Okay, so maybe referring to The Obama as specious is a bit of a stretch, but, dammit, I wanted that pun! And, really, it was just a setup for this awesome graphic by artist Mike Rosulek:

Rebecca Solnit writes in the London Review of Books of the water-powered rise and fall of the North American west:

Eighty per cent of the Colorado River’s water goes to agriculture. Twenty per cent of California’s agricultural water goes to grow low-value alfalfa. The river, in its climate-change-driven decline, will strangle all these projects and make a mockery of the two great dams and the reservoirs that were once signs of triumph over it and over nature. The reservoirs and dams are failing now, long on silt, short on water, products of the short-sightedness that has made the West a place littered with projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Indeed, the epitaph for most of the “modern world” could be simply “projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.” The UN’s triennial World Water Development report says, “Humanity has embarked on a huge ecological engineering project with little or no preconception – or indeed full present knowledge – of the consequences. We have sought to redesign and impose a new order on natural planetary systems, built over aeons of time.”

(By the way, that UN quote, the riverbed image, and the inspiration for this blog post’s title, come from Arteries International.)

It’s even creepier than it sounds. Under the new “Secure Communities” program spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security – named in the fashion of Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” Initiatives – all local and state police bookings will be run through the DHS master immigration database. Anyone flagged as an “illegal alien” will be detained at the request of DHS.

The idea that your local police would be cooperating with DHS in enforcing immigration rules completely undermines whatever limited trust might still remain between community members and police officers. Don’t just take my word for it; here’s the conclusion of a lobbying group called the Police Foundation:

immigration enforcement by local police undermines their core public safety mission, diverts scarce resources, increases their exposure to liability and litigation, and exacerbates fear in communities already distrustful of police.

The fact that every single person arrested and booked will be run through this system is considered a civil rights PLUS because it avoids the “profiling” of people based on their skin color or perceived ethnic background.

With that so-called advantage, I’m sure a lot of liberals will line up and cheer for the Obama administration’s newest plan to help Keep Us Safe from all those house-cleaners, musicians, DJs, gardeners, nannies, computer programmers, strawberry pickers, and meat packers who currently enable threaten our way of life.

Supporting Democrats who won’t stand up for what we believe in is actually the same as supporting Republicans. Someday we’ll figure that out. Until then, we have Chris Floyd to explain it to us:

I know what it’s like to be hardwired for supporting Democrats, come hell or high water, giving them every benefit of the doubt, turning a blind eye here, making a furious rationalization there. These tribal loyalties are very difficult to lay down; it really can feel like turning your back on your family. And of course the belligerent, bellicose, willfully ignorant Republicans are loathsome and dangerous.

But there comes a time when you must face the truth – or be lost to truth forever. There comes a time to recognize that the Democratic Party and Republican Party are part of the same corrupted entity. There comes a time to recognize that the Democratic Party’s agenda is not only ruinous in itself, unworthy of the support of anyone who cares about justice, peace, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – it is also empowering those very same loathsome and dangerous Republicans. There comes a time for even the most partisan tribalist (and I have been one) to accept the hard judgment of reality: that the Democratic Party is part of the problem, not the solution.

To say that there is no alternative to supporting this locked-in, closed-off, two-faction system of war and greed is an act of craven surrender to that system. To dismiss all hope for forging genuine alternatives to this system — whether these be other political parties or more general movements aiming not for political power but for broader changes in social consciousness — is a counsel of despair. It condemns us, and the world, to yet another generation of violence, chaos and corruption, another long, long journey away from the light. It is, as noted above, a recipe for disaster in every way.

Martha Coakley was the Democratic candidate who referred to Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan and who misspelled the word “Massachusetts” in a campaign ad. As a Massachusetts native, I can tell you that I have not been so uninspired by a candidate since the last time John Kerry was running. When Coakley was asked by the Boston Globe if her campaign was being too passive, she mentioned that she was busy meeting with local leaders rather than choosing, like her Republican rival, to “stand outside of Fenway, shaking hands, in the cold.”

As Jon Stewart pointed out (that’s a Stewart quip in the headline, by the way), with the loss of Kennedy’s seat in the Senate, the Democrats are now down to… “an 18-vote majority in the Senate. Which is way more than George W. Bush ever needed to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do.”

But, hey… bipartisanship, compromise, working together, bridging the divide…

I guess it’s time to modify those old McGovern-era bumper stickers:

Here’s a collection of silly protest signs of 2009. My favorite:

And, yes, it’s been a slow day at work.

…I just can’t resist. This is something I wrote right here on this here blog-o-thingy waaaaaaaay back in October of 2008:

the Democratic Party is happy to use the efforts of thousands of dedicated volunteers to elect their candidate; don’t expect the Democrats to return the favor, when those thousands of people are demanding mortgage relief, welfare payments, and health care. The Democrats have demonstrated, time and time again, that they are firmly on the side of the corporate masters, and against the people.

I’m hopeful that, with so many people getting experience in organizing their fellow citizens during the Obama campaign, we’ll find it easier to work together to bring about greater economic and social justice. The big difference will be that, instead of working with the support of the Democratic party, we’ll be “out in the cold,” working against the entire corporate-political juggernaut. If you think it’s hard to fight the Republicans with the Democrats on your side, wait until they’ve ganged up on you!

Indeed. Even though Obama campaigned on a promise of a “public option” for healthcare coverage, the new Democratic bill contains no provision for a public option, no early Medicare buy-in, no cost controls on doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers, or insurance companies. Worst of all, Obama actually told the Washington Post this week, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.”

In other words: we were sold a bill of goods. Obama’s campaign website promised “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan,” but now he denies ever having made such a promise. And the entire Democratic establishment is now turning on anyone who criticizes the bill; Glenn Greenwald takes note of what he calls the swarm of White House operatives, media professionals, and bloggers who deride

the bill’s progressive critics as insane [David Axelrod], crazy [Five-Thirty-Eight’s Nate Silver], childish [Time’s Joe Klein], idiotic and drugged-out, [CNBC “reporter” John Harwood] Naderite, purist [TPM’s Josh Marshall] liars [Ezra Klein] who — we now learn today — are the equivalent of “global warming denialists.” [Nate Silver again]

It’s like 2003 all over again, except the mud being slung is blue instead of red.

Obama also promised to run the most transparent administration in American history. He said that all of his healthcare negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN. Instead, he met in secret with pharmaceutical company executives and promised them there would be no cost controls on prescription drugs and no plan to allow the reimportation of medicines from abroad. In fact, this new bill even extends the patent protection on prescription drugs to 12 years, with an additional 12 years offered any time a change is made to the drug.

While the so-called “left” sees betrayal and a complete evisceration of real healthcare reform, the health insurance industry (and their investors) see a major windfall. Here are their stock prices since October 27, 2009 (the date that Holy Joe Lieberman pledged to filibuster any bill that included a public option):

The Huffington Post’s Shahien Nasiripour has all the details, including this summary of the numbers:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

I don’t post this to be cynical; I post this to remind myself and those few who might read this that national electoral politics are not the main avenue by which we can transform our lives and our world. No president, no matter how well-intentioned, can wrest control of the state from the hands of Wall Street and their symbionts in the Pentagon.

Facebook ads are really weird sometimes:

David Bromwich’s dissection of what he calls Obama’s Delusion (in the October 22, 2009 London Review of Books) includes this gem:

The Republican Party of 2009….has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’.

Read the whole thing.

It’s that time of year once again. Posting Nina Paley’s excellent sticker (h/t to lulutsg!) sent me scurrying to the far corners of the web, and I found this little Christmas tidbit courtesy of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:

in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Christmas Day was deemed by the Puritans to be a time of seasonal excess with no Biblical authority. The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.

The law makes for strange bedfellows. In this case… I expect I’ll be waking up next to the younger Reverend Mather. And, perhaps, I’ll finally learn why they called him “Increase!”