The San Bruno Catastrophe Goes to the State of Infra-Structure in America

Why I Don't Listen to Obama Any More (Part II)

News Item: Tony Blair

Culled from various headlines:

Blair cancels book launch party over protest fears

London, England (CNN) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair canceled a launch party for his new book in London Wednesday because of planned protests, his spokesman said.

Of his second London cancellation this week, the unnamed Spokesman said, Blair

did not want to put guests through the unpleasant consequences of the actions of demonstrators of what should have been an enjoyable evening for friends and family .... The party has been postponed indefinitely, (and) will be held sometime in the future. Guests were informed yesterday evening.

Blair's decision came after police made some arrests Saturday in Dublin, Ireland, where he was due for another signing event for his book. A crowd of people, some of them anti-war demonstrators, had gathered outside the shop to protest Blair's role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there were unconfirmed reports of eggs and shoes being thrown at Blair.

Blair said in the statement Monday,

I very much enjoyed meeting my readers in Dublin and was looking forward to doing the same in London. However, I have decided not to go ahead with the signing as I don't want the public to be inconvenienced by the inevitable hassle caused by protesters.

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop The War Coalition, which had planned the protest, said

it was a big victory ..... It shows he is running scared. The people who say we should not protest are denying us the right to persist in asking questions about the war and denying the rights of Iraqis who are still suffering because of Blair's policies.

He will not now attend a function at the Tate Modern gallery in London later, having already pulled out of another book signing in the city.

Paul Conrad, R.I.P.

Obama: Don't Turn the Page Until You Have Read (Out Loud) What's Written On It

90 months of war in Iraq come to an end for America? Maybe. Just to open the endless occupation to follow? I don't think so!

Let's review the pages Barack Obama wants to turn:

• A Bush-neoCon stampede into war, based upon the mythology that Saddam was tied to al-Qaeda and had a role in 9/11, that he had VX gas, botulism, mustard gas, sarin and anthrax, and was acquiring nuclear weapons.
• An American invasion of nation that did not attack us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us — to strip it of weapons it did not have.
• 4,416 American KIA, 35,000 WIA, more than 25,000 with life-changing injuries and life-long disabilites.
• $700 billion in treasury squandered with the meter still running on funding the 50,000 troops still garrisoned there..
• Estimates - conservative - of Iraqi war dead run from 70,000 to 100,000.

The new myth is that the surge worked. It has not.

• Terrorism has returned.
• Iraq’s casualties are back up to where they were before the U.S. surge.
• Electricity is off much of the time.
• Six months after elections, no government exists; no political consensus has emerged. Iraqi statistics dead, wounded, widowed, orphaned, homeless and exiled continue unabated.

But Purge Success is the myth that Obama wants to perserve. That's why he is in a hurry to turn the page. He is a major stakeholder in mythogizing a surge for Afghanistan.

Why I Don't Listen to Obama Any More

Whatever would be the point?

America's Summer of Hysteria

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times op-ed page has an article written by Tim Rutten who has just returned from a month spent out of our country. Rutten lists but a few of the many conspiracy theories and regressive policy proposals now openly promulgated not just by right-wing "fringe figures", but by mainstream Republican't congressional and gubernatorial candidates, and by current Republican't office-holders. I strongly encourage your readers to read the complete piece on A25. Here are parts of Rutten's column:

..... it's hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates?

For example ... a Tennessee congressman who opposes the recently enacted healthcare reforms and is running for governor, told an interviewer that he hopes "the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government."

... GOP candidates for statewide office in various Midwestern and Southern states are promoting the notion that states ought not to enforce any federal law not approved by at least two-thirds of their state legislators. It's as if John C. Calhoun suddenly had risen from the grave and had a talk show

In Nevada, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate has discussed abolishing Social Security and darkly mused over whether Washington's alleged overreaching may require a "2nd Amendment solution." That means guns, a prospect that could be facilitated in one state after another by an outfit called Appleseed, which holds weekend seminars whose participants are given a mix of Minuteman pseudo-history and instruction on marksmanship.

... attempts to repeal sections of the Constitution continue apace. The so-called 10thers, who want to roll back 100 years of federal law and regulation in order to assert rights under the 10th Amendment, are almost unremarkably ubiquitous in the GOP.

Candidates across the country pining for "tea party" support have endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end popular election of U.S. Senators and return their selection to state legislatures, a step that theoretically would "restore states' rights."

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. . . . speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot.

Nothing quite tops the anti-Muslim hysteria, which has led people to organize opposition to the construction of new mosques in places from Lower Manhattan to Temecula. One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee ... argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims.

Some inclined toward therapeutic explanations of history might attribute all this to a kind of collective post-traumatic stress syndrome engendered by the lingering, still-unresolved aftermath of the horrific events of 9/11. Others might point to the dislocating effect of electing an African American president to govern a society in which strong currents of racial anxiety still eddy beneath the surface of everyday life. Perhaps both forces act in unseen concert.

And, Rutten concludes:

Back in the early 1970s — an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign — social scientists here and in Britain coined the term "moral panic" to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic's spread as "moral entrepreneurs" — a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the "tea party" and its attendant movements.

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur's — or should we say provocateur's — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

He "nailed it", noting that today's "politics and civic conversation" is pure "hysterical moral panic" - a virulent virus that is threatening to destroy our cherished political system.

How do we fight such an out-of-control mortal virus? How do we inoculate those of our citizenry whose immune systems are engaged in fighting off this new and deadly plague?