Henry VIII must be rolling in his grave

In CNN.com - "Irony of prince's wedding delay" - Apr 5, 2005 - Martin Kettle is quoted as saying,

"Until very recently the mere idea that a prime minister or the head of the Anglican church might have any kind of dialogue with Rome -- never mind rearrange the next Protestant King's wedding to suit the cardinals in Rome -- would have been regarded as close to treason."

Or does this really show us more about the current culture of global celebrity scheduling conflicts than about the titanic clash of religious cultures and the nation-states of "old Europe"? This is not necessarily a "liberal" issue, but we can't resist it when the mainstream media starts using the word "Irony" in its headlines. It sounds as practical as the NBA avoiding a television conflict with the Super Bowl. But on a more personal level, I think I have some idea how most future wives would react to their "big day" being moved for "something more important" -- maybe not the best way to start a marriage. Though it could be the premise for the pilot of a great royal sit-com -- to quote Groucho or Karl Marx (paraphrasing Hegel),

all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. [... ] the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Which would apply perfectly to the George Bushes too, if the first George Bush weren't also a farce (OK, now it's a liberal issue fit for this blog).

- true blue liberal

Dump DeLay ? - A link to TrueMajority's appeal

Dump DeLay - TrueMajority

Look, we all know he's a scumbag, but do we really want the Republican Congress to boot him now? It's a tactical question. They're going to push the same agenda with or without Tom DeLay, so aren't we better off with that agenda having a hateful face as we get closer to the midterm elections of 2006?

The Republican National Convention of 2004 showed us that they will always push their last remaining moderates to the front of the stage (Rudy, Ahnold, Laura, Mike Bloomberg & George Pataki) when it's time for them to win an election. Aren't we better off if the Republicans are seen by the electorate as the party of the men behind the curtain -- the party of Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney and Jerry Falwell?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

precycling, mainstream media & the internet - - True Blue Liberal turns Green in April for Earth Day (1)

Here's a 1994 article from Environmental Defense entitled "Precycling: How to Shop for Future Generations". Precycling is an awkward term in need of a philologist, but it's an interesting concept as True Blue Liberal starts the run-up to Earth Day 2005 on April 22. Note their suggestions on how to reduce the amount of waste you create by buying in bulk and cutting down on packaging. How about cutting the amount of newsprint that you have to recycle by 80, 90, or 100%? How many of us are doing it already by reading our New York Times and Washington Post and LeMonde and Libération and LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle and Asbury Park Press and Guardian and Village Voice just by clicking a link or a bookmark? There's no need for us to feel guilty about recycling advertising circulars and sports sections and classifieds and stock market tables that we don't even glance at. And we're giving nothing up in the bargain (except for maybe those full-page underwear ads in the Times), and getting a much wider selection of the worldwide mainstream media than the small sample that used to be tossed toward the puddle in front of our front door. This month, let's all think about every purchase we make to reduce the waste our economic system depends on, but especially paper products like newspapers and magazines that we might be able to read just as easily on the computers that we're already staring at.

More suggestions for the month are welcome.

so, what are YOU driving? the Times examines blue cars and red trucks in today's issue

Click Here: The New York Times
> Automobiles
> Driving: Your Car: Politics on Wheels

So, what are you driving? I'm in a VW Golf, which may tell you a little something about my politics even before you see the Kerry bumpersticker fading on its back window. This article is interesting not only for the prejudices it confirms about insecure Republican males and their big trucks, and the fact that Democrats are more likely to live in cities where parallel parking spaces favor the nimble and small, but for the surprises:

• There's a whiny country singer with a hit song about what happens when a liberal lady in a minivan makes fun of the patriotic bumper sticker on "The Bumper of my SUV." Boo Hoo Hoo. (Another piece of conservative claptrap about those oppressive liberal elites with all their keying of bush/cheney bumperstickers, spitting on Vietnam veterans, burning of flags, and other [sub]urban legends.)
• "Porsche owners identified themselves as Republican more often than owners of any other cars, with 59 percent calling themselves Republicans, 27 percent Democrats."( I would have thought Hummers would be at LEAST 75 percent Republican. And I used to dream about driving an old 911 Targa.)
• Steve Sailer, "a conservative journalist who has analyzed the red-blue divide" tells us that NASCAR has an American-made requirement (no smart remarks about what might have been if Dale Earnhart had been driving a Volvo, you liberals you!) and that "In truth, a lot of fans would be sore about ending the all-American monopoly. Nascar has become a covert ethnic-pride celebration for red-state whites of Northern European descent."(COVERT? The only things they lack are the conical hats and white sheets.)

So, what are you driving and what are your politics? (Full disclosure: I've owned an MG, 3 VWs, a Fiat, and a Datsun in the thirty years I've been driving and I'm a True Blue Liberal.)

. . . an alternate path toward the extinction of suvs? casting them as anti-american?

So now, according to today's Washington Post article, "An Unlikely Meeting Of the Minds ", it's patriotism that's going to give us fuel-efficient vehicles. Even diminutive right-wing nutjob Gary Bauer has signed on to this new effort! While yesterday I wrote that only ridicule could kill the SUV (rhymes with glove), today it seems like this coalition of strange bedfellows may be pointing to another form of death for those dinosaurs:

"While skeptical about links between autos and global warming, the conservatives have concluded that cutting gasoline consumption is a matter of national security [. . . ]Last week a survey sponsored by the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute in Boston found that two-thirds of Americans feel it is "patriotic" to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle."

And of course the only way to sell anything in today's U. S. of A. is to wrap it in a flag.

True Blue Liberal

Does W use public funds to conduct these anti-SocialSecurity rallies? If so, why is the Republican party allowed to screen access to OUR President?

"Three Were Told to Leave Bush Town Meeting"
(from the washingtonpost.com)

Are these questions too simple? Isn't the President, once elected, a public servant of all the American people? If it's a campaign appearance being paid for by BushCheneyInc., then maybe the political operatives can have some control over the crowd makeup, but if these really are public town meetings to gauge public opinion being paid for with government funds, shouldn't every American be welcomed to hear and question their President unless they're a security threat or the hall is already overcrowded when they arrive? Even if they do happen to have a "no more blood for oil" sticker on the car that carries them there?

"Three Were Told to Leave Bush Town Meeting"
(from the washingtonpost.com)

And if it's a political event rather than a government event, shouldn't it be bankrolled by the investment bankers and stockbrokers who will be the only ones to benefit from the gutting of Social Security rather than by those of us who are being victimized by its demolition? Am I just naïve about the current state of Twenty-First Century American Realpolitik?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

... or is ridicule the best way to neuter america's love for the suv? (and remember that SUV is rhymed with luv just as GOP is rhymed with flop)

Stumbled upon this interesting and heartening bit in Common Dreams today: "Unlikely Bedfellows Lobby Against U.S. Gas-Guzzlers." It's great to see the right-wing security concerns of a Robert McFarlane and friends coinciding with the left's traditional ecological concerns. Of course it makes sense for everyone, and the earth we live on, that -- if we insist on driving private vehicles -- we drive smaller, more-fuel-efficient, less-polluting private vehicles.

Do SUVs have any advantage other than their large profit margins for General Motors and Ford?
Safety? How many people now claim to be driving SUVs only to protect their children from other SUVs that are threatening to tip and roll across the highway toward them. It may be, like the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, a false sense of security, but we love our security blankets as much as Linus loved his.
Space? We have too much shit already. Our houses are too big. Our vehicles are too big. And we've grown fat to fill our spaces. You may not be able to bring home the bargain vats of Spaghettios from Wal-Mart in the trunk of a Mini or a Prius, but that may not be a bad thing. (Tall people have no excuses to drive oversized vehicles either -- I'm 6'3" and the biggest car I ever owned was a 1972 Datsun 510 wagon.)
Style? No. They are boxes.
Speed? No. They are big boxes.
Handling? Ha. Big top-heavy boxes.

As much as people remember the Gas Crisis of the seventies as the sole cause for the temporary death of full-sized sedans and station wagons of that era, I remember another cause -- Ridicule. I was in high school and college at the time, and NO ONE I know would have been caught dead driving a full-size vehicle of ANY kind. If you did, you were old, you were impotent, you were a family man or driving your grandfather's car. Let's make it clear that despite the ads featuring Kayaking and Cliff-Diving Youngsters, that SUVs are cars for soccer moms, that no real man or independent woman would EVER be caught dead driving that symbol of domesticity, whether it has a "Hemi" or not.

Small is beautiful.
Full-Size is for hearses.
True Blue Liberal

"... They can't prosecute the undead for manslaughter, can they?" - Get Your War On discusses talking feeding tubes & zombies & the culture of life

There's more intelligence in these few frames of a comic strip than in all the rants of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Frist and the Bush brothers put together.

An Army of None

or,

What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came?

More excellent news on the recruiting front from Today's Washington Post : " Army Still Behind in Recruiting". No problem. As my sign said in New York on February 15, 2003, "Draft the Bush Twins!"

And here's a relevant quote I ran across in my handwritten journal (from pre-blog days), copied from the new English translation of Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. This is Charlus talking to Marcel about the Great War raging on their doorsteps (p. 105 of the Penguin UK paperback):

<<. . . the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.>>

Imagine, an Army of None,
True Blue Liberal

"Culture of Lifers" Dealing in Death

Just as evil as what the Republican Congress and President are doing to the separation of judicial and legislative powers is their continuing destruction of the meanings of common English words.

Claiming of the title "Culture of Life" by these active defenders of and dealers in death (in Abu Ghraib, Iraqi and Afghan killing fields, and the active death rows throughout the former Confederate States of America) is even worse than their "Clear Skies" for polluters, "Healthy Forests" for clearcutters, "Peace Keepers" for [our] weapons of mass destruction, and Social Security "Reform" for those who would happily return us to the status quo ante FDR. Their contempt for everything, except money and the votes of the gullible, continues to amaze. I can no longer think of a single fucking thing that they could do that would surprise me.

Just wait until they claim that Democrats and Liberals killed Terri Schiavo (it's probably already happening on Fox and Limbaugh, but who has the stomach to check? -- not me).

Meanwhile the school killings (killings of bright young people in non-vegetative states) continue, but none of the Culture of Lifers will ever call for gun control. The hypocrisy is incredible.

True Blue Liberal