This has been a real week of highs and lows for me.
I totally relate to how she feels. The absurdity with which the Administration and her fellow Senators present their agendas and utilize their power is beyond human understanding. But just so we are clear on this point, i provide my top ten list of events over the last seven days that i find the most distressing and in many ways the most damaging for our future.
10: Science magazine reports that the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at twice the pace that was previously found to be unacceptable. At this rate, one of the major chunks of the planet that controls the dispersal of carbon will no longer exist during a time of massive global warming. OOPS!
9: The oceans are warming faster than previously thought and the polar ice masses are shrinking faster and not recovering. The most powerful hurricane ever spawned spun around in the Caribbean for a bit then heads off towards various populations, while massive cyclone flooding thrashes the northeast. But of course this is just part of what is only a blip in the planet's cycle and doesn't mean what we think it means.
8: The US government chooses to drill in the Arctic, the Gulf Coast, the Pacific Coast, the hinterlands, and build enormous refineries all over the country. One of the world's true scientific experts in planetary energy process, from Cal Tech, delivers a lecture at USC in which he shows that if we merely kept the same current pace of fossil fuel use until 2050 ( and not increase it as we seem to be doing) it would take 1000 years to return the greenhouse gas concentrations back to pre-2000 levels. But hey, that isn't now now is it??
7: Congress decides to alleviate financial burdens for corporations and thus frees them from being sued for all manner of issues. Obesity and getting killed by firearms are now private matters of personal responsibility, interestingly enough coinciding with the new law in Florida that allows shooting first, no questions later; and the decision by major fastfood marketeers to put video games in their franchises.
6: The Secretary of State suggests that rather than withdrawing from Iraq (where we have actually increased the number of troops on the ground) we need to think about invading Syria and Iran, take over the whole of the Mid East, and, while we are at it, take back all of our support for a Palestinian state.
5: Congress launches its own pre-emptive strike on the environment by lifting the regulations on the toxicity of the Gulf Coast, driling in Alaska, opening more public and wilderness lands to mineral and fossil fuel exploration and financing all this with tax payer money--but not of course from the richest people--as subsidies for the energy corporations who are at this time acquiring all time record profits.
4: The corruption at every level of leadership in the US government is so rampant and so blatant that the GOP talking points for the week, in support of not threatening legal action against the most corrupt, are filled with tales of how it is just simply business as usual. And why not present it that way, because they are so afraid of losing their control of the economy, and revealing that they have off-shored and outsourced the mass of liquid assets they have been greedily acquiring from tax cuts, price gouging, no-bid contracts for their friends, and just plain outright theft in Iraq.
3: The nominee for the SCOTUS submits responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee questions that are so grossly inappropriate, inane, wrong, and incomplete that even the GOP Senators are flabbergasted by her idiocy. It becomes clear she doesn't know much about constitutional law, doesn't care about the process, is completely beholden to her boss, and is the superior stealth appointment for corporate bidding and social conservative attacks on the remaining social institutions left to all of us.
2: The pResident seems to be incapable of functioning at all in public anymore. He has relegated his duties to various TV producers within his bubble, to facilitate photo-ops and other staged events in hopes that he can successfully hide from the nightmare that five years of his administration has wrought on this country. Caught staging a mini-press conference, the WH simply ignored any acknowledgement of the event and quickly sought to distance itself from any connection with the people involved. Likewise it is doing its best to overlook the behavior of the highest officials within it, hoping to avoid letting the public know that should Cheney and all the hierarchy have to leave, that Bush is completely and utterly incapable of handling the country.
1: The MSM is saturated with horror, thriller, violent, supernatural, alien, mutation invasions of all sorts as we approach halloween. This can only mean that reality is so much scarier and more dangerous; the need to fictionalize so much at this point reveals the inherent weakness of thought and substance that once stood for rational public thinking. ID is on trial and the fundies are screaming about this or that piece of faithbased reality, and the nation's economy goes into the sewer system.. and the people get schlock visions as fodder in hopes they ignore what is really happening to them. should anyone of a dozen natural disasters strike soon, the need for the police state will be made manifest through the complete inability of the government to function to save lives and help people.
