Hattie's Web

The Obama road show.

It's all getting surreal. A man who has not even been nominated for the office by his party is touring the world, talking to heads of states. Liberal commentators are jumping all over anyone who suggests that this is an act of hubris. If he were going as a man of peace, like Mandela or the Dalai Lama, that would be one thing, but he is saber rattling.

He has a claque of 700 people that fly along and chant at his rallies. My god. This is lunacy. I'm sorry and I know Obama people find criticism of him offensive, but I am sincerely worried about what the upshot of this juggernaut of a campaign could be.

Obama's media branding, which Mother Pie comments on, is beyond anything we have seen before. I would say it is backfiring, however. It is like being run over by a virtual steamroller. It may seem to knock people over, but they stand up after it passes and go, "What was that? What was I thinking?"

Great shots of the Island

Some friends of ours did a helicopter tour of the Island and they got these pix . The first photo is of the Pu u Oo eruption, the second is the view north out of Hilo along the Hamakua Coast, which is where we live, and the third is our neighborhood. Our house is to the right of the big arrow. You might say we enjoy living on the edge. (Click for enlargements.)

Professor Zero

Please read this commentary from Professor Zero, who is touring in South America.

+ in humans between ages 40 and 50, the neurons which prevent anxiety die, never to be reborn...

Well, it's just a bunch of older women taking this stuff, anyway

There is a good article in Counterpunch by Martha Rosenberg about Fosamax and how it is making women very, very sick. It apparently does exactly the opposite of what it is taken for; it is supposed to save bones, but it kills them. The disgrace is complete. Take cortisone, HRT, and Fosamax, and you can expect to spend your golden years in a wheelchair.

Cass Sunstein is a horse's ass

See for yourself on today's edition of Democracy Now. Sunstein is smart enough to do "lawyer talk" in an exchange with Glenn Greenwald, in which he snidely suggests that when Greenwald expresses indignation about the FISA sellout and Bush Administration authorized torture,  he's being "emotional."

I stopped watching after Sunstein  started talking about his new book, Nudge, which, I gather,  has as its thesis that people are stupid so it's up the government to educate them and then maybe they will or won't decide to do something about stuff, or something. What crap.

So if anyone feels that they missed out going to Chicago, where he taught, or to Harvard, where he has a new job, don't give it a thought.  They have hired a man who is capable of going before the public and saying things such as, "Crimes are Against the Law." Greenwald is a strong contrast to him: a man who has core convictions and stands by them and never, ever talks down to anyone.

Sunstein is every bit as bad as I intuited he was before I saw his dismal performance here. He's  an opportunist with no convictions except the convenient ones, a real academic slimeball.

Guess I can't say I like him.

More: Sunstein's  crack about how he's "emotional" is to draw attention to the fact that Greenwald is openly gay and therefore irrational, like a woman, you know.

Update: Olberman does his job. I hear echoes of Cold War liberalism here in Sunstein's moral relativism. Cold War liberalism had at its base the idea that the U.S. was  a great country but not always a good one, but that the end of American hegemony could justify any actions the government took. This is a dangerous road to go down. It's the one that got us into Vietnam, an entanglement that began in the Kennedy Administration. And what are the goals now? Defeating "terrorism" and defending "The Market?" This is not a noble enterprise. It took a lot of propaganda to get the American public behind the Cold War, and I hope Americans can resist this neo-liberal push from Obama's advisors.

More: Here is some of that Obama magic, from Mike Whitney in Counterpunch:

Obama is not an antiwar candidate, that is merely a fiction maintained by his public relations team. In fact, he wants to beef up the military with 65,000 additional ground forces and 27,000 more marines. He's also stated that he will add “two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan” and encourage NATO to make “greater contributions—with fewer restrictions”. In his op-ed he boasted, "As president, I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”

He also added this ominous warning:

“The greatest threat to that security lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where terrorists train and insurgents strike into Afghanistan. We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president, I won’t. We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps and to crack down on cross-border insurgents. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”

???????

Gerry posts that some of his comments have not been getting through. Has this been happening to anyone else? You can reach me here.

Auntyhattie@gmail.com

Fiction, agin

It's slow chez Hattie's today. I have been attending to some bizarre tasks, such as wrapping my figs and pineapples in cheesecloth to keep the birds from eating them. We went for a swim yesterday evening. It was incredible to be at Richardson Beach with the sun setting behind Mauna Kea. This is the mountain I live on. It is the tallest mountain in the world, reckoned from the base, with the summit almost 15,000 feet.

So I just thought I'd post Success and Failure, a piece of fiction from 2001. Now this is pure fiction. When I've read it to people they say, "Oh I'm so sorry this happened to you." But no, this never happened to me. Honest. Some of my stuff is quasi- autobiographical, but not this one. 

Now to wrap those little dresses and outfits I bought for my grandkids and send them off.

Nellie McKay

A new star on the horizon. From Twisty.

Dep't. of Pandering

(Click for enlargement)

Last post on the topic, I promise

More, and then I promise to shut up about this: I was listening to Air America, and some movie star whose name I do not know was talking about how she had given up the Hollywood rat race and taken up meditating, losing her ego and becoming part of the group mind. She said people are just busy busy busy and they lose all sense of themselves and so on. She provided some other rapid-fire cliches. Then she said something like, "It's adolescence all over again. Like the 70's. That's what women between the age of 45 and 55 are up to these days." 

Even in deepest menopause, I never fled into that kind of unreality. What women in that age group need are good jobs, a home, steady and supportive relationships, financial security: all that boring stuff that makes life worthwhile for older women.

Don't miss the devastating little essay and video in the N.Y. Times about this late 40 ish woman. What she did not know was that the banks and credit card companies could lend her money that they didn't even have to show but could just transfer from one account to another. The money did not even have to exist! But when she had to pay it back, with interest, it suddenly became real.  And the fees, too, those were real. And she could not contest any of this. Most people, and especially women, don't understand how the money power differential affects them. Now the bank will have her house and will probably rent it out. So there she is, unemployed, homeless, unwanted. What a fate. And I hardly think she's unusual. Maybe she ought to go meditate somewhere.

More: Ms. Reyes has had more or less the same financial meltdown caused by predatory lenders, illness, and losing her job, but she is lucky in that her kids are smart and care about her. She looks like a fine and helpful grandmother,too, so she can give something back to her kids in that way. No wonder that her kid became an accountant! And see, he knows about money. He's a guy! (Click around for video. I can't seem to bring up the link.) Note how the matter of respectability weighs on her, and how much it cost her to keep up a respectable front for the sake of her kids.

In a time of extreme poverty in England in the late 19th Century, the comfortable classes distinguished between the worthy and the unworthy poor. Shaw had a lot of fun with that notion, creating Mr. Doolittle, Eliza's feckless dad who magically becomes a pillar of society through inheritance. Shaw  rather admired poor people who had fun in spite of their penury. Thanks to our present financial  system  the poor are never happy but just carry enormous loads of debt. This satisfies that need to blame the victim, which is a form of hysterical denial of the financial realities that threaten us all. We're all one illness or natural disaster or what have you away from the street. Even people like us, who have done all the right things.

So pointing the finger at these people just allows us to believe it can't happen to us. Well, it can.

Yet more: from Cinzea.

And finally: I looked at the video about the young couple who were being foreclosed on. They will be OK if they can stick together. They are young, and that gives them more options. Too bad they bought when they could have rented.