A Giant Comes to Fresno

Even though she towered over me, I mean that Elizabeth Kucinich was a giant in terms of her humanity as she talked about the desire that she shares with her husband to make the U.S. a county that again is viewed as caring about the downtrodden and oppressed wherever they may be. In just the few moments she had to speak at the Reedley Peace Center last night, she spoke elequently about the need for universal health coverage in America, the need to extract ourselves from NAFTA and the WTO so as to promote fair trade rather than free trade, and the sadness they experienced when viewing the graves of Palestinian victims of Israeli bombing which the U.S. supported.
It is just too bad that their campaign is so quixotic as Dennis remains mired in the cesspool of the other Democratic contenders who are all basically Republican-lite.

Latest Example of Hillary as Republican Lite

Here is yet another reason I have absolutely no intention of voting for this woman. She has done far too little to try and stop war funding and now she indicates that Colin Powell, after all his lying, is her idea of a good emissary for our country.

Hillary Clinton is now hinting that she'll appoint Colin Powell to help restore our standing in the world.
I know we're all supposed to like Powell because, without ever saying so, he hinted, that maybe, just maybe, when he was helping to sell the world on the Iraq War and fool Hillary Clinton about those weapons that didn't exist, he had some qualms about what he was doing, and much later, concluded that he'd played a critical role in engineering one of the greatest foreign policy disasters of all time. He's never said so, but occasionally he blinks twice when you bring this up, and so you can sort of tell that he's regretful, unless he just had something in his eye and was trying to get it out.
But you know what? Bringing back key members of the Bush foreign policy team probably won't restore our standing in the world. It's the sort of thing the Washington Post editorial board likes, but little more. And it is, definitionally, the old politics. Powell is an old politician, and all of his fine theories and international triumphs date to the Cold War era. This isn't the sort of thinking that will push us forward, not in the least.

Better See the Polar Ice Caps While You Still Can

And the beat goes on.....

The Northern Hemisphere is the warmest this year since record-keeping started 127 years ago, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
Temperatures for January through October averaged 1.3 degrees above the norm. If the trend continues, the year could break the record for the warmest set in 2005.
The Southern Hemisphere is its ninth-warmest since record-keeping began, the center said. Worldwide, this is the third-warmest year through October.
The USA has also seen warmer temperatures recently: The period from January to October was the seventh-warmest since records began in 1895, according to the national data center. The warmest for that period was in 2000; the second-warmest was in 1934.
The only month cooler than average was February, while seven months were described as "much above average." Temperatures in March and August were the second-warmest recorded for those months.

Department of Homeland Fear Is At It Again

Continuing our slide into a fascist state.....

The Department of Homeland Security is asking firefighters to snoop around in homes they're called to for emergencies. The DHS likes the idea because firefighters aren't bound by pesky warrants and probable cause and can therefore report on suspicious material like blueprints, anti-American literature, and potential bomb-making materials (e.g., the bedrooms of every friend I had, circa 1985). Firefighters are just the latest legion of potential snoops the DHS is leaning on -- they've also asked meter-readers to peer into our windows and sheds to find evidence of bad-guy-ery. This stuff doesn't work and won't work: amateur pecksniffs snitching on their neighbors just flood cops with bad intel, and turn the country into East Germany, a land where everyone is on alert lest they say the wrong thing and get turned in to the secret police.