3:10:47 PM     leave/read comments []

Sorry Everybody

Remember, at least 49% of voting Americans didn't want four more years of Christo-Fascism.

Some of us - hopefully most of us - are trying to understand and appreciate the effect our recent election will have on you, the citizens of the rest of the world. As our so-called leaders redouble their efforts to screw you over, please remember that some of us - hopefully most of us - are truly, truly sorry. And we'll say we're sorry, even on the behalf of the ones who aren't.

3:07:14 PM    

11:46:44 PM     leave/read comments []

Click the boy's club to make it BiG.

9:44:01 PM     leave/read comments []

6:33:09 PM     leave/read comments []

I'm too depressed about what sort of terrible things the Religious Right is going to try to get the Bush Administration to do, so I'll just go back to bed and cry some more while you look at photos of my gallbladder being removed.

Stuff like this:

Get ready for the "revolution" on the right. Direct-mail ace Richard Viguerie is ecstatic over Bush's victory, but says it's time for conservatives to stop pandering to moderates. [Salon.com]

Click the pix to make them big.

2:40:09 PM     leave/read comments []

Beloved the world over: George W. Bush.

The Independent bore the front-page headline "Four more years" on a black page with grim pictures including a hooded Iraqi prisoner and an orange-clad detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

The left-leaning Guardian led its features section with a black page bearing the tiny words, "Oh, God." Inside a story described how Bush's victory "catapaulted liberal Britain into collective depression."

Across Europe, many newspapers expressed dismay at the prospect of another term for Bush, a president often regarded as inflexible and unilateralist.

"Oops -- they did it again," Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said in a front-page English headline. The cover of the Swiss newsmagazine Facts called Bush's re-election "Europe's Nightmare." "Victory for the hothead: how far will he go?" asked another Swiss weekly, L'Hebdo.

Right now, 49% of U.S. voters (possibly 50%, if tales of vote cooking in Ohio are to be believed) agree with the rest of the world, at least on one thing.

10:59:38 PM     leave/read comments []

Ellen Willis is a journalism professor at New York University and the author of "Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial" and other books.
Basically, the first thing is to face up to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. They spent four years scapegoating Ralph Nader for Florida in 2000, and at least we've heard the last of that. Nader was no factor this year, and that's not an excuse.

What you see already this year is that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Thomas Frank [author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?"] are already scapegoating cultural liberals. The argument is that we've let ourselves get separated from the heartland. Why don't all these people in Ohio who are losing their jobs vote Democratic? Well, according to this argument it's because liberals are all these effete East Coast elitists who are out of touch with "regular people."

That's ignoring the fact that the Democrats didn't run a class campaign, and they're essentially not a left party on economic issues. They didn't face up to the fact that in the current circumstances the private sector cannot really create jobs. Not what we used to think of as jobs, anyway, where there's a living wage and a future and benefits and a pension and people can raise a family. There's plenty of work, but there aren't enough jobs.

Part of that is because we're competing in a global economy, and wages are much less in other parts of the world. Part of it is because of technology -- we require fewer and fewer workers to perform the jobs that do exist, and the workers don't benefit from that at all. They're just being laid off. Any economic program has to address that issue. Unless you have a public jobs program you can't solve the unemployment or underemployment problem. Do you think Kerry would have lost if he had proposed a National Security Homeland Protection jobs program?

There are other issues they don't really directly address, like healthcare and Social Security. There are many businessmen now admitting that the most practical thing to do to solve the healthcare crisis, and control the uncontrollable costs, is national health insurance. Majorities are consistently for it when you poll them, and a lot of "experts" are coming around to this view.

Did the Democrats dare to broach this topic? No, because they're a neoliberal party. Fundamentally, they have the same economic program as the Republicans, just without the enormous tax cuts that destabilize the economy. They proceed much more cautiously, they understand that there has to be some social safety net, but they basically pursue the same programs. There's not a clear contrast between the parties on economic issues.

On cultural issues, it's been a long time since the political opposition in this country really defended freedom, especially sexual freedom and religious freedom. When you read Tom Frank, he seems to see abortion as some kind of peculiar elite concern, but that flies in the face of history. Americans are deeply ambivalent on these kinds of questions, but a great deal of feminism has been absorbed into the culture. All Americans ever hear is the right-wing position: "I think abortion is a terrible thing, but it should be legal."

For 30 or 35 years, the left -- using that term very broadly -- has pushed the idea that we have to soft-pedal these social issues. We have to preserve them in court, quietly, but without emphasizing them in the public arena. Religion is the classic example: In 2000, we had a conversation about whether it was appropriate for politicians to display their faith in public, when Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were trying to out-religion the Republicans. In 2004, that issue has gone much further to the right, and we talked about whether it was obligatory for them to display their faith. So we had the spectacle of John Kerry, and Howard Dean before him, struggling to talk about religion and seeming completely inauthentic. If one of them had simply said, "Part of religious freedom is being able to keep your beliefs private," maybe they could actually have gotten away with it.

The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy

In terms of foreign policy, as long as people are really anxious about the economy and about culture, that also reinforces their fear of terrorism. They become genuinely desperate, looking for someone to make us safe, instead of realizing we have to take control of destiny. The debacle of war wasn't enough to offset that, and neither the neoliberals or the left have a coherent foreign policy

Kerry offered a realist, internationalist, neoliberal foreign policy, but against that Bush scores a lot of points by hooking into what is fundamentally a good impulse: the idea that our relationship to the world must be moral and ideological, not just realist. He channeled people's impulses that we should defend democracy, and that we should be for the freedom of others, into the idea that thoroughgoing militarism and triumphalism is the way to do it.

This has led to disaster, but the left, on the other hand, has copped out with a knee-jerk pacifist position. Islamic fundamentalism is a real threat, and it must be connected to the war against fundamentalism at home. Again, a solution in the realm of foreign policy involves connecting to cultural issues and not running away from them. As long as the left just says, "get out now" -- well, that might work in Iraq, I don't know, we may just end up abandoning them to a horrible civil war. But it's not much of a long-term policy.

So we need to realize that the Democratic Party is hopeless. And now that socialism has failed, we need a whole new framework of ideas, in which we recognize that economic and cultural issues are fundamentally intertwined. Moral and cultural issues are important to people; they're not just a distraction from real stuff. And right now only people's most conservative impulses are being fueled.

We can't be in a defensive posture all the time: "Let's protect Roe vs. Wade" is not enough. We need to defend freedom, which in recent years the left has not been willing or able to do. We've let the right define freedom. The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy

In terms of foreign policy, as long as people are really anxious about the economy and about culture, that also reinforces their fear of terrorism. They become genuinely desperate, looking for someone to make us safe, instead of realizing we have to take control of destiny. The debacle of war wasn't enough to offset that, and neither the neoliberals or the left have a coherent foreign policy.

It's time for a revolution.

11:21:21 PM     leave/read comments []

No stomach for killing fascists? Marry a Canadian!

10:57:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Thank you.

Fight the evil that is the Bush administration.

Kerry concedes.. Xeni Jardin: Updated.

Click on thumbnail for full image (Igor Knezevic)

8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

"Change comes from discontent," he said. "And right now, there's a lot of discontent."

I finish pouring my coffee, and agree when my dad says what we're faced with right now is considerably more frightening than Nixon. BB pal Jim Graham IMs a few minutes later: "Yeah, and Karl Rove makes Lee Atwater look like a choir boy."

Dan Gillmor sums up what the continuation of Bush's presidency means for America.

The Republicans have an even stronger congressional majority. They have shown how gladly ruthless they can be in using their power. Bush and his allies have never believed in compromise. They have even less incentive to govern from the middle now, even though the nation remains bitterly divided.

There's no secret about what's coming. We don't have that excuse this time.

Here comes more fiscal recklessness -- as we widen the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, cementing a plutocracy into our national fiber, we'll pay our national bills on the Treasury Bill credit card for the next few years. Many economists expect a Brazil-like financial crisis to hit the U.S. before the end of the decade. If we muddle our way though the near term, we'll still have left our kids with the bill.

Here comes an expansion of the American empire abroad, a fueling of fear and loathing elsewhere on the globe. This is also unsustainable in the end. Empire breeds disrespect.

Our civil liberties will shrink drastically. This president and his top allies in Congress fully support just one amendment in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. Say goodbye to abortion rights in most states. Roe v. Wade will fall after this president pushes three or four Scalia and Thomas legal clones onto the Supreme Court. Say hello, meanwhile, to a much more intrusive blending of church and state.

The environment? We'll be nostalgic for Ronald Reagan's time in office.

This is not sour grapes. This is reality.

I hope, but doubt, that the Democrats re-discover enough of their collective spine to block the most extreme moves. If they do it'll be a change for a party that stands for so little these days.

People say there are two Americas. I think there are at least three.

One is Bush's America: an amalgam of the extreme Christian "conservatives," corporate interests and the builders of the burgeoning national-security state.

Another is the Democratic "left": wedded to the old, discredited politics in a time that demands creative thinking.

I suspect there's a third America: members of an increasingly radical middle that will become more obvious in the next few years, tolerant of those who are different and aware that the big problems of our times are being ignored -- or made worse -- by those in power today.

That third America needs a candidate. Or, maybe, a new party.

If you follow South Park, maybe this is all about being forced to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.

BoingBoing readers are a good-humored lot, though. Some have suggested sending fecalgrams to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as an exercise of free speech. Reader Pete Setchell says, "There is still one chance to get him out of the White House - send him a pack of pretzels to celebrate his victory. I've just sent some via Amazon."

Reader Dave in the UK writes,

"As a British citizen, I just can't understand why. Does the British media unfairly portray Bush, or are more than half of American voters just fucking stupid? I write this as an appeal to BoingBoing - please, please help me understand how this could have happened, and why, why on God's earth would so many Americans support Bush?"

Presuming the elections were fairly conducted and accurately counted -- which remains a matter of some considerable debate -- I'm going with the latter.

Mateusz Pozar in Sweden (the place that has no army) echoes the emails of BoingBoing readers around the globe today: "I must say that iâo[dot accent]m surprised (and most of the world with me actually) that Bush got a second term. Seriously, would he have to rape kittens to get kicked out of office?"

Iranian expat blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan says -- welcome to the Christian Republic of America.

"You know what? I really think Iranians should export their revolution to America. They badly need it. Unbelievable, half of Americans go to Church once week at least? Even Iranians don't go once a week to Mosque, thanks to the Islamic revolution. So I guess America really needs a Christian revolution, maybe people would see what religion really is."

BB reader Billy Hayes says,

"I am from Texas (born and raised). I am a white male. I did not vote for Bush. I guess we all have our reasons. I voted for Kerry. I find comfort in what you posted about what your father said about Nixon. Bush likes to use old Texas sayings a lot. I have one for him. In Texas there is a saying that goes, 'Give em enough rope and they will hang themselves.' Well, I guess the Republicans have all the rope they need."

Reader Hal Eckhart in Minneapolis says,

"Thanks for the consolation, however small. We can only hope and keep on trying.

"I, too, remember being aghast when Nixon won re-election, and the sense that everybody was blithely oblivious to his evil. My high-school civics teacher had a "four more years" sticker on his podium, and once bragged to us that he laughed out loud when he heard JFK had been shot.

"This country and this world are full of idiots. This country's idiots are just a little more cock-sure that they deserve what they've got. A lesson in humility is certainly on the way, and we can only pray that it will be no more painful than it needs to be."

John Shirley, another ex-BB-guestblogger, says

The newspaper today says that millions of young people who said they were anti-Bush and who were registered to vote Democratic *didn't show up at the polls.* They were too busy playing Grand Theft Auto or renting Jerry Bruckheimer movies or smoking weed or babbling in chatrooms. It's their fault we're heading into a theocracy. But they're not alone in their culpability."

BoingBoing pal Q-Burns Abstract Message IMs,

Bill Hicks once told a story about an American friend of his who complained about the USA. When told, "well, if you don't like it then move somewhere else" the friend's reply would be, "What? And become a victim of our foreign policy?"

Geek and new dad Glenn Fleishman tells BoingBoing,

I've been Jewish, not very observant, my whole life. I'm one of the first generations of Jews to not fear assault as they went to school or lived their lives in secular or religious ways. To not worry about slaughter. I have only met a handful of concentration camp survivors, including a teacher in college. I don't know what it is to be oppressed or insulted for my ethnic and religious heritage.

Today is the first day I am afraid in America because I am Jewish.

Today is the first day I fear for my new son, who is not, but has a Jewish father.

I'm lucky to live in Washington State, and specifically in Seattle. A haven of secular and broad-spectrum religious views in a sea of red. We went strongly, even among Republicans, to Kerry, and maybe I just won't leave this state much for the next four years.

Me, I just keep thinking about this kid's face. And promises of endless war. Link to portrait of LC David Murphy, shot at Camp Abu Graib near Falluja by Kevin Sites.

From Kerry's concession speech:

Audience member: We still got your back!
Thank you, man. And I assure you -- you watch -- I'll still have yours.

[Boing Boing]

10:43:56 PM     leave/read comments []

Learn to use them.

Kill evildoers.

The revolution begins today.

10:27:49 PM     leave/read comments []

My friend Jason pretty much speaks for me here. I've always been on the margins, a weirdo and outsider, but today is the first time in my life that I've felt that my countrymen would see me dead and that I'm surrounded by some sort of alien way of thinking. Without further ado, here's Jason Errett:

Fuck, I'm depressed. I've never felt much like a representative of the mainstream. I've always been the oddball. I was the weird kid from age 8. We moved a lot, almost once a year, so I was always the new kid, too. Even at a small college that was science intensive, a place where we didn't even have an English program, or a business program, or fine arts, or anything, a place where in order to fill your elective credit hour requirements you had to take core curriculum classes from some other hard science discipline, a place where the EE majors where considered the intellectual inferiors, I was still the weird smart kid. So, I've never fit in anywhere.

But, never before have I felt so alienated here in my native land. I felt less conspicuous walking through the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, where I was the only guy I could see wearing trousers instead of a robe.

Here I am in America, and I feel like I must've just been dropped off by a passing flying saucer.

"Moral values"... that's what the majority of Bush supporters cited as a reason for voting for him. "Security" was a close second.

My brain must be wired completely differently than these people because I fail to see the moral value of waging a pointless war that has killed over 100,000 innocent civilians, and I fail to see the security benefit of killing them, given that it will radicalize their cousins, their brothers, their uncles, their sons, and anyone else who cared about all these people we so callously slaughtered in the name of the neocon new order.

And now, we've got Iran busily enriching uranium, and North Korea reprocessing fuel rods, and there's no chance of us meeting a diplomatic solution with the current crop of vicious thugs in power. Those two nations see that they're on our hitlist, and now that the American people have spoken, apparently most of America thinks they need to be on that list. I'm not saying these are delightful and friendly nations that we should coddle, but I will say they're much more dangerous when they feel threatened than when they feel like they have other courses of action. If we stepped in with diplomacy and perhaps even something like the offer of nuclear power assistance, like we did with North Korea during Clinton's tenure, we could alleviate the threat. It was only when that support, plus the fuel and energy support we'd been giving North Korea was withdrawn that they broke the UN seals on the fuel rod cooling ponds and began reprocessing. And now, thanks to reincarnating the remains of their early fast breeder reactor program, which we had replaced with less nuclear proliferation friendly light water reactors, they have enough plutonium for a handful of nuclear weapons.

And Iran... Iran will probably go the fast breeder reactor route, too. It makes sense when you're on the hitlist of an emerging empire that has shown no reluctance to invade and destroy other countries. You get both power in the short term, and nuclear weapons in the not too distant future. Without the power to make Pu-239 from the cheap and abundant U-238 via a breeder reactor, there's almost no way to have a successful nuclear weapons program. Enrichment of uranium is one method, sure, but you're much better off enriching to reactor grade fuel uranium, about 30-60% pure U-235, running a breeder reactor, and converting literally tons of U-238 into weapons grade plutonium, which can now be chemically separated from the residual uranium bypassing the expensive and difficult centrifugal separation process.

With a newly radicalized Iraqi population amounting to thousands of new terrorists willing to die to strike back at those who slaughtered their families, and a threat of similar wholesale destruction held over the heads of Iran and North Korea, there is nothing to stop these nations from providing nuclear materials and weapons assistance to straight up terrorists. In fact, it starts looking like the only logical step. If you know you're on the hit list, why not hit first? Especially if you've got a proxy organization of radical extremists who don't care if they die in the process of inflicting damage on the enemy.

My prediction, one shared by a physicist friend of mine who is much closer to these issues than I am since she works for the Union of Concerned Scientists and has been elbow deep in weapons proliferations issues for years, is that we will see nuclear terrorism within two years.

So, maybe Bush won't get his full "four more years".

But, sadly, he won't be alone among Americans who won't get four more years. Thousands of soldiers pumped into an increasingly unstable Iraq, or sent into Iran, or, god forbid, a new war on the Korean penninsula, won't get four more years, either. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans civilians will die when a nuclear device, hidden in a shipping container, is detonated in one of our port cities. They won't get four more years.

And the civilians who continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan won't get four more years.

And on economic and healthcare fronts, the American people will continue to die prematurely due to lack of decent medical care, and some may become despondant over their opportunities and fall prey to psychological maladies such as depression, and the increased risk of suicide that comes with it. They won't have four more years.

Four more years, my ass.

11:46:11 AM    

Well, I go to the hospital at 8:30 tomorrow morning to do battle with my gallbladder. I'm supposed to be home by the time polls have closed.

Wish me luck and vote for John Kerry and John Edwards!

I really want to be free of George W. Gallbusher.

11:21:53 PM     leave/read comments []

Jon Stewart clips galore. Cory Doctorow: Lisa Rein's on a Daily Show clips tear! Here are four more clips from Oct 26: "Interview with Bob Kerrey of the 911 Commission," "The first of several 'Fiasco Previews' of the Upcoming Election," "Another Messopotamia episode" and "A bit featuring The Shrub and Kerry have pandering to the minority vote."

Link

[Boing Boing]

6:07:14 PM    

Poor lil critter! I hope the poor dear isn't suffering.

Seven-legged calf. David Pescovitz: Last month, a calf with seven legs was born in Central Trinidad. According to the Trinidad Express, a woman who lives near the amazing creature said that its birth is divine.

"We are living in the dark age which is called (Kalyug), and during this time miracles would happen all over the world, so no one should be surprised," she said.

Link
[Boing Boing]

5:58:37 PM    

Scooter caught an unauthorized guest coming out of the storage room in the basement tonight:

I got her to let go of it and drop it in an empty kleeneex box. I took the wee critter outside to the empty lot across the street and let him go with a warning. Man, that little mouse is going to have one scary Halloween story to tell!

Click the pictures to make 'em BiG.

12:07:50 AM     leave/read comments []

You're Lewis Black. You're mad as hell, and
probably going to take it some more so that you
can use it in your segment.

Which Daily Show persona are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Via Melpster

2:15:46 PM     leave/read comments []

How Osama Bin Laden got away.

A detailed look at how Bush's obsession with Iraq allowed OBL to escape justice.

Two months after 9/11, late November 2001, Bush distracted our top military commanders from the hunt for Bin Laden with rushed plans for a new war in Iraq. This shifted their focus at a critical moment, when we had Osama cornered at Tora Bora. The facts now show that it helped Bin Laden escape. The details are all public information, but the story never got out. Until now.

Powerful, well documented stuff.

11:37:40 AM     leave/read comments []

Daylight savings time......ENDS today.

In other news, the Journal Star admits that it meant to endorse John Kerry, but got confused.

11:22:54 AM     leave/read comments []

Jon Stewart: MEDIA SUPERSTAR!

Jon Stewart will destroy television!. Cory Doctorow: Brian Dear evaluates Jon Stewart-and-co's latest appearance on C-SPAN and predicts that Stewart will destroy television!

The panelists took turns reading from their book, America: The Book. It's amazing how much coverage this book gets on C-SPAN. But these guys are not normal book authors, and they're not there to push the book. They're there to destroy TV as we know it.

I believe that Stewart and company are trying to revolutionize television by tearing down its conventional standards and practices. First, dress inappropriately, like a slacker. Stewart's starting to dress like Bill Murray in the early scenes of Stripes. Second, resort to language that's simply not said on television, certainly not C-SPAN. Speak as many four-letter words as possible, so the television audience members marvel in the fact that there are no bleeps like there are on The Daily Show, only occasional and entirely useless on-screen warnings that this program contains bad language. Duh!

Prediction: Stewart and company are going to get C-SPAN in big trouble, and somebody's going to try to fine or indict C-SPAN for breaking FCC rules. You watch: some congressman is going to take this one for a ride, and sick the FCC on them but good.

Link

(Thanks, Brian!)

[Boing Boing]

OK, you can destroy television, but leave BBC America, Comedy Central, The History Channel and let's let Star Trek: Enterprise run for a while, because it's stopped sucking and besides, it's Star Trek.

9:24:25 AM     leave/read comments []

Via Jason, who doesn't have a blog.

8:36:20 AM     leave/read comments []

Spike Needs Your Help!

Spike is a 9 week old Domestic ShortHair, Neutered Male.

Spike is very playful but can be very loving at times.

Just look at that proud little guy! You just know there's a kitten with heart. Also, he's grey. Grey cats grow up good. Just ask Bob.

BTW, Harold still needs a home.

8:31:42 AM     leave/read comments []