I haven’t been posting lately. Here’s part of the reason:
That’s a picture of sunrise over Upper Quartz Lake in Glacier National Park last week. Taking in views like this while sipping on morning coffee is part of why we live in Montana, and why we put up with low pay and Roger Koopman.
Oh, and the huckleberries, twin berries, and thimble berries are ripe too. The hike to and from the lake took much longer than anticipated.
“I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you’re able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms.” (Navy Captain Keith Allred, military judge in the trial of Salim Hamdan, a deer in the headlights whom the Bush Administration sought to imprison for life for driving Osama bin Laden’s pickup truck.)
There’s a presumption afoot in right wing circles that everyone in Guantanamo deserves what they are getting. Nice to see some justice at work. We don’t see much of it.
Note – the U.S. is still free to hold Hamdan as an “enemy combatant”, a classification made up on-the-spot in the crazed post-9/11 madness. It will be five months before we know if there is justice. If he’s not released, it will have been just a show trial.
Incredibly, the bicyclist, who was part of a Critical Mass protest, was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer. The officer in question claims that the cyclist was aiming at him and that he was only defending himself.
This is pretty neat if you like looking at stars and stuff. The brightest object in the southern sky these nights is the planet Jupiter. Last night, using ordinary binoculars, we were able to see it well enough that three of its moons were visible. Two were on the right, one on the left.
I needed to steady the binoculars to see the moons, so I crouched way down and braced them on the back of a lawn chair. After the binocs were steadied, the moons appeared as if by magic.
Three separate studies predict that Barack Obama will win the coming election with between 52 and 55 percent of the vote. The studies, highlighted in this Raw Story article, predict election outcomes based on our economic condition, and have been right in almost every postwar U.S. election.
Problem: Exit polls in 2004 showed John Kerry winning the popular vote in that election by three percentage points. Yet on the Wednesday morning following the election, George W. Bush was on top by 2.5%. Something was amiss. There was a 2.75% flip. (There was a similar flip in 2006, but the Democratic victory was so large that the exit poll discrepancy has largely been pooh-poohed.)
Exit polls, a powerful tool used by the Carter Center and the United Nations to judge the fairness of elections throughout the world, have been pretty much dead on in the United States – up until about 1998. Then they went haywire. What changed?
This study, from the National Election Day Archive Project, pretty well demolishes all of the arguments used to explain the disparities between the exit polls and the vote count in 2004. It boils down to vote-counting irregularities, which in almost all cases favored George W. Bush. In other words, enough of the vote was flipped to him, usually by unauditable electronic voting machines that count the votes in secret (using proprietary software), to swing the election in his favor.
So the problem with the Raw Data article that predicts an Obama victory is that it puts the winning margin within the ‘flippable’ range – if Barack Obama secures 53% of the vote, the final tally will show him with 49.9%, losing a squeaker.
Democrats are weak on this issue, as on almost every other important issue of the day. I do not understand why. John Kerry privately admitted to Mark Crispin Miller in 2004 that he suspected the 2004 election was stolen, but publicly has been submissive and denies saying so.
We speak in code. Hillary Clinton and John McCain are millionaires many times over, McCain by way of marriage to an heiress. They are aristocrats, and usually our elections are a choice among such people.
Why are we now told that a man from a common background who doesn’t have a lot of money, who made it on smarts and guile, is all the things that are really more like Clinton and McCain? Why are they using words like “arrogant” and “pompous” and “elitist” against Obama now? It’s easy to understand once you break the code. Barack Obama is
uppity
There’s even more going on with the McCain ad above, and thanks to Rachel Maddow for pointing this out last night on Race to the White House on MSNBC. (Her comments elicited exasperated sighs from her colleagues). Why did the McCain people use Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the ad, juxtaposed with Obama? Why not Ophra Winfrey, with whom he really has a relationship? She’s famous. She’s a really big star.
It’s not hard to see once pointed out – it’s “Harold, Call Me” all over again. It’s a black guy with white chicks. White guys hate that. It’s an archetype, something embedded deep in our minds. Advertising is a science that persuades by subtle manipulation of the senses, and not by reason. There’s latent racism in all of us – McCain needs to nurture it and exploit it. But he’s got to be careful to avoid a backfire. Our outer, or public selves reject racism, but our inner selves, which is where advertising is aimed, harbor it.
It’s starting now. I thought they’d wait until Labor Day, because as Andrew Card reminded us, you don’t introduce a new product in August. It’s going to be a long campaign. And there’s really very little that Obama can do about it. How do you defend yourselves from advertising professionals?
There are two defenses against a professionally done smear campaign: Engage them on their own turf, or stay above the fray. Neither works.
I think when people go to the polls in November, and especially in light of the fact that even Barack Obama (whom I certainly support – it’s essential, necessary that he be elected), with his support of this FISA Amendment Act, has indicated very clearly that it is not his intention to roll back this usurpation of presidential powers. He’s accepting the powers that Bush and the Congress are going to bequeath him. So I think the people will be choosing between two… not presidents in the sense of the constitution … but two kings, two people with dictatorial powers.
According to Richard Viguerie,, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, the actual Bush deficit for the coming fiscal year is not the $482 billion announced by the White House, but rather $789 billion. The former number does not include $227 billion that will be borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund (taken from the middle and working classes), and $80 billion to fund the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Estimated expenditures are over $3 trillion, counting the wars, so that we are borrowing about $.26 cents for every dollar we spend at the federal level.
Viguerie is against this sort of spending. We probably don’t agree on where spending should be cut, but it is refreshing to hear from him, to know that there are some fiscal conservatives living and breathing out there. As with everything else he touches, Bush has made a joke of an honorable philosophy.
I hope Oliver Stone was high as a kite when he made this movie, just like he was when he did Natural Born Killers (and like ‘W’ was for most of his youth). That’s when he’s at his best.
Piece of Mindful 