Obama speaks to Islam

Well done. I would have gone farther but that is okay. That is why I am not President. Finally a US President spoke honestly of our realtionship with the mideast. Thank you Mr. Obama for finally talking like a real person and not some spun moron who is fed the nonsensical BS of having to prop up stupid policies of the past. Thank you for taking responsibility for Mosedek. Thank you for upholding the greatest ideals that made America great. You are a tribute to the greatness of America and a stalwart supporter of her future greatness. Keep on keep'n on!

Getting a kick out of GOP attempts to find self

Do we need to appear to be more right-wing? Do we need to appear more moderate? Should we try to appeal to a broader section of America than white, rich, conservative, Christians?

This seems to be the ongoing debate in the GOP. What should really trouble the GOP is 2000 until now. They barely won the Presidency in 2000 and 2004, they lost the Congress in 2006, and got wasted in 2008. And they cannot tie their fall to GW Bush either. He was a symptom not a cause. He was the conservative canary in the coal mine of American politics.

The watchers of Fox or the readers of the American Spectator, or listeners of Limbaugh et al, reside in an eco chamber that tells them they are on the right path. Or that to represent America as it is would be too weak. So they continue to cling to a view that continues to become more misaligned with America.

The sad horrible truth is that it took the slaughter of 3000 people on 911 to elect their last President. I am sure that a host of them are wishing for more death and mayhem to recover their footing on the threshold of power. But one needs to really ask the question; why should you support a party that needs thousands of dead bodies to get elected?

Christians and torture? Should be against it. No question

I read in a recent survey by the Pew Center, that white evangelical Christians are more likely to think torture is okay. As a Christian myself I cannot see how anyone claiming to follow Christ can make that claim and then say that it is okay to torture somebody. Then again my Church tortured thousands and thousands in its day. These so called Christians are going to have a heavy bit of explaining to do when Jesus, who was tortured to death, will ask them to justify their stance. In my opinion satan is just as likely to cloak his evil in the mantel of Christianity, Islam, or any other faith. Blind faith and adherence to dogma is a sure way to hell.

Pew Center

Lets Mess With Texas!

By Maria M. Perotin, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Jun. 13--Texas' healthcare system ranks among the worst in the nation, in large part because so many Texans go without health insurance.

That's a key finding of a "scorecard" released today by researchers at a unit of The Commonwealth Fund who examined each state's performance on 32 separate measures focused on healthcare quality, cost and access to care.

Overall, Texas ranked No. 49 -- third from the bottom -- in the study that included all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

The bottom line: Healthcare varies widely across the country. Even the best-performing states have lots of room for improvement. And those that spend the biggest bucks don't necessarily get top-notch healthcare for their money.

"The scorecard indicates that where you live in the United States matters," said Cathy Schoen, a senior vice president at The Commonwealth Fund who co-authored the report. "The wide variation and gaps between leading and lagging states add up to substantial human and economic costs."


US Census Data 2007: Texas has the highest percentage of people with no health insurance ( 25%) . So the rest of America has to pick up Texas' tab.

So you do not want to be sick in Texas.

Red State Blues

Unwed mother / teen pregnancy rates
Bible belting "no sex ed" = more sex and more teen moms



Red Staters are the fat ones. Sorry.



Families living in povertry in 2006. The people most likely to benefit from Obama are the ones too stupid to vote for the guy.



Lastly let us look at more of the family values folks. The liberal hedonists in the Northeast are far less likely to be divorced than the pro-family south and central.

Anyway just a bit of reality to fill the void.

Red State is Right!

Right on the way to ruin. The American rightwing. Like all rightwing movements. Has at its core a moldering failure. The "its everyman for himself" anarchism that represents the heart of American conservative thought is a black fungus that, from time to time, protrudes from the outwardly healthy pretense that is conservative thought today.

Leadership, something that Obama understand well and that Bush never understood, is something beyond the mental capacity of most conservatives to understand. Again I would ask any conservative to back up what they say with examples of their ideology amounting to anything more than a bucket of warm spit captured after falling from the mouths of their radio blowhards.

This they will NEVER be able to do.

The conservatives in 1776 were all fleeing to Canada and Britain and away from the rebels that wished to throw off the yoke of kingship.

The conservatives in 1860 were all telling Lincoln to make peace with the southern landeowners and not mess with slavery

The conservatives in 1920 were still arguing that woman didn't have to worry about voting.

The conservatives i in 1940 were still arguing that Hitler would make a better business partner than England.

The conservatives in 1964 still thought that black americans didn't need to be treated equal.

So all the conservatives can stop shoveling their pigswill about how they have good ideas about future American greatess. Their track record has been one of failure and national retardation.

Motor Mounts and socialists

Things are moving so fast that it is really hard to keep up. Being 43 I am coming to the conclusion that I will only be getting older and that eventually I will be unable to keep up and or care about most stuff.

But until then here goes...

Is Obama and the government going socialist???

Well if by "socialist" you mean actually trying to help people then I guess the answer is yes. I think for me and almost all of America that is just fine. Since the people who are using the term "socialist" are so whacked out to the right that they think ANY form of government is socialist.

This goes back to what I truly believe and that is that conservatives are not really what they say they are. They think they are conservative but they are really anarchists. Their "its every man for himself" attitude is the epitome of anarchism.


For my part I hardly consider Obama any kind of a socialist. He is not pushing a single payer health care system (something I want) nor is he really helping labor. But he is at least moving the nation in the right direction as far as regaining our power, influence, stature, authority, and future greatness.

The American "right" is very wrong. They are on the wrong side of history, and have been since the founding of the republic. They have done nothing but hold America back. The best that can be said of them is that they have held America back so that the progressive engine doesn't shake the country apart. They are the motor-mount that holds the engine to the frame of the American machine.

If you ask a motor-mount what the engine should do it would probably say that the engine should shut down since that would make the motor-mounts job a lot easier. However that would not allow the American machine to work.

Conservatives are falling of the cliff, intellectually

In the past the greatest conservative voice was William F. Buckley. He was smart, very smart, funny, and on his game at all times. Now the "leaders" of American conservatism are Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Limbaugh.

Now you have to be a butt-picking, hill-billy, high school drop out, who thinks God founded the United States of America, and are always worrying about turning gay, in order to be a conservative.

They remind me of the damned in Dante's Inferno. The GOP should adopt "Abandon Hope all ye who enter" as their tag line and their slide will be complete.

Isaerl and Gaza and Obama and everyone else

Every nation has a right to defend itself. No one would argue that, at least no one who lives on Earth amongst human beings. But the situation in Israel is not just one nation attacking another and then a response.

The Palestinians were forced off their land, attacked, and penned in. Their neighbors dislike them as much as the Israelis do. However their plight provides dictatorships accross the mid east to allow their oppressed publics to vent anger at an enemy that is not the king, or president for life.

Organizations of brutes that use strife as a means to grab power and control (Hamas et al) also use the Palestinian cause as fuel for their own purposes. I recently sent a message to my mom about the perfect analogy for the situation. It starts where Michael Bloomberg left off.

In short Bloomberg said that if someone was banging on your apartment door yelling at you saying they want to kill you, you would want the police to come and stop them. I fill out the whole story...

The people pounding on the door used to live in the very apartment currently occupied by the people calling the police. They came home one day and found all their stuff dumped in the hallway. They complained to the land lord. He agreed with them that they had been wronged. But the new occupents would not listen and continued to live there. Not only that but they also took the job of doorman. So now the hall-people have to asked the doorman's permission to leave the building to go to work. Because they got angry and pounded on the door the doorman will not let them leave.

Finally the mob shows up, and for some protection money, they mug the apartment dwellers. The cops are called and tell the hall people to settle down. They move into a new apartment only to find that the next day the other dwellers have now kicked them out of that apartment too. The mob is still around and loves to pray on the down and out. So they make promises to the hall-people and make more violence on the apartment occupents.

This goes on and on.

That is a better analogy to what is going on in Palestine. The victem of Israeli action in Gaza will be America as much as Hamas. America is seen, with justification, as the main supporter of Israel. We give 400 million a year in military aid alone. How much do we bother to toss Palestine?

Obama needs to strike a neutral position here. Hamas is the mob for sure. But Obama needs to reach over the heads of Hamas and Israel and talk to both peoples and link them with both sides common desire to live a peaceful life. Talking to the gun toting scumbags on either side will solve nothing.

Enforced liesure

It started snowing last Sunday. It continued for a day then got very cold. Last week was a week of nervous driving, listening to the radio, reading internet news about weather etc. Then Saturday came and the world stopped.

Portland, Oregon, is a city known for rain and weather that is, in both summer and winter, boring. It is never very hot and never very cold and when we get snow it is usually last for 24 hour, we build a snowman, miss a day of work then forget about snow til next year.

On Saturday, the Saturday befor Chirstmas no less, it began to snow. It did not stop, indeed it is snowing now, three days later. My car is buried in the stuff. The snow was accompanied by severe winds too. So nobody could even go out in it to build the afore mentioned snow man. Saturday I was able to make a run to the store and that was it.

I am here alone. I talk on the phone, read, browse the net, and stew. I find that I have begun to devolve into something less than me. I sit in my pajamas, hair askew, unshaven, and unconcerned about the dishes in the sink, or the unmaid bed. Listening to even my favorite NPR shows puts me to sleep in minutes.

It as if I am beginning to hibernate, shutdown, coccoon myself waiting for the thaw. I play Sims and note that my Sim person has more freedom in his electronic world than I do. He is bored so he gets into his sports car and goes to a nightclub to have drink and dance the night away. His god, me, is stuck behind a wall of white muck. I can kill him off if I want. My daughter is an expert tormentor of Sim souls. She will wait for a sim to enter a room then delete all the doors and watch the Sim stave to death. Kids are cruel. For my part I am happy with my Sim having a life. I feel sympathetic when his advances are rebuffed. Even if I had advances myself there is no one to rebuff them.

Later I am extatic to find an entire 6 pack of Heineken that had been packed away in the closet. In truth I was looking for my gaiters, and do not really like Heineken, but what the hell? No gaiters but at least a beer fest. But even this is a let down. Drinking alone is not good. It too is too easy to do when you have nothing better to do.

No gaiters but I have my Denali boots. So after tricking myself out like a Himalyan mountaineer, I trudge down the stairs into the white muck. The snow is not snowman snow. It is powder snow. Skiiers would kill for snow like this. I manage down the street. The wind is biting cold, my breathing is hard because of the effort of postholing. It takes me 20 minutes of post-holing in snow to walk a block to the store. When I get there is looks like the day-lodge at Timberline. Men and women in Goretex, X-country skies leaning up against the building, all you need is overpriced lift-tickets.

On my way back I overhear a lady talking to her freind saying "I just had to escape." We humans are a weird lot. We are stuck in a warm dwelling with food and water and power, and we feel we need to "escape" that by plunging into a frozen wasteland. Curious.

My brother is going to rescue me. He has a 4wheel drive rig that can make its way around so I will conclude this evening in the company of others. I almost expect a party!

Maybe this is how things were back in the day. People living in sod houses, trying not to starve and freeze, cut off from their neighbors by miles of snow and ice, and then one day they meet up and have a big party. We take for granted having people around. We are so used to not being isolated that when it happens we are at a loss as to know what to do, or at least what to expect that we will do.

Maybe I'll sweep the steps? Or perhaps take a nap until my brother comes.

A Haberblab Christmas

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

The Plaque in Olympia

Some atheist group put up a plaque saying that, in their opinion, God does not exist. Then somebody stole it and tossed it in a ditch, then somebody found it and put it back. Blah blah blah. As a Christian what do I care if someone wants to say that God does not exist? Gods existence or non existence is in no way predicated on what any human being chooses to believe. The people who get cranky over other people expressing their beliefs, either pro or con, should really consider why they get so cranky. If you have faith it should not bother you in the least that some atheist puts up a plaque espousing his views. No soul is going to be saved, or God served by some little pink human stealing private property and then attempting to destroy the property.

I guess the problem was that the plaque was in the state house next to a nativity scene. Why in the world the State has a nativity scene in its governments house is beyond me. Again as a Christian I find the state in anyway meddling with faith to be troubling. At any rate God is not served by such earthly entities. God, being omnipotent needs no human being to acknowledge Him, fight for him, or do anything else for him. We are called to serve each other not God. We need God, God does not need us.

More Pirate Tales of Old

Francois L'Olonnais was another successful pirate from the 17th century. He was a Frenchman with a particular hatred of the Spanish. Here is an account of a typical incident of the fun loving Buccaneer:

After the pirate had attacked Porto Cabello he was ambushed by Spanish troops. After escaping the fight L'Olonnais wanted to plot a way of escape. He had taken several Spanish prisoners. He drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest, "I will serve you all alike, if you show me not another way."

Irony knowing no bounds, L'Olonnais, after a long career being a violent, murdering, torturing, maniac, was set upon by natives in Central America and eaten.

Piracy off Somalia! A new threat? Not really...

I get a kick out of all the sudden clamor over piracy off Somalia. Those waters have been dangerous for a very long time. As an example here is the story of the greatest act of piracy in history. Note that the money values were in current English pounds of the later 17th century and do not reflect today. These numbers would be vastly larger. Somali pirates of today are actually quite gentile compared to the raiders of the past.
The nature of Piracy is to attack a ship, seize it, plunder what it holds, then sink it, sell it, or use it for future profit. Piracy has been going on for as long as humans have traveled the seas. Julius Caesar spent time as a captive of pirates. The story to be told takes place in the Golden Age of Piracy.

"In August 1695, the English Pirate Henry Every, or "Long Ben" and his ship the Fancy reached the Mandab Strait (where the Somali pirates operate now), where he teamed up with four other pirate ships, including Thomas Tew's sloop Amity. Although a 25-ship Mughal convoy bound for India eluded the pirate fleet during the night, the following day they encountered the greatest ship in the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's fleet, the Ganj-I-Sawai, and its escort Fateh Muhammed, both passing the straits en route to Surat. After a protracted battle they took both ships.

The victorious pirates then subjected their captives to several days of horror, raping and murdering prisoners at will, and using torture to force them to reveal the location of the ships' treasure. Some of the Muslim women committed suicide to avoid violation or humiliation. Those women who did not kill themselves or die from the pirates' brutality were taken aboard the Fancy. The other survivors were left aboard their ships, which the pirates set free.

The loot from the Ganj-I-Sawai totalled between £325,000 and £600,000, including 500,000 gold and silver pieces. Every and the surviving pirate captains set sail for Réunion, where they shared out £1,000 and some gemstones to every man in the crew."

So how did things end for Henry Every? Well he was one of the few pirates to escape the noose. He went to Ireland and was never seen again. What ended the Golden Age of Piracy was the rise of national navies. Pirates were mercinaries who were contracted by governments to fight for them. Once the contract was up they just kept on fighting. After all what else can you do? Become a farmer? Starve? Governments created the pirates of old, just like we do today. Where did all those Somali pirates learn to fight? In the Somali wars. Who supplied them? Who helped train them?

To stop the Somali pirates of today we probably need to kill a lot of them. Thousands of happless pirates were hanged. Almost all the famous pirates of old met a bad end.

Black Beard: head cut off after being shot
Bart Roberts: Shot in face with grapeshot
Captain Kid: Hanged
Calico Jack Rackham: Hanged
Stede Bonnet: Hanged
Sir Henry Morgan: died broke, and drunk (prophetic since Henry Morgans is a famous Rum)
Sir Francis Drake: died of dysentery

Who does Zawhiri fear most?

I would say that Zawahiri and Bin Laden fear Obama more than God. They feared Bush more than God too. They talk tough, but live in hiding. Who are they hiding from and why? They are hiding because they do not want to die. They are hiding from that which they fear. They fear the US. So when the two of them weigh their faith in God and their fear of the US, the scale tips toward fear of the US. Obama does not live in hiding. Neither did Bush. America is confident while her enemies live in holes, sitting next to rusty guns used as props, making pronouncements. America knows that Zawahiri and Bin Laden, and their followers hate it.
So again why do they hide? They do not want to die? If they are confident in their service to God then why should the fear? Maybe they fear the US and God. They fear the US for its ability to kill them and they fear God in His ability to lay vengeance upon them for killing in His name.

Well the country has spoken again. The same nation that put Clinton in the White House twice, the same nation that put Bush in the White House twice, has now sent Mr. Obama to the White House. It is historic for the precedent it sets and for the fact that he won the popular vote by 4 million votes, and that it was not even close.

The Republicans are catterwalling about how Palin sunk the ticket, or how McCain was not a true believer of American conservatism. But one this is clear. The Republicans need to do some drastic house cleaning. If the reason your ticket "lost" was Palin, the one person to galvanize you base, then that does not say much about your coming chances to take back power. McCain was given such a terrible hand to play that even if he had chosen better for VP he was in trouble from the start.

Even if McCain had not been dealt a stinking mess to run with, he was in trouble because Obama simply ran a superb campaign.

Hopefully what comes out of this election is an abandonment of neoconservative dung. If America ends up with two parties who think and can have candidates who like to think, then we will all be better off. If the Republicans think Palin is their future then they should save themselves a lot of grief and jump off the bridge to know where. Because that is all Palin represents.

Final Poll Crunch for Bush

We love the little guy! 25%
So long and no need to hang around! 69%
Have no clue: 7%

In all the years of my poll crunching for W' I have had very few surprises. The poll crunch has been going on since 2004. On this his final day as a President without a President elect, he is in the tank as he has been for years. Leadership, to be sure, is not only shown in poll numbers, but if you are loathed for years and years and make your people hurt that pretty much says it all.

Goodbye Mr. Bush.

Election 2008 nearing the end

One week from yesterday the election will be over. In six days all this hullaballu will be complete and Bush-Co can rent the U-hauls and start packing up. It has been a long time in coming. As a voter I would like to say that this has been the most exciting election since the last election. That is to say that they all are exciting.

Hopefully this time at least 50% of the voters will actually vote. That in itself will be a laudable thing. I am not sure what would get the average voter to vote other than a cattle prod. I am hoping that Obama wins in a convincing enough way to keep the nuts on all sides from raising their pathetic heads. Listening to the far reaches of political nutjobs, who are already trying to position themselves with either voter fraud or voter suppression, I have to wince.

So where am I at politically now, a week out? Well I used to have a ton of respect for McCain. But most of that has gone away now. He has compromised with so many idtiots and taken so many positions that who knows what or who he really is? I am very sorry for the Republican Party who used to have some pretty smart people espousing their ideas. They have sunk to Palin and a plummer? Well most of the working guys I know are voting for Obama. I am not too sure exactly what the Republican "strategy" is anymore.

I guess their "winning card" is to say that giving tax cuts to the middle class is bad and giving tax cuts to millionaires is good. Well I guess the millionaire vote is sewn up for McCain. As for the VAST rest of us. Sorry but we need a President of the people not just of the rich. What have the rich done for America since Bushco came to power? Stole us blind, made bad business decisions, then begged us to save them. They can rot in hell.

Now on to election day. Go-Bama!

Peter Iredale 2008

This was once a 2075 ton, Liverpool built, 4 masted barque. It was the largest vessel built by Riston and Co. in 1890. In 1906, during a squall at the mouth of the Columbia, she ran a ground. This is all that is left of her.
Many people come and visit this most famous wreak on the Oregon Coast. Her rusting hulk, including the bases of all four masts, rests on a broad beach for all to see.
She has not ventured to sea since coming to rest here over 100 years ago. Her last port of call was Santa Cruz Mexico. Still the rusting iron and steel that remains knows not of her condition. It awaits, such as it is, riveted together awaiting the next voyage.
The ships hull still lives with the sea, while almost all of its brethren, long since turned into railroad iron, bridge steel, or nails, has broken that connection. Its barnacle encrusted hull tastes the salt sea each day at high tide, doing battle with the elements. She arguably has more visitors in her and on her than any other barque in the world.
And still her steel plates, whose surface resembles the surface of Mars, wait for the crew to heave away at the capstan that no longer exists, and hoist anchor to sail away.
Peter Iredale, the owner of the ship, has bones probably turned to so much dust, while his namesake rests in her still multi-tonne glory waiting. Waiting for a voyage that we know will never come. To the visitor she looks dead, is dead. But to the steel there is no thought to death or life.
It is a thing made for a purpose. And even though its original purpose ended 102 years ago, the iron and steel have a new purpose. It is a monument, a talisman, a rune as well as a ruin. What men walked her decks? What was life like back then? Where did that world go and why? So much is brought up to the surface of the mind by old rusting steel and iron.
As I write this the tide is in. The wreak is surrounded in the inky darkness by the cold North Pacific, its steel and iron doing battle with the sea, as it was meant to be.

Debate Rehash September 2008

I had a billion (actual number much lower) things to do on Friday so I listened on the radio in my car as I sped here and there doing stuff for other people that would mean the end of the world if they didn't get done.

Here is my two cents worth:

Here are two guys who actually want to get stuck with the job dealing with gigantically f'd up situations across the world, of every conceivable flavor. From anarchic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a nuclear N. Korea ruled by (fill in the blank), to Putin the puppet-master in Moscow, to an Arctic Ice sheet meltdown, to a financial meltdown.

Looking at both guys, listening to them, and what they did say and what they did not say, I felt confident that in January one of these guys will be President. Other than that I am not sure where my confidence should lay. On the whole Obama has history on his side. McCain in his "We're winning in Iraq, we're winning in Iraq" mantra sounded almost not to believe himself.

Obama also came across as the man who was more realistic in what we can and should be doing in the World. McCain wanted to paint himself as the clear military leader, and I think he did that. But there in resides a big problem for McCain. Most of the situations in the world require far broader ability than to simply be a good general.