Barack Obama is a rarity in Washington -- an honest politician who tells it like it is. Unfortunately the truth is often painful, as it was when he made the statement to a group of supporters that many working-class voters have been manipulated and used. The manufactured outrage from John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and much of the TV media has been utterly predictable and utterly self-serving, because all of these people know that Obama speaks the truth.

For years, decades in many areas, hard-working Americans have seen their jobs eliminated or shipped overseas for no reason other than the greed of CEOs and corporate boards. It may be called "good economics" or "cutting business costs," but what it amounts to is greed. If they claim it is to make a product more affordable to consumers, this is also obfuscation, because consumers are forced to buy sweatshop products only when their own wages are stagnant (or falling). This is exactly what is going on now; regular Americans like you and me are unable to stave off a recession because we cannot afford to.

The Republican Party has long invoked the old specter of communism, convincing people that there is a government-sanctioned redistribution of wealth from the top down. This could not be farther from the truth: For years, the redistribution of wealth has been from the middle and working class into the pockets of multimillionaires. It's been done with our nation's economic policies, which tax work and reward wealth. It's been done with the out-of-control cost hikes in healthcare, which have not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in people's wages. And it's been done in the war in Iraq, which has seen billions of our tax dollars taken from our paychecks and deposited into the coffers of Blackwater and Halliburton.

People do become bitter when they see everything they ever worked for taken away. But rather than make elections about the real cause of that anger, Republicans and a fair number of Democrats have been playing games with everyone, stirring up unfounded fears that the government will seize guns from law-abiding Americans or outlaw religion. It is a very smart tactic. It was no mere chance that freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to self-defense were the very first amendments to our Constitution; these liberties are important to Americans and a perceived threat to them would stir up outrage.

But there is no such threat. The years-long campaign to convince people otherwise has been to give massive coverage to local stories where individual people illegally abused their power, and pretend that it is a formal government policy. It stirs up that outrage and distracts people from the real issue. Can you go to church? Can you talk about God to someone in the mall? Can you keep a gun in your house? Why, yes, and there is no danger that you will be denied these rights. However, there is a very real danger that you could lose your job, and with that, your healthcare, your life savings, your property, and even your house. The government won't help you, either, despite that you have paid taxes all your life and been an honest American. They will bail out Bear Stearns, but you're not important enough, in their minds.

THIS is what Barack Obama was referring to. HE is not the elitist. HE is not the one who looks down on voters. To the contrary, Barack Obama wants to address nationwide, systemic, real problems, not fearmongering and lies. Those who are on TV blathering about what Obama said have too much invested in the system to offer a fair assessment of his words. However, the voters have the opportunity to stand with a truly straight-talking politician and prove to the naysayers that they will not have their intelligence insulted and will not be lied to anymore.

According to fairly recent polls, 49 percent of the American public believes the theory of evolution, against 48 percent that does not. It's not entirely clear what this poll means, because people may interpret "Do you believe in evolution?" in different ways. However, I think it can be taken at face value, because a different poll had been taken a few months earlier asking if human beings evolved, and it offered more clarity in its choices, including a choice "humans evolved under God's direction." From the same link, this other poll found that even with the choice of theistic evolution, 55 percent believed that there was no evolution involved in the human species. I think it's safe to conclude that this country is roughly split down the middle.

Now, why? Why is the concept of evolution--and with it, scientific ideas such as the age of the Earth and the beginning of the universe--so controversial that fully half of the country won't believe it?

There is a disturbing trend in some parts of the political "blogosphere" to denigrate, insult, and attack not just politicians and national figures, but also ordinary people on the other side of the aisle. It's part of the polarization of America, no doubt, but all it's accomplishing is to increase hate. You never win anyone over by calling them stupid. We are a thinking species, and whatever the idea may be, no matter how mind-blowing it may seem, the person holding it has a reason for doing so. It may be a reason they're not consciously aware of, and it may be flawed, but they have some reason for believing as they do. To disregard this fact sends the signal that you are not interested in hearing what they have to say--that you've decided that they're stupid. I am not going to play that ugly game.

I've avoided blogging for a long time, in part because of some personal issues that have rather soured me on politics, but also because my chosen candidate, John Edwards, wasn't making the splash I'd hoped he would, and I was actively against Hillary Clinton and indifferent to Barack Obama. I'm all in favor of the "hope-driven Obama nation" and political optimism, but I couldn't identify with it personally, having been the victim of a blame-shifting opportunist (who, perhaps not coincidentally, ended up supporting Clinton) and becoming rather sour about the general ethics of those in politics. There was nothing, basically, to spark my interest in the primary season.

However, I've become so utterly disgusted with the Clinton operation that I'm going to break my silence.

In my opinion, Hillary Clinton is a craven, amoral politician who will do ANYTHING to "win."

There. I said it.

Two years ago at this exact day and exact minute, Hurricane Katrina made its first Gulf landfall on the Louisiana coast.



I would like to mark this day by providing a series of links to recent news about the recovery, or what passes for it. First is my series of blogs about the hurricane:

No Environmental Reviews
Disaster Profiteering (highly recommended)
The Working Class
Global Warming
Insurance Malfeasance
Blaming the Victims
Faith-Based Recovery, I
Faith-Based Recovery, II & III
Faith-Based Recovery, IV & V
Faith-Based Recovery, VI

Next, I have rounded up external links to news sources that have pertinent stories.

Katrina: A Reality Check for All Towns -- Focuses on aftermath in New Orleans
New Orleans Still Struggling Two Years After Hurricane Katrina -- Focuses on health care
Survey: Post-Storm Mental Health Worsens -- Gulf Coast in general
FEMA suspends use, sales of ‘toxic’ trailers -- However, just so no one forgets the stonewalling they did prior to this:
House Panel Probes Toxic FEMA Trailers

(I'm thinking I may have to do a health piece soon. That is the one issue I never really wrote about.)

In the midst of all the 2-year anniversary coverage by the media, some of which will be disgustingly smarmy and positive to the point of being an outright lie, let's not forget about anything attending the tragedy. I intend to mark the occasion later today by viewing An Inconvenient Truth again and considering the environmental aspects of the disaster, both those which followed it and those which I am convinced led up to it (i.e., global warming). The best way to observe the day is to consider what we might be able to do to prevent it from happening again.

There are no excuses to be made for the rollover of Congress, specifically 57 Democrats in the House and Senate, in codifying changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Changes that legalized the very behavior that a federal judge had ruled was a blatant violation of the act. It was an act of political cowardice and fundamental stupidity. Yes, I said stupidity.

The very purpose of FISA was to prevent the sort of egregious, unlawful behavior that the Bush administration was doing -- wiretapping people without a warrant.

Y'see, in the general public, when someone breaks the law, they get punished. They don't threaten the Legislature into altering that law.

I guess there is a different set of laws for those in the executive branch.

If these people don't think that Bush's goons are using the data to profile "troublesome" Americans, with no connection whatsoever to terrorists, then they are too delusional to occupy the offices that they hold. This man, his puppet master Cheney, and their goon Gonzales have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted with a five dollar bill, let alone the private information of millions of Americans.

By rolling over, they have validated Bush's "unitary executive" (i.e., king, or more appropriately, emperor) theory of government. He commands and they obey. He is not bound by the law; he is the law.

Shame on them. They deserve exactly what will be coming their way. America is no longer with Bush, and neither will it support those who aid and abet his lawbreaking.

The final Harry Potter book comes out this weekend. I will get my copy at the midnight release at Prudential Center, in Boston, and plan to get back to my place immediately (or at least as soon as possible) so that I can read it.

I lost interest in this series with the release of the Lord of the Rings movies, which I still find to be a far superior series. But in the two years since the last Potter book was published, I got interested in it again. Ms. Rowling did indeed improve her style dramatically in books 5 and 6. These books, as has been pointed out, do not really read like children's books.

Anyway, after getting interested in the series again, and digging into the books to theorize on how they might end, I'm going to post my best guesses on the major fan theories surrounding the final book. One week from now, after I presumably have finished the tome, I'll go back and score myself.

Note: The rest of this entry contains CONFIRMED SPOILERS for the final book, Deathly Hallows. If you dislike spoilers, don't click!

I've been following this sorry saga for awhile now, because it's so utterly typical of bureaucracy, yet thoroughly disgusting. Of all the places where public appearance should be less important than getting it right, the weather agencies should be near the top of the list--yet that seems to be changing. The Weather Service and NOAA seem to be reverting to the pre-1950s era.

In that period, tornadoes were not forecast. The word "tornado" was not used in weather broadcasts, and in fact was banned until 1938. The reasoning for this was that, since the weather agency was unable to forecast tornadoes with much accuracy, false alarms would create panic and make the agency subject to public condemnation. When a military base in Oklahoma, Tinker Air Force Base, began issuing tornado forecasts with a fair amount of accuracy, the Weather Bureau tried to get it to stop, claiming weather forecasting as its own domain. The only result was further public embarrassment, but also, a great advancement in tornado and thunderstorm research, from the necessity of producing a decent forecast.

Here's what's been happening a bit more recently.

The Quikscat satellite is a satellite that measures wind patterns, speeds, and directions at the earth's surface. The satellite often reveals whether a tropical system has developed a closed circulation, which is a requirement for classifying it as a depression rather than an open wave. It also helps reveal wind speeds in tropical storms when they are too far away for the government to send planes to investigate. It's a highly useful forecasting tool, one that the National Hurricane Center frequently cites in its tropical update products to justify a wind speed. Losing the satellite would result in a 16% decrease in the accuracy of tropical forecasts.

The government has been pushing to decommission the aging satellite without any plans for a replacement. National Hurricane Center director Bill Proenza hasn't been too happy about this, and he's made some outspoken comments to the media stating the need for a replacement satellite and his complaints with the appropriation of funds for meteorological research and weather forecasting.

In recent interviews with The Miami Herald and other media, Proenza has strongly criticized leaders of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign when hurricane forecasters deal with budget shortfalls.

Within days, he got a letter from the acting director of the National Weather Service reprimanding Proenza for suggesting that the agency was in any way crippled by the loss of the satellite. The letter offered "constructive advice" on "how to go forward." In a bureaucracy, this sort of "constructive advice" is usually backed with a thinly veiled threat.

The posturing hasn't affected the other forecasters at the NHC, though:

Several forecasters and other staffers at the hurricane center have told The Miami Herald that they fully support Proenza, and his comments have earned compliments from many emergency managers and others.

Additionally, get a load of this. Two words in this demonstrate that it isn't likely to be just typical bureaucracy in action:

Proenza said that on April 13, he was told by Louis Uccellini, a high-ranking weather service official: ``You better stop these QuikScat [and other] complaints. I'm warning you. You have NOAA, DOC [the U.S. Department of Commerce] and the White House pissed off.''

The White House, huh? The same White House that organized the "Mission Accomplished" stunt? The same White House that botched the Katrina response? The same White House that stacked the Justice Department with political hacks and fired competent attorneys who didn't pursue bogus cases of election-related fraud?

So let's get this straight. After Katrina, the government spends "millions" on a P.R. campaign to make itself look good, while decommissioning a satellite that aids hurricane forecasts. When the director cries foul and raises Cain to the press about it, it gets the higher-ups, including the most notoriously political White House in history, angry at him, angry enough to issue warnings.

Bill Proenza had better hang on tight. It's a good thing that this is being brought to light now, so that any attempts at firing him would prompt outcry and calls of foul play. He can outlast this.

After director Max Mayfield retired, there was concern over whether his replacement could possibly fill his shoes. But it seems that Proenza is exactly the sort of no-nonsense straight talker that past directors have been. Should the bureaucrats who value their own media reputation more than human life and property get their way, he'll be replaced with yet another yes-man for a corrupt, sleazy administration. The forecasters and staff who supported him may be shown the door as well.

But the real price will be paid by the coasts.

Anyone within the political blogosphere knows about the flap with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a TIME Magazine blogger who also happens to be associated with the John Edwards campaign. The post that started it all, "Go Ahead And Shoot At Me," features a slam against websites that stereotype, mock, denigrate, and dismiss rural voters as being ignorant or racist.

Predictably, the flagships of the left-wing blogosphere cried foul. Sites such as Daily Kos, MyDD, and other prominent blogs posted wailing denials that they were guilty of what Mudcat accused them of. --And, to be perfectly fair, the authors of these blogs, for the most part, are innocent of ad hominem attacks on rural residents. However, the blogging community at large is GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY. And that's the ugly truth.

I'm currently an "urbanite" in the Northeast and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, my roots are in small-town and rural communities. I spent much of my childhood on a large, 10-acre property in the rural South, where the nearest city of 100,000 people was an hour and a half away. When I first was introduced to political discourse on the Internet, I was truly astounded by the utter disdain and contempt shown to rural people--specifically rural Southerners--by the online community. Left-wing bloggers and commenters used such expressions as "ignorant hicks," "backwards," "uneducated," "closet racists," "fundies" (religious fundamentalists), etc., to generalize about rural voters.

Let me illustrate:

Environmental Intolerance. On some large political blogs where Green (environmentally friendly) power and Green building are big issues, especially blogs with a large membership hailing from the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest where Green technology is widespread and growing, the members will smear rural communities with no choices other than the local Tennessee Valley Authority affiliate, which, generally, does not provide Green power. It's not limited to carbon-friendly policies, though; they'll attack people who don't eat organic foods because their local supermarkets do not carry them. They'll attack people who live in energy-inefficient housing because they have no alternative. Mitigating circumstances, such as having no alternative choices, don't seem to matter to these people. If someone does not fit their prescribed acceptable lifestyle, out come the attacks. Mudcat Saunders was talking about precisely this sort of intolerance when he posted on the TIME Magazine blog, and he is absolutely correct.

The "Commuting" Flap. When Hillary Clinton proposed a nationwide speed limit of 55 mph, there was, predictably, uproar among people in areas where driving 65, 70, or, in the desert West, 75 mph is not just a non-issue, but is almost a necessity because of the large amounts of open space. These people who objected to that sort of policy were deemed "part of the problem" (the problem being carbon emissions). If the objectors said that they needed to drive fast because they were rural and had long commutes, the proponents said, flippantly, "you should just move to the city." The utter disdain and contempt for people who lived in small towns and rural areas was staggering.

The Dean Campaign. Let me make it perfectly clear: I like Howard Dean. I like what he's done. And I have no problem with former Dean campaign staffers or consultants; in fact, I work with several. But a lot of the left-wing bloggers were supporters of the Dean campaign and never really got over his loss in Iowa and New Hampshire. After he came in third in Iowa, these loudmouths took it upon themselves to attack the voters in Iowa as "corn-fed hicks" or worse. The Dean campaign's Iowa operation included a LOT of volunteers from the East Coast, and the reports from Iowa are that many of these volunteers were so obnoxious, condescending, and in-your-face that Iowa voters got fed up with it and associated it with Dean himself. In other words, these former campaign volunteers-turned-lefty-bloggers are themselves responsible for the demise of the campaign with the condescension that they showed the Iowans, but they blame it on "corn-fed hicks" who just didn't know their own good.

Taxes, Allocation, and Demographics. It's a known fact that "red states," those states whose electoral votes went to Bush in 2000 and/or 2004, take in more federal tax money than they contribute, and that the contributions typically come from "blue" states. And I agree that it's deeply ironic that many people in those states vote conservative because they claim to hate taxes and federal handouts. This hypocrisy is a source of continued derision on the part of the left-wing blogosphere for the rural South in particular. Some even go so far as to say that "we should've let the South secede" or "we should let the South form a separate country." After the 2006 elections, there was a very prominent diary on the blog Daily Kos that stated that the South should be ignored and disregarded from that point on, because it wasn't necessary to win elections. Mathematically, this is true--all that was required in 2004 were the electoral votes of Ohio, which were lost only because of massive fraud perpetrated by the (now known to be criminal) Ohio state government. But it's a BIG difference between saying that such-and-such a state's votes aren't needed to win an election, and writing off the issues of that region... plus the people who live there.

The bloggers who advocate this should take some facts into account:

The Northeast voted Democratic by a margin of between 55 and 60 percent.
California and the Pacific Northwest voted Democratic by a margin of between 55 and 60 percent.
The South voted Republican by a margin of between 55 and 60 percent.
The West voted Republican by a margin of slightly greater than 60 percent.

Within any given state in these regions, selecting 10 people at random will result in a breakdown of 6 of them with the "majority" political affiliation for that region, and 4 with the "minority." This means that there are a lot of "blue voters" in the South, who don't deserve the blanket attacks made against residents of these states. It also means that there are an equal percentage of "red voters" in Democratic-leaning areas. These bloggers ignore these facts and refer to entire regions of the country in blanket terms, making the unspoken assumption that everyone within those regions thinks and votes with the majority. I don't even need to say how false this is. No region is a monolith. All states are variations of "purple."

However, I'm not meaning to suggest that only those voters who support the ideology of the current government should be given any consideration. That's the point of view of the Bush administration. Surely the left-wing blogosphere is better than that...? Whether one is conservative, moderate, liberal, or for that matter, apathetic, they're still an American under the Constitution and deserve the protections of that document and the United States Code. Some bloggers seem to have lost sight of this.

Hurricane Katrina Victims. Some time back I wrote a piece about Mississippi homeowners and the insurance industry and cross-posted it to Daily Kos. The response I got disgusted me: Daily Kos commenters accused the homeowners of deliberately building in disaster zones for the purpose of defrauding the taxpayers and the insurance industry, which in turn would raise their taxes and insurance premiums. All the blogosphere sympathy for New Orleans didn't carry over eastward to Mississippi. No, as far as these people were concerned, the homeowners were to blame and it was just tough luck to them. I do not doubt that there was a strong element of rural and/or "red state" prejudice in their remarks.

So, no matter how much they wail and gnash their teeth that Saunders was being unfair to them in his blog post on TIME, this doesn't change the fact that his allegations are true. The facts are out there. On the Internet, nothing goes away as long as there's a server that has a copy of it, and it doesn't take that much research to find many examples of the sort of commentary that I've noted here.

I am sure it is difficult to relate to people who live in a completely different manner than what one is used to. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird (set in a small town in Alabama, incidentally), progressive lawyer Atticus Finch advises his children not to judge anyone until they've walked a mile in their shoes. It's a lesson that many people on the Internet could learn.

I have great admiration for John and Elizabeth Edwards. Her cancer has returned, and it is in a form that is "not curable, but treatable." She also says she is asymptomatic. Since they've decided to soldier on, I hope that the psychological blow of knowing that this will remain for the rest of her life doesn't tear them down too much. There can't have been enough time for the real impact of that to sink in.

Her doctor says that, in general, patients go about their lives, and the only change is that they go to the clinic more and perhaps feel more tired than usual from the treatment.

I can picture him asking if he should end or suspend the campaign, and she tells him absolutely not. It's a good mental image.

Good, good people. Prayers and thoughts for them--and for those people who are not so fortunate as to discover it early, or who don't have adequate health care to treat it.

I didn't think I'd be writing two blogs in a day, but this is just unbelievable. Per the Washington Post: Firings Had Genesis in White House.

No, that's not the unbelievable part. A more appropriate descriptor would be "expected." Here's what's unbelievable:

Rove and other White House officials also forwarded complaints that U.S. attorneys were not doing enough to prosecute voter fraud.

Since the 2000 presidential election ended in dispute in Florida, Republicans have repeatedly raised concerns about possible voter fraud, alleging that convicted felons and other ineligible voters have been permitted to cast ballots to the benefit of Democrats.

Let's ignore the fact that most complaints of fraud have been on the Democratic side and have involved election fraud rather than voter fraud, wherein the fraud takes place on the official side rather than the voter's side. These election fraud complaints have alleged that (mostly) Republican officials have prevented low-income, minority, student, and other primarily Democratic voting groups from casting their votes. Another school of complaints alleges a conspiracy of deliberate incompetence on the part of election equipment companies; i.e., the companies peddle insecure equipment with no accountability, computers that would allow unscrupulous officials to meddle with the recorded results. There is documented and circumstantial evidence to support both claims on a wide scale.

However, there you have it on record: Karl Rove has been using federal prosecutors to cherry-pick specific complaints of election-related fraud that would benefit his party.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that he's been using the prosecutors to prevent legitimate voters from casting their ballots. As prosecutors it was their job to investigate crime, but a good prosecutor does not harass those who are innocent and does not conduct witch hunts based on information that he or she deems to be erroneous. These attorneys seem to be honorable people who took their jobs seriously. Karl Rove, who is anything but honorable, was asking them to abuse their power to investigate people who their own expertise and investigative work gave them reason to believe were innocent of this crime. And if they didn't want to cooperate with his agenda, then, well, they got blacklisted. And eventually fired.

One firing definitely was related to these issues:

Iglesias, the New Mexico prosecutor, was not on that list. Justice officials said Sampson added him in October, based in part on complaints from Sen. Pete V. Domenici and other New Mexico Republicans that he was not prosecuting enough voter-fraud cases.

Would that be the same New Mexico with massive complaints of electronic voting machine shenanigans in 2004? Oh, and by the way, Iglesias is a Republican. He just wasn't interested in abusing his position as a prosecutor to harass legitimate voters.

It's now on record that Karl Rove has abused resources of the federal government, resources being paid for by taxpayers, to try to tamper with the electoral process. This is huge.

I cannot wait to see what else is brought out in these hearings.