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Campaign sketch book

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Antidotes to complacency: four reasons to act

It’s tempting to begin taking the likelihood of Obama’s victory just a bit for granted. The polls look good. McCain and Palin are flailing. Ted Stevens is headed for jail and the Republicans have started their blame game.

But it’s dangerous to assume that the election is over, or to settle for a narrow margin. Here are four reasons to keep doing all we can to keep working (and get our procrastinating friends to finally donate and volunteer) so we can create broadest possible mandate for Obama and his Democratic allies.

Vigilante pals of Palin’s not so distant past

In the last weeks of their struggling national campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket and the Republican National Committee have chosen to attack Barack Obama for his rare and insignificant contact with Bill Ayres, a former Weather Underground member charged but not convicted of bombing federal targets at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War four decades ago.

Palin has led the charge that Obama "pals around" with terrorists, based solely on the very limited contact he had with Ayres decades after his Weather Underground days. Some of that contact is due to education projects funded by Walter Annenberg, who is also donating to the McCain campaign. Annenberg has not been accused of funding terrorism by McCain or Palin.

Sarah Palin and the new Apostolic reformation

Sarah Palin has been associated all her adult life with churches and political groups that are way out of the theological and political mainstream. Her extreme policy views as Governor reflect this background and raise questions about what kind of vice president John McCain seeks to have voters endorse.

It has been widely reported that McCain barely knew Palin and his team never fully evaluated her to determine her fitness to be vice president.

A recent report in The Anchorage Daily News stated that evangelist Franklin Graham made the Palin connection to McCain, not Republican professionals. Graham, the once-estranged son of Billy Graham, has strong ties to the various strands of the religious rightwing. He met with McCain on June 30 at his headquarters in Boone, North Carolina, after which Graham issued a statement praising McCain’s "personal faith" and prayed for "God’s will to be done in this upcoming election."

Needed for this election: a great rejection

It could be a start -- a clear national rejection of the extreme right-wing brew that has saturated the executive branch for nearly eight years.

What’s emerging for Election Day is a common front against the dumbed-down demagoguery that’s now epitomized and led by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

A large margin of victory over the McCain-Palin ticket, repudiating what it stands for, is needed -- and absolutely insufficient. It’s a start along a long uphill climb to get this country onto a course that approximates sanity.

McCain’s only real hope is to achieve the election equivalent of drawing an inside straight -- capturing the electoral votes of some key swing states by slim margins. His small window of possible victory is near closing. Progressives should help to slam it shut.

Like it or not, the scale of a national rejection of McCain-Palin and Bush would be measured -- in terms of state power and perceived political momentum -- along a continuum that ranges from squeaker to landslide. It’s in the interests of progressives for the scale to be closer to landslide than squeaker.

‘Sticking it to the Man,’ 21st Century style...

“Well, as usual, you people have everything all upside down and turned around and back to front.”
–Mel Gibson as Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon 2

As a species of beings that reflexively and unequivocally identifies itself as “superior,” we human animals have taken self-deception to a level of inimitable brilliance. And we Americans who have self-servingly cast ourselves in the role of moral beacon to the world (while engaging in industrialized wholesale violence against humans, animals, and the Earth on a breath-taking scale) are the living embodiments of the word hypocrisy.

The racist succumbs

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World food day: global crises’ double standards

The 25th annual World Food Day, marked on 16 October, was an occasion whose arrival and passing received little media attention or governmental fanfare. Evidently, much of the world media and governments are consumed with an economic crisis of epic proportions, which is perceived in the US as the worst such upheaval since the Great Depression. In the rest of the world, it's depicted as the worst economic crisis in recent memory or, as the BBC termed it, "the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets."

There is hardly any disagreement that Wall Street's woes are manmade. Regardless of what terminology one wishes to apply (miscalculations, greed, or wholesale failure in the US capitalist system, rooted in the economic philosophies of Milton Friedman and his ultra laissez- faire approach), the fact is the US economic crisis is not a fleeting phenomenon and no quick fixes can provide a magic remedy.

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Making a green revolution

“Just because we can’t sell shares in nature doesn’t mean it has no value.” Thomas Friedman

“Big Oil and King Coal may have armies of lobbyists, lawyers, foreign diplomats and even military advisors, but Americans know that we can do better for ourselves, our country, and our fellow humans. As the writer Arundhati Roy says, ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’” Michael Brune

“Reversing global warming will require a World War II level of mobilization. It is the work of tens of millions, not hundreds of thousands. Such a shift will require massive support at the social, cultural, and political levels. And in an increasingly nonwhite nation, that means enlisting the passionate involvement of millions of so-called minorities—as consumers, inventors, entrepreneurs, investors, buzz marketers, voters, and workers.” Van Jones

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