Rewarding the Turncoat

ARGH!!! So now that Democrats will in January have the White House, the House and the Senate, Joe Lieberman (Lieberman for Lieberman Party-CT) gets to keep his Senate committee chairmanships as if he were a Democrat. This after Lieberman campaigned for Republican John McCain and several other Republicans for Senate.

Now, far be it from me to try and define regular, ordinary words for politicians, who don’t seem to understand the meaning of regular, ordinary words. Words like “Party” and “Loyalty” and “Procedure” and “Majority” and “Governance.” Politicians don’t want to know these things, preferring instead to make things up as they go along.

During these past couple of years when Democrats didn’t have an actual majority in the Senate, Lieberman has been allowed to be a Republican mole in the Democratic Caucus, reporting to his puppeteers and financial backers every move planned by members. He has been allowed to hold several committee chairs, including Homeland Security, where he has steadfastly refused to enforce subpoenas, investigate illegalities of the Bush administration, or even to investigate FEMA’s horrendously inadequate response to hurricane Katrina.

So Lieberman has been rewarded with a pass from the now-actual Democratic majority, encouraged to do more of the same obstructionism that has made him so immensely unpopular outside of Israel.

One day soon, as the public wakes up to realize the Republicans are now a fringe party of right-wing wackos and religious nuts and the Democrats are what the Republicans were before they purged everyone with any sense, there will be a new Progressive Party for the “rest of us.” And it will, within 8-12 years, be electing more than a handful of representatives and Senators, way more than the fringe Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Communists and Nazis can ever manage.

Sigh. The more things “Change,” it seems, the more they remain the same.

Filed under Appointees, Caucuses, Coalitions, Democrats, Hypocrisy, Outrage | Comment (0)

A Salute to All Our Veterans

A new day has dawned, we have a new President-elect coming into office on January 20, and a couple of too-long ongoing wars in far places to bring to as honorable an end as possible, as soon as possible. With a hearty shout-out to all our veterans, especially those with whom we served all those many decades ago. Here’s hoping the new day will bring about the ‘right thing’, despite the distractions of economic meltdown. Real help for the tens of thousands of returning veterans from our current wars who have suffered grievous injuries. Schooling and re-training for all. Treatment for PTSD, even for the oldest veterans among us, war does terrible things to people’s minds.

So, in honor of our nation’s brave veterans, what follows is an edited repost of my experience the first time I visited ‘The Wall’ – the Vietnam War Memorial. It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

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An Old-Fashioned Oklahoma Election

Three of the four registered voters in my household voted more than two weeks ago, just 4 days into the early voting period here in North Carolina. That’s me, my hubby and our grandson who turned 18 in May. Daughter is voting today, mostly because she has this ‘thing’ about voting on election day. Then she and grandson are headed for Asheville to tend lines (I doubt there will be one here, more than three quarters of this end of the county early voted), then to an election party expected to go late into the night. Hubby and I will be off to our county seat, where we’ve been recruited as “Poll Ninjas” by the Dem chair, there to assist in case anybody is challenged, lawyers standing by.

Paper ballots again this year too, since Diebold got kicked out of the state after throwing the 2004 election into utter turmoil (it took months to sort out some state races, so many split-ticket votes had been compromised! Filling in the dot isn’t that hard. Counting them isn’t that hard either.

But it’ll be morning before we know the actual results, so I thought I’d offer a true story about voting out in “real America”…

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Filed under Elections, History, Humor, Media | Comment (0)