Archive for June, 2008

Today, a whole bunch of mucky mucks got together and took I-159 off the ballot at 11 am.

They tried to make it look nice; I am here to tell you the truth.

They asked the Secretary of State and Election Officials to stop counting the over 30,000 signatures voters’ signatures to qualify I-159 to be on the ballot this November, and pulled it as the authors of the initiative, even though roughly 30,000 of you put pen to paper to have on the ballot. 

DIRECT DEMOCRACY THWARTED FOR ILLUSIONARY POLITICAL GAIN.

Which is the better title to this post?

The people behind the initiative traded your signatures for supposed political leverage in the future.

I was asked to consider helping gather signatures for I-159, but I had some hesitations about some particular language in the initiative, and sought out other opinions on the proposal.  I never came across an argument that convinced me to support the issue, and I know some of the best.  My problem was with the collective bargaining directly with the Governor.  I took a deep breath, and told people that I normally work closely with on progressive issues that I couldn’t add my name to the initiative. 

Today I am pissed off.  I don’t know quite how to explain it, other than 30,000 Montanans wanted this issue on the ballot for consideration, and the people behind the initiative decided that they could buy and sell on the power of Montanans signatures that they had gathered.  Montanans wanting regulation of the Home Health Care industry, they traded your voices for a seat at the table in the future on progressive health care issues.

I know this is politics.  My problem is that people bartered your voices to vault them into a position to “matter” with the Health Care community.  I have been seething about this.

I am angry.  I am disillusioned. 

I won’t let this opportunity to pass to say that Democrats and Progressives also play dirty politics.  And to know evermore, that watching the actions of politicians is far more important than listening to their words.  Thank goodness for blogs, because we know the MSM won’t say what I am saying to you now.

I think about my friends who gathered those signatures, and volunteered their time to talk about the good things this proposed initiative would have brought to health care in Montana.  I am outraged.

I think about the Montanans who thought this was a good proposition, and whose signatures were traded for political gain, and I am incensed.

I think about the fact that Montanans have access to democracy that many other states don’t have, to directly propose ideas to become Montana law; and how it was subverted today for political gain; while I am not ready to give up access to democracy, I am exacerbated to see it used for political purposes.  In my opinion, this action ranks right up there with CI-100 in taking away the rights of Montanans to their own government. 

If there has ever been a perfect illustration of why I am an Independent as opposed to a Democrat or Progressive; here it is. 

If there has ever been a post where I wanted to capitalize, bold, italicize, underline, highlight, and to have be seen in war paint red every single word; here it is.

Many of us believe that there is a serious problem facing this country: fossil fuels. Gas and diesel at not the only problems. According to Dr. John Deutch, co-chair of “the most comprehensive, interdisciplinary study ever conducted on the future of nuclear energy,”

“Fossil fuel-based electricity is projected to account for more than 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020,” said Deutch. “In the U.S. 90% of the carbon emissions from electricity generation come from coal-fired generation, even though this accounts for only 52% of the electricity produced. Taking nuclear power off the table as a viable alternative will prevent the global community from achieving long-term gains in the control of carbon dioxide emissions.”

In my mind, nuclear power has been off the table for quiet some time. However, I have been rethinking that over the last couple of years. You see, nuclear power generation would provide ample energy for the electrolysis process needed to generate hydrogen to replace oil. With one solution, we could eliminate coal and oil. How cool would that be?

Of course, it comes with some real problems. Meltdowns, leaks, radioactive waste and two headed fish as the most obvious. Many of these can be mitigated using new technologies like pebble bed reactors, but they remain very real concerns. It is a lot to discuss and a lot to take in, but I think that the time to reopen the discussion is here. Given the damage we are doing with fossil fuels, can we afford to take any options off the table?

Any thoughts?

Anyone who knows me personally will know that I am a bit of a linguistics enthusiast. I love languages and their expressiveness (though I often butcher our own). This has led to some of the best things in my life, including my career choice (software is all about the expressive power of language). I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that a lot of my early insights into the importance of language’s expressive power came from George Carlin. From there, I moved on to Noam Chompsky, Liebniz and Gawron.

When I was about 12, my Dad had a VCR tape of a stand up routine with George Carlin, I watched it often when home alone. Carlin had a lot to say about words and their importance. Some were damn right profound and go to the heart of my early political formation. For instance, I remember Carlin had a routine on the danger of softening language:

I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that.
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There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.
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In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
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That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.
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Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
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Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
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I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.

You see, this remains one of the biggest problems in American politics. Words can be powerful things used to express very complex thoughts, but they can also be used to hide the truth. For instance, words like ‘collateral damage’ mask the gruesome truth of what happens in war. The term ‘capitol punishment’ attempts to soften the fact that someone is being put to death. The label ‘enemy combatant’ is often used to remove the Geneva convention rights of a foreign soldier. This list could go on forever, but can really be summed up by this quote by George Orwell:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind

This was all first pointed out to me by George Carlin. i was sad to hear that he died tonight. I will miss him, but I thank him for the early insights he gave me.

The feds are arresting people all over the country for mortgage fraud. To me, this is an extremely positive move and I say that jail is too good for them they should put them under the jail. This is a really big deal, people have lost their life savings, security, peace of mind and homes in this deal.

The thing is, a lot of this could have been avoided in the first place with just a little oversight. We know that the origins of the subprime market crash are rooted in the hedge fund market, the current Republican administration repeatedly rejected calls for increased oversight of the hedge fund market. Consider this from Feb 2007:

The Bush administration said Thursday that there was no need for greater government oversight of the rapidly growing hedge fund industry and other private investment groups to protect the nation’s financial system.
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Instead, the administration, in an agreement it reached with the independent regulatory agencies, announced that investors, hedge fund companies and their lenders could adequately take care of themselves by adhering to a set of nonbinding principles.

This goes back to my seminal point: the market does not operate in a Utopian vacuum, devoid of basic human impulses like greed. On paper, the emphasized statement above would be true. Too bad we live in a real world. In this case, an ounce of prevention really would have been worth a pound of cure.

Talk about some folks who ate a steaming bowl of stupid for breakfast.

Opposition to offshore drilling — once ironclad in places like California and Florida — has begun to soften. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida on Tuesday eased his opposition to new energy exploration off the coast.
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“Floridians are suffering, and when you’re paying over $4 a gallon for gas, you have to wonder whether there might be additional resources that we might be able to utilize to bring that price down,” said Crist, a Republican.
[snip]
Congressional Republicans have been seizing on high energy prices to ratchet up the pressure on Democrats to allow more domestic drilling.

Here is the idea: gas prices are too high, but if we allow offshore drilling everything will be just fine. Just fine.

I have to ask these geniuses a something though: What makes you think that allowing additional drilling will somehow motivate the gas companies to start behaving differently? Aren’t they already making record profits with huge tax cuts while we are suffering daily? I can see it now, we allow them to increase their supply with new offshore leases and then sit back a watch prices continue to rise.

Good stuff there. Need a side dish to your steaming bowl of stupid?

The oil industry generally approved Tuesday as Republican presidential candidate John McCain charted his policies on energy

Everything is just crashing in on me right now, and the last thing I have time for is political analysis. Although, I have to say Progeba and Neiffer are defeated by people who’s agenda is to pray for the state? Ouch. And how sad for the people who voted for them. I think that everyone prays for Montana, the United States, and the safety and well being of the whole world, irrespective of where they happen to live. At least if they are folks given to prayer.

I have been less and less available to the political blog-o-sphere, and I just wanted people to know that while you feel it, I do as well. There is nothing that I would like better than to be digging into an initiative right now, but my responsibilities to my own life intervene. I am feeling V’s pain.

I am also feeling the crunch with close friends and family.

I found out this Sunday, that there is an Early Welcome 2008 program with the Idaho College of Law. How to look at cases, take notes, and break them down. I have been out of school now for 13 years, this is an opportunity for me. That’s right I graduated from Carroll with Progeba in ‘95, I just recently found that out; but now I remember him, I bet he would remember me as well if he knew who I was back then. We both made our mark on Carroll, Helena, and Montana way back then. Here’s your hint Pogie, I was a native theatre major. Top 5 Helenans, for me my friend (under 40) IMHO.

Anyway, it looks like I will be leaving Montana a week earlier than planned, although expect egg on my face if I don’t get into the selective Early Welcome Program.

In the meantime, it is not that I have given up politics, just that my family and friends are moving to the top of the list of priorities. The time they gave up for me to be involved in the last election cycle is circling back to them now.

My niece, Cece2, my brothers and of course the Firecracker. My sis, and all the wonderful friends that she introduced me to, when I moved back here 4 years ago. All my blog-o-sphere friends, in real life, and online; I feel it.

But right now, to the people who take the time to read this stuff; which are at its base nothing more than my opinions on the hot plate. To the trolls who took time to comment, to the readers who dared to interject into this crazy blog world, to my dear friends who I encouraged to get more involved, and to my blogging friends who saw something more in me, than I dared to see in myself. I appreciate you all. Words don’t encompass all that is in me, because of you.

I don’t know if I will have time to get sappy again before I leave for a while, but if I don’t, know that I think of you always.

Cece-in-MT

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Dennis Kucinich recently introduced 35 articles of impeachment against GW Bush, and spent several hours doing so. That’s 35 good, legal reasons to impeach the head of the rogue administration we’ve lived under for over seven years now. Speaker Pelosi squirmed uncomfortably through those long hours and then called for a House vote to send the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, headed by John Conyers, a vocal opponent of impeachment. The vote was 251-166 in favor of sending it to Judiciary, which amounts to sending it to it’s grave.

It’s a curious thing. The Democrats voted unanimously to send it on to Judiciary. Why did Dennis Kucinich expend the effort to introduce the articles, and then join his fellow Democrats in voting to effectively kill his own resolution? Why did the 166 votes in favor of debating it on the House floor all come from House Republicans? Hmmm…

Tim Russert one of the best (in my opinion) newsman who died this past Friday will be a void in the news and politics overall. I got up this morning to hear that he is no longer with us. WOW how short life really is. Meet the Press just will not be the same no matter who they may pick to take his place if that is possible.

His two books had little to do with politics and I suggest that if you have not read either one of them to take the time to get them. One of my personal memories would be when I got to know him while I lobbied and owned a small newspaper in South Dakota along with Chet Brokaw (To Brokaw’s brother) in Pierre, South Dakota. We had a small cubby in the basement of the state capitol where the news media had their boxes. I can remember he was so friendly you would never have known that he was a major force in the news media.

We talked about the “blue line” that most reporters had to deal with while writing their respective stories. He told me that I was lucky that I owned my own newspaper because I did not have to deal with the blue pencil and that I was able to write what I wanted. George Bush Sr., was there to address the Senate and yet Tim took the time to talk with all of us.

At the time, I owned a small newspaper in Colman, S.D. (The Colman Informer) and I will never forget just how down to earth he was and that he did not come off as a person who did not have time to talk with his common man. He took the time to share his experiences and gave me some really good advice. That was something I still take to heart when I listen to others with their opinions regardless of which political party they support.

“If more people would learn to control the hole under their nose they would be amazed at what they would learn.”

NBC has a huge void to fill.

Referring to Michelle Obama as Obama’s ‘Baby Mama’ went way to far. A ‘baby mama’ is generally used to refer to the unwed and unaffiliated mother of one’s child.

The fact that this is ‘journalism’ brings a little vomit up in my throat.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? American politics is getting really interesting and with all the clamor of politics these days what is surely coming (sooner or later) will be the extension to the Clinton dynasty in American politics. When? – Oh let’s say by the year 2020.

My prediction is that we may see Chelsea Clinton running for President (after her mother of course) takes another swing at the presidency in 2012 or 2016. This will give Chelsea time to run for Congressman woman who is now 28, time to get a couple of terms under her belt and reach the required age of 35 for President. Can’t happen you say?

Hey, politics has forever changed here in 2008 and considering the Bush’s, the Kennedy’s and now the Clinton’s, I’d say that it is something that very well could happen. By that time people will be used to the idea that women can and will hold high office positions much beyond the Congress or the Senate.

You know – this thing called politics IS getting really interesting isn’t it?

I spend an inordinate amount of time wrestling with concepts of the free market. I understand the basic concepts here: the market will make the best decisions concerning the market’s best interests and government should be relegated to a policing role. Cool. I like that concept because it is saying that the people of the market will converge towards the best solutions working together for the common good. This makes a lot of sense but contains a fatal flaw.

Here is the way that I see it. When people conduct business, they are both trying to play a non-zero summed game. Generally, both parties are seeking to gain some positive benefit from the transaction. An individuals decisions concerning the way that business is conducted are based self interest. If a person intends to do business in a particular market for the long term, it is in their best interest to make decisions that will help the market remain salient over the long term. When this strategy is widely deployed, the market will make decisions that are responsive to the outside world.

The problem comes when you consider that in practice the long term strategy is not so widely spread as we would like to imagine. For an example, look at the American auto industry. It has long been known that there are major obstacles with the future of gas powered auto’s. Gas prices have been rising steadily for years and we have known that global shortage was a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. While people still ‘debate’ man’s role in global warming, there is no debating the environmental damage done by billions of cars. These are not new issues, they have been looming for decades, yet I fail to see any indication that the auto industry has attempted to address them in a meaningful way.

We are not dealing with an insurmountable problem here. It could have been solved 20 years ago. Look at the variety of choices out there. Hydrogen vehicles have existed for sometime and electolysis can be powered by wind, tidal or solar power. Full electric cars have been around as long as cars themselves. Again, refueling can be powered by renewable sources. There are air powered cars and a multitude of other choices. There are some major obstacles to overcome before any of these solutions are completely viable, but none are insurmountable. Consider what it would be like if we were just now trying to get widespread support for gasoline as an auto fuel. Questions of distribution, production and retrieval would dominate the discussion and the needed infrastructure would be huge.

The thing is that the barrier to entry for new fuels is so large because they have received very little attention and funding until very recently. Had only a portion of the money spent on supporting and continuing the current fossil fuel based system been spent on new fuels, the problems wouldn’t seem so big right now. The fact is, no one was working on them because so few in the auto industry has been looking ahead in the auto industry, so these problems have been left largely unsolved.

We like to imagine the ‘free market’ on a small and quaint scale. We like to think of the small business owner who aspires to run his business in the same market for generations. We know that that this proprietor will try to make decisions that benefit the market in the long term as his own long term survival depends on the continued viability of the market. We don’t really have a market like that. Our business is done in climate where the average CEO’s tenure is 5.4 years in a Fortune 100 company. The primary objective for that CEO is to make decisions that will benefit the company and the CEO for that 5 years. When you are focussed on the short term goal, the long term benefits certain avenues are not examined and the long term damage of other avenues are not evaluated. We are seeing that in the auto industry.

I am a believer of the free market, but not a blind believer. There are only some things market forces can successfully manage, others only work in an ideal model.

Forty years ago everyone was thinking it but no one was saying it. On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy won the DNC nomination. He had said that things were changing and that in forty years a black person could even run for and win the presidential nomination.

Fast forward forty years and Barak Obama has managed to do just that! It was also forty years ago that RFK was assassinated.

So now everyone is thinking it, but nobody is saying it. Will history repeat itself?

And then there are those who are almost demanding that Hillary Clinton be the Vice President on Obama’s ticket. Should that happen one almost certainly would realize that Mrs. Clinton would then become the “first” woman president in our nations history albeit by the death of another president who had also made history prove itself yet again.

History is that JFK, Martin Luther King and RFK all were killed and their legacy was cut short and we shall never know just how it would have all run out in the end.

As it stands now, no one has said it, but I think a lot are still thinking it – could this happen again? I hope not.

It has been quite a while since I have posted here, but I wanted to stick to one site for a while and see how things went.  The truth is that, while having my own site is always nice, there is something great about Netroots that I lack at Rebels Are We!, so I decided that I need to continue to be a glutton for punishment, and continue to post on both sites.  But I have something I am very curious about.

What with the Democratic primary season over, the big question is of course whether or not Obama should offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton.  You probably know how I feel; Hillary has burned too many bridges by means of her Republican, fear-mongering tactics.  However, with such a divided electorate, it is a question worth examining, and I am curious how Netroots readers feel.  If you prefer someone over Clinton, please voice who it is (and why) in the comments.

With all of the coverage of political elections and the folks who are wanting us to vote for them take a moment to pause and “remember” what I and others like me did so many, many years ago that have framed what and who I will support in the 2008 elections.

http://www.operationmom.org/ToOurParents.html

If you think you do not have time to look at this then I suspect you don’t remember how we enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy as a nation of free people.

After Obama’s stunning victory in Montana yesterday, I could not help myself. For some background, see this post on Andy Hammond: Professor Chaos and then go over and read some LOL Cats.

You will recall that Andy had it set in his mind that he would be able to reak havoc and chaos in the Democratic primaries by voting for Hillary Clinton. He claimed that like minded ditto-heads were responsible for her victory in Pennsylvania and predicted they could do the same thing in Montana:

I am officially opening up the Montana Division of Operation Chaos. It’s the creation of Rush Limbaugh to create chaos in the Democratic primaries.
[snip]
My goal is to continue Operation Chaos in the Montana Democrat Primary. It’s an open primary on June 3 so it will be very easy to just go and vote. It is the last state primary, along with South Dakota, before the National Convention and I am pretty sure Hillary will still be battling so I plan on voting for her. I have also recruited, to date, eight other conservatives to vote for her and plan on recruiting many more.

Well, I am not thinking that his plan worked so well. In fact, judging from the voter counts, I am thinking that a lot of formerly Republican voters crossed over and voted because they liked Obama. We’ll see in a few months.

In the meantime, while Andy Professor Chaos and his friends minions were busy trying to “to create chaos in the Democratic primaries”, something sort of funny happened. After years and years of running for every position in the land as a member of every party ever conceived, the Republican Party has nominated Bob Kelleher. The Republican party of Montana just nominated the green party candidate from the 2002 Senate race to represent their party in the 2008 Senate race.

I don’t really know anything about Bob, other than he has ran for Governor four times, congress once and president once. All of these as a Democrat. In 2002 he ran for US Senate under the banner of the Green Party. His big issue? Convert America to a unicameral parliamentary system. Now he is the official nominee of the Republican party of the state of Montana for the position of US Senate.

Good work Andy Professor Chaos. The debates are going to be a BLAST!