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

Saturday, August 16, 2008

What A "Dry-Gulching" Looks Like 

...the phrase "dry-gulching" (if you avoid Urban Dictionary definitions, and I would wholeheartedly encourage you to do so) has a couple of definitions, and the second most common one is eminently applicable to tonight's "Set-up At Saddleback":
..."the act of concealing yourself and lying in wait to attack by surprise"...
The Free Dictionary

I watched some of the the Obama portion and a bit less of the Huggy Bear love-fest (my Seahawks are hosting the Bears in a relatively meaningless preseason game, but I can get the broadcast, so priorities must be honored), but I saw enough. The night was not, as Rick Warren wanted to style it, some sort of refreshing discussion between Christian men of honor about all those really important social issues that slash across the perceived cultural and religious divide. Even from what little I saw, it was clearly a celebration of a long-time party boy, a serial adulterer, and an angry reactionary man who doesn't honor most - if any - of the concepts found in those 'words in red' found in the Gospels but who is the only sad slim hope remaining for the Pharisee religious right to be the warrior that will fight their stupid meaningless wars over abortion and gay rights...

Clearly, I have political biases, but I felt that Obama's responses were thoughtful and heartfelt while McCain's were remarkable animatronic and formulaic. But I have socially-based religious biases, too; I am not "Born Again" but have always been (we'll use the shorthand here) a Christian and am an elder in - from the perspective of a Rick Warren - a microscopically small Lutheran congregation. In this group I am an outrageously wild and crazy liberal, but we get along well anyway because we respect differences in a way that McCain's loudly appreciatively Saddleback audience apparently doesn't, and John McCain would be lucky to make it out the door with his comb-over intact were my little congregation to host the same sort of "Meet The Candidate/Discuss The Issues" meetup that went on tonight. The people with which I congregate every Sunday out here in supposedly "Red" Eastern Oregon don't generally have a lot of respect for Huggy Bear because of his lack of discipline over control of his pants zipper, his advocacy for a war that didn't make a great deal of sense to many of these folks to begin with, or his general muscular insistence that we need to kill people who disagree with us...

Barack Obama wasn't going to be the 'winner' tonight. Despite all of Warren's self-styled "New Way Christianity" chatter about branching out from traditional fundamentalist anti-gay and anti-abortion fixations to discuss larger issues that all of us can agree need to be addressed, the need to remain in the deep part of the stream of traditional conservative - so-called 'Christian' - values pretty much dictated from the outset that this little morality play would be a 'winner' for McCain and a 'loser' for Obama, regardless of the actual personal stories they might bring to the table. In an otherwise perfect world, Obama wouldn't be hurt by this evening, but the first two minutes of CNN post-event analysis that I had the stomach to watch before deciding that watching Chicago Bears run Seattle Seahawks interceptions back for touchdowns was a better use of my valuable and rare personal free time demonstrated that Obama will pay, at the hands of the SCLM/MSM, for even having agreed to walk into this lion's den...

Tonight's appearance at this dry-gulching, and the pounding that he will receive from certain progressive camps, the Republicans, and the SCLM/MSM, won't be the sort of thing that appears to advance Obama's campaign effort. I don't mean to sound like I'm smarter than your average bear, but I do acually 'get it' about tonight, though, because it is just another version of the "Fifty States Strategy" being played on a different field than the the DFH community is usually comfortable talking about. Obama was willing to go out on the other guy's turf as the visiting team, acquitted himself well despite the obvious traditional fundy bent of the crowd (sorry, Rick, but you failed tonight in your supposed efforts to elevate the conversation beyond the reasons that many Christians outside of the south - well, and Kansas - repudiate any effort at Christian ecumenism with fundies), and reaffirmed for a lot of us who dare to positively live our spiritual lives on a difficult divide that he does really represent a change we can, in fact, believe in...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:10 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 15, 2008

Update: John McCain Responds to Russain Aggression in Georgia 

...in a frenzy of inexcusable haste, the editorial staff rushed this particular post to market, without doing the appropriate due diligence and market research regarding the warmongering tendencies and reactionary irresponsibility of the various current presidential candidates. With apologies, the furry woodland creatures who staff this operation offer up the proper media visual corresponding to John McCain's response to the Georgian troubles:


[ahem]

Presumptive President John McCain Responds to Russian Aggression

cat


NOTE: No cute little furry chipmunks were harmed in the production of this corrective post, but they have been put on notice...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:11 PM 0 comments

Why ESPN Should Be Covering The Presidential Campaign 

...it's when I read stories like this that I realize that it is actually only the lowly, disrespected sports reporters (at least in the ranking of journalistic hierarchy) who are - not completely or perfectly, but in general - the last remaining vestige of what we used to understand as being an independent, probing media speaking truth to power at the risk of their professional lives...

That's a sad thing to contemplate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:51 PM 0 comments

Just A Reminder About How Gordon Smith Works For Oregon 

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 108th Congress - 1st Session

...

Vote Summary
Question: On the Motion to Table (Motion to Table Landrieu Amdt. No. 452 )
Vote Number: 116 Vote Date: April 2, 2003, 05:35 PM
Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Motion to Table Agreed to
Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 452 to S. 762
Statement of Purpose: To appropriate $1, 047,000,000 for procurement for the National Guard and Reserves.
Vote Counts:YEAs52

NAYs47

Not Voting1


Smith (R-OR), Yea


...when Oregonians serving in the National Guard and Reserves were being mobilized to begin assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan far exceeding any of the wildest dreams they may have ever had about 'service', Gordon Smith stood with the victorious Republican Senate majority in killing an amendment that would have, amongst other things, funded the procurement of modern ballistic body armor to replace either the lack of such equipment or Vietnam-era body armor that was wholly inadequate for the intended purpose...

This is how Gordo works for Oregon just after he's been reelected...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Stop Me If You've Heard This Before 

President George W. Bush expressed [some sort of heavily scripted sentiment] Friday in a statement outside the White House en route to his Crawford, Texas ranch. (emphasis added by me)
...the sentiment in this case was his handlers' view that he should express "wholehearted support for Georgia's democracy", a sentiment that the people and government of that beleaguered country might clutch more closely to their breasts in relief were it not for that bit about departing for his "ranch" in Texas. OK, so that and the fact that there really isn't anything he can actually do about the situation except issue stern statements and send Condi Rice off to be a short-term high-level human shield in Tbilisi. Not to mention the fact that his week and a half out of town seems to have a lot of time scheduled for bike rides and brush cutting...

No wonder Huggy Bear has decided to step in to fill the "president" role...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, August 14, 2008

When It Comes Time To Not Care Anymore 

...I have, dating back to my middle teen years, cared about who would be the President Of The United States. Back in the day, my obsession could rightfully be attributed to my concern that I might, like some upperclassmen in my small Idaho high school, be invited to experience an all-expenses-paid trip (except for a certain BIG potential personal expense) to an exciting Southeast Asia vacation, one that none of those older acquaintances who actually came back from actually caused them appear to be tanned and relaxed. Circumstances, the luck of the lottery draw in my 18th year, and the end of the Vietnam 'experience' (all coming at about the same time) saved me from difficult choices and the need to address my WWII combat veteran father's advice that I should flee across the northern border to avoid this particular service...

Even though I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a high school junior and began a disturbing and wrongheaded effort to lay my hands on everything that this particular author had ever written, I didn't need Hunter S. Thompson to instruct me as to the dangers that Richard Nixon represented. My first non-microscopic-market-AM-radio-DJ job that first summer after high school graduation was working in a sawmill, and an odd combination of work schedule circumstances provided me with the opportunity to watch most of the Senate Watergate hearings (the downside, of course, being the fact that being on graveyard shift most of the summer is what made that happen), and I listened to Nixon's resignation speech a year later on a federal crew rig AM radio so far back in the Idaho mountains that I'm not sure that even I could find that exact location anymore. All of this is to say that my late teens and early adulthood were loaded with meaning about Why We Vote...

I weathered Ford, sympathized with Carter, survived Reagan and Bush I, celebrated Clinton, and have ground my teeth to painful nubs in an effort to successfully withstand Bush II. I long for nothing less than a Congress in Democratic hands and a Democrat in the White House, minus the "Spank The New Boy" sense of Congressional entitlement that almost drove the Clinton presidency off the rails and did cost us a functional Democratic Congressional majority. What I'm getting, unfortunately, is the threat of a replay of 1968, perhaps minus the police riots, because of planning for this sort of potential convention action by Hillary Clinton supporters...

In the first place, it's pretty easy to repudiate anyone (and I mean anyone) who claims to be a Democrat but will even countenance voting for McCain. The McCain of 2000 was a bizarre phenomenon who captured the imagination of that amorphous "middle" (including me, I might add), but even then he was peddling a 'Maverick' message that didn't square in the smallest way with almost any plank of the Democratic Platform. Courtesy of the SCLM (aka MSM), the Ol' Maverick is getting a free E-ticket to the 2008 ride even though he has spent most of the last seven years reaching out to and sucking up to all the agents of Bushco/Neocon/fundy power that he tried to run against back in 2000 and making a not well understood joke of the 2004 campaign that came dangerously close to him being John Kerry's VP nomination (solely on the strength of all those old fairy tales about his '00 Maverickyness)...

In the second place, the long tradition of inclusiveness of the Democratic party, even with it's recent history of not being able to come together for what individuals would hopefully understand to be the good of the country, simply has no room for this:
"I have been voting Democratic for 18 years. I only voted for Democrats, from dog catcher to president and everything in between...I will be voting for someone other than Barack Obama come November."
Will Bower, co-founder of the Just Say No Deal Coalition
quoted in the Associated Press story

Damn, that's sure impressive!! On the other hand, I first voted Democratic in 1974 and have from then until now only voted for Republican candidates on one occasion when the Oregon Republican party got all strange and crazy and decided to allow registered Independents to vote in their primary (at the time, I was a registered Independent and voted in every case for the woman or out-of-spec loose cannon 'liberal' Republican on that ballot; not a single one of 'my' candidates won, but it was an amusing experience). I would be more than happy to sign on to young Mr. Bowers effort....were it not for the fact that the whole idea of a primary campaign is to decide who wins the nomination and who doesn't. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for those residents of Florida and Michigan who didn't even have a say in the Democratic primary process; unlike Orygun, which generally never has any sort of meaningful participation, these state matter. They have an important battleground role to play in determining who wins (as long as the SCOTUS isn't involved). It's really hard, on the other hand, to have much sympathy for any candidate whose supporters can't come to grips with the fact that the game is over...

This whole story seems to suggest (isn't that polite) that there are Hillary Clinton supporters who are willing to throw the game to the Republicans rather than lower themselves to vote for what they see as an inferior, illegitimate Democratic candidate in November. They can do that if they want; this is, after all, just barely - at the end of a presidency that makes Nixon look like a stone cold Statesman - within their diminishing right as American citizens. There is a serious taint of failed inevitability about the whole movement, though, and if they manage through all of their inexperienced fervor to help deliver the White House to what is little less than the third term of George W. Bush, it will finally be time for me to cut all those long-held ties to caring about any sense of the political process and the fate of the country...

The time will have finally arrived to dig that old long-ignored library card out of the desk detritus and start working at becoming a low-information voter, because none of this political crap will matter anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:59 PM 0 comments

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should 

...I first saw "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" twenty eight years ago at a midnight showing with a friend I was visiting in Fresno, California. The experience, for a small-town unworldly young man like me, wasn't life-changing, but it certainly was memorable; in fact, lives may have been saved by the simple fact that I wasn't carrying a gun, because the first time the oddly-dressed hoard starting shouting at the screen I thought some strange mean riot was breaking out and would have shot my way to the exit if only I had possessed the means...

I got better, figured it out, and even enjoyed myself (although I keep checking to reassure myself that I had reasonable bolting access to the door). I've taken in the show since then and had a great time, but it is what it is and is as it was, and I can't for the life of me imagine a reason why anyone would even want to remake this movie. That, however, seems to be the plan. It's not like they are likely to actually improve on the original or give it some sort of different voice; I mean, Tim Curry provided about all the 'voice' anybody would ever need...

I've never, in general, really understood straight-up remakes of movies in the first place. You can make another movie using the same storyline - or in this case, the same screenplay - but you won't have the same actors or the same sense of surprise and discovery that the original had. It might work for some original work that is so old or so little seen the first time around that nobody really remembers it, but with such a long-running cult classic like "Rocky Horror", why bother?

Maybe these people should have tried out their "remake" chops on something a little less ambitious first, just for practice. Nobody's done a cinematic remake of "The Ten Commandments" in a while...
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:07 PM 0 comments

On Why Drinking May Be The Best Solution To Our Media Woes 

...it would be irksome enough if Domenico Montanaro at MSNBC's First Read had just simply confined himself to once again dragging out the tattered old fable about Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey being denied a speaking role at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life stance in this post. That's not the reason Casey wasn't invited to speak, and one would think that having the title "NBC Political Researcher" would motivate a writer to actually do some research on apparent statements of fact...

It's the first couple of sentences that are positively jaw-dropping, though, in terms of their miscasting of the meaning and intent of this plank. I tried, but have abandoned, all efforts to figure out how affirmation of support for the right of a woman to carry a pregnancy to term can be seen as somehow being a shift in the direction of the pro-birth movement. My recollection of Democratic platform planks over the last 36 years during which I have been paying attention is not encyclopedic, but I do not recall a single instance where the party has ever proposed staunch opposition to women having babies if they so desired (which makes fairly simple sense, since encouraging Democrats to forswear having babies inevitably leads to less Democrats down the road). I have always supposed, silly me, that the underlying proposition of a 'right to choose' was commonly understood to mean that it was, in fact, a woman's choice - not the sperm donor's or the local D.A.'s or the governor's or the president's - as to whether or not she wanted to bring her pregnancy to term...

As this Salon story from a couple of days ago suggests, the actual fact of the Democratic platform statement regarding abortion demonstrates - if anything - a step away from the pro-birth movement rather than toward it. By dropping the "safe, legal, and rare" waffling that has been in the platform since 1992, this element of the Democratic platform is an unambiguous declaration of support for a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices. Stating support for a woman's right to carry her pregnancy to term (or, as we less sophisticated types call it, have a baby) is part and parcel of that right of choice and doesn't move the party one millimeter in the direction of a more pro-birth stance...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:11 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Blind Pigs And Acorns - Ver. I've.Lost.Count 

...Politico is often lambasted on the progressive side of blogtopia (yeah, yeah, skippy and all that) - frequently with good reason - as being just another version of the usual center-right or just plain right-wing woofer that is the pallid, twisted doppelgänger of what we used to understand as an independent media willing to speak truth to power. It's a little bit surprising, given all this, that Politico even bothered to take the time to repudiate the latest McCain campaign effort to nurture that whole "Obama/Celebrity" line of attack by creating a nonexistent link between Obama and George Clooney...

Yes, I know that the report seems to have originated with an LA Times 'celebrity' reporter and was picked up by the conservative Daily Mail in England, from which genesis it spread across the globe at the speed of meth-addled electrons. Fact of the matter is, in the world that Huggy Bear has been trying to construct, he is guilty by proximity and fellow travelers even if no effort is expended to explore the connections (as if that would ever happen). What's amazing from a DFH lefty point of view, however, is that somebody at Politico was willing to devote the effort to call BS on this whole dirty little game...

Update: edited to fix a couple of boneheaded formatting and other errors that the simple act of proofreading would have caught were I not so lazy...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:43 PM 0 comments

News You Can Use...well..maybe not...but, still 

...with the world coming apart at the seams and the MSM apparently terminally gripped by the need to obsess over the failings of the "apparent" Democratic presidential nominee while glossing over equally or even more significant failings on the part of the "apparent" Republican presidential nominee, it's good to know that we can still find important 'above the fold' news on sites like Yahoo News...

I have to confess that I've never really wondered (ok, so "cared" may have been a better word choice) why divers shower after they make a dive. That was clearly my own personal failing, but that disgusting personal fault has been rectified. I will sleep well tonight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 11, 2008

Casual Thoughts On A Monday Night 

...why is it that, when Huggy Bear speaks so sternly about the Russian invasion of Georgia, he sounds just like an angry old man in baggy pants standing on his porch in the dark on Halloween night shaking his fist at laughing teenagers and shouting at them to get off his lawn?
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:06 PM 0 comments

Bye Bye Birdie (If You're ESA Listed) 

...the words that Dirk Kempthorne uttered today about administrative changes to the way that the consultation requirements of the Endangered Species Act are conducted were pretty enough, carefully crafted to sound reasonable and measured to low-information Americans who don't necessarily buy that whole "Circle Of Life" thing about the interconnectedness of natural ecosystems. He cited the recent listing of the polar bear as the poster child for the reasons for the change in order to avoid using ESA listings or critical habitat requirements as a 'back door' means of regulating greenhouse gases. The Real Deal is something entirely different, however, and probably won't benefit anybody who doesn't offer legal services on an hourly rate...
“The existing regulations create unnecessary conflicts and delays...The proposed regulations will continue to protect species while focusing the consultation process on those federal actions where potential impacts can be linked to the action and the risks are reasonably certain to occur. The result should be a process that is less time-consuming and a more effective use of our resources." Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of The Interior

Only the first sentence actually matters, because it is the revealing statement. This administrative change, which like so many things that Bushco has done over the last seven and a half years, may not be legal to begin with, but more than anything else it seems to essentially strip away the whole concept of what are known as 'Section 7' consultation requirements with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for just about any proposed Federal Action that doesn't directly call for the wanton destruction of protected species or their critical habitat. The proposed rule has the false heft of reasonableness, tying itself to a supposed need to avoid trying to quantify difficult-to-measure climate change impacts resulting from some proposed action, but that's not what the proposed rule actually does...

The proposed rule, while forbidding consideration of climate change impacts as a sort of cover, authorizes proposing agencies to make their own determination as to whether or not impacts of a proposed Federal Action are severe enough to require consultation with FWS or NMFS. While I will certainly agree that other agencies have the expertise to analyze the potential effects of a Proposed Action on a Threatened or Endangered Species (this acronym is - not surprisingly - TES), the simple, straightforward fact remains that those people who have the expertise are not the decision-makers and can only make recommendations to the people who actually are the decision-makers. The decisions of various federal agencies that various Proposed Actions do not raise concerns of sufficient intensity to require Section 7 consultation with FWS or NMFS will not be made by subject matter experts, but rather will be made by land managers who have many more considerations on their plates than the fate of a particular liverwort...

The impact of this proposed rule, if implemented, will look a lot like the result of other ham-handed rules that Gee Dub's minions have tried to implement over this most recent Dark Age: more work for biological specialists at various federal agencies trying to address the question of whether consultation is necessary and more opportunities for those specialists to buy nice clothes to wear at the inevitable hearings in the chambers of Federal District Courts across the country where proposed Federal Actions are being litigated because of objections to management's action on their recommendations. As I said just last night, January 20, 2009, can't come soon enough...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 10, 2008

"Big Dick" Cheney Responds To Russian Aggression 

cat
more cat pictures
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:50 PM 0 comments

Bush Enjoys The Olympics. In Other News.... 

Photo Credit: Larry Downing/Reuters

Russian Troops Invade Strategically Important U.S. Ally...Civilians Targeted In Apparent Retribution/Retaliation/Intimidation in violation of Geneva Conventions...Ukraine Threatens To Bar Russian Warships From Returning To Crimean Ports, Threatening Wider Conflict..."Big Dick" Cheney Calls For War...

January 20, 2009, can't come soon enough...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:51 PM 0 comments

Popcorn Time In Republican Alaska 

...it's a shame so many other things are sucking up all the media attention right now, because it means we are missing a great Republican congressional fight up yonder in the Great White North. Incumbent Don Young, like Senator Ted Stevens, has been in D.C. longer than about half of the whole country's population has been alive and for years he - like his bud "Hulk" - has been striding the halls of power like some strange hairy behemoth, exerting influence far out of proportion to his proportional representation through raw political power and physical intimidation. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case, one thing led to another and Young has found himself playing defense in a corruption investigation, which seems to have become something of a hobby for Alaskan Republicans recently. This particular bit of unfortunate business has led to a serious challenge to his seeming lifetime appointment to the Congress of the United States in the Republican primary campaign...

The upshot of all the unpleasantness accompanying the crumbling of the long-standing Republican political machine in Alaska is that the usual suspects in right-wing money circles are taking the 'dealing with a wounded bear' approach, hedging their bets, staying away from the action, and keeping their wallets in their pockets so they don't end up getting crossways with Young if he somehow manages to win reelection. This introduces dicey characters like Club For Growth into the funding mix, which highlights some of the fractures that exist in the Republican party, both in Alaska and in the rest of the nation...

It would be safe to assume that Club For Growth and Don Young (or Ted Stevens, for that matter) don't have each other in their "MyFace" 'friends' lists, but the interesting thing to mull over is how anxious Alaskans, even Republicans, would be to losing the earmarks that have provided so much benefit to them over the years, regardless of any high-minded traditionally conservative views those voters may have about smaller government/lower taxes. Parnell is trying to send wink-and-nod signals to the primary voters to ease any concerns about loss of federal earmarks, saying in effect 'I oppose earmarks unless they are for Alaska and aren't politically embarrassing'(indicating just how much The Bridge To Nowhere left a mark). That's probably not the sort of rock-ribbed allegiance to the CFG's neo-libertarian agenda that they would like to see, but he's about the best they are going to come up with, given the comments of the other Republican candidate about his being "hopelessly naïve" on that whole 'bringing home the bacon' thing...

These are actually fascinating times down-ticket. All across the country, incumbent Republicans are in serious trouble, both within their own party and in terms of general election prospects. In some respects, the general situation for the Gratuity Obsessed Party in Alaska isn't unusual, but it is potentially tsunamic, if only because of what the departure of Young and Stevens could mean to both the stature and the bank account of the State of Alaska in the halls of Congress...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:34 PM 0 comments

The Latest Addition To My Christmas List 

...ever since it was first mentioned in the Harry Potter series, the idea of an invisibility cloak has been one of those things that I just knew that I would buy in a heartbeat if it ever hit the market. The applications could be nearly endless, but I could certainly see the utility of having one in the office for those days when a person really didn't want to be interrupted or needed to avoid the Meeting From Hell. This news, therefore, brings hope:
Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device.

I will be the first person on my block...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:53 PM 0 comments

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