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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, January 29, 2005

RANDOM TRAVELING THOUGHTS

...had to make a quick two-day trip to over the Cascades to Portland over the last couple of days. The younger of my offerings to the hopes of the future had routine appointments with his gastrointestinal specialist for his Celiac disease (wheat/gluten intolerance) and with his diabetes specialist. The trip, and the complimentary copies of the Oregonian, provided an interesting respite from and window into the twists and turns of politics and life. The primary example is the focus of political talk. The political mavens of the Willamette Valley are focused with laser-like precision on the travails of State Representative Dan Doyle of Salem, while - East of the Cascade crest - you will be lucky to see more than the very occasional (and usually thumbnail-sized) item about his sad little story. Rep. Doyle is currently beset by a desperate inability to provide evidence for over $60,000 in campaign expenditures. This little accounting problem is exacerbated as a result of several companies for whose services the money was supposedly spent being exceedingly uncooperative by insisting they neither did the work in question nor received the funds in question. One could, buoyed by sufficient quantities of alcohol and a healthy belief in conspiracies, argue that the more Republican-bent east-side media doesn't care to dwell on the grim, twisting-in-the-wind nature of Rep. Doyle's problems, he being a leading Republican legislator and all; it could probably more easily be credited, however, to the fact that he is a Willamette Valley legislator and that stimulates the varying degrees of coverage...

...another opportunity that was afforded on this trip was a chance to attend the Portland Auto Show. Various major metro areas across this great country of ours have auto shows. The most famous, in Los Angeles and Detroit, are heavy with displays of various wildly radical and improbable concept cars; shows like these are tributes to the power of innovation and the promise of possibilities beckoning from the future of the automotive world. The Portland Auto show is not one of those. The Portland Auto show is a raw celebration of automotive consumerism, consisting almost entirely of acres of displays from every manufacturer under the sun (or at least those with dealerships in Portland) exhibiting all of the various brands and styles and categories of sleek satiny new automotive jewels that you can drive home, from classic high-mpg econoboxes for under $10,000 to vehicles so exclusive and exotic that the manufacturer's suggested retail price isn't shown and you of the unwashed masses are separated from them by fences and serious-looking guardians; nobody who cares what the newest offering from Ferrari costs is in a position to buy one...

...venues like the Auto Show are always an interesting relationship-building opportunity for Mrs. Jack K. and I. I am an unreconstructed gear-head, the ultimate NASCAR geek, which is only one of the reasons I don't always comfortably fit in with the true believers of the progressive movement. My tastes run to truly competent 4-wheel-drive vehicles (sissified all-wheel-drive quasi-car SUV's need not apply) and sleek low-slung beauties with horsepower beyond all common sense and the ability to accelerate with sufficient alacrity to test Einstein's theories about the relative passage of time. My wife, on the other hand, has the true progressive's obsession with gas mileage that makes me crazy; her refusal to even look at cars that don't get the admittedly remarkable 40-mpg mileage of her aging little Ford Escort commuter car has convinced me that we may well be stuck with that vehicle well beyond the point at which we are required to manufacture replacement parts by hand. An opportunity like the Portland Auto Show allows us to have conflict-pregnant discussions involving the possible replacement of members of our current fleet with vehicles that I feel would be just perfect but that don't meet the spousal unit's intense standards for fuel efficiency. These are those sorts of small moments that serve as the foundation for a strong marriage ("yes, honey, I know the Viper only gets 12 mile per gallon, but you can get there twice as fast, so it's like a mileage multiplier...honest")...

...anyway, it was a nice respite from Condi, that serial liar Gonzales and the rest of this band of thugs, crooks, and fixers at the helm, the unremitting and inexcusable bloodshed in Iraq and their looming election and whatever aftermath may transpire. It's good to get away, but it's time to get back in the traces, fire up the snark/snide thesaurus, and cast a bloodshot eye on the world with which we're stuck. For a while, though, there's going to be a Ford GT-40 lurking on the edges of my mind's vision...off in a corner where my wife can't see it....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:49 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 27, 2005

SELF-DEFENESTRATING DOUG

...on balance, it's probably a good thing that Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of
Defense for policy, has decided to hit the silk and leave his position in the Defense Department. As a major player in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion, he may not have been the head designer of this generation's Viet Nam, but he most certainly was one of the chief mechanics who bolted this evil monstrosity together. All the right words are being said over his departure (and, given the sources, they may well even be heartfelt):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Feith, (saying)he would be missed.

Feith "is creative, well organized and energetic, and he has earned the respect of civilian and military leaders across the government," Rumsfeld said in a statement.

...well, 'respect' may be too strong a word in some cases, but he certainly did make an impression on some military leaders, such as Tommy Frank, recently retired Commander of Southern Command and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq:

"I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."

...so Doug Feith gets to saunter away to lucrative private life, after hammering together a poisonous mixture of misstatements, misrepresentations, half-truths, and fables to engineer Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Adventure, subsequent to which he did a major portion of the heavy lifting in post-conquest planning that stands as a stark icon to absolute perfection in incompetence. The darkly grim irony in all of this is that, while Feith moseys off into this personal glimmering sunset, tens of thousands of common folk - butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, the guy down the street - found themselves federalized into full-time combat area duty as National Guard and Reserve members, jerked away from their jobs and families for far longer than they ever could have realistically imagined, while thousands of others were held in or called back to military service under stop-loss provisions when they thought their military commitment was about to be or had been completed. They can't look up one day from their MRE lunch and decide "for family and personal reasons" that they would like to leave this particular branch of government service. As time goes by, in fact, suggestions are growing stronger that the previously understood commitment of maximum 24-month in-service tours may get jiggered around by the Pentagon to become virtually indefinite, stipulating only a break between overseas tours rather than an upper limit (as is currently the case)...

...Doug Feith leaves his own ugly share of the grim neocon legacy derived from this most recent spin in Federal service. What final shape his statue gets hammered into is yet to be determined by forthcoming events in Iraq, but the fact remains that there is plenty of blood-red ink on the ledger tracking the costs in treasure, bodies, and lives incurred in the prosecution of this long-sought neocon political science experiment in the Middle East, at least in part as a result of his actions in the Defense Department. Maybe the most just course of action would be to stop/loss Feith and make him stick around and see this thing through to the end, to be there to share in whatever rewards come from the outcome...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:22 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

HOW MY MAN VOTED

...so the word came down today that the Senate had confirmed Condoleezza Rice to be George W. Bush's neocon meat puppet in the large corner office at the Department of State. The slightly heartwarming news was that 12 Democrats had joined with the permanently angry Jim Jeffords to vote against Rice, casting one of the largest number of negative votes in a Secretary of State confirmation in recent memory. There was the usual partisan wrangling and finger-wagging, including a remarkable bit of Republican snarking by former middle-lefty/libertarian icon John McCain:

Since Rice is qualified for the job, he said, "I can only conclude that we are doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness over the outcome of the election."


...well, geez, big fella, that may be part of it, but I'm willing to bet that her star turn as the "mushroom cloud over America" goddess and a host of other lies and misrepresentations, followed by an absolute refusal to even hint at any type of offer to say that...just maybe...perhaps...we got just a little bit hasty on that WMD thing and...possibly...a few little wholely innocent mistakes were made, even though everybody who is up for reelection in the next two years would heartily agree that we are residents of a planet lucky to be rid of the likes of Saddam Hussein. At any rate, I was certainly proud of those patriotic Americans willing to cast a "nay" vote against a person seemingly less qualified to serve as Secretary of State than any successful nominee in my lifetime. I was warmed by the almost certain fact that my Democratic Senator, Ron Wyden, the US Senator from the State of Orygun who actually seems to understand that he is a servant of the residents of the state, unlike the mysterious ghost-like mirage known as Republican Senator Gordon Smith, of whom we residents only hear the occasional unprovable rumored sighting, like those mythical forest creatures tale-tellers have recounted to us over many a campfire through the years in an effort to keep us lying awake soaked in fear-sweat through the immeasurably long night in our sleeping bags (not that Gordon Smith inspires forest-denizen fear; from what we hear, he is a more benign being). I anxiously searched the voting list, but didn't see Wyden's name. An obvious oversight, I thought, given Oregon's lack of visibility on the national political stage. I googled on over to the absolute stone-cold authority on the matter, www.senate.gov., looking for the definitive list of votes...

...the surprise was complete. There was Akaka of Hawaii, Bayh of Indiana, Byrd of West Virginia, Harkin of Iowa...and all the rest. All twelve of the Democrats, and not one from the Pacific Northwest, one of the bluest regions in this bicolor country...and no Ron Wyden. I was - and am - crushed, stunned that my popular, active Democratic Senator wasn't willing to take a stand against one of the primary enablers, if not architects, of this misguided war that, at least until recently, had killed as many Oregonians per capita as have been sacrificed and has driven the Governor, Ted Kulongoski, almost to despair as his self-imposed effort of honoring virtually every lost soldier by attending almost every memorial service has begun to beat him down as these services keep happening and happening and happening. I've seen no offered rational from Wyden for this affirmation of the Rice nomination. I can only assume that he must hold that same mysteriously murky view espoused by Joe
Biden that, despite a total lack of honestly, clairity, and integrity on the part of the nominee, the President deserves to have the people he wants in the positions he wants them, barring actual photographic evidence of said nominee knocking off a liquor store or flinging rock-laden bags full of kittens into the Willamette River. I can't come up with anything else...

...I will be sending a missive (snail-mail; it seems to attract more attention any more if you actually show the commitment of a postage stamp to your communication effort), but I don't have much hope of getting any more than the usual bit of political swill thanking me for my interest in the issues and the Senator's efforts. It's a bit of a blow, actually; this is Oregon, after all, the iconoclastic state of Tom McCall and Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield and others who have cast party affiliation to the wind to push programs or cast votes as a matter of conscience, not as a matter of political expediency...but that's maybe not the case anymore, eh? For this vote, at least, Oregon is just another place, like so much of the rest of the country, that has Democratic legislators who can only be differentiated from the Republican majority by which hall they disappear into during party caucus time...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:43 PM 0 comments
MARGARET SPELLINGS IS RIGHT!

...ok, I'll confess that I've never heard of, much less seen the PBS show "Postcards from Buster", although it seems the intent is to sneak up on kids from behind and teach them cultural awareness and English language fundamentals without them noticing because they're having too much fun. Hey, Buster even has a blog, so we know he's balancing carefully out there on that ragged crumbling edge of cultural relevancy as only a skilled bunny can. Unfortunately for Buster and PBS, Margaret Spellings, the new Education Secretary, feels that Buster may have slipped over the edge on that Cultural Awareness issue. In an upcoming episode, Buster visits Vermont, the home of Howard Dean and state-recognized same-sex civil unions. The fact that the episode deals with homey Vermont issues like farming and natural maple syrup production has little impact on the flow of Ms. Spellings' ch'i, but the fact that this federally-funded episode features two lesbian couples (no doubt in a positive light) made a major impression on her. She has asked that PBS consider refunding the federal Ready to Learn funds used to produce the episode and remove any suggestion of a connection with that program from the offending episode. PBS has decided not to distribute the program over potential parental concerns about the content, but the actual producer, WGBH in Boston, will be making it available for anyone who asks...

...Ms. Spellings is absolutely correct. Parents shouldn't be forced to have to actually make a decision regarding the types of material that their children watch on television; that would require rigorous application of more time and effort than simply propping the l'il darlings up in front of the ol' widescreen and hitting the "on" switch. Federal funding shouldn't be used in an effort to expose this particular aspect of the diversity of the country. It should be learned, free of federal involvement or influence, through rumor, speculation, innuendo, falsehoods, and plain ol' hate speech on the street just the way we learned it when we were kids. Who do these left-wing public TV pinkos' think they are, anyway...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:20 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 24, 2005

AMMENDING MORALITY

...so, with a new session, they're at it again. The Pharisee branch of the Republican theocracy in Congress is gearing up to make another run at ratifying an anti-gay marriage Constitutional Amendment. Based on the strength of 13 successful state ballot measures that did essentially the same thing, they obviously feel that they have the momentum on their side to - at the very least - engage in cheap partisanship in order to score points against Democrats who may be coming up for reelection in the near future. While that goal makes it ugly, that's not what makes it wrong...

...we're not talking about, for example, the Oregon State Constitution here. The referendum system has turned the Oregon Constitution (which now includes one of those 13 anti-gay marriage prohibitions) into a meaningless hash of personal gripes and pet peeves that various groups with big pockets and specific axes to grind have been able to lash together out of once was a fairly straight-forward owners manual for the core operations of government. For now, at least, the US Constitution reserves for itself the right to be considered a document of governance, not a repository for settlement of issues such as compensation for land use regulations or how far a porn shop has to be from a school zone. There is not a single item in the document that proscribes social behavior of a particular cohort of the population, unless one considers popular second-term Presidents who could easily win a third term; those guys get slapped down hard, but there hasn't really ever even been such a thing with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, and he was the reason Republicans were so anxious to pass the 22nd Amendment to begin with...and the 18th Amendment doesn't count...

...the proposal for a 28th Amendment banning gay marriage is a simply political sham. There are plenty of little people out in there in the country who would, for personal religions reasons, love to see such an Amendment quite simply because they find homosexuality to be icky...er..I mean...an abomination in God's eyes. Of course, plenty of examples can be offered for other behavior that God may just as well find to be an abomination; the oft-cited list in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 is a good place to start:

9) Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (New International Version)


...now there's a list for a king-sized Constitutional Amendment. But this proposed amendment, just like various efforts to ban abortion that are kicking around the halls of Congress, are quite simply playing to the susceptible electorate. Keep 'em stirred up to keep 'em voting; offer the occasional half-hearted effort to make a show of "getting the people's work done". If the control of unpopular social behavior was a sure bet as a constitutional amendment, there would be an amendment banning interracial marriage on the books already, but there isn't, and there isn't because of the simple past root understanding of the role of the Constitution in American life. That's what we've got going on again, a cheapjack piece of useless pandering geared more toward feeding the base and stirring up the little people than any sort of serious effort at actually doing the job mandated by other sections of the Constitution...and we still don't have sufficient funding for No Child Left Behind or port security...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:43 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 23, 2005

WHAT'S A GUY TO THINK?

...a couple of items have flashed across my personal heads-up display over the last day or so that almost have me stymied, as close to a loss for words as I ever get. They're unrelated, in most understandable terms of that word, but they both seem to suggest that there's danger of one sort or another lurking under the seemingly calm surface of these particular waters...

...the first item is the information, courtesy of the Washington Post, that everyone's favorite Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has created a deep-cover invisible intelligence unit within the protective philosophical walls of the Pentagon whose purpose is to take over - forcibly, if necessary - the traditional role of the CIA by directly providing the SECDEF a Pentagon version of the full spectrum of human intelligence and, maybe just for the hell of it, run a few perhaps extra-legal operations on the side. This has been facilitated by a self-serving generous internal reinterpretation of federal laws governing the general field of spycraft to enable Rummy to set up a covert service parallel to the CIA. Now, I'm as big a fan of defeating the global minions of terrorism and protecting our citizens as you're likely to find (although I would like to drop the word "homeland" because of it's Hitleresque overtones), but the idea that a deep cover program is being set up by the Pentagon totally outside the knowledge of any member of the Unites States Congress, which has the Constitutional authority to know - at least in broad terms - how every federal dollar is being spent does tend to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up just a little bit. Intelligence is simply information; deciding what that information means can be influenced by nuance provided by the background of the interpreter and I am just a bit uncomfortable with people who's corporate background involves blowing up or shooting at things being the sole interpreters of that information...

...the other item, and I told you it was unrelated, was the release of an opinion survey yesterday that seems to suggest that at least some people who call themselves Christians are becoming less tolerant about politicians compromising on social issues and more comfortable about pressing their beliefs on others even at the expense of offending those people. Coming as it does on the heels of Dr. James Dobsen's embarrassing carrying-on about SpongeBob Squarepants, this just made me rock back in my chair and utter a muttering sigh. It is often cited by those with a religious axe to grind that the vast majority of Americans are Christian, so these results would tend to suggest some incipient sweeping change in the American landscape. On the other hand, I know these 82 percent of the population that are Christians (if the 2002 Pew survey is an accurate measure) and so do you. A small component of them show up at the church I attend; some - like me - are there every week and even come to all those Wednesday night services leading up to Christmas and Easter. Others - a lot of others - show up on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. This certainly doesn't devalue their opinions as far as Christian influence on social issues like gay marriage and abortion are concerned, but it certainly doesn't plumb the depths of their core beliefs in the event of a true turn to the application of Old Testament Law to much of our daily lives. Many of them would no doubt be unpleasantly shocked if states, relieved of the strictures of the right to privacy inherent in the Roe vs. Wade decision, decided to reinstitute criminal penalties for adultery and fornication. The bigger problem, however, is the trouble that some muscular belief in a right to force one's views on another poses for our society, if not for our place in the world. Forcing one's Christian beliefs on others is antithetical to Jesus' teachings or the actions and writings of the Apostles. The mission was to take the message to the corners of the globe, but there was never an intent to beat people over the head with it. More to the point, regardless of how many survey respondents wish to style themselves as Christians, the United States is a multicultural society which functions best in the absence of a guiding philosophy based on one particular theology. History is fat with examples of nations that fell into violence and failure because of domineering behaviors borne of a particular theology. Speaking even as a Christian, it chills me to think that there are those who profess to worship the same God who would willingly choose to travel down this particular road....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 0 comments

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