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

Friday, October 17, 2008

Another Beautiful Voice Joins God's Choir 

...the songs of the Four Tops are powerfully evocative for those of us who are "of a certain age". The memories flood back into the front of my brainpan every time I hear one of their cuts on some oldie station: the raw tactile sense of rattling down a gravel road in the cab of a truck loaded down with hay bales; that unique pungent sweaty humid popcorn smell of a Friday night midwinter high school basketball game; the presumed late-night seclusion of an old Dodge pickup in some local rock pit with a girl, a smuggled bottle of Boone's Farm, and an AM radio (circumstances beyond which, my friend, we need not discuss further)...

The Four Tops weren't the only representatives of Berry Gordy's Motown Sound that competed for space on our AM radios back in the day, but they were singularly distinctive just because of Levi Stubbs' voice. His voice had power and grace and suggested a sort of strangely ineffable cool-guy sexiness that you could only wistfully hope you could carry off when that vitally important teenage "boy meets girl" moment called on you to act before that moment slipped away. While he's left us, there remains a legacy of music and memories that will bring a secret knowing smile to many a boomer's lips any time we run into one of those wonderful songs like this one...

Posted by: Jack K. / 6:48 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Are They Tone Deaf Or Do They Think We're Stupid? 

...so, finally, the world is finally able to experience the full breath-taking maverickyness of John McCain's experience and leadership in that dirty little dark science of ecomomics with his major policy speech today. While it was a most revealing demonstration of Huggy Bear's central views on economic and tax policies, it also was a revealing glimpse behind the curtain, demonstrating the surprising fact that Dr. Seuss is apparently going to be one of the leading candidates for Treasury Secretary...

On unemployment compensation, McCain proposes suspending federal income taxation of such benefits, just one day after Barack Obama made the same proposal...

On the taxation of retirees' withdrawals from their tax-deferred accounts, McCain proposed lowering the tax rate to 10% on the first $50,000 dollars. This will, of course represent no benefit whatsoever to a large percentage of retirees with investment accounts, but does provide a substantial boon to the lesser number of people who have large investment from which they are making withdrawals...

On capital gains taxes....well, he is just recycling the usual old Republican argument that we need to get rid of capital gains taxes, which generally doesn't have much benefit to anybody that I know, especially given the fact that the only capital gains tax they may ever face is from personal home sale and the current decline in the housing market is taking care of that concern nicely, thank you very much...

The ol' Maverick's new, much ballyhooed economic proposals don't plow any new ground, but some of them do contain threads or direct reference to unproven or failed Republican policies that have dogged us for the last two decades. None of these policies actually address the real live bone-deep pain that millions of Americans have been feeling for longer than that talked about during this most recent financial upheaval. One can only wonder: are Republicans - and McCain's "brain trust" in particular - that profoundly tone deaf to the needs and desires and problems of the average American, or do they really think we are so stupid that we have even a detectable amount of faith any longer in the twisted perversion of Reagan's own failed "trickle down" policies that have so brutally punished the middle class...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:22 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 13, 2008

Another Brief Random Thought On A Cold Mountain Night 

...so now Republicans not only have to face the reality of a lefty Nobel Prize winner criticizing their failures in the realm of global climate change, but now they have to deal with the reality of a lefty Nobel Prize winner criticizing their failures in the management of the economy...

Regardless of the outcome of the election three weeks hence, it really does suck to be a Republican these days...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:34 PM 0 comments

Idiots Need Not Apply 

...it doesn't really matter why these two clowns are alleged to have done this. Politically, it doesn't even matter which candidate they support - or whether they were straight enough to even say the word "candidate", much less understand what it means - because the whole idea of firebombing someone's personal property (even if that property is a campaign sign) is so far outside the bounds of the remote edges of what we understand the concept of 'democracy' to mean that there simply aren't words strong enough to use in repudiating their alleged actions...

Anybody who defaces or steals or - in the bizarre example in this story - tosses lame half-a$$ed Molotov cocktails at campaign signs is, just like anybody who tries to enter into angry threatening debate with someone whose shirt or bumper sticker doesn't agree with him or her, a party to the sort of dangerous fascist mindset that seems to lurk around the edges of electoral campaigns these days. Violent action or the threat of violence does not begat a more democratic society, and anybody who doesn't understand that (or, like a certain Republican presidential campaign, only comes lately to understand it when bludgeoned with righteous indignation from across the political spectrum) does not deserve a place at the table. Somebody, with these two Stumptown boys being the currently-accused perps, has created an opportunity to change the subject and make the left seem no better than the right in terms of violent anti-democratic action, regardless of whether or not those who did this have ever had the faintest glimmer of an actual real live political thought (a subject on which the jury is still out)...

I'm working at going all Ed Meese here, and being charged with a crime isn't the same thing as being guilty of commission of same. The two young men in the story have only been charged with the crime. Regardless of that, the fact remains that whoever tried to firebomb this campaign sign needs to be brought straight to justice; there is no place for this sort of behavior. We are at a particularly momentous tipping point in this nation's history; lots of ground troops are needed to decide the issue, but idiots need not apply...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:31 PM 0 comments

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