The Republic of T.

• Having a good laugh over, “Enjoy The View.” I’d circle that ad, too. http://tinyurl.com/48lmlt #

There’s a pretty fair chance that I won’t get much done in the way of writing today, or reading for that matter. However, here’s some stuff from folks who have the time to do both. After all, if I can’t write, I might as well spotlight the work of those who can. That’s what I do with most of my time anyway; reading, copying, pasting and promoting others’ writing & idea, as opposed to working on any of my own.

This is all stuff I’ve read, copied, and pasted in the course of my daily work. So, I’m doing the same here now. Because those who can, do. And those who can’t copy, paste, and promote the work of those who can…

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• Top 15 things you should never do on Facebook
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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for September 29th from 12:37 to 14:03:

• WoodMoor Village Zendo: Counting on Greed – It strikes me that the crisis we are seeing unfolding before our eyes, not just on Wall Street by the way, but everywhere this financial crisis reaches, signals something that ought to be clear to Republicans and Democrats, and any other political ideologue: we can't count on greed to get to compassion, kindness, social justice, etc. And yet, counting on greed has been the underlying assumption of so much economic policy and social tinkering. To be sure, Capitalism might require competition and a certain mercenary attitude, but I also think along with Herman Daly, Paul Hawken, and David Korten, that we can work to build wealth rather than just profit, that we can be successful (individually and socially) without making everything just be an exercise in greed.
• The Bilerico Project | Palin’s Religious Affiliations — Time to Ask the Hard Questions – Is it too much to ask show-hosts on prime-time TV news to do their jobs? They should ask Palin questions like: "Is it true that you're associated with revivalist pentecostal elements who are training a so-called Joel's Army to take dominion over the U.S.?"
• Broken Down. / Queerty – It must be so easy being an anti-gay social conservative. Rather than analyzing cause and effect, all they have to do it point a finger at the lavender set. Remember how we "caused" Katrina? Well, the same can be "said" about Washington Mutual's collapse last week.
• MichaelMoore.com : The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning …a message from Michael Moore – Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies — who must soon vacate the White House — are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.
• Palin Problem by Kathleen Parker on National Review Online – As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion. …Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League. …Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.” …If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
• The Numbers . . . – Jack & Jill Politics – Cautiously optimistic . . . that’s how I’d characterize Obama’s chances at this point. Obama has a lead and it’s growing. The trends are in his favor. That, coupled with increased voter registration bodes well for the blue team. Again . . . it’s ours if we want it. Which is why I stand by my slogan for the 2008 campaign: This ain’t the time to get cute.
• Feministe – In defense of the sanctimonious women’s studies set. – Yeah, you read that right: A politician is creating economic incentives for poor people to have fewer children, and for rich people to have more. I support making sterilization and all other form of birth control free and accessible, so that they truly are voluntary — but paying poor women $1,000 to tie their tubes doesn’t sound like “voluntary” birth control to me. It sounds like coercion. And it sounds like racist coercion.

After reading some of the comments at this Politico article, saying that Republicans are getting increasingly nervous about Palin after her media performances, there something that needs pointing out. The questions she was asked, and failed utterly to answer, are not “gotcha” questions. They are questions that any serious candidate should be able to answer coherently and without hesitation, or sense that they are leading questions and avoid answering them. It follows that the level of intelligence expected of any serious candidate would enable her or him to know a leading question when they hear one.

Problem is, your candidate ain’t got it, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious no matter how much you and your party want to pretend otherwise.

Thus, the more people hear from Palin, the more they look at her like this.

Why? Let’s review.’

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Last week was a bad one for the McCain campaign, no matter how you slice it. First, he pulls the stunt of trying to “suspend” the campaign, only to get called out by Obama when the chronology of their exchange reveals an impulsive attempt by McCain to back Obama into “suspending the campaign” and following his lead. Instead, a reporter’s question gives Obama the chance to say that whoever wins the election and ends up in the oval office “will have to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”

Then he cancels on Letterman, only to have Dave catch him in a lie, and show the NBC video feed which revealed that McCain was sitting in a make-up chair, about to be interviewed by Katie Couric. McCain didn’t actually leave for D.C. until the next day. And the big bailout summit he made a big deal of coming back to Washington for (which Obama managed to attend too, without suspending his campaign), but didn’t get his hoped-for photo-op.

I think the way I lot of people felt about the McCain campaign could be summed up with one look.

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• Watching: “Idiocracy” and wondering how long we have until we’re there. ( http://tinyurl.com/3v6ut ) #

That’s how I’m gonna feel for the rest of the day. Even when you know it’s coming, sad news is still sad news.

Oscar-winning actor and philanthropist Paul Newman has died at home in Westport, Connecticut, of cancer. He was 83. See the Los Angeles Times obituary here.

The actor was famous for films such as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Exodus,” “The Hustler,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “The Verdict,” but also for his many years of charity work.

Paul Newman co-founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, with author A.E. Hotchner in 1988. The international organization arranges free camping experiences for children suffering from cancer and other illnesses and gives aid to their families.

More than $200 million, all the after taxes profits from his food company, Newman’s Own, was donated to charity over the past 15 years.

Yes, he was a good actor. Yes, he was damn hot. But that’s not all.

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My previous post had me asking "How did we get here?" (Actually, I cleaned up my language for this post.) How did we end up on what could be an economic "road to perdition."

per·di·tion – noun
1. a state of final spiritual ruin; loss of the soul; damnation.
2. the future state of the wicked.
3. hell (def. 1).
4. utter destruction or ruin.
5. Obsolete. loss.

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• 101 Atheist Quotes
  (tags: humor atheism)
• Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics
  (tags: books)
• 35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s – Sorry, RIAA!
  (tags: music)
• 9 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons That Will Save Your Time
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• How To Enable All Chrome’s Best Features in Firefox
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• 8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast | News | TechRadar UK
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Ed.Note: I’m at home with Dylan today, ’cause he has a case of the “scoots” (as I call them), and I haven’t looked at the news today. So this post, which has been sitting in draft format since last night, may be

The murmuring started shortly after McCain announced that he wanted to postpone the first presidential debate. But, at least in my office, the references were made jokingly. Because we were certain that after pulling one fairly obvious stunt, the McCain campaign wouldn’t pull another blatantly obvious stunt, like canceling the V.P. debate. We were wrong.

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Mississippi, currently slated to be the site of the first presidential faceoff this Friday.

Or, maybe I was the only one who was joking about it. Surely the McCain campaign doesn’t think they can get away with it. But, all things considered, I guess I can’t blame them for trying.

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This is the weakest shit I’ve heard in a long time.

Republican John McCain said Wednesday he is directing his staff to work with Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign and the presidential debate commission to delay Friday’s debate because of the economic crisis.

In a statement, McCain said he will stop campaigning after addressing former President Clinton’s Global Initiative session on Thursday and return to Washington to focus on the nation’s financial problems.

The Republican presidential hopeful called Obama before he made the statement and told him he was going to suspend his campaign, according to a McCain senior adviser.

Message: What is John McCain afraid of?

Message: John McCain has no message on the economy.

Message: A president can’t postpone a crisis while he gets his act together.

Message: There’s no time-outs in the White House

Message: John McCain isn’t ready to talk about the economy.

Message: John McCain doesn’t want to talk to you about the bailout.

If I were Obama, I’d stand in front of a camera and say something like this.

John McCain can’t wait to get back to Washington. The people he wants to talk to about the economy and the bailout are in Washington. The people he wants to hear from about the economy and the bailout are in Washington. The people John McCain thinks are dealing with the economy and will deal with the bailout are in Washington.

I guess John McCain has forgotten his own words. It’s easy to be in Washington and frankly be somewhat divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have. Like I said before, if all you do is walk the halls of power, all you’ll hear is the wants of the powerful.

John McCain can go back to Washington and talk with the people he thinks are dealing with the economy and will deal with the bailout. But you know and I know, the people who are really dealing with the economy, and the people who who are really going to pay for the bailout are out here in the rest of America, going to work, paying their bills, taking care of their families, and it’s getting harder for them to do it.

Let John McCain go back to Washington. Until I get a call from the Senate that it’s time for a vote, I’m staying out here to talk to you and listen to you, because the real economy isn’t in Washington, or on Wall Street. It’s right here. 

This is a post about two headlines and one scary story.

Headline one:

Bailout is financial equivalent of the Patriot Act

The passage is stunning:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency,” the original draft of the proposed bill says.

And with those words, the Treasury secretary – whoever that may be in a few months – would be vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the United States. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act, after 9/11.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.’s $700 billion proposal to bail out Wall Street is both the biggest rescue and the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy.

Headline two:

McCain Campaign Can’t…Won’t…Rule Out Gramm As Treasury Secretary

For those of you who have developed a fondness for Tucker Bounds-themed bondage and domination videos, here’s another YouTube where David Shuster chortles his way through a segment in which Bounds cannot or will not bring himself to assure the American people that Phil Gramm – who recently called America a “nation of whiners” but who led the effort for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that paved the way for the economic collapses of today – will not, under any circumstances, become Secretary of the Treasury in the McCain administration. If Bounds keeps at these sorts of “explanations,” the world’s supply of false equivalencies may run out by the first week of October.

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I admit it, the past week has left me speechless. As I sat and read the news about how the last of the investment banks shuffled off into extinction (kinda; they’re just becoming regular old banks now), it did feel like I was sitting in front of my television again watching the Berlin Wall come down.

In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model doesn’t work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.

Only this time there doesn’t seem to be as much celebrate.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for September 18th through September 23rd:

• Bush can share the blame for financial crisis – International Herald Tribune – Still, the White House, in the view of critics, fostered a free-market hothouse in which these excesses were able to flower. It avoided regulation of banks and mortgage brokers, leaving much of that work to the Federal Reserve, which, under Alan Greenspan, showed little appetite for regulation. By the time Bush's current Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., proposed an overhaul of regulations governing the financial sector in April, the storm was already brewing.
• Racism and the Race – The race boils down to racism. All things being equal, Barack Obama would win the presidency hands down. Unemployment is at a five-year high. Wages are shrinking. The stock market is in the doldrums. The home foreclosure crisis has shattered the dreams of millions of Americans. Health care costs keep rising. Food costs keep rising. Tuition costs keep rising. The price of gasoline hit record highs this summer. We’re in the midst of two wars that aren’t going very well, despite the premature declarations of victory in Iraq. And three out of every four Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. This should be a banner year for Democrats, and by all accounts, it will be—at least down ticket. But it also should be at the top of the ticket.
• Where’s the Relief for those Facing Foreclosure? – With the feds prepared to throw a trillion dollars of our hard-earned money to prop up Wall Street and the investor class, is it too much to ask them to do something for the people who are the real victims of this mess? I’m talking about the people who’ve already been forced into foreclosure or those who are just about to be. I mean, if the government is going to back the mortgage securities, why doesn’t it just pick up the mortgages itself, and let people stay in their homes.
• How We Became the United States of France – TIME – This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.
• The Bilerico Project | Sarah Palin would rather let 100 rapists go free than let one woman use contraception – It's getting pretty obvious where Sarah Palin's values lie, and it's not with protecting women's freedom, financial conservatism, or bringing violent offenders to trial – it's with making sure that no woman can use contraception or get an abortion.

Sometimes, they were abandoned storefronts on the side of the road, in towns that didn’t seem busy enough to support much in the way of commerce.

Sometimes they were kudzu-covered the the point of impenetrability, and sometimes beyond the point of visibility.

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I spent some time this weekend researching different web-based tools for creating timelines, after getting an idea for a project I might want to propose at work, when I came across this. I remember when I was in college, and 1989 was winding down, my friends and I were all kind of struck by the fact that the first decade we could remember from it start was coming to an end. I’m sure we all said we felt “old.” at the time.

So, children of the 80s, how much of this stuff do you remember? Anything left out that you’d want to add.

At this point I think “old” is relative, but when a decade of your life becomes nostalgia fodder…well, that’s something.

• Wikimedia Commons
  (tags: webdesign web2.0 stock photos media)
• KRONOMY Project
  (tags: timelines tool web2.0)
• SIMILE Project
  (tags: timelines)
• Capzles
  (tags: timelines)
• SIMILE | Timeline | Documentation | How to Create Timelines
  (tags: timelines)
• Miomi
  (tags: timelines)
• Mnemograph: Web Based Timeline Software
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• Viygo — Timeline — It's about time
  (tags: timelines)
• Bee Docs' Timeline – Timeline Software for Mac OS X
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• Time Line Creator – Open Source Time Line Tool
  (tags: timelines)
• Timelines – Create a Timeline and Share – circaVie
  (tags: timelines tool web2.0)
• xtimeline – Explore and Create Free Timelines
  (tags: web2.0 tool timelines)
• Create a timeline using Microsoft Office Excel
  (tags: tools timelines)
• Timeline Software & Tools – Software for Creating and Customizing Historical Timelines
  (tags: timelines)
• How to Create a Simple Timeline with Excel | eHow.com
  (tags: timelines)
• Dipity
  (tags: tools timelines web2.0)
• Timetoast Timelines | Create timelines, share them on the web.
  (tags: tools history web2.0)
• TimeRime – View, create and compare timelines
  (tags: history tools web2.0)

It is one of the great curiosities of conservatism that its adherents enthusiastically destroy regulations which — besides a conscience — act as a bulwark against greed and corruption, thereby making greed and corruption inevitable. Because when (a) there’s no wrong way to make a buck, and (b) no accountability or consequences for malfeasance, there’s no disincentive either. (Other than being able to sleep at night, which isn’t a problem if you don’t have a conscience in the first place.) And when the inevitable happens, the resulting disaster spreads (because it is never really contained), they bemoan the very same rampant greed and corruption their deregulation made inevitable.

Naomi Klein found hints of it, in the musings of Alan Greenspan.

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I was catching up on email when I came across this article about a Christian music performer who just came out as gay (and proceeded to open a can of worms). It wafted into my inbox via the LGBTPOC listserve.

Famed Christian music singer Ray Boltz has publicly announced he’s living a homosexual lifestyle according to Gospel News Wire. He also believes that God made him that way.

“If this is the way God made me, then this is the way I’m going to live … I really feel closer to God because I no longer hate myself,” Boltz said in an interview with the Washington Blade about his decision to engage in homosexuality.

Boltz, a father of four who was married for 33 years before officially divorcing his wife this year, is well-known for his widely acclaimed songs “Thank You” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”

Of course, you know someone had to sound off on that. And ignorantly, at that.

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