So I couldn’t help but notice that lots of people read my previous post. Thank you, I appreciate the fact that you have tuned in. And I don’t want to waste your time reading junk. So I have to say, in case you missed the irony and sarcasm, I am not a Republican. I think their plans for our country are awful. It takes us back to places we don’t want to go.

As I listen to conservative commentators, it sounds like they would actually prefer to take the country back into a gigantic depression rather than admit that the Obama plans have pulled the country and the world out of a tailspin. They would rather pay down the new debt and create a world-wide financial disaster in order to show the world that they won’t tolerate “too big to fail”. They really appear not to understand macro-economics, and appeal to the least informed members of society by using horrid slogans that inflame the masses rather than using sound thoughtful reasoning to make sense of things. It’s patently clear that they hate the president, all liberals in general, and above all, they hate the fact that they can’t get their way all the time.

But when it comes to war funding, they are the first to say, yes, let’s spend more money in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is that? To me, it exemplifies the conservative mindset: they scare easily! It’s a thoughtless instinct rather than a clearly stated plan. And of course, since conservatives are mainly business people, they also see fat personal financial windfalls out there in the middle east. As we all have come to learn, most of the war funding has ended up in the hands of the enemy and the private contractors. This stupid war has gone on way too long with dismal results and we have wasted precious money on greed, corruption and private enterprise. Why are they supporting that?

Just last night I heard a senator say that we should change the constitution regarding our immigration policy. He wants us to change our citizenship rights. The founding fathers decreed that anyone born in the US is a legal citizen. This senator argues that the founding fathers didn’t recognize what is happening today: illegal immigrants are having babies, who are entitled to citizenship under the constitution. Does he have a point?

Here’s the rub: when it comes to gun laws, conservatives say we simply cannot change the constitution, because it is a sacred document. We cannot argue that the founding fathers didn’t recognize what could happen 200-some years later: guns in the hands of gang members, thousands of American deaths each year due to some form of domestic violence or accident, hot heads shooting up the workplace, and children bringing guns to school. The founding fathers couldn’t fathom such things happening. I think they might want to clarify what they meant by a “well armed militia”. Long before now, there should have been an amendment to the constitution clarifying that the founding fathers meant citizen-soldiers who are defending the USA should be well armed, NOT that ordinary citizens have the right to walk into a school building and kill off the teacher and their class-mates because they were angry at them.

When you look at the constituent base of the conservatives compared to the constituents of the liberals, the game is over. It’s the uneducated, the religious zealots, the racists and the unhinged, plus the big business fat cats just wanting to make a buck at any cost versus the educated thoughtful rational people.  And what an interesting game it has become.

Just finished reading this political tell-all book on the 2008 presidential campaign by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. If you were paying careful attention in 2008 much of what they are writing about is old news. But they put all the pieces of this big puzzle together, all the back stabbing and political intrigue that goes on behind the scenes is well documented here.

As far as I’m concerned, the best man won the contest, and the runner-up in my opinion was Hillary. She might have been nearly as good a president as Obama has turned out to be. The Republicans really didn’t have a strong candidate in McCain. That’s really evident in this book, but I think we all knew it beforehand. His time to run had come and gone. He probably would have made a better president than Bush, but of course, that’s not saying much. My cat could have done a better job as president with a one of those “yes-no eight balls” then Bush did.

Then came Palin, and about a week after bringing her into the mix, the Republican handliers knew they had made a really big mistake there too. The most remarkable thing in the book is the retelling of the part that Palin played in the game. She was unteachable as far as policy was concerned, she knew nothing about American history, geography, or economics. But she was really good at being the nastiest, most vitriolic  candidate in the field, and probably the dirtiest political player I can remember. She was asked to do what she did and she did it with relish, even embellishing her role at times by adding nasty stuff and big lies that made McCain angry at her. He even tried to do damage control at times, sticking up for Obama when the rhetoric got out of hand. But she will be remembered as McCain’s running mate, and if he loses this next senate election, it has to be due in part to some of the disasters in his campaign.

But we can point fingers and pin most of the anger, hatred, and anti-government nonsense that’s going on today directly on Palin. She is definitely a “know nothing” about politics, but she really knows how to toss out lies and incite the unhinged. She believes that god is telling her to do these things, which puts her in the same category as the radical terrorist groups who profess to be doing god’s will too. This will also be one of the legacy’s of the McCain campaign. He found this monster and set her loose among us.

Pretty scary stuff, if you ask me.

As we all know, the Reps are just itching to get back into power and they actually think they have a chance this year to make some significant changes. So I’ve been reading up on their ideas and I’ve come up with what they have in mind for us, if and when this great upheaval occurs.

1. Dismantle those dreadful health-care programs that Obama is so proud of.
2. Take the Tarp money away from all the banks and let them fail. Dog-gone it, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”. Just let them fail, who cares! Conveniently forget that it was the banks that failed in the Great Depression and in the four years of the Hoover administration, nothing occurred to help the US economy. It was only when FDR arrived on the scene that things started to get better.
3. Same for car companies, take that Tarp money away from them too. Who needs car companies if they can’t make it.
4. Use that Tarp money to pay down the national debt, or least the debt that Obama created. The 7 Trillion that Bush spent is sacred and doesn’t need to be repaid.
5. Dismantle the Green Revolution. Don’t do anything to curb global warming because as we all know, it’s just a hoax concocted by liberal eggheads who really have no clue about what’s actually going on.
6. Also conveniently forget that it was Bush who got us into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place and left a monumental fuck up for Obama to fix. Complain loudly about the cost of the war.
7. Declare torture as legal as long as you call it something else.
8. Once and for all, take away the right of women to have abortions, even though it is in fact a constitutional right. At the same time, keep misinterpreting the constitution with regard to guns, claiming that individuals, including gangs and gun nuts, are in fact well armed militiamen, which is what the constitution calls for: a well armed militia. To Republicans, gangs are well-armed militias. However, don’t ask who they might be protecting.
9. Give big tax breaks to big businesses who have managed to overcome all odds and are now back in business making huge profits without the need to rehire old employees. They deserve to keep everything they make.
10. The model city for this administration will be: Detroit. Housing prices are extremely low and there are plenty of jobs in Detroit for private security firms to protect well-to-do neighborhoods. Also on the horizon more work is planned — digging moats and fences to protect those neighborhoods. As soon as the fence building is complete along the Texas border with Mexico they will start on the Detroit fences and moats, alligators will be optional.

There’s more:
11. Combine church with state. Down with democracy, up with theocracy. Oh, and dash of hypocrisy too. Put God in charge but don’t forget who pays the bills for the GOP to stay in power: big business, big oil, big pharma, and of course, the ever-lovin’ NRA.
12. There doesn’t seem to be any plan for the future, there are no ideas about how to solve the depression (the new one just created when the banks fail), or unemployment, or the state of the rest of the world, but nobody expects us to. After all, we’re the Party of No. We don’t think ahead, and we don’t care about “others”, only stupid liberals do that.

And finally, thinking about the next presidential election, recreate the glory of the Bush years by running Sarah Palin for president, Rush Limbaugh for VP and Glen Beck for Secretary of State or Defense or maybe both.

So, if all of this really resonates with you, hurry up and join the nearest Tea Party. You are a tried and true Republican. If, however, it makes you sick at heart, you are probably a liberal.

Amazing
Inspiring
heart-felt
Intelligent
World-wide applause and breathing sighs of relief
Hope for the future
The world will be a better place
Flawless election process
Tearful, yet hopeful, acceptance speech
A new puppy in the White House

There were 43 cars in today’s race. Shall we do the math? It’s a 500 mile race, the cars will each use approximately 100 gallons of fuel in their trip from nowhere to nowhere - an endless circle of speed. So that’s approximately 43,000 gallons of gas used in just one race today, and there are probably lots of speedway races going on around our country.

Lots of people watch the races AT THE TRACK. Maybe 100,000 folks on a good day attend these spectacles of boredom, watching cars running in circles trying to go nowhere faster than the car behind them, while they breathe polluted air and grow deaf as the speedsters roar by. Say there are 30,000 spectator cars and trucks at the track, and they drive an average of 25 miles to get to the track - some drive lots more, some less of course but for the sake of argument: that would be about 750,000 miles driven by the spectators. Say they average 15 miles per gallon. That gives us another 50,000 gallons of gas burned up in one day on this one race track. Isn’t that rather appalling!

And we could probably add another 50,000 gallons of gas when we consider all those trucks, trailers and RVs littering the center of the oval, all those camp followers drive thousands of miles every week, burning up the roads between tracks all over the country.
I’d love to be able to factor in the amount of pollution rising into the sky from the exhaust pipes, from the burned up tires and brake pads. I wish I could factor in the amount of sewage generated in one spot by all those people, the time wasted getting there, sitting there and then getting back home, the amount of junk food that’s eaten and the pile of garbage that is generated by those 100,000 people. It boggles my mind.

While this is horrendous waste of our country’s valuable and scarce resources are being burned up this afternoon, thoughtful and worried people around our country are trying to figure out how to save a mile or two while driving to run errands, are car pooling to work, spending lots of extra time using public transportation, doing whatever they can not to use an extra drop of gas. People are switching to more fuel efficient cars, are taking their lives in their hands bicycling and riding scooters to work, while wringing their hands at the rising cost of fuel. People are asking questions like: should I turn off my car’s engine while waiting at the red light? Should I drive more slowly? Should I, gulp, buy a hybrid?

And have you noticed that the news commentators are still talking about four dollar gas, as if that’s something awful. In California it has reached five dollars in many places.

Meanwhile at the track, the tracksters and speedsters simply raise the ticket prices to pay for the added expense and give no thought at all to what this sport is doing to our country.

Does anybody not know that the US murder rate is higher than any other country in the world? Google it. Check it out for yourselves. While we mourned the 3,000 killed in the 911 attacks, 20,000 others were murdered during the same year. We kill off approximately 100,000 people in the US every ten years. Now that’s a crime. What do we do about it? Nothing really. If we told President Bush those statistics, he’d probably declare war on us, or, maybe Canada. After all, he went after Iraq for no real reason in order to avenge the 911 killings and in great fear that those evil doers might come after him again, and in the process probably a half a million people lost their lives (although we are trying every way possible to cover up those statistics).

Speaking of statistics, we have to recognize that some countries do not keep track of their murders: countries in Africa principally. Among the places in the world that do keep track of murders is Puerto Rico. That’s the only place with a higher murder rate than the US, but we own them! So they are really us.

Guns are the big culprit. Nations without guns have fewer deaths. If we eliminated the guns, murderers would have a harder time killing their victims. Yet we are too afraid to even try to get some of the guns off the streets. Unfortunately, our new hero, Obama, said the other day that he would do nothing about the gun problem.

It’s depressing, isn’t it?

We’ve just published the latest issue of Clever Magazine, www.clevermag.com, our first environmental issue. We asked for “good news” and we got some, but it’s not enough. As Al Gore pointed out in his Nobel speech, we must act quickly because “too late” is almost here.

In the meantime, the USA and China, the biggest polluters and the cause of the problem in the first place, are dithering. Unfortunately, the environmental crisis must be solved through political action. Individual efforts are not enough. That’s why the good news about individual efforts is not enough.

Both Bush administrations were firmly anti-environmentalist. The current Bush wants to turn back the clock to when we were even bigger polluters in the interest of oil men and run-away capitalism. It’s frustrating to watch our politicians doing nothing except blocking all bills and ideas that could help tackle this problem.

What On Earth will it take to start the US on the right direction? I’m thinking 2008 is the year that will bring us a change. We must ask all the presidential candidates what they intend to do about global warming and then choose accordingly.

Can the Earth wait that long?

 What follows is an email string from concerned people around the world, related to the Moonbear rescue efforts. If you are intrigued, please check out the Animals Asia website: www.animalsasia.org

I am so sorry to hear about Naji and write this e-mail in tears.  As you may remember, I visited Chengdu and got to see first hand the remarkable work that they do there.  As Cath said, Naji never knew anything but fun and freedom unlike most of the bears who have survived horrible torture. 

I was there before Naji was brought to the sanctuary but got to see Peanut and I am certain that there was no maliciousness towards him - very likely a rough-housing accident.  These bears are solitary souls in the wild and to see them play and cuddle together leads one to believe that perhaps their suffering was being rewarded with a lifestyle better than they would have known outside of the sanctuary.

While I mourn the loss of Naji I encourage you to continue your foster parent roles (perhaps for one of the babies coming out of Vietnam) as well as your role as educators.  There are some great sites on the web that you can link to and hopefully lead others to take on the fight for the Moon Bears.  Ongoing contests and fundraisers will only help others in the memory of one lucky little bear - the “Naji Fund”. 

You’ve done a great thing and while this is tragic, please do not let it stop you in your efforts to end the suffering.

I’m sadden by the news and my thoughts are with you both.

Sheri

Hi everyone

I’m afraid we have some very sad news for you all. A couple of days ago, our beloved Moon Bear cub “Naji” died suddenly. We are all devastated here at “Beary Cheap” & we know many of you will be upset by this terrible news. Rather than try & explain the circumstances, below is a copy of the email received from Jill Robinson at the Moon Bear Sanctuary in Chengdu, China.

Cindy & Derek

Dear everyone,I just don’t know where to even begin with one of the saddest messages I have ever written - and know this news will come as a terrible shock to you, as it has to everyone in

Chengdu. Naji died suddenly on Wednesday and, whilst no-one was there to see it happen, the lack of any associated noise and the wound itself looked to Cath and the vet team to be tragically “play gone wrong”. Naji was found just seconds after lunch with a wound in his lower abdomen which had caused him to bleed to death. He had been captured on video just minutes before playing with best friend Peanut in the enclosure outside.

This brave little bear had integrated so well into the natural enclosure of House 6 with disabled bears like Freedom, Prince, Douglas, the cubs, and all the other bears who welcomed this ball of naughtiness into the fold. After weeks of joyous play, Peanut is apparently wandering around listlessly looking for his friend and no-one on site can believe that he’s gone.I wasn’t there as am in the UK in the middle of our Roadshow but, over the past few hours since he died, the emails have been flooding in from our Chinese and Western staff just stunned and broken that something so unforeseen and premature has happened to our beloved Naji.One thought from Angela has comforted a lot of people - that Uncle Andrew is caring for him now - but I think it’s going to be a long, long time before anyone in Chengdu can come to terms with his death and, again, I am so, so sorry to be passing on this news.I’d like to leave you with Cath’s conclusion after a harrowing Post Mortem by our brave vet team who never in their wildest dreams expected to see him on the table, together with her beautiful poem, just for Naji, which was translated and read out at his funeral by a heartbroken team.On the afternoon of Wednesday 27th June Naji’s life was cut tragically short. An accident during play resulted in a deep wound to a main artery causing fatal blood loss. There was no sign that there was a deliberate attack. Needless to say, the loss of our lively, mischievous baby has left us all deeply shocked. There is some comfort in the fact that his passing would have been quick.  Thank you for all you gave in your short time with us Naji. RIP.——-Dear Naji,

During your life you knew love from the start
And when you arrived captured everyone’s heart.
So bold, full of mischief, naughty and fun,
You loved to play in the warmth of the sun.
You had good friends, both human and bear,
Who cherished your joy in a life free of care.
You brought us all laughter, you made us all smile
As you embraced your new life in your own Naji style.
Yet today we find ourselves saying goodbye.
Hearts heavy with grief, we can only ask why.
Your spirit too free to remain with us here,
Your soul so precious, forever held dear.
Your life was a happy one; you knew not the pain
Or the suffering of so many bears that remain
In their tortuous world. Tell them they’re not alone.
Hope will come again, one day they will come home.
So as you must go, then go with our love.
You live on in our hearts as we look up above.
Evermore in our thoughts, you left us too soon,
But your spirit shines on by the light of the moon.

Cath xxx 
RIP little Naji - we all loved you, Jillx

Got to thinking about the Far Right again, I try not to, but at times like this that’s difficult. Things that are okay with the Far Right:
Lying to the American public about the reason for going to war
Looting the National Treasury and dropping the country into an enormous debt
High-jacking national elections
Placing unqualified people into office
…the list goes on and on;
It seems like the only thing that really doesn’t sit well with the Far Right is getting too frisky with interns.

Clicked past a recent NASCAR race the other day and once again I was astounded by it — the crowds, the fuss, but most of all, the waste. Here were are, talking about the price of gasoline and trying to figure out how to reduce our so-called “gas addiction”, while these racers are racing round and round an oval track, going nowhere, while burning up barrels and barrels of this priceless, non-renewal, resource — to say nothing about the barrels and barrels of gas burned by the audience to get to that race. And add to that, what about the cost of all the trucks, trailers and so forth that litter the infield — the vehicles that travel with this NASCAR spectacle.

 We will never get serious about our gas, pollution, an global warming problems until we seriously consider the detremental effects of this extremely wasteful pastime.