We are Greeted by Mr. Wingnut Himself!

#1 son and I are not experienced protesters, so we were playing it super-safe. We stayed out of town, took the yellow line in, and got off at the Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Station stop, at 7th and Pennsylvania.  Our first task was to find a rendezvous point, in case we got separated. The sailor statue seemed like a likely place, so we walked over to it, and on a whim, I decided to take a picture of #1 son with his hand-made protest sign, standing beside the statue.

Not so fast! This photogenic gentleman would not permit it.

UPDATE (after work): Apparently wmtriallawyer's archetype did not catch on. Title updated in deference to the sensibilities of the reflexively anti-authoritarian; insert preferred auxiliary verb as appropriate. Did you really think I was trying to tell you what to do?

You WILL work for downticket candidates if Hillary wins the nomination.

They'll be hurting, and that's where you'll be needed. We need a progressive government at all levels, and if Big Money wins the executive branch again, well, it does. The fight goes on.

Three excellent candidates below the fold.

mem from somerville found the bees.

Well, I wanted to let you know that I have found out where the bees are.  Some of them are fighting cancer ... Other bees have organized to fight global warming.

But what about the birds?

Not to be outdone, the birds are working on energy independence!

Poultry poop power
Plant will run on turkey litter

BENSON, Minn. ... With 16,000 hens gobbling around him, (Greg) Langmo is standing on a 15-inch layer of turkey litter - some 750 tons of the stuff - that represents a new source of energy.

It will help fuel a $200 million power plant due to begin full-scale production next month. The 55-megawatt Fibrominn LLC plant will be the first poultry litter-fired power plant in the United States, tapping a novel source of renewable energy to produce enough power for 50,000 homes.

The birds have something to say. This is important!

George Bush, are you listening? How do we get his attention?

Oh, jeez. I never thought I'd hear myself say it.

But I gotta give credit where it's due. He said this:

Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another country as we have in reality been doing in Iraq. With a national debt of almost $9 trillion, we can't afford it.

To me, our misadventure in Iraq is both unconstitutional and unaffordable. Some have said it was a mistake to start this war but that now that we are there we have to, quote, finish the job and we cannot cut and run. Well, if you find out you're going the wrong way down the interstate, you do not keep going, you get off at the next exit.

Wrong way down the interstate? Ok, maybe he's not the most gifted writer, but for a Republican, it was a pretty good speech. More over the flip.

In Boomers, Who We Are, dkmich brings us back to the generational divide, defining Traditionalists as those born 1920-1945, Boomers as those born 1946-1964, Generation X as those born 1965-1980, and Generation Next as those born 1981-1999.

While I have no nit to pick with the excellent diarist dkmich, I do have one to pick with the commonly accepted definition of Boomer. Born in 1958, I can assure you that I am NOT a true Boomer, and I hazard to guess that many among us share a similar experience.

 

Bill Moyers gave the keynote speech recently at the National Conference for Media Reform. The speech was mentioned today in Moyers video: The Plantation Mentality in American Media by mbair, and last night in Memphis Memoirs - A Recap of the Media Reform Conf. by Six Degrees of Aaron.

So why a third diary? Because this is a kick-ass speech! Y'all should listen to it. Seriously. Moyers hits a grand slam. Listening to the part on economic fairness and inequality had me on the edge of my chair. And there's so much more. Inspiring! There is no motivational speaker, no politician, no presidential candidate, that can do anything like this.

Go Listen! It's grand!

Moyers at NCMR: Part I ... Part II

Over the flip, a part of the speech that reminded me of Daily Kos.

Even though I don't live in either Montana or Virginia, I contributed a small number of dollars to Jon Tester and Jim Webb. I did it because I thought they would be better at representing what I believed in than the Tennessee candidate. I'm sure I was right, particularly after listening to Webb on NPR this morning:

I decided to run because of my concern about what has happened with the economic breakdown in this country along class lines ... there are huge income inequalities in this country ... the average corporate CEO in a Fortune 500 company makes nearly 10 million dollars a year, and we haven't raised the minimum wage since 1997. Wages and salaries are at an all-time low as a percentage of our national wealth ...

About an hour ago, I got thank you notes from both Senators elect (insert a big grin here). They arrived within about 10 minutes of each other. Since other small dollar donors might not have had a chance to contribute to either of these wonderful gentlemen, I thought I'd share their thank you notes with you, below the fold.

Thanks to this diary, we learned about classified documents from Los Alamos turning up in a drug raid, and once again, we're treated to the spectacle of treasonous negligence by our nation's leading nuclear weapons lab, those coddled incompetents from Los Alamos. We should shut them down.

I can hear the whiners already, "But what about the science?" Listen. Los Alamos and the other DOE labs are defense contractors. They are weapons merchants who use science as a marketing gimmick. Their real business is  sucking money out of the government.

Weapons labs should do weapons, not science. It's too expensive to do science in a weapons lab. You can tell by comparing DOE lab performance to labs funded by another federal agency, the NIH.

Think of this as a "good government" issue. Take a brief break from electioneering & let's look at it.

Googling for Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08), I noticed that someone has paid for a negative, sexist, anti-Giffords "sponsored link" to appear at the top of the page.

The thing about sponsored links is that someone, somewhere, pays when you click on them. If you're feeling a bit mischievous, you can post a charge against the bad guys' account by clicking here, and then clicking on the link that says "Giffords Must Be Stopped". The link might also appear on the right side of the page.

Screenshot over the fold.

Fire up Google News on any given day of the week, search for "Department of Energy", and mixed in among the self-congratulatory press releases and articles announcing the latest Pork Projects Delivered (see footnote), you'll find a generous proportion of stories on gross abuse of the environment, gross abuse of worker's rights, mismanagement, incompetence, fraud, and every so often, an out-and-out scandal.

On a typical day, you might find, for example, stories like this:

State requests EPA fine for spill at Hanford nuclear site

Sept. 20, 2006 - Washington has issued a notice of violation to the U.S. Department of Energy for leaking a highly toxic and potentially cancer-causing agent into ground at the heavily contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation.

The leak of sodium dichromate occurred as workers were digging up an old pipeline near a nuclear reactor, about a half-mile from the Columbia River ...

I've noticed several Kossians in various diaries trotting out their wannabe's as speechwriters, orators, strategists, policy wonks, and various what-have-you's. And why not? Our politics is about people-power, and there's no rule that says that only beltway consultants can have good ideas. (Or bad ones, as it turns out, as I'm happy to demonstrate.)

In the wake of recent events in Virginia, I found welling up within me an irrepressible wannabe producer. Of commercials. To be specific, a producer of ads promoting the candidacy of the profoundly impressive Jim Webb. Just reading the guy's resume, or looking at VirginiaDem's diary, makes me wanna move to Virgina just to vote for him.

Holy shit. I don't give it up lightly, but he just so kicks my ass. Jump to the screenplay.

A couple of days ago, a Richardson fan posted a diary wondering where was the love for his Bill? I replied with an off-the-cuff, snarky, unsupported, smartass wisecrack about him being the governor of New Porksico, for which I received an entirely appropriate round of raspberries. However, I do feel that Richardson would be utterly wrong as a Democratic candidate for President, so I started to write a diary on why I will NEVER TRUST ANYONE WHO HAS SUCCEEDED IN NEW MEXICO POLITICS as a candidate for President or any other office that has any power worth mentioning.

Then today, Richardson himself, or someone representing him, showed up and posted a form letter over his signature, which is on the list of recommended diaries even as I write this. I decided to stop writing the diary and just post a couple of notes instead, not because I've written anything particularly good, but because it's timely.

It's about nuclear weapons.

I'm new. And I'm impressed. Holy hell, Jimmy fucking CARTER posts on this board, as well as a clutch of Representatives, and god knows who else. People who know something. People who can get something done. People who can write. People who have ideas.

And I've been starving for ideas. Real ideas. Something more than "show me the money", you know what I'm saying? And this crowd has ideas. Ideas to believe in.

I'd like to contribute. But shit, this crowd has got it covered. Politics, economics, religion, science -- you name it, there's somebody here who's got it nailed to the wall. Holy hell, Jimmy fucking ... but I repeat myself. What can I, a mere newbie, hope to contribute?