Rayne Today

When Treasury Secretary Paulson announced work on a bailout plan, he made some comment about wanting to help responsible homeowners, implying that irresponsible homeowners were the ones to blame for this mess and needed no help. I felt like throwing something at the television when I heard him mouth such garbage. Irresponsible homeowners -- the ones who'd been pushed to become a part of the "ownership society" to help our floundering post-9/11 economy, the ones who suffered a catastrophic illness that health insurance didn't cover, or lost their jobs due to market conditions over which they had no power. It's infuriating to hear such hints of blame from Paulson to this effect, knowing that the real problems -- the really BIG problems -- had far more to do with the irresponsible and completely amoral pirahna that populated firms like Enron. Specifically Enron, but including their corporate brothers-in-arms. Once upon a time, I worked for a Fortune 100 company,...

George Lakoff wrote in TruthOut last week about progressives' response to Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's veep pick. While Lakoff tends to cling too tightly to a dualistic worldview framed in the strict father/nurturing mother model, he's quite right that progressives cannot use their over-thought realist perspective to address the problem of Palin. Where Lakoff struggles is with the unconscious and subconscious that lies deep below our own relationships with parental figures. He does not have a solid grasp of Jungian archetypes -- and that's where we must go to find the tools we need. After reading his take, I think I figured it out: she is a very primitive archetype for the authoritarians, a vengeful earth mother , a veritable goddess Kali, a bringer of death. They respect that in their guts, in their tissue, at atomic level; their heads cannot engage because her being communicates like a dog whistle to the very molecules of which they are made. Our challenge is...

So emptywheel dissects Chris Bowers' post on the rise of the non-fictional aesthetic among the political left, disagreeing with "his characterization of this aesthetic--non-fiction versus fiction," pointing out that fiction is an arbitrary construct . Agreed. If consciousness is defined as one's perception of reality -- and we all know that we can change our perceptions -- then we can change our state of awareness at will. What is fiction if it is defined by one's perception? It's all very fluid. Art -- a fiction and not the thing itself -- imitates the thing itself. Are there not points at which art is become that thing, transcended the divide between the object and the observation of the object? Which leads me to think of that unnamed member of the administration that said they (the administration and/or the neo-cons) created reality and the rest of us would be left study it. Which side of that equation is fiction? The change in our collective progres...

In re: Top Bush aids approved interrogation tactics: report – Anybody have the feeling that somebody wanted to kill the chatter about Condi for Veep? Or that the somebody might have been Ashcroft? Insert some speculation here about Powell, since this sounds like him talking with Bob Woodward, and then some speculation about Andy Card since the leaker has access and a possible conscience. So which of the likely suspects has a bone to pick with Condi? Because they sure stuck the shiv in her -- multiple times, like pins in a voodoo doll. Are they literally daring a foreign country to snag her the next time she travels overseas? The rest of the principals aren’t as likely a rendition for war crimes as they’ll probably have more security (ex. DeadEye) or stay at home (ex. Rummy). We have “a select group of senior officials or their deputies”, of which the principals were “Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Directo...

Was just reading Jill Bialosky's essay at Bookslut, Writing a Suitable Woman: The End of the Novel of Female Despair , and wondering whether women in western culture no longer have to suffer the choice of responsibility or desire. I think we do; I think that responsibility changes as do our desires, and that at any point in our life we may have to make an emotionally torturous choice between these things. Certainly we no longer find ourselves in the west left bereft of options for making the choice between duty and love, but many of us will suffer for the choice. Can you think of an example in your life, from your own life or that of your peers, where one needed to choose to stay within a relationship out of obligation or mores, or where one made great sacrifice to choose passion over the predictable? I can think of a number of them -- and more often than not, they chose to suffer in silence and stay in their groove of responsibility. But a Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina they wer...

And TRex scribed my name in the blogroll there, too!! Groovy! Congrats on the new digs , dear therapod!

I had a moment of deja vu when I read this bit at White Collar Crime Prof's blog : Yet Another FCPA Case - Individual Pleads Guilty On the heels of a Fifth Circuit Appellate decision affirming a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) conviction ( here ), the DOJ reports on a plea to a FCPA charge. The press release states that "[a] former executive of a subsidiary of Houston-based Willbros Group Inc. (WGI) has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe officials of the government of Nigeria with more than $6 million in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)." The press release notes that this former executive admitted that "[t]hese payments were offered and made to officials of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (the Nigerian state-owned oil company) and its subsidiary, National Petroleum Investment Management Services, a Nigerian political party, and a senior official in the executive branch of the Nigerian federal government, in order to assist in...

I got this from my brokerage firm this morning: MarketWatch News Google Inc GOOG:NASDAQ Lawmakers want closer look at Google, DoubleClick merger MarketWatch 4:22 PM ET SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives called Tuesday for a hearing on Google Inc.'s planned merger with DoubleClick, to extend a public inquiry that has included a related Senate committee hearing in September. A dozen House members including Rep. Dennis Hastert, Rep. Charles Pickering and Rep. Cliff Stearns sent a letter to Bobby Rush, a Democrat and chairman of the subcommittee on commerce, trade and consumer protection, calling for a "rigorous examination" of privacy issues related to the planned merger, "as soon as practicable." Rush had originally called for such a hearing in July. The Republican House members said the hearing is needed to examine the " enormous privacy implications" related to combining Google's database of ...

What can you do?

I read this quote from Junot Diaz at Bookslut : ...Any chance I get, I fucking talk about Rutgers. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, I will not lie. From the neighborhood I came from, I was literally intellectually starving. I was an incredibly bright kid outside of Perth Amboy, and going to Rutgers was sort of like someone who never had vitamin C their whole life. They're dying from fucking intellectual scurvy and rickets, and somebody gives them a fucking orange. It changed my life... You know, if you removed the name "Rutgers" and inserted "blogging", that would describe exactly how I feel. Blogging's this scurvy wench's orange.

After leaving the McCormick Center this morning following the YearlyKos Convention, I'm sitting in the O'Hare airport, trapped in waiting zone hell as my flight is delayed. Unfortunately I've got plenty of time to watch CNN. And plenty of time for my blood pressure to be elevated. Amy Walters is covering the YearlyKos convention, and she somehow comes away thinking that Senator Clinton did well. What the f---? Clinton dodged at least 3 questions during the Presidential forum, and was hissed at once about one of those dodges. She did not receive the kind of applause that the other candidates received for her efforts. Walters also claimed that Edwards was out of the first tier -- clearly not true based on the resounding approval of the YKos audience during the event. Granted, Edwards dodged at least once, or perhaps I should say that he finessed a question; he also threw the audience red meat that they ate up. But Clinton tried to redirect attention from one of her dodges...

Sometimes words simply won't do. Nope, not at all.

I'm just now getting around to catching up on things that I had to set aside in order to get the family packed up and out of town for a couple of weeks. Since I'm going to YearlyKos, the kids are going to stay with their grandparents; we're spending quality time together here in the Great White North before I go to the convention, and I'll decompress with them here after the convention and before we head back home. But that means the garden has been left untended, or left in the care of my husband who will be traveling quite a bit during these two weeks. The kids took these snaps just before we left town; we are very curious about the changes we will see when we arrive back home. Besides an avalanche of zucchini and tomatoes, what else do you think will happen? This is the first zucchini, now much larger than a nine-year-old's hand, ready for picking. But the kids forgot it; hubby says he picked them and tossed them because he didn't know what to do with the...

Been too busy for the last week, couldn't think straight. So busy that it even interrupted my sleep; I'd wake up, realizing that I'd been thinking about my "To Do" list in my dreams, adding items and scratching off others. At least twice I had to write things down in the middle of the night after waking up thinking about them. But now the travel is behind me, most of my "To Do" list has been done (save for a few niggling chores that followed me). And I've actually had my toes in the sand. Hope wherever you are, that you are also able to park yourself in a reclining position with a beverage of your choice and unwind for the weekend. I think we could all use one right about now.

Yeah, me too, I wanted to become something more than an angry American, nauseated every day by what I read and saw at work in government. I'd recently started blogging, but it wasn't enough. I needed results, something more than yelling into the void every day over a hot keyboard. As days went by I felt more and more isolated, alone, freakish, and horribly frustrated by the perception my country was sliding rapidly down a slippery, ugly slope towards something I couldn't label. I'd read about a campaign that intrigued me, some guy out east that had a straightforward and pragmatic way of looking at matters and addressing them, a guy who actually had some chops at doing what needed to be done. He'd balanced a budget for more than a decade, while providing healthcare to all senior citizens and children in his state – and he did not believe we had solid intelligence to go to war in Iraq. Damn, I thought, I want some of THAT. Where do I sign up? Mind you, I...

The garden is damp this morning; I won't have to water it today with the rain we are getting. But I'm not certain if it's a good thing. Look at how full everything has gotten over the last couple of weeks, tomatoes ready to burst out of the bed and beans looking in the garage window. The next batch of radishes -- two separate plantings -- are already up and beginning to fill in the place where the previous crop had been pulled. Oops, crabgrass in the bed...I guess I'd better weed again when the rain stops. A sign of things to come: Hungarian peppers are already coming in, these about 6 inches long and nearly ready to pick. There are about a dozen of them in the pepper bed. My daughter is pleading to pick a lilac pepper, but I won't let her; it still has green shoulders. And oops again, more crabgrass. More weeding. But look here, the zukelear threat. The first tiny zucchini with its blossom attached, about an inch and a half long. There are more coming along,...

I wish I'd taken pictures throughout the day of the electronic detritus spread across my kitchen table and family room floor, bits and pieces of a PlayStation 2 spread between multiple cell phones in various states of operation, more phone handsets and a desktop and laptop in operation. What an irradiating, irritating mess. Nobody warned me about this when I became a mom. My son's little buddy who came and stayed overnight last night managed to trip on the PS2 remote cable, pulling the PS2 onto the floor. My son and his buddy didn't fess up right away, telling me only that the buddy's game DVD was stuck in the PS2. I figured it was not a big deal, that we'd handle it when I got around to it. Unfortunately, the PS2 is community property, a joint present from "Santa" to both my son and his older sister. And the older sister was PISSED OFF. She showed me the damage after the friend left this morning, explained that the machine might be shot because it la...

My mother-in-law is slipping away from us. We spent time visiting with her in a nursing home this weekend; she was discharged from the hospital the weekend before last but could not go home because her needs for care exceeded anything my father-in-law could provide. It's a Parkinson's-like condition with continuing deterioration, although the rate of decline exceeds what might be expected in most Parkinson's patients. In the course of a year she has gone from being able to provide most of her own care to being immobile from time to time, from speaking small sentences to virtually not at all, from recognizing everyone and being able to participate in small ways in conversations to being withdrawn, disinterested and unable to recognize even her own children. It's very hard to watch, and it's caused a few heated discussions between my spouse and me. And between my parents, too; having shared some of the details with them, they've discussed the situation and foun...

(Bloody Blogger won't let me put in a title, sorry, will have to come back and fix this later.) [Fixed!] Quality of seeds show here in produce; this was a cheap pack, and the fruits are all over the map in size and color. We've planted a new batch this week with a higher quality seed and a new variety. Just wait until you see them! The Brandywine tomatoes are blooming like crazy; I love that the blossoms telegraph the fruit to come with the complexity of their doubled blooms. And look, little tiny blossoms beginning to form on the zucchini plants. Fair warning to the neighbors, it won't be long before you find zukes on your stoops.

I never would have thought I'd feel this way; I thought I'd be glad to be shet of it, especially since I've been in this new house for two years last month. But I'm mourning the sale of my old house; I left it only minutes before I had to go sign off the title. It was the first real estate my spouse and I bought together; we moved in the day after our wedding. Both my babies came home from the hospital to this house. I've scrubbed and painted every inch of this place. I've canned vegetables from its garden, run through the sprinkler with my kids over its lawn, sat in the dark shade of its trees at night listening to crickets, laughed at the squirrels that scampered in its trees, lain in bed listening to blizzard winds whipping snow over the roof and chimney deep in winter. But I think that is the reason it's so hard to say goodbye. I'm thoroughly enmeshed and entwined in this place, every plant put there by my will or left by my choice, the carpet my...