Awesomeness of the day

are you terrified? I sit here drinking coffee from a purple mug my chiropractor gave me eight years ago. Until this past Christmas I thought the cup was black, due to faltering eyesight in my one sighted eye. I gratefully relate that cataract surgery was satisfactory.
For those who have failing eyesight, it is easy to live in a virtual world, being careful never to step on cracks–remember, break your back? Maybe that’s the reason, in my virtual world, I believed that the United States was in a Constitutional crisis since December 2000. It was hard to tell with all the superstition of the new millennium still on the airwaves.
Then came September 11, 2001. When I saw pictures of the World Trade Center in flames, I said out loud to myself, “The damned fools. Why?” The early attempt had not pleased the perpetrators and they promised to come back and finish the job. Just to drive home the threat, they bombed a couple of our embassies. In the old days, embassies were considered part of American territory and called for retaliation. And when a sea vessel was hit, with loss of life, still no action. I guess it took the biggie.
As biggies go, history was involved on the day Japan annihilated our navy. In 1941 there was no doubt what our government would do. A nation and its allies had trampled on our well-being. Then, 60 years later, it happened again. This time our nation responded by taking out a group of religious fanatics who had co-opted Afghanistan. It worked. A new Afghan government was installed and all that was left to do was help it get on its feet.

Last Sunday and next Sunday at 11:00 in the morning I dedicate to procuring groceries. My young friend is so busy with school and parttime work that he can help me then. But today was mine. In bare feet and calico dress I sat at the computer and read the usual morning newsletters I subscribe to. With no intention of turning on MTP with Rove, or any other MSM talk shows, I wondered if I could find something “different.” Gone were the days of watching that punditry to gain a little insight into current events as I prepared food to make next week’s meals after work. Gone were the years of piloting little souls and their teachers at Sunday School. I would check the mail to see everyone was safe and think about hurricanes in Jamaica, lost Chinese miners, a flood in Minnesota, and the innumerable questions of what the pols were doing. They, by their own design, were undoubtedly pressing the flesh for maximum coverage in tomorrow’s MSM coverage.
Bare feet probably lit the spark. I’m a schoolgirl with an afternoon to spend between morning and evening chores on the farm. So I head for the old schoolhouse on Sundays to see what I could read. There was a flyspecked globe and a set of World Books. All other books I had long since read. I thought of how arbitrary it was to color nations in pastel with sharp blacks dividing them. At the least, why couldn’t China be yellow, for that is what I’d been told about its people. Encyclopedias never quite answered my real questions of just what it was like to live in another part of the world and be like someone other than me. These days I think of that experience as tons of literature pours in about globalization.

I feel giddy, Oh so giddy! (To be sung to the tune of Maria’s song in “West Side Story.”) Maybe it was the never-ending heat. Or perhaps too many loads of laundry yesterday. Or Romney, trying to outdo Tom Harkin with his fancy picnics in Iowa. But I think what did it was Democrats.com(munity) and their YouTube contest about dumping Dick. Two young women, in their respective rooms glued to their respective cell phones, carrying on a conversation. The instigator instigated a call to Nancy to convince her to support impeachment. And they proceeded to do the backandforth talking points we all have heard a million times. For a moment I thought about taking my trusty stomach soother but forgot to. I crashed. Woke up this morning feeling so good. Can take the heat. Can get to the grocery with my trusty boy friend (five times younger than I) and could even do more laundry if need be. But first I just have to tell you how it was in the old days.
When we were dealing with the first Tricky Dick I was in my element but out of my age group. We were all learning to be better computer programmers in an era when the IBM 360 was to die for. And to die was the subject of lunch conversation. Viet Nam was real to recent college graduates with draft cards still in their pockets. The women were even more involved. Mostly they were recent post-Sputnik math majors who had answered the call of their country by being ready to get our space project up and running. And they were political. One woman, whose husband became a veteran against the war--John Kerry style--reminded me that Women for Peace worked for them before the men even thought of the idea, had all the moves. Knew how the underground to Canada worked, and called the ruckus on Michigan Avenue during the disastrous 68 Democratic convention The Second American Revolution. Get the point? We, young and those of us old enough to be their mothers, were not bashful. I even served a special function, despite my advanced age, because I could tell them how Tricky Dick had spent his whole political career scared of Communists and how he tried to scare everyone else. Between 1968 and 1974, I held my tongue many times, because the neighbors were still scared of Communists in Viet Nam. Then one Monday morning during the last week of March, 1973, I had my JOY moment. The Wall Street Journal declared impeachment on the table. Why? Because the Chicago Tribune, that venue with Colonel McCormack’s aura still hovering over it, had thrown down the gauntlet. And the rest is history.

[Note from the blogdiva : This was first posted in June. I just saw it and decided it needed rescuing from the forums for your cynical enjoyment.]

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According to a report not yet released, the Council on Science and Public Health of the American Medical Association has recommended that a chronic and widespread affliction of Americans be officially declared a psychiatric disorder. It has been named the Political Attention Deficit Disorder (PADD). It is recommended that the disorder be included in a widely used mental illness manual created and published by the American Psychiatric Association. The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012. The benefit to people of an official classification is coverage by health insurance.

“The symptoms of PADD are all around us and treating it professionally can do more for our country than any election,” said Dr. Mable Wank in the report’s introduction; she is chairwoman of the Council and a professor at UCLA.

Here are the Council’s main findings on PADD:

Nearly 80 percent of adult American citizens are unable to pay sustained attention to issues and problems associated with their government. They are unable to accept their responsibility as citizens, including their obligation to vote, read in-depth articles and books on political issues, become active members of politically oriented groups, and initiate discussions on current events with friends and family. “The decades-old decline in voter turnout is a direct result of a national epidemic of PADD,” said the report.

Thanks for Dick Cheney

Joel S. Hirschhorn

When someone in high elected office shows the nation how vulnerable our Constitution is, we should be thankful for the wakeup call. Like many ruthless dictators, evil kings, and monster generals, Dick Cheney is the leading practitioner of the ends-justify-the-means mentality, where only his vision of the desired ends counts. And if this means disregarding and disobeying the Constitution, torturing prisoners, killing thousands of American soldiers, disrespecting Congress, destroying our environment, embracing the invasion of illegal immigrants, increasing out national debt, and disregarding the will of the vast majority of Americans, so be it. Serving corporate interests rather than serving the people is Cheney’s brand of patriotism.

Cheney’s self-righteous ego is bigger than George W. Bush’s, and what makes Cheney more striking is that he is enormously smarter and more competent than Bush, his token boss. He is so dangerous and frightening that no impeachment of Bush effort ever stood a chance. Not as long as “President Cheney” enters your consciousness. Cheney became Bush’s shield.

When reality hits the fan we use the-lessons-learned approach to stay sane. With his finger-in-the-eye disdain for what anybody else (or history) thinks of him, Cheney offers a far better lesson learned benefit than the stumbles and fumbles of Bush-the-smirker. Bush is a joke. Cheney is a monster.

Studying overseas is often thought to be an upper middle-class or wealthy bourgeois privilege that Black students cannot afford. Don't believe that hype! Because tuition, housing and transportation costs are higher in the United States than in many other countries, and educational subsidies are often lower here, astute Black students may find that they cannot afford NOT to study overseas.

For example, the annual tuition at United States colleges and universities is rarely less than $5000.00 per year and often comes closer to $$50,000 per year. Meanwhile, tuition at some French universities is as low as $500.00 per year, including a comprehensive health insurance package that covers prescription medicine. Effectively, the cost of college health insurance in the United States may exceed the cost of health insurance AND tuition in France.

Comprehensive US financial aid may be available for American students to study overseas. Many United States colleges and universities permit students to remain enrolled in the United States, paying a nominal fee of perhaps $15.00 per semester for continued enrollment, while actually earning many of their degree credits at a foreign institution, and paying the substantially lower foreign tuition. Because the students remain enrolled at US institutions, they remain eligible for all available US financial aid, but they can spend it overseas in an environment where money goes much further.

The Chicago tribune is reporting, based on a statement from a Texas state representative about his advocacy, that Shaquanda Cotton will be freed in the near future.

Hat Tip to Howard Witt

, author of the Chicago Tribune article below, for his e-mail informing me of this development.

TRIBUNE UPDATE
Girl in Texas prison controversy to go free, lawmaker says

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 30, 2007, 1:09 PM CDT

HOUSTON -- Shaquanda Cotton, the teenage black girl in the small east Texas town of Paris who was sent to prison for up to seven years for shoving a teacher's aide, will be freed soon, a senior Texas legislator confirmed today.

"She is going to be freed, I know that for a fact, either today or sometime next week," state Rep. Harold Dutton, chairman of the Texas legislature's juvenile justice committee, told the Tribune. "I told [prison officials] I wanted her out of there immediately. When I learned about this case, I thought, this case just looks so bad and smells so bad it made me hurt." Chicago Tribune

Economic Inequality Is Real (Bad)

Joel S. Hirschhorn

Rising American economic inequality has received attention by Senator Jim Webb, presidential candidate John Edwards, CNN’s maverick Lou Dobbs, and others. The middle class has not shared in rising national prosperity, because the nation’s wealth has been siphoned off to the richest Americans. Some elites are nervous. They have attacked what are pejoratively called “neopopulists” – people who say the middle class is under siege.

Surprisingly, the attack and economic propaganda have come from the relatively unknown Third Way group that is associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. Why would self-proclaimed progressives and centrists put out a report that says the whole economic inequality story is bogus?

They favor continuation of the free trade globalization policies of recent Democratic and Republican administrations. They want no restraints on international trade, despite mounting U.S. trade deficits and loss of manufacturing and many professional jobs to low wage nations. Of Third Way’s 18 board members, 14 are current or former CEOs or investors, including several hedge fund managers and the co-head of global equity trading at Goldman Sachs.

Third Way’s report “The New Rules Economy” uses sleazy statistical tricks to create a false image of rising economic prosperity for middle class Americans. You know the group is full of crap when the intellectually bankrupt New York Times columnist David Brooks praises its findings. Anyone who believes this report’s data and conclusions is either in the Upper Class or is just plain gullible. The report argues that the middle class is not stagnating, not drowning in debt, not being victimized by free trade. Is this your reality?

I'm going to skip the SOTUA parties and just down my own mojitos at home while covering the State of the Union Address. I was invited to a private chat party, but this being the internets and me being a multi-tasker, I can also host my own chat party.

The fun thing about the chatrooms we have here is that they are archivable. So all I have to do is cut-and-paste the highlights on a blog post after we're done tearing down the Shrub.

Who's in?

You may not want to know this. Americans have been successfully brainwashed to fear exactly what their revered Constitution gives them the right to have. Those smart Framers of the Constitution decided that we needed exactly what the establishment, pro-status quo elitists who run our plutocracy do NOT want us to have. There is even a well funded semi-secret group organized to prevent what we the people have a right to.

Has the brainwashing worked? You bet it has. In the absence of public furor, for over 200 years Congress has not done what Article V of the Constitution says it “shall” do. Congress has never issued a call for an Article V convention of state delegates to consider constitutional amendments, in response to two-thirds of state legislatures asking for one. That numeric requirement – the only specified requirement in Article V – has been satisfied, with 50 states submitting over 500 requests. Such a convention operating under authority of the Constitution would be a fourth, impermanent branch of the federal system, not beholding to the three permanent branches. Such independence has been cartooned into a frightening monster.

There is no uncertainty about what the Framers thought the nation needed. They wrote in crystal clear language a two-step process for amending the Constitution. First, craft proposals for possible amendments. Either Congress can do it or an Article V convention of state delegates can. Second, ratify proposed amendments by three-quarters of the states, either through their legislatures or state conventions, as Congress chooses. The Framers believed that Americans, acting through large numbers of state legislators, deserved a way to circumvent the excessive power of Congress or its refusal or inability to satisfy sovereign citizens – their bosses. No role was given to the federal judiciary and executive branch in amending the Constitution.