I just sent in my change of registration - I am now an Independent/Unaffiliated voter, or as we put it in New York, "No Party."

I have to tell you all, it feels liberating, to send a message in my own small way that I'll no longer stand with a party that allows one of its major candidates to pit white working-class people against black people.  It feels good to no longer have a part in a party whose Superdelegates sit on the sideline and allow the probable nominee get battered.  I feel relieved that I no longer have to sit in a party that retains power-brokers who think blurring the lines with Republicans is a way to victory.

By the way, at this point I'll tell you that Rock the Vote is such a great tool, and makes changing registration incredibly easy.

David Plowdenis a documentary photographer whose active career (c.1958 – 2006) neatly encompasses the waning days of American exceptionalism. He spent his entire adult life photographing those elements—railroads, bridges, grain elevators, farms, rural small towns, Great Lakes steamers, barns and steel plants—that essentially defined mid-century America. His work is strongly reminiscent of the great photographers of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's— Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lang, Horace Bristol and others. The difference is that he kept at it for almost a half-century, and has given us a remarkable record of the decline and fall of a more communal, cooperative way of life. Plowden's work shows us America before the suburb and the automobile.

And, just maybe, if we're lucky, what we may aspire to in the coming age of $100/barrel oil and $8/gallon gasoline.

Yesterday, I was reading an article ("Making a More Perfect Constitution") by a professor, the director of U. Va.'s Center for Politics, Larry J. Sabato, who has spent the last ten years developing his dream of Constitutional reform and is publishing a book explaining his reasoning and his proposals. He indicated that such a process of reform (as is currently outlined in our Constitution) would likely be a ten year process. I commented that if we were to apply our energies to a ten year process of reform, it would better serve us to focus upon curbing the current abuses and excesses of corporate power, the henchmen of which are taking egregious liberties with our common good. Corporate interests have, over the last thirty years willfully and strategically infiltrated our government, our economy, our environment, our healthcare, and now are directing our military in an unlimited war with the Middle East for control of the supply and price of oil while we have been asleep at the wheel!

I don't know how many dKos readers have heard about the Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse scandal, or the similar but not-connected Quechup/iDate scandal, but for those who have and those who haven't, here is something interesting which may tie into Granny Doc's recent post, "Big Brother IS Watching You" and also the documented efforts by the PTB to protect their civilian corporate subcontractors of unconstitutionality.

Auren Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been playing the wide-eyed ingenue ever since his Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse project blew up in a cloud of flying spam mails, is an old Young Republican.

What is Rapleaf, and why should you worry about it? I'll tell you - it begins with an email I got last week that I first marked as "spam" and ignored, until I ran across a blog post warning against this outfit.

If what we've seen so far is any indication, the 21st century may well mark the emergence of the Corporate Armies. More and more, corporations are involved in all phases of warfare including supplying, arming, funding or contracting out armies for hire. These paid combatants can be used to wage battle against opponents in a civil war, rebel factions, insurgents or even protestors. Anyone deemed by a corporation or it's allies in government as threatening moneyed interests can potentially be targeted.

In Iraq, the US government uses "contractors" to carry out tasks which once fell only to military personnel. These armies-for-hire are often mistrusted and resented by members of the US military, both rank and file and at the top levels of command:

"These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force... They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place."

Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division (US Army)

But Iraq is not the only instance...

Mary makes a well-written case for Single Payer health insurance at Pacific Views today.

"America's health care system is imploding. Despite the fact that America devotes more of its GDP to health care than any other developed country, the real outcome for a significant portion of our country is miserable. And despite all the initiatives that claimed to fix the problem, the problem is getting worse."

As someone who administers state Medicaid in Pacific County and who becomes aware of as many uninsured citizens in an hour as an enterprising researcher could find in a day, I consider the above seriously understated.

"Getting worse" actually means something far fouler smelling than what you see in Sicko.

Mary has more:

"Universal health care is particularly unsuited for a market-based approach because people are unable to do a lot of comparison shopping when they are sick and the overwhelming need for health care is when someone is sick, not when they are well."

Today I received a letter from Gary Ruskin, who runs the organization Commercial Alert.

Commercial Alert's mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.

You can, and should, sign up here to support this organization.

Funny to start a post about commercialization with a commercial eh? It's for democracy by golly, go by and sign up for their mailing list, and if you can, give them some love...

To the letter...