Wings

Think of this as a memorial to a dragonfly that died on my windshield.

If The Democratic Convention Were Postponed By a Hurricane . . .

You know that some of those conservatives who regularly talk with God would be telling us about divine intervention.

But, since I checked before posting this, it seems a lot of others have made similar observations.

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post fills out this thought most clearly:

By their own logic, Republicans and their conservative allies should be concerned that Isaac is a form of divine retribution. Last year, Rep. Michele Bachmann, then a Republican presidential candidate, said that the East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene — another “I” storm, but not an Old Testament one — were attempts by God “to get the attention of the politicians.” In remarks later termed a “joke,” she said: “It’s time for an act of God and we’re getting it.”
The influential conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck said last year that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were God’s “message being sent” to that country. A year earlier, Christian broadcaster and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson tied the Haitian earthquake to that country’s “pact to the devil.”
Previously, Robertson had argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortion, while the Rev. John Hagee said the storm was God’s way of punishing homosexuality. The late Jerry Falwell thought that God allowed the Sept. 11 attacks as retribution for feminists and the ACLU.

Science anyone?

Good Websites To Stretch Your Imagination

Image from bumbumbum

I found this arresting sculpture by  Bruno Catalano  at bumbumbum. You can also go directly to Catalano's website to see more sculptures and links.

Image from flavorwire

Flavorwire has a post on the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World

Image from Ready Made

Getting a little less grandiose, Ready Made has some creative projects you can do at home, like this grass couch. 

Image from Radass

And finally, from Radass, a way to recycle the utilitarian shipping pallet. They have 34 different ideas for projects.








We haven't exhausted all the new possibilities in the world.  We just have to be playful and creative. 

Republican Platform Committee Discusses Civil Unions

For Democrats who think all Republicans are nasty and uneducated and incapable of a civil discussion, watching the Republican Platform Committee discuss amendments might be a hopeful contrast to the way Republicans often appear on television and on the internet.  Even on Republican websites. 

I found these videos yesterday when trying to find a copy of the draft Republican Platform. I clipped a copy of the discussion of an amendment to recognize civil unions - same sex as well as one man/one woman - and allow marriage to be a religious sacrament.

The amendment didn't pass, but the fact that it was proposed and discussed without acrimony may come as a shock to some. For that reason alone, it's worth watching. I apologize for not quite mastering the trick of making clips from C-span videos. I cut out a minute or so from the beginning.

 [I thought it would play here, but if you click on the upper right corner - more info - it will take you to the clip on C-span.]





 You can see the complete video (there are two days of videos) of this and other discussions by the Republican platform committee. From the hour or so that I watched, I'd say that not too many amendments seemed to pass.

Republicans Finally Agree with Democratic Stance on Abortion: "It's a distraction."

Morning Edition had a three minute piece on Rep Akin's rape/aborition comments  . . .

Morning Edition host Steve Innskeep cites an LA Times report

"that in 2008 Romney touted the support of the doctor behind the Akin theory  that raped women don't get pregnant. . . 

Then he goes on:

Since that detail of the story emerged, the Romney campaign has only agreed to local interviews under the conditions that the reporters agree not to ask about Akin or abortion.

"It's a distraction.  We don't need any distractions, especially the week before our convention."  Republican consultant Ed Rogers says this controversy is a gift to Democrats and an albatross for Romney.

"It's cost him days when he could be having a message about something else, particularly about the economy.  And instead of having a message about that, we're talking about one of the wackiest things said in American politics this year . . ."

Let me get this straight.

1.  Discussion of abortion is a distraction from more important issues?  It seems to me for the last 30 years the Republicans have been using abortion as a distraction from the more important issues, because it got them money and votes.  But now that discussing abortion hurts Republicans and helps Democrats, it's suddenly a distraction. 

2.  Romney refuses to have interviews unless Akin and abortion and Romney's past support for the doctor Akin cites as the source of his 'raped women don't get pregnant' remark are off the table.  Is that also going to be a condition for the presidential debates?

3.  Republican consultant Rogers dismisses Akin's abortion view as irrelevant because it's  "The wackiest thing said. . ."   Let's play that back again slower.   Akin sponsored anti-abortion legislation that Paul Ryan co-sponsors that includes banning abortion in the case of rape and incest and he justifies this because rape victims can't get pregnant.  And this is irrelevant?  Republicans refuse to talk about it?  Sorry, it's not on my agenda, next question please - one about the economy. Why don't they just plead the fifth?

The 'distraction,'  it seems to me, is that attention is being put on Republican attempts to shut down every woman's access to abortion, even rape victims.  The Republican political agenda is intended to put the spotlight on the areas where they think Obama is vulnerable, and far from the areas where they are vulnerable.  

This is a distraction only if you are a paid consultant whose job it is to manage what Americans are talking about, because you've failed miserably in that agenda management.  Because one of the wacko (that's the Republican consultant's word not mine) politicians that you've helped get elected has escaped his handlers and said publicly what he really believes.  And you know that there are a bunch more wacko politicians out there who could do the same thing. (I heard some of the Alaska versions talking crazy like this when I was blogging the legislature.)

The Republican Platform on Rape and Abortion

If you google "Republican National Platform" there are a lot of links that pop up talking about the platform and abortion - but they are all news outlets and blogs talking about the platform.  Finding the platform itself is proving more difficult, at least for me. (If anyone has a link, please put it in the comments!)

C-Span reports that the draft platform has been sent to delegates for adoption on the first day of the convention, Monday. 

GOP.com offers the 2008 platform.

C-Span has video of the Republican Platform meetings.  I haven't looked at them, but they might offer some interesting insight into the thinking (yes, it's still thinking even if you don't agree with the conclusions)  behind the Platform.

NPR reports that the platform has language that would essentially ban all abortions including the 'wacky' Akin's desire to ban abortions for rape and incest victims.

. . .  one of the least controversial issues discussed this week is abortion.
With little discussion, the committee on Tuesday adopted the same anti-abortion language it included in GOP platforms in 2004 and 2008. It seeks passage of a constitutional amendment that would extend legal rights to the unborn, essentially banning abortion.
The language in the platform includes no exceptions for rape or incest.

So, while the Republican establishment is working overtime to distance themselves from Akin's comment about rape victims spontaneously avoiding pregnancy, they are pledging to  ban access to abortion even for rape and incest victims.  The most positive thing about this whole incident is that some Republicans understand that Akin's comments were bad.  (Not necessarily bad policy, but bad PR.)

Looking at the Republican Convention website - there are no tabs that link to the Platform.  Going tab to tab, I could find this mention of platform in "Features"

Some delegates will be chosen to represent their delegations on one of the four standing convention committees (Resolutions, sometimes referred to as the “Platform Committee;” Credentials; Rules; and Permanent Organization).

 The 'Get Involved" tab offers us the word platform, but a different meaning:

You can sign up to receive newsletters and other updates, join convention social media conversations or get an up-close look at convention events through our website, blog and other platforms designed to create a convention without walls.

Maybe they're just waiting for it to be approved by the convention, but I'd think they would be proud of it and want to post it on their website.  But - I don't do this often - what do I know?

Did You Do Or Think Anything Today That Wasn't Media Inspired?

Suppose you had a blog post to write today.  Suppose further that you wanted to write about what was most important to you.  What would you write about?

Have you ever made a list of your most important values?  If you have, have you tracked whether you spend your time pursuing those values?  

How hard is it for us to spend our thinking time and doing time - the actual things we think about and do from the time we get up to the time we go to bed -  on what we believe is truly important and valuable?  And how much of our time and our thoughts are prescribed by others? (Would things be changed if we added dream time to the thinking calculation?)

How many of you would keep going to work if you were suddenly given a stipend of $100,000 a year for life?  Pause a bit and think about the answer . . .





If you stopped working, what would you do?  Would your life be caught up in stuff you 'have to do' because of stuff you own that needs attention (paying your bills, repairing your car or RV or boat, or iPhone, etc.)?  Would you be influenced in what you did by what other people would think?  Would your choices come from television shows, movies, and commercials?  Or would you create options based on your most important values? 

And even if you believe your work is basically worthwhile, how much of what you do at work is truly important and how much is wasted time?  We only have so many hours to spend on earth.  How can we spend them to best effect, whatever that means to you.  Do you know what that means to you?  [You mean you didn't stop to answer this?  You really don't have time to figure out what's most important to you?]

Do you set your agenda based on your values, or does the media set your agenda?  Or do  annoying people around you  set your agenda?  Do people's reaction to what you do or say affect your agenda?

Thought Control?

Have you ever made a diary of the topics you discussed with people in a day and then determined which topics were media inspired (like health care, the Olympics, global warming, the Hunger Games, Iran, the Euro,  Rihanna, or the latest tragedy in the world covered by the media) and how much was inspired by your life quest?  (Well, if you talked about health care because you were sick, that isn't necessarily media inspired, unless you then talked about the health care system.)

Having a few days with little internet connection and little other access to news, I started asking myself questions like these.  We talk so much about the importance of freedom, yet how many of us have much freedom?   How many of us know what we really want to do, have come up with options that weren't planned by marketing teams trying to figure out ways to get into our wallets or into the voting booth with us, or otherwise set our brains' agendas? 

And if you were to track how your thoughts were influenced by the media, would that be an original act, or would it be influenced by reading this blog? 

Obviously, being influenced by others isn't, by itself, a bad thing. 

But we shouldn't be ping-pong balls bouncing back and forth from headline to headline.  Rather we should develop some basic sense of who we are and what's important and when a passing idea will help us get where we want to go, it's fine to grab it and use it.  Or even when it causes us to question where we want to go.  But that shouldn't be happening five times a day or even five times a week.  Cutting off from 'the media' for a few days is healthy.  Anything really important we'll find out about when we turn it back on.  The rest we can do without. . .

If You Vote For Obama Are You Voting For A War Criminal?

Obama's continuation of many of the Bush administration's war on terrorism actions are troubling - torture, the right to kill American citizens who are terrorists, the continued war in Afghanistan, etc.

Shannyn Moore posted a loooong conversation between John Cusack (the actor, who is also, clearly someone who thinks) and Jonathon Turlock a law professor and expert for various media.

Basically, they ask the question - Can you really vote for a president who violates the constitution and commits war crimes because "he's better than Romney" or because "I like his social programs?"

My personal rational has been that if a Republican appoints the next two Supreme Court justices, the chance to save democracy will be postponed another generation. 

There is also the assumption they make that Obama is in fact a war criminal.  It seems that they are guilty of convicting him without a trial, the same crime they accuse him of with his powers to assassinate people like Osama bin Laden, and worse, American citizens.  It's seriously disturbing, and that's why the media should cover it so there can be a full blown debate and the facts and interpretations can be examined.

Crossing the Rubicon is the metaphor they use repeatedly - is there no point past which Obama could go before you wouldn't vote for him? 

The alternatives to voting for Obama aren't nearly as well developed as the argument that he is a war criminal.  

“Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.

If, like me, you live in a strongly red state, you can vote for a third party candidate as a protest vote.  No matter how I vote, it won't cost Obama any electoral votes.  People in blue states run the risk of too many people protesting and giving electoral votes to Romney.  When people voted for Nader in 2000 they were blamed for losing the election and the mainstream Democrats didn't get the message that people were protesting Clinton's moving so far to the right. 

So, I guess now we need to be sending messages to Obama that we are voting for one of the third party candidates unless he pledges to change his ways.  USA Today reported that there would be five third parties that will be on the ballots in more than five states:

• Libertarian
• Green
• Constitution
• Party for Socialism and Liberation
• Justice Party

Here are some excerpts from the conversation between Turley and Cusack:

Some of the charges against Obama:

Turley: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two U.S. citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any U.S. citizen. . .

Cusack: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”
Turley: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy. . .

Turley: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.
James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.
So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government. . .

On the lack of media coverage:

Cusack: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an going moral fiasco’s — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies  we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go? . . .

It seems to me that there was media coverage about the Bush administration because there were lots of Democrats opposed to what Bush was doing.  But there isn't any noticeable Republican opposition to torture or assassination so there is no opposition and the press doesn't cover it. 

Who Ya Gonna Vote For?

And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –
Turley: Right.
Cusack: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.
If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?
Turley: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”
Cusack: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.
Turley: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.
Cusack: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.
But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”
Turley: Exactly.
Cusack: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you  know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.
Turley: Right.

How Many Others Who Serve in House With Akin Agree With Him, But Don't Say So Publicly?

Todd Akin has been a member of the House of Representatives for six terms - that's 12 years.  He's been voting on issues relating to women and all sorts of other topics. 

His old House district (it's been changed with redistricting) is just west and north of St. Louis.  These are the people responsible for his being in Congress.

from Akin's website

At 8:47pm Alaska time, these are Akin's most recent tweets:

• We can't be intimidated by the liberal elite. I will continue standing for life. Will you?  

• I am #stillstanding. Will you stand with me?

• I apologized but the liberal media is trying to make me drop out. Please stand w/ me tonight by signing my petition at http://www.akin.org/still-standing 

Let's see, these liberal elites include:

• Mitt Romney
• Paul Ryan
• Sean Hannity
• And a whole slew of other top Republican politicians and funders.

But my question is how many more members of congress feel as he does, but just keep quiet about it and use other reasons to explain their anti-women votes?

Random Seattle Shots

  Jackfruit at a Vietnamese market in Seattle.  You can see them growing out of the tree trunk in a photo from Chieng Mai here.   These are big fruit! 

 The ospreys I mentioned in the previous post. (There are two)

''''

 

Ferry deck going to Bainbridge.

Chillin

When the tide is out, three racoons wander out onto the mudflats looking, I assume, for shellfish.  There's an osprey nest in a nearby tree.  A kingfisher sits on the end of a pole.  And there are blackberries everywhere.  Visiting our daughter near Seattle.  Not much internet access, but natural access.

Pretty sure it's a female Western White butterfly

Not sure what this is.  The images I find for Western White and Pine white, don't have the black pattern on the lower parts of the wings. [Update Tuesday:  There's a picture of a female Western White butterfly bentler.us that seems to have the same markings as this one and another one at green nature.]