Jim Webb Says "NO" to VPOTUS

Here is his statement:

"Last week I communicated to Senator Obama and his presidential campaign my firm intention to remain in the United States Senate, where I believe I am best equipped to serve the people of Virginia and this country. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President. A year and a half ago, the people of Virginia honored me with election to the U.S. Senate. I entered elective politics because of my commitment to strengthen America's national security posture, to promote economic fairness, and to increase government accountability. I have worked hard to deliver upon that commitment, and I am convinced that my efforts and talents toward those ends are best served in the Senate. In this regard, the bipartisan legislative template we were able to put into effect through 18 months of work in order to enact the new, landmark GI Bill will serve as a prototype for my future endeavors in government. This process, wherein we brought 58 Senators from both parties to the table as co-sponsors, along with more than 300 members of the House, gives me renewed confidence that the Congress can indeed work effectively across party lines and address the concerns of our citizens.

"At this time I am also renewing my commitment to work hard to make sure that Senator Obama wins both Virginia and the presidency this November. He is a man who speaks eloquently about our national goals and calls for the practical solutions that must be put into place to obtain them. I will proudly campaign for him."

TNR Goes All Literate On Obama

The New Republic has a great review of Obama's books. Not late, rather, a study in, well, read on.....

Deconstructing Barry
by Andrew Delbanco

A literary critic reads Obama.

Andrew Delbanco, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, July 09, 2008

"Le style, c'est l'homme," a Frenchman said a long time ago. If style is indeed the man, and the man is on the verge of being nominated for the presidency of the United States, it seems the moment to ask what his style might tell us about his mind and heart.

Many Americans have already decided what they think about this question. Some find in Barack Obama's eloquence the promise that he will be a leader of insight and inspiration. Others distrust his verbal fluency and feel he is nothing more than a smooth-talking huckster. I know discerning people on both sides of the question. And, since there is no evident correlation between eloquence and executive leadership (Washington was an indifferent writer, Lincoln a great one), it may not be possible to know who's right except in retrospect.

Even after his breakout into national prominence, Obama has remained a largely unknown politician whose air of destiny can make him seem distant and opaque. Yet, by listening closely to his language, I think we can learn something about who he really is.

Everyone, pro and con, seems to agree that he is an unusually gifted writer. So gifted, in fact, that the biographer and critic Arnold Rampersad describes himself as "taken aback, even astonished" by the "clever tricks" and "inventions for literary effect" he finds in Obama's books. Consider this account in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, of playing basketball in prep school, which starts with short sentences, each ending in a percussive or sibilant monosyllable, then moves into a run-on sentence that mimics the flow of the game:

"By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou's teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions--like hurt or fear--you didn't want them to see.

"And something else, too, something nobody talked about: a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that's how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, 'Damn ...'"

This is a young writer (he was around 30 when he wrote Dreams) strutting his stuff. Sometimes he overwrites, as when he describes police cars cruising past groups of sullen black teens in "barracuda silence" or compares a row of scrappy trees to "hair swept across a bald man's head." He has a habit--almost a tic--of throwing in a cinematic flourish when none is needed: "a spotted, mangy cat" runs among weeds with a crumbling housing project in the background; a torn poster-photo of the recently dead Chicago mayor, Harold Washington, tumbles down a windswept street. And, as Rampersad suggests, he is a master of sleight of hand, as when, recounting his trip to Kenya as a young man in search of traces of his father, he takes what were clearly multiple conversations with his half-sister and stitches them into a seamless family history.

But none of these techniques strikes me as a "trick"--a word that implies fraudulence. What struck me instead about Dreams from My Father is the feeling that through and beyond the local details the writing opens out into universal experience. Obama describes his childhood in Hawaii, where his white Midwestern mother and his black African father met as students, in language so vivid that we almost taste the "rice candy with edible wrappers" and feel the relief from the tropical heat in the "cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sound of invisible birds."

But sooner or later in this Eden the serpent will make an appearance. And so she does--in the form of a red-haired girl in his fifth-grade class, who asks, with a hint of prurience, if she can touch his hair. Having been raised largely unaware of race, Obama begins to notice that "Cosby never got the girl on I Spy" and that the "black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground." The schoolgirl's question is followed by the shock of coming upon a photo in Life magazine of a black man, his skin blotched and made pallid by a "chemical treatment" he had "paid for ... with his own money" in an effort to bleach out his blackness.

I am imputing a theme here--the fall from paradise--that Obama suggests only lightly even as he tends to group his memories into episodes of temptation and redemption. In a chapter on his college years, he hints at having been tempted by drugs and what he calls "African nationalism." After college, playing half- willingly the role of Model Minority in a New York consulting firm, he fears the "beauty, the filth, the noise" of the great city, where, in order to resist its allure, he takes "on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will."

Fleeing to Chicago, he confronts new tempters--old pols, gangbangers turned radicals, and, most dangerous, the sins of wrath and despair--until he finds the promise of redemption in service itself.

It is in Chicago, where "the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground," that he gets to know the sort of people who seem wary of him today--"men and women who smoked a lot and didn't watch their weight, shopped at Sears or Kmart ... and ate in Red Lobster on special occasions." Perhaps because he grew up in a fatherless house (his father left when Barack was barely two), he feels a special connection to the mothers and grandmothers, mainly but not only black, who harbor childhood memories of church-centered Southern towns, and of the tidy city to which they brought their hopes, before the meatpacking or auto-parts plant closed and their fathers, brothers, or husbands lost their jobs and dreams. He writes about these people with great sensitivity--watching through women's eyes as their children's "eyes stop laughing." He is touched by their practice of wrapping treasured sofas and carpets in protective plastic--to be peeled off, they still dare to hope, on the day when the family will rally for the graduation or wedding of a child who has not fallen to the drug culture of the streets.

The climactic section of the book is the account of his journey to Kenya--"a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers"--in which he reverts to the lush language with which he had recounted his childhood in Hawaii. To his Western eyes, Kenya sometimes seems a picturesque "fable, a painting by Rousseau" in which lions yawn in peaceful repose while "a train of Masai women" passes by, "their heads shaven clean, their slender bodies wrapped in red shukas, their earlobes elongated and ringed with bright beads." The family members he comes to know--sisters, brothers, even a surviving grandmother--are warm and welcoming people, but this Eden, too, turns out to be a mirage.

On the one hand, it is a loving world where "nobody sends their parents to an old people's home or leaves their children with strangers"; on the other hand, it is a world of mud-and-dung huts where, witnessing a young mother with her child, he has to fight "the urge to brush away the flies that formed two solid rings around the baby's puffed eyes." Looking back in his imagination from this dual world to his native America, he sees its own dualities more clearly from the distance. Shooting hoops with a young half-brother in Kenya, he "tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell--that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too."

Obama's trip to Kenya, where he learns about the dashing but ultimately defeated father whom he barely knew, seems to free him from his enervating struggle to overcome temptation and find redemption. There is a feeling of release as he comes back home with a deepened appreciation of the complexities of history and a sense of his own opportunities and obligations in America.

Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, which takes its title from a sermon by the now-notorious Jeremiah Wright, was written a decade after Dreams from My Father. It is less personal and more miscellaneous--a set of loosely linked reflections on the effects of the press on politics, on the compromising clubbiness of the Senate, on the insularity of powerful people living in a kind of quarantine that only beneficiaries and would-be benefactors can violate. Though here and there his literary instincts reassert themselves (there's a nice description of the "python curves" of the Mississippi as seen from the air), this is basically a policy book in which the writing is more efficient than expressive. We get some familiar lamentation about gridlock politics--about the effects of gerrymandering or the irony that the filibuster, once an instrument used by reactionaries to obstruct liberal legislation, is now used (or threatened) by liberals to obstruct the appointment of reactionary judges. Sometimes the whole book seems a farewell to, or at least a rationale for leaving, the Senate.

Yet the voice of the writer is fundamentally the same as the one we hear in Dreams. There is the same internal counterpoise in the sentences: "Most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual" ... "most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows." When he scans the human landscape, Obama tends to notice contradictory individuals more than coherent interest groups. His sentences are alive because they are in tension with themselves:

I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn't see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won't give a loan to expand his business. There's the middle- aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager's abortion ...

This is the writing of someone trying to map a route through a world where choices are less often between good and bad than between competing goods. Though it lacks the sensual immediacy of the earlier book, the language is open and unresolved, the sentences organized around pairs of sentiments or arguments that exert equal force against each other--a reflection of ongoing thinking rather than a statement of settled thoughts.

Both these books are the work of a dialectical mind. Both are written by someone who believes in progress but not that all liberal social programs constitute progress. "By detaching income from work," he writes of "the old AFDC program" (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), it "sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self-respect." He has an Orwellian alertness to how easily language degenerates into cant, as when the term of praise "bipartisan" is used to dress up a sacrifice of principle by the weaker party in a political dispute. And he understands the presence of the past in public life--not only of recent history, as in his discussion of the Democratic Party since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition, but of distant history, as in his reflections on the imperiled idea of deliberative democracy as inherited from the founding fathers.

Remarkably enough for a contemporary politician, Obama's sense of the American past includes our literary past. His books are allusive--sometimes overtly, as when he dissents from F. Scott Fitzgerald ("in politics there may be second acts, but no second place"), sometimes obliquely, as when, relating an incident with a waiter in Nairobi, he echoes W.E.B. DuBois's famous passage in The Souls of Black Folk on "double consciousness." The waiter is a Kenyan citizen but still a colonial-minded servant fawning on white customers while snubbing blacks: "And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition."

Writing recently in The New York Times Book Review, George Packer recommended that Obama read Theodore Dreiser's great Chicago novel Sister Carrie--in order, Packer wrote rather patronizingly, to learn about "the sort of American he doesn't know." If Obama hasn't already read Dreiser (I suspect he has), he needs no tutoring about the kinds of lives Dreiser wrote about--lives of unfocused longing, vulnerable to temptation and exploitation. Indeed there is a sense in which he brings together in his memoir, as Dreiser did in his fiction, the two basic American stories--stories of rising and stories of awakening. His books are "how-to" books about his own exemplary success at competing with others in the marketplace, but they are also conversion narratives about his discovery that serving others is the only way to save oneself.

It is hard for any writer, no matter how selective his memory or guarded his words, to conceal himself in his writing. I suspect (I've never met him) that the weaknesses and strengths of Obama's writing reflect those of his character-- a virtuosity that tempts him to be pleased with himself and impatient with others, but also an awareness of human complexity that made me think of a writer to whom he does not allude, Henry James, whose criterion for the artist as someone "on whom nothing is lost" he meets.

Finally, one feels in Obama's books as well as his speeches the presence of that iconic American, Abraham Lincoln, whom he sometimes names and sometimes namelessly invokes. In The Audacity of Hope, he tells of having once received a rebuke ("not entirely undeserved") for presumptuously likening himself in print to Lincoln. On his first visit to the White House as a freshman senator, he tells us, Lincoln appeared to him as a ghostly figure "pacing the hall, shouldering the weight of a nation," the moral and political genius who managed to maintain "within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas--that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence."

This description of Lincoln as a man of self-doubt yet with an unswerving sense of mission is as instructive as it is insightful. Obama seems to have composed his public life in conscious emulation of Lincoln. He announced his candidacy in Springfield and delivered his speech on race in Philadelphia, where Lincoln, en route to his first inauguration, gave a great speech on the Declaration of Independence as America's secular scripture. In his victory speech on the night of clinching the Democratic nomination, Obama incorporated or played variations on several phrases from Lincoln--"the last full measure of devotion," "the last best hope of earth," "the better angels of our nature."

To some, it all seems calculated and hubristic, and they will no doubt continue to detect in his style a self-involved inwardness. But, to me, it feels like heartfelt homage from someone with a keen sense of the complexities and commonalities of human experience. On the hopeful premise that style really does tell us something about the man, this man--to my ear, at least--is the real deal.

Andrew Delbanco teaches at Columbia, where he is Levi Professor in the Humanities and director of American Studies.

At Least He Wasn't A Murderer

The Jesse Helms' premature obit by Hendrik Hertzberg back in 2001.

Photographing Photons

Some incredible photographs, of light!

Hide The Valuables! Get A Shotgun!!

Dana Milbank, a Washington Post dude, has a nice little video where the assistant Treasury Secretary has a sort-of press conference. Depressing, but funny.

Michelle Rhee: Union Assassin

Michelle Rhee is the superintendent of the DC school system (she is called "The Chancellor"). She is controversial, to say the least. Here is her great idea on how to further screw teachers--only this time, she will screw them out of their retirement!

Rhee Seeks Tenure-Pay Swap for Teachers
Giving Up Seniority Would Boost Salary If Benchmarks Met

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008; B01

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000 -- but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights, two union members familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.

Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green, said the union members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.

Teachers in the green tier would be reviewed yearly and would be allowed to continue in their jobs only if they passed an evaluation and boosted students' test scores, the union members said.

Under Rhee's proposal, raises to the green tier would be more than the 19 percent increase over five years she is proposing for all teachers, the union members said.

They said teachers are opposed to giving up seniority and tenure, no matter the size of their raise, and probably would reject such a proposal.

"You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security," a union member said. "When you trade that, it seems to me you're not getting much."

Rhee, who declined to comment yesterday because of the ongoing negotiations, has said she wants a contract that would "revolutionize education as we know it." She also has said she wants to improve instruction by ensuring that the District "has the most highly compensated and competent" teachers in the country.

Education experts who follow teacher contract issues said that D.C. teachers would be among the highest-paid educators in the nation under Rhee's plan and that a proposal eliminating seniority and tenure would be groundbreaking.

"Fixing teachers' contracts is a high priority everywhere," said Bryan Hassel, co-director of Public Impact, an education research and consulting organization in Chapel Hill, N.C. "If Rhee accomplishes this, it would be earthshaking reform that would have implications everywhere."

Rhee can restrict seniority rights through a little-used District law that allows principals to diminish seniority rankings and use them among several other factors -- including evaluations, military service and whether the teacher is in a high-demand area such as math or special education -- to make changes during staff cuts.

The law was aimed at addressing "bumping rights," which allow senior teachers losing their positions during cutbacks to displace less-experienced peers at other schools.

"Bumping rights had been viewed as a problem for those of us trying to get quality teachers in the classroom. But we knew it was a challenge getting it out of the contracts," Kevin P. Chavous, who was on the D.C. Council when the law passed, said in a recent interview. "Even after the law was passed, superintendents operated under the assumption that bumping rights were still there."

The union members said Rhee wants to get seniority out of the contract so that it will no longer be a factor in the legislation.

The two union members said Rhee wants to use donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Broad Foundation, in part, to pay for the raises and bonuses. Officials from the Gates and Broad foundations would not comment on proposed future funding.

Megan Matthews, a Michael & Susan Dell Foundation spokeswoman, said the foundation has had general discussions with D.C. school officials but has not committed funds to the teacher contract.

So. Do you really want to see this happen nationally? Rhee is the state-of-the-art, and what she does influences the education makhers (it's Yiddish for "influential person"). Please, please, start the revolution!

Without The Pen Of Paine, The Sword of Washington Would Have Been Wielded In Vain

Thomas Paine was radical, dude!

Greg Palast Sends An Email

Greg Palast is one irreverent dude, that's why I like him. He is righteously angry, and he sends emails. Here is his latest:

The House I Live In

America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We're the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.

John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That’s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lied.

Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we’ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.

Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll find the same thing: America's music, America's freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly “the light unto the nations.” Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes. I find that weird, but it’s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.

We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.

America is indeed exceptional. That's not a boast, that’s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world (emphasis mine). It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that defiantly walked out of the first “world trade organization,” known as the British Empire, announcing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free-and “we” are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are “INALIENABLE”: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre- or post- Saddam.

Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two U.S. military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp. They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. ("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Iran, these two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in America could that happen.

No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? China’s torture standard? Britain’s Secrecy Act as a standard? Switzerland’s Nazi-money-protection standard?

Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids' right to attend class. You don’t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), “We love Americans.”

They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Clinton was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represented that American sense of giving- a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of America’s Manifest Destiny.

Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little offices in New York and London is to expose these motherfuckers.

Ronald Reagan said, "America is the shining city on the hill." And he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in the Mississippi.

Go back to Taos, New Mexico, Voting Precinct 13. What you’ll find there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the flag every day and will fight and die for it knowing full well that the fight must also be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.

Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children."

Damn right, they do. That’s what Jefferson meant by "inalienable."

And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama's Caliphate of oil states or China’s money-crazed "Communism" nor half of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Iraq by George Bush.

Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don't take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.

You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go further: he’s UN-AMERICAN.

And that’s why he lost the election. TWICE.

Happy 4th of July!

Everything Old Is New Again

And Pelosi took impeachment off the table! Imagine, if you will, the declaration as seen through contemporary eyes.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

(from Discourse.net)

MOTO: Video Extraordinaire

From Gizmodo:

Italian artist BLU is famous for painting politically and socially charged street murals, but his recent project involving street animation may be his most visually stunning. Called MUTO, the video is a series of digital stills assembled from sequential paintings on the streets/walls of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's been floating around a bit, but if you haven't seen it, the effect is a sort of living, evolving mural that follows a dramatic, character-drive storyline. And if you watch one thing online today (or tomorrow or the next day), this should be it:

It is pretty awesome!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

Educational Testing: A Brief Glossary

Another bit of test-explaining from eduwonkette. You want to understand terms? I got your explanations right....in that eduwonkette link above.

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Found this at Shakesville. Ms. McEwan says "Some things just make me cry with happiness. And I'm not even sure why. This is one of them." I must say, I know what she means. Watch, then dance!

Chocolate Egg Smashing

I know what I am doing this summer now!

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Hero Worship? (updated)

What is a hero? With the Clark/McCain dust up it's a question I think we need to answer. Here is the Dictionary.com version:

he·ro

1.a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.
2.a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal: He was a local hero when he saved the drowning child.
3.the principal male character in a story, play, film, etc.
4.Classical Mythology.
a. a being of godlike prowess and beneficence who often came to be honored as a divinity.
b.(in the Homeric period) a warrior-chieftain of special strength, courage, or ability.
c.(in later antiquity) an immortal being; demigod.
5.hero sandwich.
6.the bread or roll used in making a hero sandwich.

[Origin: 1605–15; back formation from ME heroes (pl.) <>hérōs (sing.), hérōes (pl.) <>hrōs, hrōes]

So, do we continue to call soldiers heroes? How about not all soldiers, but just the ones who were wounded? What about calling only those who got shot down heroes? No? The one's who dropped the most bombs, or blew up the most civilians, or killed the most enemies? The one's who were held prisoner--for 1 year; 2 years; 3 years; 5 years? Prisoners who were tortured (did we just make heroes out of a bunch of prisoners at GITMO?)

I say none of the above. Being a soldier does not make you a hero. Being a prisoner does not make you a hero. Being the Supreme Allied Commander does not make you a hero. Doing something heroic makes you a hero. Neither McCain nor Clark are heroes.

Wes Clark's comment about McCain's being shot down is being heralded as a definitive "Kinsley
Gaffe" (when a politician makes the accidental mistake of telling the truth). And the media is hyperventilating over it. Look, Clark spoke the truth; the fact that McCain was shot down and subsequently held prisoner, and tortured, does NOT mean that McCain is more prepared to be president than anyone else. The zeitgeist says the opposite, and the zeitgeist is wrong. Clark spoke the truth, a truth that needed to be spoken. That Obama is hyperventilating about it is very, very disappointing. To me, Clark's comments were of the sort that I expected Obama to make during this general election cycle. Oh well. Here is a nice mashup of how the whole clusterfuck is going:

Thanks Digby

UPDATE: Here is a great response from Clark himself debunking the notion that he "Swiftboated" McCain. His last line in this video is my favorite...

UPDATE II: Obama makes his statement about the brouhaha:

UPDATE III: I just need to mention the fact that one of our greatest presidents had no military experience, and he got elected 4 times! They even had to amend the constitution so nobody could be president so many times. Oh, and he got elected so many times because he was such a "war" president! The whole I-am-qualified-to-be-POTUS-because-I-was-a-soldier thing just needs to stop. So, thanks FDR, and thanks Wes Clark. Now, back to Rube Goldberg!

North Carolina!

I know there is someone in NC reading this blog. You should say something! My other reader from Berkeley does!

Some fun Neil Young: