Cposted at Kos

So, yesterday we heard about a challenge issued by the County 'Young Repubs' to the Dems to field a bowling team for a Big Bro/Sis funder. The idea is you put a team together, get people to pledge and the competition is not the bowling but who raises $$$ for charity. Of course, they didn't contact us directly and only gave us a week to field a team and raise at least $250. Oh, and their age limit for the Young R's is, get ready...40. Plus I'm pretty sure there's really only 4-5 people in their club. So, we weren't even sure if we should bother.....

This is all cut and paste but, as always, it's instructive to see who is the butt of the jokes on late night. No surprise and there are some good ones: Best of starts here:

"When he [President Bush] was in India he saw a woman with the red dot on her head. He thought she had been hunting with Cheney."  
--Bill Maher  

Vice President Cheney has donated two million dollars to the  
cardiovascular center that treats him. Actually it's more of  
an advance than a donation.  
--Conan O'Brien  

President Bush and the Indian prime minister agreed on a  
landmark nuclear energy agreement in which the U.S. would  
share its nuclear know-how and fuel with India. And, in  
exchange, India would take all our jobs."  
--Tina Fey

cross posted at Kos

I don't have all the story but Justice O'Connor has BLASTED the Republicans for their partisan attacks on the courts. She stated (paraphrase) that partisan attacks on the courts for political purposes must stop. She included references to cutting a court's budget, intimidation, and poisioning the public against the judicial system. Wow! Then she said something off the charts...

I think this diary has been brewing for a while. For whatever reason, feels like it's time to let it fly. Maybe it's the incessant drumbeat of Dems don't have their act together, the constant back seat driving about how the DNC is inept, those Washington Dems can't get their act together, the candidates for fill in the blank of a congressional or statewide office are not good enough and so forth.

My theory is that national is only as good as local. Throw a pepple in still water and watch the ripples. It's not a charismatic leader at the national level that will take back the country to its principles, it's hundreds of local leaders. I'll offer proof below

Well, according to Reuters, BP, aka British Petroleum, or as their ads say, Beyond Petroleum,  plans to double its investment in greener energy sources over the next three years, in reaction to soaring demand for low carbon energy.
Really, a big oil company going alternative? Is it possible? Is it serious or greenwashing?

This is the concluding portion of my recent trip to Panama with Sustainable Harvest.  I've posted a diary a week if you want to see the others. So far we've visited and worked on several farms, working with the farmers and their families. SHI's goal is to work with farmers by funding local extension agents and materials showing them sustainable, organic agriculture practices. This way both the environment and their standard of living are raised. On with the trip.  

The next day is a boat excursion across another of the large lakes made by the construction of the Canal.  This is a gathering of several communities who have been working with SHI for around 5 years. They live on a peninsula in a watershed with no road access. Everything comes in by small boats. The community we visited has given several `agri-eco tours' and receives support from more than one organization although our work through the extension agent makes the biggest difference. The location is beautiful and the farms are more advanced. They have rice paddies, vegetable gardens, the root crops, some fruit, even some compost worm bins, and the people even look better off and healthier. Like, they have more than half their teeth. It's still poverty and exisiting at a bare existence. I get to play soccer with some of the kids and they love that. An 8 year old nutmegs me. I don't love that. Because they have some familiarity with groups coming through this is the first time I get the sense of a dog and pony show but it's clear they appreciate the support, especially of Eric, the extension agent who lives in one of the communities. There is a woman with an exquisite face. Not so much sexy as beautiful and her eyes are incredible. I fade that afternoon and night with a fever.

Last week on the New Environmentalism we started a little travel journal on my trip to Panama with Sustainable Harvest. Recap: I took a trip. With an organization that practices what we preach. They hire people from the country to be sustainable ag extension agents. They help farmers and help save the earth's lungs....Let's pick it up. Today is an actual work day in the fields preparing soil and compost bags and planting seedlings. It's our first day in the rural area. The eager Americanos and the pleased and eager farmers.

The bus goes ten miles on severely rutted dirt roads through lots of brushland and wooded country. The countryside is varied. I expected farms cleared out of virtual rainforests, what I found was different. Every once in a while a small square concrete structure with a tin roof that represents a house. The brush is cleared around the house and often one sees a semblance of fields and plants that have been cultivated....

I just started a new job with Sustainable Harvest, got lucky and went on an 11 day trip to Panama. Following is the first of a three part travel journal. If you like, let me know and I'll post the other two. It's not so much political as trying to convey the sense of the place and what we could be doing as a 'world power'. By the way, 11 days with little news of BushCo is both a relief and unsettling at the same time...grab your travel bags...

My fourth night in Panama and certainly the most miserable. It's our first night in the countryside, well a town in a rural area, it's 5:30 and I'm awake. I've been awake far more than anything that could count for a good night's sleep. The hotel is clean but it is concrete and tile (which is an excellent conductor of sound) and my room faces the road. If it were just the large trucks that pass every few minutes, I could probably do ok. If it were just the few kids running around being kids before 11pm, I could get by. It's the car, more specifically, the car below my second floor window. It's parked, it's not moving, and nobody's in it. More's the pity. Because when the vibrations from a passing truck (did I mention we are close to the road?) hit the car, the car alarm goes off. It plays five different alarms at high volume and is designed to discourage any would be thieves and alert its owner. Unfortunately for me, it attracts neither thieves nor owner.

Yesterday I diaried a hopeful What If. Today we'll whip out the post New Year's party dusty computer screen and go for the What's Next. Even in the midst of the widespread media manipulation and collusion more Americans are disenchanted with the most corrupt and sorry ass Presidency ever. That drumbeat is getting more persistent (and Rove's efforts to cover it up have failed thus far). America will find its voice, but it is up to people like us. Like-minded people are flocking together for reinforcement and gathering their forces. Don't get me wrong, there's work to do but hope is alive and change is afoot. Below the fold are four reasons why (and what you can do to fan the embers):

Last night I was watching some of the pontificating talking heads on the tube like Charlie Cook saying (paraphrase) "Oh no, the Republicans won't lose the House, that would take something like the sweep in '94 and I don't see that." Then later he said, "Aren't there something like a dozen Iraqi war veterans running?"....and it got me thinking...

What if....half of the 30 or so Iraqi veterans already running(almost all Dems) WON?

What if more returning patriotic blue soldiers run for Congress. It's still early, what if 50 run and half of them win?

What if the end of the year TV litany of Republican corruption, cronyism, Bush's 'woes' becomes the drumbeat of 2006 and Americans rediscover America and Vote?

What if Rove, Hadley, Rumsfeld, Rice and Cheney all have to resign or are indicted?

What if reporters grow increasingly bolder and publishers, seeing which way the tide is turning, pile on and the perfect storm builds?

What if they start replaying Howard Dean's speeches from 2003 & 2004 and say, 'Hey, this guy was really right from the start, maybe we gave him a bum rap.'

Back in high school, the best essay I ever wrote was based on a favorite book of mine, Brave New World. A world where people willingly submitted to a controlling government and society as long as their personal needs were met. Society was separated by rigid classes yet all were controlled by their pursuit of pleasure. Unlike Orwell's 1984, Huxley's world was not controlled by fear or a police state but by the manipulation of society's institutions. Both books were popular but Orwell's vision was more widely subscribed to. Looking back, it seems we were being seduced down the rabbit hole and into a wonderland. Over time the seductiveness of pleasure and time wasting pursuits has evolved into a tacit acceptance of a totalitarian government....or has it?

Here's the email I got:

 1. Go to www.google.com

 2. Type in "french military victories", without the quotes

 3. Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky"

4. Tell your friends before the people at Google fix it

Here's what I wrote to Google at

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

Well, I want you to Fix It. I'm more than tired of the litany of jokes about the 'hapless French'. My family was practically wiped out in WW2. 52 direct family members were killed fighting for their homeland. I became the 3rd male when I was born. Americans have no idea what national sacrifice really means. And yes, i would appreciate a response to.....

I live and work in a non-fiction world, I do politics on the side so when I read, it's fiction most of the time. So I am reading along in this book which has precious little to do with politics. It's about a biographer who is hired to write a family history on a British family of renown (not Windsor and still fiction)

Then there's this passage: "Well, it's quite simple, really, said Henry. "The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There's no point in passingsome scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what's hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at at a time..."

As some of you know (I hope) I do an ongoing series at WERU (weru.org) on the environment and here's another in the series...let me know what topics you'd like to see or whether this type of diary should be moved to some other blog....and I don't know how to do all the formatting or stick pics in so bear with please.

Sometimes, I just can't help myself. The news that 10,000 experts from 180 nations gathered nearby (Montreal) to try and address (and I quote) "the alarming effects of greenhouse gases and global warming." No kidding? The USA admits global warming is happening? Well, let's find out shall we? Now by the time this airs, the conference will be over but what the heck, it's head shaking.

"Dr. Harlan L. Watson, senior climate negotiator for the U.S. Department of State, said that while President George W. Bush declined to join the treaty, the U.S. leader takes global warming seriously. He noted greenhouse gas emissions had actually gone down by .8 percent under Bush.

"With regard to what the United States is doing on climate change, the actions we have taken are next to none in the world," Watson told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the conference."....Wow, did I hear him correctly? .8%? that's almost a whole percent. We're on the road to salvation. Take that Europe, take that Japan,