Brilliant Politics

Thomas Friedman, in today’s New York Times:

“My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the alternative energy sector will save us from the addiction to oil AND ignite the next economic boom. The Economist suggests that we follow the money:

The world’s venture capitalists, having fed on the computing boom of the 1980s, the internet boom of the 1990s and the biotech and nanotech boomlets of the early 2000s, are now looking around for the next one. They think they have found it: energy.

John McCain’s idea to give $300 million to the manufacturer of an advanced battery is on the right track, although he wants to give too much money to one innovation. The market will richly reward anyone who achieves that goal, so the government doesn’t need to sweeten the pot. But McCain is thinking small. And where is Obama on this issue lately? He’s letting McCain take the lead. If Hans and Franz can come up with a vision for a Green Economy, surely the presidential candidates can do better:

There is a big enthusiasm gap in favor of Obama.

(Photo/Martin Saunders)

In its true state consciousness is naked, immaculate, clear, vacuous, transparent, timeless, beyond all conditions. O Nobly Born, remember the pure open sky of your own true nature.

-Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

Milwaukee Art Museum, June, 2008 (Photo/Martin Saunders)

Lake of the Clouds, Upper Michigan (Photo/Doc Pierson)

Hillary Clinton will campaign with Barack Obama on Friday, June 27th at an as yet undisclosed venue. That will certainly be an interesting event. Check with the Obama campaign website later in the week for details. The following photograph was taken by our photographer, Martin Saunders, in November 2007 at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa. When I heard Obama speak that night, my gut reaction was “This guy is going to be president.”

November, 2007 Photo/Martin Saunders)

Frank Rich, in today’s New York Times, highlights John McCain’s culpability in advocating for war in Iraq:

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

It is really Bush’s Disgrace, but because he is the president of the United States he has made his Soviet-style contempt for civil liberties and constitutional freedoms into our national disgrace. From Andrew Sullivan:

You know what is a moral disgrace? Conflating innocent people with those who “want to slit the throats and watch innocent Americans bleed and die.” Here’s also what is a disgrace: that an American administration knowingly seized individuals who were innocent of any crime, tortured and abused hundreds of them, and lied about it. That Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decided in advance to bypass the Congress in setting clear, legal, constitutional rules for the handling of detainees in the war on terror and so ended up in the Gitmo mess. That, in a time of war and great peril, Bush and Cheney decided to go on an executive branch power-grab because they knew full well that what they intended to do – torture their way to “intelligence” – was illegal. That the Bush policy has neither brought anyone to justice nor provided a decent alternative to habeas rights and poisoned the reputation of American justice for a generation around the world. That the United States coopted former Soviet prison camps in Eastern Europe in order to perpetrate Gestapo methods of interrogation. That‘s a disgrace.

But Wehner and the neocon chorus reserve their howls of outrage for a defense of habeas corpus by the Supreme Court, after one of the most appalling records of random, brutal injustice ever perpetuated by a president of the United States.

-Doc Pierson

Farmers Market, Madison, Wisconsin, June 7, 2008 (Photo/Martin Saunders)

Barack Obama is one of us. One of Us.

The ad is helping voters to learn how to feel safe with Obama, the first black nominee for president, and a man with an uncommon background. His first general election ad will air in the following states: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

“I’m someone who grew up taught by the Sisters of Mercy and the Jesuits. And both those nuns and those priests taught me, and taught us, my classmates, how to pray–that it simply wasn’t the recitation of memorized prayer but meditation and contemplation.

The situation you’re talking about is when my wife was in labor for a long time, I walked out of the hospital and walked around the corner and there was a church. And actually, it was a shrine to Saint Elizabeth who is the mother of Mary, the mother of God, which is more than ironic and important.

And so I, constantly, realize it’s a long road, it’s a long journey, and we can’t get there alone. And so I’m very open and find it quite necessary to ask for help and assistance and inspiration. And that comes in a very powerful way in the form of prayer.”

-Tim Russert

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the quote.