"So it’s sort of like the end of democracy, in a way. We don’t know what the government is doing. People inside the government don’t know what the government is doing." —Seymour Hersh yesterday, June 30,2008, on Democracy Now! Talking about the current covert operations against Iran

Color me low on hope, but the diaries on the Bush administration's secret doings in Iran yesterday (here and here and here and here) cycled through with little comment, and no REC list or Rescue. It’s unlikely my missive will fair better, but it should: Hersh is talking some serious shit that could impact the election, including a possible October Surprise designed to throw the electorate in to chaos and patriotic hysteria.  

So. I drove back through Anderson Valley, yesterday, through Boonville, and into Sonoma County, through Cloverdale south to Rohnert Park where I had an interview at KRCB, a Sonoma county NPR station. Otherwise, I wouldn't have made the drive. The smoke would have kept me in. Air pollution is two to three times the amount considered safe by federal standards.

"All of Northern California is being impacted by severely degraded air quality," said Lake County health officer Karen Tait. "Residents should be prepared to stay indoors and avoid vigorous physical activity."

Driving through Boonville, California, in Mendocino County this weekend, the smoke was overwhelming. There are 131 fires burning in my home county, the result of a freak lightening storm last weekend. The LA Times called it an

"unusual weather pattern" that "sent dry lightning flashing to the ground—again and again and again. More than 8,000 lightning strikes touched earth, according to the National Weather Service."

The result is something like (as of this morning) 800 fires across Northern California, which by Monday had burned 44,000 acres.

So, while McCain and the Republicans want Americans to focus on the dangers of terrorist attacks, Americans (and earthlings everywhere) are suffering unparalleled loss from the changing weather patterns. I don't mean any disrespect to the losses this country suffered on 9/11, but, frankly, IMHO the dangers from Global Warming, exceed the dangers of terrorism and it's about time we take the weather seriously.

No kidding. I just won the 2008/09 Historical Fiction Award from the Independent Book Publishing Professional Group, part of their Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

I won the award for Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, my historical novel about the life of Mary Shelley.

I'm so excited. I feel like I'm sharing good karma with Barack Obama.

Remember the Trojan Horse? Achilles was dead and the ten-year Trojan War was at a stalemate when Odysseus sent the Greek ships into hiding so it appeared they’d given up. He presented a big wooden horse as a gift—a peace offering—leaving it in front of the city walls of Troy. Fascinated, believing they’d finally won, the Trojans dragged the startling creature into their city and celebrated. Inside the horse, however, were Greek soldiers who slipped out of it’s belly and destroyed Troy from within.

Fact or legend? Doesn’t matter: the symbolism should put us on our guard. We’ve been warned of late that McCain trolls out are out and about. They’re easy enough to spot, spouting their Republican talking points. What's more difficult, and more insidious are the infiltrators who lay low and try and fit in, doing their business in a quite a different way. I say this not to be awarded a tin hat or drummed out of the dialogue for my paranoia, but because I think it’s worth considering that DailyKos has undoubtedly been infiltrated by clever PsychOps types who aren’t going about things in an obvious way.

I was eighteen when Bobby Kennedy was gunned down. I went to sleep before the news hit. My father woke me up the next morning. I stumbled upstairs thinking he couldn’t be saying what I thought I had heard him say, that there must be some mistake. I remember the huge and suffocating sense of "no!" that was building in my chest like an explosion of hatred for the injustice of it. I'd been thirteen when they shot John Kennedy, and it'd been barely two months since Martin Luther King had gone down. Both deaths had been traumatic, but Bobby's death felt personal—I'd seen him just two days before, been close enough to touch his hand.

I listened to Ted Kennedy's eulogy tonight and felt a sudden hunger to hear the sound of Robert Kennedy's voice. I was eighteen years old when he was gunned down. I saw him speak maybe two days before his murder. He was at a synagogue in Portland, Oregon on his way to the California primary.

I remember the morning of June 6, forty years ago, waking up to my father's voice. My bedroom was in the basement and I had an intercom, high-tech communication for 1968.  My father's voice oddly tinny in that little box, calling me out of sleep. I remember sitting up, rubbing my eyes thinking what's he talking about? Thinking what a stupid, terrible thing to say, to tease about. I should have known better:  I was thirteen when they shot John Kennedy, seventeen when they took out Martin Luther King and, anyway, my father didn't make those kind of jokes. It shouldn't have been so shocking. It shouldn't have been so hard to make sense of his words, to wake up to the truth of the matter, but it was.

I just sent the following letter off to my local newspaper, The Fort Bragg Advocate, and to Rep. Mike Thompson's office. Mike Thompson represents a district in California that voted for Barack Obama 45-43% (80,491 to 77,134). This district is progressive. It runs from Del Norte and Humboldt in the north to Sonoma and Napa in the south. Mendocino county (my county) was the first in the nation to outlaw genetic seed. I've contacted Thompson's office and I've asked him to make a public statement justifying his continued support of Hillary Clinton now that she's talking up her "nuclear option" for winning by changing the rules.

I'm hoping others will support this letter by contacting Mike Thompson's office.

News out today says a recent Gallop poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters and 19% of Obama supporters are ready to vote McCain if their candidate doesn't win the nomination. I've been one of those people. I've stated it here and elsewhere for awhile.

But today, after listening to a report on McCain's foreign policy on Democracy Now! I changed my mind.

Defending herself today, Ms. Ferraro opens by saying she's offended by all the emails, phone calls and all the threats she's getting, and she says, "And it's coming out of the Obama campaign."

I seriously doubt that anyone in the Obama campaign is sending Ms. Ferraro threatening emails. What's likely is she's casually conflating anyone who is offended enough to email her in behalf of Obama with the Obama campaign. Now, maybe that's a "silly" mistake or oversight on her part. But only moments later, in the same interview, she's quick to draw distinctions between herself and the Clinton campaign. She does not allow the commentator to call her a surrogate. She suggests that being on Clinton's Finance Committee doesn't mean she's part of the Clinton campaign. She's her own women, a commentator. She says what she wants. So, she gets it both ways. Angry emailers are "from the Obama" campaign, while she, on the Finance Committee, is not part of the Clinton campaign.

Take a look:

In Defense of the Indefensible
Metaphorically speaking, Samantha Power was not wrong.

Frankenstein is not the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel.  Frankenstein is the monster’s creator. The monster is a nameless creature who has a taste for revenge and a lack of self-control.  Now, while I don’t condone calling Ms. Clinton a monster, I can see how the misstatement might of taken place. And there’s little doubt in my mind that the reference was, unconsciously, if not consciously, fueled by the existence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our cultural lexicon. Such a comparison—while not as adept as comparing Barack Obama to Ken Starr—is, shall we say, understandable.

Where is John Kerry, who promised to have Obama's back? Where is Ted Kennedy? Where is Chris Dodd? Where is Johnn Edwards? Where is Howard Dean? Where is Harry Reid? Where is Nancy Pelosi? Where is every single super delegate that has endorsed Obama? Where is the Democratic leadership? Where is the outrage?

I first noticed the Clinton's attack mentality just before the Iowa caucuses when their campaign started putting out the message that Obama was weak on Choice.

I have been convinced for some time that the Clintons are embracing Karl Rove's political tactics, one of which is to accuse your opponent of what you yourself do, and not simply to accuse, but to do so with wounded outrage and bigger than life drama, just as Hillary is doing today.

In fact, the Clintons have long admired Rove as a strategist and early on their campaign boasted about using his tactics.  Follow me below the fold and I'll give you links to back my claim.

Support the release of the UN Report on climate change by joining today's 5 minutes of electical rest for the planet.

Turn off your lights and electrical appliances on February 1, 2007 at:
19:55 for Paris, Brussels, and Italy
18:55 for London
1:55pm in New York
1:55pm in Ottawa, Canada
10:55am on the Pacific Coast of North America

For more information follow me below the fold.

There have been a couple of diaries about the 2006 Weblog Awards, but neither have made the rec list or gotten any attention.  Maybe it doesn't matter, but DailyKos has been nominated for Best Weblog and its losing. As of this posting, Little Green Footballs is ahead by over 1200 votes. People can vote once every 24 hours and the polls close at 11:59 PM (US - Eastern) December 15, 2006.  

DailyKos has also been nominated for Best OnLine Community and is winning in that category.

Admittedly I'm putting on my tin foil here, but we're in the middle of a perfect media storm and behind it, with very little media attention, all sorts of other very intense things are happening. In the Middle East for example, the Iraq war is on such a high burn that it's taking out US soldiers at an alarming rate, but more importantly, as LondonYank has been reporting for two days now, there's a huge deployment of US troops taking place.

Not to mention all the Bob Woodward revelations about 911 lies and just how much effort there was to warn the White House that something was up.  Undoubtedly the White House knew the Woodward and his book was going to be news at this time. If either of these were the lead story right now, it would potentially be creating a very different kind of stir.

UPDATE: The IDF is denying this story.

Israel has just given Syria 72 hours to stop "Hizbullah's activity, bring about release of kidnapped IDF troops."

The London-based Arabic language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Saturday that "Washington has information according to which Israel gave Damascus 72 hours to stop Hizbullah's activity along the Lebanon-Israel border and bring about the release the two kidnapped IDF soldiers or it would launch an offensive with disastrous consequences."

(snip)

Al-Hayat quoted the source as saying that "the US cannot rule out the possibility of an Israeli strike in Syria,"

I was in the Soviet Union in 1987. I was there as a US delegate to the International Women's Congress on Peace and Justice--an international gathering of woman that was hosted by the Soviet Women's Committee. I was a mascot, really, invited because of the work I'd done for an Academy Award winning, anti-nuclear documentary called Women for America, For the World (1987's Fahrenheit 911.) I'd been an administrative support person for the filmmaker, Vivienne Verdon-Roe and she'd seen to it that I was invited along with her as a thank you for countless hours of hard, underpaid work.  I was young and out of my league amongst some of the most powerful women in the world, (a subject for another diary at another time.) What I want to talk about in this diary is my impressions of the Soviet Union and the "feel" I got for a state emerging out of totalitarian rule.