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

Thursday, June 16, 2005

IS THIS HOW SKY KING STARTED?

...yeah, I know it's theft, and if it were my personal property involved I'd probably be pretty pissed, but still, you just have to take your hat off to this kid. I mean, I'm fifty years old and a long-time devotee of the whole spectrum of flight simulator games, but I'm pretty sure that if I found myself in an aircraft in the air needing to get back on the ground without help, about the only thing I would be able to come up with would be a profound urge to make my peace with that Maker that I would be shortly be conversing with face to face about the various errors and shortcomings of my life. This young fella not only took mom's car that he shouldn't be able to know how to drive and managed to land and take off before final executing that ultimate 'good' landing (you know, any landing you can walk away from...). He's certainly not my hero, because he royally screwed up some poor guy's plane, but he certainly does show promise....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:20 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

LIVIN' LARGE AT CLUB GITMO

...what is it with Duncan Hunter? Do the people in his district wear grocery sacks over their heads to avoid the embarrassment? Do they have some sort of...oh, I don't know, maybe a Constituent Protection Program that allows them to assume new identities to hide their voting crime from friends and family? There has to be something going on there; it can't be possible that these people willingly elected a living breathing highlight reel of "my Congressman's most surreal moments. Hunter, the House Armed Services Committee Chairman, has - since the release of the Time Magazine article about abuse/torture at Guantanamo - developed the sort of food fixation normally only seen at fat farms in his effort to justify the existence of the detainee center at Gitmo. There he is now, with plates of lemon chicken and rice pilaf, encouraging reporters to take a bite and extolling the virtues of prisoner treatment in the sunny placid Caribbean, insisting that this proves how well the detainees are being treated. A truly remarkable wack-job performance...

...in fact, what is it with the Administration and military defenders in general? The Pentagon is even getting in on this food fight, eagerly pointing out that they spend way more per head than most US prisons for food to stuff the godless heathen mouths of these terrorist criminals. The chorus of noise makes sure to point out that, were they to be feeding these prisoners the same MRE's that God-Fearing, freedom-loving American troops every day, now THAT would be inhumane (which no doubt would be greeted with noisy approval by the troops but probably doesn't do much for the morale and fighting spirit of the companies that actually manufacture those MRE's). It's all stirring and heart-warming stuff, knowing that we Americans won't stoop to feeding wormy gruel to even those who wish to harm us, but it does beg one particular question: WTF does this have to do with what the hell we're talking about? What sort of weird perverted nonsense is this. Oh, I know myself that after a hard sleepless 30 hours of peeing in my pants, scrambling around on the floor naked and barking like a dog to keep the guards from hitting me again, a bit of 'waterboarding', and the occasional attachment of live electrodes to my testicles, I look forward to a good meal of lemon chicken, fresh fruit, a nice garden salad and a perky house dressing, and rice pilaf to put that important exclamation point on the day. But that's just me...

...are we supposed to be that stupid? Is this how little the Bush Monkeys and their minions think of our intellectual capacity? This isn't about FOOD! This is about abusing prisoners! This is about how you treat other human beings during interrogation. Under these sorts of circumstances, I wouldn't care if you had Chef Emeril cooking my meals in my cell using the finest ingredients from around the globe; all I would be thinking would be that the first thing I was going to do if I ever got out was to get a weapon and even up the score just a little bit. The constant denials of abuse are simply becoming ridiculous, given the mounting body of evidence provided by our own people in e-mails and testimony and leaked documents that clearly spell out that being in an orange jump suit at Guantanamo is in the top five on the list of "The Last Place On Earth That I Want To Be". The Administration clearly knows that the latest Time mag piece spells serious trouble for this little extra-judicial theme park that the Bushies have been running in Cuba. Aside from General Meyers and his just simply silly bean counting about the cost of feeding the detainees, we've just in the last two days seen Big Dick Cheney rumbling in that way of his about how we aren't going to close Gitmo and Clueless Don Rumsfeld insisting that we just don't have the facilities anywhere else to keep these dangerous characters, apparently forgetting that we didn't have any such facilities at all before we built them at Guantanamo Bay. Cheney pulled out all the stops, insisting (in the same way that he insisted that Iraq was bristling with dangerous mass-killing weapons all pointing at the United States back in late 2002) that our standing in the world isn't hurt by the existence of this facility. That may very well be true, but only in the context of the incredible damage that this putrid had already wreaked on our reputation...

...at the end of the story, this is a simple up or down issue. How do the American people want to feel about themselves? If we don't have any problem dealing with a world image no better than some tin-horn banana republic dictatorship when it comes to the treatment of prisoners, then it's time to move on from this story. But it hasn't in the last century been the American way to treat prisoners in this fashion. There are even Republicans objecting to the things that the Time piece reveals (although, oddly, McCain isn't one of them, and I would have bet good money that he would have been screaming about this, given his story). It's not about the rice pilaf, it's about the abuse. It doesn't make us better, it doesn't make us safer, and if it didn't honestly reveal any important secrets it was a useless waste of time in any case. I thought we were better than this; boy was I stupid...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:22 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 12, 2005

SEIZING THE DAY...AND THE HOUSE...AND THE CAR...AND THE FRIDGE...

...the most recently coined state tourism motto around these parts is “Oregon - Things Look Different Here!” Hardly a day seems to go by without some organ of state or local government trying to prove that statement, but unfortunately each attempt would no doubt stun whatever big-dollar P.R. flack who cooked up that happy little phrase. The Republican-dominated Oregon House of Representatives, a group of stone cold professionals at attempting to make things look...well, different, and often leaders in that very effort, are making a run at it again. On Friday, they passed Measure 3457 and referred it to the Democrat-controlled state Senate, the general effect of which would be to overturn a ballot measure of four years ago, Measure 3, that changed the laws under which law enforcement officials could seize citizens’ personal property and sell it for the profit. What’s amazing about this effort to overturn that bill is that a broad and unlikely coalition of conservative and liberal groups led the campaign for Measure 3 that resulted in a 67% affirmative vote...

...OK, actually it isn’t all that amazing. The commentary by this new bill’s supporters makes it clear that they think that the majority of us who voted for Measure 3 were either too stupid to understand the issues involved or were incipient crooks anxious to protect our belongings. Unfortunately that wasn’t really the case. Prior to Measure 3, property seizure was a primary funding source for police drug enforcement efforts in the state, and the standard of proof was an exceptionally low bar, more suitable for limbo contests than for, say, the high jump. Some of the elements of the old law that would be reinstated include the ability to seize property for profit even though the owner (or user) of the property owner has been neither charged or arrested for the crime in question. In addition, there is no provision in the current House-passed bill to restore a citizen’s property to his possession in the event he or she was acquitted of the charges that led to the seizure. The only real improvement over the bad old days is that a judge is now required to agree that there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the property was involved in the commission of the crime, although this is absent and outside of the judicial process of actually determining guilt...

...what is most disturbing about this is that the running commentary makes it clear that this slap-down against the voters is only tangentially about combating drug crime. It’s about money; in effect it’s just another ramification of the disastrous taxing strategies and successful property tax initiatives that have brought Oregon to the place it is today. The combined dope-slaps of increased state responsibility for funding things once covered by property taxes and the recent recession have put the state in a difficult position where something has to give in the budget battle, and part of that something has been drug enforcement; all the while, in some areas of the state, at-home meth production and sales has occupied the niche once occupied by in-home cosmetic sales....or plastic storage container parties. Problems with meth labs can be seen even in my little corner of heaven: not only did the neighbor’s house blow up a few years ago (another neighbor’s quote as we watched pieces of the roof flutter gaily to the ground: “Bet that sumbitch won’t be sellin’ no drugs no more!”), but also, coincident to a house changing ownership somewhere down the street from me last year, there has been a remarkable increase in traffic, with the most notable part of that remarkable increase being the fact that the traffic is comprised primarily of a continual string of vehicles I’ve never seen before driven primarily by young men. Probably don’t mean nothin’, but I’m just sayin’...

...I’m as much for fighting drug crime as the next red-neck Eastern Oregonian, but the old forfeiture laws weren’t even a close call. They were ridiculously broad and could result in forfeiture for reasons that could never make sense in any other judicial process. For all the aggressive whining from this bill’s supporters, there was simply nothing reasonable about the risk of losing property forever in a situation where you weren’t even going to be charged, much less convicted of a crime. It is a bracing reminder of the attitude folks in power have about the rest of us that they insist that we were lied to about Measure 2, that we were duped, even though they didn’t avail themselves of the opportunity to correct any of those supposed misconceptions that resulted from the all-too-true stories of people who were little better than innocent bystanders having personal property seized and sold off for profit. The only duping going is that being done by those citizen-legislators who want to solve their budget woes while trying to make us all think they are tough with-it law-and-order guys and gals instead of dealing with the structural difficulties of Oregonian taxation policy that result in even needing to explore such an option as this. They’re trying to dupe us into thinking that “innocent until proven guilty” is the law of the land when, as far as your personal property is concerned, it isn’t even close...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:26 PM 0 comments

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