Victory is sweet

Jill wins!

Won't spend a day in jail

Dubya casually admitted that he's guilty of war crimes, and that he'd do it again. Never mind that. The real outrage comes from Paul McCartney.

Wait, let's send this guy to jail instead.

Election time again

Don't forget to vote on Tuesday if you haven't already sent your ballot in! For those of you who haven't made your minds up, let me offer my recommendations on the ballot measures and selected races.

First and foremost for Sonoma County residents, vote Jill Ravitch for DA! The DA's office is currently wallowing in misery under a graduate from the Captain Queeg School of Management. Jill will have the prosecutors loving their jobs again, benefiting us in the process.

Prop. 13 - Yes. Though the name Proposition 13 bring a gnashing of the teeth, this one fixes some confusion regarding the reassessment of seismic upgrades.

Prop. 14 - No. Takes away the ability of parties to choose their own candidates, lessen third-party participation and unfairly decreases the power of progressives.

Prop. 15 - Yes. It's a step in the direction of taking money out of politics. We don't need eMegs and iCarlys buying elections.

Prop. 16 - No. PG&E's plan to protect their monopoly. Will take power away from voters.

Prop. 17 - No. Mercury wants to gouge more money out of you and is using this as a tool to do so.

Whatever you think, vote! Remember what Frank Zappa said, "if you don't vote, don't bitch."

Jill Ravitch makes her case

LeeJ and I are volunteering for Jill Ravitch's campaign for Sonoma County DA. Here's some reasons why:

Now that Stephan Passalacqua is taking a page out of Karl Rove's book to keep his position and losing support over it, the choice is clear. We need somebody who cares more about the job than the career.

Spill, Baby, Spill!

How's that oily, drilly, thing workin' for ya? Currently spewing oil at the rate of four Exxon Valdez's every week, our newest poster child for corporate greed is threatening the Gulf coast with an environmental and economic disaster. Not surprisingly the greasy fingerprints of Halliburton are all over this, and there's more to come.

Just another Republican atrocity that'll be blamed on the Democrats.

Almost forgot, picture credit: NASA/Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system. That's right, you can already see this from space.

Liars being honest for once

A cluster of admissions today gives us a glimpse of how much we can trust our leaders:

Republican congressmen say, "everybody thinks that Iraq was a mistake." I guess you were too busy strutting and chest-bumping to let us know that.

John McCain says he never considered himself a maverick. Sheesh, after building an entire persona around that?

Our military brass covered up two sickening incidents, just now admitting the cold-blooded murder of two pregnant women and a teenage girl, among others, then attempting to hide the evidence in an especially grisly way. The other is a 2007 video posted by Wikileaks from a helicopter gunship slaughtering 12 people, including two Reuters employees, with the crew celebrating.

Every now and then the mask slips and we see the rot underneath.

Finally done

Health insurance reform legislation passed in the Senate today after more than a year of wrangling between progressive and corporate Democrats, and an all-out effort among Republicans to derail it. The Teabaggers and other right-wingers throughout the country reacted with their usual grace and sophistication: racist and homophobic slurs, vandalism, threats, envelopes of white powder in the mail and other charming instances of the spittle-flecked, purple-faced rage that spills over whenever a small, long-overdue step towards social justice is achieved.

The ignorance and incoherence of the Right was in full flower during the past year, what with cries of "keep government hands off my medicare," attacks on medical patients and children, and the comparison of Obama to Hitler in the apparent belief that attempting to solve the healthcare crisis is equivalent to exterminating millions of people.

The spectacle was similar to school integration in the 60's when the desire of dark-skinned children to have a better educations was a crime worthy of capital punishment by vigilante mobs.

It would have been nice to have a single-payer system or at least a public option for all this effort, but when you want something more than your opponent does, you are at a disadvantage in the negotiation process.

There is good to be had out of this, with the closing of the Medicare donut hole, the ending of discrimination against pre-existing conditions, ending limits on coverage, and of course, extending coverage to more people. I also hope that this ordeal has finally convinced Democrats that Republicans care about nothing but regaining power and will never negotiate in good faith.