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

Saturday, September 06, 2008

A Night For Music...Just Because 

Doan wanna talk politiks tunite...just because...



I've got the Blake Shelton version on my 8 gig Sansa (some of us out here in the hinterlands are too cool...or too cheap (maybe closer to the point)...to be iPodders) and it is one of my favorite songs. Tonight, though, five days out from last seeing my sweety, the original seems right...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:07 PM 0 comments

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over 

...yes, my friends, if I may call you that because I have a suddenly uncontrollable urge to use that phrase, the long National Nightmare of the Republican National Convention is finally, at last, over. It's not just that everything we've heard over the last few days has been a repudiation of everything that is concerning the American people. It's also that the sheets of paper on which were written all those pretty words that Huggy Bear spoke about a respectful campaign were crumpled up, shredded, burned, and scattered to the wind in St. Paul...

This election will be about ugliness, the same way the last several campaigns have been about the ugliness and cheapening of the whole idea of a democratic process that chooses the right person for the job. A couple of observations, though, about the culminating speech of tonight and all that came before:

1) What happened to Gustav? There was a panicky flurry of effort to make sure Gustav wasn't Katrina II, but once it became apparent that Trent Lott's porch and New Orleans weren't going to be wiped off the map, the suffering of people who actually suffered greatly from Gustav simply disappeared from the Republican and media radar screens. It's like there was a checklist: no pictures of floating bodies in the lower 9th Ward? Check. No video of desperate NOLA survivors waving at news choppers for rescue? Check. Communities are wiped out, serious damage has been suffered, but it's all good in St. Paul...

B) Republicans were more than harshly dismissive about the 'celebrity' nature of Obama;s effort of daring to fill an NFL stadium with roaring fans for his acceptance speech. I see why, now. The vitally important lead-up speakers - and McCain himself - demonstrated that (aside from Code Pink protesters) Huggy Bear wouldn't be able to fill one of the locker rooms at Mile High Stadium with people who already didn't have a ticket to the show as delegates. I'm still wondering, after three nights of watching this convention on C-SPAN, why the organizers didn't either fill the empty bleachers with stuffed animals or enlist the Chinese government to create animation to make the blank sections look full...

You can choose your friends and what you're having for dinner, but you can't choose either family or your electoral opponent. Mitt Romney actually sounded like he meant it sometimes and actually has meaningful executive experience; Mike Huckabee was a governor longer than Sarah Palin has been in public life - including her PTA time - and is actually entertaining to listen to. We are, unfortunately, saddled for an opponent with a stern, scolding, war-mongering crusader for a return to some mythical American Reich that never really existed and a running mate that gives speeches sounding more like girls'locker-room whining/sniping/snarking by one of the high school Kool Kidz than serious discourse by the person one heartbeat away from the job of Most Powerful Person In The World...

Suddenly, I almost miss Ronny Raygun...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Predictable Outcomes 

...saw the Palin speech tonight. It was about what one would expect, with one significant observation:

Sarah Palin has now abandoned any hope of being given a free ride by anybody for reasons of gender or personal story. She came out and represented for the Party, and at the same time gave Joe Biden and the whole Obama campaign a free pass to address all of those many months of executive experience that supposedly make her so much more qualified to be President - never mind the vice presidency - than either of these apparently "hopeless" stooges (according to the lead-in speeches) could hope to have (more qualified, one would presume from the introductory speeches, than her own running mate)...

Governor Palin doesn't actually have a great deal of experience at dealing with national exposure and has only had to deal with local media in the past. She does, however, have a facile sort of delivery that seems able to deliver the talking points of the last eight years without sounding like that's what she's talking about and "advocating" the McCain platform, whether she believes in it or not. The next couple of months will be tremendously interesting...

The election of the next president will turn on a lot of issues well beyond who picked whom for VP, but ya gotta admire Huggy Bear for giving everybody another distraction to talk about. Clever, that...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:57 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Say Goodnight, Joe 

...I can only assume that Joe Lieberman has some personal sense that there is a building storm-surge of Huggy Bear coat-tail support that is going to result in a stalemated 50-50 split in the US Senate that will still allow him to be a king-maker. I can't think of another reason for him to be in St. Paul trashing the nominee of the party of which he is still trying to claim that he is a member...

Presidential politics aside, I pray that the Democrats can turn just a couple of Senate seats and give Joementum that final blessed liberating freedom to finally join the Republican caucus...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Just A Quick Thought... 

...if Sarah Palin is more experienced than Barack Obama because she has executive experience as both a mayor of a moderate-sized western town and almost 20 months as governor, does that make her more qualified than John McCain to be president?

UPDATE: I said this before my local feed of the Colbert Report....and I stand by that statement....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:58 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 01, 2008

Counting Eggs And Calling Them Chickens 

...we are already seeing the first vestiges of what will probably be a self-congratulatory round of high-fiving by Republicans of all shapes, sizes, and stripes because the Bush administration was finally able to get it's fecal matter all in one basket and respond better to the exact same situation they so horribly bungled last time around. It's at this point that I am quite sure that any number of people - both disaster survivors and recover specialists both inside and outside of the federal government will be more than happy to say "Not so fast, My Good Friend!"...

The agency that is at the pointy end of the arrow is called the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It came into existence on April 1, 1979, on the effective date of Executive Order 12127 by President Jimmy Carter and its mission is, in its own words, "to lead America to prepare for, prevent, respond to and recover from disasters with a vision of “A Nation Prepared.”" Unfortunately, FEMA has had a - to be exceedingly generous - spotty record on the "respond" and "recovery" fronts through the Reagan and GHW Bush era and only came into its own as the agency that it was intended to be when Bill Clinton appointed James Lee Witt to be director and elevated the agency to cabinet status after the woeful performance following Hurricane Andrew. Gee Dub killed all of that, though, by pulling FEMA into Homeland Security and appointing a series of patronage hacks to the Director position...

FEMA underperformed (again, a generous assessment) in the face of virtually every emergency that faced the country after Bushco took over, and its response to Katrina was simply the most visible example because of the pure brutal scope of the human tragedy. Given that this one event did so much to open the eyes of the American public to the general incompetence of Gee Dub and his minions, it shouldn't come as any particular surprise that this particular bunch of clowns could get the front end of Hurricane Gustav right; while they may be evil, they aren't stupid, and the prospect of having New Orleans drown one more time, live, 24 hours a day on cable news while they chugged the sort of expensive whiskey that only Republicans can afford and trash-talked Obama in St. Paul clearly was sufficient motivation to make them, for once, do the right thing. But the fact that there were fleets of rescue boats, squadrons of helicopters, and enough generators to electrify Wyoming all ready to go doesn't get to the heart of the FEMA mission. Natural disasters come in all shapes and sizes and hurricanes are the easy ones (which adds to the madness of the Katrina response) because you can see them coming for a few days. Earthquakes that level whole cities, tornado outbreaks that wipe entire towns off the map, floods that carry away everything hundreds or thousands of families have worked for years to build, and wildfires that burn hundreds of families out of their homes don't have a National Center that track their progress for days in advance; they happen right now and the FEMA role is to step in and provide the sort of help after the event that makes just about everybody a liberal when it's their home that's gone and they don't know where to turn...

This is the area where FEMA still struggles, wrapped up in the sort of red tape that only "Small Government" Republicans can cook up. The real failure of FEMA in the Katrina episode wasn't so much in the immediate aftermath but in the days and weeks that followed; I don't know anybody who went through that hurricane, but I do know people who went to Louisiana on Incident Command Teams to coordinate the immediate recovery effort, and their stories of waste, unnecessary bureaucracy, incompetence, and cronyism were truly enlightening. That same failure, aside from all the bizarre stories of vast oceans of unused travel trailers sitting in lots across the south and the whole formaldehyde issue, has been the hallmark of Bushco FEMA from Southern California to Florida with a few notable stops in between, although they can run some sparkling self-contained, media-free news conferences when the occasion dictates. The full measure of FEMA success isn't how may rescue boats or water bottles they have on hand in advance of a disaster (although that is important in this case), but is rather how effectively FEMA responds to the needs of those people who really do need federal assistance days and weeks and months from now because they were in the Gustav bullseye, even if they weren't in the highly-publicized Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area...

There are miles to travel before the Bush administration gets a passing grade on the Gustav incident, and they may well have to step it up a notch if Hurricane Hanna hits the Southeast Coast later in the week. It's a little bit of 'counting your chickens before they've hatched' to be very celebratory about the Federal response right now, because there's a lot more "mission" yet to accomplish...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:06 PM 0 comments

Candidacy To Nowhere 

...one good way to play yourself out of the league when it comes to big-time politics is to do major damage to your carefully - coiffed reputation right out of the gate. The presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has apparently decided to take a first step down this path with her stoutly-stated opposition at her coming-out party on Friday to the construction of the Gravina Island Bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska, more infamously known as "the Bridge To Nowhere", which is in keeping with her supposed reputation as a reformer and fiscal conservative...

Aside from actually not being true, however, her statement that she told Congress "'thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere" has irked her constituents back home, particularly in Ketchikan:
When she was running for governor in 2006, Palin said she was insulted by the term "bridge to nowhere," according to Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein, a Democrat, and Mike Elerding, a Republican who was Palin's campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city.

"People are learning that she pandered to us by saying, I'm for this' ... and then when she found it was politically advantageous for her nationally, abruptly she starts using the very term that she said was insulting," Weinstein said.

When she announced that plans for the bridge would be shelved, it was actually the lack of funds coupled with escalating construction costs rather than some philosophical objection that was her stated motivation. More to the point, she never said "thanks but no thanks" to the money itself.

This isn't just another case of a politician being for something before being against it. There isn't any strong evidence that Palin was ever actually against the Gravina Island Bridge until she said she was at her introductory rally with Huggy Bear. In fact, according to this entry in the Federal Register from July of this year, the State of Alaska and the Federal Highways Administration aren't exactly through talking about the subject yet...

The Governor may luck out on this particular flip-flop; a combination of meteorological distractions and the on-going failure of the MSM to examine her presumptive boss's own rather spotty record on sticking to his guns (see, today, his most recent views on torture compared with his recent voting record on the subject) could result in Friday's remarkable assertion being swept under the rug. If the Obama campaign decides to address this, however, all those adjectives like "tenacious" and "reformer" might be supplemented by new choices like "albatross" and "millstone". That's a good way to get your name off the list of "rising stars"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:20 AM 0 comments

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Disturbing Sunday Night Thoughts 

...by this time tomorrow, people will have lost their homes. They will have lost the places of employment that gave them their jobs. Some, tragically, may will have well have lost their lives. There is going to be a strange and disturbing spectacle following the landfall of Hurricane Gustav sometime tomorrow, where the Republican administration will try to make political hay on behalf of its presidential nominee out of an understandably improved response to a major hurricane. There already has been - and will continue to be - all sorts of official hand-wringing and heart-felt expressions of support for afflicted citizens by the Republican National Committee as they try to craft a silk purse out of this particular sow's ear that they've been handed at the exact moment that they were hoping to have a moment of triumphalism in St. Paul with the anointment of St. John and Sarah of Arc as their Warriors For Change Of White House Business Card Names...

The Obama campaign will respond - has already responded in a sense, in fact - and we may well have the strange privilege of seeing confrontations on the ground between volunteers mobilized by the Obama campaign and mercenary forces mobilized by Bushco (on behalf of their own bank accounts and - secondarily - the McCain Campaign) that want desperately to refuse them entry. Given the timing of the landfall and given the perceived political stakes, the stark human tragedy that looms - regardless of the damage that New Orleans may suffer - may take a back seat to the presidential campaign...

A raw looming human tragedy is just about to become a play toy of presidential election politics. The only good news is that there may be some perverse benefit to the victims of Hurricane Gustav because of this political focus. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is interested in being seen as the modern equivalent of Nero fiddling as Rome burned, so the most likely flashpoint of civil disobedience is going to be Democratic and Republican volunteers battling over who gets on the ground first and the victims will be the primary recipients of this odd benefit. I wouldn't even dream of wasting money betting against the proposition that John McCain will heroically deliver his nomination acceptance speech from some devastated remote disaster location, complete with sweaty rolled up shirt sleeves and surrounded just out of camera range by a phalanx of security personnel that really should be Out There saving lives and maintaining security instead of playing up a Repub dog-and-pony show...

Complaints about the politicization of the raw pain of real people have been a part of the burden we bear as Americans for a long, long time. I suspect, however, that we haven't seen the worst of this kind of action yet...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:59 PM 0 comments

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