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

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Vetting The Spawn Of Cheney 

...so the hot news tonight that is setting the chattering MSM class on fire is the possibility that Republican Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia might be a leader in the running for Huggy Bear's vice presidential slot. Having never heard of this fellow - understandable, I suppose, given that there are 435 of 'em and I have five of my own to keep track of - I decided to mosey on over to the "On The Issues" web site to check him out...

Oh. My.

This would be a perfect pick for McCain's running mate. Not only is he the only Jewish member of the House and a staunch supporter of the sort of Israeli behavior that guarantees the most vicious sort of Middle Eastern instability for the foreseeable future, but he is also two years younger than the 'callow', 'inexperienced' Democratic presidential nominee and is a poster child for just about everything that American voters insist that they want to make The Change to get away from...

This would be an excellent choice for the Republican vice presidential nomination, and I whole-heartedly endorse any consideration that John McCain can give toward this selection...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:15 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 01, 2008

"Some Republicans Are GOOD People! Honest!!" 

...a couple of days ago, Tim Rutten of the LA Times wrote a column that - on the one hand - documented the actions of some principled Bush Administration insiders and military lawyers who stood up to the Bushco efforts to prostitute the Rule Of Law and - on the other hand - tried to draw a distinction between the unconscionable, amoral, and very possibly illegal behaviors of the current administration and what is actually represented by the ideal of 'Republican Values'. Unfortunately, the underlying premise of the first of his two basic points fails utterly at the point of purchase:
One (thing) is that their efforts were essentially ideological rather than partisan. That's an important distinction, because although those involved in the White House campaign to subvert legal safeguards of all sorts obviously were Republicans, many Republicans working inside the administration -- some of them deeply conservative -- gave up their jobs rather than go along with the putsch.

An interesting point, but it fails because of the simple fact that, as time as passed, these things have become one of those Rumsfeldian "Known Knowns" in the public conscience and what we have learned, by the partisan behavior of Republican Members of Congress, is that ideology has most assuredly been supplanted by partisanship. Any efforts by the Democratic Congressional majority, however lame those efforts may have sometimes been, to investigate the subversion of the Rule Of Law by Bushco have been fought, stymied, blocked, and derailed by Republican Members Of Congress for no better reason than to prevent any investigation or even observation of the slimy outrageous efforts of "Big Dick" Cheney and the other real power players in the White House (forget about Chimpy; he's been along for the ride from the beginning) to create a cheap, sleazy fascist doppelgänger of the "American Experiment"...

It doesn't really matter what heroics were performed by stalwart true-blue Republicans inside the administration; the efforts of Republicans outside the White House but within the legislative branch of federal government speak sufficient volumes about anything that matters about "heroic behavior". Those heroic insiders found that the currency they might have hoped to have earned by their actions wasn't any good in the lazy loose speakeasy that Congressional Republicans set up in the halls of Congress. At bottom, there is no "important distinction" between partisanship and ideology when it comes to the "putsch" that Rutten describes. Congressional Republicans were enablers, fellow travelers, and willing participants in the effort to make a host of truly frightening changes to any common sense of American democracy, changes that didn't seem to really seem to bother anybody on that side of the political aisle when it came time to stepping up to the plate to defend What It Means To Be An American..

The failures and truly dangerous initiatives of the Bush administration are not merely the product of some strange perverted idealistic offshoot of Republican dogma. Those things are the direct result of the opportunity offered to the Republican party to grab the levers of power in the White House and craft a Federal Executive Branch that reflects the beliefs of the current incarnation of that party, all the while being protected and supported by Congressional Republicans. The statistical and emotional anomaly isn't the Bush administration or even its Congressional supporters; the anomaly is those Republicans who decided to stand up in opposition. There may well be a few "good" Republicans still lurking out there, but they don't matter and probably won't for another generation....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:17 PM 0 comments

Getting No Stars From A Hollywood Review 

...Huggy Bear McCain's 'celebrity' attack ad against Barack Obama has had lots of reviews pouring in over the last couple of days - not to mention receiving a tremendous amount of free media penetration thanks to the MSM - and, sad to say for the Ol' Maverick, some of the negative reviews are coming from places where negative views are unhelpful. Not only has his ad apparently pissed off Conrad Hilton and most of the rest of the family, but it has also irked a prominent and well-heeled subset of the Hollywood crowd that saw him as some sort of comfortable antihero with a great story line who was worthy of support back in his iconoclastic "Maverick" days just eight short years ago...

From the LA Times article:
McCain's latest attempt at discrediting his handsome, photogenic young rival particularly galls stars and executives with a memory, because only eight years ago, McCain was a fixture in Hollywood fundraising circles when he tried to raise money from the very people his ad now ridicules.

At the time, dozens of people in Hollywood -- including Lear, Harrison Ford, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy and Michael Douglas -- gave to McCain because they thought he was a Republican celebrity ď with a great personal story. And, dare we say, some celebrities, namely Warren Beatty, even became friends with the Arizona senator.

But the truth is most of Hollywood won't return McCain's calls nowadays because many of the stars and executives he initially impressed now believe the maverick stance they found so attractive was just a pose. Hollywood doesn't object to a good pose -- unless, of course, it doesn't work.

Bad news, St. John. If, in fact, you've lost Indiana Jones, you've lost the country...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:40 PM 0 comments

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Another Bad Day For Bushco 

...the "Breaking News" coming across the wires this morning would be bad enough for Gee Dub and his gang of thugs in any case: this morning U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that there is no legal basis for the White House claim of Execu, tive Privilege to prevent Congressional subpoenas of Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers to testify about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. There is a backstory about the Judge himself that makes this an even more striking decision than it appears on its face...

This is U.S. District Judge John Bates. A George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. An appointee of SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. The judge who dismissed the GAO suit to force "Big Dick" Cheney to reveal information about his energy task force. The judge who twice dismissed lawsuits by Valerie Plame against "Big Dick" and other administration officials. The judge who wrote the FISA court decision refusing to force the Bush administration to release information about its illegal wiretapping activities. A guy who was an assistant to Ken Starr during the Whitewater witchhunt...

This esteemed jurist doesn't - by his track record - come across as the sort of fellow who misunderstands the deference he should be according the party that put him into current station in life. And yet, here he is, threatening to saw clean off the hand that has been feeding him, opening up at least the possibility of judicial risk for two prominent Bushco minions, if not creating the risk of giving the table on which Gee Dub's whole crooked house of cards a good shake. This ruling will most likely, of course, be appealed, not so much to protect the concept of Executive Privilege but to run out the clock so the perps can make it across the county line ahead of the posse. In that respect it is a cheesy little moral victory that is too little and too late to actually hold accountable one of the most legally and morally corrupt administrations to ever foul the air inside the White House. Even so, it does make the day a tiny bit brighter...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

And Now For A Little Inside Baseball 

...Los Angeles Times staff writers Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart wrote a piece published on Sunday that did a fairly accurate job of documenting the incredible explosion of wildland firefighting costs over the last several years. Their article weaves a discussion of the problems facing state and federal land management agencies - primarily the US Forest Service - into a thumbnail recount of the effort to quell the Zaca fire last year on the Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara county, California, and documents some of the reasons that the Forest Service expenditures for firefighting have increased from $300 million to $1.3 billion over the last decade. For all its in-depth analysis and insight, however, there are a few points that are missed and a couple that are misrepresented (perhaps more as a result information provided by interviews than anything else)...

Some points to clarify:

1) While contractors are a large part of the expense in wildland firefighting, many of these expenses are not as a result of some recent cultural shift in federal firefighting policy. Paying local landowners for the use of their land, using local restaurants for the production of fireline lunches, employing contractors to provide food service and shower facilities and laundry service in fire camps, and the hiring of private bulldozers, road graders, water trucks, drivers with vehicles, air tankers, fire engines, and helicopters have all been fairly standard practices on large fires for a few decades. Some of the equipment and services mentioned, such as air tankers, helicopters, bulldozers, shower trailers, food service, and the like, have been contractor-provided for longer than I've been around this desperate business, which dates back to 1974...

2) Most firefighters on most fires throughout the Western United States don't have camp food service provided by a company that caters movie shoots. There are a number of companies that provide - and have for a couple of decades - basic food service. Out here in the real west, you can sometimes tell that something big is going down because you get tangled up in a caravan of semi rigs towing trailers that will be the cooking facilities or are carrying the large tents and tables and chairs and lighting equipment and generators that will become the dining areas. There's nothing fancy about most of this and only the most hopelessly lost middle-aged yuppie looking to connect with "The Simplicity Of Life" would actually pay money to enjoy the experience (we won't be discussing portable toilets here, for the sake of the children)...

3) I have never in my life even seen a "sleeping trailer". I've seen a rodeo ground or two and a couple of football fields. My favorite experience was on a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) fire on the Warm Springs Reservation in north-central Oregon, where the crew I was on arrived late in the evening after having been redeployed from another fire and was led to our sleeping area, which was a patch of ground underneath a stand of young Ponderosa pines up away from the rock pit that was the focal point of the fire camp. The earnest young BIA rep told us out of the darkness that this would be an excellent place to bed down because the large number of king snakes he had seen told him that there wouldn't be any rattlesnakes around. The 20 members of my crew, who were - as was the tradition back in the day - a 'pick-up' gaggle of engineers, foresters, botanists, biologists, and other non-firefighting types, glanced with skillfully hidden alarm at each other, understanding to a degree that this young earnest fire specialist didn't that the prolific presence of one of the most prominent rattlesnake predators in our sleeping area probably suggested that we were about bed down in a place that had lots of food resources for king snakes...

4) One of the main reasons for the increase in the cost incurred by private contractors comes directly from that last story. Regardless of the quotes in the story, the primary reason that so much of the cost of wildland firefighting comes from the use of private contractor is directly related to the circumstances of the federal workforce and the changes that it has experienced over the last twenty years. The Truth is that the US Forest Service hasn't for a long time maintained large rosters of firefighters. Maybe they did in California - since this is a California-centric story - but they didn't everywhere else. California, in fact is something of an anomaly in the world of land management in the western US. Throughout most of the intermountain west, management activities such as timber harvest and silvicultural treatments of forested land have been important, which isn't the case in many (not all, admittedly, but many) of the areas of California than have been so prominently in the news over the last few years. It has for decades been a tradition that all of us who aren't dedicated fire fighters would form together into 20-person crews to sally forth to fight fires all across the west. That was traditionally the workforce from which Forest Service crews were drawn, but it was disrupted by two things: declining budgets that made there be less of us and the reduction of workforce in those other areas as a result of budget cuts dating back to the Reagan administration that led to the 20-something ranger district employees of the 1980's who would roar off on a fire assignment suddenly being the 50-somethings of the 21st Century still being those same ranger district employees...

Federal land management agencies use contract crews in large part because they are themselves incapable of calling on large numbers of non-firefighting employees to staff fire crews, which has been a traditional source of firefighters. They are incapable of doing so mostly because of the reduction in budgets that have precluded the hiring of new employees over the last couple of decades to do the other important jobs that nobody knows about unless they live in the west. The essence is simple: we got old, we can't get it done anymore, and a variety of legal and court-ordered initiatives have made it unnecessary to hire a new generation to fill in behind us. As a result, there is neither a pipeline of future wildland managers or a ready supply of eager young employees hankering to charge out into the woods to experience the closest thing that you can get to military combat without actually being shot at (although I have to confess, given past experience, that the "not being shot at" thing isn't necessarily a guarantee, depending on the region you're in...

Wildland firefighting has always been a dynamic environment, creating a commingling of tradition and current reality that has resulted in changing ways of doing business. Technology and business opportunities have combined to take the useless "Real Man" sensibility out of the process over the last three or so decades, but aside from that there are a host of reasons having nothing to do with increased use of contractors for the dramatic increase in firefighting costs. This LA Times story does a good job of getting at the basics, but the Whole Story is, as is usually the case, a lot more complicated...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:15 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 28, 2008

Why Did THIS Take So Long? 

...the only meaningful legacy that George W. Bush left behind from his otherwise unremarkable stint as Governor of Texas was the impressive body count he rang up on the gurneys inside the execution chambers run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Over that 6-year period before the Supreme Court of the United States decided that partisan connections rather than the rule of law should decide who will be the President of the United States, Gee Dub oversaw the execution of 152 prisoners, frequently applying the same sort of attention to last-minute clemency appeals that you or I would devote to which numbered meal we might pick at the local fast-food joint. Just as a casual comparison, the State of Oregon has executed 54 death row inmates (if I counted correctly) since 1904...

Because of his history, it is something of a surprise that it has taken Gee Dub over two years to get to the point of authorizing the execution of a federal military death row inmate...or maybe not. Gee Dub has more astute political managers than he did back in the day, and the sensitivity of killing an American soldier had to have set off alarm bells inside the West Wing, given that by late 2005 the country was starting to turn away from the whole concept of the Iraq invasion and the thousands of lives - tens of thousands of lives, if you count the innocents - that were lost and also given that the perp himself had been sentenced to multiple life sentences in civil criminal court. Coupled with his history of casually, even disdainfully, refusing clemency for an impressive number of death row inmates for apparently no better reason than to show he was "Tough On Crime" (or maybe too busy doing something else, although what that might be for the Governor of Texas would be open to speculation), it is possible that a raw political calculus has led Gee Dub's mechanics and wet work men to decide that 'going back to basics' is the only fallback position left, now that any hope of saving the legacy he hoped to nurture has gone over the falls...

The question of 'why did this take so long' is actually a grotesquely profound one, when it comes to Gee Dub and death row inmates at any jurisdictional level. A man who was so anxious to launch a war that was unnecessary to this country's security that would - by definition - cause the unnecessary deaths of American troops and Iraqi civilians and who had a history of casually supporting the execution of people for apparently no better reasons than it was 'what the law required' (even if it wasn't) and reduced the tax obligation of the populace to pay for their incarceration wouldn't seem to be the sort of guy who would shy away from killing a miscreant who had already been convicted in civil court of the same brutal crimes that called for military execution. Once again, with the same reeking stench that we have come to understand as evidence that some aspect of Gee Dub's evil reign has passed nearby, we get to prepare ourselves for another political execution...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:54 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 27, 2008

The Scourge Of Biker Violence 

...we've all known since Marlon Brando roared across the silver screen in "The Wild One" all about frightening scenes of lawless out-of-control bikers running wild on the streets. Now they're at it again on the streets of Seattle. This time it's even more horrific than anything we've seen in the past, because now - and the very though sends fearful chills up my spine - there are bike shorts involved...

The lawless culture of the biker community has become a desperate risk to the rest of us, clearly even to those Subaru drivers who bought the hype and falsely believed they would somehow be considered fellow travelers and be held safe from wild outbursts of random violence. Obviously we non-Subaru owners have no hope unless we band together to fight back. We must take to the streets together to defend ourselves, scattering thumbtacks by the bagful to stop these roving gangs of biker thugs in their tracks. It's our only hope. Well, that and a good rainstorm...
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:38 PM 0 comments

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