…news items about the right-wing preacher whose threats persuaded Microsoft to wimp out on supporting gay rights weren’t enough, now there’s a right-wing preacher in North Carolina who’s kicked all Democrats out of his church.

…in the current Capitol Hill Times, expanding on my recent thoughts i.r.t. the silly Republican drive to split Washington into two states.

…of the Federal Election Commission warns political bloggers that they’re about to get regulated.

Remember all the worse-than-1929 stock market crashes we were supposed to have had by now, according to the authors of highly hyped paperback books? How about the civilization-destroying calamity that was supposed to have been Y2K?

Guess what! You can experience that kind of unproductive fear all over again!

Matt Savinar, an obscure northern California lawyer, has composed a new fearmongering book, Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash. (Found via Curry.com.)

The basic thesis: Oil supplies aren’t running out, but they’re running down. With a bigger world population, and more industrialization in places such as China, the effect’s the same as if supplies were running out. Nothing can be done; we’re all doomed.

Our author’s prescription, unimaginatively, is exactly the same as that of the Y2K doom prophets:

“Get off the grid, out of debt, out of the city, learn to grow as much of your own food as you can, and get ready for some very interesting times.”

In other words, become a mountain-militia nut.

Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather stay in town, among people who take care of one another, than in some brutal macho dystopia fantasy.

And besides: Global civilization built itself around cheap oil in just a few decades, slightly longer than my own lifetime. It can rebuild itself, or more likely adapt. If you’re hoping for hopelessness, you’re as misguided as the “millennial” conservatives.

…to Gwendolyn Knight, the grande dame of Seattle painters, whose work only received “serious” professional attention following the death of her more famous hubby Jacob Lawrence.

I GET TO SPEND this sunny Saturday all inside, giving a fourth thorough scrub-down to MISC Towers in preparation for its open showing on Sunday. Yes, you can view this lovely little jewel of a hi-rise condo, and then make it your very own. It’ll be open 1-4 p.m. There’s nothing worthwhile on TV then (I’ve checked); the ski slopes will all be mushy and gross; you’ve really no excuse not to come down. A professional representative of the real estate industry will be on hand to answer all of your concerns.

BILL WHITE BELIEVES “there needs to be a new genre created to describe Seattle’s country music. It is as different from Americana and alt-country as Burgundy is from Chablis. Closer to European folk music than the hard-kicking roots music of the South, [Jesse] Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter evoke a Scandinavian sense of dread that savagely denies itself the merriment of a Tennessee waltz.”

There’s a reason for this uniqueness, and it’s called Glitterhouse Records. Thanks to them, many of Seattle’s leading alt-country acts (the Walkabouts, Terry Lee Hale, et al.) have typically had great distribution in Europe but a spotty (if any) market presence on our own continent.

Thus, Seattle alt-country’s been defined less by attempts to re-create the pre-Opryland country sound, and more by an intellectualized, upscale, English-as-a-second-language Euro audience, and by Euro-influenced imagery of the American open road, American isolation, and American detachment. (Cf. the US-set films of Wim Wenders and Lars Von Trier.)

IT’S NOW A MONTH since my father died. I’ve got more to say about that, and might post it soon.

In the meantime, please be edified by this remembrance of the mother of an acquaintance of mine.

SOME REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS are suggesting that Eastern Washington secede into a separate state. I wouldn’t mind that, actually. When the original Oregon Territory was split in two back in the mid-19th century, it should have been cut east-west instead of north-south. Under the new scheme, we’d keep our two U.S. Senators; the realm of Hanford and the Gorge Ampitheatre would get two of its own.

I’d also like to see statehood for Washington DC, and for certain “blue” territories that sometimes get dominated by their “red” outskirts in state and federal elections (NYC, Chicago, etc.).

…harps that self-proclaimed “born again Christians” today are often just as non-monogamous, money-obsessed, and otherwise un-pious as everybody else.

What this guy sees as a scandal, I see as a sign of hope and faith. We’re all just plain ol’ humans on this planet. Nobody’s all that superior to anybody else. It’s not doctrine or ideology that’s gonna “save” us; it’s how we take care of ourselves and one another.

Which is what I should’ve told the guy who stalked me across Belltown on Sunday morning.

I was wandering the sidewalks, snapping pix of the rapidly disappearing snow. Suddenly, outside the Crocodile, a clean cut young man with steely eyes and a rigid smile stood in front of me. “Good morning. Have you heard about Jesus?”

I could have told him the line by the guy in the original Swept Away, who, upon finding a crucifix on the desert island, grumbles that Jesus is everywhere, just like Coca-Cola. But instead I smiled and said, “Of course,” and walked away.

“I hope he sees you in heaven.”

“I’m sure I will.” (I declined the temptation to add, “I’ll tell him ‘hi’ for you.”)

He followed me east on Blanchard. He yelled, “You have an evil spirit. A rebellious spirit. It must be made right.”

I ignored him, forgetting the painful lesson I’d learned on childhood playgrounds: Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop them. It just makes them harrangue you worse.

I sprinted onto Third Avenue. He followed.

I darted into Dan’s Belltown Grocery. He followed. He confronted me by the frozen pizzas. “Would you like to go to church today?”

“I do sometimes. But it’s to a church of my choice.”

“What would that church be?”

“Either the University Friends Center or the Church of New Thought in Laurelhurst.”

He mumbled something about the need to beware of false churches (presumably meaning all other than his own).

I strode out of the store and back onto Third. I darted across the street, hoping to snag myself a table for one at Ralph’s or Top Pot. He finally walked in a different direction.

I now know I shouldn’t have been as obsessed as I was with my own selfish, egoic privacy. I should have talked nicer to him. I should have asked him to consider the benefits of trading his narrow-minded sense of mistaken certainty for the universe-expanding adventure of doubt, a world (and a God) bigger than any of our own finite minds can imagine.

The Seattle Times today claims a melting Arctic ice cap just might allow direct cargo shipping from Asia to eastern North America and to Europe, bypassing western US/Canadian seaports such as the Port of Seattle.

For such a reasoned thinker, Susan Sontag’s inspired some awfully dumb obits. My biggest beef is with the accusation that Sontag’s post-9/11 essays offered “backhanded praise for the hijackers.” No, no, no. All she did was say they weren’t “cowards.” A suicide bomber isn’t a coward. A zealous, misguided, homicidal maniac, but not a “coward.” That’s not praise, backhanded or not. It’s intellectual rigor, a quest for more precise definitions and analyses of the world around us. That’s something the US, and the world at large, could always use a lot more of.

A leader in the near-right Democratic Leadership Council apparently thinks Kerry might have lost partly because the Dems were perceived publicly as not conservative enough. No. Kerry was too conservative. Too cautious. Too afraid to offend the drug companies, the insurance companies, the religious right, and the warmongers.

…the real difference between the “two Americas” is one of family models—we believe in balanced parenting, they believe in “the strict father.”

…insists progressives should scoff at talk of a right-wing “mandate”: Editor’s Cut: “There are two Nations–not Bush’s America and some dissenters… I’d be willing to bet that numerically there are more of us.”

…Democrats oughta be as tuff toward Repos as Clinton-era Repos were toward Dems: “If they keep playing football and we keep playing croquet, guess who’s going to keep winning?”

Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, Media Matters for America, Black Box Voting, The Black Commentator.

My week-long political-news boycott’s done. I’m feeling a little better now. I’m not gonna let some stupid election get in the way of my future, and the future of the land I love.

Yeah, there were voting irregularities again. A few political bloggers have suggested a wholesale, multi-state sabotage of the election process. Greg Palast claims another stolen election. These allegations have little tangible backing evidence; but, of course, that just causes the allegers to say it proves what slick operators the alleged fixers are.

I once wrote that if “our side” lost the 2004 election, there might not be a 2008 election. I now realize that was foolish. We’ll still have elections, all right. They might be as fair and open as those in PRI-era Mexico, but we’ll have ’em.

Mexico’s progressive/reform movement broke through its country’s corrupt one-party system, working from without. So can we.

For as long as I can remember, US liberals dreamed of a strong and paternalistic federal government that would be the font of all social progress. (There’s a possibly apocryphal story of an early-’70s NOW manifesto, two thirds of whose items began with the phrase “The federal government should….”) These days, we’ll have to “route around” the feds and their corporate sponsors, just as the Internet was designed to “route around” regional outages.

After all the angry websites, all the angry movies, all the angry books, all the get-out-the-vote drives, and all the giddy chatter on liberal weblogs this past week about a potential landslide, it’s all come down to the near-exact opposite of the 2000 situation. Depending on the outcome of some late counts and/or recounts, we just might end up with an Electoral College victor who didn’t win the popular vote.

Lesson One: Internet-based electioneering is still not ready for prime time.

Lesson Two: No matter the outcome of the electoral-vote challenges, Bush’s popular-vote lead is quite likely to stand. Those of us who wished a different outcome simply failed to effectively convince enough citizens toward our position.

The progressive movement’s made a lot of progress in the past three years. But it still has a ways to go.

We need to be on the ground in all 50 states, all 52 weeks of the year.

We need to prove we can do better than the radical right in re: fiscal responsibility, economic equity, affordable health care, personal freedoms, sound foreign policy, and reducing the odds of any more terrorist nonsense.

Sure, the radical right has huge media vehicles, lavishly funded think tanks, corporate lobbyists, highly emotive preachers, and a few rather virulent web-writers with which to spread its ideas. But people-power has overcome worse odds.

The previous was written at around 1:45 this morning. Since then, I’ve had a dream.

I dreamt that I was stone-sober, but found myself listing and stumbling about, everywhere I went. My brother the naturopath showed up on the scene, but ordered me to go to a regular clinic for X-rays. There, his suspicions proved correct. My left calf bone was missing two inches in the middle. My left kneecap was shattered, with tiny fragments scattered about, even into blood vessels. How and when it all happened, I couldn’t remember. Fortunately, modern technology could repair or replace all the broken or missing pieces, and herbal concoctions could dissolve the scattered fragments.

But soon, another problem emerged. My left hand was decaying, and falling off my wrist like a dangling broken fingernail. But a new hand was already spontaneously generating itself from that wrist. With a good stretch and some piano fingering exercises, it was ready to go.

You needn’t be a professional dream analyst to figure what my subconscious was getting at.

The body (as in the body politic, or the nation as a body) cannot fully function, or even stand, without a strong “left.” Otherwise, it reels about, making a stumbling fool of itself, encouraging others to mistake it for a drugged-out idiot. But the left can be renewed, using a combo of modern tech (those “Internets”) and organic renewal (grassroots “organ”-izing).

We’ve already come a long way since the days of “embedded” war reporters and Democratic Senators cowed into supporting the Patriot Act.

The Dem leadership now knows it can’t limp along on the strength of its old-time constituencies alone (blue-collar unions, civil servants, aging boomers). Nor can it go far with the New Republic‘s near-right ideology, with policy wonks, or with attempted compromises with the neocons.

The Democratic Party now knows it needs us progressive populists. And, at least on the national level, we still need it, or something like it.

The Republicans only win when their anti-populist actions are cloaked in populist rhetoric. We can outdo them on the rhetoric, and back it with actions that actually help people. We can do more for seniors, for family farms, for small business owners, and for working families than the other party can even promise.

And as for that trumped-up “culture war” nonsense: We’re the advocates of diversity and personal choice. If you’re strongly attached to your religion, your family structure, and your lifestyle, we’ll help you preserve your right to them, just as we’ll help preserve other folks’ rights to their religions and lifestyles.