Edwards' withdrawal could boost Obama

A real surprise - John Edwards will end his campaign in New Orleans today. He has decided that he will no longer serve as the port where frightened Democratic white male voters can safely shelter their vote. Even though these guys knew Edwards couldn't win, his candidacy was a way for them to reject Hillary without having to take a gamble on Obama.

Now Democratic voters must choose between Hillary or Obama -- and they will have their first chance to see them go head to head in the upcoming debate.

Perhaps there is still time for Obama to win. Voters who think Hillary is the safe choice may realize that there's a good reason that the Republicans are salivating at the thought of running against her. She has the highest negatives of any presidential candidate in recent memory.

If McCain gets the Republican nod, the race will pit a Nixonian Evita against a shorter, older John Wayne. But if the race comes down to Obama versus McCain, it will be the past versus the future, peace versus war, jobs versus guns.

The challenge for Obama is that there is not much time for voters to digest all this before next week's SuperDuper Tuesday. Thank God for the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet.

STATE OF THE UNION - A voter ID boondoggle that would make the KGB proud

Why aren't Republicans whining about voter fraud during the primaries? Down deep, do they know that there is actually little or no real problem with people showing up to vote who shouldn't be?

JURIST reported last year that a federal panel found the only voter fraud occurs with absentee ballots. (The fact that the report was completed in May but wasn't released until October also suggests the Republican administration didn't like the findings.)

Yet voter ID will undoubtedly be a big issue for Republicans this fall. (Karl Rove can be counted on to perpetuate the hoax.) Note that part of Bush's desultory State of the Union message last night talked about giving employers "the tools" they need to ensure their workers are not illegal immigrants. As BBC reporter Greg Palast blogs, that's code for a kajillion-dollar government giveaway to cronies to build a citizen ID database, preferably one that tracks our fingerprints, DNA and retinal scans (maybe even some face recognition?).

This bill of goods that will shred our Bill of Rights will be sold as a way to ensure none of those pesky illegal immigrants steal our jobs or dilute our votes. Right-wing radio will whip listeners into a frenzy at the thought that hordes of "illegals" will spill across the border straight into the polls to pull the lever for the (female or black) Democratic nominee this fall. The horror. The horror.

What the citizen ID program will really do, of course, is make it easier for the federal government to spy on us. And if you think the Dems will save us from such evils, keep an eye this Friday to see if the Democrats cave to Bush's demands that Congress pass legislation to indemnify the big telcos against lawsuits for the illegal spying on us that they have already done.

At least in Iraq, people who care get to vote. They even get the day off work to do so. Our system instead puts every possible obstacle in the way of people at the bottom of the economic pile. Applying for a new federal ID card is just the latest version of the old-fashioned poll test. Makes you wonder when and if democracy will ever become a priority here, too.

DTRT MYR SCNDL - 1 dwn - 1 2 go?

The text-messaging mayor remains hunkered down in his mansion, planning how to avoid facing the music. As always, it is the woman who steps down. (The persistence of the glass ceiling keeps women in the lesser-ranked jobs -- so there's no question that a Monica would go, not a Bill.)

At some point, Mayor Kilpatrick will emerge and hiphop his way through a press conference, arguing that the official investigation precludes him from commenting. So unless Prosecutor Kym Worthy can get the goods on him, don't buy any wolf tickets that promise Hizzoner will go away anytime soon.

Will a corrupt delegates system give the Clintons an undeserved win?

As both the Democratic and Republican primaries tighten, political junkies like me will start tallying up how many delegates each candidate has. (After last night, the interactive MSNBC toteboard shows Obama with 63 delegates to Clinton's 48. Meanwhile Romney has 59 delegates, compared to Huckabee's 40. "Frontrunner" McCain has only 36.)

But don't bother paying too much attention to those running totals. It's the "superdelegates" (for the Dems) and the "unpledged delegates" (for the Republicans) who may well decide both races. (To learn more about how the two parties choose and allocate delegates, consult the SFgate.com article that tries to make these murky rules comprehensible.)

Awarding someone superdelegate or unpledged status is a way to reward party bigshots, at the same time it also means that they could swing the outcome. When Governor Janet Napolitano endorsed Barack Obama, not only did that win him a few positive headlines when the announcement was made, but she's also a superdelegate whose vote therefore can be counted in his column if there's a convention showdown.

According to the Minnesota Monitor,the Dems have assigned 796 (19%) of the 4,090 primary delegates "superdelegate" status. The Republicans have 463 unpledged delegates (19%) out of 2,380 total (and of those unpledged, 123 are members of the Republican National Committee). Bottom line is that one out of every five votes at the convention will be cast by people who have no requirement to reflect the will of the voters.

The history of primary voting in the United States has long been a battle between democracy and power politics. Sadly, ever since the "power to the people" Sixties, the pendulum has been swinging back to giving party hacks more power, to the point where the system in place today makes the old Soviet Union look like a bastion of democracy in comparison.

I am old enough to remember seeing Mayor Daley's red-faced machinations to ensure Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee in 1968, even though I was watching him on a black-and-white TV. Revulsion at that kind of politics in the Sixties briefly made us a more democratic country. And, for the most part, primary elections since have not been tight enough for voters to realize how much our people power has eroded since.

This could be the year we will see how much we've lost. On the Republican side, imagine the kinds of games that the Establishment Republicans will play if Mike Huckabee comes anywhere near the number needed to be nominated.

The more dangerous and divisive possibility, however, is that Obama could be robbed of the nomination by the ruthless Clinton machine. Can't you see Terry McAuliffe threatening superdelegates with the political equivalent of homicide to ensure the final votes go Hillary's way?

Does anyone doubt that the Clintons would do this? Would they even flinch?

Is it just me or does today's Democratic race echo 1968?The entry in Wikipedia about that contest decades ago reminds us that we never had the chance to find out whether Bobby Kennedy would have received the nod. Before his assassination in Los Angeles during the California primary, Kennedy had won four primaries to Eugene McCarthy's five. Hubert Humphrey did not compete, instead using "favorite son" surrogates to gain delegates he could count on.

Some historians believe Kennedy's charisma would have carried him to the nomination. More objective observers such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times insisted that Humphrey had enough delegates to win and would not have given up the nomination no matter what.

On many levels, I worry that we could be watching a similar scenario unfold today. My biggest fear is that we will return to the political bloodshed of the past. There is something unnerving about having Caroline Kennedy and (probably) Teddy Kennedy, the remaining icons of the Jack/Bobby legacy, endorse Barack Obama.

My second-biggest fear is that we will again see youthful idealism crushed by politics as usual if the relentless Clinton machine is not derailed in time.

This past week proves that the Clintons have no shame. The next few weeks will show whether women voters can see past their gender loyalty to Hillary Clinton and deny her the delegates needed to make it close enough so that the superdelegates matter.

Anyone who cares about the future knows those young people behind Barack Obama last night are the emerging heart of the Democratic Party. I don't want to play Cassandra and jinx the outcome, but if Hillary Clinton ends up winning the nomination by manipulating the superdelegate count, she and Bill will preside over the death of the Democratic Party.

On the one hand, I am energized at the thought that hope will triumph. On the other hand, however, I can feel my heart in my throat.

Hill-Billy, go home

How can the Dems avert a disaster this fall? Find a way to dump Hill-Billy in the primaries.

When I see our former president, with his W. C. Fields nose, in his shiny gray suit with the neon orange tie, he looks like the kind of guy who would seduce a self-absorbed young intern into playing sexual tricks with him and a cigar.

But I remember feeling guilty when I first had these thoughts about Bill. How could I be so trivial, so superficial? But then Bill became the self-anointed Hillary hatchetman. To help Hillary win, Bill is willing to slime Barack Obama himself himself, no matter how undignified this is for a former president. And now I just want Hill-Billy gone.

There is no doubt in my mind that, if we don't stop them, Bill and Hillary will become the stars of a new low-rent soap opera that we will be forced to watch for four more years, four more years. Bill Clinton has proven himself willing to distort, if not outright lie, about Barack Obama, unleashing the same scorched earth assaults that he levied against the "nuts and sluts" who stood in his way before. According to a new poll on CNN, Bill Clinton's attempts to paint Obama as the black candidate mean that Barack will win South Carolina, but with only 10% of the white vote, far lower than his share in Iowa and New Hampshire.

A pundit this morning (too early for me to remember who) said that the Clintons had gone so far that they must plan on offering Obama the veep slot, because it's the only hope they will have of securing the black vote in the fall.

No mas. Let's end it. Make sure that the Clintons take a drubbing on SuperDuper Tuesday. If they aren't stopped, it will be Washington business as usual for the the foreseeable future. It's time to turn a new page.

Bush and Dems destroy stimulus plan

I should worry that I find myself agreeing with more and more of my Detroit News blogmates. But George Bullard is right that the stimulus/tax rebate plan won't do much good.

As economist Paul Krugman explains in the New York Times, the Dems caved on a stimulus plan that would have worked, by putting the money into the hands of people who need it and will spend it. A sensible plan would have included extending unemployment benefits, or paying folks good wages to rebuild our infrastructure, or targeting the money to low-income people.

But the Republicans fixation on taxes taxes taxes and the Democrats timidity and lack of vision conspired to produce a plan that risks spending $140 billion on a plan less likely to work than the alternatives that were quickly rejected. When Mitt Romney droned on last night about how our economy sucks because Washington is broken, we all know that he would be yet another MBA without a clue about the lives of real people.

Did you hear Romney talk about how great the stock market plunge was? While the rest of us worried that our retirement money was eroding to the point we could look forward to dining on dog food, Squire Romney looked upon the disaster as a great "buying opportunity."

But no wonder the multimillionaire Romney isn't worried. He has his money tax sheltered in the Cayman Islands, so that he doesn't have to pay income tax on it like the little people.

NYT endorsements (they were wrong on WMD, too)

Arguing that Hillary deserves the nod because she's ready from day one, the New York Times has just endorsed Hillary Clinton as their choice for the Democratic nomination. Equally as non-sensically, the NYT also endorsed John McCain arguing that the fractious senator is a consensus-builder who knows how to work well with others.

A fall election campaign from hell! The battle-axe and the bulldog. Is this really the best the United States can come up with after spending millions on primaries that defy reason? Or is this just another example of the establishment closing ranks?

Kwame, Bill and intellectual consistency

I agree with my Detroit News blogmate Henry Payne that the Free Press should not try to have it both ways. The newspaper's editorial board cannot logically argue that Kwame should go for lying under oath when they previously argued that Bill Clinton deserved pass for similar transgressions. However, it is with no great joy that I am being consistent in saying that both men should go.

Lying under oath about a material issue is lying under oath.
The issue for me is equity. If it were Bonnie Bucqueroux or Lil' Kim fibbing under oath, we would end up doing time (as Lil' Kim did). The argument that either Bill and Kwame somehow deserve to escape punishment just because the issue is adultery fails to move me.

In Bill's case, his sin was compounded when he signed legislation that criminalized the workplace harassment that he then lied about in the Paula Jones' case. Serial lying blended with hypocrisy compounded with sexual harassment means that the case cannot be dismissed as "just about sex."

Last I knew, Kwame has not spent much time pandering to the feminist vote as Bill did, but he made a bad situation worse by putting both his arrogance and his adultery on the taxpayer's tab. Settling the case brought about by his unscrupulous behavior in suppressing information about his private life cost Detroiters $9 million they don't have to waste on his peccadilloes.

If consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, put me down for a tiny hat size. I think both men deserve to be broomed off the stage, the sooner the better. Watching Bill Clinton tarnish his already tainted reputation makes me wish that we had seen the last of him long ago.

We do need a new kind of politics.

Kiss my bottom

Market analysts like Jim Cramer seem elated at the thought that the stock market has "bottomed." Cramer's eyes glistened and gleamed tonight on his CNBC show "Mad Money." Time for the piggies to head back to the greed trough!

But there is another school of thought, the gloom and doomers (of whom I am a charter member) who foresee a different future. Global warming, with its violent weather, emerging diseases, drought, wildfires and economic dislocations. Then there's also Peak Oil - the argument that we are on the downslope of depleting the world's oil supplies, and that our commuter-based suburban lifestyle will soon become untenable.

James Kunstler, the best author in this apocalyptic mini-genre, will follow up his book "The Long Emergency" with a novel at the end of February called World Made by Hand. This new book explores how our world will shrink to the point where we can only know and care about what we can walk to. In a blog about his predictions for 2008, Kunstler argues that we can no longer sustain our wasteful ways. "Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports."

BBC reporter Greg Palast, author of the rollicking read "Armed Madhouse," recently blogged about the inevitable economic unraveling that is now a question of when, not if. His latest screed explains how the Saudis now own us, lock, stock and barrel (of oil), now that we owe $3 trillion to China, Saudi Arabia and Japan who hold the paper on our national debt.

So before heaving a sigh of relief that the economic meltdown has been averted, take a moment to read these oracles who remind us that the slide is only beginning.

Let's build a neighborhood response plan now

The same folks who brought you the post-invasion chaos of Baghdad and the post-hurricane debacle of New Orleans are the same folks we must rely on to deal with bird flu. As ABC so succinctly put it, "It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu."

Run for the hills!

Or maybe what we need is to invest in developing neighborhood-based response stategies that could allow us to cope with a variety of different local threats. At the first organizing meeting, put together a list of local residents and all of their contact information. If the communication infrastucture survives, you can use it to get the word out and also to quell rumors. If our landlines and cellphones die, we can also go on foot around the neighborhood with updates. Make sure to collect information on people with special needs.

Next step is to identify a safe refuge within walking distance. The basement of a school, the township hall, the community center. Pitch in to stockpile food, water, blankets, flashlights, batteries and all those other things we will need if something goes wrong, whether it's a blizzard, a tornado, an epidemic or a terrorist attack of one kind or another. Put someone smart and organizing in charge of developing the checklist and seek local donations.

Then we need a response plan to get people to the refuge, while identifying fallback options. Make sure that volunteers conduct periodic dry runs to make sure the plans work.

I would be overjoyed to find that my local and state officials, as well as FEMA, have it together. But I do not want to bet my life and my family's life on it. In most cases, the challenge is to get through the first few days. That persuades me that it's time to get to know my neighbors better. How about a potluck to get started?

Atheism tutorial continued

It is clear from many of the comments regarding my previous posting about why "Under God" should be excised from the Pledge of Allegiance that many people really do have an uninformed, if not twisted, view of atheism, at least atheism as practiced by yours truly.

First, Big Bonnie does believe in something. I posted my credo: "Humans should strive to support the best possible quality of life for all living creatures." And, yes, that does mean that I revere all life on the planet. Indeed, when push comes to shove (as it often does), I increasingly find that I prefer most dogs to most people. (You posters know who you are.)

And if I may be allowed a second commandment, it is that we also owe the natural world, both plants and animals, our attention and respect. While the U.S. media almost universally ignores such stories, the Independent in the United Kingdom reports that we may be approaching the point of no return with global warming -- if we have not passed it already. (For a lengthy discussion of my analysis of why, please visit my less-than-optimistic article called "Why conservatives will keep winning ... and winning ... and winning.)

As a card-carrying atheist, I look to science for answers to many but not all questions. So I exercise those not-God-given brain cells of mine seeking information that helps me better understand the world, knowing that we can never find all the answers.

I realize that it is less work and less unsettling to believe in a sky god or astrology or some other system that requires only faith. And some spiritual constructs, if they are appreciated as metaphor and not as literal truth, contribute to our quest to make sense of our lives.

But it is the pursuit of information and ideas and the attempt to place them within a logical framework that makes life exciting and worth living for me. I would actually find it quite sad and constricting to find that someone or something else hands us all the answers.

Roe versus Wade? Bush says he doesn't care how people got out of New Orleans

That joke from my sister sums up how an increasing number of people view George Bush -- as clueless, indifferent, incurious and over (as in "put a fork in him, he's over").

Columnist E. J. Dionne of the influential Washington Post this week announces the Bush era is over

. Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal says in Salon, "Bush's America is gone with the wind," while the headline screams that Bush's presidency is ruined.

Bush lovers will argue that these are people who never thought much of Bush in the first place. But the difference now is that the press no longer hesitates for fear of being called unpatriotic. News organizations have regained their voice and are willing to criticize this group of ideological kleptocrats for what they are -- radicals who line their own pockets with your money.

The rebuilding after Katrina shows the Bush folks for who and what they are. They don't give a damn for the folks abandoned at the SuperDome or the Convention Center, as evidenced by the fact that Bush immediately lifted the Davis-Bacon requirement to pay prevailing wages from all those new contracts. And Halliburton, of course, gets first dibs, even after whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse of the Army Corps of Engineers was demoted for telling us how badly Halliburton performed in the rebuilding or Iraq.

This is cronyism of the highest order. It is also part of that privitization ideology that means workers get screwed so that owners can make higher profits, cloaked in the argument that we must create a business-friendly climate of competition. Do you know any competitors for corporations are large as Halliburton and Bechtel that aren't equally as corrupt and incompetent?

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins blows the whistle on the work he used to do -- selling economic development to Third World countries that did nothing but enrich the Halliburton and Bechtel corporations, while leaving the impoverished countries with a massive debt and dubious projects. These policies not only do nothing to alleviate poverty, they add to it. Sound familiar?

Unintentional honesty by Irish TV

A TV broadcast in Ireland inadvertently titled its image of George Bush correctly - he is one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S. in my book.

"Under God" should go back where it came from

I know that even some fellow atheists are arguing that banning the "Pledge of Allegiance" from schools, as Michael Newdow's court case attempts to do, has been pooh-poohed as the wrong battle at the wrong time.

But this is not the same as having a reference to god on our money. The pledge is recited in schools each day, which means that children who don't believe in a god face harrassment.

I know I did. I was in elementary school in Cleveland when Eisenhower stuck "under God" into the pledge and I was ridiculed daily for refusing to do so.

By middle school, we had moved to the country and the issue became my refusal to say the morning prayer that the principal led over the PA. (In Burton, Ohio, in the 1950s, it apparently didn't matter what the Supreme Court said.)

I can still hear the principal say, "Little Bonnie doesn't believe in God. She and her parents think she will be harmed to hear these healing words of prayer. So we will ask her to step outside until we are done seeking the Lord's blessing." How Christian of him.

It wasn't yet an era when you could raise a clenched fist in support of Atheist Power. (Come to think of it, it's pretty dangerous to do that now.) I sure wanted to do something to rebel against his self-righteous, smug and superior tone. But usually I was just too busy running for my life.

The fact is, when we talk about religious toleration in this country, the baseline standard often seems to be that everyone believes, but maybe not in the same sky god. The reality, of course, is that there are actually lots of people like me here who don't believe -- atheists, agnostics, ignostics (I don't know what you mean when you say god, so I don't know whether I believe what you believe or not), freethinkers (think Tom Paine) and The Brights (kind of atheist-lite or atheist but more wholesome and friendly).

Throw in a few existentialists as well (It's those pesky French again).

The problem for many of my peers back there in Ohio was that to them, an atheist was immoral, maybe even a Satanist. As one young red-faced boy shouted at me years ago, "You just don't believe in nothing so what would stop you from killing and stealing." Not as eloquent as Albert Camus quintessential question perhaps - "without god, who can say that it is better to nurse lepers than burn Jews?" But I found comfort in Jean Paul Sartre's challenge that each of us must construct our own meaning against the backdrop of a cold and uncaring universe.

For those of us who have struggled to create our own beliefs and rituals to support them, the idea of an off-the-shelf set of beliefs based on garbled utterances of self-anointed prophets in agricultural societies thousands of years ago seems far more peculiar. My modest credo -- that humans should strive to support the best possible quality of life for all living creatures -- seems all the more appealing because of the process required to develop my own values.

But requiring school children to pay obeisance to a god, any god, whether it's in the Pledge of Allegiance or school prayer does what it has always done - which is invite expressions of intolerance against those who don't agree. Most of my peers received little or no spiritual nourishment from repeating the words "under God" in the pledge -- most paid little attention to what they were saying. But the ritual of invoking a god in school contributes to perpetuating the myth that people like me don't exist or don't deserve to.

FEMA concentration camps?

This first-person account (with pictures) of a family bringing donations to Katrina evacuees housed aT a church camp in Oklahoma run by FEMA sounds more like a prison. If you leave the camp, you cannot come back. No cooking in the kitchen -- even the church groups who volunteered aren't allowed to. No cellphone coverage. And the government plans to keep people there five months!

The more you read this family's account and look at the pictures, you see that FEMA is not about protection but control.

I don't know about you, but I don't remember voting yes on making our country a police state. Oops, sorry -- I guess we did when we allowed Congress to pass the PATRIOT Act and establish Homeland Security.

One thing the right and the left should agree on is that our freedoms are eroding. I am old -- I remember when we were freer. I worry that if Abby Hoffman and the Yippies were protesting today, throwing money at the New York Stock Exchange and trying to levitate the Pentagon, they would be whisked into federal custody as potential terrorists.

It's time for both ends of the political spectrum to join forces and take our country back.

FEMA debit cards cancelled - do you smell a rat?

FEMA has not really given a coherent explanation for halting its debit-card program that gave each Katrina evacuee as much as $2,000 in direct assistance in Houston. Could it be because the banks and the usurious check-cashing companies that have long been allowed to exploit the poor weren't getting their share? (Let's keep those campaign donations rolling.)

With the pro-privatization crowd in power, it always pays to look for the underlying economic motive. But part of the challenge in investigating these issues is that reporters themselves rarely know what it was like to grow up poor, so they don't even know what questions to ask.

Do you think that Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, ever had to worry about how high the check-cashing fees are?

Because we kid ourselves that we are a classless society, when there is talk about diversifying our newsrooms (and all too often it is just talk), they never talk about diversity in terms of class. We may see more women and people of color hired (and occasionally promoted), but they all come from the same narrow socioeconomic slice of society.

And as our colleges and universities become more and more expensive to attend, only the sons and daughters of the upper middle class can afford four-year degrees, which will further narrow the range of voices we hear and issues we address.

These people will never get it

Former White House staffer Jock Gill blogged: "As a former staffer in the White Office of Media Affairs, my sympathy goes out to the current White House staffers for their recent epic failure to recognize that hurricane Katrina presented their principal, POTUS, an opportunity to demonstrate strong Presidential leadership - an opportunity which, unfortunately, may become more frequent.

Note that he doesn't regret that POTUS could have acted soon enough to save some babies and elderly folks who died of thirst before water got there. He's only sorry that the POTUS didn't get the chance to LOOK good.

Remember Billy Crystal as Ricardo Montalban saying, "It's better to look good than to feel good"? With this group, it's all about perception, not performance.

WHEN DADDY FAILS: Why the Bush team's mistakes are the only ones that really matter

I am tired of the constant refrain from the Bush lovers that we must look first at the failures of the mayor and governor. No criticism of our boy until you pillory officials further down the food chain.

But even the conservatives should feel a chill down their spines when they think about What If It Happened Here?.

If a nuclear device goes off in DC, Mayor Nagin won't be there to blame.

If someone infected with bird flu is getting off a plane at Detroit Metro Airport this moment, it won't be Governor Blanco in charge of dealing with the pandemic.

We have paid billions for a vision of Homeland Security as our ultimate protector. Let the others dither and falter, these strong, brave and competent men will come to our rescue.

Uh-oh.

Born-agains aside, Bush won the last election because he peeled off enough women's votes -- women who turned to what they perceived as a strong husband and father to save them. His appeal to enough women to win became blindingly clear to me when beauteous Angie Harmon of Law and Order fame spoke at the Republican convention about how she felt after 9/11. With her own eyes, she had seen people of her race and class murdered by the thousands. She wanted no part of the Democratic Mommy Party, with its compassion and nuance -- give her the tough Republican Daddy Party every time.

So what may be the Bush administration's ultimate undoing is that they didn't deliver, no matter how many Democrats might have stood in their way. Dad is supposed to brush the feckless aside and carry you to safety.

If the Angie Harmons of the world don't abandon the Bush ship now, the only explanation I can come up with is that this time, the victims didn't look like them. If you don't identify with the folks at the SuperDome, maybe you can cling to the hope that these guys will still keep the privileged classes safe.

But even the Angies of this country must rest a little less comfortably at night wondering whether catastrophes like bird flu will spare people with means like the hurricane did. Maybe it takes having that second home up in the mountains, where you can shoot anyone with the sniffles who tries to stop by?

One of the comforting myths that Americans cling to is that we are all in this together. New Orleans showed how many are left behind. Let's hope that we all become smart enough to understand that the trickle-down theory leaves too many people drowning and that even those who own their own lifeboat may find they aren't safe either.

On Common Dreams, eco-author Bill McKibben warns that the consequences of global warming will be devastating. A three-foot rise in ocean levels means 150 million people who live near the coast will be displaced. "That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured," writes McKibben.

I am in danger of becoming a broken record, but I think the challenge will be to keep us focused on this issue. The problem with insidious catastrophes is that we do not have a media model to keep up the pressure. Yes, there was a report that the levees would break and New Orleans would look as it does now. But until the disaster occurs, you don't have the visuals on TV that keep people riveted to the tube, demanding action.

No one can prove that any one hurricane like Katrina is the direct result of global warming. But the increase in dangerous weather is undeniable and even the naysayers are running out of excuses.

In just the past few weeks, scientists discovered the error in the way temperatures were read that skeptics relied on to argue global warming is a myth. Soon even the diehards who cling to corporate-funded research to argue that humans are not part of the problem will be forced to face reality.

McKibben warns us that continuing to ignore taking action to slow climate change will mean that more people die and are displaced. We have already waited far too long to act decisively.

Time to get those oil men (and women - little Condi sat on the board of Chevron board of directors) out of the White House.

Rick Santorum - compassionate conservative

Santorum calls for harsher penalties for those who stay. ABC in Pittsburgh has the clip. Clearly, Santorum is a man who has no clue what it is like to be poor -- and who doesn't want to learn.