my life right now is that my doctor is attempting to get me into a National Institute of Health clinical trial which will pay my transportation to Bethesda and resultant medical care.

So, since it is believed that I am suffering from one of the rarest diseases in the world, there is, at least, that.

Vote Democratic!

And don't lose me. I will return again. When, I cannot say.

Here are a few bits to chew on...

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it. Andre Weil, (1906 -?) In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Adieu, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1977.

I don't believe in mathematics. Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) Quoted by Carl Seelig. Albert Einstein.

Suppose we loosely define a religion as any discipline whose foundations rest on an element of faith, irrespective of any element of reason which may be present. Quantum mechanics for example would be a religion under this definition. But mathematics would hold the unique position of being the only branch of theology possessing a rigorous demonstration of the fact that it should be so classified. F. De Sua, (1956) In H. Eves In Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1969.

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us consider the two possibilities. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Hesitate not, then, to wager that He is.Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) Pensees. 1670.

The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it. Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) In N. Rose Mathematical Maxims and Minims, Raleigh NC:Rome Press Inc., 1988.

In my opinion, a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy -- an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers. Henri Lebesgue, (1875 - 1941) Scientific American, 211, September 1964, p. 129.

Why I am not an atheist

I am not an atheist because I am not arrogant enough to think that I am so wise as to know that God does not exist.

Ever since I posted on Pascal's Gambit (or Wager) I have found numerous references to it in forums and on blogs, etc. Usually it is being used by atheists in various ways, always claiming it to be fallacious or easily refutable or otherwise faulty. However, in order to do so, they invariably change Pascal's assumptions to suit their purpose and then declare "Eureka! Wager disproved!"

It doesn't work that way, folks.

For it is based on certain assumptions, and one primary assumption is that God is good and rewards believers with heaven and punishes non-believers with hell.

You cannot change the assumptions in order to disprove the wager.

However, you can think of it this way:

If you believe in God, and he does exist, when you die, God does whatever he wants to do with you, and the possibilities are infinite.

If you believe in God, and he does not exist, then nothing happens, and the possibilities are nil.

If you do not believe in God, and he does exist, when you die, God still does whatever he wants to do with you, and the possibilities are still infinite.

If you do not believe in God and he does not exist, then nothing happens, and the possibilities are still nil.

Either way, the odds are always in favor of the House (or God), because our belief or non-belief in him has no bearing whatsoever on his existence or non-existence. If he exists, he holds all the cards.

If you are turned off, or disillusioned by the Christian God concept because of fundamentalists or whatever, that's fine. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what form of God we're talking about here. An active, prescient God who directs us all in everything we do. An inactive, detached God who set everything in motion and then disengaged. A good God who has a nifty little heaven set up for all believers and a nasty little hell set up for all non-believers. A God who transforms us into another reincarnated being after death. A God who does nothing whatsoever with us once our time here on earth is finished.

IT JUST DOES NOT MATTER, PEOPLE. Whatever you think, whatever you believe, whatever you've been taught, whatever you've read, whatever you've envisioned or prophetized or proselytized, it JUST DOES NOT MATTER.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND? You, me, the preacher, the priest, the rabbi, the master, the bodisattva... we are all just little bitty human beings running around on a teeny tiny planet in a gi-normous, unending Universe and it does not matter what we believe.

We don't know that there is not a God. We don't know that there is a God. God doesn't flicker on and off like a neon light depending on what one little human is thinking one second as compared to what another little human is thinking the next second.

God either exists or not. What we think has no bearing on his existence. Just because you imagine there is a God does not make God materialize. Just because you think there is no God does not make God disappear.

If there is a God, when you die, God will do with you whatever he will.
If there is no God, when you die, then nothing will happen.

I've studied Buddhism pretty extensively, and the problem I have with reincarnation is that something has to set that in motion which means that there would have to be a God. And, if there is a God, then he may or may not reincarnate you because it will be his choice what to do and he will do as he will. So, you can have no true assurance of reincarnation.

No matter how well educated you may be, or how intelligent, or how knowledgeble, you, my friend, are not all-knowing.

You can feel self-assured all you want, but you can have no assurance of anything except that one day you will die and on that day, and not until that day, you will know the truth.

Intact dilation and extraction

is what the media has allowed to become better known as "partial birth abortion" in support of those whose agenda is against the health of living women and for unborn fetuses, whose use by medical professionals has been outlawed and upheld by the Supreme Court today.

What does this mean? It means that physicians will now induce labor so that these fetuses will be expelled vaginally, or will perform cesarians.

Both of which are much more harmful for the living woman, but will achieve the same effect ultimately.

John Prine

will be on Austin City Limits Saturday night at 11pm. Just a note to myself if no one else. I love John Prine.


Artist: John Prine
Song: Jesus the missing years
Album: The Missing Years
[" The Missing Years " CD]

(spoken)
Jesus.... the missing years

It was raining. It was cold
West Bethlehem was no place for a twelve year old
So he packed his bags and he headed out
To find out what the world's about
He went to France. He went to Spain
He found love. He found pain.
He found stores so he started to shop
But he had no money so he got in trouble with a cop
Kids in trouble with the cops
From Israel didn't have no home
So he cut his hair and moved to Rome
It was there he met his Irish bride
And they rented a flat on the lower east side of Rome...
Italy that is
Music publishers, book binders, Bible belters, Money Changers,
Spoon Benders and lots of pretty Italian chicks.

Chorus:
Charley bought some popcorn
Billy bought a car
Someone almost bought the farm
But they didn't go that far
Things shut down at midnight
At least around here they do
Cause we all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.

Wine was flowing so were beers
So Jesus found his missing years
So He went to a dance and said "This don't move me"
He hiked up his pants and he went to a movie
On his thirteenth birthday he saw "Rebel without a Cause"
He went straight on home and invented Santa Claus
Who gave him a gift and he responded in kind
He gave the gift of love and went out of his mind
You see him and the wife wasn't getting along
So he took out his guitar and he wrote a song
Called "The Dove of Love Fell Off the Perch"
But he couldn't get divorced in the Catholic Church
At least not back then anyhow
Jesus was a good guy he didn't need this shit
So he took a pill with a bag of peanuts and
A Coca-Cola and he swallowed it.
He discovered the Beatles
And he recorded with the Stones
Once He even opened up a three-way package
In Southern California for old George Jones

Repeat Chorus:

The years went by like sweet little days
With babies crying pork chops and beaujolais
When he woke up he was seventeen
The world was angry. The world was mean.
Why the man down the street and the kid on the stoop
All agreed that life stank. All the world smelled like poop
Baby poop that is ..the worst kind
So he grew his hair long and thew away his comb
And headed back to Jerusalem to find Mom, Dad and home
But when he got there the cupboard was bare
Except for an old black man with a fishing rod
He said "Whatcha gonna be when you grow up?"
Jesus said "God"
Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?
I'm a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood
They're gonna kill me Mama. They don't like me Bud.
So Jesus went to Heaven and he went there awful quick
All them people killed him and he wasn't even sick
So come and gather around me my contemporary peers
And I'll tell you all the story of
Jesus...The Missing Years

Repeat Chorus:

We all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.

In Memoriam

To life.

Oh, yeah, we're safe...

I know all the facts are not in yet, but I think the incompetence of the Blacksburg, VA police is self evident.

What a total fuck up! I wouldn't even trust them to find all the bodies.

I would say that the FBI should have been sent in by noon, at least, if I even thought the FBI were competent enough under this administration to do a decent job.

What does the Department of Homeland Security do, exactly? Our largest universities apparently haven't even gotten a memo about how to provide security on enormous campuses, even against a lone gunman.

They send emails? EMAILS???? How ridiculous is that?

How about a bloody, fucking siren?!? Just a simple, low tech siren that sounds to alert everyone to get into a room somewhere and lock the g*ddamned door! Maybe a different sounding alarm to alert everyone to vacate the buildings in case of a bomb threat?

Is that too complicated to fathom?

Not only was this act unconscionable, the response was, also.

In Defense of Hip Hop

Frank Zappa on Crossfire

Yeah, I can't believe I'm about to defend Hip Hop either. Or rap. Or any of the truly misogynist crap that passes for it. Personally, I never listen to either. Still, I gotta say that I'm with Snoop Dogg.

It is musical artistic expression. I don't like it, but I recognize it as art. It is profoundly anti-American to censor art in any way, shape or form. It is a violation of the First Amendment, clearly, to censorship art.

Don Imus, Glenn Beck, or any other political, cultural or other commenter does not qualify as artistic expression. They do have Freedom of Speech, but Freedom of Speech does not allow defamation, libel or slander of specific individuals. Which is what occurred in the Imus situation. Too bad, so sad. I would not have accepted his apology until I received a check from my libel suit.

Music lyrics which do not defame, libel or slander specific individuals are protected under the 1st Amendment. One can speak out against it, one can boycott it, one can protest it, but one cannot censor it.

Otherwise, I'll let Zappa have his say.

Kurt Vonnegut

November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007

Goodbye and rest in peace, my favorite contemporary author.

As a memoriam, of sorts, below is re-published poputonian's post from Digby's Hullabaloo:

"Last year, Vonnegut published another best-seller, this one called A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut's humor will make you laugh, but his fatalism will make you cry. In typical Vonnegut fashion, the points he makes throughout the book are woven together with the flair of a creative writer. The two main complaints he emphasizes are unmistakable: the senseless killing being perpetrated by America, and America's addiction to fossil fuel. America is destroying the planet, which leads Vonnegut to reject the country he once fought for.

Overall the book is about politics, government, and philosophy, but on its sweeter side it is about people and family, about community. It might well be his best work ever. At one point in the book, Vonnegut describes how children learn to be creative, or how they came to use their brains to think and imagine; no sounds, no pictures, just thinking and imagining:

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892, if you were a seven-year-old, you'd read a story--just a very simple one--about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn't that make you want to cry? Don't you know how the little girl feels? And you'd read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn't that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses.

(snip) Have you ever served in a war? Have you ever been held captive? Vonnegut was an American prisoner of war, held in captivity in Dresden, Germany on February 13, 1945. That was the night the British intentionally massacred 135,000 people. Killed them all dead, in one night.

It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little POW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it.

Of course, as prisoners of war, we dealt hands-on with dead Germans, digging them out of basements because they had suffocated there, and taking them to a huge funeral pyre. And I heard -- I didn't see it done -- that they gave up this procedure because it was too slow and, of course, the city was starting to smell pretty bad. And they sent in guys with flamethrowers.

Why my fellow prisoners of war and I weren't killed, I don't know.

I was a writer in 1968. I was a hack. I'd write anything to make money, you know. And what the hell, I'd seen this thing, I'd been through it, and so I was going to write a hack book about Dresden. You know, the kind that would be made into a movie where Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and others would play us. I tried to write, but I couldn't get it right. I kept writing crap.

So I went to a friend's house -- Bernie O'Hare, who'd been my pal. And we were trying to remember funny stuff about our time as prisoners of war in Dresden, tough talk and all that, stuff that would make a nifty war movie. And his wife, Mary O'Hare, blew her stack. She said, "You were nothing but babies then."

And that is true of soldiers. They are in fact babies. They are not movies stars. They are not Duke Wayne. And realizing that was key, I was finally free to tell the truth. We were children and the subtitle of Slaughterhouse Five became The Children's Crusade.

Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O'Hare was saying, in effect, was, "Why don't you tell the truth for a change?"

Ernest Hemingway wrote a story after the First World War called "A Soldier's Home" about how it was very rude to ask a soldier what he'd seen when he got back home. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

But I think the Vietnam War freed me and other writers, because it made our leadership and our motives seem so scruffy and essentially stupid. We could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.

Of course, another reason to talk about war is that it's unspeakable.

I can sense the brain circuits of the right-wingers, or the flag conservatives, or the authoritarian followers, as they try to process Vonnegut's words: Just how courageous was he in battle? Prove it. Did he have any serious injuries, or just superficial ones? Did he have the right attitude, that of a soldier dedicated to his country? Does Vonnegut think any war is worth fighting; is the Constitution worth fighting for?

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!"

Outrageous, I say!

Secretary of Defense Gates is outraged at the "hardship" that was caused to servicemen and their families by someone leaking the Iraqi tour extension to 15 months.

Yeah, right. It was the leak of the information that causes the hardship.

Not the 3 month extension.

The hypocrisy of this administration knows no bounds.

The inhumanity of this administration knows no bounds.