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

Friday, June 20, 2008

Bad Times In The Friendly Skies And The Death Of All Those "Be Home By Suppertime" Ads 

...there once was a time when United Airlines would fill our TV's with "Rhapsody in Blue" and images of the 'Do It All" mom dropping the kid off at day-care, flying across the country to bring home the bacon, and being back in town in time to pick up the adoring child before the sun went down. That time is now apparently over...

Depending on how the airline's policy actually plays out, this is shaping up to be a real problem for business travelers, who may now be faced with either phenomenal increases in cost or the simple inability to function in a way that airlines have previously actively encouraged. Maybe it's finally time to sink some of the retirement fund into stocks of companies that are aggressively involved in internet meeting technology...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:49 PM 0 comments

The Politics of Jellyfish 

...the handwriting on the wall is large, lurid, and capable of being read from near-earth orbit. Congress is going to pass the bill revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the House did today and the betting money is all coming down on the same outcome in the Senate next week. This means, most importantly of all, that the Executive branch will be able to wiretap Americans for a far longer period of time without FISA court approval and - perhaps more importantly - all those telecommunication companies who decided to go with the Bush administration back in 2001, even though they probably had lawyers smart enough to know that they shouldn't be stepping across a clearly defined legal line, are going to get away with their actions because the Attorney General is going to yell "ally, ally, in come freeee-ooo" and life will once again be good....

The netroots has reacted with understandable dismay at this episode, but it seems as though one possible underlying motivation may be being missed in all of this. Conventional lefty wisdom generally seems to be that Democratic leadership is once again cowering before Republican pressure or demonstrating that it is little different from Republicans in any case or that it is more interested in the welfare of its corporate masters and the almighty dollar than it is the legitimate civil liberties concerns of a natural constituency. One way or another, the general view is that the Democrats are - in the words of a placard at one of the jellyfish displays at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport - "floating through life spineless and brainless"...

I suspect that there is probably another motivation that is to some degree at play here: fear of being left holding the bag in the event of another terrorist attack. This is a bit different from the conventional idea of being afraid of Republican tactics, because that 'fear' relies on the formerly tried and true tactics that worked so well back in 2000 through 2004 and only started to break down in 2006. All of that was just name-calling enabled by the SCLM and cable news channels but untethered to any reality-based fact. Congressional Democrats are fully aware that there's a chance that somebody may slip through anti-terrorism net that is pretty much window dressing in so many ways; they also probably fully understand that another failure by the Bush administration to protect against an attack from evil islamofascist persons of a brownish persuasion can easily be turned on its head by the Repub's and their enablers to make it seem as though whatever heinous act befalls the country is in all ways the fault of the Commie-simp America-hating Democrats...

This sort of political calculation in no way excuses Democratic support for the FISA revision/amnesty bill; it just is what it is. A spineless, brainless failure to stand up to efforts to chisel away at civil liberties and reward those companies who were complicit in doing so is a win for bad guys of all sorts of stripes. It's a win for Repub's who want to take discussion of their natural failure of leadership off the table and replace it with talk about who's going to die because of Democratic squishiness on Terra, and it is a win for those who want to make us fearful and change our attitudes and behaviors to the detriment of long-held values. Benjamin Franklin didn't spend much time speculating on the political nature of jellyfish, but he did say all that needed to be said about the FISA revision bill two and a half centuries ago. You've probably heard it before, but it bears repeating:
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

The jellyfish would understand...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:38 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 16, 2008

The Detainee Treatment House Of Cards 

...trying to get to the truth behind the treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay is about as easy as trying to dig a perfectly square hole in a pile of dry sand, but some the weasel tracks are starting to become ever so slightly more visible. We are apparently going to find out tommorrow that there wasn't a tight friendly comity within the military legal community about using 'aggressive' interrogation techniques...

Aside from the fact that this little bit of dramatic action only reinforces what has already been talked about just offstage for a few years now, any sort of confirmation of the sorts of brutal comic-book hero action that our government, on our behalf and in our name, carried out on people who in some instances may well have been innocent farmers is instructive as to how much in trouble we are in as a nation. Bushco hasn't been desperate to hide what might be about to be revealed because of national security or protection of "sources and methods"; it has been trying to keep proof of torture out of the news to prevent the loss of its last shred of credibility in polite international society. Never mind the damage that such news would do in the Muslim world; the people of Afghanistan and Iraq already know what's been going on. The legacy of Gee Dub's administration won't be just that of a destroyed economy and a failed neocon experiment in the Middle East; it will also include the radicalization of whole populations who didn't otherwise have any reason to be seeking some sort of blood-oath revenge against the United States...

Tomorrow will not be good news at all for what passes for America's standing in the world, but that ship pretty much sailed a long time ago, anyway. It will also be another embarrassing opportunity for Republicans to demonstrate that their sense of humanity has long since been subsumed by their anxious hunger to feel like they are living life through the eyes of Jack Bauer hizownself. It may mostly be, however, an opportunity for residents of this country to finally get a good look at what happens when people decide that who they want to have a beer with is a better measure of who should be president than whether a particular candidate actually has the moral grounding to live in the White House for any meaningful period of time...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:08 PM 0 comments

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