Three reasons not to like Hillary Clinton:
Bourgeois democracy in the USA is already in serious peril thanks to the abuses of the Bush regime, which will most likely go unpunished. The lesson in that to future leaders is to grab for more power because you’ll get away with it.
The absolute last thing on earth we need at this time is a president who personifies the values of avarice, aristocracy, and arrogance.
If the country is a car, Republicans advocate driving it towards Fascism City, drunk, at 120 miles per hour. Democrats advocate driving it to the same place, sober, while obeying the speed limit.
Case in point (sorry, login required).
And no, the Democrats (at least those who control the leadership they have) don’t get off the hook by the virtue of a majority of them voting against the thing. That was merely The Great Oz’s pyrotechnics display. Meanwhile, behind the curtain (from the article, emphasis added):
Racing to complete a final rush of legislation before a scheduled monthlong break, the House voted 227 to 183 to endorse a measure the Bush administration said was needed to keep pace with communications technology in the effort to track terrorists overseas.⋮
But with the Senate already in recess, Democrats confronted the choice of allowing the administration’s bill to reach the floor and be approved mainly by Republicans or letting it die.
If it had stalled, that would have left Democratic lawmakers, long anxious about appearing weak on national security issues, facing an August spent fending off charges from Republicans that they had left Americans exposed to threats.
In other words, faced with the choice of fighting for civil rights, honoring the constitution, and honoring their oaths to it, or of chickening out and taking the craven low road, the Democrats chose the latter. They could have let the ugly thing die, but were too chickenshit to.
The irony of it all is, that kind of antic is precisely the thing that plays into the Democrats’ reputation for being timid and devoid of any principles. They could have turned the fight over this bill into a national civics lesson in honoring constitutional rights.
Sorry, Nancy, talk is cheap. The way you gave this ugly thing the fast track behind your back shows that you were just crying crocodile tears when you professed to be so upset about “violence to the Constitution.”
Potentially millions of children put at risk by the toy industry, and how does the establishment media spin the headline? Why, by expressing sympathy for the corporation that sold the toys of course. Even though corporations aren’t alive and thus can not get lead poisoning.
Apparently for some people, the money of the rich is more important than the children of everyone else.
I’ve been exploring the idea of moving into a two-bedroom apartment and sharing it. To that end, I’ve sent out e-mails exploring that possibility.
One reply comes from a guy with a new-agey sounding nickname. That sounds like strike one, though not definitively. “Starhawk” is a new-agey name, yet she’s done a damn lot of good things and I have a great deal of respect for her. So it’s not the kiss of death.
Then he mentions www.corporateshamanway.com in a positive light. I muster all my strength to stifle the waves of nausea it triggers. It makes me appreciate how much old Red Karl was right on the money when he wrote:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
It is a good thing that those caught up in an oppressive and unjust system feel unhappy. We should feel unhappy in such situations, in much the way that a developing cancerous tumor should be painful. That pain is a message. And it’s not saying “increase the dosage of painkillers and continue on.”
It could, of course, be beneficial for the opiate-seller to be confronted about the harmfulness of his so-called “remedy.” However, optimistically that would take years; world-views don’t change easily. Pessimistically, it might be like trying to teach the proverbial pig to sing.
Moreover, I do not want an ongoing confrontational dynamic in my home. I want my home to be a refuge, in part from engaging in such confrontations outside of it. Then there’s the whole deception angle: it would involve entering into a house-sharing arrangement under false pretenses (of a compatibility I don’t actually believe exists).
So, unless some important piece of new information comes up to change the impression I currently have, scratch this one off the list.
Who’s he, you ask? The Burning Man “arsonist.” In one stroke, he contributed more originality than what has become a tired and hidebound ritual has had in years.
Every year, it ends in the same way, at the same time. There’s traditions, and then there’s ruts; sometimes one has to break the former in order to avoid the latter. The organizers tell participants to expect the unexpected. Promise certainly delivered upon this year. Addis even tastefully chose the symbolism of torching the Man during the lunar eclipse, pairing one unprecedented Burning Man event with another.
So what did the “artistic” “anarchists” who stage the event do? Why, they called the cops and the fire department, of course. The “wrong” person burnt the effigy at the “wrong” time, after all. We can’t have that!
They’re even planning on, get this, rebuilding the Man in a hurry so routine can go on as usual on closing day. How boring. Can’t they think of doing something else with the remaining charred skeleton, something new, something different? A bonfire, perhaps? Saw it up into bits and give each participant a piece of something unique that was created at a one-of-a-kind event? Apparently not, sigh.
Well, at least it all shows the folks behind burningman.com selected the appropriate top-level domain for their site.
Disclaimer: I’ve never been there myself (I’m definitely not a desert person), but from the sound of things I have a hard time squaring the kind of shock and outrage I’ve heard with the concepts of “anarchy,” “expecting the unexpected” and “radical self-expression.” In defense of the Burning Man crowd, not all “burners” were outraged at it, either: a sizable fraction — perhaps even a majority — got it. Alas, a sizable fraction, and apparently a majority, of the organizers didn’t.
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