Babylon burning, and they got no water…

Excerpted from the Viridian mailing list

“Is the human race too stupid to live?  This mayhem should be front-page news every day. 2,349 words of a whole continent in heavy weather.

Britain bakes, Europe burns. Is this proof of global warming?
“If it isn’t proof of global warming at last, it certainly looks like it. As much of Europe burns like a furnace and rivers run dry across the continent, Britain is bracing itself for its own record temperature.”

Related storties:

“Technicians sprayed cold water on a nuclear power plant in eastern France yesterday to prevent it from overheating as soaring temperatures caused problems around the world.”

“The intense heat wave that has baked much of Europe for weeks, fueling deadly forest fires, causing drought and damaging crops, has convinced many people that global warming is a reality. “

“Global warming is now a weapon of mass destruction . It kills more people than terrorism, yet Blair and Bush do nothing “

Hell, those two dimbulbs probably think the magic of the marketplace will fix global warming if only we would let Capitalism be free of all those silly laws and regulations. Hmmm wait, for them to want to stop global warming, they’d have to admit it’s happening, wouldn’t they???

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Peter Camejo makes it official, will file signatures Thursday in recall race

From Peter Camejo’s campaign

What: Peter Miguel Camejo will submit the last batch of signatures and make his campaign for governor official. Mr. Camejo has submitted all paperwork to formally register his candidacy. With the turn-in of the final qualifying signatures, the campaign begins.

When: Thursday, August 7th at 4pm

Where: Alameda County Registrar of Voters - 1225 Fallon Street G-1

Camejo was the Green Party candidate in the 2002 California Governor election, getting 5.3% statewide, and over 15% in some counties like San Francisco - where he came in 2nd, beating the Republican candidate Bill Simon.

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DiFi says no to recall, Arianna will say Yes, Loretta Sanchez says maybe

Senator Dianne Feinstein today said said No to running for Governor in the California recall election. Leftie pundit Arianna Huffington will say Yes later today. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, may run.

Update: Arianna has officially announced she is running, and the Arianna For Governor website is up and running!

Details:

Feinstein

“Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Wednesday ruled out running for governor in the Oct. 7 recall election, complicating plans of California Democrats who are seeking a strong candidate.”

Arianna, in her newsletter yesterday said

“You’ve been reading every week my outrage at the state of our politics, and I would love it if you could be there to join me as I make the leap from analysis to action — from columnist to candidate”

Sanchez, said she might run if Feinstein doesn’t.

“Attention is a frequent companion for the four-term congresswoman. She was hailed as a giant killer in 1996 when she pulled off an upset victory over entrenched Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan, becoming the first Democratic congressional representative from Orange County in a dozen years.”

Sanchez defeating the extreme right-wing Dornan was more than an upset, it was an earthquake, and made headlines nationally. It is clear she has serious political skills…

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A reason to vote Democratic?

From Howard Dean’s blog

“Governor Dean electrified the AFL-CIO forum tonight — he received the largest and most enthusiastic response, showing a deep command of the issues and powerful grassroots support within labor. Here is his closing statement:

“The real question here tonight is which one of us can beat George Bush. Here’s is how I plan to do it.

I opposed the war in Iraq, not because I am a pacifist, but because I didn’t think the evidence was there.

I opposed No Child Left Behind because it was an unfunded mandate that doesn’t help kids and it leaves more of them behind.

I opposed the tax cuts because I want a balanced budget and investment in America so we can have jobs in this country again.

You can’t beat President Bush by trying to be like him, we tried that in 2002 and it didn’t work. The way to beat this President is to stand up and be proud to be Democrats.

Look to what Harry Truman put in the 1948 Democratic Party platform: Health insurance for everybody. We need to stand up for ourselves again and take on the President directly.

We’re going to stand up and be proud to be Democrats. We’ve got the numbers, and this time, the person who gets the most votes is going to win the White House.”

Hey, Dean is sounding like LBJ! Given the craven calculating type of Democrats we’ve seen way too much of lately, this is a welcome change. But, you ask, if elected, will he turn out to be just another Bill Clinton-type weasel? Maybe. But I doubt we’d worry much about him starting wars because he thought Jesus told him to. 

He’s got some serious momentum too. Dean MeetUp, an online way to organize meetings, had 69,000 Dean supporters signed up as of Sunday. Tonight, when I checked, it was up to 77,000.

“Something’s happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”…

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US anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban

“After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised “no-fly” list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.

The strong suspicion of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the government to try to learn more, is that the second list has been used to target political activists who challenge the government in entirely legal ways. The TSA acknowledged the existence of the list in response to a Freedom of Information Act request concerning two anti-war activists from San Francisco who were stopped and briefly detained at the airport last autumn and told they were on an FBI no-fly list.

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Diebold voting machines in Georgia

From Bev Harris’ newsletter

“Georgia, perhaps hardest hit by the growing Diebold scandal, is now facing renewed questions about missing memory cards and other irregularities. On election night during the 2002 general election, 67 memory cards, containing thousands of votes, went missing in Fulton County. Also, according to documents provided to Santa Clara County, Diebold machines experienced “buffer overrun” problems during the election, requiring poll workers to turn them on and off, and if not done properly, this can also cause loss of votes.

Georgia officials, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by Georgia voters, admitted that they did not have any of the certification documents clearing use of the machines following a series of unexamined program patches put on the machines right before the election. Georgia law requires that any time software is updated, it must be recertified, but the patches were never examined by testing labs. No one really knows what was on the patches; Diebold denied that patches were done.”

Bev Harris’ tone is sometimes too accusatory. I feel she’d be more effective if she notched the attacks down a bit. However much of what she says is being confirmed by other researchers.

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The past is a foreign country

From The Guardian

“America is a great country. But, ever since independence, <historian Douglas> Hofstadter demonstrated, sections of its political class have repeatedly viewed “conspiracy as the motive force in historical events”. At different times, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, Jews and communists have been identified as the conspirators in question. Whatever the perceived enemy, the “central preoccupation” has always been with “a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character”. As a result, Americans have been regularly prone to seeing a “wrestling match between good and evil” as the “archetypal model of the world struggle”.

This kind of paranoia occurs in many countries and groups. But in America, Hofstadter argued, it has usually been prompted by religious and ethnic tension, and is particularly characteristic of the political right. Does any of this ring bells? It should. September 11 was an atrocity, and there are doubtless still more to come. Heightened security and improved intelligence are certainly called for. But by representing all this as an epic, ongoing war against “shadow and darkness” that requires pre-emptive attacks against sovereign states, it seems likely that Blair, like Bush, has succumbed to the paranoid style in American politics, and with far less partisan benefit.”

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