Dear Friend and Reader:

For those of you who are not plugged all the way into the blogosphere via one of those Matrix ports in the back of your head, I have some funny news. A number of top blogs are reporting Sunday night that the McCain team is in Wasilla, Alaska vetting Sarah Palin. Vetting means checking her background, making sure she’s up to the job and so on. The story reportedly broke on the blog of Andrew Halcro, a Republican who ran against Palin for governor in 2006. The story was picked up by John Cole’s Ballon Juice and bas been bouncing around all night.

Senator John McCain and running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Mississippi, August 31, 2008. (REUTERS)

It’s also been widely reported that McCain met her just once before last week. But he seems to really like her a lot.

I forgot to predict last night that Sarah Palin wasn’t going to make it. She’s a test balloon to see what they can do in the polls using some, er, goddess power. Even as a delegate of the divine feminine, her selection reveals a stunning lack of leadership in a Republican party that has been choked by a decade of Neocon death grip.

Meantime, the Associated Press is reporting that John McCain “tore up the script” for the Republican National Convention on Sunday, “casting himself above politics as Hurricane Gustav churned toward New Orleans.” I mean, they can’t have a political convention in Minneapolis if New Orleans is flooding again.

It gets better. Bush and Cheney aren’t going to the RNC themselves. Why should they? They’re not really Republicans. McCain himself may not even attend. Instead, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain “would speak from the podium and describe ways to help victims of the storm bearing down on a region that was devastated three years ago by Hurricane Katrina. The first lady visited the convention hall Sunday evening to check out the podium.”

“This is a time when we have to do away with our party politics, and we have to act as Americans,” McCain said as fellow Republicans converged on their convention city to nominate him for the White House. Aides said Monday’s program would be shorn of political rhetoric, AP reported.

What exactly are they going to do? Recite the Vagina Monologues?

Yours & truly,

PS, it must be hopping up in Alaska tonight. A reader keeps writing to me about how They are using the HAARP facility in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park to create Hurricane Gustav. I might think she’s a little on the tin foil hat side of things except that I know for a fact that weather control has been used as a weapon by the U.S. military since the Vietnam days. I know because my therapist wrote an investigative piece in ‘73 or so for Newsday called “A Weather Arsenal.” And that was back in the day when you needed a warehouse to hold what you could put in an Apple IIe.

Technorati Tags: Astrology, Campaign '08, Eric Francis, McCain, planetwaves, Republican

The Oracle takes us to the June 2006 Cancer monthly horoscope. The oracle is a database of some 10,000 daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes written by Eric Francis. It pulls up one totally at random in response to a question. The Oracle is included with subscriptions to Planet Waves.

If you take charge of your finances and resolve to make some crucial long-term decisions, it will be possible to get results that last for many years. This stage of your life, counting this year and next, is one of the most important times ever for building your economic foundations. At the same time you can and indeed must face your personal insecurities and remember that you are a unique individual with talents, resources and a gift for humanity that only you possess. It’s almost a birthright that you be one who is not only financially successful but actually content — but you have to claim it.

Technorati Tags: Astrology, Cancer, Eric Francis, monthly horoscope, Oracle, Planet Waves, weekly horoscopes

Note, the discussion thread on the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is continuing below. Here is the link. Last year I published an article on the chart for the election of 2008, looking in detail at its astrology. Here is that article, called My America.

TONIGHT is the burning of the Man ritual at Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada. In many ways this festival has set the tone of counterculture for the past two decades, it being the central meeting point for many of the most creative people in the world. Burning Man is the perfect blend of Bohema and Babylon, and the festival’s reputation for edgy, saucy fun veils its most potent contribution to culture, art.

The Man got checked out by one of the Man crew just before the first people climbed aboard.

Black Rock City emerges out of the landscape of an ancient plateau left by the extinct Lake Lahontan. It is a living work of creative community. For its weeklong existence each year, it becomes the third largest city in Nevada.

At this writing, final preparations are being made for the burning of the Man ritual and it won’t be long before a sizable crowd has gathered. What has for a week been a Bedouhin tribal outpost with deisel generators, an airport and satellite hookups, is about to transform into a Fire Bowl celebration. This happens when the central icon of the festival, a wood statue of a man about 60 feet high, is torched.

As dusk falls over the desert, fire spinners dance and provide an opening act. These are often young men and women clad in just shorts or bikini bottoms, the movement of whose hips accents the spinning balls of flame. As night subsumes the landscape they turn to silhouettes. Black Rock Rangers patrol the crowd.

As the Man is lit the crowd transforms into that of a Western football game, alive and cheering in the energy of transformation, creation and libido, converging on the embers as the huge statue finally collapses.

Tonight’s fire ritual is just hours past the Virgo New Moon and as such is a de facto honoring of the Goddess in her many forms and ways of expression. Tonight, her name is Vesta.

Technorati Tags: Astrology, burning man, Eric Francis, planetwaves, virgo new moon

Editor’s Note: I was just sent this article from Daily Kos by our longtime reader, political observer and artist Fe Bongolin. Here is a short excerpt from a very worthwhile piece of writing. Thank you Fe as usual. –efc

To put it simply, the 2008 Presidential race will not be over politics but — as it was in 2000 and 2004 — over the purpose of politics. In that sense it will be a meta-debate, and one that many will miss because they thought it was settled long ago.

Here then are the disputants in this argument over what politics is for in the first place. On the one hand, there are those who think that political argument is best aimed at perfecting a pluralistic society of equal citizens who do not agree on metaphysical questions of purpose and meaning, but nevertheless wish to live together under conditions of amicable cooperation, and on the other hand those who think that political debate is about winning, precisely, the metaphysical argument — about settling fundamental questions of purpose and meaning on the public stage.

Pluralists do not want to address metaphysical questions on the public-political stage. This is not because they think they cannot win but because they think they should not win. Religio-philosophical victory in a political — as opposed to dinner-table — setting has, pluralists think, no upside. We get along as a people in the first place because we first agreed that religio-philosophical issues are not something we need to agree upon. We don’t debate those matters at the ballot box. Rather, we need only agree on the best ways to further our society to the benefit of all, so that we may in our own ways address questions of purpose and meaning at home. A home secured by a concern for the general welfare.

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential, Daily Kos, Eric Francis, Fe Bongolin

Dear Friend and Reader:

Writing about other things overshadowed any comment on the Virgo New Moon (except in the horoscope), so I’m leaving you in the capable hands of three commentators. First is Kirsti Melto, wose Lunations series covers the major lunar markers for Planet Waves. Second is Priya Kale, who wrote this blog for more than a year. Third is Shelley Ackerman, whose post today covers both the New Moon and the Democratic National Convention. Click on the author’s name for a direct link to their commentary on the Virgo New Moon, which is exact to one degree as I write at 3:16 pm EDT.

Yours & truly,

Technorati Tags: Astrology, Democratic National Convention, Eric Francis, Kirsti Melto, New Moon, Priya Kale, Shelley Ackerman, virgo new moon