“Health care nays spark 3rd party” leads off page 8 of the Times this past Monday. The article is from The Washington Post and is subtitled “Progressives target 3 Democratic congressmen who sided with Republicans” In it, North Carolina reporter Philip Rucker opens with “Frustrated liberals and labor organizers are taking aim at the Democratic party …” And as to the spoiler effect of a third party, there is this gem: “Organizers say they are so fed up with Democrats who did not support health-care overhaul that they simply do not care.” Well, I’ll be. This report has a pomegranate of facets, two at least, make that three or more if you add Richard’s move against Murray. Here’s the one that juiced my pomegranate: Assuming that North Carolina liberals and labor are not stupid, why should they attack those three Democrats for voting against a patently lousy health bill? The answer to this facetious question is: A) The tarheels only appear to be staunch supporters of the administration and actually want the Republicans...

Yesterday somebody I had known for a long time came to me with a problem. He had just watched the 2007 video of US soldiers shooting civilians from a helicopter, He said he felt terrible and could do nothing about it. He said he had to talk to somebody. I said start talking. He told me that he’d led a sheltered, a-political life until three years ago when he got an email from an activist in Portland seeking volunteers for a campaign to get signatures for some legislation. Apparently one of the environmental groups he had been supporting had sold his name. He’d agreed to approach a local political party. His pitch to them, while rejected, led to his joining their support for a candidate opposing Cantwell’s reelection bid. That campaign in turn had been organized by a coalition in Seattle many of whose members now became his friends. Over the next few years the email postings of that coalition layer by layer pried off his illusions about the United States. In result he actually hit the streets for a year...

To find ill-behaved "right wing"  mobs and nice, hard-left-against-the-stop, progressives both denouncing Obama's health bill is a paradox.  An attempt to resolve follows. The tea baggers'  message is that the government should not be in the business of providing healthcare. The hard-lefter's  message is that this bill leaves health care firmly in the control of the insurance industry. How in the world, one may ask, does a bill that further entrenches the insurance industry seem to the right wingers to be socialistic? It is put that the tea baggers are a decoy invented by the pro-industry forces in the administration to make the single payer/public option people think the bill is a step in that direction. 

In support of the contention that the bill leaves control with the industry note for example the wide approval of the bill by the European financial sector. 

As to the substance of the bill, here is Liberal's comment: "What's wrong with extending basic, preventative health care to a larger segment...

That way I can be sure civilization is still operating when I go. Until then I will keep up my hobby of throwing darts at simple minded pundits like the one who writes for the PEN. Today heershe got my attention by exhorting us to go to Facebook and annoy our Friends with a political message. Heershe got my attention by stating flatly that Facebook is far more powerful than television in controlling people. More hits daily than Google! Realizing this, we must use FB immediately to urge our Friends to get a certain bumper sticker. Rise, supine progressives, here at last is your aegis! Wield your new power!

No, I will not go to Facebook, because lack of Facebook is not what got us into trouble. We are in trouble because we communicate by computer instead of by cracker barrel. Besides, riding around in a car with a sticker that says corporations are not people is not communicating anything to anybody. Perhaps the PEN would like to have it explained that we are losing a class war against an entity so powerful...

You’ll have noticed that in its effort to trigger a flood of comment and consequent mass action, this blog tends towards pontification and polemic.  Sorry about that, as I would prefer a lighter touch. But I’m over-educated, and my paternal grandfather was head of the Congregational Church, two obstacles to poesy. Today the noted tendency is in full force due to a pair of articles floated across Puget Sound by Stand Up Seattle and caught by Maryrose Asher. The combined effect is devastating. Socialist Barry Grey writes of the health bill (death pill) that in essence it is a means for mass impoverishment, a regressive law rammed through congress in spite of scattered opposition and aided by total confusion. Canadian Chris Benjamin has totted up pandemic and irreversible health, yea even survival, problems caused by US wars in Indo China, the Middle East, and South Asia. Images of deformed babies, ruined crop lands, and anarchy at home torment my hours. And surely as they do for some islanders. As for example...

As the aftershocks of healthcare deform continue, the truth of the matter seems to have emerged. According to letters from Ralph Nader and Jon Walker, president Obama last year had cut a deal with the insurance industry to prevent a public option. According to these letters, president Obama has lied to us. Let’s say you and I accept as true that unthinkable travesty because I want to pile on some more bad news in order to make a seamless case for my point today. Here’s the pile: One learns in today’s news that the recent loss of bee hives in fact is due to pesticides, that US funded death squads operate in Indonesia, that the Senate is taking recess without funding unemployment insurance, that Colombia’s US funded drug operation is poisoning the fields of peasants who are out of line, and that Alan Simpson has been called up from the political trash heap to whittle away at Medicare and Social Security.

The pile was heating itself up last evening as I watched the “Nature” show on a PBS fundraiser. It was...

For about two years now it has become apparent to some that all attempts by progressives , whether on the street or at the ballot box, to rein in the malfeasance of US administrations will continue to fail. It has become apparent that the process should in a sense be reversed, that the attempts should be directed by locals at localities: united locals will be the only survivors and the better protestors. Rhetoric! It's me, it's me, oh lord, standin' in the need of prayer. Do I believe that things are that bad? Chris Hedges does, get a load of this excerpt:   Zero Point Of Systemic Collapse By Chris Hedges 19 March, 2010 "Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This...

This morning my wife and I discussed arithmetic. I’d tossed a book on sets and the new math, she’d read about fibonacci numbers, and then of course there is Richard Feynman and his reverence for time as in you cannot count it. Mainly I was thinking about a granddaughter who dislikes “math”, as in a class where you have to do decimals. So I quoted a brother who has pointed out that base ten is not the only scheme for writing down a number. There is for example the binary scheme in which a hundred years would be written 0010011. Wow, just think of a people with one finger on each hand that marked a century with oooneoooneone! Gimme five, for heaven’s sake. And what would the “fifties” be called? Well, okay, the point is that counting with base ten may be as natural as the nose on your face, but it’s entirely arbitrary: take away those two god-given fives and who knows what scheme would evolve for writing a number. Let that sink in a while, good menwomen of Vashon, and then let me remind Fox News and all its bigoted...

A letter signed by the US Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and head of the CIA in 2004 told the 9/11 Commission it could not interview detained suspects. Dear fellow islanders, we are living a lie. Roughly one quarter of the US population knows that an inconceivable crime had been committed by our own government yet buries that knowledge and daily acts the patriotic role. The letter was obtained by the ACLU under the freedom of information act and posted today on my net by one of the "Truthers". This revelation raises the question of sanity, yours, mine, and every last hapless addict of the good life. I am going to finish out this day as usual, and the next, because if I do not I will make my family miserable. Et tu, Dennis Kucinich, and I'm right behind you.

Jim Page has written a ballad called I'd Rather Be Dancing, subtitled above. It's more hypnotic than musical, but the video that he or somebody tacked onto it is powerful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTB1f_EW_Uw

Maybe I just could not catch the words. He mumbles. No matter, at the end I found myself fixed in my seat staring vacantly at the monitor, stunned by a  moral sledgehammer to my soul, our complicity in that bulldozer. Getting on this Ides of March, it occurs that upon watching the video Vashon might forget its sushi and high school football long enough to take a long hard look at the moral squeeze we are in. Vashon could make a difference, not only here, but nationally by taking and defending a position of accountability for barbarism in our name. Clumsy words but I hope you get the idea.







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