We've fallen a long way from the noble ideals that our founding fathers believed in and fought to realize. They conceived of a nation unlike any other that had existed in the history of the societies of man. Their dream was a nation governed by the people; where each individual would have the freedom to pursue the life of their choosing. They imagined that this freedom alone would inspire every citizen to take responsibility for realizing their own dreams. It was not wrong for them to imagine this, because they lived in a world where a normal life was a life of hard work for someone else's benefit. To think that people might refuse to work for their own benefit was not a concept they would have easily understood. And so, in the beginning, we were a revolution in liberty and Democracy.   Read More »

It irritates me that I can't send a PM, but oh well.

Here's a question. I know the whole long history of how you are going to vote, and WHY you are going to vote that way.

My question is this. What's a good subject that you would REALLY like to see me write about? You know I got spare time the next several days. So what's worth really talking about here?

In my last year of university, I took a public speaking class (mostly for fun). One of the topics I chose for speaking on was Genealogy. The opening of that speech is something I'm going to re-use here.

When you live in a small town and someone wants to know who you are, how do you tell them? If someone hasn't met you, and wants to know you, they don't want to know your name is Anne and you have two cats and your favorite color is green. They want to know who your dad is, and who your grandfather was, and who your uncles and aunts and great uncles are. You name your family, your pedigree. Knowing my grandfathers and great grandfathers names tells the people in this small town what they need to know: who raised me and what values they instilled in me. When I say "I'm Warren Riden's granddaughter", what it means is that my family is honest, and they are people who work hard. It means my grandfather fought the Nazis in France, and my dad went to college and studied math. We'll fight for our country, we've never gotten in any trouble, and we're smart. When someone asks who I am, what they really mean is: where did I come from?   Read More »

I. Have. Had. It.

I'm sick to bleeding DEATH of hearing the couple of neocons prancing around this site pretending to be angry Democratic women talking about how women have been screwed over, ignored, belittled, berated, pushed aside, discriminated against, victimized, and had their hopes and dreams trampled on by the party.

GAAAAAHHHHHH.

Look. What EXACTLY do you think Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey and Donna Brazile are? MEN? COME ON!!!!! Right up until the end, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were almost in a dead tie. You wanna tell me that all the women who voted for Barack don't matter? Oh, wait. Yea, that's exactly what you want to tell me.

Well, I just want to go on record here for EVERYONE who plans later today to talk about how badly women have been treated. (Guys, you might wanna skip over this.)

I AM A WOMAN. I have a uterus which has carried and birthed two beautiful children. I have breastfed those children. I have stretchmarks. Joy. I have ovaries, which despite my insistance that it is really no longer NECESSARY, continue to release an egg every month, which then causes me to have cramps, swelling, irritability, and bleeding every month. It's a great time. I have to spend 90% of my time feeling guilty about eating because the tabloids shove Angelina Jolie's 97 lb frame into my face and tell my I'm ugly because I don't look like that. I have to put up with men who are sexist. But WORSE STILL is that there are women who are "feminists" constantly telling me that they know what I want and what is best for me. Here's my answer to everyone. SHUT UP AND GET OUT OF MY FACE.

I AM a woman. I DO make my own choices. And me and my ovaries and uterus and breasts and stretchmarks and college degree and PMS and diet ALL plan to vote for Barack Obama.

According to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), climate change will likely lead to an increase in extreme weather in the United States. That means more droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes. Not good.

We hope to alert 100,000 people to this NOAA report within the next 48 hours. If each of us tells 5 people, that's within easy reach. Please use our tell-a-friend tool to help educate your friends and family about this critical issue.   Read More »

Everyone knows this is election season.

But there's another season that starts today: Hurricane Season, 2008.

Everyone remember that movie Al Gore did? Something about Inconvenience? Hurricanes are pretty inconvenient. Right now Hurricane Boris is tracking through the Pacific off the Southern coast of California and not hurting anyone. Boris's track, if unchanged, will put it in Honolulu around mid July.... but the Pacific's a big ocean. Tropical storm Christina is getting ready to go hurricane level, and there's another depression off the western coast of Africa that will get a name sometime tomorrow... David or Daniel or something. The point is they're coming. Already.

Are we ready?

a new study in the journal Nature found that hurricanes and typhoons have become stronger and longer-lasting over the past 30 years. These upswings correlate with a rise in sea surface temperatures.

The duration and strength of hurricanes have increased by about 50 percent over the last three decades, according to study author Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Full Article   Read More »

You guys gotta love this comment. Read it and weep for us all.

Here's just a lovely comment on another post.

I got an email this morning to check this post. Posted at 11:30 pm on the 26th.

There are a few people who read it and commented and argued here in this post. I think it needs pointing out so that more people can go in and read.

I've left my comment on the subject at the bottom of the post, brand new this morning.

Thanks

A gentle reminder of what the OTHER choice is really like.

What does McCain really think of Senator Clinton

If you're considering either actively voting for John "I support the Bush policy of preemptive war" McCain, or just passively stating that you hate Barack Obama and HOPE that the young Chicago politician does not become POTUS, then I submit to you that you don't actually give a rat's ass about your freedom of speech. Yes, I said rat's ass in a main blog, because for now, I CAN say that. If Barack Obama loses the GE in November to John "It's not important when the troops come home" McCain, then there are a lot of things that we might not be able to say any more.

Here are just a few of the things you WON'T be able to say once President McCain is in office.
"Doctor, I want to terminate this pregnancy."
"My same sex life partner and I are planning our wedding."
"Now that the war is over, my son is coming home."
"Thank God we can afford gas now that the war is over."

It goes on and on.... but those examples aren't even the tip of the iceberg.

Ever heard of a FREE SPEECH ZONE?   Read More »

there was darkness and a void, and the world was without form. And the Republicans were in charge. There was great evil in the darkness. Voices whispered "WMD" and "Mission Accomplished" and "No child left behind" and "Patriot Act" .... and there was chaos upon the land and all the living creatures of the sky and of the land and of the water.

And then Howard Dean spoke out against the darkness and said, "Let us prepare for the next election." And there was light.   Read More »

Over $507,000,000,000 in 8 years, leading to a national deficit and a recession.

According to John McCain's website:

"A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq. John McCain agrees with retired Army General Jack Keane that there are simply not enough American forces in Iraq."

It's going to get a lot more expensive.

"The most consistent short-term economic effect of war is to push up prices, and consequently to reduce living standards. This war-induced inflation was described in ancient China by the strategist Sun Tzu: "Where the army is, prices are high; when prices rise the wealth of the people is exhausted" (Tzu Sun, c.400 BCE) His advice was to keep wars short and have the money in hand before assembling an army.

Paying for wars is a central problem for states (see War Finance). One way governments pay for war is to raise taxes (which in turn reduces civilian spending and investment). U.S. revolutionary Thomas Paine warned in 1787 that "war ... has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."

Another way to pay for war is to borrow money, which increases government debt, but war-related debts can drive states into bankruptcy as they did to Spain in 1557 and 1596. A third way to fund war is to print more currency, which fuels inflation. Inflation thus often acts as an indirect tax on a national economy to finance war.

Industrial warfare, and especially the two World Wars, created inflationary pressures across large economies. World War I caused ruinous inflation as participants broke from the gold standard and issued currency freely. Inflation also accompanied the U.S. Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, among others, owing to trade disruption and scarcities.

Present-day wars continue to fuel inflation and drive currencies towards worthlessness. In Angola's civil war (1975-2002), for example, the government currency became so useless that an alternative "hard" currency - bottles of beer - came to replace it in many daily transactions."

~Professor Joshua Goldstein, Economic History
In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, ed. Joel Mokyr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

   Read More »

Many of us have reasons why we want the Democrats to win in November. Mine are all about the future.... better access to education for middle and lower class kids, better jobs, better technology, environment, etc. on and on.

But conversely, I guess we all have something that we see as likely to happen with another neocon Republican administration. So: what is it that you really want to avoid that would happen if John McCain was elected?

For me, that one's War/Economy. Those are two issues that MUST be linked together in people's minds. More about that later.

I have a brother who is the right age to be drafted, and for that matter, a sister too. On the other end of the spectrum, my parents will probably retire during the next administration. I fear, a LOT, for their ability to have good healthcare and medicine if they need it in their retirement, as well as just getting by, keeping home and vehicles maintained, paying taxes and insurance, etc. A tanked war economy is not particularly friendly to retirees.

Of serenity. Of peaceful and appreciative contentment that our party and our candidates have done and are doing fine.

Real Clear Politics , Los Angeles Times , and Rasmussen all show Obama leading McCain looking toward November. And in battleground states as well.

As a former Edwards supporter who would have been satisfied with either of the two end front runners, and as someone whose MAIN goal is the shift from a conservative to a liberal administration starting next year, this is good news to me. I realize others think differently, and I respect their right to their opinion. But this is mine.

Just off the top of my head... since we've been talking about the site, and how it works and how it doesn't work, how would everyone feel about PB A and PB B. A split site with one side supporting the Dems in the GE, and another side for Democrats who will be supporting the Republicans in the GE but still want to blog here.

Obviously, the problems on the site come from those two sets of people rubbing against each other. If there were seperate "pages" or "forums" or however it might work, then both sides could blog more effectively about their opinions and ideas without having a lot of confrontation.

I'm disappointed. Just thought I'd mention it. I'm not gonna scream about it, or write 500 posts about how angry I am, or call everyone who didn't agree with me a bunch of names. I'm not gonna boycott the party, sit out the election, pray for the Angel of Death to visit the entire DNC leadership, or yell for impeachment. I'm not going to tell other people they are wrong, or their feelings matter less than mine, because that isn't true - we're all equal. I'm not going to slander anyone, or obsess about the bad news, or try to browbeat anyone, or yell biased statistics, or make up lies and spread them as truth, and I'm sure as HELL not going to try to make sure the Democrats lose the election... I'm just going to tell you about why I'm disappointed.   Read More »

Before I start, the point of this post is not to say anything about Barack Obama or Hillary or Bill Clinton, or Al Gore. The message intended here is about the Republican base. We know a little about them. The "base" are all those good Southern Christians who are middle or lower middle class people who believe more in what they learn at church than in higher education. They believe themselves to love God and then Country. They dislike, and perhaps even fear anything that opposes the things they have faith in. And, sadly, they are easily duped by a neocon propaganda machine that appears to meld seamlessly in with their "value" system. In fact, there is no meld, hence the dupe. But, sadly, it works.   Read More »

Happy Father's Day to the Wild Eyed Southern Boys

This seriously pisses me off. I live in a small town which had no preditory lending establishments until just a couple of months ago. My youth group kids and I plan to get it closed as soon as we can. We're writing letters to the paper and we'll be protesting out in front of it and trying to stop people from going in.

If you don't know how it works, here it is. Money Market, Quick Cash, and all the other brand names of "payday advance" or "check cashing" businesses target low income workers who from time to time have trouble making ends meet. You write a check for $120, they hand you $100 cash, and they agree to hold the check for a week. At the end of the week they cash your check OR you can pay another $20 and they'll hold your check for another week.
People who already have trouble making ends meet often are forced to pay only the $20 week after week after week....   Read More »

Which of the following is WORSE

A corrupt Chicago politician running a free country with civil rights protected by a constitution ?

 OR

A corrupt neocon politician running a bankrupt military dictatorship?