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

Saturday, May 17, 2008

The Uncounted Casualties of Bush's War 

...there are numbers and then there are numbers. All kinds of DFH blogs have HTML coding that show the losses suffered as a result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. As this report demonstrates, that's not the actual number...

There are a million words that one could write about all of this. NPR had a revealing and outraging series of reports last year by Daniel Zwerdling that provided all the proof that anyone might need about how too much of the military deals with post tramatic stress disorder...

I got nothin' here. The way I feel right now, I'm afraid to start because I may never stop and tonight, at least, I don't want to take that trip. Let's just say that the full accounting of the cost of Gee Dub's neocon-driven Grand Nation-Building Adventure will probably never be completely accurate and leave it at that...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:13 PM 0 comments

Friday, May 16, 2008

When Giving Up Golf Isn't That Big A Sacrifice 

...I was originally going to do some sort of snarky take-off on Gee Dub's bizarre and supposedly sincere observation that he had given up golf in order to honor the sacrifice of American troops in harms way in his Greater War On Terra. It was an absurd, meaningless gesture even if it was true - which it probably wasn't (given the photographic evidence circulation the intertubes today) - and deserved to be responded to by the claim that I have given up eating Sea Salt and Vinegar potato chips, which is equally as meaningless and equally untrue...

All of the potential snark started to drain away, however when this particular piece of news came down through the intertubes. Any interest in gettin' down with the usual themes was fully blown out of the water with this report in today's Bend (Oregon) Bulletin...

This soldier was part of the 'Family' to which I have belonged for over 30 years, both through her personal connection as a fireline grunt and through a parent's job. Regardless of any particular view about what we are doing in Iraq, there is a special honor that has to be accorded to the people who have offered their very lives to do what the command authority has asked them to do. All of the politicians in the country can debate until the cows wander back to the barn over whether invading Iraq was The Right Thing To Do and How Long We Should Stay, but - at least for tonight - all of that is a meaningless exercise when held up against the fact of another family facing a brutally simple reality. The mourning families of soldiers understand what sacrifice looks like, and it has nothing to do with golf...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:17 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Horses, Barn Doors, and Special Elections 

...one of the fundamental risks that politicians run is that people aren't as dumb as they (the politicians) think they (people, or more specifically, voters) are and that those people will finally get tired of being lied to. There's a bad reckoning on an ugly Tuesday night laying in wait for any politician or party convinced that slick stump speeches and ads uncoupled from any sort of meaningful action is the sure way to some sort of enduring electoral success. It took forty years for the Democratic party to finally grind down the voting public to the point of handing all the keys of Congress to the Republicans in the 1990's. In a remarkable display of unearned hubris, the Repub's appear to be about to hand those keys back after less than a decade and a half behind the wheel, and oh my Lord are they in a panic about it...

Anyone who has spent any time watching action movies over the last couple of generations would, one must think, be at least passingly familiar with the simple concept that the instant after your car bursts through the cliff-top guard rail is not the time to start pondering whether you should have gotten yourself all tangled up in that car chase. The Republicans came to power on a magic carpet held aloft by all sorts of sweet soothing words about how they were going to get government out of our pockets and off of our backs, after which they proceeded to demonstrate that these promises were only true if we were the sort of people who would show up near the top of their campaign financial statements. As it turned out, little people not only needed to not apply, but they could also forget about any consideration when talk turned to their taxes, their health care, their right to be protected against predatory big-money interests, or some of the deepest, most sacred portions of their personal lives. The little people learned lots of hard lessons about the differences between the sweet talk of Republican politicians and the hard, grim reality of their actions, but the three most recent special elections to fill Republican Congressional seats are demonstating that the little people did pull some take-home lessons out of the last fifteen years...

The lame efforts of the Republican Congressional caucus to drag a bunch of moldy, rotting ideas out of the meat bin to try to stave off what is starting to look like an electoral blood bath is simply another example of why the old saw about "closing the barn door after the horses got out" still works. Congress makes glaciers look like some consultant's dream of speed and efficiency in good times. In the course of an historically contentious election year like this where cicadas could walk the land for more days than the number during which anything meaningful might happen in the House and Senate chambers, there isn't enough digital storage media on the planat on which to save some useless images of Congressional waste and inefficiency from which their hot-rod media specialists could construct some sort of meaningful message that could offset the hours and weeks and years of video demonstrating that The Republican America doesn't have room for anyone who doesn't show up on the "Rangers" donation list...

The Republican party is facing an 'on-year' election disaster of almost historic proportions, and all they can do is trot out a bunch of half-baked 'look-pretty' initiatives that - had they actually cared about the little people - they would have taken care of when they controlled all aspects of the Federal government. All one can think is "don't let the barn door hit you on your way out"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 12, 2008

Mr. Kulongoski, Please Pick Up The White Courtesy Phone 

...I have been a supporter of Ted Kulongoski before he became the Governor and during his two terms in that post. He has never been all that much of a Knight in Shining Armor to the more Dirty Frickin' Hippie segment of the Oregon liberal population cohort, but he has been suitably moderate in his approach to government and a far better choice than any of the Republicans that have run against him for any state level office. I have, in fact, mentioned in various venues on more than one occasion that I was rather proud of the fact that my Governor could beat up your Governor either in the parking lot or when it came to actually honoring our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that many governors and one president who comes mind haven't by attending the funerals and memorial services for almost every soldier from Orygun who died in Gee Dub's Great War On Terra...

Given all of that, I am absolutely befuddled tonight; I am trying to think of some reasonable explanation for why Ted Kulongoski would choose to show up at what was essentially a campaign appearance by John McCain in Portland. I lived for many years in the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan area early in my career and I know that even thirty years ago there were a host of better things to do on a free day in the Rose City than hang out with some superannuated far-right-winger with a hunger for a bigger prize and an undeserved reputation for being some sort of wild iconoclast. There's the Oregon Zoo, Ted, or maybe OMSI; if that doesn't work, hop the MAX light rail and buzz down to Tom McCall Waterfront Park along the Willamette River...

McCain wasn't in town to chitter on about how he would improve the prospects for wind-generated electricity as a U.S. Senator; he stopped by to try to play his way back into shape as some snarky Maverick future president who doesn't always hew to the path that party affiliation dictates. John McCain came to Portland, Orygun, to make a political appearance on behalf of his own last-ditch desire to be the President Of The United States. The fact that he - or his handlers - are once again playing that "Maverick" theme to attract low-information moderate voters in the Beaver State is what matters...or is at least what should matter to a Democratic governor, regardless of which candidate of his own party he has chosen to endorse. This is McCain's last big-time lunging grab at that brass ring that would finally win the ultimate political prize and his record on issues of the environment and climate change offers precious little to suggest that a forced return to the Senate chambers after a November defeat will result in any sort of sustained interest in the subject...

John McCain isn't a latter-day Barry Goldwater. He will not grow comfortably into some strange sort of elder statesman that the next generation will look at and wonder why so many of us were afraid of the prospects of a McCain presidency. Ted Kulongoski did tremendous damage to the electoral prospects of either Democratic presidential candidate today by even being in the same zip code as John McCain as the ol' Maverick continued his oddly bifurcated run for the presidency as both a calm, reasoned moderate and the answered dream of the fundamentalist religious right. McCain's appearance was no more and no less than a campaign appearance, and Democratic Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski did neither himself or the Democratic party any sort of favor by being caught within affordable cab-fare distance of the event...

Get a clue, Ted; buy a Vowel. Don't do this anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:31 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 11, 2008

That Sort Of Thing That Makes Mom Proud 

...somehow it seems appropriate that it would be on Mother's Day that we learn that Neil Young has been the recipient of an honor that has come to very few over the course of history. Young has been recognized by being the namesake for Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, for now and forever the donor for the name for a newly identified species, which is the sort of thing that would make any mother proud...

Well, yes, it is a new species of trapdoor spider. But, hey, a new species is a new species, and to be recognized in this way is truly special, although one might reasonably suspect that most mothers would see no need to include this part:

"...spiders in the trapdoor genus...are distinguished from one species to the next on the basis of differences in genitalia..."

Listen, it's not every day that you can get a new species named after you and there are a host of odd, bizarre little creatures in the ground under our feet lookin' for a home, if you catch my drift, so being the donor for a newly identified spider's scientific name is way better than having a soil scientist who really likes your stuff identifying a fungus new species...

After all, Gary Larson got a new species of owl lice...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:03 PM 0 comments

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