Open Thread January 18, 2023

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:40 am Editorial, Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jan 182023

Yesterday, I did get all the cartoons done for the rest of this month – although a couple of hthem are a little off. There’s one where I used a date for it which is not usually associated (the usual date is the date then news got out, but the one i used was the date of the initial discovery), and another where I used two related events which happened on the same day but more than a decade apart. Anywa, now it’s on to February.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

The Daily Beast – The Traitorous Spooks Helping Putin Crush Their Own People
Quote – As the volunteers were desperately trying to convince Alexander and his mother to leave, three men drove up to the courtyard on mopeds and started taking photos of our group with their phones. Immediately, Darren turned to us, looking genuinely fearful for the first time…. “I’ve spoken to the Ukrainian military about this, and they have specifically told us they have problems with guys on mopeds who will take photos and send them to pro-Russian forces,” Wilson later explained.
Click through for story. Every nation has some of these. Ours are called “far right.” It’s quite possible that every nation throughout human history has had some. And they are the real reason we can’t have nice things. We will never eliminate them completely – but we can do a whole lot better at restraining them. It starts by recognizing who they are – and who they aren’t.

NM Political Report – Proposed legislation would provide tax deduction for teachers
Quote – It is not just students’ parents who buy pencils, paper and protractors; teachers, many times, spend hundreds of dollars to keep their classrooms stocked for the school year. One proposed bill in this year’s legislative session seeks to help curb that expense.
Click through for details. It is, of course, not enough. But that’s no reason not to pass it. It’s a start.

Food For Thought

Video Thread 2/10/22

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 11:38 am Blog News, Editorial

Feb 102022

Glenn Kirschner – Trump’s Document Destruction; Pence Says “Trump is Wrong” & Republican Party Continues to Implode

CNN – NC elections board says it can disqualify Rep. Cawthorn from running over January 6 .[It appears to me that it is exactly the State Secretaries of State/State Elections Boards who have the sole authority to determine who does and doesn’t go on the ballot. I have wrotten to my Secretary of Stateabout my representative.]

The Lincoln Project – “Legitimate Political Discourse 2

Ring of Fire – First Lady Dr. Jill Biden Says Free Community College Is Off The Table

politicsrus – Legitimate Political Discord

Brent Terhune – ban the books NOW

Beau – Let’s talk about fast food, California, and AB 257….

SOUND OFF! 5/15/21 In the Pipeline

Posted by Freya at 6:47 am Editorial, Politics

May 152021

The recent cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline is a wakeup call in more ways than one. Not just about the lack of cybersecurity in our infrastructure, not just about how vulnerable we are to malicious hackers, but also how we really need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

As soon as news of the attack got out, demand for gas spiked, as people topped off and hoarded, making the situation worse. (Putting gasoline in plastic bags? Stupid and foolish – as well as illegal. What’s wrong with a Jerry can?) Prices jumped at many stations, sometimes enough to constitute price gouging. People are probably rethinking travel plans, since this affects airplane fuel as well. Public transit looks a little more attractive.

Some people may recall the gas pinch in 2008 after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike damaged refineries on the Gulf Coast. Drivers waited in line for hours; occasionally, fisticuffs broke out. People followed tanker trucks like ducklings. 911 operators got sick of people calling to ask where they could find gas.

The shutdown of the Colonial pipeline and resulting fuel pinch will have wide-reaching consequences. It supplies 45% of the Southeast’s gasoline and aviation fuel, which means that other shortages are looming. Lack of fuel hurts commercial transportation, which means many goods will be in short supply. As the hoary old saw says, if you bought it, a truck brought it. Even locally made goods contain materials transported from somewhere else.

If we got all of our energy from renewable sources, hackers would be less of a concern. Imagine if our homes and businesses were all solar and/or wind powered. Decentralized energy is far less vulnerable to evildoers than a single pipeline supplying a hefty portion of the petrol for a region.

Meanwhile, we need to improve the cybersecurity of our infrastructure. Ransomware attacks are particularly nasty because nearly always the victim has the choice of ponying up or losing vital data and computer systems. Colonial Pipeline has, reportedly, paid the ransom to the DarkSide crime ring, which will just encourage other cybercriminals to make similar attacks. Also, countries that harbor cyberterrorists and do not crack down on these villains need to be held accountable.

In the short run, we need to shore up our infrastructure against assaults such as the one loosed on Colonial Pipeline. In the long run, we need to kiss oil and other limited, unrenewable energy sources good-bye. President Biden’s Green New Deal will set us on that path.

The Other 9/11s

Posted by TomCat at 11:15 am Editorial, Politics

Sep 112020

11-911
This is a repetition of the editorials I published in 2011, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019 with alterations to bring it up to date. Nineteen years ago this morning, the first airliner hit the tower, as I was about to leave for work. When I arrived, I learned about the second hit. My duties that day were to contact top executives of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New York on behalf of our client, a major developer of computer operating systems, to arrange site visits and one-on-one executive interviews for our client’s research team. What timing! I felt uncomfortable calling, but the account exec’s assistant, an airhead and a Republican, ordered me to go to work. Many of my executive contacts were in the Twin Towers. I got on the telephone. Nobody was answering, and many of the lines were out of order. I did get through and spoke to a man in one of the towers above the fire, who knew he would not survive. He said he couldn’t dial out and gave me his home number. He asked me to call his wife and tell her he loved her. I did. She was hysterical. Who could blame her. That shook me up so much that I went to the account executive’s office, and told him I was done calling New York for the day. He asked me what idiot had told me to call into New York under these circumstances. His assistant changed the subject. Because of that experience, I cannot think of 9/11 without my heart going out to the people who lost loved ones that tragic day, and I consider it imperative to do whatever we can, within reason, to prevent a reoccurrence. One failing, in that regard, is that we often ask who and how, but all too seldom, ask why. So as we remember the events of 9/11/2001, perhaps it may help if we consider the other 9/11s, 9/11/1973 and 9/11/2020. Twenty eight years earlier, the roles were reversed. Instead of being attacked, the US had arranged and was assisting an attack to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile, and the installation of one of the most infamous dictators of the twentieth century, Augusto Pinochet. An article by Peter Kornblug from August 2003 describes and explains those events.

On September 14, 1970, a deputy to then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote him a memo, classified SECRET/SENSITIVE, arguing against covert operations to block the duly elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency. “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets,” noted Viron Vaky. “If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us., e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.?” Vaky asked. “It is hard to argue this.” Kissinger ignored this advice. The next day he participated in a now-famous meeting where President Nixon instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to “save Chile” by secretly fomenting a coup to prevent Allende’s inauguration. When those covert operations failed, Kissinger goaded Nixon into instructing the entire national security bureaucracy “on opposing Allende” and destabilizing his government. “Election of Allende as president of Chile poses one of [the] most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere,” says a newly declassified briefing paper Kissinger gave to Nixon two days after Allende’s inauguration. “Your decision as to what to do may be most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year…. If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, result will be steady draft toward modus vivendi approach.” Had Washington adopted a “modus vivendi approach,” it is possible that Chileans, indeed citizens around the world, would not be solemnly commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. In the United States, the meaning of this anniversary is, understandably, overshadowed by the shock and tragedy of our own 9/11. But Chile reminds us that the topics of debate on US foreign policy today–pre-emptive strikes, regime change, the arrogance of unilateral intervention, unchecked covert action and secrecy and dishonesty in government–are not new. From the thousands of formerly classified US documents released over the past several years, the picture that emerges strikes some haunting parallels with the news of the day. Chile, it must be recalled, constitutes a classic example of a pre-emptive strike–a set of operations launched well before Salvador Allende set foot in office. Nixon ordered the CIA on September 15, 1970, to “make the economy scream” and to foment a military move to block Allende from being inaugurated six weeks later, in November; the Chilean leader had yet to formulate or authorize a single policy detrimental to US interests. “What happens over [the] next 6-10 months will have ramifications far beyond US-Ch[ilean] relations,” Kissinger predicted in a dire warning to Nixon only forty-eight hours after Allende actually took office. “Will have effect on what happens in rest of LA and developing world; our future position in hemisphere; on larger world picture…even effect our own conception of what our role in the world is.” As in the distorted threat assessment on Iraq, this was sheer speculation–unsupported, indeed contradicted, by US intelligence. In August 1970 CIA, State and Defense Department analysts had determined that “the US has no vital national interests within Chile,” and that the world “military balance of power would not be significantly altered” if Allende came to power… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Nation>

For many years, the United States has treated the rest of the world, particularly third world nations, as the private reserve of an American economic empire, repeatedly using force, usually covertly, any time a nation had the audacity to suggest that their resources should benefit their own people, not US corporations. Neither party is blameless, but the vast majority and most heinous of such actions occurred during Republican administrations. In the twentieth century, the United States overthrew more democratically elected governments and installed more dictators than any other nation ever has. No nation can stand toe-to-toe against the US on the battlefield, so guerilla tactics are the only option available to nations who would oppose us. We should also remember that there would be no such thing as Al Qaeda, had not Republicans under Reagan financed it’s formation to perform terrorist attacks against the USSR. I do not hate this country. I love the USA enough to insist that we actually practice the principles we claim to profess. These are the lessons we need to learn to prevent future terrorists attacks against the US. If we practice oppression, we guarantee resistance. If we practice partnership, we will get cooperation. We need to stop trying to control other countries by force, To forestall terrorism, we must stop participating in and supporting terrorism ourselves. We will be seen as hypocrites if we oppose ethnic cleansing by ISIL, another Republican creation, but continue to support ethnic cleansing by Zionists. For the last lesson, let’s return to the story with which I began. Shortly after the account executive agreed that I was done for the day, the company shut down for the rest of the day too. Several of us gathered around the TV in the lunch room. Knowing that I am politically involved, coworkers asked me what I thought was going to happen. I told them that I thought Bush would use the attack as an excuse to do two things: to invade Iraq and to curtail civil liberties guaranteed under our Constitution. The last lesson is this. If we adopt the tactics of evil to oppose evil, Republican tactics, we become no different than the evil we oppose. Even if we do all that, we must still be vigilant. Sadly there are forces in pseudo-Islam that pursue hatred against America, just as there are forces in pseudo-Christianity that pursue hatred against all who fail to obey their dogma, both for their own respective right-wing political agendas. The latter are the far more dangerous, both at home and abroad.

Now they have Trump skyrocketing their hatred to unprecedented extremes, and the last other 9/11 is today. Criminal Fuhrer Trump*, rabid talibangelical pseudo-Christian Vice Fuhrer Pence, and the rest of the Republican Reich are the terrorists attacking the United States in an attempt to replace our government with a permanent Fifth Reich that is National Socialist and plutocratic. If they succeed, the US that we love will be gone forever. What are YOU going to do about it?

Osama bin Laden murdered over 6,000 Americans on 9/11/2001. Barack Obama sent Seal Team Six to track him down. They killed him. What do we do with Donald Trump*, who has murdered over 196,000 Americans? I am not advocating killing Trump*. I cannot condone capital punishment, even though no American has deserved it more. However, life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is the minimum acceptable end for Trump*!

RESIST!!

Don’t Let Trump* Kill MLK’s Dream

Posted by TomCat at 10:36 am Editorial, Politics

Aug 282020

0828KingDream

Martin Luther King, Jr. influenced my political thinking more than any other individual. I was fortunate to have worked under him on Vietnam Summer and to have been present on the Washington Mall fifty-seven years ago today on August 28, 1963. It’s hard to believe that we are once again fighting the battle to secure the voting rights won as a result of his dream, and to restore them, where racist Republicans are outlawing the right to vote. Will his dream survive? This is almost a repost of last years article. I updated it to fit the situation today.

Last night Trump* violated the Hatch Act by using the White House Rose Garden as an Republican National Convention prop. He spewed an unprecedented stream of lies, hate, and racism, while blaming Democrats and Blacks for the plague and economic devastation spread by his own incompetence. If Trump* can steal the 2020 election, America as we knew it will cease to be. Never before has there been such a threat that Dr. King’s dream will be destroyed by the Republican Reich! Will it survive or will defacto slavery, in which Blacks, Latinos and poor Whites slave to serve the interests of greedy Republican billionaires and corporate criminals? The choice is Dr. Kings dream or a permanent National Socialist Republican Reich. The outcome of that choice depends on what YOU do NOW!

RESIST!!

Trump* Lies about "Relief" Plan

Posted by TomCat at 11:05 am Editorial, Politics

Aug 102020

Last weekend, Resident Donald Trump*, Fuhrer of the Nazi Republican Reich, promised a press conference in which he would explain how he would provide his own relief plan for the American People. It was really a campaign rally, delivered at taxpayer expense from his own Bedminster, NJ country club, while greedy Republican billionaires cheered him on. Everything he said and everything his supporters, like Larry Kudlow, said later were lies.

According to the Washington Post, his so-called unemployment relief created a whole new program that would take months to set up. States would have to pay $100 of the $400 per person per month payments, and pay for the administration of the program. Trump also said he would suspend payroll taxes. These are not taxes at all, but the entitlement payments that fund Social Security and Medicare. He said he will terminate those “taxes”, if reelected. The so-called rent relief provides for studies, but no relief at all. The measure on student loans is just a two month extension of the relief Democrats passed in March.

According to the NY Times, the Trump* plan included no relief for small businesses, schools, or state and local governments.

According to Market Watch, workers would still be on the hook to repay the payroll tax relief by April 15. Unless governors request the unemployment relief and can afford to pay their share, workers will receive nothing. Since Republicans are funding the program with money repurposed from from disaster relief funds, the program will run out of money in two months and leave nothing for disaster relief during hurricane season.

On the other hand, if Trump steals the White House again, and eliminates the “payroll taxes” permanently, Republicans will have an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare, as they have wanted to do for years.

In short, this is nothing but a dog and pony show, intended to make Trump* look good before the election, but providing virtually no relief.

I’ll leave you with wise words from Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi calls Trump’s executive actions ‘absurdly unconstitutional’

RESIST!!

52 Years Ago

Posted by TomCat at 11:13 am Editorial, Politics

Apr 042020

Fifty two years ago today I had “cleaned up for Gene”, sort of, and was working on his campaign, while fighting to keep SDS nonviolent. Back then, the world was not connected the way it it now. I did not watch TV every day, so I did not learn until sometime the next day that my hero and friend had been murdered. Barack Obama joined John Lewis in a tribute to his legacy.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of his death. In order to commemorate the occasion, Barack Obama discussed MLK’s legacy with John Lewis and a group of high school students in a new video released by the Obama Foundation.

At the beginning of the video, Lewis recalls where he was when he got the news that King had been shot — in Indianapolis, organizing a rally. Obama tells students from Washington, D.C.’s Ron Brown College Preparatory High School that Lewis was one of the people who made him want to become involved in public life.

“I thought that this would be a good opportunity to connect the people who inspired me with the next generation of young leaders who are going to be doing outstanding things themselves,” Obama tells the students, whose all-male high school grew out of the Obama administration‘s My Brother’s Keeper initiative…

Inserted from <Bustle>

Here’s that video.

Civil Rights leaders remembered him in a CNN interview.

The previous summer I was walking down the hallway after a planning session for one of Dr. King’s Vietnam Summer demonstrations. Dr. King appeared between two of us and told us how glad he was that young people were dedicated to continue the work after he was gone. I felt surprised and asked, “Gone?” He said that he was stirring-up a hornets nest didn’t know how long he would be allowed to live. In the naivety of youth, I assumed he was kidding.

He was right, of course. If he had stuck with civil rights, he might have died of old age. But when he also organized so effectively against the war, and for the poor, he was threatening billionaires’ profit.

It boggles my mind that this was over fifty years ago. That confronts me with my own mortality.

I’ll hope you’ll invest 43 minute to listen to his last speech, in which he predicted his own death.

RESIST!!

The other 9/11

Posted by TomCat at 9:56 am Editorial, Politics

Sep 112019

11-911

This is a repetition of the editorials I published in 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2018 with minor alterations to bring it up to date. Eighteen years ago this morning, the first airliner hit the tower, as I was about to leave for work. When I arrived, I learned about the second hit. My duties that day were to contact top executives of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New York on behalf of our client, a major developer of computer operating systems, to arrange site visits and one-on-one executive interviews for our client’s research team. What timing! I felt uncomfortable calling, but the account exec’s assistant, an airhead and a Republican, ordered me to go to work. Many of my executive contacts were in the Twin Towers. I got on the telephone. Nobody was answering, and many of the lines were out of order. I did get through and spoke to a man in one of the towers above the fire, who knew he would not survive. He said he couldn’t dial out and gave me his home number. He asked me to call his wife and tell her he loved her. I did. She was pretty hysterical. Who could blame her. That shook me up so much that I went to the account executive’s office, and told him I was done calling New York for the day. He asked me what idiot had told me to call into New York under these circumstances. Because of that experience, I cannot think of 9/11 without my heart going out to the people who lost loved ones that tragic day, and I consider it imperative to do whatever we can, within reason, to prevent a reoccurrence. One failing, in that regard, is that we often ask who and how, but all too seldom, ask why. So as we remember the events of 9/11/2001, perhaps it may help if we consider the other 9/11, 9/11/1973. Twenty eight years earlier, the roles were reversed. Instead of being attacked, the US had arranged and was assisting an attack to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile, and the installation of one of the most infamous dictators of the twentieth century, Augusto Pinochet. An article by Peter Kornblug from August 2003 describes and explains those events.

On September 14, 1970, a deputy to then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote him a memo, classified SECRET/SENSITIVE, arguing against covert operations to block the duly elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency. “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets,” noted Viron Vaky. “If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us., e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.?” Vaky asked. “It is hard to argue this.” Kissinger ignored this advice. The next day he participated in a now-famous meeting where President Nixon instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to “save Chile” by secretly fomenting a coup to prevent Allende’s inauguration. When those covert operations failed, Kissinger goaded Nixon into instructing the entire national security bureaucracy “on opposing Allende” and destabilizing his government. “Election of Allende as president of Chile poses one of [the] most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere,” says a newly declassified briefing paper Kissinger gave to Nixon two days after Allende’s inauguration. “Your decision as to what to do may be most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year…. If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, result will be steady draft toward modus vivendi approach.” Had Washington adopted a “modus vivendi approach,” it is possible that Chileans, indeed citizens around the world, would not be solemnly commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. In the United States, the meaning of this anniversary is, understandably, overshadowed by the shock and tragedy of our own 9/11. But Chile reminds us that the topics of debate on US foreign policy today–pre-emptive strikes, regime change, the arrogance of unilateral intervention, unchecked covert action and secrecy and dishonesty in government–are not new. From the thousands of formerly classified US documents released over the past several years, the picture that emerges strikes some haunting parallels with the news of the day. Chile, it must be recalled, constitutes a classic example of a pre-emptive strike–a set of operations launched well before Salvador Allende set foot in office. Nixon ordered the CIA on September 15, 1970, to “make the economy scream” and to foment a military move to block Allende from being inaugurated six weeks later, in November; the Chilean leader had yet to formulate or authorize a single policy detrimental to US interests. “What happens over [the] next 6-10 months will have ramifications far beyond US-Ch[ilean] relations,” Kissinger predicted in a dire warning to Nixon only forty-eight hours after Allende actually took office. “Will have effect on what happens in rest of LA and developing world; our future position in hemisphere; on larger world picture…even effect our own conception of what our role in the world is.” As in the distorted threat assessment on Iraq, this was sheer speculation–unsupported, indeed contradicted, by US intelligence. In August 1970 CIA, State and Defense Department analysts had determined that “the US has no vital national interests within Chile,” and that the world “military balance of power would not be significantly altered” if Allende came to power… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Nation>

For the last lesson, let’s return to the story with which I began. Shortly after the account executive agreed that I was done for the day, the company shut down for the rest of the day too. Several of us gathered around the TV in the lunch room. Knowing that I am politically involved, coworkers asked me what I thought was going to happen. I told them that I thought Bush would use the attack as an excuse to do two things: to invade Iraq and to curtail civil liberties guaranteed under our Constitution. The last lesson is this. If we adopt the tactics of evil to oppose evil, Republican tactics, we become no different than the evil we oppose. Even if we do all that, we must still be vigilant. Sadly there are forces in pseudo-Islam that pursue hatred against America, just as there are forces in pseudo-Christianity that pursue hatred against all who fail to obey their dogma, both for their own respective right-wing political agendas. The latter are the far more dangerous, both at home and abroad. Now they have Trump skyrocketing their hatred to unprecedented extremes.

RESIST!!

VOTE BLUE!!

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