Something is missing beyond the spine of some Democrats in the rush to legalize warrantless wiretaps, end privacy, and reward corporations for betraying the public trust. Let's call it the beef (or nicely textured soy protein for the vegetarians among us).

I am an empiricist at heart. I want proof in the form of sound evidence before I am willing to believe something is true. I am also deeply cynical and suspicious of politicians because too few decisions favor the common good. That cynicism has grown after our elected officials 'misrepresented' the threat posed by Iraq. In the uproar over the FISA revisions, now is a good time to point out there are some glaring gaps in the evidence at hand.

Either McCain does not understand our laws or does not respect them.  Not a good sign for someone sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws of our land.  Even worse for someone who aspires to be president.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Source: NYT

Patrick Coburn has a chilling piece in the Independent about what Bush is trying to push through the puppet government of Iraq.  The subhead gives a nice summary:

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

The deal would effectively tie the hands of the next administration unless the Iraqis can muster the political courage to reject it. Since the Bush administration has done everything possible to keep the terms secret to ward off an Iraqi backlash, the least we can do is make sure the leak spreads to flood proportion.

There has been a spate of stories about religion and politics in the past few days. The basic theme is that the mixture of religion and politics is dangerous. It is almost refreshing given the media neglected the story of how the the Republican Party and Karl Rove deliberately politicized religion to give the party of greed and violence an upper hand in elections until the 2006 meltdown.  Unfortunately, the media is still getting their facts wrong or slanted in ways that seem to give McCain a pass and reflect badly on Obama.

The US military is back in the cross-hairs of human rights organizations.  The issue in question is our detention of children, their treatment in custody, judicial review, and access by international monitors. Today, the issue will come up for review by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

On May 22, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child will meet in Geneva to review US compliance with the international treaty banning the use of child soldiers, which requires states to help with the recovery and reintegration of such children under their control.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Although Iraq is supposedly a sovereign country, US forces still seem to be playing a major role in arresting and detaining Iraqi citizens, including children.  

Everyone has heard about ANWR.*  It is so well known that I do not have spell out the acronym. Ever heard of the Pebble Mine Project?  Probably not. The major environmental organizations have done an extremely poor job of publicizing this disaster in the making. Pebble Mine is worse than anything the oil thugs want to do in ANWR and it is in the permitting stage, making it a critical issue in terms of time and public awareness. Please join me for an introduction to the proposed Pebble Mine Project.

*Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

As if the devastation from Cyclone Nargis on May 3 was not enough. As if the inability of the government to help the victims or allow international aid organizations to feed and shelter the millions in need was not enough.  As if the people of Myanmar had not suffered enough death, disease, hunger, thirst, cold, and fear.  An estimated 2 million survivors of the storm are still in need of emergency aid.  To date, U.N. agencies and other groups have been able to reach only 270,000 people.

Bottlenecks, poor logistics, limited infrastructure and the military government's refusal to allow foreign aid workers have left most of the delta's survivors living in miserable conditions without food or clean water. The government's efforts have been criticized as woefully slow.

Souce

The situation is about to get much, much worse.  Forecasters are now tracking another tropical low that is expected to become another cyclone and track into the already devastated Irriwaddy delta.

A stumbling point for me in the practice of Buddhism is optimism.  I do not do optimism.  My thoughts on optimism parallel Ambrose Bierce.

Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

I am particularly prone to pessimism (realism) when it comes to the response of our species to climate change. In reading the parable of the Burning House from the Lotus Sutra, I am tempted to wonder (which is as close as I come to hope).

The former journalistic enterprise known as the Washington Post has an article in the May 10 edition about the election results in Indiana and North Carolina.  The title says it all:

Wright Controversy Deepens Voter Divide

As a country, we face serious issues on the economy, foreign policy, energy policy, and health care.  So, in this pivotal election, why are the media talking about Jeremiah Wright?  This is the story of how the media uses exit poll surveys to keep tempest-in-a-teacup kerflufles brewing.

The death toll and suffering in Burma continues to rise in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis (Urdu for daffodil). The situation is dire.

Aid has barely trickled into one of the world's most isolated and impoverished countries, although experts feared it would be too little to cope with the aftermath of Nargis, which left up to 100,000 feared dead and one million homeless.

Witnesses saw little evidence of a relief effort under way in the hard-hit Irrawaddy delta region.

"We'll starve to death, if nothing is sent to us," said Zaw Win, a 32-year-old fisherman who waded through floating corpses to find a boat for the two-hour journey to Bogalay, a town where the government said 10,000 people were killed.

"We need food, water, clothes and shelter," he told a Reuters reporter.

Source

May 1, 2003, is another day of infamy for the Bush administration and America. In the kind of staged bravado dictators relish, George W. Bush donned a flight suit, pretended to fly, and then used an aircraft carrier as the backdrop for a speech to declare the mission in Iraq accomplished. Every cable news channel carried the event live as if history were somehow being made. It is time to look back at five years of accomplishments in Iraq.

Do you recognize this man?

His name is Rod Serling and he once hosted an amazing little television show called the Twilight Zone.  Each week, he would appear to announce the story of someone trapped in a bizarre set of circumstances, typically surreal and frightening.  It was fiction, but great fun.

I suddenly find myself looking for Rod Serling to appear again because I am suffering from the same uncomfortable sensation of surreality, except this time it is neither fiction nor fun.

As a parent of a student at Indiana University (IU), I have been impressed at the get out the vote efforts at IU by the Obama campaign. Voter registration drives on campus have been very successful. Registration to vote in Bloomington makes perfect sense for the November election since the student body will be on campus.  However, the primary schedule and school calendar present a logistic challenge. The spring semester ends this week, with the campus in recess when the May 6 Indiana primary rolls around.  Early voting to the rescue with local Obama organizers providing transportation to the polls.

The Los Angeles Times has a sweet little editorial about the latest Bush gambit on the environment.  It is worth a read.

The opening paragraph gets to the heart of the matter.

For Earth Day this year, the Bush administration sent California a few million tons of carbon dioxide, then tried to pass it off as a gift for the environment. The proposed federal fuel economy standards issued Tuesday represent a backdoor attempt to thwart the will of the state, Congress, the federal courts and possibly even the Supreme Court. That's quite a day's work even for President Bush.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just released data on greenhouse gas emissions for 2007. The news is all bad. The levels of two major drivers of global climate change, carbon dioxide and methane, reached new record highs.  

Last year alone global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global climate change, increased by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tons. Additionally methane rose by 27 million tons after nearly a decade with little or no increase.
Source

After watching the returns, speeches, and morning after analyses, I am filled with sadness. Sadness that seeps into every pore. Bone aching sadness.

Last fall as the primary season was really heating up, I was filled with hope that America was awake to the damage done by the Bush "Republic" and welcoming of new leadership and a new direction for the country. Yes, I was disappointed that Gore decided not to run but understand fully why he decided to put all of his energy into fighting climate change. However, the field of candidates for Democratic Party was strong and I was drawn to the social justice platform of John Edwards. On the other side, the party of greed, fear, and violence was serving up slime from top to bottom. I could taste change in the air.

I have been astonished by the number of people who have rushed to defend John McCain against charges of hypocrisy on the subject of torture.  An article by Michael Scherer in the April 10 edition of Time magazine is typical of the pervasively sloppy thinking among McCain apologists.

But on this latest piece of legislation, which arose during the heat of the primary campaign and may surface again later this month, McCain sided with Bush in opposing a further restriction of CIA techniques. Despite the claims of some partisans, McCain's decision was not a flip-flop, but rather the continuation of a position he took in 2005 when he first championed a bill to restrict the Bush Administration's ability to mistreat detainees.

Flip-flop charges only seem to stick for Democrats, not saintly public servants like John McCain or wormtongues like Joe Lieberman. The sad truth is that there is no flip to McCain on torture, just flop.

Recent revelations that torture was approved, applauded, and enjoyed by senior Bush administration officials have caused quite a stir. Bush now freely admits that he "approved" of the CIA torturing a few "high value" terrorism suspects in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. All those assertions that the United States does not torture were knowingly false. While lying to Congress, the American people, and the world community might get another president in trouble, even impeached, war crimes appear to be much more acceptable in post-9/11 America. The mea culpa simply forces the administration and its supporters to create a new mythology of torture.