Thursday, December 23, 2004

Feliz Navidad yaw'all


The Shrub has struck again! Starting next week, it's open season on our national forests, and the last real tree you might see is the Christmas Spruce in your living room..

Yes, indeed, Weyerhauser and their ilk has hit the jackpot. The Department of the Interior will start implementing its new rules allowing "economic use" of our national forests next week, and before you know it, it's gonna be Erosion City everywhere. Check this out.

Friday, December 17, 2004

Friday follies

1,240,000 citations for fraud

Yep. That’s how many citations that Google pulled up when I keyed in “2004 US presidential fraud.” Yikes. Now, it is true that a lot of the cites were from blogs, but there were many, many from mainstream media: CNN, New York Times, the UK’s Independent, etc., etc. I’m not linking them here, because you can just scoot over to Google and pull up the citations yourself.

Now I have said before that I am no conspiracy fan, but it just stands to reason that with as many people screaming (and they are screaming) that the fix was in, well, like the man said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Know what I mean?
 
Red Rover
Those little tin guys on Mars are still chugging along, and this week sent back pix of clouds; more proof, if it were really needed, that there’s free water on the Red Planet.Now, if Bush were to do one Good Thing, he could follow through on his promise to send men to the place, we could establish a colony, and maybe Mankind would have a refuge, a seed store as it were, for after the Shrub starts the next nuclear war and irradiates the whole damn Earth.

If you’re interested in reading some speculative stuff about exploring the Red Plant, , the sf trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), might give you an appreciation how the colonization of the 4th planet might play out. Stanley is a damn good writer and has some nifty insights into the political process as well.

 

History as fiction

Speaking of writers and political fiction, don’t forget to check out The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, an alternative history of a fascist United States, and also Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle, another fascist fantasy. This stuff hits close to home, as it were.


While we're on the subject, while checking the Google for the above citations, I noticed that there are over 14,900,000 entries for "alternative history." Seems to be a popular subject on the Web. I wonder if any of those alternative worlds postulate a Dem winning the last election. Gee, I wonder what it would be like ...

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

More on voter fraud

This is probably the most important issue facing the American people at the moment. While the mass media are crying out about voter fraud in the recent Ukranian elections, they have steadfastly refused to smell the rotten cheese here at home. Truthout is posting articles updating the situation vis a vis the suspected voter-machine manipulation in both Ohio and Florida. As noted in a post earlier, a software writer in Florida is being interrogated by the FBI and other interested groups. The Supreme Court of Ohio has put off hearing a petition from the Alliance for Democracy asking for a block and/or suspension of Ohio's Electoral College voting results. Others elsewhere, including the New York Times, are also semingly getting seriously interested in this story.

But don't hold your breath on this one, and don't think for a minute that it's going to change the identity of the Man in the White House come January. The Shrubbery have a death-grip on the elections commisssions in most states, and there's an end to it. However, we really need to pressure the media to stay on the story. Even through the Dems task still remains to reclaim their liberal heritage, and sell that to the American electorate, rather than take the DLC's terrible advice to move the party plank right and pander to corporate donors, this can be the turning point on the way to reclaiming our democracy.