Going to Heck in a Handbasket

We don't know yet whether it's heck or hell; guess we'll find out soon enough - but Mukasey was confirmed by the Senate. Although six Democrats voted to confirm, the majority of them did not, because of his equivocal position on the torture issue.

"Democrats said Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to characterize waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, as illegal torture disqualified him from taking over as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

'I am not going to aid and abet the confirmation contortions of this administration,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “I do not vote to allow torture.'"

The article in the New York Times goes on to say that NONE of the Democratic candidates for President who are currently serving in the Senate cast a vote on this issue. According to the Times, "The four Democrats had said they would not support Mr. Mukasey because of his equivocation during the confirmation hearings over whether waterboarding is torture." So why did they somehow manage to avoid casting the votes? I'd like to hear an explanation.

John McCain, who had denounced waterboarding as torture, did not vote either, although he had said last week that he would support the Mukasey nomination. I guess he didn't have the heart to support it enough to vote for it, however.

Moving on...

The New York Times has an excellent editorial about the Employment Nondiscrimination Act that just passed in the House of Representatives, protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in the workplace.

First of all, I'd like to say that the ideal solution would be that NO type of discrimination against any person for any reason should be allowed by our Constitution. That is, or should be, the promise of our country.

Personally I think that promise is in there already; but obviously no one is paying attention to it, and perhaps it isn't specific enough, so an amendment would be needed to enshrine it properly in the Constitution. But given that an Equal Rights Amendment for women has still never been able to pass, it is unlikely that a more all-encompassing amendment would pass either. So the only solution is to ensure these important civil rights by legislation.

Some may ask why we need this law? But according to the Times, "there remain 30 states that have not acted to prevent gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from being denied jobs or promotions simply because of who they are."

Sadly, even the House legislation that passed this week had a group of people removed before passage was ensured: Transgender people. I find this disgraceful, and it is a sad commentary on our elected officials that they can't manage to pass a bill that protects this group as well as gays and lesbians.

However, I always say "The best is the enemy of the good," so, although some gay advocacy groups opposed the final bill because of this omission, I still feel it is important to get this version passed despite this defect. Hopefully, one step at a time, these rights will continue to expand.

It is amazing to me that this country is, at heart, so ignorant and so bigoted, that so many can feel threatened by giving people rights they themselves have without having to even think about them.

Tellingly, only 35 Republicans voted for the House bill. Senator Edward Kennedy is going to introduce the bill in the Senate as the next step.

Naturally, Dubya is threatening to veto the bill. According to the Times editorial, the reasons given are "that it would be too burdensome on businesses and that it would lead to too much litigation" - pitiful excuses for outright bigotry.

Let's hope if he does veto the bill, that the Congress will override the veto. And Bush can go down in history as the Anti-Civil-Rights President.
***

Today's haiku, entitled "Democratic Candidate Lament"

I do hate torture
And can't stand waterboarding
Voting is risky.

Work, School and Blogging

Today was one of those hectic days where I had no opportunity to break up my work day with personal e-mails or phone calls, let alone blogging, as I had back-to-back meetings most of the day. Then this evening I had a class to attend.

I've been taking continuing education courses in historic preservation at Drew University over the past seven years. I received my Certificate in Historic Preservation back in May of 2004 but continue to take additional courses if they offer new ones that interest me. My main purpose in taking these courses is to use the information to help me in preserving historic buildings in my area. However, I sometimes daydream about getting involved in this field full time when I stop working for the Big Corporation.

This particular course was in grant writing, which could come in very handy for a certain project I've been working on. Tonight was the last class, but my project, which is to actually prepare a grant application, isn't due until the 17th. Being a polychrone, I have procrastinated grievously and have not yet actually started working on the project. I hope to get most of it done this weekend.

That said, it is now 11:30 and time is running out to post on November 8th. So I will leave you with another pitiful haiku:

Too many meetings
No time for NaBloPoMo
November is long.

Dona Nobis Pacem

"Give us peace."

Today's the day - it's November 7th, the day of the Blog Blast for Peace, started by Mimi Lenox of Mimi Writes. Be sure to go to her site and read the touching story she has written about her Papa - and read last year's too. Both are wonderful and poignant.

Here is my Peace Globe (on which Mimi kindly inscribed my blog's name as I wasn't able to figure out how to add anything to it!).

Mimi has assembled an amazing number of blogs to participate in this Blog Blast, and it is so encouraging to realize how many people believe in the possibility of peace.

With all of the strife in the world; the selfishness, the greed, the hatred, that exist...we sometimes feel that we can never have peace. But if enough people still believe in it, there is always hope.

Thank you, Mimi, for reminding us of that hope!

Update:

Instead of a haiku today, I thought I'd post this. It is a song we used to sing in Girl Scouts:

Peace I ask of thee, O river -- peace, peace, peace.
When I learn to live serenely cares will cease.
From the hills I gather courage,
Vision of the day to be,
Strength to lead and faith to follow,
All are given unto me.
Peace I ask of thee, O river -- peace, peace, peace.

Election Day!

Election days are always exciting for me. Since I was a small child, my parents kept me involved in the political process. I remember when I was only 6, my mother woke me up in what seemed to me to be the middle of the night - and perhaps it was - so I could hear the election returns coming in on this, the first election that she knew I would remember. To this day I distinctly remember hearing the voice on the radio saying that Kennedy was leading by just 100,000 votes.

I remember having an argument with my friend Sally, whose family were Republicans, during the 1964 election, and telling her that Barry Goldwater "would start World War Three." Mind you, I am sure I did no research of my own to hold this political opinion and was no doubt repeating something I heard my parents say. But my feelings were sincere and my opinion was strong!

Then in 1968 came the tumultuous year that Lyndon Johnson decided not to run, and left the Democratic field wide open. It was the year of McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and ultimately, Hubert Humphrey. I was devastated when Kennedy was shot (I found a whole folder of clippings about his death that I'd compiled back then, when I was cleaning out my mother's house last year). Once the candidate was Humphrey, however, I was a strong supporter. I still was too young to vote, but I did distribute flyers. And I remember how uncertain everything was even the next day. We still weren't sure who had won, until finally the bad news was clear: It was Nixon.

In 1972, the first year I could vote, I was in college in Boston, and cast my first vote for McGovern. Massachusetts was the one state that went for him, so I appreciated the bumper stickers that popped up on Massachusetts cars after Watergate broke, saying "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts."

Since then there have been many more elections; and in the past 10 years I've become involved in local politics; not as a candidate, but as a supporter. I've stuffed envelopes, walked the neighborhood with candidates occasionally, made donations, and made phone calls.

This evening our town's Democratic slate once again swept the election. It is very interesting; when we first moved to this town it was a mainly Republican town. But over the past decade or so, the demographics have changed markedly, and the town has become much more diverse. The population has become younger, and there are many transplanted New Yorkers here now, who all tend to vote Democratic.

So, in celebration of the Democrats, here is today's haiku:

Democratic sweep
All politics is local
We are glad they won.

OK, that was lame. But it's almost midnight and I have to get this posted! NaBloPoMo is becoming stressful!

Using the Internet to Search on Health Issues?

Be careful out there!

Go to my Medicana blog to read more.

Also, in case you didn't already notice, I have a recent post over there on the subject of the latest media frenzy: MRSA.

Oh, and you know what? I am totally counting this toward NaBloPoMo! This is a post, however short!

Today's Haiku:

Today is Monday
I blogged on Medicana
It's all I could do.

Tomorrow is another day!

Now For Something Completely Different

Since DH has uploaded the pictures we took when we were on our recent trip, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit and show you some of the peaceful, picturesque scenery we enjoyed.

Here is the view from in front of our cabin:

This is the cabin we stayed in:

Views of the lake where we stayed:

Foliage in mountains:

Diva chasing her toy into the lake:

...And bringing it back to "Mommy."

Today's Haiku:

Blue sky and blue lake
Fiery leaves in the mountains
Bring peace to my soul.

P.S. I have just discovered that when you start a post, even if you save it as a draft and don't publish it, the date that shows up when you do publish it is the date it was started. So it looks as if I had two posts on Saturday but the Ann Coulter post was actually published on Sunday! Now I just did this post for Monday and instead it's going to look like Sunday so I might as well publish it now. Darn, now I have to write another one for tomorrow! ;-) This NaBloPoMo thing is more complicated than I thought!

Speaking Up

In view of the discussion on the return of Imus to the radio and the many valid comparisons of his brand of hatefulness to the hatefulness of other radio personalities (Limbaugh, Hannity, et al), I thought I'd write today about why it is so important to continue to speak out against these people.

Free speech should never be curtailed. But we must speak out against those whose free speech is akin to shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. They are making intolerant, hateful speech part of our culture. As Tomcat said in his comment on the Imus post, "Bush, the GOP, the neocons and the theocons have made hate mainstream." And this is the real danger of this type of free speech. It makes hate acceptable in our culture.

While we were in the Adirondacks two weekends ago, Leonard Pitts, who writes a syndicated column for the Miami Herald, had a very interesting op-ed piece that was published in the local town newspaper near where we were staying.

His article concerned the remarks Ann Coulter had made about Jews on a recent program:

"Last week, Coulter said that in her perfect America, everyone would be a Christian. She said this to Donny Deutsch, who was hosting her on his CNBC program, The Big Idea. Deutsch, who is Jewish, expressed alarm. Whereupon Coulter told him that Jews simply needed to be ''perfected'' -- i.e., made to accept Jesus as savior. Which is, of course, one of the pillars (along with the slander of Christ's murder) supporting 2,000 years of pogroms, abuse and Holocaust."

Pitts said that many people would be telling him he shouldn't be wasting his time condemning Ann Coulter, and that it would be better to ignore her. But he refuted this idea, saying:

"I suspect the reason some people believe that kind of ignorance is best ignored is that they find it difficult to take it seriously, or to accept that Coulter -- or those who embrace her -- really believes what she says. After all, this is not 1933, not 1948, not 1966. It is two-thousand-by-God-oh-seven, post-Seinfeld, post-Gore-Lieberman, post-Schindler's List. We no longer live in the era when open anti-Semitism could find wide traction. This is a different time.

But time, Martin Luther King once observed, is neutral. Time alone changes nothing. It is people who make change in time. Or not. So you have to wonder if this determined sanguinity in the face of intolerance is not ultimately an act of monumental self-delusion."

Pitts went on to say that in fact, letting remarks like Coulter's pass without protesting them, without shouting out that they are wrong, will just give the impression that this type of hatefulness is acceptable in society.

"While some of us are cheerfully assuring one another that They Don't Really Mean It, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the number of hate groups in this country has risen by a whopping 40 percent in just the last seven years. If you had spent those years, as I have, jousting in print the agents of intolerance, you would not be surprised. It would be all but impossible to quantify, but I've noted a definite spike, not simply in the hatefulness of some people, but in the willingness to speak that hatefulness openly and without shame. What used to be anonymous now comes with a name and address.

Like Coulter, many of those people find intellectual cover under the cloak of conservatism. It is a development that thoughtful conservatives (the very need to use that qualifier makes the case) ought to view with alarm. For all that Colin Powell, J.C. Watts, ...and others have done to posit a friendly new ''big tent'' conservatism, Coulter and others have done even more to drag the movement back toward open intolerance.

That will be read as criticism of conservatism, but I intend a larger point. After all, liberalism has had its own unfortunate extremes -- the drug use of the '60s, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the like. The difference is, say what you will about Michael Moore or Jesse Jackson, they are not pushing back toward that which has been discredited. Coulter is.

And if some of us are laughing that off, not everybody is.

So this is not about bashing conservatives. It is, rather, about challenging them, and all of us. Within living memory, we have seen Jews in boxcars and blacks in trees and silence from those who should have been shouting. They pretended it wasn't happening until it already had.

So, what about Ann Coulter? What about the push-back against diversity, pluralism and tolerance, that she represents? I keep hearing that we should just ignore it.

My point is, that's been tried before. It didn't work."

(emphasis added)

So we must keep protesting when we hear hateful commentary on the air waves. We have to keep pointing out that this type of speech is wrong and is not to be tolerated. We must urge people not to listen to these voices. Our country has free speech. But we are also free to protest what is said.

I'm going to skip the haiku today and instead quote this, by Pastor Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

It's Not Just My Imagination

This fall's weather has been unusually, unseasonably, warm. As this map shows, during the third week of October when we were in the Adirondacks, temperatures were nearly 10 degrees over average. While I was pleased and surprised to be enjoying beautiful fall foliage and 75 degree temperatures on our long weekend, I knew there was something just not quite right about the whole thing.

I look out the window into my back yard and see all the trees here in my neighborhood not only still have leaves, but those leaves are green. The maple tree overhanging our deck looks the same as it did in mid-summer.

When DH and I were married 22 years ago on October 5, 1985, the leaves had turned and were already falling off the trees. One of our wedding pictures shows us in our wedding finery standing next to a maple tree. The tree's leaves were universally yellow and many of them were already on the ground beneath our feet - a full month earlier than today.

When we visited Newfoundland, Canada, two years ago, everywhere we went the people were talking about global warming. One town, Twillingate, is usually a mecca for tourists coming to see the picturesque icebergs floating down from the north; but when we were there, at the height of the iceberg season, there were none. There are many there who depend on the tourism for much of their income, and no one wants to go out on a boat to look at iceburgs when there are no icebergs to be seen, so their livelihoods are suffering. (See below for a magnificent iceberg in the Twillingate area - something we did not see when we were there).











I think nowadays there is no denying that global temperatures are getting warmer. Even the Neocons have to admit this when faced with trends such as these:













But what many of them still deny is the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature change. But this comparison is pretty convincing to me:




















It is true that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. And it's possible this warming trend might have happened anyway and the increase in carbon dioxide in the air is a coincidence.

This site goes into a lot of detail showing that carbon dioxide may not be the sole, or main, cause of the recent warming trends. Apparently there was a similar warm trend back in the Middle Ages, followed by a Little Ice Age, from which we may just be emerging.

But science shows that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could promote warming. And we do have more of it in the atmosphere. And warming is happening. Could it do any harm to try to cut down on it and slow down this trend? Cutting back on fossil fuel consumption can have other benefits besides slowing global warming, such as making us less dependent on countries such as Saudi Arabia, and postponing the inevitable date when we run out of these fuels altogether.

The problem is, businesses don't want to make the investments needed to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions. Those whose political careers are supported by Big Business don't want to offend their supporters.

So unless that changes, prepare for more warm autumns, hotter summers, less snow, fewer polar bears, more floods and dangerous storms, and beachfront property several miles inland.

Hmmm, perhaps our house will become more valuable with a beach in front of it? It might not be all bad.

Today's Haiku:

Maple trees are green
Canada Geese don't migrate
Climate change is real.

More Incivility on the Air - Imus Returns

Today's Star Ledger announced the bad news - Imus is coming back on the radio - and worse yet, he's taking the place of Curtis & Kuby on WABC's 6-10 a.m. morning slot.

For those from other areas who may not be familiar with Imus, he is the radio "shock jock" who was booted off the air for making racist and sexist remarks on his radio show. I said "good riddance" back then and am sorry to see him return to the airwaves.

I am particularly sorry to see him take the place of Curtis & Kuby. As I pointed out in my post from April, their show included both sides of a story, both right and left. And opinions were delivered with civility, and even good humor, on both sides. Sure, sometimes discussion was heated, but it never crossed the line. And most of the issues they talked about were serious subjects discussed with intelligence.

Now WABC will have Imus on instead; and I'm sure he isn't going to tone down his rhetoric one bit. And if calling a bunch of Rutgers women hateful, disrespectful names is an example of his form of discussion, I wouldn't call it intelligent. I suppose he will bring his own audience of fans with him, but WABC has lost this one.

Today's Haiku:

Curtis and Kuby
Now gone but not forgotten
How will I survive?

Market Woes

According to the New York Times, the Stock Market has plunged 300 points this afternoon, "triggered by weak earnings from oil giant Exxon Mobil and concern that Citigroup’s woes may not be over."

The article goes on to say that the worst may be yet to come:

"Investors may also be unnerved by a disappointing batch of economic data released today. Consumer spending began to slow in September, growing 0.3 percent after a 0.5 percent gain in August. Analysts are predicting a weak fourth quarter, and the Commerce Department report may have confirmed fears of a sharp slowdown in spending as energy costs rise and the housing recession continues to worsen.

Meanwhile, manufacturing activity in October recorded its worst month since March, with American companies hurt by a decline in production coupled with a rise in costs. A closely watched manufacturing index dropped to 50.9 from 52 in September..."

This cheery news does nothing to cement my hope of retiring early. And it just goes to show that Bush's policies have not been beneficial to our economy; on the contrary.

So with that, here is my Haiku of the Day:

Stock market falling
Consumer spending slowing
Retirement's a dream.