Harbors open their doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies billboards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived?
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river!

It was time when strangers were welcome here
Music would play they tell me the days were sweet and clear
It was a sweeter tune and there was so much room
That people could come from everywhere.

Now she arrives with hopes and her heart set on miracles
Come to marry her fortune with a handful of promises
To find they’ve closed the door they don’t want her anymore
There isn’t any more to go around…
Turning away, she remembers she once heard a legend
That spoke of a mystical magical land called America…

from Salon:

“If the mood and the speeches at the winter meeting are any guide, Republicans are seeking refuge from electoral defeat in an alternate reality, one where the public still loves them — or would if they could only improve their sales pitch. And where going along with President Obama’s agenda just isn’t in the cards.” If any further evidence is needed, consider this little gem: On the afternoon the 168 national committee members were electing Michael Steele their new chairman, fully 10 days into the Obama administration, the “national leadership” page on the RNC’s Web site still depicted George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as president and vice president.

Along with that, there’s always the Bush-Cheney Alumni Association.  I not you kid.

Several GOP leaders have, indeed, pointed out the risk of the GOP becoming a regional party, and my call on that is that there’s plenty of truth to that, in general.  Surveys like this one from Gallup,  showing a big drop from the GOP has some truth to it, but the real problem is that We’re Not Talking Sense here.   The Republicans have been taking this big dive away from studied, responsible good government towards a reflexive system of government that values fears over hope, ive-got-mine-jack over the common good, and ignorance over inspiration.

A big factor in the whole situation is that the GOP gets a jump from all sorts of things, including people who are serious low-information sorts or vote out of fear of various things that they associate with the Democrats, such as the <insert racial or ethnic group> or <insert foreign power> will take over if you let the Democrats in concept.   This has been stirred up so at length by far right talk radio that the GOP sorts don’t dare cross the on-air bozos, for fear of being marked as a Pariah Against The Cause.

But the cause is not responsible government, it’s manipulating the masses towards supporting corruption and opportunism of the worst sort:

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Thus the whole ‘I hope Obama fails’ rot, and so on.  If Obama ‘fails’, we are in the deepest of crapola, and I don’t know how we get out of it.  You would end up with something very akin to The Sheep Look Up where only the plutocrats have anything, and everything else is a godforsaken mess.  I do not want to hand off that sort of world to Mere and her peers.

I’m just so looking forward to a grownup in the White House.  I think most of us are.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,”

- Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

Being a student of American History and Political Science, I’ve noticed something since - oh, 1930.  When some Republicans, the more wingnut sorts, are behind the eight-ball and trying to stir things up, they call the Democrats commies, socialists or commie sympathizers.  And traitors to the realm.

Go back and check out the commentary about FDR, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, and so on, and you’ll see this sort of nonsense over and over again.  It’s not just the province of Joe McCarthy.

Progressive political movements in this country are NOT socialist.  I mean, I know real socialists, Wobblies and such, and they are the fringe of politics in this country and always have been.

I know that there’s people who go on at length about Obama in particular, being socialist, and that’s utter nonsense.  He’s a center-left sort, very cautious, uninterested in ideology.  The closest to a real rip-snorting socialist in the last round of Democratic candidates was Congressman Kucinich.    Notice how much support he got.  (Or there’s Ralph Nader, who is a whole lot closer to being a socialist than Obama.)

Since the beginning of the New Deal, we have lived in a somewhat ’socialized’ country.  I’ve studied Marxism since college, and I’m a fervent anti-Communist.  But the numerous reforms created since then that were fought against by the Republican party are legion, and they have made our lives a whole lot better.

• Banking reform, including the Glass-Steagall act and the FDIC and SEC.  The New Deal essentially *saved* capitalism and banking.
• Taking the country off the Gold standard.
• Farm Price Supports, Rural Electrification and the TVA
• the CCC and many road and school building projects
• various dam projects on the Colorado and Columbia rivers, increasing hydroelectricity and making Las Vegas possible.
• Social Security
• GI Bill
• Voting Rights reform and modern Civil Rights
• Medicare and Medicaid
• Federal aid to Education, including loans and grants for college attendees.

But to be honest, the two things that stick in my craw is that the biggest Socialistic measure for many years was just accomplished as part of the bailout plan; partially nationalizing many banks.  By Bush and his cabinet.  And the reason that Palin can afford to be so hot on tax-reduction is the collective ownership by the state of Alaska of tax revenues and profits from the North Slope oil - eliminating most taxes and involving massive paybacks annually to every Alaskan.

That sure sounds socialist to me….

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Susan and I took advantage of the federal holiday (but not one for the elections people) to go for the first day of early voting.  We have to, because we’re election judges.  The ballot was light - only a scattering of races, and in our heavily red area, a lot of the more local stuff was one-party-only.  Voted for the local park district getting a bond for a new rec center, and for the Illinois Constitutional Convention to be held.  And if you haven’t figured out the Presidential, Senate and Congressional votes, you haven’t read my political notes.

I was irritated at having to use the Diebold machines; don’t like or trust them.  And the person taking our ID stuff was asking Mere cutesy questions, including stuff about who she was for.  Susan didn’t mind it, but I didn’t care for it at all from a poll worker - the preference stuff.  Not her business to ask such questions of anyone.

I’m also giving up debating this stuff online, pretty much, at least for a while.  Debating political issues can get to be a situation where, as in religion, people can get invested in a particular point of view, and trying to explain, say, the advantages of Buddhism or polygamy to the Pope, a big waste of everyone’s time.  Even if you think that the Pope’s explanation of some point of Catholic doctrine is dodgy and doesn’t hold water, the Pope’s eyes will glaze over as you point everything out, no matter how closely reasoned you think your logic is.  It’s a matter of faith in the logic of his system, and that’s that.

it’s a matter of realizing that that point has been reached, I guess.  Or pre-guessing that further discussions on this line will be more likely to alienate a friend than to get anywhere.   I prefer to have a diversity of friends - I certainly don’t want them all to think exactly like me.  (It would get pretty boring.)  And frankly, most everyone around here has probably made up their minds on the issues of the day, and I’d rather discuss something with the Pope or Pope-ess that is a whole lot more fun for us to talk about.

That doesn’t mean I give up my ideals or my search for truth, justice and a better world.   Not a chance.

Oh, yeah - good luck to my Canadian readers going off to the polls tomorrow!

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.

I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?).  I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity.  I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness.  I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly.  And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.

However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama.   If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.

The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.

And there are people who have very specific issues.  If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else.  If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.

Much more below the cut.

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…I write as much as I do on political subjects, the answer is simple - because I care.

My view, for as long as I can remember, and has been ever since, is to see the long run, the big picture.  My focus and education was directed at the synthesis of the world around me - history, political science, the law - and the scientific and economic areas that supported that sort of a image of How Things Work.    Mechanics are largely beyond me. Detailed views of physics I have a weak grasp on, but probably better than some.  I know how to make computers do tricks, but I couldn’t code in assembler if my life depended on it.

I guess it’s both a How Things Work and Why Things Works sort of view, as well.  And in the process, you see where the seams are.  You have the concept that this works better than that, that this is a smarter way to do things, that good government and good management saves everyone a lot of time and trouble.  And you wonder why people don’t do that.

As I’ve said many times, my real focus is and has been on good government.  But I realize that people are ridden by the ur-feelings within.  Grog stomp, Grog kill, Grog mighty.  Grog get laid.  Grog stuff face.  Grog burp, roll over, go to sleep.

In my case, I guess that I have decided to go over to the Democrats because I finally have gotten the message after this last week that the Republican Party is quite willing to feed the country endless streams of BS in the search for power.  At that point, it was something that, to me, cried out for redress - that if people within are simply not willing to let the truth have merit beside the concept of power for ‘their guys’, then they don’t deserve political power.

This is not an easy decision for me.  I was greatly troubled by the 1988 election, and that and the fall of the Soviet Union made me see that between the theocrats and a new motto of ’screw you jack, I’ve got mine’, the Republican party was less an agent of positive change and more an instrument to hold power and control the masses through trickery.  The Clinton-Lewinsky debacle stopped me in my tracks, because I didn’t care for such trickery out of any party.  But at this point, under these circumstances. my feeling is that the only long term hope that remains is to support the Democrats as a party, and take a part in things in that direction.  The path the Republicans want to take is, in my strong opinion, disastrous to all of our futures, including Meredith’s, and I fear for her and us all and for our democracy if that’s the one that is chosen.

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NASA is looking at the problem of maintaining the ISS if the Russians and the USA are having a p!ss!ng match, especially when there won’t be an American option for getting up there from 2010-2015 (at least).  Where’s an X-20 when you need it?

NASA has for years relied to some extent on Russian spacecraft for transport to the space station, and the agency will spend $719 million for cargo, crew and emergency return services from 2009 to 2011. The yet-to-be negotiated agreement would cover all crew and cargo transport until 2015, except for any work that can be provided by fledgling American companies and European and Japanese cargo craft with limited or no track records.

John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Washington-based think tank, said sentiment in the nation and in Congress is running strongly against Russia. He said the waiver could be added quietly to a must-pass bill, but “Congress could very well say, ‘The hell with the Russians, we won’t approve the waiver,’ even if it badly hurts our program and interests.”

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, and talk to the Generals, learn their languages….hmm, hmm…of course, McCain’s walk last year to prove ‘how quiet things are now’ had the cast of the 12 days of warfare. 100 soldiers on point, three Blackhawks hawking, two gunships gunning and a geezer in a big flak suit… ah, you know the song.

The idea, too, was to show how McCain was a maaaaanly man, and Obama a know-nothing elitist pipsqueak and how that would go over with Mr and Mrs. Bubba.

Of course, the answer is that Obama went and – well, looked seriously Presidential wherever he went. And the VIPs he met on the way treated him as such, and were sighing with relief that someone who was halfway sane and sensible might be President of the USA. And at point after point on the trip, and just before, Obama’s ideas on the problems with the Middle East came out as sensible, sound solutions – so much so that the locals he was visiting were endorsing them to the great consternation of Bush and McCain. And since polls are showing that Obama’s weak spots is that he’s something of an unknown factor who may not have sound stuff on security and foreign affairs – well, this is all money in the bank for him.

McCain saw the huge crowds in Berlin and compared them to the sixteen people and an oompah band that he had at his speech in New Orleans when Hillary hit the wall, and – well, he didn’t like that. So now he’s throwing dirt at the idea of Obama Campainging Overseas, the horror of it all – of course, the fact that he’s campaigned and given speeches and travelled recently for fundraisers in such places as Mexico, Canada, Britain and Colombia is set aside.

Why? Because nobody’s calling him on it. CBS got caught the other day screwing around with an interview and rearranging the answers to the questions to avoid showing that he had (1) no idea as to when and what has happened in Iraq over the last couple of years, and (2) forgetting that the war against the Taliban happened since 9-11 and Iraq happened a couple of years after that. In short, he would have looked like a total fool, and CBS was protecting him.

With that, McCain could call Obama the Muslim Spawn of Satan and get away with it, because the big news agencies are not willing to aggressively report about his failings. They aren’t willing to pull apart his fakery, his non-plans, his weak numbers and figures, his failure to remember his butt if it’s not attached. They’re not willing to point out that the man can’t remember the most basic things about the whole situation in the Middle East, supposedly his strong point. Or that short of Bush’s policies for another four years, he has nothing to offer except that there will be a different picture in the post offices with the title President of the United States of America under it.

And basically, that’s the whole campaign. He wants the big job bad enough that he’s willing to say or do anything to get it.

After the last week of major screwups from McCain, including the whole “surge is when I say it is, ignore history business”, and things like accusing Obama of being responsible for the rise in gas prices and willing to ‘lose the Iraq war deliberately in order to win the 2008 election’, it looks as if the news media, who have generally treated McCain with kid gloves or think he’s still Mr. Maverick From the 2000 Election (he sold his soul to Bushco in the interim) are finally starting to wake from their torpor and realize what a real goof this guy is. Maybe. In the meantime, McCain is prepared to pull out anything, like connecting Obama to Castro, in the hope that some random piece of crud will stick.

The situation is that if he runs on a Bush platform, which is what he’s come up with (even though he feebly tries to deny it IF he’s in front of independent voters) he can’t win. Bushco’s deregulation and hamstringing of government oversight on business led to the mortgage crash and the expensive bailouts that followed for some wall street biggies. It led to a situation where we can’t trust the things we buy, the food we eat and the safety of our workplaces. It led to the fall of the dollar, the high cost of gas and oil products, and the collapse of our economy.

And McCain is starting to realize that nobody’s listening to him, partially because he really doesn’t have a real plan to do anything different than what’s screwing the US public right now. He can’t come out and say publically that ‘you can’t vote for Obama because he’s a black guy, and you can’t deal with a black guy in charge’. He can use any euphemism he can come up with, of course, trying to emphasize the ’scary’ stuff, but it really comes down to what he can find to divert people from their real problems (which will sink him) and towards something that will make Obama look too scary to vote for. They know McCain since he’s been in the news a lot for the last ten years, but Obama’s a new face, and – well, people don’t KNOW him.

But while Obama’s speaking in front of a massive crowd in Berlin, McCain’s in a German sausage restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, for lunch. This German-American isn’t impressed. And I like sausages.

Larger (and clearer) version linked through the photo. Fireworks photo taken by Susan at last weekend’s Eyes To The Skies in Lisle.

I know that there are people out there who have a bunch of questions about Obama’s stance on the military and the war.  I decided to look up his initial statement in 2002 as an Illinois State Senator - a speech where he said what his feelings about war and the military were.

I work about a block from where this was given, and I wished that I’d heard it at the time.  It’s incredibly prescient to where we are now.

…well, sometimes.

I watched the TODAY show and the very good COUNTDOWN / Olbermann interview of Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary for Bush, and I’m listening to the audio version of his book, and I came to a couple of conclusions.

1. He’s an honest-to-god idealist in politics, whose entire life has centered around political-civics-way-to-improve-things; his mom has been in politics for a very long time, and he was imbued from an early age with the idea of civic duty and the public trust, etc.
2. I really think that he drank heavily of the Bushian kool-aid in the first place, thought that Bush was going to come into the White House to clean up the ‘Clinton mess’, and found that Bush was the wrong person in the wrong job who went with his initial gut feelings rather than think things over, would alter the past because he wanted to believe that his initial decisions or the-way-things-spoze-to-be was correct.  Or, in short, delusional.
3. It took the Plame affair to make him realize that whatever the hell was going on, that he was being dragged into reeking mess after reeking mess, and that he needed to get out.
4. It took him a while to realize how badly he had been torqued around by the kool-aid, and feels horrible that Mr. Friendly and Folksy is also Mr. Wrong For The Country in a big way.  And that he was a part of adding to the mess.
5. The book as it stands is meant as a means of repentance and shining a light on how bad that kool-aid is for you.  He doesn’t expect to make a buck, he just hopes that he’ll be heard.
6. He’s still incredibly naive in spots.

Go Read Terry Kearney on the case of a Quaker professor who was fired after not being able to take a ‘loyalty oath’ that she felt could cause her to affirm to ’support and defend’ the California and US Constitutions in a violent taking-up-arms sense. Let me add a caveat on this that I will do so in a non-violent way, she said, and I can take the oath. No exceptions, no caveats, no job, out you go - said CalState Fullerton.