Monday Reads: If They Could Turn Back Time

Posted: August 26, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

soft-watchGood Morning!

Well, another Monday is here.  It’s my turn once again to offer up the reads for the day before starting my usual Monday “student time”.    Time sure stands still when you’re trying to come to terms with challenging stuff.

There’s an interview in Saturday’s NYT with the wonderful Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  I have no idea how this woman stays on at SCOTUS with all those nutty men, but she does and she says she is staying put. She doesn’t think its her time to retire.

In wide-ranging remarks in her chambers on Friday that touched on affirmative action, abortion and same-sex marriage, Justice Ginsburg said she had made a mistake in joining a 2009 opinion that laid the groundwork for the court’s decision in June effectively striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The recent decision, she said, was “stunning in terms of activism.”

Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews. Justice Ginsburg has given several this summer, perhaps in reaction to calls from some liberals that she step down in time for President Obama to name her successor.

On Friday, she said repeatedly that the identity of the president who would appoint her replacement did not figure in her retirement planning.

“There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president,” she said.

Were Mr. Obama to name Justice Ginsburg’s successor, it would presumably be a one-for-one liberal swap that would not alter the court’s ideological balance. But if a Republican president is elected in 2016 and gets to name her successor, the court would be fundamentally reshaped.

Here’s some research on wormholes that is very weird and intriguing. It is all about spacetime.

Wormholes! I feel like we haven’t talked about them since the ’90s. Basically, wormholes are theoretical objects that connect two different points in space. They’re allowed as possible solutions to Einstein’s equations for general relativity—indeed, Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen first discovered wormholes, which is why they’re also called Einstein-Rosen bridges. Unfortunately, wormholes aren’t perfect—Einstein’s equations also imply that nothing with nonnegative energy (that is to say: nothing that we know of) can traverse a wormhole, so they’re not going to make for useful intergalactic portals anytime soon.

Maldacena and Susskind, following Van Raamsdonk, posit that any time two quantum particles are entangled, they’re connected by a wormhole. They then go on to say that the wormhole connection between particles inside a black hole (the infalling virtual particles) and the particles outside of a black hole (the Hawking radiation) soothes out the entanglement problems enough so that we can avoid the firewall at the event horizon.

Note that this requires a profound rethinking of the fundamental stuff of the universe. Entanglement, a deeply quantum phenomenon, is fundamentally wound into to the geometry of the universe. Or, to flip it around, quantum weirdness may be stuff that creates the substrate of spacetime.melting clock

The Sunday news programs continue to have discussions on what will happen to voting rights now that the Supreme Court decision has muddied the waters.  Cokie Roberts calls the changes “downright evil”. Can the Republicans turn back the clock on Civil Rights?

In a roundtable discussion on ‘This Week’, ABC News’ Cokie Roberts reflected on the progress in our country 50 years after the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech.

“Growing up in the Deep South in the era of Jim Crow, the difference is dramatic… It’s a great testament to the fact that when you do something like pass a voting rights bill. That makes a difference.”

Still, Robert’s expressed concern over recent legislation on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In June the Supreme Court invalidated key parts of this law, which spurred contentious debates on race and equal opportunity. Critics of the ruling call it a regression. Proponents argue that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is outdated.

Robert’s said, “What’s going on about voting rights is downright evil because it is something that really needs to keep going forward not backward.”

 Former SOS Colin Powell was also on air Sunday.  He continues to be one of the few reasonable Republicans left that finds his way to the airwaves even though his status has been greatly diminished by claims of WMDS in Iraq. Bet he wishes he coul go back in time and change that!!  Where’s the spacetime continuum when a General needs one?

“These kinds of procedures that are being put in place to slow the process down and make it likely that fewer Hispanics and African Americans might vote I think are going to backfire, because these people are going to come out and do what they have to to vote, and I encourage that,” Powell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Following the Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in states like Texas and North Carolina are advancing legislation that would require voters to show photo ID at the polls.

“They claim that there’s widespread abuse and voter fraud, but nothing substantiates that,” Powell said. “There isn’t widespread abuse.”

A Republican who has been increasingly critical of his party in recent years, Powell endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

He said the GOP’s moves on voting access would in particular damage the party’s effort to appeal to the growing minority populations it will need to win national elections in the future. “This is not the way to do it,” Powell said.

He said he disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act.

“I would have preferred that they did not reach such a conclusion, but they did, and I can see why they reached such a conclusion,” Powell said.

Meanwhile, Bobby JIndal continues to write some of the weirdest, disjointed op-eds around.  This one is ironic given the current challenge to his prized Louisiana School voucher program that appears to be enabling re-segregation of schools. Remember, this is an op ed on racism as you read this weird, theocratic screed.  He seems to yearn for a more simpler time.  Simple, say, as his mind.

 When I look at America, I see a country that increasingly has lost its way in terms of morality. As a Christian, as I look at American culture over the past half century, I don’t like a lot of what I see. Divorce is through the roof, pornography is everywhere, sexual predators are on the loose and on the Internet, our abortion rate is higher than almost every First World country, vulgarity and profanity are mainstream and commonplace. In general, our culture has become coarser, and I regret that.

Which reminds me,  Jindal thinks all this fuss about the Keystone Pipeline is “alarmist” and “anti-scientific”.  Here’s a local op-ed that gives him the what-for.

It is time to stop being mad at Gov. Bobby Jindal. He’s just too funny.

He was out of state again last week, but we are long past feeling neglected while he pursues his White House dream. He can forget that for sure; a politician is heading for the exit when his most earnest speeches are greeted with laughter.

If Jindal did not bring the house down when he denounced Democrats as “extremist and unscientific,” it can only have been because he was far from home and his audience was unaware of his own efforts to spread ignorance and superstition. When his remarks were reported in this country, we were in stitches.

Jindal was in Canada, promising to “fight like heck” for the Keystone XL pipeline, which will carry oil all the way to Texas if President Barack Obama, who has been considering it for five years, gives his approval. This was not exactly Daniel in the lions’ den; Jindal was speaking at the Oilmen’s Business Forum Luncheon in Alberta.

If the oilmen had reason to welcome Jindal’s views on the pipeline, however, it is a safe bet that they have been exposed to enough geology to conclude the earth has been around for quite a long time. They wouldn’t have much use for Louisiana high school graduates who had been told tales of Adam and Eve in science class.

Sitting there while Jindal claimed to be on the side of science in the pipeline row, the oilmen would have been incredulous if you told them he promoted new-earth indoctrination. Why, they would have said, next you’ll be telling us he believes in demonic possession. Well …

Jindal has also termed global warming “conjecture” and “alarmism,” a comforting view that is much less common among scientists.

Jindal’s speech was otherwise the same, hackneyed fare; the “blind” ideologues of the “radical left” are blocking the pipeline because they want energy to “remain expensive.” They want the government to “tell Americans to live in smaller houses, drive smaller cars, set their thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter.” They want “negative growth,” while Republicans stand for prosperity and jobs..

This simple dichotomy leaves only one question answered. Why would anyone, anywhere, ever vote Democrat?

The analysis, in truth, is so shabby that Jindal is clearly not cut out for the intellectual rigor required of, say, a scientist. Jindal’s blithe assumption that the pipeline would reduce energy prices in America is highly debatable, while he is flat wrong to deny that companies plan to re-export pipeline oil for a quick profit.

Really, nothing is safe from Republicans these days.  Hide your wives and daughters!  HIde your groceries too!

Which 14 cities are running out of time due to Global Warming?  The number one endangered city is Miami, Florida. Boston is number 3.  You don’t get to New Orleans until number 7.  Read on.

There is really no way around it: Thanks to climate change, sea levels are rising. A huge question on the minds of many is, what does this mean for America? Will sea walls and city planning protect major metropolises, or are we bound to lose some national gems? Unfortunately, the latter is a significant possibility. Read on for 14 U.S. cities that could be devastated over the next century due to rising tides.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?  Because, now it’s your time.

Friday Reads: Life’s a Beach

Posted: August 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 39 Comments

beachcd36Good Morning!

It’s Friday and some how everything old is new again

Republicans continue to search for a president as impeachable as Nixon.  I wrote about this last night, but wtf don’t they get about high crimes and misdemeanors? It seems to be another Clintonian search for votes during an election that’s not about the President.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said Wednesday that President Barack Obama was getting “getting perilously close” to the constitutional standard for impeachment. Coburn was speaking at the Muskogee Civic Center in Oklahoma.

“What you have to do is you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president, and that’s called impeachment,” Coburn said, responding to a question about holding President Obama accountable. “That’s not something you take lightly, and you have to use a historical precedent of what that means. I think there’s some intended violation of the law in this administration, but I also think there’s a ton of incompetence, of people who are making decisions.”

“Even if there is incompetence, the IRS forces me to abide by the law,” a constituent responded to Coburn.

“No, I agree,” Coburn said. “My little wiggle out of that when I get that written to me is I believe that needs to be evaluated and determined, but thank goodness it doesn’t have to happen in the Senate until they’ve brought charges in the House. Those are serious things, but we’re in a serious time. I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor, but I think they’re getting perilously close.”

Coburn then mentioned a story of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees telling him that officials at Homeland Security said to “ignore all the background” and just “approve people.”

“I’m documenting all this stuff as it goes along, but I don’t know where that level is,” Coburn added.

“Barack Obama is personal friend of mine. He became my friend in the Senate but that does not mean I agree in any way with what he’s doing or how he’s doing it. And I quite frankly think he’s in a difficult position he’s put himself in, and if it continues, I think we’re going to have another constitutional crisis in our country in terms of the presidency,” Coburn concluded.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Here’s the President’s plan to make college more affordable.  Will it work and who will vote for it?

By the 2015 school year, Obama said, his administration will begin evaluating colleges on measures such as the average tuition they charge, the share of low-income students they enroll and their effectiveness in ensuring students graduate without too much debt.

The president also will seek congressional approval — which could prove difficult — to steer more federal student aid toward colleges that score highly in the ratings. A student in financial need at such schools might qualify for a larger Pell grant or a better interest rate on a federal loan.

The result, officials hope, will be relief for families from college bills that are in many cases three times as high as they were 30 years ago even after adjusting for inflation. Average tuition and fees topped $8,600 last year at public four-year colleges and $29,000 at private and nonprofit schools. The total annual bill, counting room and board, exceeds $50,000 at many elite schools.

“Higher education should not be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford,” Obama told students packed into a basketball arena at the University at Buffalo.

Obama’s plan relies in part on his executive power to collect, manage and publish data. But it is likely to draw significant criticism from colleges intent on protecting their market share, and a divided Congress will present an immediate obstacle to elements of the plan that require legislation.

Obama said that in a global, knowledge-based economy, a quality college education is more important than ever. He pitched the ratings system as a consumer guide for prospective students and parents, evaluating which schools offer “the bigger bang for the buck.” His idea is that accountability will yield affordability.

“Colleges that keep their tuition down and are providing high-quality education are the ones that are going to see their taxpayer money going up,” Obama said.

So, I used to read Maureen Dowd because you know, occasionally a stopped clock is right like two times a day,  Here’s an analysis on her that’s spot on.

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New York Times star columnist Maureen Dowd just isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a good story—or an accurate quote for that matter. Her most recent misdeed, for which she has apologized (most likely in the face of tape recorded evidence against her) is misquoting Progressive Mayoral Candidate Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray. A little background: de Blasio, the only candidate in the race who is talking about inequality (more severe in New York than just about anywhere else in the country) has lately overtaken longtime frontrunner Christine Quinn in the polls. (Anthony Weiner briefly led before self-imploding.) Quinn is an out lesbian, married to her partner, but that might be it in terms of her progressive credentials. She is seen as too cozy with big business and real estate.

But back to Dowd, who, it seems decided to stir up a little trouble. She quoted McCray, de Blasio’s wife, saying that she thinks Quinn is “not accessible … She’s not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave.” Understandably, took this as implying that she, a childless lesbian doesn’t understand issues “like taking care of children,” in other words a swipe at her sexual orientation.

But McCray did not say that. Dowd compressed what she said to such an extent that it really altered the meaning. What McCray did say, responding to a question of why women may not supporting Quinn in droves is:

“Well, I am a woman, and she is not speaking to the issues I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, workplace; she is not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that, I feel, that you can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things. And I suspect that other women feel the same thing I’m feeling.”

Pretty different. Although it should be said, Quinn was still mad.

Dowd’s accuracy has been shaky, and she can be pretty offensive,

WTF is it with Dowd?  Does she have to be the only woman in the room?

This is another story that I can hardly believe in this day of science and fact.  But, it seems that about 30% of the population believe that Gay people can change their sexual orientation.  Some one should ask them if they could change theirs!!!

In the wake of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s announcement that he will sign a bill banning so-called “conversion therapy” for gay teens, the Pew Research Center pointed to recent research that more than one in three Americans believe sexual orientation can be changed.

On Tuesday Pew republished the data — gathered in 2012 — in a sobering reminder of just how far this country has to go in terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender acceptance. The survey concluded that slightly more than half of all Americans believe an LGBT individual cannot change sexual orientation — while 36 percent believe it’s possible.

These numbers reflect a small shift toward increased tolerance from a decade ago, according to Pew, which in 2003 found that 42 percent of Americans felt being gay was changeable, while 42 percent believed it was not.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, LGBT advocacy group GLAAD’s Director of Religion, Faith & Values Ross Murray explained that New Jersey’s gay conversion ban “focuses on the harm that comes from trying to force someone’s sexual orientation.”

The widely disputed idea that sexual orientation is “curable” or changeable is bad enough, but even worse is that many people who end up in gay conversion therapies are minors, Murray told HuffPost. “[They] did not choose the program for themselves,” he said, “and may have been forced into it by a parent who was influenced by religious leaders.”

It makes me think that the Spanish Inquisition is still not that far away!

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I was rather shocked to find out that fishing off of Fukishima has just been suspended!

A fisheries co-op in Soma Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, said Thursday it will end its trial catch at the end of this month, signaling an indefinite halt to all local fishing operations off the prefecture because of the constant flow of highly radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the Pacific.

The move by the co-op in Soma Futaba, in the northern part of the prefecture, follows a decision by a co-op in Iwaki, in the southern part, to drop plans to resume operations on a trial basis from Sept. 5.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday it noticed puddles with high radiation levels near an area where a number of radioactive water storage tanks stand at the Fukushima plant. At least one of the tanks has been leaking, and it is believed the water it contained seeped down and merged with tainted groundwater that is flowing to the sea, and ran to the Pacific in drainage channels.

Tepco later admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from the tank, which should have been holding about 1,000 tons. It said Wednesday that water from the tank probably flowed to the ocean through drainage channels.

Hiroyuki Sato, head of the Soma Futaba cooperative, said, “We want the central government to take steps to pull us out of this trouble as quickly as possible.”

JJ has written about this but it is really truly shocking!! What is going on with Fukishima and why aren’t more countries involved?

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority Chairman Shunichi Tanaka attends a news conference in Tokyo. Following the discovery that highly contaminated water is leaking from one of the hastily built storage tanks at the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said officials are concerned that more steel storage tanks will spring leaks.

So, those are the stories that I’m following this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Irrational Exuberance

Posted: August 22, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Tea Party activists | Tags: , | 21 Comments

So, I am not exactly going to use the term “irrational exuberance” quite in the context that it was originally uttered by Alan Greenspan in 1996.  MaybeCARTOON INSANI-TEA PARTY irrational mania or hate-driven zealotry or crazy-go-nuts gullibility are better terms.   Whatever the case, the so-called “Tea Party” ginned up by the histrionics of folks like Ted Cruz , the low information and thought ability of Sarah Palin, and the whacko ideology of the neoconfederate Pauls believes that taking down “Obamacare” and our government is the be all and end all of their existence.  There’s some articles today looking at their efforts.  Why are they doing everything from crowing townhall meetings and running strange ads?  There’s an interview there with one of the exhuberati that’s pretty damned strange.

Another objection that’s been raised is that this would only lead to a government shutdown or default, and Republicans would get blamed for that. Are you advocating that outcome?

The outcome we would like to see is that the American people don’t have to pay for Obamacare, however that comes to pass. It’s like driving from L.A. to San Francisco — there’s a million different ways to get there. We believe this approach is the last, best opportunity to prevent the American taxpayer from having to shell out the money and support Obamacare.

Think for a second. You’re a taxpayer, an ordinary American working woman. You’ve got to pay for a health-care system that Congress is exempt from. You have to participate in a health-care system that big business, political cronies, congressmen and their staffs do not have to participate in. That doesn’t sound like a democratic republic to me. That’s what’s got the grassroots upset. We are not serfs. We are citizens.

The House has had, what, 40 votes to repeal Obamacare, and what has that done? Besides given members of Congress a bloody shirt that they can wave on the stump back home and say, “I’m against Obamacare”? This effort to ensure right now that Americans don’t have to pay for Obamacare is the best way to go about it. It’s not just bloody-shirt-waving for the voters, it’s an actual, working thing.

For some reason, the right wing always seems to think they get to pick and choose what their tax dollars go for even though their representatives and our representatives do that for us as clearly outlined.  They seem to think that they don’t have to pay for birth control or abortion services or whatever it is that drives them to hysteria while I have to pay for their wars, their Isreal at all costs policies, their police state, their gay conversion therapies, and their screeds and lies that basically outline state ownership of women.

The deal is that the anti-Obamacare movement will fail if it does not succeed now.  Folks like Ted Cruz basically know this.

Cruz’s suggestion that conservatives can still win the defund fight is getting attention, but the really important quote here is Cruz’s concession that conservatives have not won “the argument” in a long time. Here’s why: Cruz almost certainly knows full well that this is the last chance to win the broader argument over Obamacare. Once the law’s benefits kick in, it will probably no longer be winnable.

Obamacare opponents cite polls showing Obamacare’s unpopularity to justify continued efforts to repeal and/or sabotage the law, whether through a government shutdown or through more prosaic methods. But, as even some Republicans are now acknowledging, the Republican position on health care is untenable as long as they fail to offer a meaningful alternative that would accomplish Obamacare’s core goals — expanding coverage to many millions of uninsured and protecting consumers and those with preexisting conditions from insurance industry abuse.

This is the argument conservatives are losing: As unpopular as Obamacare is, there is simply no evidence that this dissatisfaction translates into public support for repealing the law entirely and simply letting the “magic of the marketplace” ensure that everyone is covered. And a number of writers — Jonathan Bernstein, Aaron Carrol, Ezra Klein,Jonathan Cohn, and Paul Krugman — have already explained well why Republicans can’t offer an alternative to Obamacare that accomplishes what the law accomplishes, and why there’s simply no meaningful Republican alternative to embracing Obamacare’s general approach or essentially doing nothing.

For several years now, Republicans have been able to paper over this problem by making the political argument only a referendum on the lurid, nightmarish vision of Obamacare they have painted (with some success) for voters. But as even Cruz seems to recognize, the actual contours of the argument we’re having will only become clearer as Obamacare’s concrete benefits kick in — very likely rendering that argument unwinnable. That leaves Republicans in the position of hoping the law is a disaster and doing all they can to bring that about. But that posture only further underscores what makes the GOP position untenable in the first place. Cruz is absolutely right: time is running out.

Undoubtedly, the law will begin to morph into something else should the  political and governance process in Washington work again. The absolute hysteria on the right caused by the law is nearly as bad as the attempts by the right to circumvent civil rights, gay rights or reproductive rights.  The weird difference is this law has some component that is likely to benefit nearly every one.  It isn’t aimed at relieving oppression of any one group.  It’s aimed at solving a nationwide problem created by our very dysfunctional healthcare system that mostly became dysfunctional because of the system of paying for health care.

 From the day the Affordable Care Act was enacted, every Republican in Congress and most Republicans in state and local governments have done everything imaginable to interfere with its implementation, and have systematically opposed the kind of legislative “fixes” that are normal for any major new law, while loudly cheering for its failure. Now we are told that executive measures to make the law work mean that it’s not the law of the land. So what exactly happened when the president signed this legislation on March 23, 2010? Does the legitimacy of a law depend on acceptance of it by its opponents? Think about the implications of that theory, and recall that not so very long ago Republicans tried to drive a president from office on grounds that his efforts to hide sexual impropriety threatened the very Rule of Law.

That last sentence deserves a second look because there are calls to impeach Obama over “ObamaCare”.  This is another clear indication that the Tea Party and Republicans–n general–are rarely about the Constitution. What is their generally accepted definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors”?  Even Republican congress critters don’t seem to understand our Constitution.

Kerry Bentivolio is a Republican member of The House of Representatives from the great state of Michigan. He’s also clearly deranged. Bentivolio is the latest TEApublican to throw his voice in support of impeaching President Barack Obama. Speaking at a town hall meeting in his home district, the congressman told a constituent that essentially he doesn’t like President Obama, would love to impeach him, but he just doesn’t have any of the pesky evidence you need to actually convict a sitting president on impeachment charges.

“You know, if I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” Bentivolio told the constituents. “I feel your pain, I know, I stood twelve feet away from the guy and listened to him. I couldn’t stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. That’s my job, as a congressman, I respect the office.” A dream come true, congressman? There used to be a time in this country where impeachment was considered such a drastic undertaking that even a president’s political foes took no glee in doing it.

All of this just isn’t rational under any logical paradigm.  So, that just brings me back to the the conclusion that this is mostly about anger, hatred, and racism at a very visceral level.  This is also what probably ties what should just be a basic economic policy issue to basic civil rights issues and it’s also what makes the Tea Party a mostly white movement tinged with strong elements of neoconfederates, christofascists, and gun toting preppers. These folks seem to like their social security and medicare and scream loudly when these programs are threatened.  They only seem to hate it when folks outside of their ‘own’ might get access to something that they’re convinced doesn’t benefit them even when it likely does.  That’s just plain crazy talking.

Monday Reads: The Heart is Still a Lonely Hunter

Posted: August 19, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , | 41 Comments

Dance Magazine Diana Huntress Varga greyhound art printGood Morning!

I am in one of those becoming states.  It’s heartening in some way, I suppose, to think that one can be so firmly planted in adulthood and smug only to realize they still have so much work to do on issues that seem to crop up out of no where. I remember clearly where I was when Princess Diana died in Paris in that tragic auto crash 16 years ago.  I was in my French Quarter apartment with the man who brought me to New Orleans.  I thought he would be the love for and of the rest of my life. I have never known such passion right up and beyond the day it ended. It did not end well.

It is sixteen years later and life and love remain ephemeral as they are by design. Those days gave birth to my intense Buddhist practice.  These days I do not feel like I can find the pure wisdom of dakinimind. The day of Diana’s death was a turning point for me because I was about to be left for a woman half my age and everything would fall apart by the end of the year. I had a creeping feeling that summer when he spoke of a certain student but felt that taboos where too big to cross.  They were not.

“We” fell apart.  I fell apart. My job disappeared.  The ink on my divorce decree dried well.  This man actually wrote to me right before my daughter’s wedding last year to reconnect. He congratulated me on the doctorate because he knew that it was a central pursuit of my life and he knew what it was like to get one.  He found me again or had been watching me evidently. The e-missive was ignored because I have grown in many ways and I have no desire to revisit that relationship.  At that point, nearly 15 years after, it seemed impossible for me to believe I would ever mutter the words “I love you” again to another man and I haven’t until last month.  Too much had been lost even though much had been gained like the kathouse, the mighty mustang, the doctorate, and the wonders of New Orleans and my tangential career in music. My life has been an adventure that would have been unknown in Nebraska.  You know that  I have had a rich life here and met many of my goals. But, I tossed the love thing and men in general in the dustbin of expendable items by the time Diana’s death was a year old.  Hence, I have earned the nickname “Cold Pizza” because that’s about how I’ve treated men for the last 16 years of my life.   It never tastes good reheated so might as well toss it out.  I actually sustained several simultaneous relationships for a number of years.  One for nearly 7 years.  Still, no mention of the goal of the lonely hunter.  So now, on this nearing anniversary of Diana and her tragic death and her endless search to just be loved by one person without reservation and without boundary, I  am drawn back to the hunt of her lonely heart.  This path is one I know well no matter how overgrown or recently cleared it may be.

Hers is one of those stories that still draws others in too but for many different reasons. For me, it is because I so desperately understand her need to be loved unequivocally.  You’d have to know the troubled story of my mother to really understand that statement but you are not my psychologist and this post is not directly about the bonds of early attachment. It is about the result of attachment gone unresolved.  It is why I try to let  all the people in my life know they are loved without condition. This includes you.  I have Bodhisattva vows even though I fall sadly short of them and I try to expand love to encompass every being out there.   DIana appeared universally loved but yet that was not enough for her.  There was something compelling her from childhood to find the one sort of love that she felt she had never experienced. I think she loved without bounds too because it was the one thing she felt she never was given in her most basic relationships. To me, she exists beyond the boundaries of time and history like a tragic Shakespeare heroine or a mythical being.  Her central story is still her quest for unconditional love.

Conspiracy theories are back surrounding the deaths of Princess Diana and her companion Dodi al Fayed, after British media reported allegations that the couple may have been murdered by British special forces.

Despite a $7 million joint French and British police investigation that concluded that Diana, al Fayed and their driver Henri Paul’s deaths in 1997 were accidents, a report in The Mirror claims they were allegedly murdered and it was all covered up.

The allegation surfaced at a second court martial of Sgt. Danny Nightingale, who was found guilty of illegal gun possession, The Mirror reported. Among the evidence presented at the trial was a letter from a former soldier’s estranged in-laws that makes the claim that the SAS (Special Air Service) “was behind Princess Diana’s death,” the newspaper reported.

On Saturday, Scotland Yard said that British police were looking into new information that has surfaced in connection with the deaths of Diana and al Fayed, but police declined to say what that new information was.

“The Metropolitan Police Service is scoping information that has recently been received in relation to the deaths and assessing its relevance and credibility,” Scotland Yard officials said in a statement. “The assessment will be carried out by officers from the specialist crime and operations command.

“This is not a re-investigation and does not come under Operation Paget,” the statement said.

These new conspiracy theories are not what has driven me back to the Diana chronicles.  It was her portrait once again shining from my issue of Vanity Fair. This story is about another love in Diana’s life.  It makes me wonder what drove her on this endless search for love and acceptance when the world offered it up to her?

Diana’s closest confidants in her last years did not need an inquest to know the absurdity of Al Fayed’s claims. Not only was she not planning to marry Dodi Al Fayed, or pregnant with his child, they say, but she was in fact still “madly in love,” as one of them describes it, with another man, an unassuming Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan.

Perhaps, her hunt for love will be better memorialized in yet another movie. My hope is that it will not be one more sophomoric soap opera filled with less complex people than you find at any mundane Republican convention. The royals are anything but simple folk.

With the birth of her first grandson she’ll never meet, Princess Diana is again in the headlines. Now she’s gazing out at us from the September cover of Vanity Fair, just as a new and controversial movie about her final love affair is preparing to open.

It is hard to imagine two more unparallel lives than me and my two daughters and the late Diana and her heir and spare.  Yet, I continue to be drawn by her story because her search and mine seem inexorably linked by more than the timing of her death and a betrayal that made me such an Ice Queen for so long. Her post-betrayal life was seriously different.   I am still here in New Orleans and trying to deal once again with outcroppings of our shared pursuit.  Even after all these years of time on the mat and time in my mind, of trying to find a way to love without grasping, love without differentiating between my flesh and blood and the hungry dog on the street, and seeking the ability to understand that love should be beyond just two, I struggle again.

1788-22716The endless pursuit of humans for all kinds of things seems to be all encompassing at times.   Some of them are higher pursuits, some of them are the tasks and errands of fools.

The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol was one of Sarah Palin’s earliest supporters to be picked as the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and now he says she can “resurrect herself” by running to be a senator from Alaska.

In an interview on Sunday, ABC’s Benjamin Bell asked Kristol if Palin had disappointed him after he pushed so hard for her to be on the 2008 ticket.

“I was for taking the gamble of putting her on the ticket, I don’t think it hurt the ticket in 2008,” Kristol explained. “I think her stepping down as governor of Alaska was a big problem. People don’t like to see a candidate, a governor, an executive — absent some medical reason or whatever — just leave office early. And she had been a good governor — incidentally — of Alaska until then. So, I think that is something, I think, she has to recover from in terms of being a serious leader in the party. Still has a lot of loyalty, still can shape the debate, she still has a great political touch.”

“I think the way Palin would possibly resurrect herself — if that’s the right word or rehabilitate herself, I think is a better way of putting it — run for Senate in Alaska in 2014,” he continued. “I’m not urging that. I’m just saying, if I were her adviser, I would say, ‘Take on the incumbent, you have to win a primary, then you have to beat an incumbent Democrat, it’s not easy.’”

“But if she did that, suddenly — if you can imagine that,” Kristol added, smiling. “Sarah Palin, freshman senator, January 2015 in Washington having beaten an incumbent. That would be pretty interesting.”

Bell also asked Kristol about the presidential ambitions of billionaire mogul Donald Trump.

“I don’t think he’d be a particularly good one, and I don’t think he’s going to be one,” the conservative columnist quipped.

But Kristol did have some ideas about how Republicans nationwide could be in “good shape” by following the lead of conservative lawmakers in North Carolina.

I just have one thing to say to that interview.  WTF?

Unfortunately, many start filling the days of an uneventful hunt with drugs.  What has mandatory drug sentencing done to our society?  Why not treat the disease instead of punishing the outcomes?  The money appears to be in the punishment these days as the profit motive and the Reagan/Nixon Drug Wars creates more US Gulags than Stalin. This is from the keyboard of Adam Gropnik at The New Yorker.

 As I wrote last year, there are more African-American men now incarcerated in America than were held in slavery in 1861, and more Americans under “judicial control” of one kind or another than Stalin held in his Gulag.

But even if this is the first decisive small stone pitched against a national shame, its specific effect on the imprisoned will still be minimal. Most diana-the-huntressprosecutions are not federal, no one now in prison will be released, and the careful hedge of politic exceptions—no mercy for drug gangs, dealers, etc.—is bound to create many complications. As so often, though, the critics, I suspect, both underestimate the difficulty of big change and the geometric, multiplier effect of small ones. The mandatory-minimum movement was a way, typical of the fear-and-revenge cycle of the eighties, to prevent those damned liberal judges from letting drug offenders loose. It was a way to short-circuit permissiveness—not to mention decency, common sense, and simple mercy—by insisting that an offense that is no worse, really, than being caught with a Martini in a speakeasy should be met with enough prison time to ruin a life. It expressed an ideology. By expressing its opposite, the new rules discredit the old one. As with gay marriage, a signal from on high can often have as much value as a successful bit of comprehensive legislation. The clarity of the sign is plain even if the power of the signal is weak: the thirty years of irrational vengefulness expressed in those mandatory minimums that filled our prisons to no real social purpose is now robbed of its appearance of natural legitimacy, of social consensus. What should follow, surely, is its end.

Republicans are in search of something.  Obama’s media guru David Plouffe says that they don’t have anything to sell.  How does a party repackage and sell bupkis?  Here’s what Plouffe has to say about Preibus saying that no media outlet that isn’t interested in Republicans gets a debate.

“They (Republicans) don’t have a product to sell.” He elaborated, while trying not to laugh too hard at the endless endurance of Republican delusion, that they could open all of the field offices in the world but without a product to sell, it would not translate to national electoral victory.

Plouffe said, “Chairman Priebus just talked about all of the field organizers — by the way 160 people in this big country isn’t very much — they don’t have a product to sell. You can hire 10,000 people to win the presidency in 2016, 2020 — these are facts, not opinions — but they have to grow their vote with Hispanics, suburban women, younger voters, the growing Asian communities.”

Plouffe added that the GOP is not rehabilitating; they are retrenching.

This is accurate. The media likes to portray Democrats as partisan and thus as blind and inaccurate as Republicans, but that is a lazy false equivalency. Plouffe is the author of The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory, in which he laid out the strategies and tactics that he used during Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 campaign. He didn’t do that by pretending that opening field offices in areas where minorities reside would sell them on policies that would harm them.

Obama opened field offices (largely manned by volunteers, I might add) in areas where his policies were a natural fit — that is, anywhere that the 98% and/or the morally responsible reside.

diana Diana2During the 2012 campaign, the Obama team kept telling the media that their polls told them something different than the polling companies. The media and the Romney campaign happily ignored these warnings. That was a mistake, because it turned out that the Obama team weren’t bluffing. It turned out that they actually dealt with reality in order to strategize a winning plan.

Republicans can’t win until they either face reality or come up with a new way to sell people on policies that are harmful for them. So far, Republicans are doubling down on their Southern Strategy, which is not new and is finally starting to backfire. And let’s face it, if they believed in their own press, they wouldn’t be working so hard to disenfranchise the very people they claim their field offices are going to appeal to. They know that they can’t sell bigotry and hate to minorities, but they must sell it to whatever is left of the whites-only contingency because it is all they have.

With that, I leave you to hunt some good links and blog threads to share with us.  Have a great day!

The Panic Room: Republicans just can’t figure out what Women Want

Posted: August 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: | 8 Comments

The GOP has a woman problem.   It also believes it has a 2016 Hillary Clinton Problem.  There’s been this talk of rebranding, reinventing, reinvigorating, and Mona-Lisa-by-Picasso--73993remessaging Republicans.  The deal is that Republicans are vested in deliberately misunderstanding women.   They met last week to once more show a large degree of mass confusion over why their pograme of sending women back to the world of no birth control, no work, and no opportunity just isn’t selling. The only women they seem to impress are the ones with Stockholm Syndrome.

“In the last election, Governor Romney won among married women by 11 percentage points, but he lost among single women by a whopping 36 points. With single women making up 40 percent of the voters, well, you can do the math. And the president won women by 11 points,” said RNC Co-Chair Sharon Day in her remarks at the panel. “The bottom line is we’ve got to make the case for more women leaders in this party.”

She’s taking the issue — and her role as party co-chair, which has sometimes been more of a figurehead position — seriously, heading off to New Jersey after the meeting to help train and encourage the 35 women running for state-level offices there, the largest number of women Republicans making such bids in any state in the country. The party has to start somewhere, and one things it’s emphasizing is the deficit of Republican women at the start of the pipeline of political leadership.

The question is, is the rest of the party taking the issue as seriously as her? Women at the gathering were not sure. Not sure at all.

“The messaging to women is really bad,” said Ann Stone, a pro-choice Republican and one of the founders of the push for the National Women’s History Museum. “There’ve been closed-door sessions where we’ve talked about how do we get the men to stop saying some of the things they are saying. It’s usually out of ignorance. They don’t understand what they’re saying is highly insulting, which is really sad.”

Day opened her remarks with a similar air of disappointment. “I’m really sad, to be honest with you, that there’s not more people in this room. Because again as women, we are the majority. And as women, there should be more women in this room. Every one of us should be in this room,” she said. “So that’s the first thing I want to say, just to make me feel better. This room should be packed. And it’s not. ”

Florida State Sen. Anitere Flores had a similar complaint. “This is a self-selected group of people who have come here, probably saying, ‘Yeah, you know, We know we have a problem. We need to fix it.’ But there are a bunch of other people that are in other meetings right now that maybe are thinking we don’t have a problem — we don’t really have to go listen to that,” she said, before apologizing. “I hope I don’t get into trouble for saying all of that.”

“There is a problem. There is a gap,” she said. “And we can’t just keep going around and saying we won married women, woohoo, that’s great….

mona-lisa-funny-0So what does the party of birth control restrictions, abortion access restrictions, nonsupport of equal work for equal pay laws have to say for itself?  Basically, Republican women tried to change the subject,

During a panel introducing the party’s “rising stars” moderated by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Karin Agness, founder and president of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW), spoke on the GOP’s need to reach out to young women on college campuses who might not feel comfortable expressing their views in organizations with a more “radical, feminist perspective.”

Agness shared her experience in promoting conservative values on progressive college campuses, and encouraged the audience and fellow conservative leaders to provide an alternative for young women who did not agree with the Democratic Party’s platform.

She also emphasized that Republicans should be talking about a variety of issues that women truly care about, and use new technology and local news outlets to “meet them where they are.”

“Women aren’t a unified voting bloc that’s going to vote liberal every time,” Agness said.

At a panel later Thursday afternoon about the importance of women in the Republican Party, Washington Times opinion Mona Lisaeditor Emily Miller suggested Republicans needed to flip the rhetoric around about the existence of a “war” on women. “Do any of us in here feel like we’re in a ‘war’?” Miller asked.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think this is the best way to stop a Hillary Clinton candidacy.

 

This is a very open thread.

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