Category: Politics

Posted on

Three Trillion

Well, I got close, but no cigar. It’s painfully hard to spend three trillion dollars. Even with the Hope Diamond and the Hannah Montana Anti-static Pink Hair Brush in my cart, I was only able to spend around 80% of what the Iraq war will cost us (with veteran care costs included) by 2017. Not much info on the site on where the cost estimates for items below come from; I’m presuming they come from Stiglitz’ book:

“Just counting the zeroes on the $3 trillion price tag of the Iraq War is enough to induce hyperventilation. But what does $3 trillion really mean? It’s difficult even to comprehend a number that big. Well, try filling your shopping cart with what the cost of the Iraq War could buy: healthcare for every American? A new home for every subprime borrower now facing foreclosure? An Ivy League university? You haven’t even gotten started.”

-Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War

Here were the contents of my shopping cart, before I grew tired of making world dreams come true and stopped shopping:

 Switch to Solar

1 purchased for $420,000,000,000.00 each

Universal Health Care

1 purchased for $3,067.00 each

finish repairing the damage done by Katrina

1 purchased for $200,000,000,000.00 each

End hunger and poverty related diseases

2 purchased for $195,000,000,000.00 each

Full Funding of Amtrak Passenger Service & Expansion

1 purchased for $2,500,000,000.00 each

Achieve Universal Literacy

1 purchased for $5,000,000,000.00 each

Broadband To Every U.S. Home

1 purchased for $100,000,000,000.00 each

100 New Libraries

1 purchased for $5,000,000,000.00 each

New Clothing, Shoes, Coats, and School Supplies for Ten Million Children

1 purchased for $10,000,000,000.00 each

The Hope Diamond

1 purchased for $250,000,000.00 each

Hannah Montana Anti-static Pink Hair Brush

1 purchased for $10.99 each

Plant 1,000,000 trees

1 purchased for $10,000,000.00 each

End our Dependence on Foreign Oil

1 purchased for $500,000,000,000.00 each

Kyoto Protocol Worldwide Compliance

1 purchased for $400,000,000,000.00 each

Help Rebuild Iraq

1 purchased for $20,900,000,000.00 each

Universal Preschool

1 purchased for $35,000,000,000.00 each

revamp the u.s. education system

1 purchased for $100,000,000.00 each

Build a National High Speed Rail System

1 purchased for $300,000,000,000.00 each

Fight AIDS in Developing Nations

1 purchased for $15,000,000,000.00 each
Music: Rolling Stones :: Yesterday’s Papers
Posted on

48 State Parks Slated for Closure

Every responsible state budget means someone gets to swallow some bitter pills when their pet project gets slashed. You can’t reign in government waste and keep everyone happy. I get that.

But Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to shutter 48 of California’s magnificent state parks is not just a blow to people who like to spend their weekends in them — it doesn’t make fiscal sense. Total savings from closing 48 parks? $9 million annually — less than 0.1 percent of the state budget. What can a state buy for $9 mil these days? Meanwhile, the cost to the spiritual and physical health of the state would be incalculable.

The state’s obligation to maintain a few slivers of natural land for public use seems crystal clear. The question, I suppose, is how much land, and at what expense? Fortunately state parks are cheap to run, and we’re talking about tiny specs of real estate in the big picture.

Check the map of proposed closures on the governor’s own site (also as PDF).

Then, let the governor know that Californians won’t make this particular sacrifice, especially not at this miniscule benefit/cost ratio.

Music: Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama :: Without The Help Of Jesus
Posted on

A Very Sad Day

After just having spent the last couple of hours watching the Republican half of the ABC debates, I can sort of relate to this poor four-year-old:

(not really). Actually, it was a pretty interesting experience watching the GOPs duke it out. You go through stretches thinking “See, they’re not all idiots! Some of these guys are pretty bril.” Then someone’s real agenda eeps out through the smokescreen and you’re forced to recant.

Music: Altai Hangai :: The trot of an uulgan shar camel
Posted on

Kucinich’s Real Numbers

Listened to a very moving conversation with presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich on the Commonwealth Club podcast the other day, and found myself wondering why he gets such a small sliver of the spotlight. The more I heard, the more I felt myself feeling strongly aligning with his views. Apparently I’m not alone – someone whipped up a simple script to ask where you stand on various key issues, then tells you which candidate should be your guy.

The results are pretty amazing. You’d expect to find Obama and Clinton at or near the top of the pack, while in fact 57% of the 147072 who have taken the poll so far have discovered that Kucinich is their man – or would be, if aligning on issues were the whole story. No other candidate even broke out of the single digits. Of course it’s not, and realistically Kucinich has about as much chance of rising in the polls as he ever has (i.e. very little). But fascinating to see how it stacks up.

Music: Tindersticks :: Closing Titles
Posted on

Karma Credits

As the neocon backlash continues to swell, the “I told you so” temptation grows. Liberals: Right about the environment, right about the war. On a similar tack, the always astute (though often overly wordy) Mark Morford, for the SF Chronicle:

The hippies had it right all along.

All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

via Tim Bishop

Posted on

Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A ‘Gay Bomb’

Sometimes I feel like I must have eaten some bad fish, had a few terrifying hallucinations, and woken up in Victorian England. CBS 5:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

And here’s an ABC News story on Bush’s top pick for surgeon general James W. Holsinger Jr.: Homosexuality Isn’t Natural or Healthy: “Bush’s Choice for Top Doc Compared Human Genitalia to Pipe Fittings and Said Homosexual Practices Can Cause Injury or Death”

An alien landing here would think reality imitated Saturday Night Live, not the other way ’round. File under: Not Funny.

Posted on

Man in the Mirror

Claus Christian Malzahn for Spiegel Online, on how the quickest way for a German politician to win public cred and rise in the polls is to take a swipe at America.

Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. … Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States … For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic.

Not sure whether this correlates to Rufus Wainwright having recently moved from New York to Berlin, recording his disgust with the U.S., and rocketing up the European charts (“I’m so tired of America.”) Of course, German politicians may simply be using anti-Americanism as a popularity mechanism, while I don’t think Wainwright is doing that. Either way, the man in the mirror is looking pretty grisly. Those who still doubt that America’s image has been irreparably damaged must be wearing some mighty thick blinders.

Music: The Fall :: Backdrop
Posted on

Karl Rove and the DNS

Want to subpoena some gubmint email? Might be tough if the correspondents are using addresses @gwb43.com (think about that domain name for a second) rather than @whitehouse.gov.


whois gwb43.com

Registrant:
Republican National Committee
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US

Domain Name: GWB43.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Republican National Committee dns@RNCHQ.ORG
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US
999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 16-Jan-2008.
Record created on 16-Jan-2004.
Database last updated on 4-Apr-2007 11:54:31 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET

Who administers TRESPASSERS-W.NET? A little outfit called Coptix. And here’s Karl Rove with a Coptix brochure under his arm. Coptix claims the image has been Photoshopped, the brochure added artificially; Correntwire disagrees.

But let’s not get hung up on the photo. Whether Rove is involved in this or not, the law requires that public business be conducted on a public server. But Karl Rove does about 95% of his email through the RNC-controlled account — which is listed in DNS with a false phone number (illegal). Bypassing government-provided DNS servers gives the RNC the ability to bypass public oversight, to make a quick phone call and change email forwarding options in DNS, or to have email records destroyed, away from taxpayer’s prying eyes. Feeling warm-n-fuzzy yet?

More info.

Thanks Hamrah

Music: Akron/Family :: Franny / You’re Human