October 2008 Archives

War is not pro-life.

I was recently in Maine. It was gorgeous! Photo albums one day...

Instead of wasting our time running his campaign based on mindless and misleading assaults on the opposition, like the Republican party is doing, Barak Obama is telling us what he will do to fix this mess our nation is in today. I am so impressed!

I am disgusted at how easily the mega wealthy, who pull the puppet strings--read: take the money out of your pocket and put it in theirs, can get away with manipulating the world. I would bet that the real reason oil prices are going down has absolutely nothing to do with supply and demand, which is what they blamed the rise of oil prices on, which was hog wash as well, in my angry opinion!

My take on a probable reason for oil price decline: The mega wealthy oil producers know that anarchy in the streets of America would destabilize the world after the super wealthy flushed the world's economy down the toilets and Americans were becoming completely fed up. It's all a game of taking as much money from our pockets as possible.

And, to make matters worse, it really appears the Americans are rather serious about electing a president that will actually attempt to sustain the will of the people to become an oil independent nation as fast as possible. Dear god! They don't want that. They want us to keep funding terrorists as if it were our patriotic duty!

Several oil analysts who predicted earlier this year that oil would reach $200 by year's end have recently said oil could drop to $50 a barrel. The plunging price of oil has put money in the pockets of recession-worried consumers. Falling worldwide demand, especially in emerging markets, is the primary reason for the fall, Time.com reports.

[Source: CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News]

CNN reports today that, as the world economic downturn impacts his kingdom, Saudi King Abdullah announced he would deposit 10 billion riyals ($2.67 billion) into the Saudi Bank of Credit and Saving, a "royal gift" that will be used for loans to Saudi citizens.

Source: CNN.com

I know I offend some of my conservative friends with my views, but I have to call it the way I see it! What if I'm actually right?!

I only know of one state in the United States that outright practices socialism on a systematic, state-wide basis: Alaska. The governor of that state happens to be Sarah Palin.

Alaska, sitting on rich oil reserves, heavily taxes the oil companies for drilling out their natural resource. The state of Alaska doesn't charge any state income tax or state sales tax to its citizens. The state brings in so much revenue from oil, the state treasury cuts every Alaskan a check every year! That's right, Alaska actually pays you to live in Alaska! I blogged about this when I visited Alaska over a year ago.

That's socialism! That's redistributing the wealth! That's government taking money from one group and giving it to another group!

Now, don't misunderstand me, I actually think it's a great idea for Alaska to do this!

But I want to suggest that Sarah Palin, and her Republican handlers, needs to rethink her attack strategy! She's the executive of a socialist state! Pot, meet the kettle!

And one last point on this issue of redistribution of wealth: Bush has given the wealthy more of everyone else's money than any president in my lifetime. That's OK? It's only socialism when we give money to the ordinary guy on the street? It's capitalism when we structure policy to give the wealthy more of everyone else's money through unfettered greed--the American way!

Capitalism good. Socialism bad!

It's OK to give the wealthiest sector of our economy, Wall Street, an open checking account straight from the nation's treasury? That's not socialism? Oh, I forgot, that's just a handout, I mean, bailout. Wall Street needs those posh trips, on our dime, for wealthy executives who have been hard at work screwing up the nation's economy!

Fact: Wall Street is the new welfare recipient of the socialist Republican policies, not the poor mother working two jobs who still can't afford food and gas, not Joe and Jane the whatever!

I hope Americans are paying careful attention. We are witnessing something of historic proportions: The Republican party is actually showing it's true colors. They want to do away with public funding for public schools, do away with social security, do away with graduated income tax, do away with minimum wage, do away with job creation, do away with all of the forms of the "evil" social contract that I believe government actually owes its citizens.

The Republican party believes the role of government is to fatten up the Wall Street mogul. They have worked effectively to obscure these critically important facts behind the vail of "Patriotism": the "American Way," "True America," "Pro-Americans," "Anti-terrorists." They have painted media images of the truly patriotic American as a Joe six pack plumber, gas guzzling, Hummer driving, guy and a soccer mom doing shout outs to third grade school children.

For the past 8 years Republicans have successfully diverted attention from their true policy positions and intentions by leveraging the most divisive issues they can flood into our homes through every media outlet they can turn on to their message: "Save marriage," "Save the unborn," "Fear the godless Muslims and Arabs as terrorists," and sneak some old fashioned racism into the fear mix as well!

Palin's greed-centric diatribe is just more of the evil Republican policy that has bankrupt the moral and financial soul of this nation!

Fire them!

Just back from Petra (since I am in the country of Jordan). I didn't think I would get to go, but I squeezed in a quick day trip. The scale of this antiquity is astounding! Here are three quick pictures. I'm hoping the Petra Photo Album will be published before the new year, along with the Arizona, Maine, and Moscow albums.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter has written a book, The Defining Moment. In an interview with Stephen Colbert on October 23, 2008, he said:

Any time you build a road, any time you build a school, any time you create jobs, any time you provide social security, you are redistributing wealth. And, by the way, if we can redistribute wealth to greedy bankers, why can't we redistribute some to needy Americans. ...

After FDR was inaugurated, Justice Holmes had him over for his birthday..., and after he left, the justice said, 'Second class intellect, first class temperament.' Now the potential that Barak Obama has is that he has a first class intellect and a first class temperament. ... He has the potential to restore people's confidence and lift the sites of the country.

On the politics of it, Obama represents that sharp break from the past. He wants to redraw the American social contract, the idea of what we owe to each other as a people, in the way that Roosevelt wanted to redraw that contract.

If what he says is true, and I personally suspect that it is, our nation needs Barak Obama! Finally, someone who will live up to what I have blogged about several times: my fundamental belief in our responsibility to take care of everyone in our country and abandon this evil "it's all about me" mindset that has bled our pocket books and our souls dry.

Source for the quotation: Interview

A pretty lady with a brain full of hatred, very cleverly disguised to lure decent people into bigotry and prejudice, is, in my humble opinion, dangerous. She should never be in Washington as the US Representative from Minnesota's 6th Congressional District. And then she said last week that Obama has "anti-American views." She goes on to say that "the news media should do a penetrating expose ... and take a look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they 'pro-America' or anti-America." Is the Republican party really about McCarthy-era witch hunts? Check out the second video clip.

Then, in the first video clip, she says what?!

I don't care if God did tell her he was "hot" to have her in Congress, the decent people of Minnesota need to fire Michele Bachmann!

Check these out at this link. The detail is amazing.

I have never made a secret of my detestation for Rove.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama as "a transformational figure" was powerful. But even more powerful was his withering indictment of the state of the Republican Party and the cancer of Rovian politics.

It was similar to the diagnosis of Christopher Buckley following his endorsement of Obama: "To paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan, I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."

There are many other anti-Rove Republicans abandoning their party. I've had several Republican friends tell me privately what Powell and Buckley told the world publicly: that they're voting for Obama. Most of them not because they like Obama, but because they can't stand what Bush, Rove and now McCain and Palin have done to their party.

Rovian politics may or may not end up destroying the GOP. But, thanks to the Internet, with a bit of luck it will no longer have the power to befoul our democracy.

[Source: Arianna Huffington: The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics]

I have been curious as to why the GOP is underfunded compared to the DNC in this election. The Republicans have traditionally always outspent the Democrats on presidential elections. Aside from promoting divisiveness, and controlling the media outlets, how else could they achieve their agenda?!

But why is this not the case in this election in which the Obama campaign is flushed with cash and can afford to purchase 30 minute TV slots on the major networks--which is extremely expensive?

At first I thought that so many ordinary Americans are so fed up with the GOP that they are financially backing the Obama campaign. And I have some belief that this is true, but I don't think it can create this unprecedented level of funding.

Could it be: Maybe those greedy, self-indulgent, Wall Street moguls who backed the wretched Bush administration all just went belly up with the crash of the market and can't afford to contribute to the GOP in the hopes their posh lifestyles will continue to be protected?

And the oil industry might be a little worried that their interests will not be protected in a McCain presidency. So their pockets didn't gush gold as they did for Bush.

If that's the case, the financial meltdown has a silver lining!

So the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on clothes for the Palin family. Hmmm, I just don't think that Joe the Plumber's wife purchases $50,000 worth of clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and $75,000 worth of clothes from Neiman Marcus in two single shopping sprees--as did Sarah. Joe the Plumber's wife doesn't spend that much money on clothing in a lifetime.

No, she's not "just like one of us." She's not Joe six pack. She's a character in a play, and this was her costume budget.

The point of the play is to deceive the common American person on the street into believing that the Republican party understands them and will work for them. Bull!

Let's put it another way:

During a week in which the Republican ticket is trying to highlight its connection to the working class -- and, by extension, promoting its newest campaign tool, Joe the Plumber -- it was revealed that Palin's fashion budget for several weeks was more than four times the median salary of an American plumber ($37,514). To put it another way: Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.

[Source: Palin Clothes Spending Has Dems Salivating, Republicans Disgusted]

The Republican Noise Machine is in high gear. Since they know they can not win on the issues that matter, the ones that truly affect our daily lives, the Republican candidates are lying and trying to assign negative hot button words to Obama. This is so typical of a party that has no integrity and a record of failure!

America needs to send a clear message to this washed up party: fire them!

The Republicans have stooped to the lowest form of hate and fear mongering one would ever imagine. Their rallies have become rage factories. How completely irresponsible!! At one of Palin's rallies, after she worked the crowd into a froth of mindless madness, a member of the crowd was yelling "Kill Obama!" She said nothing. This is unspeakable, disgusting, and deeply rooted in the extremist, radical, delusional nature of a party losing power.

This blog post quotes a blog post. Both are interesting and thought provoking! If we can tie what a politician is saying to an artifice of stability and nostalgia, what we hear is more easily accepted, believed, desired. Brilliant. Deceptive. Manipulation! We need to teach media literacy!

...President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis "with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter" [1] in San Antonio, Texas.

The idea here - the spatial implication - is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we're meant to believe - a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States.

But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It's a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam's Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn't have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull.
It's as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society - a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation - seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter.

...

All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.

[Source: greg.org: the making of: Bruce Willis Type For President?]

McCain was not his best in last night's debate, which of course is fine by me. He appeared to repeat himself too much and not be organized in his thinking. Today, in a speech in PA, he called the nation "my fellow prisoners." Now, granted, I feel like the nation has been in prison for the past 8 years, but the question is: Is McCain under too much stress and not dealing with it well? Is it impacting his capacity to think and articulate his thinking rationally? I am even more concerned! Check out this 13 seconds...

The more I travel, the more I realize that people are pretty much the same everywhere. I have experienced one notable exception of late.

Adults the world over tend to love and care for their children, want them to have the best lives possible, want to open the doors of opportunity to them while protecting them from the many difficulties they might encounter. I see this every where.

But, as I have blogged in the past, children in the US are increasingly not receiving the parenting they need to thrive and be successful in an increasingly complex world. I live in a community that seems to actually have a far greater ratio of children to adults than the national average. And the young children are very badly behaved in public: yelling, shrieking, refusing to comply with what few limits parents do place on them, crying and pitching temper tantrums when they don't get their way, throwing objects, running around utterly unsupervised. The above behaviors have become so common place, so pervasive, in the restaurants at which I frequent, that I simply don't enjoy eating out any more.

I suppose the parents are exhausted after a long day's work and just don't feel like "dealing" with their children. Perhaps they feel they will quash their expressive natures and repress their creative expression in the future. Maybe they are just too consumed with themselves to care about the children they brought into the world. I really have no idea.

But let's contrast this to the cities in which I just visited and worked in Russia. Parents were actively engaged in parenting their children. Children were well mannered and well behaved. Children were noticeably quieter and demonstrated respect for those in their surroundings. Children were attentive to the adults. Numerous grand parents were spending time with young children in parks. Both parents were frequently holding their children's hands as they walked about. In school older children frequently attended to and supervised younger children. I was told bullying virtually doesn't exist in Russia. Adults seemed to be more actively engaging with their children at all times. Children appeared to behave in a much more mature way. These were genuinely warm-hearted people as often adults would even walk arm in arm.

I observed, in one rather ordinary restaurant, two little brothers. They were not seated with their parents. The one hit at the other across the table. They proceeded to get up from the table and began to playfully tussle in the restaurant. The only thing that would have been different if this had happened here in my city would have been the volume level. Here the children would have also been boisterously loud while tussling more aggressively. These boys were not. They were just laughing rather quietly.

In less than a heartbeat the manager was present. While I don't understand Russian, I have a good idea what he said to the boys: "Shut up. Sit down. And behave appropriately." Which they immediately did. The manager then turned to the parents. Again, since I don't speak the language, I'm not sure what he said. But, based on the tone of his voice, I would guess it went something like this: "Make your children behave or leave." The father then got up and went to the boys' table and appeared to dress them down.

Here in the US the manager's behavior would have probably resulted in his being fired for not maintaining a "child-friendly" restaurant environment. In Russia, however, it does appear that adults expect children to behave and parents to parent them appropriately.

We could learn something from the Russians!

I took the picture above in Patriarch's Park in Moscow on October 4, 2008.

I have no doubt that a large part of this financial meltdown, bringing the entire world to the very teetering brink of the worst global depression the planet has ever known, is a direct result of the greedy oil companies.

When a family is faced with outrageously high gas prices to get to work so they can buy higher priced food (because of the higher oil prices) or pay the mortgage the bank should never have financed (remember, "greed is good"), what's the choice?

So as our nation borrows trillions from the Chinese and then sends the money to the oil companies in the middle east (and in the process making the Bush family and their good buds richer and richer), the terrorists get even more money to finance their efforts to destroy the west and the average American gets thrown out on the street.

Now we will end up probably borrowing trillions more to buy up the "toxic assets" at an inflated value and a loss. So in the end who will own the United States? Will it be the Chinese, the Middle East, or the terrorists? The one thing for certain is that it will not be Americans!

This is all a direct result of incompetent, self serving, greedy, arrogant, failed leadership. Who gives a damn if "he's a God-fearing man" when he's flushed the whole nation, and possibly the world, down an oil slicked sewer.

The question now becomes, just how far will it go?!

This info graphic from The Chicago Tribune is very powerful and telling. It sums up 8 years of unbridled arrogance, power, incompetence and a legacy never to be forgiven. Click it to see the larger and more legible version.

Amazing that lines can create a sense of depth.

For his Lexington, Kentucky rec room, Charlie Kratzer used $10 worth of Sharpie pens. Read more about Kratzer's hands-on project, including the various sources of his artistic inspiration (from Star Wars to Sherlock Holmes)

Source: Bad Banana

I love this trompe-l’œil staircase inside the elevator ad for Becel margarine in Istanbul, Turkey!

Found at directdaily

[Source: Neatorama » Blog Archive » Clever Elevator/Staircase Ad]

The Marriott Grand is overrun with athletes. Tennis players are arriving in Moscow for the Kremlin Cup which will be played atop an enormous platform in Red Square next to St. Basil's Cathedral–a magnificent backdrop. You can see the set up being erected in the picture below.

I've mentioned before, but want to give an example, how expensive Moscow is. The normal rate for a night in the Marriott Grand, which, while located on a main street just a mile or two from Red Square, is not in the middle of the town's hotspots, is $800! On top of this, I learned the hard way, they charge 650 rubles per day if you turn on the TV.

When I first arrived, naturally I was interested in watching CNN to stay informed about the economic meltdown in the US. I was stunned by a 1,300 ruble charge to the room for Pay Per View. After protesting that Pay Per View was never viewed by anyone in my room, they removed the charge. I later learned they bill you if you turn on the TV at all. What a rip off!

At any rate, below you can see the construction of the location for the Kremlin Cup underway as of yesterday. Earlier this week, before I left for Ekaterinburg, this area was filled with hundreds of people and dozens of brides.

Last night I had the most awesome experience dining out. We went to The Margarita Café here in Moscow. I can't recall ever having such an enjoyable dining experience. The company was, of course, delightful. And the café itself, named after the main character in the Russian book I mentioned in an earlier post from my trip, The Master and Margarita, is utterly sensational.

The café is very small, seating only about 32 people in a seating with two seatings per night. Reservations are required. And while the café is listed in the tourist guides, unless you speak Russian, you aren't going to have much success getting a reservation. Therefore, this is a "local establishment."

The tiny café is designed after an authentic library/café from the late 1800's: rich textures, deep colors, book shelves, and, best of all, live music: two beautiful Russian women violinists and a male pianist playing with delightfully reckless abandon and a contagious enthusiasm. The music, from Queen and ABBA to Russian folk music and the classics, was sensationally fabulous! The intimate setting, with everyone having his/her own tiny plastic milk carton filled with beans to "play along," made for lots of laughter, the occasional rhythmically punctuating shouts, and an adoring audience caught up in the musical energy. I suspect that, had there been sufficient room for dancing, the diners would never leave!

Oh, and the food was great as well. I had borsht and a Russian version of mushroom and meat ravioli. If you ever get to Moscow, this is a must-experience café! I was so disappointed that I left my camera back in the hotel room. So here is a shot of the café the next evening before they really open. The waitress is standing next to the table where we all sat. I was facing the piano and the violinists.

If we were picking someone to coordinate the weekly pickup schedule for all the Soccer Moms or to win a contest drinking Joe Six Pack American (her words, not mine) under the table, or if negotiating foreign policy only required sending shout outs to third grade children, then the folksy style of Sarah Palin would make her a very likable choice.

But that's not what we're doing here!

She would be a heartbeat away from running this country and has no more qualifications to do so than I do!

John McBush has cheated death by cancer several times. If he had never had cancer at all, she would have a 20% actuarial chance of him dying in office in the next four years because of his age alone!

I am insulted and angered, as should every middle class and under privileged American be no matter what party they support.

The Republican party, the party of the wealthy, the party of the rich, the party that has over the past 8 years created the economic crisis in which we are now living by giving everyone's money to the most wealthy and greedy, thinks that all they have to do is dangle an "I'm just like you" mom with a great smile in front of us to make us think the party is any different today than it has been for the past 8 years.

The party is the same! And they want to continue doing the same to this nation.

How disgusting! OK Sarah, just continue lying, smiling, and saying cute little homegrown things so the Republicans can finish middle America off.

Palin actually said on conservative talk radio today that she is running for Joe Six Pack American–just like her.

I Am HORRIFIED! Simply and utterly HORRIFIED!! What an idiotic thing to say!!

In one of my first posts about Sarah Palin I stated that she's just like Bush--another oil man but one that wears a dress. Well, this article is an eye-opener! But let's start with Palin in her own words back in July, 208, "I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can't drill our way out of our problem."

But the whole article is worth the read. And then there's this great article at Rolling Stone setting the record straight between what Sarah says and what Sarah does.