There are a couple of things that have happened since I last reported. It is clear that the economy is in the toilet. It seems that things have fallen apart. But there are two main stories which have dominated the news for some time, but are now starting to die down a little: The first was the scandal surrounding the Illinois governor, Rod Blogojovich, and the second is the Bernie Madoff scheme. I want to make a couple of quick comments on both of these news pieces.

The first, the scandal around the governor, is a boring story. Everyone in Illinois knew the guy was corrupt. For us, it was not if, but on what charge would he be brought up. Appearing to want to take money to sell a senate seat is criminal, apparently. Though, you know, American politics are all pay to play. I am a proponent of publicly hanging corrupt politicians, and if it is found that Blogojovich committed a violation of the law, he should be strung up. But you see, they stopped him from selling the seat. He didn’t get to break the law. This is an ethical matter, and should be treated as such. Unfortunately, the law in Illinois requires all state employees, (and I presume this also applies to the governor) to take ethics training so they can be legally held responsible for ethics violations. This is a real overreach of the law: the law should never dictate ethics, because in doing so it denies agency, it denies a person the ability to make the ethically wrong choice, but instead fixes the “right” for as long as the law lasts. This is really wrong, it twists things, and forces people, under threat of punishment to do what the state has deemed is “right”. It does not create better people, as it implicitly claims. Read the rest of this entry »

Long awaited supershow, Supernova Earth 20 featuring the old skool crew jib jabbing about the election. Dan joins me in a electoral prediction fiesta. We released this as a SNE show to be able to present our viewpoints without worrying about standards and practices. And now we present it to you. This show will also be cross-referenced as Creepy Sleepy 150 after the election, but for now it is going up in the SNE feed.

Contentwise, we discussed the various news-politics issues and the VP roll-out, our predictions for tomorrow and this campaign as an extended go metaphor. I also included some great old Supernova Earth production and a couple classics from the radio days. We hope you enjoy.

Also, Dan wanted me to mention two sites we used while making this show. These are great resources for political junkies all the way to politically uninformed.

The first is 538.com. It is a site which predicts outcomes based on baseball algorithms. Don’t ask me to explain. Just check this site out, and I am betting you will have a fairly accurate prediction of the landslide that will be toimorrow.

The second is mapmash.com, where you can check out polls, predictions from across the news landscape, and make your own road to victory for one or the other of the campaigns. See if it is possible, then check your own predictions against 538’s.

We love you all. Happy Selection Day
Serenely,
W. Doc

The following is an email exchange that I recently had with Quentin Lewis, who blogs at When Elvis Died.

Here it is:

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Quentin Lewis wrote:

Hey man,

What’s this shit about Human Rights Watch issuing a negative report on Chavez, and him expelling their officers? Do you have a good read on any of this? I tried to find out more information, but it’s hard to wade through the bourgeois “Chavez hates freedom” bullshit.

Quentin

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 2:33 PM, William Stodden wrote:

I would say a good site to check for news on LA, and especially Cuban allies is Presna Latina. It is like the Cuban AP. It is generally more credible than some sources reporting about Latin America. Their primary weakness is that they neglect to write stories that are negative about LA, and primarily Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.

That said, PL doesn’t have anything about this report in it that I found. I haven’t read the whole report, but here is the whole 200+ page pdf link from HRW:

http://hrw.org/reports/2008/venezuela0908/venezuela0908web.pdf

Glancing at it briefly, I will say it confirms my belief that human rights, as we think of them, is a industrialized northwestern construction. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to take an opportunity for some sarcasm here, so be warned: The word “maverick” is not found anywhere in the first Article of the US Constitution.

So is being a “maverick” a qualification for President of the US? Before we can make a definitive statement on this question, I would like to explore what exactly a “maverick” is. Merriam Webster’s online dictionary traces the word to a feller on the Great American Plains during the second (and therefore super-romantic) half of the 19th century named Samuel A. Maverick. This guy apparently did not brand his calves, for whatever reason. This is interesting to me, that this word, which has been appropriated by both McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin to describe themselves, should come from such a source. It seems to me that since January 20, 2001, our country has been presided over by someone who affects cowboy images and cowboy lingo to describe his foreign policy. Need we bring up the “Wanted Dead or Alive” comment?

We can leave off that a maverick is, according to mw-online, an unbranded calf. I find the etymology of the term especially interesting because of the second definition of the term: “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party”. Does McCain not have a Party? Does he NOT vote with the Republican Leadership and President George W. Bush more than 90% of the time?

Right, right, those are talking points of the Obama Campaign. Gotta watch out for that. Fact is McCain is a Republican. He is running on the Republican Brand. He doesn’t consider himself a libertarian, he considers himself a fiscal and social conservative. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a preemptive word. I have been getting like 50 or so hits on each of these posts on Sarah Palin. This says a couple things to me. Most of the people who are googling her name aren’t coming up with Supernova Earth’s site. And second, those who are keenly interested in reading about her (either against or for her) are not reading Supernova Earth. The right wingers continue to pay attention to their media, and the left wingers continue to pay attention to larger leftist blogs. This is fine. I write for myself anyway, and if someone else sees it, I am that much more famous for it. I raise this topic, because just this once I hope Sarah Palin visits my blog, so she can rectify some of her recently identified deficiencies.

Second, I want to make a note as to why I have dramatically increased my volume of posting since the conventions. Sarah Palin is just a great story. It is my opinion that she is less qualified than George Bush to have anything to do with the White House, and that is saying a lot. She regularly supplies material for a curmudgeon like me to write about. In short, I don’t know if I could help it but to write about her even if I wanted to.

Now to the meat. Let’s talk about Sarah Palin’s lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine. You can see her “soft” ball interview with Charles Gibson, but pay special attention to the line of questioning about the Bush Doctrine . Clearly (and pretty much everyone agrees) that she tripped on this one. “In what respect, Charlie?” is almost the stock answer to a “yes or now” question in which someone doesn’t know the context and doesn’t want to fuck it up. Ok Cool.

1st point. The media rallied to Palin’s defense on this one. Don’t believe me? Youtube is a remarkable resource where not only is a source usually cited, but you can watch the words coming out of someone’s mouth. I discovered there, after a one minute search, a clip of people on several news channels saying “Oh. Don’t worry about that. Nobody refers to it in these terms, nobody knows what the Bush Doctrine is. It’s no surprise that Palin doesn’t.” Here’s the link. No one knows what it is, so why should she? It is simply stunning to me that the corporate media is willing to give her a pass on this, because the Bush Doctrine is the ideological foundation for the war in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Nazi’s are at it again, or so it would seem. Apparently there have been rumors going around the anti-Palin blogosphere concerning her desire to compose a list of books to have banned while she was mayor of the small town in Alaska. This added to her now discovered false statements concerning selling jets on EBAY and firing official governor cooks is just more fodder for the ultra-paranoid left to write more blog posts attacking Palin and trying to get people to see just how wicked and Nazi-ish she really is.

Problem is, apparently this book burning story is completely false. I was watching Fox News today, you know to find out what the enemy is saying (apparently a WHOLE LOT LESS coverage of the Presidential election than MSNBC, which really REALLY surprised me.) They had some dude on there yacking about how the liberal media (by which they neglect to mention, they mean leftist blogs, which are NOT legitimate sources of news, regardless of how many people pretend that they are, and I mean this one too) were claiming that Palin tried to have books banned. I thought, “Huh, how about that… Good thing I don’t trust or even read leftist blogs, because I know every last site that presents commentary as if it were legitimate journalism is full of shit… Next Story.”

Then I get something from my friend Dave McReynolds in NYC that contained a mea culpa from some dude at www.flamesofdiscontent.org saying “Whoops. I got this book-burning story from someone I thought was a reliable source, and I heard the rumor on NPR, so I immediately wrote up a report and sent it out to presumably everyone on my email list. Sorry: it turns out it wasn’t correct after all, but that still doesn’t mean Palin isn’t dangerous.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m no financial expert, nor do I profess a deep understanding of the US economy (for example, I’ve only been trained in macro and labor economics theory… a far shot from understanding precisely the relationship between the gold rate, interest rates and stock future prices.)

That is a disclaimer of course. Given my lack of comprehensive knowledge, I would like to offer a superficial response to the government “seizing” the two mortgage guarantee companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. But I think this is fine, because while I have a lot of intelligent associates and friends, I am willing to bet that nobody really knows much about these two companies. So I can feel free to write, and look forward to being corrected if I present an inaccuracy:

It would seem that these companies are sponsored already by the US government. As much as I can tell, the government backs up these private companies’ loans. The company itself goes about buying loans, which allows individual banks to extend credit far beyond their own ability to cover, because they know that these private companies, which are guaranteed by the government, will buy them. In exchange, banks make loans to individuals, using criteria set up by these two agencies (provided as conditions under which these loan buyers will actually purchase the loan.) Supposedly this relieves the burden of backing up the credit from the bank (who immediately turns around and sells the loan, keeping a percentage, and therefore making money), while allowing millions of people who would normally have been turned down by an individual bank to buy homes. The criteria provided by these megalithic companies is much laxer than what would be applied by an individual bank, and can be because the investors in the guarentee agency know that their investments will be covered by the government should some catastrophic downturn in the financial market occur.

Well… it has. Read the rest of this entry »

I want someone to go on television and say, “Well, the Republicans are fascists.” I want one of these pundits to discuss how the GOP is synonymous with the German Nazi Party. It’s a discussion that needs to be had. I just wanted to get that out there, in the blogosphere. In my opinion if you put a Republican Party activist and a Nazi with no german accent into a dark room and then asked them both to tell me what they believed, I don’t know that I would be able to tell which was which. The Republican Party is the Nazi Party of the United States, in my humble opinion. Period.

I’ve had the opportunity to tune in to a couple of the keynote speeches of the GOP convention now just ending. I watched Fred Thompson, Guilliani, Sarah Palin, and of course Mr McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President. I’ll dispense early with the speech I preferred of those four. John McCain’s speech was even. I noted a few jabs at his opponents, and the standard Republican fare we have all become accustomed to: More jobs, lower taxes, better schools, more money to religious institutions, against reproductive choice, middle class, Country first, military blah blah blah (notice he didn’t talk about immigration. That issue sort of lost salience when Tom Tancredo exited from the race). Not much new there. McCain’s speech, probably because he isn’t really that good a speaker (especially when compared to Obama), but more likely because I will bet he used his own speech (unlike Palin) was a decent speech, a nice rousing speech that I can’t find much fault in except it is for the Party of white millionaires Read the rest of this entry »

This is a post I wrote for a group on Facebook called “Progressives (Critically) for Obama”. It was created by a guy apparently for people who call themselves progressives and yet who still (despite Obama’s strong centrist position) still support Barack Obama for President. It was in a response to a post the author sent to my mail inbox there which complained about Obama moving to the center and not being the kind of progressive he should be, and potentially picking a VP choice who is also a centrist Democrat, like Evan Bayh. But it is also a response to people in general complaining that Obama is such a dissapointment, and a potential feeling of buyers remorse, and whatnot that is being engendered by a news media that is suffering a little withdrawal after the binge that was this spring, and the few people in this country that seem to believe that Hillary Clinton should still be the nominee because she was somehow “cheated” out of something that was her right by a fellow who did not “wait his turn”. We all know who these folks are: They are the people that Clinton herself has organized a delegate whip team to stand in front of them when they begin chanting from the floor or blowing kazoos(?) at the convention or whatever.

Anyway… Here is the post. For progressives only (the right is not allow to know that the left is eating itself alive, so if you don’t like Obama because he is “too liberal” then tune out now, please.)

(this post is mainly a response directed toward the messages I got in my Faceboook inbox from the owner of this group concerning Obama’s VP selection)

As a socialist, and a former member of the Socialist Party who swore up and down that I would never support a Democrat, I have resigned from the SP and have thrown my support behind a Democrat. And apparently, one who is a little more conservative than most of those folks on the progressive left would like him to be.

I got one thing to say about that: Too damned bad. Read the rest of this entry »