Parsing the candidates' resumes

This is the kind of patriotism we need

Dozens of telemarketers in Indiana refuse to read anti-Obama soft-on-crime call script.

Citizen protest, citizen sacrifice - this is what helped create this country and this is what this election is all about. It's not just choosing the better candidate, it's about exercising the responsibility to say NO to corporate and government pressure to conform to sanctioned hatred and character assassination.

I've worked at a call center and I can tell you these workers who refused to read anti-Obama sleaze scripts took a big hit in pay when they walked off the job. These are our role models and heroes.

Definition of "Undecided"

Just days before the most important election in US history, David Sedaris nails it:

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how
the chicken is cooked.

Our god damned society

From samharris.org:

Contrary to the views of many conservative pundits and the Christian Right, the least religious countries in the world today are not full of chaos and immorality, but are actually among the safest, healthiest, most well-educated, prosperous, ethical, and successful societies on earth. Based on a year's worth of research conducted while living in Scandinavia, SOCIETY WITHOUT GOD by Phil Zuckerman explores life in a largely secular culture, delving into the unique worldviews of secular men and women who live in a largely irreligious society, and explaining the reasons why some nations are less religious than others, and why religious faith doesn't seem to be the secret to national success that so many claim it to be.

"Most Americans are convinced that faith in God is the foundation of civil society. Society Without God reveals this to be nothing more than a well-subscribed, and strangely American, delusion. Even atheists living in the United States will be astonished to discover how unencumbered by religion most Danes and Swedes currently are. This glimpse of an alternate, secular reality is at once humbling and profoundly inspiring--and it comes not a moment too soon."

-Sam Harris, a Co-Founder of the Reason Project and author of the New York Times best sellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

Foot-in-mouth disease strikes McCain

A gaffe, for sure, but given the McCampaign's robocalls, a fitting self-damnation.

Death and the election

Posted in AlterNet. I'm posting here in case I need to refer to it in case one or more of the four scenarios listed occurs

What if the Presidential candidate dies before being sworn in on January 20?

Being this is the United States – the rules, law, regulations and precedent for this 'event' are extremely murky and vague. Mainly because we never do anything until we have no choice. And even then…………………..

There are four dates that important to this process.

* November 4th, 2008 - the general election. Remember we are voting for electors from each state – NOT the candidate directly.
* December 15th, 2008 - the electors casts their votes. Remember technically the electors (who are party loyalists) can vote for whomever they want.
* January 6th, 2009 - the opening of the joint session of Congress. The electoral votes are officially counted, certified and the winner is declared.
* January 20th, 2009 - Inauguration Day, when the winner is sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Four gruesome, disturbing scenarios follow.

McCain, get your yoga on!

Letter from a former fundie to Sarah Palin

That god-fearers are toxic to liberty has been made plain the past 8 years. With god on your side you can turn on your fellow-humans with impunity. Here's an excerpt of an open letter from a former fundamentalist, Marlene Winell, PhD. Read the full text here.

As a former fundamentalist, I'd like to call you on what you are doing.

The media has found you "opaque" about your religion. Why? You have not been honest about the most important thing about you: the fact that you are a born-again charismatic on a mission from God. Most people who have never been entrenched in the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity may not understand what this really means, but I do. Like you, I was raised in the Assemblies of God and I was a zealous part of the Jesus Movement. Like you, my life was consumed with seeking God's will for my life and awaiting the imminent return of Jesus.

Former fundamentalists like me know that your worldview is so encompassing, authoritarian, and powerful that it defines who you think you are, the way you view the world, history, other people, the future, and your place in the world. It defines you far more than hockey mom, wife, woman, hunter, governor, or VP candidate.

Ridiculous religionists - too easy

There are many funny moments in Bill Maher's "Religulous." And that's part of the problem. Freaks, nut-cases, extremists in outrageous costumes and inarticulate people can all be easily set up for a laugh. They are ridiculous religionists. There are a number of these in "Religulous," a film that Maher says is intended to raise doubts about the claims of religion. A laudable, even important, goal. But the toxins of religion also worm deep into the psyches of mostly ordinary people, not just the flamboyant crazies. Stand at the door of most churches prior to a service and you don't see freaks walking in. You see the hoi polloi, the intensely average mass of society. Some, if not many, of these people are awake enough to know that the claims of religion are ridiculous, but they choose to go along to get along. Many more just don't think about the claims, they just accept it as part of their cultural identity. They wear their religion like an occasional badge (or flag pin), a set-it-and-forget-it accoutrement to be displayed at the door of social acceptance.

Where the Great Average goes horribly wrong is when it has to make decisions that affect the world as a whole. In a political contest every candidate has to flash that badge because if they don't then Joe Average gets suspicious. And so dolts like Bush garner praise because they say they make foreign policy decisions based on messages they receive from a heavenly Father. An airhead like Sarah Palin can espouse freakish beliefs in End Times, fear of witchcraft, and messages from the divine and the religious “right” say amen to the possibility (probability) that she could become President. Even Barack Obama has to steer through the treacherous shoals of perception that he is either a Muslim terrorist or a Christian anarchist – so he just goes bland.

While it's true that the claims of religion are ultimately ridiculous, I wish Maher had shown (or had been able to find) more ordinary people. I would have recommended most of my family, who are good-hearted and generally likeable, even while they shamelessly take comfort in ridiculous, unprovable assumptions.

But owing to the hypnotic nature of these beliefs, I doubt that they, and most ordinary religionists, could be persuaded to doubt. But it would have been interesting for Maher to try anyway.

More on impending martial law in the US

A video contained in an article on HuffPo by J.S. McDougall. See also corbettreport.com

US soldiers in US streets - sign of an October surprise?

Read the full article to learn how to resist the growing dictatorship in America:
The Battle Plan III: Deployment and Its Dangers

Excerpts:

On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade -- which means three to four thousand warriors -- somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is 'crowd control' as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology 'module package' as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.
....
The president has troops, and we don't. Remember: if the President declares a state of emergency, he can unilaterally take over even the National Guard. Congress has no troops and, in this scenario, neither do we. Here is what you must do.

Garrison Keillor on future trivia

Powerful prose! Not sure where it was first published, but I provide the brilliant full text forwarded to me by a friend.

We are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so than in hard times. People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus. In Philly, a woman earns $10.30/hour to care for a man brought down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning, brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It's hard work lifting him and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can't afford health insurance, she can't get fixed, but she still goes to work because he'd be helpless without her. There are a lot of people like her I know because I'm related to some of them.

Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not inevitably The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it. Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantanamo Bay -- uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander in chief who commits war crimes. If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the names of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Lt. Col. Mark Bridges, Col. Steven David, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Maj. Michael Mori.

It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone's mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged. When she said, "One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let's commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars," people smelled gas.

Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne'er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself -- one stink bomb after another, and now Governor Palin.

She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for forty grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.

Your broker kept saying, "Stay with the portfolio, don't jump ship," and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you're not going to lose your shirt, but you didn't do it and didn't do it, and now you're holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They'll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.

Garrison Keillor is a syndicated columnist and the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty" (Viking).

Thanks to SEW for giving a publication link: here

McCain: seriously out of touch

Gotta love these guerrilla videomakers, protesting while there's still time.

Swing music for voters

This makes me think of all the words that could rhyme with "McCain." Like:
pain
insane
blame
shame
inane
feign
down the drain
more of the same...

I'm sure you can think of more. In the meantime, enjoy:

Naomi Wolf's "Handbook for American Revolutionaries"

The coup has begun. Are we ready to fight back?



The book: Give Me Liberty. Get it!

Ad Campaigns I'd Like to See Obama Run

Now that personal attacks are the only weapon McCain has left, here are some that Obama can add to his Keating 5 assault:

1. McCain's a gambler It's well known that he doesn't mind throwing around $100 chips at casinos. Bring this to light and ask the voting public if they want a gambler to lead their country through rough times.
2. Maverick = Unstable Instead of tacitly agreeing with the idea that being a maverick is a sign of laudable independence, start framing it as a mental trait unbefitting a leader who must weigh the complex elements of a changing world. Oh, and also not a good trait for a Commander-in-Chief.
3. Macho man Make prominent the crappy way he has treated the women in his life and his flip-flopping on womens' rights. Characterize a woman who votes for McCain as a co-dependent enabler.

Does theism add value to the universe - or subtract it?

In this simple, home-made video a former minister asks the question that I asked as I took leave of theism: why isn't the world wondrous enough all by itself? Why must we make its existence subservient to the claim for an unprovable "creator?" Ultimately the answer is that in times of fear or crisis we long for the comfort and protection of our outgrown infantile relationships. But yearning doesn't make it so. When we grow up, we realize we're on our own and have to craft a more practical way to grapple with reality.

Is it her "privilege" to be stupid and incoherent?

Palin, in an interview on "fair and balanced" Faux News, reveals that she thinks freedom of the press is a privilege.

"As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we've really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance."

No, guv'ner, it's a RIGHT! A right as fundamental as your right to be a blithering dolt.

War is the McCain way