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

Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Newly-Discovered Criminality of Dissention 

...a remarkable story is unfolding in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, one that is getting a little bit of a hit by the MSM but truly represents all you need to know about how the Republican party is getting behind that energetic youthful agent of change that is John "ol' Maverick" McCain: "City, County, State, And Federal Law Enforcement Arrest American Citizens Who Disagree With Republican Policies"...

Even some evil librul national media outlets are getting a sniff of this story. There is even a backstory and follow-up that isn't getting much coverage, and it provides a remarkable illustration of the degree to which the Republican party has sunk to the point where they don't even feel the need to "mail it in" when it comes to civil liberties. I must admit that I was kind of busy last week, so I pray that I will be forgiven for having missed all those stories about the Sheriff of Denver County violating the jurisdictional authority of the City of Denver by staging raids with Federal agents on the gathering places of those dangerous agents of anarchy who were hoping to turn the Mile High City into a sea of riotous flames. There must be some. Right?

Maybe the DFH brigade needs to call in reinforcements...

cat
more animals
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 PM 2 comments

Friday, August 29, 2008

The Wrath Of A Candidate Scorned 

...while it is a well-known story that at-risk Republican incumbents are staying as far away from the Republican National Convention as possible without having to use a passport and are cranking out all sorts of commercials insisting that - all evidence to the contrary - they are absolute masters at Reaching Across The Aisle, there are some stories that just don't get the attention they deserve. The (formerly) Republican candidacy of Joel Haugen, who seeks to replace Democrat David Wu in the 1st Congressional district in the state of Oregon, is just such a story...

Huagen pounded all of his opposition in the Republican primary back in May and earned the right to face incumbent Wu in November. Apparently, unfortunately, he wasn't able to get his hands on the full copy of the "Gordon Smith's Primer On How To Win A Federal Campaign In Oregon" book, so he apparently ended up missing that whole section about how to only appear to be a Democrat without actually slipping over the edge...

That is the only possible explanation (aside from things of a clinical nature) for his going far beyond Senator Smith's bizarre insistence about reaching across the aisle to work with Democratic Senators, specifically those black Democratic Senators with funny, vaguely exotic and islamic names. Haugen - on the heels of his dominant victory in the Oregon Republican Congressional primary - decided to go Gordo one better and actually endorse Barack Obama and Jeff Merkley, who just happens to be Gordon Smith's Democratic opponent in the fall election. This has, as one might well imagine, created a bit of consternation within the Orygun Republican party...

Shunning and ostracizing at a Major League level predictably ensued in smoky Republican halls of power, and Haugen has decided to respond by coming over to the people who will reliably return his phone calls and announcing today that he will stand as the Independent Party candidate for the position of Member of Congress from the First District of Oregon. The fact that he has decided to campaign as a member of the Independent Party is probably of less importance politically than the fact that he has waited long enough in the election season to declare his change in status that the Republican Party is now faced with the prospect of not even having a horse in this race...

This is what "pwned" means, for those of you who might not have known. Haugen learned that the whole Republican idea of "The Big Tent" died with Lee Atwater and probably never really existed on the ground in the first place. Winning has never been "the only thing" in politics, and the Orygun Republican party organization is no different than that of most other states when it comes to sticking with the powerfully conservative social points that brought them to that brief shining moment of power in the past. Haugen was operating well outside of the normally understood comfort level for Republicans, and shunning was going to be the obvious response. That wasn't the only game in town, though, so sad though it may be to point out to those Republicans out west of Portland in the First District, they really don't have any sort of card to play in November. They don't matter...

Their local and state-wide leadership may well not have learned The Fundamental Lesson that this episode offers, but presumably they now understand The Price to be paid when Facing the Wrath of A Candidate Scorned...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:25 PM 0 comments

The Risk Of Katrina Ver. 2.0 

...sometimes a situation just feels so wrong, has such a bad heft when you pick it up to look at it, that you just know that there's no possible way that everything is going to turn out alright. The preparations for the possible arrival of Hurricane Gustav in New Orleans, when you sit down and read the press reports, is starting to get that feel...

The numbers won't be the same as were left in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, but there will probably be people who are going to be left behind, because they can't get to the bus pickup points or because they don't know where those pickup points are. There won't be any Superdome for them this time, because They've Been Warned. What lends that bad sense of foreboding to the looming situation is that the one statement that could serve as both a warning to those who - for whatever reason - can't escape and as an indictment of the approach that the authorities are taking has already be snatched up, claimed, and reserved by the City of New Orleans: "If You Don't Leave, You Are On Your Own"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:41 PM 0 comments

WHO??!? 

...yes, I know who Sarah Palin is. She is the extremely popular governor of Alaska, a fellow Idahonian by birth (although I stayed around for about two decades more than she did), an alumnus of my own alma mater (Go Vandals!), and is viewed as a reformer in Alaskan Republican politics, where the most popular parlor game is "Who Going To Be Indicted Today". She is also herself being targeted by an investigation into efforts to fire her ex-brother in law, an Alaskan State Trooper, and the abrupt firing of her own appointee as the head of the Department of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, for a host of murky reasons - some of which lead directly back to those efforts to fire her sister's ex...

Aside from the interesting prospect of the McCain campaign having a potential opportunity to talk about these issues in October, the selection of Sarah Palin as Huggy Bear's running mate is extremely curious in a number of ways. She is an aggressive fiscal conservative, which I suppose is a plus for McCain, and is fiercely anti-choice, which would be assumed to be a definite plus for the ol' Maverick with the Pharisee base. She also has a resume of service in elected office that makes Barack Obama look like a senior statesman. One would probably be wrong to be presumptive, but one could be forgiven for presuming that we have heard the last of random chatter from the McCain campaign that Obama is too inexperienced to be President (although they always say "Commander In Chief" because Republicans apparently no longer see any role for the Oval Office occupant other than as an aggrandized War Lord of a very large and imperialistic tribe)...

It is truly...well..."interesting", I suppose is the best word to describe the idea of the oldest man to ever seek a first term as President reaching into the Republican bullpen to pull out possibly the least experienced and youngest candidate out of all the names that have been bandied about for the last month or so. Maybe she was chosen to create the specter of Joe Biden striking a woman in the VP debates. Maybe she was chosen to try to capture those remaining disgruntled Hillary supporters; if that's the case, they haven't been paying attention, because it was all about Hillary and the only female nominee that would have fit the bill for these folks would have been Hillary...

We are told often enough that vice presidential picks don't really matter in the long run, and James Danforth Quayle is more of an affirmation of that proposition than Thomas Eagleton is an argument against it. After all, name the VP nominees for the losing parties (without Googling) in every election dating back to your birth. That lack of importance may well be the case again this time around, but for today - at least - Huggy Bear can certainly ring up Gee Dub and inquire as the whereabouts of that nifty "Mission Accomplished" banner so he can drape it across the Strange Talk Express; he certainly has stepped on the buzz from Obama's remarkable speech last night...

Judging from some of the comments I'm hearing from the punditocracy this morning, I'm just not sure he's doing so in quite the way he intended...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:31 AM 0 comments

Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Fournier AP Dream Machine Marches On 

...as anybody who has been getting all wonky with the political scene knows, the head of the Washington, DC, Associated Press bureau is Ron Fournier, who has a history of exceedingly friendly correspondence with Karl Rove and is alleged to have sought employment with the Republican effort to hold on to the White House. There isn't any dramatic proof that he is, in his role as the AP bureau chief in Washington DC, some sort of journalistic Republican Manchurian Candidate, even though there is a disturbing electron trail of what reasonable people could consider to be 'fellow traveler' evidence...

On The Other Hand...

Tonight, after a dramatic and specific acceptance speech by Barack Obama in front of more people than Huggy Bear could expect to attract at any 10 or 15 events combined, we find ourselves facing a 'first out of the block' analysis of Obama's speech by Charles Babington of the AP that, stunningly, says that Obama only spoke in flowery terms about his own plans and in snippy, whiney terms about all things McSame...

Because the AP is losing market shares by leaps and bounds and has decided that all of its words are deathless and chargable prose, I can't actually excerpt Mr. Babington's febrile neo-thoughts. Can't afford that cost-per-word thing, after all, so you'll have to go read the linked article yourself. I can say two things, however:

A) I can only assume that Charles Babington has some really, really nice real estate holdings that he can't afford to lose by refusing to do one of the most lame, ineffectual hatchet jobs that has ever been seen on behalf of a particular political party in the rapidly diminishing history of a once-proud independent media.

2) I probably shouldn't make too much of this, but it does so happen that Charles Babington, who apparently didn't actually see Barack Obama's acceptance speech (surprising, that, given that it was so widely available on TV), is an employee of the Associated Press stationed in Washington DC, which would mean that he takes his orders from Ron Fournier, Washington AP bureau chief and well-known friend of Karl Rove.

Many things are much clearer to me now...

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Posted by: Jack K. / 9:15 PM 0 comments

The Day After - Ver. 2008.01 

...tomorrow, you will hear from the Republican party that Barack Obama isn't ready to lead...

Tonight proved that wrong.

Tomorrow, you will hear from hired Republican talking heads that Barack Obama doesn't have any specific policy proposals...

Tonight proved they will be lying.
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Tomorrow you will hear that Barack Obama has no specific proposals...

The video evidence from Obama's speech tonight will demonstrate that's a lie.

Tomorrow the FAUX News chattering faces and Paid Republican pundits will tell you that Obama Didn't Close The Deal...

They will want you to miss or forget the message that Obama delivered tonight before a crowd larger than anything Huggy Bear could attract without offering free gas cards to anybody within driving distance and busing in the inmates from every prison within 1000 miles, a message that had all the specifics that anyone who understands politics could ever expect.

They are dreaming.

The glove has been tossed to the ground in front of the ol' Maverick. He doesn't have the rhetorical skills to challenge tonight's performance on a good day. Tonight wasn't a Good Day for Huggy Bear. Next week will be an embarrassing nightmare for a party that, like its nominee, has lost its bearings and can only lash out with anger at anyone who dares to challenge its decade-long stranglehold on the levers of power. Next week in Minneapolis will be a sad, brutal spectacle of name-calling and insults that have no basis in reality and have no connection to the reality that those of us who aren't married to beer distributor heiress's understand. Tomorrow is the Day After, and John McCain will try to make the day his with a running mate announcement that has, tonight, lost pretty much all of its meaning. In the eyes of the MSM, he will probably succeed, but in the eyes of Americans it will be the beginning of the end of the long march toward the sort of America that we have long dreamed that we should be...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong - Portland/Pentagon Edition 

...Monday night, residents and hotel occupants in downtown Portland, Oregon, were suddenly (and without prior warning) visited by a small squadron of MI-6 "Little Bird" helicopters - complete with heavily armed men dangling their legs out the passenger door openings like some redux of every Vietnam war movie you ever saw - darting in and out amongst the high rise office buildings and hotels. Panic, as you might well imagine, ensued...

Turns out it wasn't a terrorist attack, or perhaps the next step in Gee Dub's diabolical plan to take over the world by declaring martial law and overrunning obvious potential centers of opposition like Portland (where casually outraged citizens would eventually meander out to the streets in small but generally concerned groups and begin flinging Molotov Cocktails made from microbrew bottles filled with fast food cooking oil biodiesel corked with chunks of flaming organic natural fibers). Nope. It was a training exercise. One that the City of Portland knew about but chose not to share with its citizens or visitors (other than those visitors in military helicopoters). The city's motives for not revealing a long-planned Defense Department exercise in advance of its execution is understandable, as far as that goes, but the panic and fear that the sudden unannounced appearance of unusual military aircraft and personnel in the skies of the Rose City has apparently suggested to the Mayor's office that maybe. ..just maybe...all that "Homeland Security/terrorist fighting/well-maybe-we-will-need-to-fight-them-here" deep dark secret decoder ring secrecy isn't something that will ever play well in the local urban landscape without a bit of forewarning...

The only good news in this story is that the Defense Dept. either lucked out or was somehow smart enough to not schedule this sort of training exercise in the "urban centers" on the East Side of the Oregon Cascades...

Out here, Black Helicopters are a well-understood matter of the lore of an evil, overbearing government, and the entire training exercise would probably have been shot out of the sky by every hunting rifle, shotgun, and .22 or .17 plinker in the county. That probably wouldn't be the outcome that the Defense Department was looking for....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:14 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Cutting The PUMA's Off At The Knees 

...the big Drama of Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention was, and has been for a couple of months (even though the date wasn't certain until recently), how Hillary Clinton would address the fact that Barack Obama and not she was the nominee for the Democratic nominee for President of The United States. The subtext, which has been the passion of the MSM, was "will she knuckle under or throw Obama under the Campaign bus"...

That question has been answered to the satisfaction of anybody who really understands and is involved in the political process. Those PUMA's who have been carrying on, demanding more pounds of flesh at the risk of either causing trouble on the convention floor (which would be real live "good news" for Huggy Bear) or launching an effort to bring Hillary supporters to Huggy Bear (ditto, as certain drug-addled radio hate-mongers would say), have been cast adrift by the woman of their dreams. She made clear tonight what Job One has to be: Making sure that we do not suffer another four years of the B.S. we have had to endure over the last eight years...

That sad little band of PUMAs who wanted, in large part, to overturn the primary process and force their own will on the party and the country have just been delivered a devastating blow. They probably won't go away, but they don't really have any real story-worthy meaning anymore. Hillary told them what they need to do, and any one of them that didn't get the message aren't Democrats...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:49 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 25, 2008

OK!! So I'm A Bad Liberal! But There Was Football... 

...I'm a child of the Pacific Northwest. I love sports of all kind. I remember where I was when the Supersonics won their championship, where I was when the Trail Blazers won their championship, where I was when the Mariners and the Seahawks improbably won their first playoff games. Tonight was Monday Night Football (yeeesss, preseason; I know) and it was my Seahawks vs. the Chargers, their formal conference rivals in San Diego. As a Life-Long Westerner and a small-town guy, I assumed that those vicious party animals in Denver would be keepin' on keepin' on into the late night...

There's wrong, and then there's Wrong. After the last few minutes that suggested that the outcome of the game would not please me, I turned over to the phalanx of channels covering the Democratic National Convention to find various pundits raving wildly about the spectacular appearance of Michelle Obama and the Obama children (well, NO, I don't ever watch Faux News; why do you ask?), as well as the speech delivered by the iconic Ted Kennedy over the objection of his friends, advisers, staff, and doctors. The moments themselves? Maybe I can find some replay or YouTube video or other capture. I Missed Them. I missed those special moments that the non-Faux pundits are marveling over, probably because I wasn't doing the time zone math and didn't realize that events just one zone to the east was actually being staged for the majority of the population that lives east of the Mississippi...

OK, so I know better now. I'll pay closer attention tomorrow because I get it. And - as I am now watching the postmortem on MSNBC - I promise I will only watch the CSPAN feed for the rest of the week. I find m self appropriately chastened....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:35 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Why Does Madonna Hate Former POW's 

...it is clearly going to be a busy campaign season for the spokesminions of the Huggy Bear campaign, if today's little eruption is any indication...

Swear to God, this one made me laugh out loud. How the preciously-named Tucker failed to throw in some reference to all the wild rumors about Madonna's alleged marriage-wrecking connections with Alex Rodriguez is anybody's guess, because that's certainly the sort of detail that Rovian disciples or their anxious hungering wannabe's wouldn't normally miss. Clearly the fast-rising onslaught of attacks on the chimera that is McCain 2008 is starting to overload the circuits. There may be episodes of spontaneous human combustion at Huggy Bear Central if they ever figure out over there what Bruce Springsteen is actually saying about them...

The money quote is nicely featured in the above-linked story:
"The comparisons are outrageous, unacceptable and crudely divisive all at the same time..."

This, for almost more reasons than there is time to enumerate, shows how seriously off its game the McCain campaign can be on a weekend. Aside from the fact that any sort of video associated with a Madonna concert on the southwest coast of England probably isn't as accessible to anywhere near the number of actual American voters who have been exposed to equally - if not far more - outrageous, unacceptable, and crudely divisive ads by Huggy Bear's campaign, two truth moments remain:

1) Madonna would have included the video connects in her act in front of a whole bunch of people who can't vote in our election regardless of who was the Democratic nominee. This is a simple case of 'liberals' vs. 'fake "straight talker" who has sold his soul to the party of George W. Bush with all that desperate wrongheaded hunger for boots on the ground' that offers up the difference between a common sense of what Americans are feeling these days and the sort of militarism advocated by the Ol' Maverick that has consequences that a former Naval Aviator - for all of his punishing suffering as a POW in North Vietnam - simply can't understand.

2) Neither supposed Democrat Toby Keith or Clear Channel will be able to ride to Huggy Bear's defense the way they did in the past for Gee Dub. The Dixie Chicks have been a productive and talented group, but they aren't iconic.

One thing I can't figure out, given the obvious Main Theme of the McCain campaign, is how precious Tucker failed to throw in some gratuitous reference about how an American Hero POW shouldn't have to endure the shame of this video moment. That omission really shows how confused Huggy Bear and his campaign can get when the the sweet blissfulness of another sumptuous Sedona weekend beckons...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:05 PM 0 comments

He's BAAaaak! 

...in his ongoing quest to become the Harold Stassen of our age, Ralph Nader has once again launched a campaign to get his name on as many state ballots as possible. This time around, unlike 2004, he has been successful in gaining a spot on the Oregon ballot...

The secret to his success this time? Secrecy. Nader's crusade to make the ballot four years ago was an amusing and wild affair, complete with charges that Democrats monkeywrenched his failed effort and countercharges that Republicans and Republican-linked groups were working illegally behind the scenes to get Ralph over the top. I'm not sure what a nomination effort conducted in utmost secrecy says about the value and meaning a candidate brings to the contest, but I suppose ya gotta do what ya gotta do...

Over the last couple of presidential election cycles, the backbone of Nader's campaign has been that the Democratic candidates and George W. Bush were two sided of the same coin, which is an reasonable stance only from the standpoint that everybody is entitled to an opinion. We won't ever know whether or not that actually would have proven to be true in any case - although it is a pretty difficult bug to swallow - but what we can take to the bank this time around is that this new spoiler campaign will probably bring another spate of the same sort of rhetoric. And he still has to make two more runs for the White House to catch Stassen...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:28 PM 0 comments

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