By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
If my in-box is any reflection, Thanksgiving is no longer a mere holiday but more a gateway to Black Friday turned Black Weekend cum Cyber Monday, already evolved into CyberWeek. This pernicious capitalism-creep has been sneaking up on us for years, and now it’s gone full-tilt boogie. We pass long-standing markers of tradition without even a glance behind these days. Christmas stuff went up just after Labor Day, competing with Halloween candy and Thanksgiving decorations, and I expect Valentine’s Day junk to fill the aisles soon after New Years (if not before.)
I dunno, maybe a spending spasm of this sort, giving folks a leg up on holiday shopping, will take some of the angst out of the December crunch. At least some of the popular products show a tendency toward greening. I was pleased to see CNN highlight the newest environmentally-sound technology at the LA Car Show today, featuring the cute little Chevy Spark that will be available in 2014 in California and Oregon: an electric car that gets 100 miles per charge and is capable of taking an 80% charge in as little as 20 minutes. Hard to imagine in the Pea Patch, but — you know — as California goes, so goes the nation, sooner or later.
With the eclipses behind us and Mercury gone direct, we’ve finally seen some progress on the home front, or, at least, movement in the larger sense. Brad Manning got a long-awaited day in court, testifying about his brutal pre-trial treatment and how his military psychiatrist’s recommendations were blatantly ignored by brig commanders. Manning was detained without trial for 921 days, despite military law’s mandated maximum of 120. Coming on the heels of the two-year anniversary of the release of the Wikileaks documents, Julian Assange — a virtual prisoner in London, granted long-term political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy — spoke of Manning’s treatment in an article he wrote for Huffington Post, a briefing on the Wiki information every American should read. Pass it around.