Let me put it in financial terms for immoral wingnuts: We owe Haiti for the greatest legal real estate deal we ever made. Research it yourself. Napoleon sold New Orleans to us b/c he failed to re-enslave Haiti, essential to his imagined sugar empire & threw in the rest for free. Time to thank Haiti, w/it’s tiny band of courageous rebels, for defeating the mighty armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, who then gave up & ’sold’ us, @ $3/acre, the 14 states (12 of which are reliably red & redder) that unite the United States . Now shut up and donate $10. Text HAITI to 90999. You will receive a confirmation request from the Red Cross that you wish to donate $10 to Haiti Relief, and a link to a website.

—-

or as my friends James says,

“screw the lapel pin - make every dickwad poseur politician do THIS to prove their patriotism.”

While we’re out here making calls to congress about the energy bill, and insisting members support real health care reform, another shiny object has diverted the GOP, or what was once the GOP. This time it is a trumpeted article in Vanity Fair about the failed McCain/Palin Presidential Campaign. Apparently, there is much bitterness now that they have finally discovered what we knew to be true all along. Rather than waste fresh words, let me once again simply paste in a tid-bit from our fair and balanced source about the sources discussing sources.

From the ‘article’ titled:

Palin Vanity Fair Article Reignites Feud Among Former Campaign Aides

…The article also claims that top aides worried about Palin’s “mental state” during the campaign — with some suggesting Palin was suffering from postpartum depression following the recent birth of her son, Trig.

On Tuesday, editor of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol — who once served as an informal adviser to McCain — accused former campaign manager Steve Schmidt of spreading the idea to other campaign aides.

“In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote in his magazine blog posted Tuesday.

But Schmidt vehemently denied the charge Tuesday and lambasted Kristol for his work as chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle.

“I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign,” Schmit reportedly wrote in an e-mail to Politico.

“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued.

——————–

Enjoy. This can’t last forever, can it?

Frederick Douglass was perhaps born on February 14, 1818. The month and year are estimates for he was born at a time when slaves were prohibited from reading  and writing. No records were kept.  Douglass chose the 14th as the day of his birth and died 77 years and 6 days later on February 20, 1895. ”The Lion of Anacostia”, Douglass is one of the most prominent figures in  United States history.  In 1872, without his knowledge, Douglass became the first African-American nominated for Vice President in the U.S., running on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States.

As a slave at age twelve, his master’s wife taught Frederick the alphabet, breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. The master found out & strongly disapproved saying,  in front of Frederick, that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom. From white children in the neighborhood, observation and practice, Douglass taught himself to read. He credits the book, The Columbian Orator with clarifying his ideas about freedom, civil rights, servitude and the power of oratory.

Douglass literally went far in the world. Before the US Civil War, he traveled to Ireland and Great Britain, where he was already famous with many public journals on human rights and abolition named after him.  By the breakout of the Civil War, Douglass was known, even in the US,  for his powerful oratory on the rights of all people, including women whom he supported in particular, to be equal in all things.  He met with Abraham Lincoln regularly and, after the war ended he was appointed to US Government positions as marshal to the District of Columbia, consul-general to the Republic of Haiti and as chargé d’affaires for the Dominican Republic. He accomplished far more than I need list here. His biography is widely available.  

Douglass, without doubt, read  ”Dialogue Between a Master and Slave” from the Columbian Orator mentioned above.  As it would be any day, today is a good day to read such a logical discourse:

The  pages are posted here, the entirety linked to above in the sentence or a URL is linked below : 

Hard To Find Reading in 1831, When Douglass Was a 12 Year-Old Slave in Maryland.

http://www.thelosangelesmirror.com/the-dialogue-between-a-master-and-a-slave-from-the-columbian-orator

-Barbara McCarren

—

First, please read President Obama’s Opinion piece in today’s Washington Post.

Some things haven’t changed and the GOP’s divisive tactics continue, in spite of  what we voted for on November 4, 2008. 

President Obama did not play politics with his economic stimulus plan because, he presumed there existed Congressional bipartisan desire to help our citizens in  dire  straits, and that a spirit of ‘good will’ would allow him to present an honest* plan,  that is generously complete with a dedicated 1/3rd  in corporate  and other tax cuts that the GOP support, even though the President (and we) know those cuts are rarely put directly into the economy.  It is ye olde  trickle-down theory that never works very well, and never fast enough.  We face a tremendous crisis!  That is a surprise to no one! It requires both short and long-term solutions.  The President incorporated the GOP’s favored tax-cuts without a hint of placation, & wrote the rest of the plan aimed squarely at energy independence and  job creation as well as debt relief for those who would immediately stimulate the economy with spending.

As the GOP clusters-up again, always reserving their energy to use against someone or something, as it seems to be their comfort zone, while change clearly disrupts their willfully stagnant  thinking, remember well and long the ginormous olive branch of trickle-down, ineffective tax cuts, that President Obama & Speaker Pelosi included, as the President had promised to be genuinely bipartisan, to a fault, without prompts. His honest intention to be generously, not niggardly, inclusive of the GOP’s anticipated requests for their beloved hand-outs to the wealthy, which suck up 1/3rd of the stimulus plan,  is not a starting point for negotiation. President Obama did not expect the worst from the GOP & yet the GOP appear to be intractable spikes, rusted in place. I’m talkin’ to you, Lindsey Graham.  How many times do you require an invite to exchange your ideas, any ideas, preferably ‘better’ ideas, not the same ones that got us here, only to declare that ‘the President is AWOL’ b/c you had no ideas to offer the President in lieu of his own plan, be it over cocktails,  at 2 meetings or during lunch at the White House.  So you blame civil banter or ‘lunch’ as the insubstantial factor, rather than that your well is empty of new, multi-purpose ideas that fit a 21st century collapse. You claim that the President is all talk, as if that charge will stick now like it did not in November.  But if there are no ideas in his plan, then why do you have so many objections to tiny bits of it, about 1% of the spending?  Do you object to his increase in defense spending too?  If his plan is the void you claim it is then pull out those twinkies, put them on display with your buddy John McCain and then pack the plan  with smart stuff that  gets us off foreign oil, creates jobs and increases national security - simultaneously.  You’ve had months to ponder a plan,  and what the hell have you been doing with your time, Lindsey?  Weren’t you tools readying your demands, mimicking Bill Clinton by taking the ideas listed above and ‘owning’ them?  All I’ve heard is  Senator Kyl laying it on Speaker Pelosi, as if the President is her puppet, and from the rest of you, a resounding, “No! We want more than a third of a trillion in tax cuts & you haven’t given in since you put it on the table.” This isn’t poker, gals and fellas, it is the lives and livelihoods of the millions of people who pay for your comfy salaries and benefits.  But what is left of the GOP  does not recognize honest compromise or inclusion; a third for the left, a third for the right, a third down the middle.  It is called fairness and they have never seen it, at least not as defined by either President Obama or the O.E.D.. As citizens lose their jobs by the thousands, these devoted partisans stall and hope that the President and, thereby,  even more citizens, will fail. Healthcare will be delayed as they stall and industries will leave the US forever. They want their country to fail but our President is too noble to say it and too good a person to perhaps even believe it. But I am  starting to hear the urgency in his voice. There is not a single reporter on the Hill who, when asked (Fox News doesn’t ask),  has seen a glimmer of a flash of  a spirit of attempted bipartisanism from any GOP members other than Snowe and Collins, as usual. There is, to put it very nicely, no tacit agreement in the  GOP to compromise or concede a point b/c in their cruel world, they could not imagine any President sincerely proclaiming a significant success as a result of a bipartisan effort.  Bill Clinton played them on their own game-board and that is what they expect, at best.  It is saddening when the country’s biggest skeptics, including me, see in a President what they wish they could be. Ye Olde GOPs have no intention of going large, or being productive b/c they cannot see the world Obama spoke of for 14 months.   As another economic horror report is due out tomorrow, think of this excerpted quote by Abraham Lincoln, addressed to the  Southern people, “ if they would listen - as I suppose they will not” in 1860.  ’But you say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. . . Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.”

This is how we carry on the fight: Call 202-224-3121 (or 866-544-7573) and leave a message for your senator. Even if your senator supports the plan, make sure they don’t agree to further conservative demands that have failed us for decades and have kept us without a real energy plan because they cannot abide real change. If you don’t know who your Senators are, go to this link to find out:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

This is what we’ve been waiting for since January 2008.  I’m holding my breath and hoping Barack et al have checked it over and believe that it will fly.  As much as I have mistrusted HRC, it would be a heart-breaker if Bill sullied her stairway up. Again.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former President Bill Clinton has agreed to make public the names of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation as part of a deal with President-elect Barack Obama to clear the way for Sen. Hillary Clinton to become secretary of state, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Citing Democrats close to Clinton and Obama, the newspaper reported Clinton had decided to publish his contributor list to avoid an appearance of conflict of interest with his wife’s duties as secretary of state.

Her appointment is expected to be announced on Monday.

A member of Obama’s transition team confirmed the conditions of the agreement as reported by the Times.

Who knew? It turns out the country was in the tank for Obama.

Keith Olbermann

I wish I could see Obama’s FISA vote as just an election-mode calculation, rather than a warning about his true view of the US Constitution, but I have seen no sign that his vote is anything but irresponsible. Obama stated that we should trust that, when he is POTUS, he won’t abuse this illegal power he has handed to George W. Bush for the next 6 months. Firstly, I trust Obama to be many things, but a reliable soothsayer is not one of them. Secondly, what if the November election does not result as Obama foresees?  I suggest Obama reexamine the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2004.  And thirdly, what is it about the Bush administration that leads Obama to believe they won’t abuse this power over the next 6 months? 

The point is that we the people, including Barack Obama, are now legally spied upon by the federal government and its agents, no matter who is POTUS.  We the people pay the price for election-mode calculations gone awry, often in the form of legislation, authorizations and resolutions.
 
If Obama had admitted a real reason he voted this way, I could live with it in disagreement if it sounded like the truth, and not the usual pabulum I am embarrassed to hear coming from him. He did not bother to give a full and honest explanation to we ‘research-based voters’. I guess it looks good to have the so-called ‘left’ angry at you, but what about we pesky Libertarians and Constitutionalists? It’s a profound miscalculation to not only willingly sacrifice the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, but also to glibly ‘dare’ a large part of his foundation of support, to no longer support him.  Obama stands to lose a lot more than my enthusiasm. College students for example, active in politics for the first time in generations, are easily bored by politics, and they know when they’ve been used.

FISA has no expiration date and the pressure to vote ‘yes’, in the interest of national security, is another example of the Bush administration’s fear-mongering in order to protect wealthy corporate lap-dogs, to amalgamate executive power, and to steal yet another ‘inalienable right’ from the people. In the Colonial era, illegal search and seizure was a significant offense committed by the British Government and was one cause of the American Revolution. Government exists primarily to defend our rights, as posited by the founders and as defined in the US Constitution; not to take them away.  Bush administration fear-mongering is a familiar shell game to expose, and a game most Americans have agreed they are tired of.  Obama’s ability to call upon the strength of the American people, against our fears, was a powerful subcurrent of his candidacy during the Democratic Primary.

Obama’s recent forays to the right of center have been enough. Shredding his “Constitutional Law Scholar” bonafides with the FISA vote wasn’t necessary, but shred he did. Antonin Scalia must be smiling. On this matter, we are not hearing from Obama “what we need to know” as he promised, but what Obama wants us to believe.