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

Saturday, December 17, 2005

A White HOLIDAY SEASON 

...December 17, 2005. 2:17 pm. Temperature: 16.8 degrees F. My "front yard". The first 6 inches fell on Nov. 28, the second 10 inches fell three days later. The next 4 inches came in little dribs and drabs over the next two days. It's settled some since then, even thought the temperature has seldom been above freezing, but I think we have that "White Christmas" thing covered again this year...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:52 PM 0 comments

What Is A Body To Think? 

...Oregon's own Bill Sizemore, the anti-tax, anti-union, and pretty much anti-anything-that-liberals-might-support ballot measure maven - not to mention the most soundly defeated candidate for governor in generations - is back in the news. The two teachers unions who whupped his butt in court in a racketeering lawsuit have asked that he be found in contempt of court and jailed for violating a court order to stay out of raising money for political purposes. In normal times this would be something that it would be easy to get behind cheerfully and with gusto. These aren't normal times...

...it just so happens that the initiative that Sizemore is fronting is one that would forbid insurance companies from raising the rates of policy holders on account of bad credit ratings. It just so happens that I have some personal knowledge in this particular field. A couple years ago, my auto insurance company raised my rates, citing that very reason. The thing that led to my having a series of rather angry discussions with various employees of that insurance company was my discovery that I didn't, in fact, have a bad credit rating; they based jacking my rates on one bill payment that was a day late in being processed by the biller (I had both a copy of the check and credit reports from the two major credit reporting agencies that the insurance company said they relied on showing only that one problem). This is becoming a common practice and, as was my case, can involve bill payments having nothing to do with the item being insured. More to the point in cases like this, no other debt-holder considers the "offender" to have a bad credit rating...

...so I don't know what to make of this. This is seriously confounding. On the one hand, Bill Sizemore hasn't previously uttered a single complete sentence with which I could agree. If he feels that his free speech rights are being violated, the opportunities have existed for some time to fight that out in court and - based on his past activities - there are certainly lots of people who would cheerfully wish him ill and not a few who wouldn't mind seeing him stylishly attired in clothing with the word "prisoner" prominently stencilled all over it. On the other hand, the issue he is fronting now is one that fires me up and - so help me God - I would vote for it in a heartbeat even though Sizemore is involved in what I would consider to be my side of the issue. Sometimes a body just doesn't know what to think...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 16, 2005

Networks: Just Say No on Sunday 

...having realized success beyond their wildest dreams by raising Gee Dub's popularity by two whole percent with all those dreary politically self-serving speeches over the last couple of weeks, his fixers and mechanics have decided to go for the big kill: give a nation-wide prime time speech on the networks on Sunday night. My advice to the networks: Just Say No. This isn't about the important moment that we face in Iraq on the heels of "this historic election"; this is about another desperate effort to try to bring up Gee Dub's poll numbers. There isn't any longer any reason to pretend that these waterheads don't hang on poll numbers to a degree that previous administrations never imagined. There's otherwise no need to interrupt people's Sunday evening prime time viewing; the citizens either maintain sufficient awareness to understand that Iraqis just voted, or they don't. Equally they either know or they don't that momentous times lay before us. We don't need a speech either way....but we'll probably get one...

...fortunately, there's always Sunday Night Football, and ESPN doesn't do self-serving presidential speeches...

...I might even get my wife to watch this week. At least for 20 minutes...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:40 PM 0 comments

The Domino Theory - Abramoff Edition 

...the defensive walls are tumbling down around Jack Abramoff. First Michael Scanlon and now Adam Kidan have done deals with the fed's that will lead to their sweet songs about his dealings in the SunCruz Casino fraud case. Scanlon will also be quite helpful to authorities delving into Abramoff's dealings with Indian tribes and their casinos. This is not the way to start the holiday season, if you're Abramoff. It's not much better news if you're Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, facing the appearance of having received bribes to perform official acts. It's not likely to brighten the Christmas season much for Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, Tom Delay, and a handful of other members of Congress either...

...the handwriting is starting to become more legible on that wall, and when Smilin' Jack can finally make it out he's going to figure out that there are enough federal lawyers pursuing enough threads of his high-flying life that he can be pretty much guaranteed that a time will be coming in the near future where the remainder of his days will be spent either in some courtroom or behind bars. It is bound to occur to him that the only shortcircuit to this future is to begin speaking frankly and in detail about his dealings with federal lawmakers over the last several years in hopes for a better deal than he's looking at now. That will be a certifiably bad day for a number of elected officials...

...that's how domino's works. Some of the federal lawyers involved in all of these wide-ranging investigations aren't in it because they want to nail Jack Abramhoff's greasy hide to the barn door. Their interest lies in the field of government integrity, and Scanlon, Kidan, and Abramoff are the row of dominos they are trying to line up to tip over the big scorers at the end of the line, those federal legislators who may have accepted money not from loving supporters who adore their work but from shady-eyed fixers who expected specific actions in return for those envelopes of unmarked bills or quiet electronic transfers. There will be vacancies to be filled on Capitol Hill before this is all done, and they will be well-deserved vacancies...

...and maybe a couple of them will even be big-named vacancies...

Wouldn't that be loverly...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:15 AM 0 comments

Like Maybe Not Such A Good Neighbor 

...I don't know about you, but if I was running a major nationwide insurance company worth billions of dollars and thousands of my policy holders' homes had been wiped out by a major hurricane, I would do a quick check of their names before I tried to deny their claims to make sure that none of them are powerful US Senators...

...or maybe powerful hotshot lawyers who have beaten millions of dollars out of the tobacco industry and are brothers'-in-law to powerful US Senators...

State Farm, sadly, didn't explore that little bit of due diligence, and having denied Senator Trent Lott's claim because they, along with other insurance companies, are claiming that the storm surge that wiped out Lott's Pascagoula home was a flood event and not a wind event. So now they get to face bro'-in-law Dickie Scruggs, who also lost his home to the storm surge, and defend the notion that an event that cannot occur without the powerful winds of a major hurricane is a "flood" against a lawyer who made the best that the intensely rich tobacco boys could come up with look like foolish clowns. If their karma is just right, maybe they can even do it in front of a federal jury made of up people who themselves have had to deal with the post-Katrina madness of trying to make insurance companies honor their policies...

...nope, if I were running a major nationwide insurance conglomerate, I'd pay those big-timer's claims in a heartbeat. Obviously their policy adjuster office and their legislative lobbying branch don't talk to each other very often. And apparently none of them recall how anxious Gee Dub is to be able to sit on that front porch again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:40 AM 0 comments

Thursday, December 15, 2005

McCain's Pig In A Poke 

...MSM has been bleating all day about how the White House finally knuckled under to the overwhelming personal presence and righteous indignation of John McCain today and agreed to his insistence of a ban on torture for all federal employees. Fine. I'm not buying it. I think that McCain bought the proverbial pig in a poke here. Why? Well, for first instances there is a particular bit of business in this "agreement" that rings untrue:
As passed by the Senate and endorsed by the House, McCain’s amendment would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody, regardless of where they are held. It also would require that service members follow procedures in the Army Field Manual during interrogations of prisoners in Defense Department facilities.

In discussions with the White House, that language was altered to bring it into conformity with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That says that anyone accused of violating interrogation rules can defend themselves if a “reasonable” person could have concluded they were following a lawful order.

What, one might ask, would be the purpose for this change? Answers to this question come quickly to mind:

1) This change in procedure doesn't in any way address the entire currently hot issue of suppposedly secret CIA facilities originally established in various European countries. The point of anti-torture legislation should have been forbidding the secret holding of terror suspects out of the view of this supposedly moral nation of ours. It's a pretty safe bet that nobody involved in the handling of suspected terrorists is ever again going to even think about trying out that new digital camera in the midst of an effort to make the inmates reconsider the nature and detail of information that they have been providing during interrogation. Without that sort of Abu Ghraib evidence or some other spilling of the beans, that particular action isn't going to be addressed by this compromise...

2) This change doesn't seem - as reported - to even address the subject of rendition. That's a big part of what we're supposed to be talking about; the idea is that we don't torture those held in custody and we don't circumvent our own supposedly high moral standards by farming out the toenail ripping action to the hooded goons of various putative allies. Rendition, combined with heartfelt insistence that "we had no idea" that our friends would engage in a bit of creative questioning of which we don't approve...

3) This change doesn't begin to address the creative nature of the effort that the Bush Monkeys have applied to the entire question of what "torture" actually even means. We generally already know that these dipwits were more than happy to slap such strong downward pressures on the definition of torture that anything short of life-threatening organ failure fell short of reaching the far end of that twisted little measuring stick. The "agreement" reached by McCain and Bushco seems to leave open a door big enough through which to drag that artful "Mission Accomplished" banner, if not the entire USS Abraham Lincoln itself, given that it doesn't really apply any particular sense of definition to just exactly what the hell "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" actually means. Given the past practice of the president's counsel providing definitions of just exactly what constitutes torture, an impressive window opens up for what could constitute a situation where a "reasonable person" could at least argue, if not believe, that he was receiving a "lawful order" that resulted in treatment of a prisoner that we as Americans might objectively reject as being "cruel, inhuman or degrading". This doesn't even address the vexation of the Guantanamo conundrum, where claims of abuse apparently can only be considered vibrant and alive if offered up by senior officers and officials (given that reports by the run of the mill federal lackey won't be attracting much attention)...

...none of this even touches on the various reports that the Army Field Manual was being modified to embrarce a wider variety of interrogation techniques, apparently for the purpose of clarifying McCain's amendment out from under him. That in itself, by the rumored incorporation of SERE training techniques as interrogation tactics in the Army Field Manual instead of the brutal inhuman tactics of the Godless commies, muddies the water and creates opportunities in the realm of number "3" above. The simple fact remains, after all the dust and smoke clears, that the agreed-upon ban on torture that the White House 'folded on' isn't all that similar - given the specific language - to the outright ban that McCain was seeking. If, however, you rely on the MSM for interpretation, this is a Big Victory for Big John and a surrender by Gee Dub and his merry torture-loving band. But these guys have rolled John McCain before, and even your average cynic can't help but suspect that - somehow - they have managed to roll him one more time, playing word games and practicing a bit of sleight of hand in which McCain and - they hope - the rest of America can't successfully figure out under which of the three cups that magical bean is hiding...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The Pentagon's Yellow Journalism 

...even though they expressed just all kinds of shock over the recent revelation of US military payments intended to get Iraqi media to run US-friendly stories, the Pentagon has set aside $300 million to do pretty much the same sort of thing everywhere else in the world. It shouldn't be surprising, given this administration's willingness to pay journalists to say nice things about the 'No Child Left Behind' Act or to create infomercials that looked remarkably like local evening news reports to try to sell that wild Medicare drug program that the 'Golden Years' set is now grappling with and swearing at. But even at that, it seems odd that the very same people who are going to be conducting investigations into the favorable news reports slipped into Iraqi media on a "cash and carry" basis...the very...same...people... will be engaging in virtually the same sort of practice other places in the world. Apparently any concerns about the nurturing of a free and independent media aren't as important in those countries that we haven't yet invaded...

...of course, we already know how they feel about our media...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:02 PM 0 comments

Ruining A Good Night's Sleep 

...so even though he tiptoes all the way out to the edge of actually admitting that the intelligence that led us to Iraq was flawed - although he refuses to admit they probably knew that at the time, and even though he clearly has no one on board who has the skill set necessary for nation-building, and even though our military has been nearly driven to its knees and the people who got fired for publicly overestimating the cost of the invasion turn out to have been hapless fools who fell seriously short of the mark, still George W. Bush said he would do it all again, and just might if he thinks it's necessary. "Who" is probably something we could narrow down to a couple of likely candidates, but "with what" seems like a pretty important question...
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Either Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein said that (or maybe Al just liked it alot and stole it), but how they possibly could know that a piece of work like Gee Dub would come rolling down the pike is absolutely preternatural. No wonder Iran is upgrading it's anti-aircraft capability...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:25 PM 0 comments

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