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

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Ganging Up on Greg Walden 

...one of the advantages of a lengthy incumbency, aside from all the money and goodies that can be sent the contituents' way, is the ability to sit back in relative comfort whilst one's opponents burn through the campaign dough bashing each other's brains in for the chance of making it to the November vote. Greg Walden, Oregon's Republican District 2 U.S. Representative, has has this advantage over the last few election cycles and that, coupled with the traditionally red tinge to the voters in this district, has made his efforts at reelection a fairly casual affair. This year, however, things are going to be a little bit different on the Democratic side of the District 2 congressional campaign...

According to a report today in the Bend Bulletin, to which I cannot link because they have decided that you have to pay if you want to read their on-line content (a quintessentially Republican approach if ever there was one), the four Democratic candidates will be holding several joint appearances in all of District 2's counties. These aren't necessarily debates in the usually bloody political sense; these candidates want first and foremost to talk about why Walden shouldn't be our Congressman anymore. Each of the four - Carol Voisin, an Ashland college professor; Dan Davis, businessman and veteran from Jacksonville; Charles Butcher, a contractor and gun rights advocate from Baker City; and Scott Silver of Bend, best known as the head of Wild Wilderness and opponent to the U.S. Forest Service access fees program - wants to be the Democratic nominee in November and each will strive to bring out his or her strong points, but the emphasis is to highlight their individual and collective objections to Walden's agenda. It's an unusual approach, but it demonstrates an interesting new example of how Democrats are making moves to try to recapture the majority in Congress...

Walden has been skillful in his politics. There should be no mistaking that he is a George W. Bush hanger-on and a social conservative well beyond the beliefs of the average Joe in District Two, which covers all Southwestern Oregon and everything east of the Cascades. He is very very quiet about a lot of his support for the more intrusive aspects of the Bushco social conservatism that has been all the rage over the last few years, and for good reason: these people are ranchers and loggers and mill workers and businessfolk, and have something of a small-government libertarian streak in them. Walden's visibility is in the area of natural resource management, whether it be grazing issues or logging of federal land or the on-going Klamath Basin irrigation issue; he doen't talk much or loudly enough to be noticed about those issues that generally fire up the religious right, although he supports them faithfully. Folks in District 2 may oppose expanded rights for gays because it sounds icky and may object to abortion on a mostly theoretical basis, but what they want most of all is to be left alone and to have an advocate representing them against government intrusion. If you were to structure a conversation that could demonstrate how the provisions of the Patriot Act could easily be used against local residents and spoke approvingly about that eventuality, you could get yourself hurled bodily out of every bar from Enterprise to Lakeview with little effort...

It's a shrewd gambit that the Democratic candidates are playing, trying to display all the things about Greg Walden that a good many of his constituents would object to while at the same time keeping the intra-party parking lot gunfights to a minimum. The fact that Walden has a Republican challenger suggests all by itself the depth of belief about how things are heading in the wrong direction right now. Sadly for Greg Walden and the Oregon Republican Party, Diebold won't be there to help him much in fending off this concerted attack from both flanks; we vote by mail here in Oregon...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:58 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 09, 2006

NO! and NO! 

...these are the answers to the two obvious questions about the newest civil rights-crushing revelations: 1) Did the Pentagon really thing they were mistaken in recording the behaviors of American Citizens exercising their Constitutional rights in protesting against the Iraq war, and 2) Do we really believe that they have expunged those records and have stopped engaging in monitoring that behavior...

This behavior by the Pentagon isn't anything even remotely approximating an accident of misinterpretation or the product of some unfortunate zealousness by confused underlings. If anything, it has the same sort of backbone-chilling overtones that we thought we wouldn't ever feel anymore once the strong arm of Justice had flung Richard Milhouse Nixon as far from the South Lawn walkway as far as an angry, disillusioned nation thought it could hurl his sorry carcass. It was simply no accident that Quakers looking to protest Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Adventure found themselves being an item of interest to camo-spies from the Defense Department. We spend a great deal of money training the Future Leaders of our Military, and any half-bright ring-necked coot that can't figure out on his own that it SIMPLY ISN'T PROPER to collect covert information on American citizens isn't the sort of officer and gentleman that this country cares to see have any sort of long-term career success. Somebody, somewhere, deep down that chain of command, had to know that the particular sort of data collection in which they were engaged was not just wrong but illegal, as well as unconstitutional. If there really is some sort of strange majority in the Pentagon that would look at these circumstances and say "whu..?", it's time for the citizens of this country to start looking way more fondly on that whole 2nd Amendment thing. There isn't any sort of cover anywhere in law or the Constitution that provides for this sort of behavior, and there never was...

One of the groups that we have so much fun making sport of out here is the 'black helicopter' gang, the true believers of libertarianisn who just know that jack-booted federal thugs are lurking behind every clump of brush, and yet....and yet they may have a more legit concern than any of the rest of us really understood. The Pentagon shouldn't be spying on Americans in the first place, and shouldn't have been collecting and storing this kind of info in the second place. The worst part about this report is that it won't be getting enough play in the main stream media, even though it is one of those chinks in freedoms armor that every American should understand and know about, because we seem, on an almost daily basis, to be sinking into that grim dark place we thought we were going back in 1973. We didn't get there then, but it was mostly as a result of one particular Federal judge and a media that was more interested in understanding the truth than in maintain good relations with the White House. And that's what scary right now: we seem to be saddled with a remarkably similar Administrative gang but lack the protective influence of federal judges and major media outlets that delivered us last time. All of the Pentagon's excuses have that taint of grasping at straws that almost define one of the later refuges of scoundrels. This is the sort of thing that should make all Americans sleep less well at night...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:38 PM 0 comments

Hey! I'm Back!! 

...after several days of being sentenced to Blogger Perdition as a result of having been flagged as a 'spam blog' (what the hell is a spam blog, anyway?), I have finally been restored to weblog fullness. After two FRIGGIN' years of operation, the fact that this happened immediately after I posted about Ben Westlund's run for governor (next post down), who is striking all sorts of fear in the hearts of both established parties, certainly doesn't raise any sort of suspicion in my mind, nosiree bob! On the other hand, any major parties looking to start blogs to get in on this phenomenon for the sake of their particular candidates for Oregon Governor should probably consider finding a host other than Blogger, because I do bear grudges....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:26 PM 0 comments

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