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

Friday, July 18, 2008

Late Night Random Thoughts 

...given the newly-born friendship that seems to be developing between John McCain and Mitt Romney, one can only hope that they can come together, make that final emotional connection, agree to an invitation to the party ticket for the Mittster as VP candidate, and charge forward as a pair of financially-endowed rich white Republicans to challenge the horrors that an actual grass-roots movement Democratic presidency would represent...

I mean, think about it: A campaign ticket represented by a Republican presidential nominee who engenders the sort of excitement amongst the Republican base that equals the prospect of cleaning up the spot where the family dog threw up on the carpet coupled with a running mate who is devoutly connected to a religion that the vast majority of that base considers some strange twisted cult. I might just donate money to that sort of campaign, if only for the pure evil pleasure of watching it blow up in spectacular ways....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:14 PM 0 comments

If Ya Can't Beat 'Em, Have Iraqi Insurgents Kill 'Em 

...sometimes I simply don't know what to think about Huggy Bear McCain. His insistence today on speculating about just exactly when Barack Obama would show up in Iraq was as unnecessary as it was stupidly evil. It was unnecessary because Obama and the other Senators will get there when - or if - they get there and showing up on Tuesday would matter no more than showing up on Saturday would. It was stupidly evil because it creates the raw specter of a candidate trying to put his opponent in harm's way by revealing his itinerary, but doing it in such a ham-handed way that the entire world would blame McCain if some bad thing were to befall the entourage...

On reflection, the biggest mistake McCain may have made here is stir up Obama's traveling companions. Chuck Hagel is a real live non-com Vietnam combat veteran who knows more about what "war" actually looks like than the Ol' Maverick could ever imagine (I certainly don't disrespect McCain's service and the brutal circumstances of his years as a POW, but that is not "war" as understood by the vast majority of combat personnel) and strikes me as a tougher character and far more the maverick than Huggy Bear could ever hope to be. Jack Reed is not a combat veteran, but my experience with both serving and retired military personnel is that people who have earned Ranger tabs and Airborne wings don't yield to anybody - especially bottom-feeding politically connected Naval Academy graduates - when it comes to stupidity that adversely affects them. The Ol' Maverick might want to miss a few more floor votes after these guys get back to D.C. after their trip...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:22 PM 0 comments

Thursday, July 17, 2008

OMG!!! TERRASTS ARE COMING!11!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!2!!!2!!@! 

...OK, so stop me if you've heard this before, but Michael Chertoff has some Very Important News for you:
“We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy.”

Oh, wait. Wrong Important News. That was a couple days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and tens of thousands of people were trapped in horrific circumstances in New Orleans without any help whatsoever either on the ground or on the horizon...

Wait...no...Here It Is!! Michael Chertoff has this Important News for you:
"...[redacted because the Associated Press wants to go to the mat over commonly understood concepts of "free use"..."]

Well, then, Shorter Michael Chertoff: Osamabinislamofascistjihadistbarackobamaladen terrorists packing real live passports from European nations are sneaking into this great but dangerously threatened nation of ours with dark malice in their pagan hearts and bomb-making instructions in their carry-on baggage. Other 'evil ones' are foregoing even that simple expediency by sneaking radiological material across the Atlantic Ocean on innocent-looking personal business jets and sleek black Cigarette boats and Secretary Chertoff wants us to know that He Probably Can't Catch Them All...

Thank God In Heaven we have brave stalwart people like Michael Chertoff manning the walls to protect us. It is only a true public servant who will level with us about the desperate threats we are facing...usually just before a national level election....and usually when the Republican party and the White House thinks that there is some value in pulling that old "Rule By Fear" rabbit out of the hat one...more...time. It would be tragic, if not profoundly unpatriotic, to point out that the very warnings that Secretary Chertoff is shouting from the ramparts seem a bit odd given that A) he seems to be suggesting that we are not a whit safer for all of this "winning" that has been going on in Iraq and, 2) al-Qaida and its allies have had some sort of unspecified time and space to recruit and train terrorists, which means Afghanistan and Pakistan, which means the region that George W. Bush and his budding surrogate John McCain have virtually ignored for about six of the last seven years, which means that another successful attack on American soil would represent the most abject failure that could be imagined accruing from the Bush-McCain "War On Terra"...

Michael Chertoff will enter the annals of history as a true Patriot Of The Motherland...er...sorry....Homeland ...for his efforts to carry the only coherent message of the Bush administration to the American people: "You are going to DIE unless you trust US, and only US, to protect you from dangerous terrorists and the commie-symp Democrat party fellow travelers who have been enabling them." He's not quite fully serving us Americans, though, because he's not coming straight out and explaining the obvious truth that John McCain is our only hope for salvation because John McCain knows how to win wars (McCain's Call of Duty IV screen name, where all of that war winning has apparently happened, is - not surprisingly - "The Maverick")...

"God Bless Michael Chertoff" is what I say. It would be right and proper to say that we need more true-blue American heroes like him incessenently pointing out the wormholes that he and his boss were supposed to be plugging over the last several years that the bad men will probably crawl through to kill us in our beds if we elect Democrats to national office. Sadly, though, we'll probably just have to get by with the brave chatty few like him that we are graced with now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:26 PM 0 comments

...And The Gas Tax Holiday Rears It's Ugly Head One More Time 

...apparently one of the lesser-documented advantages of having married well is the lack of concern burdening a body over the cost of vehicle maintenance. That would seem to be one logical answer to the question of why Huggy Bear McCain insists on bringing up his gas tax holiday once again, this time embellished with the suggestion that such a reprieve may need to extend for longer that the three months he first suggested. Either that or his lack of understanding of money issues extends to the management of federal trust funds...

The 18.4-cent per gallon federal gas tax is deposited in the federal Highway Trust Fund, from whence funds are distributed to construct and maintain the transportation infrastructure of the United States. The Highway Trust Fund is already seriously underfunded and - as things now stand - highway funding will need to be cut by 34% in F.Y. 2009. The underfunding has been exacerbated by reduced driving because of high gas prices, and if Congress isn't successful in dealing with the current shortfall, the next year will see job losses in the construction industry as state and federal agencies are forced to shelf projects fixing the growing backlog of road and bridge problems...

Enter the Ol' Maverick himself, having slipped out of his 'tax-cutting/budget-balancing' disguise in order to squeeze into his 'populist' getup. He offers what is largely an empty gesture - in light of the total increase in price over the last year - that has the bonus attraction of hammering the primary source of funding intended to do things like keeping bridges from falling down without notice or patching tire-busting potholes in the nation's roads. Apparently the McCain campaign must have some otherwise unknown source of poll information indicating that the American people are crying out for meaningless half-measures to address the outrageous increase in fuel prices...

I mean, it couldn't just be a case of pandering, could it?
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:58 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Short Random Thoughts on Cable News Networks 

...I would assume that by this evening that the Rev. Jesse Jackson has become quite clearly aware that the cable news show name "Fox and Friends" is just another bit of New Yorker Magazine-worthy satire.

I mean, he's bound to have figured this out by tonight, right?

Right?
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:22 PM 0 comments

Things That Can Drive The Netroots Crazy 

...so, it turns out that two of the names prominently mentioned by the MSM as leading candidates for the Democratic vice presidential nomination have been caught hanging out with Barack Obama today, carefully not necessarily discounting the likelihood of their chances. Either of them would represent another spike hammered in the fissure that is growing between progressives and the Obama campaign...

The root problem of naming either of them as the vice presidential nominee is that they don't necessarily represent - in any sort of good way, for different reasons - the kind of "change" that Obama is always talking about. Evan Bayh is what most on the left would consider a DINO: somewhat fiscally conservative; not completely on-board with a woman's right to control her own body; and, worst of all, a reasonably solid member-in-good-standing of the Democratic Leadership Council. He does have a history of tremendous success in a red-trending state, which has to be attractive to Obama's strategists, and does represent a certain type of post-partisanship, but his actions as governor and votes as Senator have been all over the map...

Sam Nunn offers his own challenges for the themes and backdrops that Obama has been trying to feature. First of all, he is a moderate to conservative Democrat who voted in ways that (let me be charitable here) don't square at all much of the time with what could geneerally be called the progressive viewpoint. He is an earlier model for the uncomfortable characters that make the left so unhappy today, a 'counter' toward maintaining a working majority who doesn't vote the way that we might hope the members of that majority would vote. While he has done some nice work on nuclear proliferation, his history is not the sort that would exactly encourage the base to flock to the polls. The only good thing that could be said about a Nunn vice presidency is that it wouldn't lead to the logical extension of a Nunn presidency after two Obama terms...

I'm probably not the best judge of just how badly the nomination of either of these two guys would rattle and dispirit the Democratic base, given that the fact that I'm a beer-drinking, country-music-listening, firearm-owning, pickup-truck-driving, NASCAR-watching sort of liberal myself, which I have been led to understand disqualifies me from the true progressive clubhouse simply on principle alone. But even I feel that picking either of these two prospects represents a failure of both message and imagination. While I would trade either of them for my Junior Republican Oregon Senator Gordon Smith - maybe even throwing in the old pickup truck (not the beer, though; a fella's gotta have some principles) to sweeten the offer - I wouldn't trade either one of them for Ron Wyden, nor would I necessarily hope to see either one of them sitting comfortably in the VP's West Wing office. They represent old-fashioned ticket-balancing, both in the sense of moving toward the "middle" and addressing that 'gravitas' issue that have so plagued Democrats for a long time (see: Johnson, Lyndon). Selecting either one of them as vice presidential nominee will ignite the netroots in a firestorm, and - even though I'm not one of the clubhouse Kool Kidz, I suspect that I would be right in the maelstrom with them...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Wildfire: Now It's The Northwest's Turn 

...there has been a great deal of attention - and rightfully so - directed toward the wildfire situation in northern and Central California over the last few weeks. An undercurrent to the main story line has been that many of these fires, spawned from an intense series of thunderstorms, have been out of character, especially in NoCal, because they were coming at least a month earlier than would normally be expected. Now, and somewhat unexpectedly, it appears that it is the turn of the PacNW to start experiencing unexpected fires...

The area where the Cold Springs fire is burning isn't necessarily all that high in elevation (the chair I'm sitting in right now is probably a little farther above sea level than a good portion of this fire), but the rather harsh growing site conditions close to a dormant Cascade volcano create subalpine conditions that control the type of vegetation that expresses itself in the area. A combination of circumstances, including the effects of a tree-killing spruce budworm infestation and moderately rare thunderstorms has now resulted in a fire that once upon a time would have been considered a real whopper for the region. I first launched my career thirty years ago around Mt St. Helens just to the west of this area - and spent some time hiking and camping in the vicinity of the fire location, and I can't quite honestly recall an 8,000 acre forest occurring in this or any other portion of the Gifford Pinchot N.F. over that entire period (doesn't mean there hasn't been one; I just don't remember any, and this particular country has a special meaning for me because it was my first home for almost 9 years after college and I still have some connection to the place)...

So it appears that it's just about to become our turn in the barrel now. Just today, as I was driving north to Bend, Orygun, to do some personal business, I found myself in a pall of smoke and looking up at a small gaggle of Aero Union P-3A Orions dropping retardant on a fire that had broken out just off to my west (nothing like seeing one of these babies - easily the most distinctly painted of all the aircraft to be seen in the air tanker environment - pop out of the tree line about 3000 feet right out in front of you to capture your attention). Given that this particular fire started virtually at the foot of a volcanic cone butte that has a staffed lookout station on top and was close to all sorts of fire fighting resources, it amounted to little and won't make much more than the local news, but it is a warning shot across the bow after a long cold snowy wet winter that made us feel like this wouldn't be our year for big fires, which would be a nice break after six years of fires spanning tens of thousands of acres each...

Fires in my part of the country don't tend to capture the attention of media, mostly because there aren't usually harrowing tales of desperate evacuees fleeing the deadly maelstrom, but we get 'em and they are frequently big these days. Oddly enough, even given the fact that I live deep in the very woods that could burst into flame at any moment, my biggest concern is this part of the Cold Springs Fire story:
A team of about 50 veteran Oregon firefighters has arrived in Washington to help fight an out-of-control blaze north of Hood River.

I work with or know several of the people on this "veteran" firefighting team. They are going to be impossible to live with once they find out that they are "heroes"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:26 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 14, 2008

Brother, Can You Spare A $500 Million Dollar Bill 

...it is ironic that the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe isn't about to come apart at the seams because of internal and international objection to the farce that was his reelection but rather from something far more prosaic and yet vitally important to the citizens of that country: the lack on paper for printing money...

I won't even pretend to know much about economics, but - unlike John McCain - I'm not running for president so my lack of knowledge is somewhat less significant than his. I do remember a couple of earnest college professors trying to instill some vague sense of the subject on me, and their impassioned insistence that printing more money without a corresponding increase of something of tangible value to tie to that increased physical supply of paper currency was a bad bad thing still sticks with me for reasons as inexplicable as my recollection of the scientific name for the willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus, if you must know). I also recall that hyperinflation is a bad thing, and I suspect that when Mugabe can't pay his thugs anymore to keep a lid on things, Zimbabwe is going to quickly devolve to another failed state, complete with all of the violence and human suffering that is becoming so depressingly common these days, and Mugabe will probably be found in comfortable exile in some other willing nation...

After all, any country in which the price of a beer increases by 50% in an hour is clearly headed down a bad road...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:37 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 13, 2008

The Dean's Agenda 

...it's not surprising to see that David Broder is at it again...

David Broder is of course well known, according to the self-aggrandizing "conventional wisdom" of Big Time MSM, as the 'dean' of the D.C. chattering class. Although he has earned this exalted demigod status mostly as a result of longevity born of consciously currying the favor of the true centers of power, the reputation alone gives him a certain power-player status of his own that opens doors and makes life comfortable. Whether that status and the words that he has used to maintain that status make sense in any parallel universe where sensibility reigns is another question. A nice snapshot of his recent comment history can be found in this 2007 Harpers' article by Scott Horton; my personal favorite, just for its pure audacity in the face of the popular vote, is this one:
But that does not account for either the emotional or the inertial forces that shape politics. At the personal level, it was clear in 2000 that more Americans liked Bush than his opponent, Al Gore.

...which no doubt explains in some way that I will never understand, not being a DC insider, how Gore captured the popular vote...

I don't claim to be anything approaching the most compelling writer in the world, but at least I work for free...

Broder, as an insider's Insider, understands the simple tautology of The Insider Rule. There is only comfort when the insiders are in control of the levers of power. Outsiders intruding into any piece of the mechanism create discomfort and discomfort is to be avoided at all cost. It's the reason that the insider class struggled so mightily with the raw fact of Bill Clinton...or Jimmy Carter, for that matter. Barack Obama is another of that ilk, even though he occupies a seat in one of the premier insider clubs; his problem, as far as the herd leaders are concerned, is that he is not yet one of them. Broder has not dined on quail at his table, and Obama talks crazy talk about post-partisanship that would leave the punditry segment of the insider class with no choice but to live in refrigerator cartons on those mean DC streets were their 'inside baseball' CW wisdom to no longer be a marketable commodity in that post-partisan world. Broder, therefore, must create doubts; he has to stoke the fire Republicans are desperately trying to build, dragging the twin specters of "flip-flopper" and "inexperienced poseur" out onto the front porch of political discourse, even though he had no particular reservations eight years ago to a Republican candidate with a rather sparse resume of his own...

This isn't a contradiction, though; it is a natural progression. George W. Bush wasn't an outsider by any stretch of the imagination, owing to his family tree. John McCain isn't one by any stretch either. Huggy Bear provides the compelling promise of future comfort, so that is why you will read the words of "The Dean" and all of his department heads casting cautious aspersions on everything Obama says, reads, drinks, wears, and eats, while not a discouraging word will be heard - or written - about the huge yawning gaps between the carefully crafted image of "The Maverick" and the standard-issue Mark 1 craven politician that is John McCain...

It's all about the agenda, which is to remain comfortable no matter what the cost is to us little people...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:15 PM 0 comments

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