Again, for two more days and in retrospect....I don't like Columbus Day....and I'm sure I don't have to explain why here. Snarky William is saying that its not even Italian because Columbus was representing Spain...so in the world of the splitting of hairs and the distribution of small pox blankets; the raping and pillaging, some 13 year old is bound to come along and pop your bubble too. Give me back my mail! Fuckin' postal holiday...some of us are cheered to see the new coupon shopper or Bird Talk in the box! Anyway...in "honor" of this day I put up my favorite Son Volt anti-Columbus Day song on the lil' player over there at RIPCoco....and though these genocidal things tend to happen in the natural Darwinian course of things, I'm feeling very sorry about what we do in the name of our own feelings of superiority. I guess that you could add Iraq to that equation too.

I was added to the list of 100 Women Political Bloggers, over at Informed Voters,which is really nice. But whats better is to see how many, many Political women's blogs are out there Its not that there has been a dearth of women bloggers around, but it seems that in the past they have either hidden behind named blogs or been part of duo or group blogs. I think that Digby's coming out was a real revelation for alot of us (though I was always out there...not careful enough, according to my peeps.) In any case, after looking myself up, (and hoping that those hits weren't on my silly chicken blogging days,) I took the quiz at Informed Voters main page to find my candidate, and it was spot on...except that the first 3 didn't have a chance in hell for the nomination, and then the 4th was my boy, Johnny Edwards. The interesting thing is that down at the bottom of Dems was Hillary, of course being the most conservative and furthest from my ideals, and then right below her was Rudy, as the republican closest to my ideals...then the choices went down, down, down from there....I find it so much fun that the republicans are actually thinking that old Rudy has a chance. Its just too good and though I am pretty upset these days, I look forward to Rudy's fall. If he doesn't fall, then I'm gonna have to think hard about America and if it embodies my beliefs anymore.

Onward:
I got wind of this guy, Scott Horton's blog through Sam Seder's Sunday show and then again Sam talked about him during his fill-in stint for Mike Malloy a week ago Monday, and I went where I normally wouldn't consider going; to the Harpers magazine site, to find his blog "No Comment," It was like the old days when I used to discover so many things just by listening to Majority Report or Morning Sedition. Now, that sort of in depth, interesting reporting is limited to Sam's shows on Weekends, a little bit of Rachel Maddow, and the Vod-cast of Marc vs. Sam. I miss those days of driving around with a pen and pad and jotting things down to check out when I got home and all the new ideas I had just from the great discourse going on; It was almost like sanity. I bought more books and DVDs, and got more ideas, from that little outlet than anything else...oh well...
Anyway,I was looking for that unbelievable story that Horton covered involving the lawyers who have been
supporting Edwards (and, to some extent Hillary, though targeting her seems to be more about paranoia than anything else,) and what the government is doing to try to stem that support....which is pretty much to start a federal investigation of them, which the lawyers are not able to talk about without ruining their own reputations, and then squeezing them by making every tiny financial issue into a big deal so that their financial support would be tainted. This is the lowest form of the misuse of government power that a scared-to-death party incumbency could put into action: strong arming supporters of one candidate or another, and I'm sure its only the tip of the iceberg.

At least we can be pretty sure that even the slimiest of the slimy of trial lawyer supporters of Edwards can't touch the dirt on the hands of too many of our country's most outspoken and devoted neocons. If there is any comparison to be made, this administration wins the slime race hands down.

Lucky me; No Comment is a great blog, though just scanning through the posts is enough to make me cry at how insane things have gotten. These rundowns, no matter how sarcastic, hit me like a lead weight (made in China, no doubt,) in the enormity of what we're seeing happen in the political realm daily, weekly; even hourly. Its overwhelming and infuriating.
Before I could even get to the meat that I was looking for, I came across this from last Tuesday (my bold:)

"Thank God for Tom Davis (R-Va.) He fully understands the constitutional role of the Congress. Davis has sent a letter to Henry Waxman, chair of the House
Oversight Committee, with a very sharp demand. The Committee needs to set aside all other work and immediately take up a matter so gripping that it supersedes everything: Why, he asks, did the organization Moveon.org get a more than 50% price break when it recently ran an advertisement in the New York Times attacking the Administration’s plans to continue its “surge” in Iraq?
I understand Rep. Davis fully. Why should the Oversight Committee be looking into the roughly twenty billion dollars that have disappeared down mysterious rat holes in Iraq; why should it be looking into the festering open wound called FEMA; why should it be considering the operating rules governing security contractors who are running amok in Iraq and Afghanistan, endangering U.S. soldiers and destroying America’s reputation? The people aren’t concerned about this trivia. And heaven forbid that Congress should actually examine and discuss Iraq policy itself, or the increasingly obvious disaster in Afghanistan. No, what Americans want is for Congress to get to the bottom of the internal advertising practices of the New York Times. How did this group of lefties get such a good deal; how did they land a page at the stand-by rate?! (But, by the way, let’s ignore Fox News, which operates as a G.O.P. campaign soapbox 24/7, using ever less care to disguise its political pimping–of course, it’s a broadcaster and actually subject to Congressional oversight.) "

You would think that these politicians have nothing better to do than pander to the obscene propaganda being pushed out there; saying that the left is somehow unpatriotic. How is it possible to turn that around when we are dealing with what amounts to a big bucks propaganda and advertising campaign? Well, the follow-up was, of course to try to bring a resolution to the senate floor about Rush Limbaugh...not worth saying much more about, really...its just more craziness while our soldiers are dying.

Isn't it becoming painfully apparent how all of this frustration is playing out in all of us lately? Had enough yet?

This is exactly along the lines of something that I had a filed away a dusty working draft of here in the RIPCoco vault.... but I had written it off as something long expired, along with so many of my ideas that seem to be getting swept away by the speed at which stuff is unfolding. But then, of course, the psychology of anger and the nature of the id never get old; they just get turned to the next subject, object, or person.
It all just feels so rotten...Like Bush/Cheney haven't just damaged our government,environment, budget, and society, but that they have hurt our psyche. I feel real stress fatigue from the last 6 years, and I cant fathom how those years slipped by the way they did, without all of the trauma sapping the very life out of me....I survived, but I'm different... I've lost hope at times, and wished for this unraveling of the republican party; I've wanted the worst for these people in ways that Ive never felt before. I hate them and I pity them, because what is life without empathy and some degree of self reflection?...and that, they lack.

The unraveling of the facade of those holier than thou conservatives who have been wielding power in this country, and the anger floating around at the enormity of their fall, comes almost as a surprise to me; and I'm someone who expected it all along! This thing has been the equivalent of waiting for a death that is a given, but somehow as it happens, and in its last throes, there are truths and realities revealed that no one could be prepared for ....ever. The actuality is always a surprise in its finality. We surely have known that things would fall apart, but my take on it went from some sort of slo-mo despair at who will ever get the truth out, to something so big and all encompassing that I keep waiting for the dancing girls and locusts. The thing that I wonder sometimes is if all of this emotional upheaval isn't somehow a negative force...and if I am driven to hate so deeply, have they somehow been successful in turning me somehow into an image of them?...or if maybe the despair can be turned to something positive.

I am raising my anxiety riddled child in a world where people blow themselves up in the service of an idea more important (to them) than life itself. This idea is not to free slaves or feed children, but to fit humanity into a set of rules being translated into religious texts by societies run by people with an agenda. The extremism that has been actively inflamed by the form and action of our presence in the middle east is mind-boggling to me, and the specter of it increasing is terrifying.
And yet, the march to further this war, and begin the next, continues. The information and "evidence" forming the foundation of the movement towards more war seems to be largely a replay from before, and the recycled fear, even in the face of acknowledgment that this has all been a farce, is almost laughable.

Those of us who have been fighting the good fight since long before it was considered OK to whisper our dissent in public; and even those of us who knew, and who have been allowed moments of sangfroid musing, are caught in the anger/depression/disbelief cycle of not only just the realization of how bad things are, but also the weight of knowing too many details of what is happening and how it came about....and how long it will take to even begin to stop digging the hole, much less start getting out of it.But the most troubling and chilling thing that I'm realizing is that the hate is something that they strive to create. They want to make us hate and then try to turn us on eachother, and turn and point fingers saying that we are just insane angry conspiracy theorists. I can't see my way out of this, except maybe to just not react to anything, but I am acutely aware that is this a negative force; and I don't want to be angry all the time about how my son will never know the same American dream that the few generations before him knew, and that I remember, in the earth shattering changes of the 60's. After all, didnt those flower children still grow up to expect a home of their own, even if it was bohemian? Will doesn't even know a world where you can eat fish without measuring it out weekly and worrying about poisons, much less a hamburger that has to be cooked through because it certainly has a bit of poo in it.

It really makes you want to throttle the few people out there who stupidly say "oh yeah, I voted for Bush 2 times...because I thought we needed someone who could fight the war and protect us."
What do we do with the urge to smear those people, who now are saying that they they just didn't understand how bad he was, across the pavement?...what do we do with the "friends" who continue to send us neocon spam mail? Is it excusable to use your vote to make a decision that you have surely not researched and that has so negatively effected our country and the world? Do the same people who were so misled even have the reasoning power to be able to comprehend what has happened? Or are they like those people lately who are feeling like its all just too negative and that maybe its best to stop watching the news?

I am working on forgiveness and empathy, but its difficult if the person doesn't somehow repent in a real way. For instance, the very same people who may have realized that Bush has been a jerk and handled things in the wrong way, or however they excuse it, seem to be looking at Rudy. Anyone looking at Rudy seriously has definitely not done their homework. Right now, that is inexcusable.
And I know that these are not people that I can actively be "friends" with, even on a completely superficial level. The self centered yuppie mentality and the car much bigger than you actually need for your living conditions sends a message out to the world about how you want to be perceived. So if its Hummers or diamonds or any other overt signals to the rest of the pack, I just cant tolerate it much past the karate waiting room...and I hope that they also keep their Spam amongst themselves. isn't it a little presumptive to send out some neocon screed without checking the basic facts?...because a simple Google search would show that its bullshit...and there is little difference between that and other urban legends that can easily be checked on Snopes...and not so strangely, there is actually a political part to Snopes, but I would urge them or someone else to add some Spam debunking pages because this one deals with errant "facts," rather than really delving into the huge lies and smears perpetrated by the Rovian sleaze machine.

Im hearing alot of talk that its gonna be Hillary and Rudy and that no one else stands a chance so we should just get used to it? Huh? Was it really that easy for these guys to kill our spirit and hope? Are we still a nation of people who are just sure or lazy enough to not feel like our votes count? How did we get so passive? The Hardball pundits discuss the republican field and only compared them to Hillary. They act like this decision has been already made. And I have no doubt that it has been...but, something in me wants just a few brief shining moments to think about what it might be like to have a fair system, and to have a system that cares about people. I'd just like to muse a while before Chris Matthews informs me who my candidate is gonna be.

The American dream has dried up for a huge portion of our society, and at the same time, almost in defense of what they have, the soccer families on the cul de sac have gone into overdrive protecting not only what is theirs, but also their (God-given??) right to have it. Who told us that we deserved these kinds of riches and that there would be no larger price to pay in the world? Where did the idea spring from that us few lucky ones in the rent controlled then co-oped apartments, who were lucky enough to invest in Microsoft when it was just a baby, or who were born to the privilege of even just being American, didn't owe something back to the society that made those gains possible? Could any of us have even begun to pull our bootstraps up if we weren't standing on a publicly funded road, and on the shoulders of the soldiers who fought for us and who serve in our socialist military? The infrastructure that has made it possible for the fortunate to be where they are is largely socialist...no bootstraps involved really. Look at it sometime!

It is clear now that the outsourced privatized service sector is a failure...and if there is anyone left who doesn't realize that, just Google what Blackwater charges for a guard and compare that to what the army pays a sergeant to do the same job. The Blackwater entity is at least 10 times the cost across the board, and the service of those individuals cant be said to be better. Indeed, in many cases its worse. What a slap in the face to our military to have an officer making less than $100 per day serving next to a private guard making six times that, and not necessarily limited by the same laws and rules as our soldiers.

Surely its obvious how the quality of the socialist parts of our society have gone downhill incrementally as the republican party has tried to transfer and privatize them away. isn't it clear to anyone who cares to take a look? And now, in the absence of proper funding for schools and police and the army and all that, where are we to go beyond Blackwater and Halliburton?....and haven't they proven over and over that they are inept
at providing even bottled water to soldiers in the dessert?

I was just explaining to a 13 year old boy from the inner city about why history class matters. He is studying the time in Europe right before the supposed "discovery" of America and jumping around to the first settlers here, and he is having trouble with not only the dates and names, but also why it is important to him to know this stuff now and what it means for his future.
Sometimes great truths come out of the mouths of babes, and in this case, a young guy who should have everything ahead of him laid out in gold because he is smart and funny and good-looking, is looking into the gaping maw of human nature over time and, if shown the connection, sees all too well why it matters. Because you have to know what it is in order to see what they are trying to take away from you.

He was born into the class that has become what the underclass was in Europe and what spurred the difficult immigration to a very difficult new land for a chance at what became the American dream. So, after the basic overview (and at this point he started rolling his eyes because he realized that I was somehow gonna tie this into Bush and what is going on now,)we discussed the American Dream and the birth of the idea of having rights and the evolution of thought about what your rights are if you put work and resources into a place, and what you should be able to expect to get back.

At that point he started coming up with all sorts of unanswerable questions about what it is that republicans, and more specifically neocons, reasons are for wanting to tip the power upwards even if it means that those on the bottom won't ever have a chance at the rights and the dream that America was built on?
Here is a kid who has grown up with very little and in a situation where things change quickly and people disappear and go away, and he is trying to fathom
why he and his family shouldn't have a chance to at least be stable.
...and I don't have answers for any of it. Except to try to explain the selfish ideas that come from that line that if you have it you must have earned it
somehow, and maybe there is some sort of fear and then shame that happens when you have and others don't....but that its really important to keep trying because the people who are trying to keep others down aren't always successful and aren't always in power...you have to keep trying to slip through the net that they have strung above you or they have won.

Is selfishness an instinctual urge for survival?...could this all just be Darwinism at work? If humans are able to reason then do we have a responsibility to use
that reason for the greater good as opposed to for the selfish desire to get ahead, just because we can? And when does that reason attach itself to a feeling of empathy; because we sure have empathy, at least towards our own immediate family; Otherwise our young would die.

I find that for myself the anger at who was stupid enough to buy the line, be a selfish prick, feel the fear, not admit to any wrong doing, and be a real
21st century American from the land of the ME of id...isnt it all about me after all?, turns into some sort of pity at people who may live their entire lives as not much of a part of the human race, or who are so weighted down with their own stuff that they never get to experience the joy of giving. But maybe the "full" experience of the nuclear family and the rituals that we all create around that picture is enough for some people. The perfect denial of it is so rampant around here, which is very strange considering that we live just outside NYC and are surrounded by communities full of lives so desperately in need that its unfathomable to people who live just a few miles away and drive Hummers.

The explanations and acceptance of things as they are as anything but luck are hard to take, though....and I cant see what interest there can possibly be in
cocktail parties full of people dressed alike all talking about their houses and summer plans, skiing over the winter break, and the restaurants they've been
to. I'm not saying that its bad if some happiness can be squeezed from some part of that, and Im not saying that these people dont do alot of charity all around. But the people writing a check to the soup kitchen dont seem to fully acknowledge their "help" and the paradox of having that sort of help in general. And Im not saying that its bad, because I've fitfully accepted some help lately...but I think about it, and it weighs on me. I care about the people and wonder what their lives are like, and would never pay them as little as they are getting out on the market. They need the job...I know that....and its not huge....But I seem to lack the gene where I expect someone to do my laundry or clean my dishes. It somehow doesn't compute.

The thing is also, that often the same people who have the seemingly idylic life with this seamless acceptance of their great fortune to be in the class where they are,reveal something that cant be covered by the facade.
Underneath there is usually someone in pain, on medicine, a child who is suffering silently, and a search for some meaning. I also have found many things that are left unsaid for fear of what the neighbors might think. People are so terribly unhappy that I am always just thrilled to find anyone who is actually happy, or labels themselves as such, that I want to put them in a jar and study them.

But the truth here is that people like me, who never really felt like a part of things, often were told and shown in pretty apparent ways that they, in fact,
weren't a part of anything. And in however the psychology of that effects anyone, whether it is a dysfunctional family or the 60's in America when many of
our parents rebelled, only to end up not providing the false sense of belonging that some people seem to have had (and maybe its NOT false...what do I know?)
What concerns me is what we are teaching the children of this generation of the underclass. They are certainly trapped in a system that wont give them a
chance at anything resembling the American dream. They are learning helplessness that can look so inpenetrable that having a baby and getting housing in the neighborhood starts to look good after a while.
Hell, alot of the middle class is in THAT situation too! Make the best of what you can get your hands on, pay the minimum on your credit cards and hope to win the lottery.

To continue to cut funding and to make it more and more OK for the very rich to get richer without any sort of regulation, sends a signal to those with no way out of their station. And that signal creates a hugely disgruntled population that is tired of standing on line for 12 hours to vote in the richest country in the world.
What are we telling these children? Learn what the founders were fighting against so that you can watch your leaders now take it apart? What I'm hearing alot is the learned helplessness line of people who feel that they have no power, nothing that anyone does matters, and a laziness that is not real considering how much more people actually DO in their days than they ever did because everything takes so many more steps for the consumer...and often you have to do things twice. But there is also a lack of interest in anything that is not comfortable, as if our daring entrepreneurial spirit had somehow died in the past 6 years. I think it got outsourced.


At some point the only people who I can talk to in any real way anymore are those who understand and feel the pain of whats going on and what has gone on, as if it were happening right on this street; because I am sure as hell that it could happen here, and that it did, and that it IS actually here, in so many ways, and that if most of the country stays asleep we will see it in drastic relief, and it may not look like the villains that we have come to expect.

But then, here I am, out in my community, talking to any number of people who have made wrong choices in many areas of their lives. They still have a vote and when they honestly say that they were afraid of Kerry or whatever, do I tell them to fuck off because I have no time for their brand of stupidity? Do I tell them that we don't need their vote anymore and that its not worth anyone's time trying to educate morons?

I've lived through alot of disappointment around the people in my life. Disappointment in the larger aspects of humanity and the weak crowd's need for a controlling force lest they spin out of line, and also serious disappointment in many of my personal relationships, where Ive had to come to terms with the fact that people are just fucking limited, and that no one can be everything to you for all time. I expect a lot of people, and thats probably why I don't hang around many or consider many to be my true and trusted friends. But that doesn't mean that I don't also spend time talking to all sorts of acquaintances out there, and strangers in here, trying to share a little and to explain what its taken me years to figure out, and then longer to really believe on an emotional level.

I am angry as hell at how things have gone. But who is the real victim here?...and do we blame the victim or the situation that has created the victim?... or do we try to suss out the culprit? If the aim of the sort of sociological manipulation that the neocons have been slowly putting in place, over more years than we might want to look at, is to redirect the anger and blame downward towards the people rather than upwards towards the engineers of this experiment, then the myth of the welfare queen and the reality of the poor voting against their best interests has come to full fruition. We blame them for voting against their own best interests, but at the same time we wont take responsibility for our role in the society that has allowed this to happen.

In America, we have everything, and it could be said that there is no excuse for ignorance in a place that offers so much if you just work hard enough. But fear is a powerful thing, and when a long term plan of disempowerment, fear, and bold lies comes into play, its uncanny how people will act. It is also true that serious roadblocks exist for many people in this country and no matter how hard they work, ever, they wont get out from under...thats just a fact. The neocons have no plans for those people.

Honestly, for me the anger is more towards our mealy politicians who I know are really just being strategic in a powder keg atmosphere where one statement taken out of context can ruin not only a career but a plan that may have been in the works for years. This is where the delicate balance of powers has been so ruined and twisted in a way to be used against the very people that they were designed to protect.
And thats what we have to look at if our democracy is going to survive.
We need leaders who don't give a crap about what people think, their careers, and if protocol is followed exactly.Its not that I don't respect the structure and protocol of this thing, but I also am aware that desperate times call for desperate measures...and there have been less desperate times when an entire body has stood up and walked the hell out...or abstained from an insulting and time wasting vote.

In a world of tit for tat, we are seeing what the senate wants to spend their time on...the safe and non confrontational issues that wont rock the boat as it sails safely into harbor....And, to tell the truth, I can see both sides of the arguments...except that kids are dying, and the situation is getting worse and worse....probably due to the insane vote that allowed this "surge" to happen in the first place. And now we are supposed to be happy that we will have some 5000 troops home by Christmas and then in a YEAR we may be back to pre-surge levels....? Like I said, I understand fear, and I have empathy for the folks under the gun in this government...but they signed up for the job of representing the people, and I hope to god that we start to see a little of that soon....


So yeah, I have been feeling like, what the fuck is going on in the government that really important issues slide by and then they spend time on what appears to be shit? How is it possible that any grown person would even for a second think of voting on some of this crap? But the balance and the votes and the climate...and the stupidity of the American people...the media...I could just imagine the endless bickering about the troops who originally called Petraeus a nickname, and who thinks he is an asskiss and who thinks he is not in a position to judge anything. The openings that leaves for sound bytes that make the democrats fighting non-issues would turn the entire left into petty nitpickers who hate the military (nyah, nyah...this guy said that about your stinkin' general...) And its seemingly that way with every issue that comes along.
In my opinion, Obama showed some real leadership on the Limbaugh issue by abstaining...and I believe that entire body should have abstained and gone right outside and talked to the media about who is wasting time...
RIPCoco