Monthly Archive for February, 2007

4 more years?

Another year, another “anniversary.” Don’t know about you but I’ve had ENOUGH.

Iraq.. Afghanistan.. Iran.. Syria.. the lines are all blurring together. Shall we just hit the big red button and get it over it — put us out of our misery?

What a good excuse for a party, it may just be the last one we ever have. Sponsored by World Can’t Wait Columbus, Columbus 9/11 Truth, and other local peace groups. Music by Cultural Relativity, Ukulele Man, Connie Harris, Victoria Parks, and more. Speakers include Bob Fitrakis and others. (Will update when more details are available.)

That weekend is also the one-year anniversary of the release of V for Vendetta, how perfect.

Poorest Americans get poorer

Incomes of 16 million fall 50% below poverty line

Columbus Dispatch - 02.25.07

Since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown more than any other segment of the population

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line, and the gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

Among the states with the most people in severe poverty, Ohio ranked sixth with 657,415. California was first with 1.9 million people, and rounding out the top five were Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois.

Washington, D.C., has a higher concentration of severely poor people — 10.8 percent in 2005 — than any of the 50 states, even hurricane-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana.
Continue reading ‘Poorest Americans get poorer’

4 AM

“…It’s late now
And there’s only four hours ’til I get up again
You know I’d wait somehow
If I thought this was something
That a little time would mend…”

- Sarah Harmer

PC.com under redesign!

I’m messing around with a new WordPress theme right now, trying out K2 (following Andrew’s rave review), so stuff is gonna be moving all over the place and looking different… but stay tuned, it’ll be finished soon… I hope!

PS: Can anybody tell me how to get a 3-column layout using k2? That’s what I want the most right now. Oh— and a way to display links with some kind of drop-down feature so the whole dang list doesn’t have to be shown until you want to see it (ie click on “Blogroll” and *then* you’d see the list of blogs.)

PPS: I’ve got three of my photos uploaded as banner images, set to display randomly. I think I like it, esp. ’cause I tend to get bored with a static banner. Soon as I get some time I’ll be adding more, until then, hope you enjoy the few I have!

XM and Sirius Satellite Radio to Merge

From the Associated Press: “Federal regulators warn that combining rivals Sirius Satellite and XM Satellite Radio will be a tough process, since there’s already a provision barring both satellite radio licenses from being owned by the same company.”

As an XM subscriber, I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. Since when did the FCC actually stand up against market monopolization? Telecommunications Act of 1996 anyone?

Worth noting: Kevin Martin, the chairman of the FCC, has quite a history before the FCC, including being a hugely successful telecommunications lobbyist. He is also a BIG opponent of Net Neutrality, he did everything in his power to approve the recent merger of AT&T and BellSouth (which created the world’s largest telecommunications company.) He didn’t see any reason to include net neutrality provisions in the deal. Awful trusting of him!

SO— even though I’m obviously against more corporate media consolidation, my gut instinct is telling me that Martin (AND the gov’t. AND his business buddies) must stand to lose something if XM and Sirius merge. Not the customers. And since what the gov’t. wants is usually what I don’t want (and vice versa) I’m thinking I may actually want the merge. Which would be strange. Time will tell I guess.

SPEAK UP TODAY about Iraq and Iran!

God Bless Amerika!HEY AMERIKA!

  • You say you support our troops?
  • You have one of those fancy yellow ribbons on your car?
  • Do you plaster an American flag on everything you possibly can so people know you’re an American, dammit?
  • You proud of yourself cause you voted in the last election? Maybe even more proud because you voted for candidates that claimed to be against the war?
  • You waiting for God to Bless the USA?

Well GOOD NEWS! Boy do I have a deal for you, WalMart’s got nothing on this. Today you can quit waiting for God to intervene and do something yourself! It’s your day to prove you really care, beyond mere materialistic expressions. Today you get to SPEAK UP and hold your representatives accountable. You’re stuck in the snow anyway, what else do you really have to do?

Today the House finally begins debate on Iraq, it’s your job to tell your Senators and Representatives where you stand. Remember — THEY work for YOU.

It’s really easy. Take five minutes out of your day (it won’t even take that long) and call them. Ask to please speak with the aide responsible for Iraq War issues. Then be sure to give them your name and address so you’re verified as a constituent.

Tell them to END of the Occupation of Iraq, STOP funding the war, bring ALL the troops home NOW, and going into Iran is out of the question.

If you want to get specific you can ask for support on HR746, The Safe and Orderly Withdrawal from Iraq Act.

Here are the numbers to call for Columbus folks:

  • Senator Voinovich: (202)224-3353
  • Senator Brown: (202)224-2315
  • Representative Pryce (15th district): (202)225-2015
  • Representative Tiberi (12th district): (202)225-5355

For everyone else, check out Project Vote Smart to get the contact info. for your representatives.

Seriously, it’s not a hard thing to do. There really are no excuses. Unless you don’t mind giving the message to the tens of thousands of troops over there that you really don’t care when they come home, or even if they come home alive. That’s your call and your own conscience to deal with…

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

“The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.”

I know I’ve been doing a lot of cutting and pasting lately vs. original content, but this article is too good not to post… and just to clarify because I bet most Americans don’t know the difference between Fascism, Communism, and Anarchism (and that’s understandable because nobody teaches us these things in school because they’re all so bad and un-American!) this is the actual definition of Fascism, from Merriam Webster:

Fascism: Political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

Now, taking that into consideration, read this article. And when you’re done, check this out.

From Alternet - By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age — he was then close to 80 — we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure — personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers — those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.
Continue reading ‘The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy’