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

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Brownie Trumps Fiction 

...it's been a nice last few days over the course of a long week on the road. Just floating blissfully in a dense tryptophan fog with shields constructed of cornbread stuffing deflecting even the most pernicious hate rays of Bushco attempting to burn through that soft, fuzzy, warm feeling. Just the pleasure of being in a relative news blackout surrounded by conservative, devoutly Christian in-laws who hate George W. Bush as much as their strong beliefs will tolerate and a local newspaper that makes our local effort, the Bend Bulletin, look absolutely encyclopedic by contrast. Well, that's not all exactly true; yesterday's trip back home from the central Washington coast to Central Oregon was done through the sort of weather for which indoor hobbies were created: torrential west-side rain that makes a soul want to google "Noah" and "Ark" for a set of plans and some hint of how the hell long a "cubit" actually is, the kind of rain that offers the occasional nasty little freeway low spot surprise that begs for reconsideration of driving anywhere near the lavish 70 mph speed limit that Washington sets on I-5. But even that didn't intrude on the idyllic nature of the week. Some things, however, are so bizarre that their very mention can blow it all away. The news that Michael Brown is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm, is just such a thing...

...it's like one of those old World War II Pearl Harbor attack movies: "This is Not A Drill!" This is the real deal; this is not some joke or a fictional "Where Are They Now" recreation. The virtual face of the rank incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency - not just from Hurricanes Katrina or Rita, but from the continuing but unreported problems that still plague Florida's residents from last year's storms - is going to advise clients how to properly prepare for a disaster.

Seriously.

(more on the backside)

...one can only assume that he has some crackerjack associates and underlings who actually know something about the subject, because his performance during Katrina demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity about what was actually happening in New Orleans or any particular sense of awareness regarding the reports that he was actually receiving or how to respond in any case. Brown may have only been a water-carrier for the Bush Monkey's efforts to gut the emergency management aspect of FEMA's name, but the fact remains that - in FEMA's initial failings alone - he was the guy in charge, the one who should have been setting the tempo and actually moving the proper chess pieces, and he displayed a total lack of raw capability. The simple fact exists that close acquaintences of mine who spent several weeks in Louisiana as part of the federal incident response to Katrina would now rather hurl themselves off cliffs than rely on Michael Brown's FEMA to do anything remotely smart or right or proper; it's just not in 'em to make things happen when tangling everything up in big wads of red tape is an available option, and FEMA sank to this sorry state at least in part under Michael Brown's watch...

...it would be a joke if it weren't for the clear and abundant media evidence of Brown's new career move. Who knows, maybe he's learned a thing or two after being run out of town after the Katrina fiasco. It's entirely possible, but - at the same time - I'd sure like to know who some of these clients are, so I can steer a wide berth around them...just in case, you know...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:54 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Fox News - Sticklers For The Truth 

...I suppose that after all those ads full of twisted half-truths, misrepresentations, and flat out lies that those of you sturdy enough to actually watch Fox News put up with last year, this apparent change in policy has to hold a certain degree of good news. Now that Fox News is going to provide personal regulation of the factual accuracy in political ads, one would imagine that this will now become a haven of reasoned discourse in that swirling sea of deception that is the cable news world...

...of course, this being a new policy, there are some of the inevitable kinks to work out. For example, in their quest for factual purity, they will need to develop a more clearly defined understanding of what does or does not constitute factual accuracy. In the case of the rejected Alito ad, it is not factually inaccurate to say that Alito voted to approve strip-searching a 10-year-old girl, because that is quite specifically what he did. Strip-searching a little girl who wasn't specifically listed in the search warrant was directly at issue in the case that the 3rd Circuit was hearing, and Alito said that this was appropriate in this instance. It's probably understandable that Fox News is going to be struggling with properly working its way through this factual accuracy jungle, and there may well be those snarky enough to say that they don't have much of a reservoir of experience at that sort of thing. But I believe this is a good thing that Fox News is pioneering, and I salute them for this bold step. I'm also anxiously looking forward to their application of the same standards next year during the mid-term Congressional elections. Who know, it may even lead to more hours of programing and less of those annoying political ads. In fact, with a policy like this in place, I don't know how it can't be helped...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:28 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 21, 2005

"Will 'President' For Money"... 

...in Portland today, for an appointment with the second child's diabetes specialist (a specialty unavailable in Central Oregon), and we saw the most amazing sign. A person - in fact a remarkably child-looking person - was sitting on the hard, cold concrete sidewalk next to the Safeway grocery store across from Lloyd Center (ok, so locals will know where I'm talking about), huddled against the frigid east wind that seems to be plaguing The Rose City these last few afternoons, holding a hunk of cardboard with crudely scrawled letters spelling out "Will take verbal abuse for money". Seriously. I missed it myself initially but Diabetes Boy hollered out "Hey, look at that!" After a few quiet shared seconds, someone in the back seat said "Maybe that was George Bush."

The Lady of The House claims they get their cynicism from me...

...on the other hand, maybe it was George W. Bush. Maybe he wrestled the controls of Air Force One away from the pilot and put 'er in a nose dive to come screaming out of the late afternoon sky to grease an unannounced landing at Portland International Airport so he could scamper down the skystairs and disappear into the crowd for a bit of anonymous verbal whipping for a little non-taxable pocket money. Lord knows he's earned enough of his taxable income listening to it over the last couple of weeks. After all of his trouble and bad polls at home, his efforts at creating a hemispheric free trade zone did little but got him the cold shoulder and a bunch of riots in Argentina a couple weekends ago and his splendid Presidential adventure to the far east earned him the same sort of success in China regarding trade, monetary policy, and personal freedom, which is to say zero, zip, nada...in other words, a big fat nothin'...

(more on the backside)

...this isn't the way it's supposed to be. Times are hard for Bush right now at home. With popularity slipping to such low levels that revelations of oral sex with an intern would probably help him, Gee Dub and his minions embarked on a strategy that didn't attempt to justify the Iraq war so much as to try to shut up all those Congressional Democrats that kept wanting to yack about it, and that whole strategy seems near to the point of blowing up in their collective faces. Unfortunately, that doesn't even address all the other issues that most Americans think he's making a hash of, and we haven't even yet plumbed the full flowering of senior citizen's outrage over the new Medicare drug program. It's at times like these that any President worth his salt looks out over the swirling flames encroaching on the White House and decides that the only prudent course of action is...hit the tarmac at Andrews, climb aboard that big silver bird, and jet off to exotic foreign lands where simple foreign peasants who still worship America as the Land of the Free and the President as the world's greatest man will flock in vast adoring throngs to cheer their brains out in a way that not even the most carefully scripted "citizen meeting" back home can emulate. It's a tradional presidential tactic. Unfortunately, time and circumstances and technology advances - not to mention the singular ability of this crowd to basically piss of anyone who doesn't happen to hold congruent world views with their insulting, haughty, dismissive attitude - have raced across the face of the globe faster than any jet Boing could ever build, and they are all waiting now for Gee Dub at the bottom of any skystairs he wants to come waving and smiling down, hunkered down like some stinking, warty mutants at the end of the Red Carpet just to the left of the national leader of the day. Most of the world doesn't like us as an image, they really don't like Gee Dub, and Dick "Big Dick" Cheney is probably wasting his time maintaining a passport because there aren't enough Marine Expeditionary Force battalions unencumbered by the cyclical Iraq assignment to provide sufficient security for any forays much beyond the inspection station at the Canadian Border...

...there is little refuge for this president. The critics are hounding him at home over half a dozen issues, and any reception abroad is more likely than not going to be obscured by clouds of tear gas. Even those countries that have stood fast by his side in the Iraqi diversion from the actual War on Terra are populated largely by citizens who hold their own government in low esteem over their cooperation in Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Adventure. There isn't any place - not some remote South Seas island or some village on the southern tip of Peru - where the world's circumstances and the hubristic arrogence of the Bush Monkeys hasn't already preceded any proposed visit. Gee Dub has no recourse for feeling presidential, beloved, and powerful in any positive sense in anyplace that matters anymore. It may be that the only way he's going to gain anything even remotely positive out of these remaining years in office will be to vanish into the crowd, maybe dress down in some serious street dude clothes, and earn a little money on the side with a cardboard sign on some blustery Pac. NW street corner. Heaven knows this foreign travel thing isn't working out...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:28 PM 0 comments

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