BILL HALTER for Senate: It looks right now like Blanche Lincoln will be forced into a run off against the progressive candidate Bill Halter in Arkansas. Per Arkansas election law, Lincoln needs to meet a 50 percent-plus-one-vote threshold Tuesday to avoid a run-off on June 8. Halter is EXCELLENT and deserves national support so he can kick Lincoln out and get that seat for progressives. It is ALL of our concern who consider ourselves progressive and who want to make sure the president is HELD to his promises. He cannot do so if he is fought at every turn by conservadems and Republicans. That health care insanity did NOT have to happen if we had the right Dems in power. We had initially a sixty vote majority. There should have been NO question and there would not have had it not been for some DINO's (Democrats in name only). We would have gotten a public option easily! Obama MUST do what he promised and I think he will IF there is a mandate.

Therefore we MUST support campaigns like Bill Halter.

So far this is a good day for Dems. Murtha's seat was retained and BEST OF ALL Specter is TROUGH in PA senate and hopefully Sestak will take the Senate seat in the fall. Sestak is brilliant and would be terrific and maybe even has an bigger future.

I will contribute more to Bill Halter's campaign tomorrow when the runoff is official. It's late now and I must call it a day but I am pulling for Bill Halter BIG TIME!!!!

I think progressives WILL come to him -- hopefully in large numbers and send a TRUE progressive to Washington. We must show that we are NOT kidding that Obama's base people like I mean business. We are NOT to be taken for granted. It will
take grass roots work but I think we can pull this one off. Blanche Lincoln was a DISGRACE to the Democratic party. She was bought, sold and owned by big insurance, big pharma and probably big oil.

Progressives are young (even though I am not so young) but I believe we are the wave of the future and that progressives will cast a HUGE shadow on right wing extremist teabaggers. This is what I hope. Please help if you can IF Halter is forced into a run off against Lincoln. I attach his campaign web page below. Think about a contribution no matter how much if the runoff proceeds! Please feel free to forward this to all of your friends.

http://billhalter.com/contact

Letter to the White House: I can forgive.

Tip of the hat to the administration when it's due! Glad Jonathan Katz was fired!!! I feel MUCH better and will post it to my blog. This is why I gave to your campaign and why I loved you.

Feeling a bit better now let's get the leak under control.

A Letter to Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann: Rachel, Keith: get a load of this article if you haven't already on Huffington. How many times can this president put a stake in our hearts? First the oil leak which is bad enough and which he was AWOL on as he took 1/2 of the Bush administration's incompetent employees into his administration and now this virulent homosexual hater Jonathan Katz is on his science team to deal with the leak. It makes one sick to one's stomach.

Not only is Obama NOT what I thought he would be he is almost NOTHING I thought he would be. I am going from love to loath inside of one year. I should have KNOWN from the start when he had Rick Warren at his inaugural this guy was pulling the wool over somebody's eyes. This is as if he had on his team someone who was racist against blacks and used pseudo science to prove blacks were inferior. This guy Jonathan Katz is AWFUL simply awful. Surely you can have this exposed on your show tonight. I am stricken with grief that this president has failed in so many ways ESPECIALLY now with the leak. NO ONE but NO ONE can talk about Bush's Katrina now. Obama's oil leak is INFINITELY worse. I LOVED Obama and wrote endlessly that I did.

My element of trust has been broken and it has been for awhile but now it REALLY is. He is NOT what I bargained for and to whom I thought I gave my hard earned money. I am sad. VERY sad. Here is the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/jonathan-katz-member-of-s_n_579206.html

I hate to say this but Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite (See Newsweek's Gabe Pressman article "Pat Buchanan's On the Rampage Against Jews -- Again" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37196037.) I am letting various media know that if they have him on I will NOT watch. One evening on Rachel Maddow's show Buchanan was particularly vitriolic against whom I cannot remember. I suspect it was either blacks or Jews naturally -- who else? Rachel Maddow, it seemed, got rather steamed at him and showed me again how wonderful she truly is. She used to say he was her friend but I doubted he was. Kudos to her for not having him on, that I have seen, since then but then again to Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, too, I give kudos every time I watch which is every night. I do not know what I would do without them.

I am not anti-free speech as Pat Buchanan, of course, may say anything he wants but I do NOT have to listen to him and I won't. To think a couple of years ago I emailed him directly applauding him for being so smart is astounding to me now. I said I wished he were in the left corner instead of the right. I never heard anything in response but maybe my surname being quite Jewish was responsible for his not addressing my email or maybe he is just too damn busy to make time for us peons. We are ONLY the ones who keep his bank account humming. Why should he bother with us?

I will not listen to anti-Semitic comments from anyone. Jewish history has been too damaged and the six million are never out of my mind for even a day. He besmirches their memory to me when he waxes anti Semitic, denies the Holocaust or thinks it was trivial to US interests. Never again is not just a slogan to me. It means something -- not now, not tomorrow, not ever again will THIS Jew listen to those who wish that Hitler succeeded and think, too, that the US interests would have been better served during that fateful time had it been Germany's ally instead of its enemy. If Buchanan were a Jew he would be singing a different song. The fact that he cannot place his own feet in someone else's shoes shows me how sour, off key and despicable his song truly is.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

DESPICABLE: I am so upset over the oil spill I cannot even look at it or write much about it today. I am stilled into a neurotic mute over this obscenity. I continue to believe our president, given that this drill was SO huge, had an obligation to insist appropriate permits were delivered and significant oversight by the Department of the Interior and MMS (Minerals Management Service) was given. The spill is SO immense the buck has to stop somewhere and it stops, as Harry Truman said, at the president's desk.

The president is right the spectacle of the big three JERKS -- BP, Trans-Ocean, and Halliburton, responsible for the spill was UNACCEPTABLE but I maintain that even more than that his lack of supervision of this unique drill was unacceptable as well. Everyone must take their lumps for this one INCLUDING and maybe most especially the president because of the the drill's immense and unique never-been-done-before aspect.

I urge you to write to the White House to tell him of your dismay and to vote a resounding NO to off shore oil filthy drilling. Yes, I still support him. He is the only game in town and Republicans are more poisonous than even the spill but I don't have to like what I see to know his lack of attention to this matter is WORSE than Waterloo. It is despicable!

To marry or not that is the state's rights question:

Jeff Jacoby is, as most of you probably know, an arch conservative editorialist for the Globe. Mostly we disagree on just about everything. Occasionally, especially on immigration issues, we agree. He is curiously humane, at least to me, on that issue. I email him when we agree and I email him when I adamantly disagree. Today was a disagreement day as he wrote an anti gay marriage editorial entitled “Who decides what ‘marriage’ means.” (Op Ed May 12, 2009 Boston Globe) I enclose the link of that article below. He maintains a states rights approach to that issue. I fundamentally disagree and wrote to him the following:

No sooner could I not believe there were actually humanitarian issues on which I agreed with you, you sanctimoniously and smugly write about an issue that is sure to incur my wrath: gay marriage. You write about it as if it were simply a martial arts class subject to state consideration. You say a state can choose to classify it any way they want but other states do not have to. So now you equate HUMAN rights with martial arts classification rights.

I am going to OPPOSE vociferously what even some black people, often indoctrinated by the church, say and that is that homosexuals cannot be equated with them. I beg to differ. Homosexuals CAN be equated with them and to the discrimination blacks have felt for centuries. I have had profound experience to know that when a child expresses the fact that he or she KNEW her or his affectional preference at age THREE there is something more to homosexuality than a mere adult choice. As gays have said so often who would CHOOSE it knowing in many cases society will either condemn it, reluctantly acknowledge it or EVEN KILL you because of it. I do not postulate it is a choice I ADAMANTLY KNOW IT IS NOT. It is an ascribed status probably made so by genetic determination. It cannot and SHOULD not be changed.

No one would EVER in our culture prohibit nor would a state be allowed to reject a marriage of two people one male and one female with Downs Syndrome. It is perfectly legal for the state to marry both or for one who has Downs to marry another who does NOT even THOUGH it may be genetically ill advised and disadvantageous to society to allow it. Yet their relationship is deemed worthy of marriage. So is, I might add, an elderly couple who, clearly, will NEVER procreate.

I maintain because homosexuality PROBABLY has a genetic determination -- and EVEN if it did NOT -- it is NOT the state's obligation to define what marriage is or isn't with respect to the sexuality of two people who love each other and deny to them the relationship solidification that marriage can bestow. We are NOT talking about commerce, we are talking about HUMAN BEINGS who usually from day one know EXACTLY to whom they are attracted. What business is it of yours OR the state to tell an adult anyone whom they can love and with whom to spend a life? Answer: IT'S NONE of your business and it's NONE of the state's business either. Neither you nor the amorphous blob of the state has to suffer the consequences of a lonely life.

I have to laugh at so called "conservative" state's rights enthusiasts. They are ALL for states rights EXCEPT when they are not when it comes to the rights THEY like which they want federalized such as business rights, religious rights, anti-gay marriage rights or property rights. Then its perfectly right to them for the federal government to step in to tell everyone else which rights they will protect. It becomes perfectly fine for the court to use federal law to protect rights of those who make money, own a corporation or property but not right of the federal government to tell a state you are abridging the rights that civil law should bestow to all by singling out one group the discrimination against whom is sanctioned by the state.

Finally, after nearly 300 years this country decided that the answer to discrimination against blacks in the voting booth was illegal and for a president to decide it was immoral to ask a black man to risk his life and sometimes die for his country in a segregated armed services. The full integration within our culture INCLUDING laws against black and white marriage was NOT I repeat NOT something that could be up for a vote. If in 1957 or 1962 one put integration or black and white marriage up for a public vote it would have been voted down easily. The court, however, said otherwise and should have. Why? Because society advances, grows and understands more about tolerance and, in the instant case, human sexuality. These are human beings and they have the right to control their personal existence and happiness free of governmental prohibition. The tea baggers should know this as they want government out of everything but, of course, not for gays.

Rights cannot and should not be denied because gay people serve in the military, because gay people pay plenty of taxes, and because we KNOW many have died for our country and conclude that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is an unjust law. More than that, however, is that the state -- ALL states -- have no right to discriminate against homosexuals because it is UNFAIR and INHUMANE for one group to commit this injustice against another and for the state to sanction it!

Your wrong on this issue, Jeff. It may not happen in my lifetime that the FULL FAITH AND CREDIT CLAUSE (Article IV Section 1 of the US Constitution) will apply to gay marriage in every state but someday it may and should. I would LOVE to live to see the slings and arrows you on the rancid right hurl and which hurt, be taken away so that you cannot HURT anyone else any more!

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/12/who_decides_what_marriage_means/

Ignorance is NOT bliss

I ask no I PLEAD with you to read the following from Greenpeace AND Newsweek about the spill of the decade. The worst thing our country faces is not its DISASTROUS oil and other bad policies but its our IGNORANCE about them that WILL kill. I don't care WHAT you do but DO SOMETHING! Cntribute to the effort to stem this catastrophe, email, call, or smoke signal your state and especially FEDERAL Congress and our president who made the worst decision of his presidency to give a thumbs up to coastal drilling. Still we do NOT want Republicans as they are worse IF that is possible. It is. Dems can be bad but trust me Republicans are worse they are totally in bed with corporations and are proud of it. They are its true base. DO NOT BE IGNORANT of what these filthy corrupt corporations ESPECIALLY oil corporations like BP are doing to you, the ones you love and to your children and your children's children's environment. We can either live on this planet or we won't. GET INVOLVED and do NOT stay silent!!! Please read the paragraphs below it should take all of five minutes to do so. Then email anyone or everyone you know to get this message out or forward this email as you please. Google Greenpeace or the Sierra Club to find out the TRUE course of these horrific events. IGNORANCE is NOT bliss it is death. If you care about our natural environment which sustains you AND sustains your descendants you MUST care about this.

"Yesterday, Friday May 7, we met a few media crews in Biloxi Mississippi. We got on a boat with one of the crews and headed out into the waters of the Gulf. Rumor has it, and there are lots of rumors, this disaster of a spill is moving but the million dollar question is where is it moving and where/when will it hit the coast. They may be closing another area to fishing to the West of the mouth of the Mississippi so the oil must be going there? Pods of journalists are spread out along the shores looking for the picture they want. One journalist commented the lack of visible oil is good for the environment not good for pictures.

We did see oil (likely mixed with dispersant) quite a ways out from the port. According to maps we were at the edge of the "Zone of Uncertainty" to whether or not the oil would be going there. The lack of pictures of oil slicks coming ashore is missing the point and the spin from BP is good. "Dispersant," besides being toxic in and of it self and more so when it combines with the oil, is giving folks the impression the oil is dispersing and everything will be OK. They're not seeing the oil so maybe there's not a problem. [There IS a problem]! Problem is we've got estimates of over 200,000 gallons of oil per day sitting in the Gulf, dispersed or not. The oil is toxic, everyone agrees with that. The dispersant is toxic everyone agrees with that. Whether in long (un)impressive streaks across the surface or sinking to the bottom it's all toxic. And just because much of it is currently escaping the human eye does not mean it isn't there. One way or another the fish will eat it and the birds will eat them likely killing both.

Clean up measures continue. We're yet to see how this huge structure might work that BP is lowering over one of the two remaining spills still spewing oil into the Gulf. Everyone hopes it will work and that BP can do whatever it takes to stop the oil. Still the fact remains that even though we can't see all of what's happening out there, it is still happening out there. Rick Steiner has said many times over our time here that in the best case scenario with even the best efforts likely 90% of the oil still escapes, and he notes that 21 years after the Exxon Valdez Alaskans are still recovering from that spill.

Greenpeace is going to see what we can do to find out what BP doesn't seem to want us to know about the rest of the oil. Again we hope the measures BP takes to stop the spewing oil works. But the disaster has already taken place. The oil is already in the gulf. Economic and environmental damage has been done. Lives have been lost. The so called "Zone of Uncertainty" certainly can't escape the reality of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Newsweek further reports as INCREDULOUS as it might be: "Just as Louisiana politicians are about to get an up-close-and-personal look at the BP oil spill (it is approaching the shores an hour's drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital), they are considering a bill to "kneecap" all university environmental-law clinics in the state, which have led the way in challenging the historically cozy relationship between state politicians and the petrochemical industry."

High Hopes: The NYT editorial by David Brooks "What it Takes" is SO interesting. (See link below). I found myself shaking my head "yes" as I read it. I am a product of the late 1960's and attended Boston University, the so called "Berkeley of the East," at that time. I keep wondering where all those activists are now. Where are the students and professors I knew then who imbued me with a sense of purpose and hope? It is as if they vanished into thin air. Future generations since that time have never been, it seemed to me, as committed to principle or as vociferous about it. They seemed to simply go along to get along.

Where is that generation that was supposedly going to change the world for the better, of course? I do not see the fervently principled youth today that I saw as a student during those turbulent times. Those years were my BEST years. They were the years I loved the most as I look back on my life. I wish hopelessly for a return. Why? Because we had values that meant something and we were NOT afraid to say or, yes, even to scream what they were.

Elena Kagan seems like she went along to get along BUT my visceral feeling is thus: I think Elena Kagan's values are much like the vocal students of my era although she KNEW that politics is a minefield. If she wanted to shoot for the top one utterance of one's point of view could mean certain defeat.

I am hoping Barack Obama, too, is cut from that same cloth. In the end when it is Obama's SECOND term should he get it and when Elena Kagan IS confirmed should she be, that both will show us the reflection of my generation's values which they have osmotically ingested. I suspect it is only when they both have nothing to lose that they will show their true colors to be that of the gallant liberals I think lie dormant within them. I may be hoping against hope but it is the ONLY hope I have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/opinion/11brooks.html?hp

It's Kagan: Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan, former Harvard Law president to the Sup Ct. I'm happy. For once. She has no paper trail, has written little but balked at ROTC on the Harvard Campus because of the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Clearly she opposes that. Okay, so basically from what I have read she is conservative with respect to strong executive power but perhaps liberal on other issues, hard to tell. I remember once thinking my idol FDR was an example of a strong executive. It was once a rather liberal position. Since Bush and 9/11 it has not been.

Not sure if I'm against that except of course if we get another God forbid like George Bush or any other Republican for that matter. That's the problem.

Three women on the court as long as Ginsburg stays physically okay. She has had her problems that is for sure. This is why the presidency matters.

I'm still grumbling about the spill as my heart still breaks for our environment and the lost jobs of people there not to mention poor Louisiana.

But Would I rather have McCain and the idiot Palin? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

They are floating around another idea to cap it....I fall asleep praying. What me? Yep there are NO atheists in oil spills of this magnitude!

Obama's Fatal Flaw: Prediction: Barack Obama will be a one term president. As I have said before, the oil leak is a metaphor for Obama's Waterloo. It is simply outrageous. Why he gave thumbs up to off shore drilling to make Republicans love him and kiss him I will never know. This will have huge rippling effects and this president has SERIOUS flaws. He is NOT what I thought we were getting. I was willing to overlook all the other sorely inadequate policy such as his civil libertarian erosion and the people he chose for his administration to craft that policy but this spill breaks my camel’s back.

This oil spill is a metaphor for the president’s utterly incomprehensible leadership. His policies have been fraught with error and this spill shows it. He NEVER should have given a thumb up to off shore drilling ESPECIALLY at 3000 feet something that had not ever been done before. Before the drilling took place, if it took place, it SHOULD have been inspected by neutral parties including government who had NO monetary stake in the action. The rig itself SHOULD NOT have gone to a no-bid contractual entity and if it failed other fail safe options under government supervision should have been in place. BP had a bad record and it should have been exposed.

If Bush was an uncompromising idiot Obama, with his superior intellect, is EXTRAORDINARILY too deliberative and INFINITELY too compromising. This was not Harvard Law Review and he is blowing his chance AND FAST to enact lasting social change. At this moment in history his idea of bipartisanship would be LAUGHABLE if it were not so consequentially horrific. His idol should not have been Lincoln it SHOULD have been Franklin and even Theodore Roosevelt. FDR faced a Republican party that loathed him during the greatest economic catastrophe man had ever seen. He didn’t care. In fact, he welcomed the opposition and Obama should have done the same especially with a huge majority he enjoyed in Congress. Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust buster, with anti-trust legislation, broke up monopolies which had a stranglehold on the essence of capitalism and on the people that economic forum is supposed to serve.

Bob Bennett, decades long moderate Republican senator from Utah, is the canary in the coal mine. Utah just nixed him for a tea bag candidate. The moderate Republican is extinct. The American public soon will get what it deserves -- Republican control of Congress which will be Obama's real Waterloo. Will they be different? Oh sure. Just what the doctor ordered like the cancer they are. It will be more of the same but worse. Obama will be stymied at every attempt to substantive enactment of anything.

Corporate stranglehold on government is the problem. Oligarchy is the problem and our debt and deficit are the problems. Republican control of everything again ESPECIALLY by tea bag Republicans ultimately will mean that government will do nothing and allow the always responsible (I wax sarcastic) private sector to rule the day. There will be few government safety nets for the many problems our nation faces that ONLY government can provide.

Obama ruined health care by reneging on the public option. He gave a gift to the insurance cartels. Lyndon Johnson would, by any arm twisting necessary, have gotten it done, moreover, it should have been done AFTER our economic house was in order. In large part I hold Barack Obama accountable for Brown's win in Mass. He came in too little too late just like he did nothing when the tea baggers exploded over health care last summer. Where was his leadership then? He gave it to Congress who could not go up against the know nothings with guns. Our president then was not to be seen.

The FIRST duty of his presidency should have been to stop the economic bleeding on Wall Street AND Main Street, hire Krugmanesque or Elizabeth Warrenesque people in Treasury NOT Geithner, Summers and his cronies Rubin the Goldman Sachs rapists including Ben Bernanke Chairman of the Fed. The president can only be as excellent as the excellent people who surround him. Obama chose Bush light. He is NOT who I thought he was.

I am HUGELY disappointed in much of Barack Obama’s leadership. The HUGE cuts should be in defense spending as even Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (a former Bush appointee) has said. We should be paring down much of our empire to direct our economy where it needs to go to meet the social needs of our people and not our belligerent needs. President Eisenhower's statement on the dangers of the military industrial complex was exactly correct. I am dismayed and discouraged that our president did not know this too. He seemed to know it all in the Senate but not as the Commander in Chief.

The call should go out to everyone in the US or ANYWHERE for MIT-like geniuses to try to get this horrendous oil gusher ruining our coast, our economy and our nation, under control. This is BIG TIME SERIOUS for ALL of us. It is NOT just Louisiana's problem. If you think it is think again. Just wait until the oil starts crawling slowly up the east coast. This is a Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions and our president has a fatal flaw! He does not act. As Shakespeare so eloquently said “The play’s the thing!” Hamlet anyone?

Notes on a Journal: Last Friday was Bill Moyers's last show on PBS "The Journal." I have been an avid viewer taping that show every week. The understatement of the century for me is to say it was a great show. It was that and more. I learned so much playing cerebral ping pong, chewing on so much, and voraciously digesting all that it had to offer. Bill Moyers is one of the greats in television news commentary and journalism. If you have any money lying around doing nothing may I suggest a contribution to PBS? I sent the following thank you note to him, PBS and "The Journal" staff:

Since it is your last show I wanted to send you a quick thank you note describing my not so quick love affair with PBS, Bill Moyers and "The Journal." I have loved you nearly all of my life.

When PBS first came to Boston I must have been all of ten years old. It did not compare then to watching the Lone Ranger, Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. As I grew older, though, until this very day at 61 not only have I continued to love PBS and watch it, it is the one of the few channels that I give my life's precious time TO watch nearly every day.

When my mother passed away I thought I would never be able to take a breath without her. That is how I am feeling now. Bill, you are an irreplaceable man. I will miss you more than my feeble words can convey. I thank you and your staff SO much for the humanity, compassion, insight and to your many guests, too, who reached out to me every week and from whom I learned so much.

You are a priceless gem and I am thrilled to have lived in the ascribed era I had no part in choosing. I thank you, too, for nurturing my knowledge, understanding, and interest in the people and events of this earth we all occupy for much too short a time.

Thank you again!!

Breach of Tort: This is NOT the change I bought into. Each day I grow angrier and angrier at the president for making this DISASTROUS decision to oil drill off the Gulf Coast or any coast. The lapses we expected under the Bush administration and which were routine are the VERY opposite Obama said his policies would be. He said in HIS administration there would be NO negligent implementation of policy by those whom he would put in charge of government institutions whose job it is to enforce regulation to protect the nation against disaster. The disaster that has happened in the Gulf is beyond adequate expression. I am enraged and this story, if true, (link below) makes me weep all the more as the BP rig used in the Gulf drill seemingly was given a regulatory pass.

Some say I should just shut up as what do I want a Republican? NO of course NOT BUT I do NOT want Republican light either. I wanted and THOUGHT I was getting a progressive Democrat. For this and other policies I simply let slide, the president is in breach of tort. Unless he can reverse the severe damage to our waters, ecosystem and the many human livelihoods soon lost by this disgusting spill, he is in DEEP trouble in 2012. People like I am are his base and we want a new product. The president is in breach of tort. In many ways he is NOT the product we thought we were getting!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36956650/ns/us_news-washington_post/

Oil and water do not mix, neither does coal and neither does nuclear power: Please try to support Greenpeace, any other environmental group or any group involved in this horrific oil spill clean up. See link and email below.

It's possible I don't know if it's probable but I have read it is POSSIBLE the leak could be so huge it goes around the Florida coast and eventually up the eastern seaboard. I am hoping that is media hype because in that case WE would be directly affected as if we are not already. It all depends on just how much oil is at the bottom of that 3 miles down ocean floor and so far the weather
has made it impossible to see. It is now LIKE an upside down faucet GUSHING this disgusting crud.

There is NO such thing as, safe oil drilling, clean coal or CERTAINLY safe nuclear power. Nuclear power has nuclear waste. Now I ask you in a country of 300 MILLION people how much nuclear waste will there be the substance of which we CANNOT
get rid of? It is unfathomable. If you think this oil gusher is a disaster our minds cannot conceptualize a nuclear waste spill and the corporate "experts" will say oh don't worry we have the technology. YEAH RIGHT where have we heard that lame story before?

In Massachusetts, because of a water main rupture, people are going insane for water because 30 communities need to simply BOIL their water before drinking it. They are plundering the supermarkets getting all that oh so safe plastic bottled water with, of course, no toxins emanating from that plastic bottle. NOT MUCH! So how many of those people who killed themselves to get the plastic water will recycle their bottle? One can only IMAGINE the insanity that would take place with a nuclear power disaster. WAKE UP AMERICA we live in an oligarchy which is a fancy word for the union of HUGE corporations with government. Add papers please as in the lovely Arizona anti-immigrant law and the word becomes fascism.

Scroll down and see what Greenpeace has to offer and I urge you to support it and support our country by doing it!


http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/05/01/2291388.aspx

UNFORGIVABLE: I, as an Obama supporter and life long Democratic, am horrified to say, THIS HUMONGOUS oil gush is Obama's REAL Waterloo! (See link below) I must call it as I see it. Our president has disappointed me on a number of fronts. I was willing to overlook most of them. I overlooked even ones that overturned the bedrock of my own philosophy when Obama maintained Bush's lack of due process in continuing the Patriot Act and warrant-less wiretaps, even when he obliterated the public option on health care, even when he failed to directly respond to racist teabag shouting matches last summer, even when he put the Wall Street foxes in charge of the sick chickens, even when Attorney General Holder is instructed to continue to go after reporter James Risen when Obama promised to endorse the journalist shield, even when he said there is no difference between Wall Street and Main Street BUT THIS oil disaster I cannot forgive.

Placating Republicans by turning over on drill baby drill is UNFORGIVABLE. This spill may make Bush's Katrina debacle look like child's play. SOMEONE did not pay attention to the minutia of safety factors concerning this UNIQUE 3000 foot under-the-ocean drill. No one in the administration screamed at Obama the error of his ways so he could consider both sides of the off shore 3000 foot never done before deep drilling issue and all of its attendant risk?

Not only is this Obama's Waterloo it may be ours as well. Between Wall Street and Obama's unceasing placation of a toxic Republican agenda, the reversal of solid Democrat policy surrounding off shore drilling just may be the camel back-breaking straw I cannot endure. He is losing my support. The question is not only whom did we elect but who else could progressive Democrats in 2012 elect instead? Unless this spill can be contained, the damage stopped and the fault determined then I say to Rahm Emanuel who said the president's base does not matter, I AM the base and I MATTER!

What has he done to our country in his feeble attempt to play a mating dance with Republicans? Since we are on the dance card what will this do to all of us? Maybe the president should consider dancing with the ones who brought him to the dance in the first place!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fix-20100501,0,323202,full.story

Five Words for Drill Baby Drill Gulf Coast Oil Spill

MONUMENTAL DISASTER OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS!

Give to the animal clean up rescue as well as human business devastation any way you can. Just be careful if you choose to give whatever you give to is absolutely legitimate.

Two I would check out are The Sierra Club and Greenpeace. I am sure the major news networks will have a list of what you can do or where you can give IF it is as bad as so many think it will be.

I am hoping against hope that the winds will die down and that some brilliant minds somewhere will figure out a way to cap these leaks. One wonders why this was not thought about in the first place.

Time will tell who is responsible for this nightmare and like the Wall Street gluttons they will reap what they have sown!

The Arizona Colossus of Madness: The Arizona law is the closest I have ever known in this country of a fascistically tyrannical state and a national mindset in blind rebuke of the civil libertarian Bill of precious Rights our Founders so presciently bestowed upon us. Our Founders three centuries ago KNEW the threat behind the power of the state. This law reflects the mean, rancid, nasty, cruel, inhumane, disgusting, nature of a particular segment of the American psyche. We should be hiding in shame because, we know what fascism REALLY is and we have OUR dead in their graves in France on the shores of Normandy to prove it. What did we fight for? The US stopped the cancer of Nazism death in its tracks in Europe only to see our own country fall short of its own free thinking promise.

Arizonans have BETRAYED the very nature of HOPE that is the essence of this country's DNA -- the possibility of a better life for everyone no matter who wants it and wants to work for it ..... WHAT HAVE WE BECOME? Like the Dorian Gray picture, PART of us has morphed into an UGLY, SICK, corrupted face. I do not recognize the nation I knew. In five thousand years THIS was the ONLY place a Jew could feel safe and now MILLIONS of decent, hard working Hispanics will go back to the poverty from whence they came reminiscent of the 1939 ship the St. Louis portrayed in the film "The Damned" when its cargo, a boat load of Jews, was rejected from American shores only to return to the ovens of Auschwitz. So many Hispanics, struggling people wanting only work will return to the heat of the desert to the poverty they knew and the possible early death that may await. So many are good people, hard working people, loving people, some even married to US citizens but leaving them nonetheless because that rancid bill does NOT discriminate -- it attacks ALL of them if they happen to be brown. This is tragic!

I shake my head in disbelief from the anti-human Arizona law, to the bloaviating imbeciles carrying pictures of a half African American president pictured as a Hitler. How stupid, how illogical, how insane and how insulting they are. What has happened to my country, indeed? This is a sad time, and more sad times lie ahead as an immigration law of ONE STATE may spread like a virus to another tying this nation's hands and fitting our heads with the tyranny of a crown of thorns.

I remind you of the poet Emma Lazarus who wrote in 1883 her famous poem about Lady Liberty and our land engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside our Statue of Liberty:

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
""Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

YES, I want my country back, THAT country, the country of promise, the country of humane thought that for a time lit the world.

To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate THAT is the Question: PBS’s Frontline showed a segment on childhood vaccinations. As many know whether to vaccinate a child for the various so called childhood diseases is a controversial subject today. One woman interviewed in the Frontline documentary said that we had not had a case of wild polio in this country for decades and that wild polio is all but eliminated from the planet so she saw no need to vaccinate for that here. I differ with her STRONGLY. Polio is NOT eliminated from the planet. She is making, in my opinion, a HUGE error because we are a globalized society. There IS wild polio still remaining in some third world countries. In addition, there are global areas which are at war, areas of turmoil and areas which present different religious obstacles preventing (hard to believe as it may be), immunizations. All it takes is one unvaccinated person entering this country harboring the virus and settling in an area where there are numbers of children and even adults who are not vaccinated against this dreaded disease for that child to create an epidemic which will spread to the unvaccinated. This is unacceptable, it is immoral and, in my opinion, it is wrong.

I speak unfortunately not as a scientist or physician but from personal experience. I contracted polio in 1954 at five years old, six months before a vaccine was available. If the vaccination had been available then and I had not been vaccinated, I would have later thought it criminal not to have been vaccinated against it.

There are, of course, other aspects of this complex problem. Perhaps SOME of the diseases within vaccinations could be eliminated or injections spread out more evenly or the other substances within the vaccine itself could be examined BUT, in my opinion, it is UNCONSCIONABLE with respect to polio in particular for anyone to say that because wild polio has not been seen in this country that this disease is eradicated. Polio is NEVER ERADICATED UNLESS children are immunized with the polio vaccines to prevent it. It CAN return at any time and WILL if children are not immunized against it.

I can testify to the fact that polio is a life long horrendous, deformative and expensive disease. I was considered "lucky" at that time as it completely paralyzed only my right leg. My left leg was functional but is still somewhat compromised. Polio for me meant constant hospital returns, three painful surgeries to ameliorate its after effects and it meant paying for expensive equipment to this day.

After mid life when bones become weaker it meant THREE successive FEMUR fractures of my polio leg. That leg is extraordinarily fragile. It has meant additional hospitalizations as an adult taking one year per each fracture to heal because that leg does not heal quickly. The risk to that bone is significant as now, falling is a regular occurrence. Aging makes life even more difficult for a post polio survivor. Fracturing that bone a fourth time could be life altering or even life threatening!

Polio is a life long, utterly deforming, and an EXPENSIVE disease. It has caused UNTOLD hardship, psychological damage and as an adult it has cost me my stamina that others of my age still possess. Polio has had HUGE complications in my life and it is, in my opinion, UNFORGIVABLE for a child not to be immunized, at the very least, for that. Life is a risk. The risk of acquiring polio is much too great and the benefits of vaccination to prevent polio are much too good, not to vaccinate. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate that is the question. The answer for me is abundantly clear. For THAT disease, it is an absolute and unequivocal YES!

The Sickest Slick: I am in another hurry this a.m. so this is off the top of my just awakened brain. I am SICK SICK at heart about the drilling oil spill off our coast as I have iterated before. I feel like I want to cry. If I were a believing person with SO much disaster I have never seen SO much disaster in the world from economic to climate, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, climate change, tsunami's, mine disasters and so much more I can't keep track of all of it and now THIS disaster I might think Revelation is at hand. Don't worry I'm not a believing person in THAT anyway but it is HORRIFIC. I just KNOW they won't contain this spill for weeks if not months and I just know it is oozing more probably much more as the Coast Guard says today AND worse they have to burn it sending HUGE toxic plumes of ugly disgusting poisonous smoke into our air. A reporter said the wonderful smell of salt water is obliterated there and replaced by the cancerous smell of oil. I won't even mention the eleven humans dead and many injured from this rig explosion.

Do I want to say Palin with her drill baby drill is the idiot of idiots? YES but why why does this brilliant president in whom I had SO much faith WHY would he EVER on planet earth EVER decide to lift the coastal drilling ban when EVERY good mind who KNOWS about drilling oil knows it's risky, dangerous and whatever we get WON'T be enough. It just delays what we REALLY need to concentrate on and that is clean energy. WHY DID HE DO THIS? I simply do NOT get him. I love him but he is still the enigma to me he was when he began his run. Something is undecipherable about this president and I just don't know what it is. BUT who would care about that if his policy decisions were what I thought in the beginning they would be and if they did not impact us so hugely! This oil spill I will say it again is just an AWFUL AWFUL thing. Drill baby drill around our coast should be HALTED IMMEDIATELY and Sarah Palin should put a sock in her moronic mouth!

Barack Obama WHAT are you doing, who are you? Where is the progressive senator I knew and loved? I'm am sick at heart, saddened and disappointed beyond belief. Our beautiful coast and all the animals, birds etc. are at grave risk. The poor innocent beautiful things. Please anyone out there if you are working on this and can save those gorgeous animals do and save us while you are at it. IF this slick hits the shores of LA, FLA, and Mississippi or WORSE they won't know what hit them and neither will we!

Goldman's Gold: I see the Goldman Sachs' actions as both a CRIMINAL matter AND a civil matter. The SEC, of course, filed only a civil complaint so far. In a civil case we are simply talking about monitory remuneration. A criminal case is really a much more serious matter requiring a proof from the state of, in this case, the breaking of federal laws against most especially fraud by the defendants. I believe what has been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and largely innocent public is SO serious that not only should Goldman pay monitory damages to their clients commensurate with the perpetration of this fraud but I also believe a criminal case should be brought as well. Goldman’s actions were so heinous and seemingly so illegal that the “I know it when I see it” Supreme Court measure for pornography SHOULD apply to this as well. Someone(s) should pay for these malevolent and destructive acts not only in money but in jail time as well.

We are, I think, talking about billions of investments, securities, derivatives and other very complex investment instruments which were packaged, cut up into pieces unknown to mortgage holders as well as securities purchasers alike and sold by Goldman and others as sterling products. Customers were in essence duped into thinking this investment was a good thing to purchase when, in fact, these securities were toxic garbage and, I believe, Goldman itself KNEW they were garbage and sold them to their unsuspecting clients. Compensation for those fraudulent investments is more than warranted due to the massive quantity sold and the dire effect it had on the country and, indeed, the world.

If Goldman’s acts are not criminal then I do not know what criminal is. In the instant matter a crime of HUMONGOUS proportions was committed against innocent people who lost their hard earned 401Ks, pension funds and other heretofore thought stable investments. I dare say lives were lost often by suicide as jobs and even health insurance were causalities of Wall Street hubris.

I watched four hours of the Goldman Sachs Senate hearing. Goldman testifiers looked SO bad yesterday bobbing and weaving as if they were children being asked if lying about a school yard prank was the wrong thing to do but not really figuring out how to make sure their answer was the right one so they would not be punished. Instead they were asked the serious seemingly simple question should the customer have faith in the investing institution or any institution to which the customer gives its money. Is it a bad thing if an investment firm represents one thing to its customers but in reality knows what they are selling is junk but sell it as if it were gold? Moreover, the firm KNOWING it was selling junk and that the instrument would fail bet against its own sale by taking out insurance (credit default swaps) on those very instruments. The house would win even if they lost. Those sanctimonious immoral jerks before the Senate could NOT give a decisive answer to those simple childlike questions. Goldman was not MERELY a "principle" just acting as a conduit for savvy investors. Goldman sold these junk securities to anyone whether they were savvy or not. That is NOT the point. Goldman’s conduct was shameful, it was immoral and, I believe, it was illegal.

Compounding the matter was the rating companies like Standard & Poors which were hired by the investment firm itself to rate the securities and were paid by the very firm that was selling the securities. That would be as if I hired an evaluator of my home and gave them instructions to rate it high and sold it off to a buyer who took their word for it. Do I see a conflict of interest here? Emphatically, YES!

Goldman actions are an abridgment in tort law and it should be one in criminal law too. It is my opinion that the customer of an investment firm relies on that firm in good faith for advice because one often does not have the expertise to do so oneself. If one buys a product one should have the reasonable certainty and expectation that the product is what the seller SAYS it is. In this case Triple A rated investments which were in reality junk. That is basic in tort law. Goldman did not sell the security thinking it was a good product. They sold it thinking it was a terrible product and in fact a “sh*&^%” product (as a Goldman employee said in his email) and shorted it i.e. bet against it unknown to the ones to whom they sold the rotten product in the first place.

It is NOT the bet here that is the issue. Everyone knows that if you go to a horse track and you bet you COULD lose but not everyone knows IF a horse is lame or doped. If one knew that one would clearly not bet on that horse and, in fact, doping is illegal and if the track bet AGAINST a doped horse well need I say what would happen if found out? If that doesn't move you maybe the Black Sox scandal rings a bell? Betting is bad enough but when you bet against your own team failing when you KNOW they are going to throw a game? Need I say more?

Credit default swaps or insurance taken out on bad securities sold to customers by Goldman as good securities should be both civilly negligent and criminally prosecutable. Their actions and actions by many others caused innocent people HUGE harm, probably forever, and still is affecting the country and even the world adversely.

ALL of those who knew about these fraudulent monstrosities should be indicted, tried, convicted, fined in civil law and tried criminally as well. If there is not good case law AGAINST what these unconscionable excuses for human beings have done then there ought to be BUT I suspect there is. I am hoping the best legal minds that the government can employ FIND it and find it FAST as CLEARLY Goldman’s product was NOT as good as gold!