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

Friday, August 22, 2008

Chris Shays Feels The Obamamania 

...it's the new theme for at-risk Republican Congressional candidates this year: "I ♥ Obama". Republican Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, State Co-chairman of Huggy Bear's campaign, is the latest victim of whatever strange virus is sweeping this particular endangered class of incumbent Republicans that leads them to speak in relatively positive terms about the Democratic presidential nominee...

Shays, of course, isn't the first Republican to claim that he as as thick as thieves with Obama, as the article says. Our own Gordon Smith, Oregon's newly discovered second Democratic Senator (a surprising revelation, given the fact that he always shows up with an (R) behind his name on Oregon ballots and tends for the first four out of every six years of his Senate terms to vote quite reliably with the Republican caucus) made a point earlier this summer of the fact that he could, too, work just as closely with Barack Obama as might his Democratic opponent Jeff Merkley. Smith's contention has been pretty much repudiated, which may be why Shays elected to confine his reach to the area generally within his grasp; "working closely" would be a harder sell, anyway, given that he is in the House and Obama is in the Senate...

Unlike our own Gordo, Chris Shays is a somewhat moderate Republican, also known as a Vanishing Species, given that his more moderate views (for a thoroughly modern Republican) don't endear him to the currently understood base and Democrats can't think of a reason not to go for "more and better" and a bigger majority. Inquiring minds do wonder how hard Shays will be fighting for on-screen time in Minneapolis...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:27 PM 0 comments

More Bad News For Obama 

...the fan dance that Barack Obama has been putting on for the MSM this week has been an thing of joy to watch (and, no, I didn't delight in tearing the wings off of flies as a child). For a long time, the media has wandered lost in the cultural wilderness, using useless trivia as its compass rather than redeeming what used to be understood as its responsibility to inform us about things that matter. To see the hoards almost doubled over in the pain of frustration at not being able to scoop Obama's campaign in ferreting out The Name when there are so many things that are more important tells you all you need to know - as if you didn't know already - what a useless third eye the media has become...

[At the same time, Joe Biden clearly needs to see his place in Greenville and buy a spread out in the country where it won't be illegal to fire off a few rounds of .45 APC out the window so that he can clear out the driveway to get to the grocery store and pick up a loaf of bread]

The Punditocracy hasn't been taking all of this disciplined silence well, but we can leave it to Politico to make sure to point out that all of this secrecy and peekaboo action is Bad News For Obama. While nobody is going to clutch pearls at the disturbing tight-knit secrecy of the Obama machine - to do so would call immediately into question why MSM hasn't been fulminating against that very issue over Gee Dub's last 7 ½ years - there is and is going to be all sorts of noise just like this article explaining for us morans just exactly why this is a potentially serious mistake that Obama is making. "Losing an opportunity"; "Stepping on the Message"; potential 'deflation'; this is Serious Fire that Obama is playing with, there are those who will say, and it stands to burn him...

Isn't it odd that the fact that John McCain, who has announced his intention to reveal his VP nominee no more than 24 hours earlier in the news cycle leading up to his coronation, isn't causing the punditocracy to laden his campaign with the same concerns?
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:38 PM 0 comments

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Charge Of The Light-Weight Brigade 

...if I were going to bust through all of the traditional norms of political behavior and send a phalanx of meat puppets into the heart of the other team's national convention to try to disrupt the affair mostly for cheap political advantage, I probably wouldn't pick these two guys. Any RNC bigwig worth half a damn would be scouring the old Rove Rolodex looking for names and numbers of people who could be trusted to discretely foul up their airline reservations to Denver, just to avoid any risk of the potential looming difficulties and embarrassment that the reappearance of either of these two clowns on the national media stage...

Let us focus on just exactly who these two leading "message" Republicans are. They are:

a) a formerly liberal Republican Governor of Massachusetts and a former "liberal" Republican Mayor of New York City (which represent both Sodom and Gomorrah to core Republican wingers) are going to try to appeal to the base as well as to the vast unwashed "uncommitted" in an effort to sway people away from the Democratic nominee and toward one of the most conservative and openly reactionary Republican candidates in 40 years...

and

b) a couple of mokes who so fired up the Republican base that they will between them be bringing a full 12.7 percent of the committed Republican delegates to the upcoming toe-tapping festival in better mens' rooms all across the Greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area, and all of those delegates are Romney's. All added up together, they were beaten by a former Arkansas governor (what is it about Arkanas, eh?) who had little more working for him than a good feel for a bass guitar and a killer weight-loss regime. More to the point, we should not forget, they were all three beaten like rented mules by a guy who just a couple of months before the primary season began looked like the icon for the concept of lame also-ran...

The first rough draft of history is already written, however, and it shows that Ruuudy and the Mittster weren't even good enough for rank-and-file Republicans to support, so why the hell anybody thinks that they are the perfect faces to motor into Denver to disrupt the Democratic National Convention is a pure mystery. Of course, on reflection, the Republican brand is so thoroughly in flames and sinking by the bow that it's hard to actually hunker down and figure out just exactly who would be a good choice for this shameless and bizarre little show they want to put on...

This particular lineup is far from being the Republican version of "The Best And The Brightest". At the same time, it certainly would be fun ( he said - apropos of nothing whatsoever) to get one's hands on a press pass for their daily press conferences....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:28 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

And YOU, Sir, Are No Teddy Roosevelt 

...in this McClatchy story published today, we learn that John McCain's long personal battle against regulation of local phone business, which was finally more or less accomplished with the aid of other actors, has accomplished two things:

1) It effectively killed anything that looked like actual competition in the local phone access industry and created a trio of large monopolies that essentially control the phone market.

2) The three telecom giants are anything but ungrateful for his efforts, having funneled millions of dollars into his 2008 campaign coffers.

Unlike his supposed "hero" TR, Huggy Bear has the traditional Republican view about totally unrestricted deregulation that generally during implementation ratifies the free market "Golden Rule": He Who Has The Gold Decides Who Will Rule. Having had some encounters with one of those three phone companies, I tend to suspect that a deregulation fan is someone who never has had such encounters, but the larger story is Huggy's history of links to lobbyists for industries that would dearly love to be deregulated (and not for the benefit of the consumer). Not only has he expressed a passion for letting the free market reign in the telecom field, but he also has deregulatory interest in such diverse areas as the cruise ship industry - and where has that Vicki Iseman got herself off to, anyway - and in the health insurance industry where he has some special plans that would "reform" that industry apparently to the primary benefit of the industry's stockholders...

Maybe Huggy Bear meant that his old Teddy Bear was his hero and misunderstood. That would make more sense...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:37 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The MSM And The Goose/Gander Paradox 

...the final dichotomous question that one finally runs up against at the end of a long brutal day is simply this: Is the So-Called Liberal Media so miserably co-opted by the editorial fiat of its fat-cat dollar-obsessed corporate ownership that it isn't allowed to actually deal honestly with even the nuanced edges of a presidential campaign, or is the SCLM so deeply infested with a slimy fetid band of syphilitic cretins so desperate to maintain that soul-sustaining "insider" status that they were spoon-feed behind the scenes over the last several years by far smarter White House operatives that they will intentionally refuse to deal honestly with even the clearest, simplest of stories?

This story is just one more example of the millions of words produced by the SCLM that suggests the need to finally address this particular decision set. It established the point that you, faithful 'Grey Lady' reader, are supposed to identify as the anchor point of its underlying premise:
Mr. Obama, whose candidacy has been built in part on a promise to transcend traditional politics, (emphasis added) is running the negative commercials on local stations even as he runs generally positive spots nationally, during prime-time coverage of the Olympics.

The rest of the story, the theme of which is the quiet, stealthy negative advertising campaign that those dirty lying dogs of the Obama campaign are sneaking around in smaller markets, mentions a lot of things, including the suggestion that these ads are a 'tit for tat' response to McCain ads that have plowed similar ground. Somehow, unfortunately, you don't seem to find any reference to this statement - or any other of the many similar statements by John McCain - anywhere in the article; it is all about the apparent moral failing of Barack Obama in not keeping his word about 'transcending traditional politics'. But Let's Go To The Tape, Bob, and review that McCain statement in Super Slo Mo:
John McCain pledged a "respectful campaign" Tuesday against either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton, but said he is less confident about the influence of outside political groups.

John Sidney McCain III, the son and grandson of respected Naval leaders who clearly understood the Code of Honor that should guide all Naval Officers - and himself a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and therefore directly steeped in the institutions that establish the honor of an Officer and A Gentleman, PLEDGED that he would run a respectful campaign. That pledge lasted only as long as it took to finally allow the primary process to establish just exactly who would be his opponent, even thought he has continued to adopt that patented and well-practiced pained expression as he 'regrets' the 'intemperate' response of his opponent to the latest wildly inaccurate or just plain lying and subliminally racist attack ads that his own campaign - not some rogue 527 group; his own campaign - has been running. Somehow, however, there has been some sort of tragic and misguided failure by the once-vaunted research staff of one of the primary media outlets on the entire planet that failed to lead them to any discovery of claims by the apparent Republican presidential nominee that he would be ever so "respectful"...

One of the true measures of a completely abject and totally embarrassing failure of integrity by anyone is to fail the "eye-roll" test as administered by my college- and high school-attending teenage children. With this dirty little mind-worm plant of a story by the NYT suggesting that Obama is somehow the person who stands most accused of veering away from a heart-felt campaign promise while the Ol' Prisoner Of War Maverick who has been through the hellfires of the Prisoner Of War crucible and therefore - as a Prisoner Of War - simply can't be guilty of simple lying because Prisoners Of War don't do those sorts of things and it was all Just A Joke Anyway, The New York Times finally made it onto the Jack K. Family Hit Parade when I was reading this particular article out loud to the family (one of those disturbing, vaguely Islamofascist, anti-American things I do to expose them to concepts not likely to be found on iTunes, YouTube, or Deviant Art) - has, in fact, been elevated to megastar status - because even I have never earned an "oh, Brother!" coda to an eye-roll, despite my best efforts...

Perhaps the whole underlying premise of "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" is such a deceivingly simplistic idea that it escapes what passes for intelectual rigor in this newer generation of "journalists". Perhaps this is all just one more example of a truly entrenched, comfortable band of insiders fighting to keep an outsider from storming into their midst and upsetting their own special apple cart. Just maybe...and this is a really crazy idea and I know that nobody is going to buy it...maybe the NYT isn't as liberal as the wingers would have you believe...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:49 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 18, 2008

...And Al Gore Is Still Fat... 

...the usual trend for thunderstorms in Central Oregon is to have them develop in late morning through early afternoon and then peter out when Prime Time looms. It's rather convenient, actually, from a TV viewing standpoint. Once in a great long while - like every two or three years - there may be some early morning thunderstorms that liven up that whole getting-out-of-bed thing and maybe a few lingering afternoon storms to finish off the day. The development of wave after wave of thunderstorms, on the third hand, that continue from the evening all through the night into the morning and all through that next day into the next evening is something that I don't recall ever seeing anywhere that I have lived in the Pac NW...until the last 24 hours...

All of this excitement, and the threatened wearing out of outlets because of the repeated unplugging/plugging of various sensitive or expensive electrical devices at all sorts of odd moments over the last 24 hours, has been an unusual and unpleasant experience for someone like me used to an otherwise comfortable, familiar ebb and flow of meteoroligic conditions in these parts. But Mother Nature or Gaia or whatever has more in store...and we don't even live in hurricane country. From the National Weather Service tonight:
...AN UNSEASONABLY STRONG WEATHER SYSTEM WILL MOVE OVER SOUTHWEST
WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON LATE TUE THROUGH WED..
...
THIS STORM IS REMARKABLY SIMILAR TO WINTER TYPE SYSTEMS AND WILL
PRODUCE STRONG WINDS ALONG THE COAST. WIND GUSTS WILL BE
STRONGEST TUESDAY NIGHT. THEY WILL PROBABLY PEAK AROUND 50 MPH
NEAR COASTAL HEADLANDS...BUT COASTAL CITIES WILL SEE LESS STRONG
WINDS PEAKING AROUND 30 MPH. INLAND CONDITIONS WILL BE QUITE A BIT
LESS BREEZY...EXCEPT FOR HIGHEST ELEVATIONS OF THE CASCADES.

THE SYSTEM WILL ALSO PRODUCE RELATIVELY HEAVY PRECIPITATION
ESPECIALLY IN THE COAST RANGE...FOOTHILLS AND CASCADES. RAINFALL
TOTALS FOR THE STORM WILL RANGE FROM 1 TO 2 INCHES IN THE COASTAL
MOUNTAINS AND CASCADES...
...
THIS STORM WILL HAVE A FAIRLY RAPID ONSET AND PRODUCE BACK COUNTRY
CONDITIONS THAT WILL BE CHALLENGING AT BEST...WITH COOL
TEMPERATURES...WINDY CONDITIONS...COPIOUS RAIN AND EVEN HEAVY SNOW
AT THE VERY HIGHEST ELEVATIONS.

We are always cautioned, and rightfully so, to resist drawing conclusions about climate change based on individual events. I can do that. What the heck, I have a background of intense scientific training that leads me to understand that one can't rely on random observations to make an informed evaluation about climate change in the same way that a military career steeped in intense training in Naval Aviation would lead a presidential candidate to resist the temptation to claim that he understands the employment and deployment of ground troops in a foreign conflict. But, still...

But still, the last few days are getting to be just a bit ridiculous. Three days of brutal record-breaking high temperatures followed by a wild and way longer than necessary episode of occasionally severe thunderstorms followed by what is essentially a winter storm represent a situation that is "juuust a bit outside" for this part of the country that insists on incorporating the word "pacific" in its name. I blame Al Gore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:04 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 17, 2008

The On-Going Tragedy of Trees Dying For George Will's Opinion 

...I can't really offer any sort of logical explanation or something that even sounds like a good excuse for why I ever read anything that George Will ever writes. I've tried to explain it as the natural product of constant exposure to the right-wing tendencies of my local newspaper, the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin, that primarily offers such nonsense on it's Opinion Page, but that line of reasoning falls apart when I have to admit that I never read any of the constant pipeline of nonsense from lead Hoover Vacuum Cleaner salesman Victor David Hanson...

Today I did it again, courtesy of the WaPo website. Hello, my name is Jack K. and I'm a George Will reader ("Hi, Jack K."). As usual in any instance where Will isn't writing about baseball, today's column starts out with the usual sorts of red herrings; this time, they are about Things McCain Should Say He Will Do and accomplish Will's compositional goal by misrepresenting the whole "secret unionizing vote" issue and demonstrating either a complete lack of understanding or an intentional refusal to acknowledge the fundamental rational behind issuance of broadcast licenses in the whole "Fairness Doctrine" debate...

But that's not the big fish that Will is looking to fry. What he wants to go after is the truly heroic nature of that whole disturbing, possibly Logan Act-violating, faux-Presidentin' act that McCain has been running with all week long regarding the Russian response to Georgia's ill-advised effort to bring the breakaway region of South Ossetia back into the fold by launching a military assault against its civilian population. In the dark world through which most old, wandering, lost Cold Warriors like Will grimly tread, the resurgence of a Russia that bears some resemblance to the late and unlamented Soviet Union is a boon for any Republican candidate - and especially for Huggy Bear - because that is a comfort zone that served them in good stead for several decades. The last two sentences of this excited meditation on the prospect to a Return to Cold Wars Past speaks volumes even though some of those volumes aren't probably intended:
Until Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it seemed that not even the Democratic Party could lose this election. But it might if McCain can make it turn on the question of who is ornery enough to give Putin a convincing, deterring telephone call at 3 a.m.

Obvious questions come to mind. Given the profoundly overextended nature of the US military machine, just what exactly is the convincing deterrence that Huggy Bear is going to speak into that telephone at 3 a.m. that will make Pootie Poot stay up for the rest of the night, mulling over his new set of choices? Given the fact that Russia is a major supplier of natural gas to both former Soviet satellite nations and the rest of Europe and is the second largest world supplier of oil, just what exactly is the convincing deterrence that Huggy Bear is going to flaunt in Putin's ear, aside from some either lame or - if you think about it - terrifying threat of military action...

What George Will seems to be suggesting - maybe or maybe not - is that John McCain will deal with that 3 a.m. phone call by saying "Vladimir, you better head to the basement, 'cause the missiles are on the way". There isn't any other suggested response that would make any sense in the construct of those two sentences. Russia is a redeveloping power in its own right because of its energy wealth and the influence that this particular wealth has on the rest of the world. The US in a John McCain world sees all international problems as nails in search of the American hammer. George F. Will has just ratified that jingoistic militaristic world view - indeed, Will longs for the implementation of this particular world view - and the first depressing thing about this is that trees have had to die so that a desperate desire for a new Cold War in the cause of winning an election can be expressed as a respectable point of view...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:31 PM 0 comments

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