Monday, April 22, 2013

April 22


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Just one more quick note about all the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. I believe that Obama was so quick to call the bombing a terrorist act because, as usual, he's a wimp. I'm sure he is worried that just like in Benghazi, the right wing will attack him for not calling it a terrorist attack. I'm all for being a wimp when it protects a person. I've managed to avoid fights all my adult life by being a wimp. But Obama will not avoid fights this way. If he hadn't called it a terrorist attack, the right would have attacked him. If he said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be given his Miranda rights, the right would have attacked him. As it is, he has indicated that Tsarnaev will be tried in our regular court system, so the right is attacking him for that.

Will the president never learn that the right will attack him regardless of what he does?

I have an idea for the president. It's radical, I know, but here goes: why doesn't President Obama try to please his base? It is very possible he would actually succeed at that. Trying to please the Republican Party is a fool's errand. In fact, trying to please the centrist Washington insiders is also a fool's errand. Did you read Maureen Dowd over the weekend? The defeat of the gun bill is apparently Obama's fault. She's a great example of how Obama just can't win with the only people he seems to care about winning with.

The clock is running out for the president. He needs to come back to the liberals he was courting all the way through 6 November of last year. Because despite everything, we still like him. And we're the only ones who ever will as long as he is in power.


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Senator Told Shooting Victim's Mother He Supported Background Checks, Then Voted Against Them

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Arkansas Republicans: 2nd Amendment means right to assassinate

Koch Brothers Plan To Buy Up Eight Major Newspapers

Bob Cesca: Earth Day is today, and every doomed climate has a silver lining.

We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.

After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.

In an accompanying piece in the latest issue of Rolling Stone,  the face of "the new green revolution– from college students to reverends to high-finance investors" comes into focus. From green activists like Maria Gunnoe and Rev. Lennox Yearwood who are shutting shit down and "throwing their bodies on the gears of the machine" if need be, to retired billionaires funding the green-friendly redevelopment of America. Even the Sierra Club is now taking more direct means under the executive leadership of Michael Brune– who "zip-tied himself to the White House gates– the first sanctioned, illegal, act of civil disobedience in the Sierra Club's history."

This coming Earth Day, I think it's important to remember that there are a lot of really good people in the trenches fighting the good fight, and with the U.S. military transitioning away from fossil fuels, as well as insurance companies seeing the cost benefit of not having to pay out hundreds of billions in claims when Florida is swallowed up, it's as though it won't be one giant meteorite that wipes out the fossil fuel dinosaurs, but thousands.

I'm just getting tired of having to observe starving fucking polar bears that are floating out to sea on a broken piece of ice because "oh no, throwing them a goddamn salmon head would be interfering with nature, and balance, and the food chain, and corporate fucking profits (just like welfare for the poor)!" Meanwhile, it's as though we just keep shoving a hundred billion bearded seals and Beluga whales down the throats of the fossil fuel industry every day.

That's the imbalance of nature.

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