Please check out the drug policy article I did for The Huffington Post.  And if you like it: by all means, pass it on!

I found this new video very disturbing:

Britney Spears was [rightly] excoriated for saying “I think we should just support our President in everything he does.” I expect to hear at least as much criticism of this stupidity – which brings Oval Office hero-worshiping to a new and nauseous level.

I totally agree with the “be the change” concept – nothing new (although still very rare).

But Ashton Kutcher (not the world’s brightest sociopolitical bulb) and Demi Moore pledge to be “servants” to President Obama. What the fuck are they talking about? Kutcher is the same moron who recently referred to President Bush as our “commander”.  Is he channeling jungsturm or something?

Who are these people?

And how many of them do you think could actually sit down and engage in a substantive, nuanced conversation about the important issues they’re pledging about?  Two, three, maybe?

This new Harpo Productions video feels right out of a 1930s propaganda machine. I truly sympathize with President Obama – a human facing inhuman expectations. He will have a very hard time living up to the high-style, breathless absurdity of fluff like this.

Hey idiots: pledge loyalty to ideals, or goals, or foundational principles that stir your heart and soul. Respect others, hope for the best for them, empower them, agree and disagree with them, but don’t worship them.  Pledging to be a “servant” to a single person is called a cult.

Hollywood needs political cluefulness, not a new branch of Scientology.

Here’s my pledge: I pledge to fight against blind, unquestioning loyalty of any kind. It’s what got us into the mess we’re in – and it’s certainly not going to get us out.

“Various administrations have closed in gloom and weakness … but no other has closed in such paralysis and discredit (in all domestic fields) as did [President Ulysses] Grant’s. The President was without policies or popular support… half its members were utterly inexperienced, several others discredited, one was even disgraced. The personnel of the departments was largely demoralized. The party that autumn appealed for votes on the implicit ground that the next Administration would be totally unlike the one in office. In its centennial year, a year of deepest economic depression, the nation drifted almost rudderless…”

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Let’s transcend politics and look at the arc of history today.  The hard work will come – but for now, I wish to revel in some starry-eyed honeymooning.  No matter who you voted for, here are some reasons to be proud of your country today:

Senator John McCain’s Call For Unity

Senator McCain’s concession speech was the most gracious and patriotic I have ever heard.  While his crowd seemed to want almost none of it, he – and most of his supporters – are better than that.  This is the man I was excited about in 2000.  Had he run like this – had he been this guy all year – and avoided the neocons who sunk their claws into him, we’d very possibly be looking at a different outcome today.  I continue to believe – as I always have and as I have said publicly loud and often – that John McCain is a good man who wants the best for his nation.  It wasn’t particularly obvious these last few months, and that was tragic.  This speech – and the action that will undoubtedly follow it – serves as a powerful exclamation point on a distinguished career.

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I’m really thrilled – more excited about this Election Day outcome than any since ‘94, when my friend Angus King won the Maine Governorship.

Our nation is confronting once-in-a-lifetime challenges, so the road ahead is rough.  But this outcome makes us far better equipped to face them.  I’m proud of us, and not just for the choice we made, but for the impressive numbers of people who engaged, spoke up, and turned out.

Shortly, the real work begins – but for now, maybe let’s celebrate a little.  Fireworks have actually erupted here in Venice.

Leading into the MSNBC announcement, Chris Matthews said: “The world will look at us – thank God – with wonder again.” NBC called it at exactly 20:00 PST, with a clearly emotional Keith Olbermann delivering the news:

image by tom.arthur via Flickr

Everyone – please, for the love of all that is holy, get out and vote tomorrow.  If you can vote early (at this point I guess that’s just today), do. Those of you who can’t vote early, please be sure you know where your polling place is, and that you bring anything you may need to bring (some states require ID for first-time voters.)

RockTheVote has a great resource center that helps you figure out where to go and what you need to bring.  Use it.  Now.  And DO IT.

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Funny Cleese interview on Olbermann’s show tonight:

Looks like – if the McCain-Palin ticket wins – that Senator Reid is in for a big surprise. Because Sarah Palin says the Vice President is “in charge” of the US Senate. Golly gee, won’t that be neat!! But shucks, this is probably just more “gotcha” journalism, tryin’ to find out what a candidate knows and thinks n’ stuff…

Welcome Blog Action Day listeners.  Thanks Eric, Dawn, and Easton for having me on the show.

Now, let’s back up our talk with action:

Breadlines and Battlecries – a call for you all to get involved in your society today.

A way to fight poverty in Los Angeles.

A way to prevent future poverty everywhere.

A way you might not have thought of to help fight urban poverty and despair: change our nation’s drug policies.

More on my agitate page.

Senator McCain somewhat gracefully trying to fight a fire he and Palin started:

“I expected John McCain to be the first person on his campaign to lose patience with the character attack strategy… you can see him doing that.  He did not expect to be ending his campaign in front of audiences where he had to explain – as we just saw him do – that his opponent, the Democratic nominee, is actually a citizen of the United States and not an Arab.  This is not where John McCain wants to be…”

- Lawrence O’Donnell, on MSNBC tonight

For a moment there, I saw a glimpse of the guy who ran for Prez in 2000…

Conservatives are furious.  Here’s a good Politico piece on McCain’s latest plan to bail out homegamblers with our money.  Excerpt:

“Last night, he took that position on the housing issue of buying up everybody’s mortgage,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Fox News. “Conservatives are scratching their heads today and saying, ‘What happened?’”

“What on earth is that about?” Huckabee asked. “Then you got to ask, which houses? The condos in southern Florida, where people bought $500,000 homes as a second home and now can’t pay for them? Are we buying those, too?”

And in perhaps the only time in history I wanted to echo the words of Michelle Malkin:

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I am generally not one to delight in the misfortunes of others.  But schadenfreude has never been more at home in my heart than in the story of Denver’s own Gabriel Schwartz.  The obnoxious, self-impressed, clueless lawyer did an interview on the floor of the Republican National Convention… I don’t want to just  dislike him for his worldview (although I do) – which mostly revolves around bombing and plundering Iran.  I also dislike him because he’s such an assface.  Think I’m being harsh?  Watch the interview and tell me you don’t want to beat him with a stick:

I’m not the only one who has issues with this guy.  The day after he gave that interview, he met a woman in the bar of his Minneapolis hotel and invited her to his room.  Once they got upstairs, the woman asked him to get undressed while she prepared him a drink.  That drink made Gabriel a very sleepy boy.  (Is there a bomb joke here?)

When Gabriel “Iran, baby” Schwartz woke up, the woman was gone, as was more than $120,000 in money, jewelry and other Schwartzy bling.  After that righteous plundering, Gabriel said;

“as a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me. I used poor judgment.”

Poor judgment?  By the same Gabriel Schwartz I see in that interview?  No!

I can only assume she saw the interview, or had an equally maddening conversation with him in the bar that night.  Here’s what I wanna know: did she “plant a flag”?

Valleywag picked up a FriendFeed discussion between a few of us yesterday regarding the bailout bill within which Scoble blames “people like [me]” for the coming “breadlines”.  It rings a little hollow considering where I’ve been on all this and where he’s been (i.e. nowhere), but it brings a much more important issue to the fore.

To the thread in particular, I realize how acerbic my tone can be when discussing such things and try to be cognizant of that every time I write.  Sometimes my frustration – the result of a bit too much anguish about our national slumber – gets the best of me.  But Americans sat mostly silent as international and domestic crimes were perpetrated in their names and their economy was wrecked – choosing to glide along as if they had far more important things to think about.

Robert is right to describe the financial mess as the result of our collective idiocy.  The bill for one or two generations of stupidity has now come due and our remaining credit cards have been declined.  And for the moment, the social media characters participating in the specific tendril of web masturbation that is Robert’s “what to do” post have come up substantially empty.  So, I’ll see what I can come up with.

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Nothing else needs to be said.

I can’t help but notice some chilling similarities between the Bush Administration’s approach on the financial crisis and the Iraqi War Resolution.  I literally sat awake until almost 5:00 this morning fretting about this.
Let’s look at a few of them:

• We were told that calamity was imminent, and a failure to act and do exactly what Bush asked of us would result in a disaster;
• Congress was strongarmed into doing something big and something fast, without time for proper analysis;
• We were conned into spending hundreds of billions of our hard-earned dollars (much for the benefit of corporate malfeasants) – only to take a giant step backward;
• We handed legal immunity and absolute control to the very authorities who demanded the actions;
• We were lied to every step of the way.

And eventually the majority came around to see it as a colossal blunder.  So, I think Congress would serve itself and the People well if it took a much more measured approach to this, or even refused the bailout.  I know, I’m asking for cajones of steel here, but I can dream.

If this goes through, it will be the swindle of the century.

I’ll close with a few words from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That is fascism; ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

How did we get here?  Is it too late to stop it?

Today on MSNBC, lonesome truth-telling libertarian patriot Congressman Ron Paul said that McCain is “not someone I could endorse, ever.”  Not surprising, of course – but nonetheless interesting to hear from a fellow candidate for the GOP nod.

Today on MSNBC, Carly Fiorina said that this weekend’s Saturday Night Live skit that portrayed Hillary Clinton as substantial and Sarah Palin as a moron was a “sexist” skit.  How in the hell is that sexism?  Ms. Fiorina – what credibility you had with me is out the window.  What this really does is illustrate the McCain campaign’s clumsy strategy of dismissing any criticism of Palin as “sexist”.

So, let’s talk about true sexism.

What is truly sexist is gender tokenism – you know, picking a female for your running mate whom, had she been male, would never even have been considered -  not even as a joke.  Now that’s sexism.

You know what else is sexist, Ms. Fiorina?  Decrying anything that points out Palin’s weaknesses as “sexist” merely because it attacks a female.  Do women need special protection from criticism?  A sort of affirmative action for chicks?  A criticism-free zone for all those who have a vagina?  I mean, if you want to move our society away from real sexism, then let’s agree that men and women must stand on their merits and may be critiqued on their merits.  If you are an intellectual and geopolitical midget – as Governor Palin is – then it doesn’t matter if you are Samuel Palin or Sarah Palin.  The fact remains.

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I’ve been avoiding saying much about this because it’s all so freaking hard to believe.  First, McCain stuns the world (and even his senior staff) by choosing a political nobody to be his running mate.  The gulps were loudest in the GOP, let me tell you.  Not a shred of foreign policy experience and not a moment on the national stage.  My first thought was that it was interesting, but made McCain look frightened.  As I dug deeper it became more ominous – surely he knew her?  Was familiar with her and her policy history?  Nope – he had met her once prior to offering her the gig.  But this weekend he told FOX News’ resident assface-in-chief Chris Wallace that Palin is his “soulmate.”  Seriously?  Am I dreaming this?

But I rub my eyes, and am awake to hear that his vetting team landed in Wasilla last night to check her out.  Wait - last night?  They’re vetting her now? – after the fact? So this is now looking more like what it really was – a rash, shoot from the hip act of confused desperation, and no one in the room to say, “Senator, sir, I understand your enthusiasm, but…”

McCain himself had said that his prerequisite for the VP slot was that it was someone who, “on day one,” would be ready to step in and serve as President.  Really, Senator McCain, this was the best person you could think of?  Are these the kinds of decisions you will make as a President? Read the rest of this entry »

Every American should sit through (and actually digest) this interview in its entirety [Part 1] | [Part 2].  Whether you watch or listen, please take the time to do so with open ears and an open mind.  It is probably the most powerful and sobering assessment of the American condition I have heard in years.

Bacevich’s 2007 op ed in the Washington Post provides some sad but interesting background.  His new book is here.

I really want to push for everyone to feel that the Obama candidacy might be their best choice – Democrats, Republicans and independents – and that everyone should evaluate him regardless of their affiliation.  But it needs to be said that none have been betrayed by their “leaders” the way Republicans have.  Their party was hijacked by a few dozen neoconservative criminals, and our global reputation and economy are in tatters as a result.  The Republican party under Bush abandoned its ideals, and many Republicans are finding considerably more they like about Obama than they do about McCain.

I know more than a few smart Republicans – young and old school – who are supporting Obama.  But many of them don’t talk about it, or, if they do, not very loudly.  I hope that over the next couple of months they’ll speak a bit more loudly, because this is a candidacy that everyone should seriously consider.

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Leo Strauss, the GrandPa of neoconservatism, spoke of stealth ideology when he talked about “noble myths” that leaders needed to use in order to rally the masses around a common purpose.  Now Len Hart at the Existentialist Cowboy describes how Bush and his men used stealth ideology to turn the Constitution into an ash heap.  Read and weep.

I am very unhappy about this so-called “compromise” and am still fantasizing that Feingold and Leahy succeed in removing the immunity provisions from the bill.  Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, speaking on MSNBC’s Countdown tonight, offered this assessment:

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Guys – are you kidding me?  Now, my grandma used to tell us that we had to “get all our colors” when eating – and bushels of recent science has proven her correct.  But the DNC’s three-color rule for convention food is silly at best – first of all, it feeds into all the stereotypes about the neoliberal nanny state mentality; and second, most people are probably unaware of the health benefits and will see it as some sort of aesthetic ideal.