I'm mad at Van Jones

Before this week, all I'd ever heard about Van Jones was glowing. He spoke at a UUA General Assembly a few years back and I heard numerous people tell me that it was the best speech they'd ever heard or that he was the smartest person they'd ever heard. I'd missed his speech, and I was sorry.

But today, I'm thinking that it was so dumb of him to take the job of Green Czar, that I'm angry at him. Did he think his past statements and petition signatures (that Bush "let" 9/11 happen so he could go to war, is the most damming) wouldn't catch up with him in this incredibly polarized climate? Had he not noticed how much damage President Obama took on just because he was in the presence of Jeremiah Wright? Hello, Mr. best-speaker-people-have-ever-heard! This is the real world speaking! It matters what petitions you signed and what impolite things you said in the heat of various news storms.

Obama (whose people should have done a better vetting job...that's also true) didn't need this. The nation didn't need this. Mr. Jones... your bad.

Praying for the House

I offered a prayer to our State House of Representatives this morning.
I have strong feelings about public prayer. I was asked to lead the Representatives in prayer, and that's what I did; reminding them of their gratitude for our beautiful state, our democracy, our connections, giving them a moment to call to mind those they wished to pray for and asking a blessing on their work. No big deal.

But expressions of gratitude and appreciation I got suggested to me what my Santa Fe colleague confirmed, which is that too many persons of the cloth preach rather than pray, or pray only with and for persons of their own faith tradition.

I was glad to have offered something of value to hard working legislators!
And glad to see that the Domestic Partnership bill has had a sudden resurrection for this year's session.

The Anthrax Scare

So it seems that a suspect in the 2001 Anthrax scare/murders had committed suicide. Now we may never know what exactly happened and why a respected researcher put anthrax powder in envelopes, killed two people and scared the nation half to death. (remember, no powder allowed in gym dressing rooms?) ..either because the man who did it will now never tell, or because the suicider will be presumed guilty and the case closed.

One thing I've not seen much about in today's news about this strange case is how the Anthrax scare was originally blamed, with supposed substantial evidence, on Iraq. It was another reason we had to go to war. One of the supposed weapons of mass destruction was germ warfare. The notes in the envelope were supposedly from Iraq and the powder itself had some especially Iraqi chemical makeup. That turned out to be flat out made up somewhere in the "information" chain. For a long time now (once we started the war), the FBI has focused on domestic sources of this little terrorist event that we've mostly forgotten. But that little terrorist event was a major cause of this disastrous war. And now the person they were about to finger is dead.


It's an unsatisfactory, not to say downright fishy ending to a very strange, not to say, downright fishy episode in American life.

Hilary's Triumph

Today is the 89th anniversary of the proposal of the 19th ammendment to the constitution, giving women the right to vote.

Yep...it's only been 89 years. There are woman alive who were born disenfranchised. What a long, long way we've come!

Today it seems clear that we will not have a woman president this time around, and even though I didn't vote for her, there's a sadness in me about that.

Let's give her her due. She dared to dream, she braved criticism (no...not criticism, scorn) that would have withered a cactus in the desert, and she almost won. If she can get that far, one of her sisters, sitting watching the TV last night, will get farther. And a generation of girls knows in a new way, "I could be president."

And that's a triumph. Thanks, Hilary.

Playing By The Rules

My major objective for November is a Democratic win, and I preferred Obama over Clinton a little bit...until the last few weeks and the fight over illicit delegates.

Amongst the problems of the past 8 years is that we've had a president who doesn't play by the rules...international rules, UN rules, Geneva convention rules, compassion rules...any rules but his own rules. It's been destructive and damaging and scary.

A president needs to live by the rules, abide by the things s/he negotiated, and live gracefully with the result. That's adulthood. This playground squabble in which one party wants the agreed-upon rules set aside so that she might win the game, and complains when the rules are set aside but in a compromise...that's not my president. That's not even a grownup. And God knows, it is high time we had a grown up in the highest office on the planet.