By Tom on 10/29/2008 7:49 AM

Whereas the following is an example of my rule of one blog, one thought, I must  say that David Sirota's idea of a "progressive mandate" is an attempt to inject a modicum of significance  into a paper mache election:

The Potential Progressive Mandate* Denver Post's PoliticsWest, 10/28/08 Thanks to Maryrose Asher for finding this and so providing an opening for my single thought. Sirota states that McCain has augured a hole of some kind that a president Obama would have a mandate to fill. Misquote? Go read it yourself. My single thought, regardless, is that the 2009 president's only mandate is to  provide a cloak of change for unchanging corporate control of our government. Johnson changed it, Reagan changed it, but since then the presidents have been window dressers, Clinton the most skilful.

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By Tom on 10/28/2008 4:37 PM

NPR used to feature "Dr. Science, he knows more than you do." In these trying times we need himerher, oh well, him actually, more than ever, as authorities daily try our faith in reason. So we have looked him up, and the first question we posed was: how come Christian Science can heal?

"Simple," he said. "It is known that the auto-immune diseases are strongly modulated by stress. Well, these are typical of the diseases that have been cured by Christian Science practitioners."

Don't bother contesting this , remember, he knows more than you do.

By Tom on 10/26/2008 9:23 AM

The bubbles of truth rising to the surface of the mediatraumanian sea tell me that on election day we bail out of a losing situation using a parachute with a hole in it. Got that from Europe, actually. The word from Latin America is similar but has an edge of hostile defiance. L.A. has my whole-hearted empathy in that regard, no matter that Senors Hugo and Evo are poking a desperate US in the eye. (Can a blog put a wiggly over an n?) Now, about that hole, it's the vacuum of moral authority in the office of the President. The "dark matter" in that vacuum is corporate hegemony, revealed finally for all to see and despise.

Vashon, oh my Vashon, whyfore dost thou stick thy obomination signs in the hardpan? You have been proffered a straw whilst his backers roll in the hay.

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:12 PM

  An ironical blend of farce and tragedy, this election for president has as its icon the adorable wolverine in Juneau. The debates are a farce, and tragically, both campaigns are financed by non human, inhuman, corporations that are laying waste to every profitable square inch and soul on our little blue dot. The timing of the irony is remarkable in that so many things are going sour at the same time. Arctic methane is putting an afterburner on climate change, the Iraq middle class has fled, Palestinians are being dehumanized, species are going extinct at a rate exceeding the big extinction, the rain forests are over half gone, the NAFTA-con-Wall Street fiasco has newly pushed poor Mexicans into poverty, the fiasco itself has been “rewarded” while the people hurt by it have been ignored, and on October 15 at Hofstra University a mounted police officer deliberately trampled a protesting veteran of the Iraq war. Menwomen, as the farce plays on, the war on terror has come home. But of course there never as a war...

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:08 PM

A Green Rhizome As this appears in e-print the GPoWS will have approved amendment #1, survived a week tacked to a bulletin board, and be ready for diversion. But all you’re going to get here is a root canal job. With #1 passed, the state party will be an aggregation of locals, GPoWS becoming GPsoWS. How the locals will operate will be new, but their goal will still be to put good people into office. The wisdom of that should be questioned, because it so far has gotten us nowhere: us, the Party, nowhere. Findings are listed, and then a different goal offered. Electioneering at the national level will continue to fail because the two-party system was designed by professionals to keep a third party out. Electioneering by labor movements in the past has eviscerated them, eg the Workingmen’s Party faded after it diverted energy into electioneering. We are smarter? Corporate control of national offices has severely limited options for good works. It’s the money, right? The higher the level of office the lower...

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:06 PM

The other day a man in a wheelchair was seen at the Vashon north end coffee kiosk. While that in itself was not uncommon, the cluster of white dogs around the wheelchair was uncommon. What then happened was out of this world. A poodle separated out from the cluster to reveal a pair of big white Alaskan sled dogs attached to the wheelchair. And off they went down the walkway to the ferry. As they passed our car the wheelchair was seen to have no arm rests nor, apparently, a back. And they were moving. I don’t know if the walkway at this time had been clear, or got cleared suddenly, but no late walk-on ever hit this pace. The effect was as if a ray of hope had broken through the miasma of MARSEC signs that insult ferry commuters these days. At risk of dog paddling in deep water I’ll comment on human nature. Not just because a wheelchair was doing wheelies behind two sled dogs, but also because last Friday Andrew Bacevich told Bill Moyers that Americans are stodgy greedy lumps. You could look up the exact words...

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By Tom on 10/13/2008 11:25 AM

  Last week arctic researchers found “chimneys of methane” erupting from the surface of the Barents Sea. The gas is released by melting sub-sea permafrost. Calculations have shown that there is more carbon where that is coming from than in known coal reserves. Meanwhile, Henry “Poke” Paulson is telling Congress that the financial sector is the basis of the US economy. We hope Congress will maintain a deaf ear to that, but hope is in short supply what with McCain wanting to augment the 700 billion that may be going into Wall Street’s poke by throwing Social Security in after it. Given all this one would think that the election would turn on an issue: if not the war then perhaps the resale value of a Prius, or how to live on crackers and high fructose cola. Could someone explain to this stupefied column how it is that at this worst crisis in US history both nominees for president promise to make things worse? Speaking of the election, it’s a paradox that the race for California’s 8th district House seat is more...

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By Tom on 9/21/2008 12:31 PM

  All it took to make me hit the epiphany button was one look at Kevin Phillips’ face last Friday on television. Now, before listening to me belabor the epiphany, permit a correction: the “stock market” is just the portion of the financial sector you can smell. What Phillips was trying to swallow was the entire enchilada. I’ll now labor to rise above mismetaphor in order to think on survival of the consumers in the feed lot. No cutting nor slicing of the current financial salami makes it comprehensible to me the public. Both pundits and fundits mislead us into thinking that there is a financial explanation of, if not solution to, this uh, let’s face it, tsulami. There isn’t. What masquerades as explanation is a laundry list of symptoms. The true explanation is that when we went off the wampum standard we set off on a “dark and unknown road” (Steve Fraser). Okay it was gold, but I’m trying to make a point. What passes for a dollar these days is somewhere between a memory and a figment. If you want to read the...

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By Tom on 9/20/2008 5:53 PM

Rachael Carson had spun a silken trap when she exposed the danger of pesticides, the trap of the Ten Commandments, the trap of thou shalt not. Rachael Carson died before she could envision a positive way to stop pesticide use. For the context and actual wording of that judgement read Adam Werbach’s 2004 speech titled Is Environmentalism Dead?. In this he chronicles the birth (by Carson) and death (by Commandment) of the environmental movement. Inherently negative, the trap also narrowed the environmentalist view in the way that a medical specialist begins a diagnosis narrowed to that specialty. And narrowness was double trouble for it not only took problems out of context but invited corporations to label environmentalism a special interest. The result has been ever-expanding aggrandizement by the establishment and ever-blind scooping of establishment poop by the movement. The initial victories of the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA, are being reversed. Praise Carson and pray...

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By Tom on 9/9/2008 6:27 AM

This is the first of a hoped-for study of all US elections that asks whether the will of the people had any effect on the result. Thanks to Gore Vidal, 1876 was picked to start the series.

The Election of 1876 In the fall of 1876, three years after having shot itself in the foot, the Establishment called in witch doctors to fix the festering sore of the worst depression in US history. Fix to Establishment satisfaction is what developed, but the turnaround did soon follow. The initial phase of the fix was to get the Democratic House to vote against the Democratic winner of the popular vote for president. The shot in the foot was the panic of 1873, triggered by over-expansion of graft in railroad development. The situation in 1876 has been described as follows: “It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper…Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising…. From both East and West came threats...

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