<$BlogRSDURL$>

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

Friday, July 20, 2007

Mitt Raises the Bubbling, Fetid Cup of Kool Aide To His Lips And.... 

...the sad, sordid saga of Mitt Romney has had many twists and turns. On any given day over the last decade or so, he has been either for or against embryonic stem cell research, a woman's right to choose, personal ownership of firearms, taxes, death and taxes, and the unsightly stain of underarm perspiration. As one of the leading competitors for the base Republican vote, he has been willing to take policy positions that are totally contrary to his past beliefs, but we may have finally acheived a watershed moment in Mitt's singular hungry quest for the biggest prize on the political landscape...

Amazingly, amongst all the talk over the last few days about the speed with which
Republican candidates at all levels are running away from this particular failed presidency, Mitt Romney is suddenly standing up bold and strong in defense of the core Bush principles of spying without recourse on the American people and torturing those people that it just feels like torturing. Mitt feels the power of George W. Bush; he apparently senses the possibilities that a no-holds-barred approach to common human decency and long-held concepts of civil liberties can offer. Aside from the "24" feeling that his view of life seems to suggest, there is a strong sense of common danger to the current set of Romney views. He doesn't have a problem at all with the Patriot Act. He doesn't have a problem at all with the sorts of "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have made the United States and its citizens one of the most hated entities on the globe...

Mitt Romney has decided that he believes...really believes...in the whole sordid dark idea that spying on his fellow citizens and doing inhuman things to others is all part of 'protecting' the rest of us. That whole gig hasn't worked out very well over the last nearly seven years, and we are less safe from terrorists and less protected from the unreasonable spying eyes of our own government than we have been at any time since 9/11 supposedly changed everything. Mitt may be making a clever play for the base in an effort to convince the Pharisee branch that he is really one of them and not really a cultist, but for the rest of us, it is a clarifying answer to the question "why shouldn't any of the current Republican candidates actually become president"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 2 comments

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Chasing the Dangerous Illegal Brown People Out of St. Helens, Oregon 

...there are places in the Pacific Northwest where political battles over illegal immigration would be the sort of thing you might logically expect. St. Helens, Oregon, isn’t one of them. Located roughly 30 miles downstream from Portland on the southern bank of the Columbia River, St. Helens is the sort of place that would stir more thoughts of Lewis and Clark, lumber mills, and loggers in hickory shirts and “high-water” pants striding around town in the ubiquitous ‘Romeo’s’ slip-on shoes that replace those needly-soled caulked (pronounced "corked") boots they wear out in the woods. The immigration reform battle, however, is being waged right there in front of the Columbia County Board of Commissioners...

It would be tempting to suggest that there is are personal interests involved in the debate that was held before the County Commissioners. Despite the insistence that the motivation for this proposed ordinance is to have people be here legally, the focus on construction crews being checked for residency - as opposed to shop clerks, restaurant workers, truck drivers, and hotel maids - weakens the argument that it’s just all about whether someone is legally in this country. That’s not the only reason to be disturbed by the proposed ordinance, though. As pointed out by a members of the Columbia County Citizens for Human Dignity, a whole new can of worms gets opened up when some mechanism is created to report “suspected” illegal immigrants running around town...

Honesty is important in both the larger debate and this particular case: this is about Hispanic people. If a van full of French chefs rolled into town and became the culinary directors of every eating establishment in the area, there probably wouldn’t be a person in the county willing to pick up the phone and call the proposed complaint line to check into their immigration status. On the other hand, any person or family of a non-Caucasian hue taking up residence can bet big money with a reasonable prospect of good return on the prospect of drawing the attention of the local authorities under the proposed ordinance...

It’s not hard, given my experience, to have a certain understanding of possible motivations for this proposed ordinance. The issue of low labor costs and competitive advantages resulting from the employment of illegal immigrants isn’t a new issue in the Pac. NW, only an evolving one. There has been a tension for at least thirty years over the issue of tree-planting and tree-thinning crews, with complaints that crews comprised of illegal immigrants could more successfully acquire contracts from large private timberland owners and the federal government than could forestry companies who hired legal residents. That doesn’t excuse a county-level big-brother approach, though, with the sort of built-in “inform on your neighbors” mechanism that would be better understood in the Soviet Union or the novel “1984" than in a country primarily populated by immigrants. Who is legally in this country is a federal issue, not a county or municipal one. It’s a federal issue precisely because of the proposed Columbia County ordinance that would focus county attention on construction crews, but not necessarily on farm workers or kitchen help or motel maids or any of a host of other jobs. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, not because of the impact on one particular industry but because of the impact on American society as a whole. If it needs to be fixed, then figure out how to fix it nationally and not just at the county and municipal level for one particular industry...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 15, 2007

I Missed THIS For Harry Potter?! 

...ok, so I actually don't watch the Sunday morning talking head shows. It was a vice I had to swear off any number of years ago for the simple raw fact that electronics manufacturers just don't make television remote controls beefy enough. Does't take much of a jolt at all to put those little puppies straight out of business; one smack against the wall and it's DOA time for another multifuntion universal remote. It's expensive to have to keep replacing these things, and the more affordable models aren't always as "universal" as their manufacturers would have you believe...

Faced with the unattractive choices of either gluing pillows to the wall to end the carnage (an option that the spousal unit assured me, in the immortal words of George H. W. Bush, "Will Not Stand") or sitting there vibrating like a tuning fork whacked with a claw hammer as my sky-rocketing blood pressure threatened to make blood start squirting from my eyes, the only obvious choice was to step away. Oh, sure, I regularly drop in on one Sunday morning gabfest or other, but I've taught myself to bail out when my grip began to tighten around the remote. All for the best, really, because it isn't a good thing for an elder of the local Lutheran Church congregation, even if he is known as the most liberal Lutheran for leagues in any direction, to come storming into church muttering about "hell" and "damnation" directed towards other of God's creations. Today, however, I didn't even drop in, because I promised Mrs. Jack K. that we would go to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix right after church (we can discuss the efforts by fundie wingnuts to ban the Harry Potter books because of the whole witchcraft thing some other time, but...as a preview...they're idiots). And I missed this wonderful little moment...

...let's stipulate up front, although it's a bit superfluous to do so, that South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is a water-carrier when it comes to Gee Dub's Iraq War. He knows perfectly well, given the fact that he has long served in both the Air Force, Air National Guard, and Air Force Standby Reserve, that the military hierarchy would rather drink its own bathwater than allow Members Of Congress to get within decent rifleshot distance of troops who may not be exactly trustworthy in the art of speaking the 'truths' that commanders want to be spoken. He also either has to know that his little rug-buying fling a couple of months ago with John McCain in that now-infamous Baghdad market has become a moment of farce, or else he is leasing a nice efficiency unit adjacent to Big Dick Cheney's place in that underground bunker complex we aren't supposed to know about underneath the Vice Presidential mansion...

...the most amazing thing about this exchange is Graham's effort to diminish Jim Webb's viewpoint because of how many times each of them has been to Iraq. It's just silly, and it's a striking mark of desperation by George W. Bush's minions. Of all the people to challenge in this way, Jim Webb would be high up on the list entitled "Bad Idea". If he has never been to Iraq, he's been to war. He's seen it, felt it, tasted it in a way that an Air Force JAG officer couldn't imagine even with a copy of Hamburbger Hill and a bottle of cheap whiskey. He can read the reports and see through the lies, because he's been in places where the Uniform Code of Military Justice would serve little more purpose than toilet paper. He's been in places where civilian leadership didn't or wouldn't give the troops the tools to actually, properly win the conflict that the civilian leadership ordered them into. He's seen the dog and pony shows...

Most of all, he hasn't yet developed a fully functional smarminess gland that afflicts too many politicians of all stripes. He's a fighter, more than happy to scrap in the down and dirty, and to hell with sitting there and taking it the way a genteel Gentleman of the Senate should. I missed the exchange on the tely - although I may catch the replay on MSNBC tonight - so its hard to tell how public perception will award the points, but from the transcript it looks like Jim Webb showed a New Way to present the opposition viewpoint to Gee Dub's Grand Iraq Nation-Building Adventure...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:12 PM 0 comments

Jim WHO? 

...I've always considered myself a pretty well-informed consumer of political news, being something of a junkie/wonk about the whole sordid game. I have to confess, then, that I was shocked to find out that Jim Gilmore has dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

...I didn't know that Jim Gilmore was running for the Republican presidential nomination...

Maybe that is a hint about the issues that drove him out of the race. Well, that and the fact that he has collected about a thousand times less campaign money than the likes of Mitt Romney or Barak Obama...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:58 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?