THIS AIN 'T THE - S U M M E R OF L O V E

This ain’t the summer of love. That was a summer of expanding psychic awareness and cultural evolution and growth. This could be the summer of Mc Cain because so far everything is breaking his way. Obama has pretty much slipped into the wood work like camouflage wallpaper or something. Mc Cain is winning the Oil Wars convincing the American people that Obama wants to keep the price of gasoline high by not allowing drilling. We know that the oil companies are just sitting on their leases waiting for their assets to appreciate further and may let us have some when the price climbs to two hundred dollars a barrel. But Obama is not explaining this to the people. People are wondering whether Obama is for or against this FISA bill. I guess Obama has a long track record for not being present on key political issues and people were afraid this would be one of those. But Obama just released a statement saying he was against the provisions of this bill, which gives the phone company immunity from law suits from people who have had their privacy violated. Many democrats voted for the bill and it passed the house making Bush happy. It’s generally agreed that the bill will have an even easier time in the Senate. Scot McLellon testified today before congress. The word is he back peddled on some key issues a la Fred Mc Murry in “The Caine Mutiny”. He is playing it safe hoping not to anger the administration further. Of course Obama is catering to the Christian right making that Father’s Day speech a la Bill Cosby about Black people being responsible fathers. The speech was so transparently self serving. Now Obama is in trouble for back-peddeling on this Public Funding of Campaigns issue. He was for it before he was against it. Mc Cain isn’t going to let Obama hear the end of this one, and he knows the American People have no patience for the “finer detales of the issue”. People don’t think in shades of gray like the Monkee’s song, but in stark black and white. Now it’s roomered that Obama hustled Islamic women out of the picture in a photo opportunity, but of course the media reported that, so Mc Cain comes out the big winner for exposing Obama as a phony. Obama and Bush and Mc Cain all three visited the flood area of the Mississippi valley. But the thing is cops and security have to be pulled from more important jobs to provide security for the political candidates. Remember that time that Al Gore had the flood gates of a dam opened during a drought so that he could be photographed canoeing down the rapids of a river. Michelle Obama’s “Not proud of America” remark is repeated in an endless loop on some TV outlets and nobody bothers to take that remark in context. In terms of documenting a recession, the democrats aren’t even successful in doing that. Apparently coming up with statistical proof we are actually in a recession is more difficult than meets the eye.

I was reading older posts in Rocca-Rolla this morning and Iran was predicted by me to be a continuing problem that wouldn’t go away. Now Israel admits that earlier this month (when I astrologically predicted it) they were doing military drills - - exercises in preparation for a pre-emptive bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. When this happens it will be a feather in Bush’s cap. By having all this bad oil news now, any positive news that comes down the pike between now and November will only help Bush. China is raising oil prices 18% that will cut demand in that country and lower the overall price, we hope. And the Saudis may be “persuaded” to hike oil output a bit. Stewart Mc Burnie used to talk about the two steps forward – one step back - - approach the Russians used to have with Communist aggression. We are so “relieved” they took that one step back, and we forget about all the steps they’ve already taken forward. As President, Bush has a lot of executive prerogatives to help out Mc Cain, that Obama doesn’t have.

Yesterday I was looking at all this stuff on You Tube saying that Global Warming was bogus. That British speaker they had on was pretty eloquent on the subject. He says that true science is being thrown out the window and any contrary facts on the other side are just being ignored. Like the flat earth- - in the past scientists have had a “concencus” about certain things. But when more evidence comes in and/or the political climate changes, then the concencus changes. He says nobody will even debate him, and that Al Gore doesn’t want to discuss the issue intelligently; he just wants to preach. Apparently China has stated that they won’t let up on their own carbon footprint until their “per capita” pollution equals that of the United States, and that China and India are behind a lot of these UN resolutions because they benefit the economic interests of China and India. “Well, how do your friends at the Federation feel about it?” Since at least early 1982 they have been on the band wagon citing the dangers of Global Warming. We do know that something is wrong with the weather. We’ve had two “hundred year floods” within fifteen years. And in the West we’ve had conditions beyond drought. Now all the evergreen trees are dying off, in some cases being attacked by a beetle that is supposed to get killed off in the winter, but now that the winters are warmer, the balance has shifted. And of course earlier snow run off has heightened fire danger, and we all know about the epidemic of fires. I guess it’s this nickel and dime – fractions of a percentage point that gets to most people. We seem to be straining at gnats while we pay $4.50 a gallon for gasoline. I guess Rush Limbaugh has said that if we gave the environmentalists everything they asked for, it would devastate our economy but only be a drop in the bucket for the alleged global warming problem. The American People are an impatient lot and they want to see a pay-off for their actions, and the more immediate, the better.

One thing that keeps me from entirely jumping into the liberal bed is that one thing liberals do is they look for problems and they red flag them and they whine and complain and worry about them. In my own life my problems stem not so much from people not helping me when I need it, although there’s been that too, but it’s fighting labels other people have placed on me and once the label has been decreed, like a Papel utterance of infallibity, nobody dares question it. In that mythical “liberal world” that Thom Hartman talks about there is a flip side. The flip side of it is you don’t see as many cigarette machines as you used to. And health problems of old people dominate the commercial scene on the air waves. We are reminded of this or that malody such as autism your kid may be plagued with. In the old days people just “snapped out of problems”. Now black lists are compiled and you may get fired from your job, or profiled and kept from getting a job. People don’t share opinions with one another because they “don’t want to violate someone elses’ beliefs”. You may not be able to have a barbecue in your own yard. You can’t run your power tools because someone has labled them noise pollution. If you want to hire people for a small job you have to jump through government hoops. You can’t buy the arthritis medication you need because some 86 year old man in New Hampshire had a heart attack. If you try and use cash in some places they look at you funny. Our kids are regarded as some rare China property with no life of their own without being overseen by every kind of electronic checking up. People can’t tell a casual racial joke any more. People have lost their sense of humor. All of this may not make me vote Republican, but they may well make a lot of other people in America vote Republican. If you compare this race to 1996 with Dole, the parrellel isn’t the same because Obama is no Bill Clinton. Today nobody has to even mention building a “bridge to the past”. Because we as Americans have our own ideas of “Normalcy”. We don’t like politicians rocking the boat. Perhaps 1928 is a better comparison to today. Al Smith had to overcome being a Catholic, and an advocate of alcohol. The American people were just not ready for anyone that “different”. People in the South when Ronald Reagan was elected were the most elated they’ve been since the election of Zachary Taylor. For all Hartman’s list of offences and bad precedents of Ronald Reagan, ask the average Joe Q Citizen out they and they still hair Ronald Reagan as a saint, such that nobody has ever done a “film noir” on Ronald Reagan.