Not Done Opening...

Remember this before you go all snark attack on the new parents in your lives...

"The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We parents have so little now; the children have taken so much. We just have nothing left to say. We sometimes hear ourselves and know how we must sound to others, and we feel great shame. Our children have broken us and turned us into single-subject simpletons. They've accomplished this feat in what is supposed to be the prime of our intellectual life."
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/12/04/traister_parenting_makes_me_dumb?source=newsletter

I see every mind in my generation dissected,
Splayed out in HTML, each detail laid bare,
Twittered and spat out, partially digested,
Read and ignored, dis-punctuated,
Unimpressed,
Utterly devoid of mystery.

I see them laughing in upper case consonants,
Cursing in Absentia,
Commenting commenting commenting
Always,
Opinions made in haste,
Expressed in links to more eloquent voices,
And answered with
STFU.

I see millions of cameras
Voluntarily trained on each personal train wreck,
Each major crime or minor infraction,
Eagerly soaking in humanity,
Alienated from its creator,
Sending his voices, receiving his messages,
Affirming his context.

I see friends reunited and houses divided,
Couches sit vacant save the vagrants, miscreants,
Children and dogs that still watch with both eyes that
Flickering fickle oracle of entertainment and diversion.
Desks contain us all, sustain us, enthralled, by this
Face in the mirror hewn from our peers’ reflections,
Monetized and analyzed by unseen teams.

The Nielsons are dead as the Cleavers-
Even The Simpsons are old news, past their prime;
Time for shows is reduced as we skim over commercials,
Sped up but still selling, and there’s not even time to pee
Without those ads, nor time to discuss without the specter of the show
Hanging over each word in paused agony
As you try to speed through that last dialogue before
We hit PLAY.

Pay day. V Day. Friday. Saturday.
Work day. Week day. May day.
No way. My way. All day.

Every day.

"On Wednesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson [R, SC-2], shouted "You lie!" at President Obama when he said that the healthcare bill would not cover illegal immigrants. "The supporters of the government takeover of healthcare and liberals who want to give healthcare to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan," Wilson said the next day in a campaign fundraising video.

However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants' healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250 million annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent."

These are the ironies that make the reasonable person inside of me weep.

To finish a single task,
Is not too much to ask,
But it is easier said than done.
Saturday's efforts paid dividends on Sunday,
When there was time to play
With my son.
Watching him slipping and sliding on river rocks,
Watching my father do the same thing,
And marveling at how
Much of this world
We've all managed
To preserve,
To not totally fuck up;
To see the smile my wife
Shares
With my son.
It all rests on this pinhead,
Where we dance,
Impossibly defying gravity
And inertia,
Spinning and laughing
While we can.
As the stars slowly burn out,
And the rivers dry up,
As the ideas get recycled,
It is important to see these things as they are.
It is important to be greedy with this love.
To soak in it until we are wrinkled and pruned.
We may be running out of parking places,
But there will always be room to dance.

"To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal health care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 -- that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1-percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1-percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year -- or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul."

Not since 1929 have the super wealthy had it so good. I forgot to link the source on this, but it was on alternet.com I think.

http://vimeo.com/5732745

Don't tell me there is no magic left...

"If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won't get a chance to produce children. When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies... Don't think I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious... Eighty percent of population growth can be reduced through TV."
-- Ghulam Nabi Azad, India's Health and Family Welfare minister

(memo to self: stop paying for cable and turn off that damned noise box tonight)

Why isn't the FBI breaking down the doors of the commercial and investment banks and grabbing computers so as to preserve incendiary e-mails that will most definitely implicate executives? Why are managements that caused this still in their jobs and still receiving bonuses? Are the bonuses paid to the folks at AIG that caused its collapse nothing more than hush money? How can the rating agencies still be in business? Why don't we make one arrest and lean on the bankster to see if he will fold like the cheap suit that he is and name other conspirators? The FBI spends more time investigating $2,000 drug buys than they have to date investigating the biggest heist in the history of the world: $40 trillion, that's trillion with a T, that's 40 million bags each containing $1 million.
--David Talbott
--http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/22/economic_crisis_part_one/

From Glenn Greenwald's column in Salon today...

"It would be one thing for the Obama administration to argue that there is no value in releasing torture photos specifically, and in investigating and imposing accountability for past abuses generally, if there were consensus among Americans that torture is wrong, barbaric and -- as Ronald Reagan put it (hypocritically but still emphatically) -- "an abhorrent practice" justifiable by "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever." But we have the opposite of that consensus: we have an ongoing debate over torture that is fluid, vibrant and far from settled, with half the population embracing the twisted and morally depraved pro-torture position. For that reason, to suppress evidence of what our torture actually looks like and the brutality it entails -- particularly graphic evidence -- is to make it easier for that pro-torture position to thrive, just as it would have been easier for the Iranian Government to slaughter protesters with impunity if they had succeeded in suppressing the images of what they were doing (it was this same dynamic that led the Israeli Army to defy its own Supreme Court and forcibly block reporters and photographers from entering Gaza and which caused the embedded American press to suppress images of the massive civilian deaths which their protectors, the U.S. military, was causing in Iraq)."

I copied this right off of Doonesbury's site.

"You know, Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke, who was the head of the counterterrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it."
-- Dick Cheney, on Richard Clarke

"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (5/3/01)

"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (5/26/01)

"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (6/23/01)

"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (6/25/01)

"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (6/30/01)

"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (7/02/01)

-- subject lines of Richard Clarke emails to Bush Administration prior to 9/11/01