Go vote for Obama like the liberal sheep that you are

CHANGING THE VERY NATURE OF POLITICS!!

"My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices." Thanks BO!! The US puts more carbon into the air than any other nation, 22% of the world total despite having just 5% of the world's population, but BO's interest is in making sure we have cheaper gasoline. Such bold leadership! Such vivid change!

In linking McCain to the unpopular President Bush, [BO] struck a theme from Ronald Reagan's successful 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter by asking a town-hall audience in St. Petersburg: "Do you think you are better off than you were four years ago or eight years ago? If you aren't better off, can you afford another four years?"

Just like in 2006 when we took over Congress! Republicans had been in charge, but you marched to the polls and voted for Democrats because you knew they'd make everything better! Remember how great things were after that? BO supporter Glenn Greenwald will remind you:

Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:

• Repeatedly funded -- at the White House's insistence -- the Iraq War without conditions;
• Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- Jim Webb's bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;
• Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;
• Enacted -- at the White House's insistence and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous Republican support
-- the so-called Protect America Act, vesting the President with extreme new warrantless eavesdropping powers;
• Overwhelmingly approved the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a "terrorist organization," an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made "regime change" the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;

• Deleted from a pending bill -- at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House -- a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;
• Overwhelmingly enacted -- at the White House's insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support -- the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008," to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration's illegal NSA spying program;
• Confirmed, with the indispensable support of two key Democratic Senators, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, despite his support for radical Bush theories of executive power and his refusal to oppose torture;
• Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.

BO and the Democrats are fucking filthy slime, and you just can't get enough. He'll punch you in the face and you'll ask for more. When someone mentions that he just punched you in the face, you get mad... at the person who mentions it... as you crawl back to Obama and kiss his feet.

Then he kicks you in the teeth.

CHANGING THE VERY FOCUS OF OUR IMPERIAL WARS OF AGGRESSION!!

Hooray! Glorious freedom bombs dropped on different civilians! But dropped by a President who might actually know how to pronounce the name of the towns he destroys, so that makes it better!

finishing up strong

George W. Bush, restoring dignity to the White House:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."

Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice".

The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.

Concluding the three-day event, leaders from the G8 and developing countries proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change. However, they failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions.

Via

Pessimism

I keep trying to write a post about how pessimistic I've gotten about the prospects for our species. But I keep getting too depressed by it to continue writing or putting effort into adding some good research to my points. I'll try again today.

The bottom line is that as far I can see, everything is fucked. The "Western" world's way of life is devastatingly unsustainable, which as a recent TomDispatch piece points out, is linked to three related impending crises: energy, agriculture, and global warming. And furthermore through NAFTA and the IMF and various other fucked-up neoliberal globilization efforts we've forced the impoverished part of the world to restructure their societies to meet our needs, destroying their way of life so we can maintain ours, the continuation of which is certain to result in suffering and death on an unimaginable scale, threatening the existence of human civilization and maybe even human existence.

I just don't see how there's any hope that any of this will be happily resolved. The leadership structures we have in place are incapable of addressing these matters; it simply isn't what our failed institutions are built to do, and it isn't what the people who occupy leadership positions are interested in doing. Rather than address these problems that are certain to devastate us without systematic changes in our day-to-day life, they continue to escalate the problematic policies (continuing to subsidize terrible agriculture practices, half-heartedly pursuing retarded alternative energy strategies, continually delaying meaningful carbon emissions regulations, advocating more oil exploration and resulting environmental damage) , and instead invest massively in genocidal resource wars.

It is hard to predict what the exact form of the impending devastation will be. (Somewhere in this doomsday rant I feel like I ought to mention that I'm obviously distinguishing here between death and destruction on the usual scale and on an even larger scale. Presumably the functional distinction is that the latter actually personally touches privileged people like me.) We're already watching the US economy crash as oil price soar. Tens or hundreds of millions of impoverished people are being driven the edge of starvation by rising food prices. We're seeing unprecedented natural disasters on a seemingly regular basis, but nobody is willing to explore the connection to global warming, yet alone use it as motivation to restructure our fucking societies around sustainable food and energy practices. And the ruling class in the US is threatening yet another war, this time with Iran, and belligerently mentioning nuclear weapons all over the place. Wars could well destroy everything before those other things get a chance to. Shit, we have nuclear arsenals in the hands of insane fanatics in North America, the Middle East, all over Europe and Asia.

I read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.

War as environmental disaster

From here via Mahatma X Files:

Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.



The war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.



Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed, but that the Bush Administration has struck down. Finally, if the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries on the planet.



Just the $600 billion that Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the country’s current electricity demand. If 25% of our power came from wind, rather than coal, it would reduce US GHG emissions by over 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to approximately 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions in 2006.



In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.



US presidential candidate Barack Obama has committed to spending "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure." The US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.

Jesus fucking Christ. The North Pole might be ice-free this summer and war is our priority.

assortments

I jogged around the neighborhood in shorts today. In Ohio. In January.

I'm sending off my 4th and final graduate application today. I have no idea if I'll get in to any of these programs.

I haven't eaten meat in 4 days.

I haven't seen a stray cat near my house since I've been back from Maryland. They must know we're the people who disappear felines.

more interesting stuff today

That was so much fun that I'm going to do it again. Actually the real reason I'm linkdumping all over my blog is because my gmail isn't working so I can't just email this shit to people. I imagine that they are grateful for this change of venue.

Let's start with a few stories about how completely pathetic the mainstream media is. Glenn Greenwald had a field day yesterday with two posts on Chris Matthews and his Sunday panel of pathetic asshats who giggled nonstop about the US Attorney scandal. Following up on that theme is a strong criticism of David Broder, who cautions Democrats that it would be politically unwise to investigate the Bush administration's conduct with the scandal.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? We've got information that strongly suggests executive branch was using its clout to pressure the Justice Department into partisan politically motivated prosecution, and these media fuckheads just laugh about it like it is a cute little joke and then urge those nasty Democrats not to take anything too seriously and actually investigate. This is just mind-blowing to me. None of these people give a shit about anything but preserving their own power. And it could be the case that those in Congress who are pushing these investigates are doing it for their own partisan political reasons too (though I have no reason to think so), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. For fuck's sake James Madison thought that dismissing qualified public servants was grounds for Presidential impeachment, but David Broder says investigating the Bush administration is oh such a bad idea for Democrats. WHO GIVES A FUCK IF IT IS GOOD OR BAD FOR A POLITICAL PARTY? It is good for the fucking country to have inappropriate and possibly criminal behavior exposed and dealt with.

Moving on to other areas of media worthlessness, here's a good piece today from the Daily Howler, which is my new blog obsession. These guys cut through the bullshit in a way that makes it look easy. Today's link continues their recent (well as recently as I've been reading which is about 2 weeks) of the media's burning hatred of Al Gore and their absolute failure to engage in responsible reporting on the global warming issue. I'd strongly recommend browsing through their incomparable archives.

Think Progress offers an amusing picture of Republican hypocrisy and characteristically authoritarian self-blindness, at the expense of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee. This dummy blasts the investigation into the attorney firings as partisan grandstanding and supports the Bush Administration's refusal as a right of executive privilege, meanwhile Smith is trying to get President Clinton to come testify about Presidental pardons. (It is possible that Clinton used pardons inappropriately, but the obvious contradiction in regards to executive privilege is glaring, plus it is going to be tough to argue that his mission is nonpartisan but the attorney firing is political grandstanding.)

And to finish up on a lighter note, this guy rules.

Interesting stuff today

I'm going to have to acknowledge the harsh reality that "links adspar likes" was a pretty worthless meme. It was kind of like those Conan O'Brien featurettes that always have the most literal names that aren't funny at all. At least he used to do that. I haven't watched him in years. Yeah, but that's what they were like. And Conan and I both have huge heads, so we have at least those two things in common.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I've seen a bunch of interesting stuff this morning that I thought I'd share.

First up was this piece by digby, contrasting today's understanding of impeachment with the views of the founding fathers. Here is James Madison on impeachment:

...let us consider the restraints he will feel after he [the president]is placed in that elevated station. It is to be remarked that the power in this case will not consist so much in continuing a bad man in office, as in the danger of displacing a good one. Perhaps the great danger, as has been observed, of abuse in the executive power, lies in the improper continuance of bad men in office. But the power we contend for will not enable him to do this; for if an unworthy man be continued in office by an unworthy president, the house of representatives can at any time impeach him, and the senate can remove him, whether the president chuses or not. The danger then consists merely in this: the president can displace from office a man whose merits require that he should be continued in it. What will be the motives which the president can feel for such abuse of his power, and the restraints that operate to prevent it? In the first place, he will be im-peachable by this house, before the senate, for such an act of mal-administration; for I contend that the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal from his own high trust.

"Mal-administration"... "wanton removal of meritorious officers"... "abuse of power"... raise your hand if this sounds like anyone you know. This wanton US Attorney scandal alone ought to be enough to bring that bastard down.

Next up, courtesy of PZ, is the God Simulator. Start as an eternal, omnipotent deity and see what happens!

Here's a new story about how global warming is probably going to fuck us over in ways we haven't even really considered yet. But Republicans will still loudly deny anything is happening.

And rounding it out, here is the NitPicker condemning yet another Republican corruption scandal:

So, while it's good to see Congress finally chipping away at the crust surrounding the Bushies warm, gooey center of corruption, it's important to make clear that this isn't simply a rogue, incompetent administration. This is a rogue, incompetent administration which is, nevertheless, following the exact recipes Republicans have written over the last thirty years. Americans need to understand that, in one sense, Bush hasn't failed. He implemented core Republican principles and they failed. And they always will.

You go, Gore!

Gore said:

“The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action. The planet has a fever.”

Awesome.

so warm

This latest round reminds me yet again how pathetic it is that there's a political party with such a strong anti-reality tendency. Apparently acknowledging broad scientific consensus is too much for these lunatics.