Silenced Majority Portal

McCain has a Swift Boater on his Team / Vietnam Rehash 2008

Yesterday on a Talking Head Show, General Wesley Clark was asked by Bob Shiefer (a Talking Head) why he had told Huffington Post that McCain was not qualified and he said:

"I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall." Schiefer noted that Obama did not have those experiences, nor had he "ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down." "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," Clark said.

So now McCain has a "truth squad" Web site designed to fight attacks on his military record. He has a surrogate called Bud Day who says, "John was slandered and reviled in the 2000 campaign in a way that denigrated his service enormously...it was absolutely important to face this issue right off the bat."

Bud Day was featured in the Swift Boat Vets ads attacking John Kerry in 2004 when McCain condemned the Swift Boat Vets!

RAPID RESPONSE:

Sen. John Kerry on a conference call with reporters:

"Colonel Day's comments today only further highlight the McCain campaign's disregard for a new kind of politics. John McCain condemned these kinds of attacks in 2004 when he called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 'dishonest and dishonorable.' Senator McCain should condemn these remarks and cut ties with the Colonel and anyone else connected to SBVT. Day's comments only serve to disparage all those who served on swift boats in Vietnam."

Also read Jon Soltz of Vote Vets at HuffPo & Time to Get General Clark's Back by John Soltz at Daily Kos., This diary at dKos - John McCain are you listening to me was written by my friend Suz. It tells about her misadventure in contacting John McCain's office. She was told John has been "defending" John Kerry. LOL (She could find no evidence of such.) & here is My Brothers Want Their Proud Name Back, which I received from a contact close to JK, which is also up now at DKos. Please read & recommend, if so inclined. Then Defending Wes Clark by a Lieutenant Gard. Veterans Respond to General Clark, by B Friedman at DKos

Obama was then accused of distancing from Clark, & had to clarify, a perfect Republican/MSM distraction from Obama's "patriotism" speech in contested Missouri. Much of this isn't real.

When can we move on for CHANGE and stop refighting the Vietnam War?!

Here McCain does stand-up comedy and essentially says what General Clark said. & he is not funny. Also, ever notice how people stop paying much attention to even Generals if they come out as antiwar? The only reason McCain's service is so sacrosanct is because he is a poster child and apoligist for the military industrial complex. Slugbug

World Pride 2008 - Mexico, Israel, Colombia, India

Obama Pride Spectators

It was because of the magical interaction with the crowds that the Obama groups won People's Choice at Seattle Pride 2008. We had 400,000 people and here is my video finally! (took a long time to upload - alot of people must be doing it)

Get Rich Quick: The Shell Game In Paris

Many people are lured by an opportunity to get rich, and it often doesn't matter if the methods are honest. Have you ever seen the shell game? In it, a con man shows you three shells and hides something, like a pea, under one of them. He then shuffles the position of the shells and asks a co-worker, unknown to onlookers, which shell contains the pea. He gets it wrong every time, and loses his wagers. It looks easy, so someone in the crowd steps up to take his place. The con man always wins. The old saying that the hand is quicker than the eye is true. You can't follow the pea even if you know the scam.

I saw the shell game scam for the first time outside military bases in the 1970s. I've seen it on buses more recently in Minneapolis. And I saw it yesterday in Paris.

It was fun to see the shell game close to its likely origin. The shell game dates back to the middle ages, as depicted in this period painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch's painting is in the Municipal Museum in France.

The allure to get rich quick is hard for people to ignore and most citizens in the US have the false belief that social class mobility is greater in the US than elsewhere. One attraction is Wall Street. People worldwide dream of making it big in the US markets and that's why it pays to use Wall Street as the lure to learn English (see ad I captured in the subway). It doesn't matter that the Euro is worth a lot more than the dollar or that the likelihood of becoming rich and changing the social class one was born in is greater in France than it is in the US. No, people don't base their decisions on reason when if they see a quick way to make money.

Obama Pride Seattle

I just got this message:

We're exhausted but happy, and thankful for the amazing day that was because of all of you. You invited your friends, set your alarms to arrive on time, waited patiently for the parade to start, and when it did, handed out 5,000 stickers, danced and chanted, and made sure that the entire parade audience knew that Obama Pride was in the house! We surpassed every goal we had. We registered *577* people to vote. We raised thousands of dollars to be used for grassroots efforts to ensure an Obama victory here at home. We even won the People's Choice Award for best parade entry!!! We saw dozens of cameras in circulation throughout the parade and during the festival. More photos at Flickr & videos at YouTube

Hope - Obama

It's the little things .. like the table I passed with an Obama sticker, or the Law Office with an Obama flag flying. I may not agree with any Presidential candidate on everything - I never have. But I put another sticker on my Beetle and sent in a quarter end donation (& my 4th this month), to get a really cool t-shirt. I went to a Unity event (the young woman pictured is an Obama fellow) and I marched with the Obama contingent at Pride (see separate story, coming up.) There seem to be more people who are "for" something rather than merely "against," and it's hard to believe it's possible. It's hard to have Hope, but the people who do are inspiring me. Slugbug

Kayakbiker. Must. Find. Graffiti.

He is on the loose in Paris. I liked the graffiti he found. Here is more inspiration. I think that the City of Paris puts most of its resources into the area around le Seine, which is the showplace. The poor live in the suburbs outside the city, not middle-class Bush-voting exurbanites like here. The issues of class and globalization are huge though, and there are many parallels despite the differences.

Seattle: What's left of Belltown besides Condos

Greetings from Kayakbiker: Paris Graffiti

Miriam and I arrived in Paris by plane at 7 am and rode the Metro to district 17, the place of our hotel. We saw a lot of graffiti on the north side and Miriam believes that the city has lost control. It's ubiquitous, even several stories high on some buildings, and just about anyplace with an open space is a potential target for the taggers. I like the graffiti along the Metro line; it does look a little strange though when an entire neighborhood is tagged. My images are from along the Metro line. Naturally, the area around the Metro lines is saturated with graffiti because the artists have a large, captive audience.

Some are quite talented. I am not a particular fan of the abstract letter graffiti, but the ones here are striking.

Exposure: Photography of S. M. "Blue" Selby

(I am blogging about this with the photographer's permission. Please check out her Cyber Yard Sale.)

S. M. Selby is a friend of mine - for decades now, I guess. We can remember when Belltown or the U District had cool bars instead of yuppie condos, and both the Reagan years and the Clinton years. I attended her photo show at Miner Gallery. I went out to repark and had a $38 ticket from Joe Diamond for being a "walkoff" - I guess I was in the grocery store parking lot - and my enjoyment of her show made the ticket less painful. (Capital Hill has a high population density but poor mass transit.)

I have known her as a musician, comic and was even a character witness for her once! I support her in her new incarnation! Her show ranged from the abstract to the literal, with close-up textural shots of common items made mysterious, images taken from nature almost directly, and digital images that some initially mistook for paintings.

Here is her website - as it says: she "transcends the everyday via SLR and LCD. A landscape, a crow, a dew-bejewelled bridge, and the moon become icons either by unblinking exposure via digital SLR, or by destroying and recreating via the kaleidoscope of PhotoShop CS3."

I love these. Slugbug (The portrait of S. in the frame shop was taken by me.)