Things I’ve Seen

• McCain hates kids
• McCain hates workers
• Mc Cain loves lobbyists
• McCain hates seniors
• McCain loves NAFTA
• McCain loves war
• McCain hates veterans
• McCain hates choice
• McCain loves Bush

Justin Whelan writes in (the excellent) New Matilda - a tale of Two Americans

Two very different Americans are arriving in Australia this week. The reception each will receive, and the messages they have for Australia, could not be more different

… One talks of world domination in the name of ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ the other talks about loving our enemies in the name of the crucified Jesus.

In the system of legal justice in place in the US, Dick Cheney’s alleged responsibility for war crimes goes unpunished, while John Dear’s non-violent protest against weapons of mass destruction has seen him do time in US Federal prison.

In the system of priorities in Australia, Dick Cheney will be warmly met by the Government, attract much media interest, and applauded by business leaders. John Dear will be met by Church leaders and thousands of ordinary people, but largely ignored as an irrelevant idealist by the mainstream media.

So there it is: two Americans in the same week: the ‘war criminal’ and the ‘peace criminal.’ One comes to preach war, the other comes to preach peace. The Government will listen to the man of war. Who are you going to listen to?

Hugh, of librivox fame, has a new blog, textosolvo, on

open collaborative projects, (mostly non-software) with a focus on idealism and not money-making.

I put it to you that it is when our sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is overidden by our sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that injustice prevails in our society.

This is the essence of wedge politics, and the grease in the gears of John Howard’s success.

From How to Make Wealth, but not really about it:

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

Thanks to New Matilda, I found this excellent Australian blog called “Turtles All The Way Down”

Its like you crossed Lynn Truss with Media Watch and then focussed it on Radio National:

The Law Report on Radio National is very good, but when you hear someone referred to as “a champion athlete and father”, don’t you have flashbacks to a primary school teacher hurling in your general direction a piece of chalk and the perceptive words, “Oh, he was a champion father, was he?” The ABC needs some chalk throwers, or at least some primary school teachers.

A very simple game which looks dangerously addictive: SET.

A great article in The Guardian, ending with a profound question:

….poor kids will stop wanting Nike trainers only when they have another way to prove their own worth, another way to show they are valued. In other words, when society itself is changed. It raises a tricky question. Can we really protect children from consumerism run wild without changing the way the rest of us live? Is this a problem of the young - or a problem for all of us?

From Sidney Blumenthal, in the Guardian:

A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, the Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers’ request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration’s additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem - whose presses are underwater and can now only put out an online edition - has reported: “No one can say they didn’t see it coming … Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.”

The Bush administration’s policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly has contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands around New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush promised a “no net loss” wetland policy, which had been launched by his father’s administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed the approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The army corps of engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a study that concluded in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary - much less a category four or five - hurricane. “There’s no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection,” said one of the report’s authors. The chairman of the White House’s council on environmental quality dismissed the study as “highly questionable”, and boasted: “Everybody loves what we’re doing.”

All fo them are here…

“Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears”

… “The Three Little Pigs Build an Improvised Explosive Device and Deal With That Damned Wolf Once and for All”

… “Little Red Riding Hood Strays Into the Neutral Zone and Is Never Heard From Again, Although There Are Rumors … Awful, Awful Rumors”