Time for Leno

For the life of me I don't understand how pro-military types support a man who first was a draft-dodger and then went AWOL from his cushy Air National Guard service:

Next week, President Bush is going to Vietnam. So it looks like he's finally going to finish up that National Guard duty.

--Jay Leno

Snark, snark.

Gay marriage in South Africa

Well, here's part of an AP article entitled, "S. Africa parliament OKs gay marriages":

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - The South African parliament on Tuesday approved new legislation recognizing gay marriages — a first for a continent where homosexuality is largely taboo.
...
The bill provides for the "voluntary union of two persons, which is solemnized and registered by either a marriage or civil union." It does not specify whether they are heterosexual or homosexual partnerships.
...
"When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past, by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of color, creed culture and sex," Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told the National Assembly.

As John Aravosis noted on AMERICAblog, we are now behind South Africa in terms of civil and human rights. Sad.

My problem with bi-partisanship

Really good news

The Independent has published an article entitled Democrats Purge Climate-Change Skeptics. Here's the main information:

This week's seizure of both houses of Congress by the Democrats means that two key Republican opponents of action to confront climate change - Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Richard Pombo of California - will lose their positions as the chairmen of Congress's two environmental committees.

Mr Pombo, who lost his bid for re-election, will leave the House altogether. Mr Inhofe, who once said the threat of global warming was, "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people", will probably be replaced by the California Democrat Barbara Boxer. She has promised to curb carbon emissions and strengthen environmental protection legislation.

"I think this represents a huge shift in the political dynamic of environmental politics," said Karen Wayland, legislative director of the National Resources Defence Council, a environmental group in Washington.

It is a personal embarassment to me to be living in the same state as Inhofe. I am SO happy to see him lose his position on the environmental committee. I hope Barbara Boxer hangs tough.

Hopeful next steps

The Los Angeles Times has published an article entitled Democrats Are Set to Subpoena. Here's part of what it says:

It has been 12 years since Democrats were in control of both the House and Senate. But they are looking to make up for lost time, and in some cases, make the Bush administration and its business allies sweat.

With control of every committee in Congress starting in January, the new majority will inherit broad powers to subpoena and investigate. And that is expected to translate into wide-ranging and contentious hearings.

The agenda is likely to be dominated by the Iraq war, but could include probes into the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance, environmental policies and new prescription-drug program for seniors. Industries, such as oil companies, could also come under closer scrutiny.

Of course, the main thing they need to do is impeach the president but Nancy Pelosi says that's off the table. Pity.

Shrine for Edgar

Well, I've started a little shrine for Edgar. The little stone sleeping cat was given to me just yesterday as a memorial for such a fine, fine kitty. I will be adding some flowers and a photograph soon.

New blog of interest

I found a new blog yesterday that's called Markham's Behavioral Health. While browsing through the archives, I came across the following:

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not - that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more 'moral' energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research, And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.

-- Sam Harris, Letter To A Christian Nation

The blog is an interesting combination of postings on mental health, public health, social work, education, politics and spirituality. I recommend that you take a look.

Veterans Day awareness

An article called We Failed Our Children, with War ends with the following paragraph:

On Veterans Day we usually remember the past, honoring the service and sacrifice of those who served. But in the midst of this war, a better way of honoring our veterans, old and new, is to act in the present and apply the lessons we learned so painfully a generation ago. Let's start with an apology to the Iraq war generation. We failed you, and we are sorry. Our job now is to get you home.

Each day, more die. Let us hope that the Democrats will act quickly to get our sons and daughters home.

Sheehan sizzles

Cindy Sheehan

Wow. Cindy Sheehan has written another letter to George Bush that is so scorching you have to handle it with forceps. Take a look:

Americans (you remember us, don't you?), turned out in huge numbers the other day to hold you accountable. You had yourself another accountability moment there, and you lost, didn't you? We Americans did not vote to retain the Republican status quo of murder, mayhem, and oppression. We voted to change politics as usual in this country. We voted against you and your wars of terror. We voted against you and your spies. We voted against you and your torturers. We voted against you and your definition of freedom as something that can be spread by bombing a country into oblivion. We voted against you and your definition of peace as something that can be spread by violence. We voted against you and your definition of security while your state sanctioned terrorism is creating more terrorists. We voted against you and your most atrocious and abominable exploitation of the right to life to continue your genocidal policies in Iraq.

We the people have a mandate for change. If you think that we are going to squander our mandate and permit you to slide away into obscurity in Crawford, as a footnote as the worst president in US history, to lick your wounded pride and count your stacks of ill-gotten gains, you are wrong. You are not escaping punishment as other war criminal presidents have in our past. No matter if you and Rep. Pelosi become best buddies and take tea regularly in the oval office, we the people with our mandate are not going to allow you to get off scott-free.

Just go read the rest of it. You'll be glad you did.

Rest in peace

Edgar Finlay (? - November 9, 2006)

Ethel and Edgar

Dear friends, it is my sad duty to tell you that Edgar had to be put down last night. The circumstances are too complicated and painful for me to go into right now but be aware that he was FIV positive (feline AIDS) and that that was part of it.

He had a very beautiful death. He purred right up to the end when he died with his old head on the arm I was cradling him with. Needless to say, I am heartbroken.

Ethel will miss her life partner. Now she is all alone. Unlike Edgar, who was a real love muffin, Ethel is still quite wild and will rarely let me touch her - and then only for a second or two. I have tried to invite her in but she won't come. Perhaps when it gets cold and Edgar is not there for her to snuggle with, I will be able to coax her inside. We shall see.

I'm having Edgar cremated. Perhaps I will bury his ashes in the yard where he was so happy. Perhaps I'll come up with another plan. I'm not sure yet.

Do remember me in my grief and say a prayer or spare a thought for Edgar as he makes the great transition.

He was a good, good kitty.

Something I just HAD to show you!

More Leno

The homophobes among them must really hate this part:

The GOP was concerned about Republican turnout. And in fact, between the Congressmen and the preachers, this will be the first year more Republicans came out than turned out.

- Jay Leno

The broken health care system

Slate has an article up right now called Time To Socialize Medicine: How Democrats can make themselves useful. Here's how it ends:

It's a given that the government will be forced to take over health care. Just about every doctor I've ever questioned on the subject has said so, even though one consequence may be that doctors will lose income by becoming salaried employees rather than fee-for-service entrepreneurs (a system widely agreed to have increased the number of unnecessary and sometimes dangerous medical procedures). Will the cost be prohibitive? Obviously if more people have access to medical care, that will push costs up. At the same time, though, eliminating the ever-more-elaborate financial game-playing between insurers, doctors, and patients would save an enormous amount of money, and so would eliminating costly medical care required when a patient has failed to receive preventive care, which is comparatively inexpensive. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration all have their faults, but they all manage to deliver health care more cheaply than private insurance, and the VA, which actually employs doctors and owns hospitals, is widely understood by experts to provide better care than private hospitals do. Krugman and Wells note that when Taiwan switched to a single-payer system in 1995, overall health-care costs went down:

"[T]he percentage of the population with health insurance soared from 57 percent to 97 percent, yet health care costs actually grew more slowly than one would have predicted from trends before the change in system."

The practicalities of politics may shun putting socialized medicine at the center of the Democratic agenda. But the practicalities of life demand it and will soon reverse the political calculus. People are dying, and corporations are going broke.

Let's get started.

The point was also made that hospitals are severely overloaded with the burden of treating the uninsured. We've simply got to do something. I hope the Democrats are paying attention.

And the Senate, too!

Jim Webb of Virginia

UPDATE: Allen concedes.

Madam Speaker

Nancy Pelosi

Two heartbeats away from the Presidency.

Here's her website.

The world reacts

CNN has an article on line that reports on the world's reaction to our election results:

Regardless of the effect on world events, global giddiness that Bush was finally handed a political black-eye was almost palpable throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

In an extraordinary joint statement, more than 200 Socialist members of the European Parliament hailed the American election results as "the beginning of the end of a six-year nightmare for the world" and gloated that they left the Bush administration "seriously weakened."
...
One Frenchman, teacher Jean-Pierre Charpemtrat, 53, said it was about time U.S. voters figured out what much of the rest of the world already knew.

"Americans are realizing that you can't found the politics of a country on patriotic passion and reflexes," he said. "You can't fool everybody all the time -- and I think that's what Bush and his administration are learning today."

I hope they are learning it. But I doubt it. I think it's likely that the only thing they've learned is that they did not play dirty enough. This crew is not self-reflective enough to learn anything edifying from losing.

Now about the Senate...

Here's a little excerpt from an article called Jim Webb and Jon Tester are the Winners:

Jim Webb and Jon Tester have won the initial count in Virginia and Montana. It is clear and indisputable that they deserve the same presumption of victory that George W. Bush received in 2000. They are the winners until conclusively proven otherwise by every method of counting and court review possible.

We have winners in Virginia and Montana. The question is whether George Allen and Conrad Burns can petition the courts and the electoral process within their states to change those outcomes.

As it stands, the Webb and Tester leads are conclusive. They will not be over taken in the regular count. The vote count shows that they have been elected as the new senators from their states.

Of course, Allen and Burns can spare their states the grief and the hassle of a recount (I believe these were the kind of words used against Gore in 2000, and I haven't even gotten to constitutional crisis), if they gracefully accept the will of the people.

Unlikely, of course. The Republicans are both sore winners and sore losers.

Also, Webb should have won by a larger margin in Virginia. There was major voter suppression by Republicans going on there. You'd think Allen would prefer not to have the scrutiny of a recount. However, he'll undoubtedly try to cheat on that too.

Here's the official statment of the DSCC:

Both Jon Tester and Jim Webb have won their races in Montana and Virginia but want to make sure that every vote is counted. We expect to have official results soon but can happily declare today that Democrats have taken the majority in the U.S. Senate.

Ah! Music to my ears.

Relief!

Evil and ignorance

Something to ponder as we await the election results:

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

~ Albert Camus