Recent paintings and photographs

Since Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have obviously transformed 51 Park Place into a target for right-wing extremists, I believe that Cordoba House should be constructed at a different location, but in the meantime President Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership should make it absolutely clear that right-wing hate-mongers have created the danger of another terrorist attack in lower Manhattan, like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Or instead of attacking Beck and Palin, we can humbly remain with the usual paradigm, where right-wing pseudo-populists define the issue…

Sarah Palin: We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?

Obama blathers uselessly in the middle…

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.”

And progressives are chained to a deeply unpopular dead weight.

Recent American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as listed at the Washington Post.

Pfc. Bradley D. Rappuhn died at Zhari Kandahar, Afghanistan, August 8, 2010. He was 24 years old.

From the Lansing State Journal…

“He was supposed to come home in the end of July,” said his mother, Roxanne Rappuhn, 53, of Grand Ledge. “But they tacked 45 more days on.”

“If he were here right now, he’d be telling me to suck it up,” she said.

Spec. Faith R. Hinkley died in Baghdad August 7, 2010. She was 23 years old.

From the Denver Post…

Hinkley, who had been in her high school’s marching band, surprised her family after the first year of college at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs when she announced she had enlisted in the Army.

“She really couldn’t tell us what she did,” Orene Hinkley said. “She didn’t want us to worry about her.

Lance Cpl. Kevin M. Cornelius died in Helmand province, Afghanistan, August 7, 2010. He was 20 years old.

From the Ashtabula Star-Beacon…

One of Kevin’s favorite times was the bicycle trip he took in 2006, when he rode his bike from East Glacier, Mont. to Ashtabula, a distance of 1,975 miles.

Pfc. Vincent E. Gammone III died in Helmand Province, Afghanistam, August 7, 2010. He was 19 years old.

From the Murfreesboro (Tennessee) Daily News-Journal…

Gammone’s father, Vincent Gammone, II, suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease that affects the ability of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to communicate with one another. West said when the older Gammone learned of his son’s death he “didn’t believe it was his son” at first. “Yesterday (Monday) it finally hit him.”

Spec. Michael L. Stansbery died near Kandahar, Afghanistan, July 30, 2010. He was 21 years old.

From NewsChannel 5 in Nashville Tennessee…

His family received a letter recently dated three weeks ago. One of his friend’s read parts of it to NewsChannel 5.

“Don’t worry yourself so much over me because I am well. I wish I knew how I could bring peace to your mind,” said John Jankovich, a longtime friend of Stansbery’s as he read the letter from Michael.

He also read parts of a letter Michael had written in first grade.

“I will go to battle and have a bunch of men with me to help. I will go to the ocean and save someone from trouble,” read Jankovich.

Staff Sgt. Conrad A. Mora died at Qalat, Afghanistan, July 24, 2010. He was 24 years old.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune…

Military life “was his passion,” said his brother-in-law, Christian Lleva. The last time Mora’s family saw him was in May, when they shared a meal at Goldilocks, a bakery and Filipino cuisine restaurant in National City.

“After dinner we came back here, and we all talked for hours and hours,” Lleva said. “He would rap about anything,” Lleva said. “He could make anything rhyme.”

Sweet Old World
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Physically, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just about the biggest, strongest Republican of them all, and even mentally, compared to the rest of those idiots, he’s almost a genius. But in a battle of wits against anyone of approximately average intelligence, the Governator has about as much of a chance as Elmer Fudd against Godzilla.

For example, in Arnold’s recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he makes several claims that even a fifth-grader could refute.

Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to public employees who opt to retire at age 55 and are entitled to a monthly, inflation-protected check of $3,000 for the rest of their lives.

Hundreds of the Wall Street Journal’s dim-witted readers accepted this silly claim with pitiful credulity, little suspecting that their all-time favorite action-hero was about to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a left-wing Terminator.

About a week ago I came across this photo among the “curiosities” that make up most of the content of high-traffic websites like the Daily Beast and Huffington Post and boingboing, and it occurred to me that the sort of progressive blogging I try to do doesn’t really amount to much more than putting up a little sign in the middle of the desert.

“Sand.”

Are carbon emissions from industrialized economies causing runaway global warming? After millions of pages of scientific research, how much clearer could it possibly be?

“Sand.”

Is the American occupation of Afghanistan a senseless quagmire? With nothing to show for it after nine long years, except a ridiculously corrupt government “elected” after a ridiculously crooked “election” and tens of thousands of Afghans slaughtered and millions of refugees scattered all over Southwest Asia, how much clearer could the futility of all of it possibly be?

“Sand.”

Is globalization a rising tide that “lifts all boats,” or just a scam for enriching an international elite, demolishing rural economies all over the Third World, and driving down American wages to “compete” with slave-labor in a “competition” where we fall behind by $500 billion in trade deficits every year?

“Sand.”

Flood victims peer out of a Pakistan Army helicopter.

A man thrust a folded paper into a reporter’s hand. “It is requested that this person is very poor, who bought a buffalo after a lot of hard labor. It has died in the flood, and it is requested you help,” it read. It was signed with a thumb print, by Muhammad Amin, from the village of That Salay, in Jhok Kalay Khan. Attached with a small piece of string was a photocopy of his ID card that showed he was 32.

“For months and even years, the people of the Indus Valley will not have sufficient income for food or clothing,” he concludes. “They will rebuild, if they can afford it, by inches.”

Now that the United States has increased its aid for victims of the recent floods in Pakistan to $150 million, that grand total is just about exactly as much as the Pentagon spends every two hours, 24 hours every day, 365 days per year.

For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $533.8 billion. Adding spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to $663.8 billion.

Divided by 365, that’s about $1.8 billion per day, or $75 million per hour.

And 120 minutes of that enormous and never-ending flood of money is all we can afford for the millions of victims of one of the greatest natural disasters in modern history.

Ray Liotta\’s elves

Unlike most of my pointy-headed left-wing friends, I can totally sympathize with right-wing protests about the “Mosque at Ground Zero,” because I felt exactly the same way when they built a Blimpie at 30 John Street, only two blocks away from the World Trade Center!

Blimpie! It was born in New Jersey!

Blimpie! Ray Liotta’s elves eat Blimpies!

And don’t even get me started about the Fusion Hair and Wig Store at Ground Zero!

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The Wall Street Journal is currently displaying “A Tea Party Manifesto” at the top of its website, and this thing includes a declaration of war on the Republican Party.

The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.

After that relatively bold war-whoop, most of the rest of it is just about the sort of anti-government hate-speak that you might expect.

By definition, government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or redistribute tax dollars to bail out the broken, bloated pension systems of state government employees. Or purchase, by federal mandate, a government-defined health-insurance plan that is unaffordable, unnecessary or unwanted.

By definition! It couldn’t be more obvious! Only a fool would dispute these self-evident truths!

All of this is already familiar, and none of it differs much from the Republican platform in every election for the last 30 years.

What’s more or less original about teabaggers in general and the Wall Street Journal “manifesto” in particular is a fantastic claim that all of it arose spontaneously out of the legitimate indignation of honest citizens, united from the ground up by their adherence to the American values of “individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and limited government.”

The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds.

Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge.

Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues.

In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.

Activists! From the ground up! Common sense! Only a fool would dispute these self-evident truths!

But unfortunately this beautiful and apparently spontaneous harmony of all honest citizens is immediately discombobulated by a screeching dissonance!

The rebellion’s name derives from the glorious rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who in February 2009 called for a new “tea party” from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

What?

I thought it all began “around kitchen tables” and “at weekly book clubs!”

And now you tell me it was christened on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in a crowd of zillionaire traders, by a network TV reporter?

So it isn’t exactly surprising that the “manifesto” of so many humble activists is proclaimed by a billionaire’s newspaper, and proclaimed by none other than…

Richard Keith “Dick” Armey, the former Majority Leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives and immediately thereafter a $750,000 per annum lobbyist for DLA Piper, representing such humble clients as General Motors, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and more than 100 of the largest corporations in America!

So the next time a crowd of suckers gets together for a spontaneous demonstration they heard about on Fox News and CNBC…

They can bring along the full length version of Dick Armey’s Tea Party Manifesto, from HarperCollins…

…which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch, like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and most of the other strings that jerk the tea-suckers around like so many pitiful puppets.

Population 1960-2008

I’ve been watching the great HBO series Six Feet Under on DVD for about a week, and yesterday I saw the episode which ends with Ruth Fisher singing along with a tape of Joni Mitchell. I didn’t even recognize the song, but a google search for the lyrics revealed it was Woodstock.

Then last night I had a dream about walking up a long hill with the same song playing in my head, but when I came to the crest and looked down, instead of mobs at a concert I saw a flood like an ocean, and millions of people washed away in it.

“And maybe it’s the time of year
or maybe it’s the time of man
and I don’t know who I am
but you know life is for learning.”

“We are stardust,
billion year-old carbon,
we are golden,
caught in the devil’s bargain
and we got to get ourselves
back to the garden.”

They’re known as the 99ers — laid-off people who have gone 99 weeks without finding work, at which point their jobless benefits expire.

More than 1.4 million Americans have been unemployed for at least that long — victims of an economy that has not been creating many jobs.

The 99ers took a stand on Wall Street Thursday. A throng of desperate job-hunters — who’ve been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out — staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall.

“Are you going to tell us, President Obama and Congress, that our lives are not worth saving?” asked 99er Connie Kaplan.

And the recent extension of unemployment benefits does not help the 99ers.

This bill will not add any additional weeks of benefits for people who have already exhausted their unemployment, a group of people sometimes called the “99ers” because they have already collected 99 weeks of unemployment insurance.

Long-term unemployment as a percentage of total unemployment has typically bounced up to 20% during previous recessions, and even as high as 26% during what was formerly considered a “severe” recession in the Eighties, but now it’s over 45%, and the curve of long-term unemployment is almost vertical.

Faced with this dismal picture, why is Washington’s response so feeble?

Paul Krugman recently dismantled the usual excuses.

We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows.

So it’s cheaper to run a deficit now than it ever has been, and more Americans are in desperate financial trouble than at any time since the Great Depression, but what do we hear from the Democratic Congressional leadership?

More than ever, Americans understand the danger of debt: a stagnant economy, a hobbled government, and a weak national defense.

It isn’t possible to debate and pass a realistic, long-term budget until we’ve considered the bipartisan commission’s deficit-reduction plan, which is expected in December.

The only help in sight or even in prospect is Senator Debbie Stabenow’s Americans Want to Work Act, which would provide an additional 20 weeks of unemployment insurance for 99ers, but only in states like Michigan with an unemployment rate of 7.5% or higher, and there isn’t much chance that this bill will even be debated before the end of the year.

It appears that after taking a long break, the Senate’s legislative agenda on September 13 will not include deliberations on a Tier 5 unemployment extension bill for 99ers.

Senator Debbie Stabenow’s Tier 5 “Americans Want To Work Act” is not tabled for discussion during the Senate’s first session on September 13 after going on recess a week ago according to OpenCongress.org.

And in the meantime hundreds of thousands of Americans like Alexandra Jarrin will descend into homelessness and destitution.

When interviewed by the New York Times, she was living in a motel in Brattleboro, Vermont, having paid $260 she managed to scrape together from friends and from selling her living-room furniture – enough for a week-long stay.

Her vehicle is now on the verge of being repossessed. Jarrin has contacted her local shelter, but was told there was a waiting list. “Barring a miracle, I’m going to be [sleeping] in my car,” she said.