Dry Ice Factory

'We live now in hard times, not end times."

-- Jon Stewart at the Rally to Restore Sanity

I went to the Seattle satellite Rally to Restore Sanity today. A good crowd showed up, although it thinned out over time, especially when it started to rain. Best sign may have been "Hitler is a Nazi," although I didn't actually see that one. Weirdest one was "I shaved my balls for *this*?" I met up with Scott K using advanced cellphone technology, and we had lunch at the Pike Place brewpub afterward. Not sure that my sanity was actually restored, but it was heartening to see how many people showed up for the event in DC. It was also oddly heartening to stand in the rain with a bunch of other smiling, laughing people.

This is for King County voters in Washington State. How are you going to vote on Proposition 1? This proposition would raise the county sales tax to help with the county budget. I sympathize with the need to do something about the budget catastrophe, but I'm really, really tired of solving our problems with a regressive sales tax. I'm leaning pretty strongly toward voting No on this one, despite the fact that all progressive organizations seem to be recommending a Yes vote. Any thoughts?

'Maybe we could talk him down from burning a koran to just deleting one off a kindle.'

-- comment on Koran Burning Still Possible at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog

'The fact that people are feeling a lack of leadership in him at present and are worried is perfectly natural. These things go in cycles. ... He says to tell you that Congress is accomplishing a great deal in spite of the fact that there is very little publicity on what they have done. ... The relief bill and [social] security bill are bound to go slowly because they are a new type of legislation. If he tried to force them down the committee's throat and did not give them time to argue them out, he would have an even more difficult congress to work with. ...

'Please say to everyone who tells you the President is not giving leadership that he is seeing the men constantly, and that he is working with them, but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship and I would hardly think the country would like that any better than they do the delay.

'The ups and downs in peoples’ feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately. Considering the time we have had to work in the past for almost every slight improvement, I should think they might get over with it, but they never do.'

-- Eleanor Roosevelt to Molly Dawson of the Democratic National Committee in 1935

(Via puakev on Daily Kos, although I hunted down more of the quote via Google.)

I've stopped writing much about national politics, because I'm so sick and fucking tired of everybody's political opinions, including my own, that I could puke. And this tired NYTimes article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Obama Pushes Agenda, Despite Political Risks," is a perfect example of what is so sick about the political press in this country. She spends the whole article talking about the political risks of Obama's policy agenda in the past two years without once trying to analyze whether in fact the policies are good for the country. She compares Obama's push for health care reform in the face of bad polling to Bush's defense of the occupation of Iraq in the face of bad polling: "It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made to justify an unpopular war in Iraq as he watched his own poll numbers sink lower. Mr. Bush and his aides often felt they could not catch a break; when the economy was humming along — or at least seemed to be humming along — the Bush White House never got credit for it, because the public was so upset about the war."

You know what, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, fuck you. Health care reform is going to make our country stronger. The Iraq debacle made our country weaker. One thing was worth the political risk, and the other wasn't. It's really not that difficult to see, is it? Yet all you want to look at is whether it's damaging to Obama's political career or not. Fuck you. Think about your fucking country, you fucking dimwit. Obama could go down in flames tomorrow, and we would still be better off because of what the White House and Congress have done in the past eighteen months. How eerily similar is that to Dubya, you fucking idiot?

Marc Lynch has some sensible comments on recent news items: Moving past the GWOT ain't easy. Amongst other things, he talks about this week's revelation (via intentional leak?) that the Obama administration has targeted a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for assassination.

I guess my take on this is that the national security state has been an excuse for bad executive branch behavior since at least the '60s, if not earlier, and I'm cynical about the prospects of putting the genie back in the bottle at this point. Who is going to contain the executive in this? Congress? The courts? Angry bloggers?

I've read that the Bush Jr administration was the first to claim the right to kill American citizens who have been designated terrorists. Was there any legal challenge to this finding? Have the courts ruled on it at all?

In short: What is to be done?

When you have a few minutes, it's worth taking a look at Ta-Nehisi Coates's long post, "The Big Machine," which is a meditation on systems, including the fast food system and American white supremacy. As he has done a lot recently, he gets into Civil War history, and I learned something new again. This time I learned about George Henry Thomas -- the son of a Virginia slaveholder who fought on the side of the North, destroyed the Army of Tennessee in 1864, and receded in national memory while the likes of Stonewall Jackson became legendary.

As Pesto says in the comments, "Systems resist change, and one way they do that is by adapting to certain kinds of resistance." Which isn't to say that resistance is futile, but that as TNC says about white supremacy, "We should be humbled by the clear evidence that we don't really understand what we defeated, how we did it, or how its legacy haunts us today."

The good news is that Joe Lieberman (I-Joe Lieberman) just lost a lot of leverage.

AOSIS: Alliance of Small Island States

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change. It functions primarily as an ad hoc lobby and negotiating voice for small island developing States (SIDS) within the United Nations system.

AOSIS has a membership of 42 States and observers, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea. Thirty-seven are members of the United Nations, close to 28 percent of developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN's total membership. Together, SIDS communities constitute some five percent of the global population.

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Wikipedia:

Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small Island countries. Established in 1990, the main purpose of the alliance is to consolidate the voices of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to address global climate change. AOSIS has been very active from its inception putting forward the first draft text in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations as early as 1994.

Many of the member states were present at the COP15 United Nations on Climate Change Conference in December of 2009. Democracy Now! reported that members from the island state of Tuvalu interrupted a session on december 10 to demand that global temperature rise be limited to 1.5 degrees instead of the proposed 2 degrees.

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And yes, the Federated States of Micronesia (and thus Yap), are a member. Some of the Outer Islands of the State of Yap (many of which are low-lying atolls) will probably be submerged by rising ocean levels. Yap Island itself is not an atoll, but a chunk of continental plate that rises above sea level.