tom_thinks

Now you can have the power to turn off any television set you encounter. Tired of obnoxious news commentators on the tv in your breakroom? Tired of all the televisions at the bar or the restaurant you're eating at? Just turn it off. Check out TV-B-Gone its only 15 bucks and fits on your keychain, so you can always be ready to free some minds.

A great Thanksgiving read:

In today's American supermarket, there are no seasons, no limits. The world's harvests and manufactured meals are at your fingertips. The supermarket appears to symbolize the best of democratic capitalism, offering consumer choice and a largess born of amazing productivity. But how does all this food actually get here? Is it really as cheap and convenient as it seems?

In fact, this veneer of epicurean egalitarianism conceals a less glamorous set of realities. Our most basic necessity has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic and environmental epidemics - pesticide-laminated harvests, labor abuse, treacherous science, and, at the reins, a few increasingly monopolistic corporations controlling nearly every aspect of human sustenance. The way we make, market and eat food today creates rampant illness, hunger, poverty, community disintegration and ecological decay - and even threatens our future food supply.

Its doubtful he'll do it but why not take a moment and send a quick note to your rep urging them to call for his resignation. (from Public Citizen)

Washington -- House Republicans adopted a rule change Wednesday that would allow their powerful majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, to keep his post if he is indicted on state corruption charges stemming from a fund-raising scandal that has already involved three of his associates.

How did your villanous republican representative vote on the Delay Rule? Talking Points Memo is leading a charge to find out which members of congress supported the rule in a sneaky voice vote.

Josh Marshall gets it:

It's just time for some of these folks to go -- not because they're bad people (though more than a few are opportunists and backstabbers) or they lack expertise but because the party needs some new blood. The lessons of the 70s and 80s or even the 90s are not directly relevant to today.

The Washington Post has created an online calendar of U.S. casualites in Iraq. Every soldier that has been killed is included and so is their photograph if availible. Also included is the soldier's hometown and how they died. This is a site that everyone should see. Spread the word. If only they had such a list for the Iraqis that have died from this war. Do we even know how many have died? Don't they each have names and faces too?

So I'm reading this great book, Don't think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives by George Lakoff, its an abbreviated version of his book Moral Politics. Basically the book is about the two main competing world views that drive politics in this country. Lakoff brings it all back to idealized family structures which mold our thinking. Lakoff is a cognitive psychologist you might have heard on Air America or read about on the internet. He's becoming quite popular. He should also be essential reading for all of us. Rarely would I recommend a book to this extreme, but understanding what is up with all those "red-states" is crucial if we care about what happens in our country.
Much of what Lakoff discusses you might already have a bit of knowledge about. For instance when Republicans coined the term "tax relief." We're all familiar with euphemisms but this verbal strategy goes beyond that. The term "tax relief" creates a frame, a context which the debate takes place in. In order for there to be relief, there are many other assumptions made such as: there is a burden to be relieved from; a person who brings relief is a hero; and a person who opposes relief is part of the burden. This is just one example, but Lakoff's analysis is much more in depth and far-reaching.
Language is a powerful tool and the Republicans have spent a great deal of time in crafting the language they use. Its time for us to do the same. We can no longer accept their terms, like "partial birth abortion," "tax relief," "the death tax," or perhaps worst of all "the war on terror." Each time we use one of these terms we set ourselves up to lose the argument. Our facts simply are not powerful enough to penetrate the frames set up in the minds of conservatives. Republicans know this and smile happily whenever a Democrat uses one of their terms.
So rush to the stores and buy a copy, then buy 10 more for all the upset Democrats you know. Now is the time to re-frame the debate, not 2008.

The age of Ashcroft has come to an end. When I first heard he was resigning, I, like many other people breathed a sigh of relief. But immediatly following that sigh, I was worried about what monster Bush would pick to fill the job. Not one to dissappoint fans of the apocolypse Bush has chosen Alberto Gonzales. Yes, that Alberto Gonzales The Torture Guy:

The president is putting his own counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wrote the famous memo defending torture, in charge of America's civil liberties. Torture Guy, who blithely threw off 75 years of international law and set the stage for the grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib and dubious detentions at Guantánamo, seems to have a good grasp of what's just. No doubt we'll soon learn what other protections, besides the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution, Gonzales finds "quaint" and "obsolete."

So welcome to the nighmare of a second Bush term where torture is the norm and the government is above the law. Are you Red-Staters happy now? Theres nothing good to come from this that I can see. Maybe the uproar over this guy's record will be so great that the torture scandals get more attention.... wait what was I thinking, this is the same country that just invited Bush back to the White House. Get ready for more of this crap from Bush and pray for the health and longevity of the Supreme Court.


What's with the tortured logic?

Many of you may have heard of Act For Change, they are associated with Working Assets (that group that provides long distance telephones and other things and shares profits with progressive groups). Act For Change has started a letter writng campaign calling for an investigation of electronic voting machines. Join the call here. Update MoveOn.org has also initiated a campaign to investigate the vote, join them here.

The past few weeks have been a bit of a blur. Up until the "election" on Tuesday, I was pretty busy working with MoveOn PAC to get out the vote for Kerry, so I hadn't been reading much and definitly not blogging.Now I've piled up a lot of things I wanted to blog about, so I'll try to keep it brief.
Working with all the other volunteers here in Gainesville and our great organizers (Megan and Mark) was a great experience. It was truly inspiring to see so many people taking action to make the world a better place.
But all that work seemed to matter very little Wednesday afternoon when John Kerry conceded. I was pissed, not only did my state (FL) go to the Republicans, but then John Kerry has the nerve to quit before every last vote had been counted! He then went on to suggest building a bridge to the Republicans rather then insisting that "President" Bush was still just as bad as he had sad just yesterday. I'm still pissed, even more so now that there seems to be more evidence of election fraud (read this, this and this.) I thought we were gonna fight to the last vote, not give up in a few hours. I think that was an even bigger dissappointment then the fact that so many people were motivated to vote out of prejudice against gays and lesbians. Record numbers of people came to the polls not because they cared about the war in Iraq, the growing deficit or health care but because the idea of two men getting married offends their sense of identity. I had thought America had grown up more than that.
So after all that dissappointment I was pretty depressed. At 7pm Wed. I went to our monthly Democracy For America Meetup and that all changed. I was reminded of the great people that worked so hard on this election and their passion to see real change in this country. I was reminded that even with a Kerry victory we still would have had to fight for real progress. I was reminded that we've been defeated before and we've come a long way since then. Our meeting had almost a record turnout. Almost everyone had an idea on what to do next. The same enthusiasm we had before the election came back into us all almost instantly and now we're back.
To those of you feeling down and depressed you should get up and get out there. Think about what you did or didn't do to influence this election. What will you do about it next time? If we want to see this country change direction and take the reigns of power back from the religous right, the corporations and war mongers we don't have a day to waste. I highly recommend getting involved with Democracy For America in your area (Find a meetup) There are many other groups working towards the same goals and a bunch of them are in my sidebar.
In related news, another loss for the Democrats has got to be a signal to the top dogs in the party that they are doing something wrong. The media and of course the Republican elements inside the party (DLC) are all probably thinking of how the party can become more like the NeoCons, but we can't let them do that. We need to take this opportunity to shift the party to real progressive values and take this party off the defensive. I personally beleive that a big factor in Kerry's loss was his percieved indecisveness compared to Bush's resoluteness. While many of us realize that the world is very complex and does indeed require a great amount of studying and measuring, we can also realize that middle of the road "moderate" decisions made for political reasons are not going to inspire voters. Was anyone happy with John Kerry's "safe" position on Iraq or Gay Marraige? We need to start electing leaders with real progressive values that aren't afraid to say what they stand for. Percieved resoluteness need not work only for the Right.
Ok, I'm done, thanks for tuning in. We've all got a lot to do, a lot more than we thought, so let's get to it. Oh and I've started a new blog for Democracy For America in Gainesville, if you're interested.