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

Saturday, November 01, 2008

OK, So Now I Have To Sell My SUV 

...I own an older Jeep Wrangler.

There, I said it.

Yes, it swills down fossil fuel like a Republican grabbing girls and gin at a lingerie 'show' in some seedy hotel lounge on a Wednesday night. Yes, it is in many ways impractical, except for the actual use for which it was designed - which is to say as a stone-cold rock-solid 4x4 to drive around in circumstances out in the wild country where a sensible person would say "OK, so maybe we should turn around now". And no, I don't use it as a daily commuter...

The fact remains, however, that when you like to drink beer and listen to country/western music, own an interesting array of firearms, and take time out on Sunday after church to watch NASCAR races on TV - like I do - there can be the occasional difficult question cropping up regarding one's actual credentials as a lefty when you own something that slots into the car ownership list as an SUV (regardless of the lack of acual "utility" represented by a Jeep Wrangler; trust me on this one) ...

I'm cool with all that. I've long been a big believer in the premise that the whole "litmus test" thing shouldn't be used as a means of measuring a person's actual political beliefs. I can't help, on the other hand, feeling a bit squeamish about being associated with the sorts of SUV owners who are idiots who probably otherwise display a host of symptoms demonstrating that they are people that you don't want to know. With morons like this running loose on the streets of this great nation of ours, I may just have to sell my Jeep in order to feel better about myself...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:57 PM 0 comments

Friday, October 31, 2008

Perfidity Alert: The AP's Continuing Effort To Influence The Election 

...in the absence of any sort of real, meaningful October Surprise, the Associated Press (yes, that Associated Press, the one employing people who have a history of fairly obvious cheerleading for Karl Rove and his ilk) has decided to provide its own version. This once-proud independent giant of the fourth estate would like you to know tonight that, as far as the Associated Press is concerned, one of the candidates has an immigration issue...

There's a powerful bit of innuendo going on in this story, far more than one would ever expect to see from the AP in any discussion about the circumstances surrounding the Republican nominee's marriage to the filthy rich Halloween Barbie lurking just behind him in every photo. This particular story isn't any sort of surprise, given the strange sorts of reporting that we've seen coming out of AP over the last few weeks. It probably shouldn't come as any surprise that a growing number of newspapers are dumping their AP feed...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:43 PM 0 comments

The Obama World Series Ratings Bump 

...OK, so it's safe to say that the good folks at the Faux Network will never admit that a known socialist commie fellow traveler - as identified by the sister network Faux News - could help salvage what was generally a deplorably insignificant World Series (sorry, Philly and Tampa Bay, but we're just not that much into either of you) by providing a mildly interested viewership for the latter innings of the oddly and historically belated definitive Game 5 on Wednesday night. But think about it for a minute...

This World Series set new records for the worst television ratings since the invention of the cathode ray tube. And yet...on the night that Barack Obama mercifully snuffed the pre-game show preceding the continuation of Game 5 with his half-hour 'infomercial', Faux had some of the best ratings of the entire series for the end of a game that most of America hadn't really cared all that much about two nights earlier when all the betting money would have been down. Nobody at the Faux network will every speak about such things in terms that might appear beneficial to a Democrat, but the clear appearance is that Obama's half-hour presentation just prior to the completion of Game 5 probably contributed to some small redemption in the face of the disastrous ratings that Faux had endured throughout the series...

Meanwhile, Huggy Bear falsely whined (as usual) about the supposed hubris of Obama preempting the start of the few innings completing Game 5, which wasn't true in any case and which probably helped the Faux network far more than any McCain presentation could ever hope to do...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:14 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Today's Episode In The Sad, Public Devolution Of John McCain's Integrity 

...on today's news that Exxon Mobile has earned the largest corporate quarterly profit since our species crawled out of trees to take their chances with all those large carnivores at the top of the food chain down there on the ground, John McCain decided to misrepresent his beliefs, personal sense of ethics (stop that laughing now, please), and the actual facts of his voting record by blaming this breathtaking new profit record on Barack Obama's vote on the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which handily passed the Republican-led Congress:
McCain took note of the record earnings announced Thursday by Exxon Mobil and told a crowd outside the Defiance high school that Obama "voted for billions in corporate giveaways to the oil companies. I voted against it."

Now, look; I understand the right that we are supposed to accord candidates seeking high office to wrap some strong rubber bands around the truth and test it's stretchy limits, but this is just silly and shames the MSM for it's failure to honestly address the rather spectacular degree of Huggy Bear's misrepresentation of his views about Big Oil. Yes, the fact is that he voted against the 2005 energy bill, but only part of his reasoning sounds connected to his challenge to Obama today:
McCain was one of a half-dozen Republicans to vote against the bill. He complained of unwarranted subsidies for the energy industry (my emphasis), too many last-minute earmarks, and no budget offsets for increased government spending. McCain referred to the bill again at the Republican national convention, calling it “corporate welfare.”

The unwarranted subsidies about which the ol' Maverick was complaining were primarily those that supported alternative energy technology, an area of energy independence to which McCain has been consistently opposed. Today's bit of rambling nonsense is the waypoint at which any lingering sense of respect for John McCain begins to flee wildly for the nearest border; he is trying to catch some sort of angry populist wave that has been building for over a year over the obscene profits of Big Oil when the simple stark fact is that he has been a far more muscular defender of Big Oil's ability to earn obscene profits than Obama - or any other Democrat - could ever be expected to be even if cases of spendy whiskey and carloads of hookers were involved (which they aren't of course, given that this is more of a Republican gig...or was, at least, until Duke Cunningham got taken off of the street)...

The truth of John McCain's involvement with Big Oil is straightforward and damning. McCain has no particular distaste for Big Profit by Big Oil, and neither his associations in his current campaign with Big Oil partisans or his meaningful votes on the general subject of Big Oil profits offer any argument to the contrary. John McCain is the Big Oil candidate, and his unconditional flip-flop on off-shore drilling says more about his connections (and the financial benefits to his campaign) than it does about his concern related to the common person's distress over gas prices. His comments of today are perhaps the most dishonest of any he's made during this campaign and serve as the final breaking point....

It's been a long, difficult trail from the heroic McCain of 2000 to the useless political hack we see now, and any respect that I have ever held for John McCain beyond the extremely narrow fact of his military service looks like just another bleached-out random collection of bones scattered along the points of failure on the Oregon Trail. John McCain has long since reached the point of failure at being someone special and all of his heartfelt talk about "a campaign of ideas" has become just another object of cruel mockery as he devolves into being just another self-serving political loser. Today was just one more example of that...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:41 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

What The Bottom Of The Barrel Looks Like 

...Republicans at all levels in these desperate electoral times have thrown just about every shape, size, and consistency of cow pies at their Democratic opponents over the last several months, and we are now getting down to the rotten offal at the bottom of the barrel:

One-Party Government Is A BAD Thing!!11!

In all honesty, that observation probably suggests a Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment. We are, for all intents and purposes, in Iraq because of one-party rule. We are trapped in what is dramatically intoned as the most serious economic crisis since The Great Depression because of one-party rule. We are potentially victims of a Big Brother government because of one-party rule. There's a long, grim, sad black granite wall in Washington, D.C., that came into being because of one-party rule, but at the same time it could well have been a few panels shorter if the right set of circumstances and better security in California had led to one-party government in January of 1969...

On The Other Hand, we are still suffering the effects of a mere 6 years of one-party government that has led to at least 75% - and as many as 91% - of Americans thinking that the country is on the Highway To Hell. And yet...and yet...we have all sorts of Republicans like John McCain, Norm Coleman, Liz Dole and Gordon Smith carrying on about the lurking terror of one-party rule, even though not one of them offered to resign four years ago in order to avoid the brutal horror that one-party government can bring...

This is the ugly bottom-of-the-barrel, end-of-the-line argument of people who no longer have any reasonable argument to offer. They have been tested in a setting where they could have been independent arbiters of the people's will, and what they gave us was misguided and unnecessary war, a threatened environment, constricted personal freedom, a collapsing international economy, and either hatred or distrust by the majority of the people on this finite little planet of ours. What they won't and can't tell us is that the sort of one-party government that looms threateningly over the horizon is one that has beliefs and values that are in polar opposition to the last one-party Amnerican government. It is a one-party government that is by and for The People, not an advocate for the richest or the priveleged or the most well-positioned amongst us...

I must confess, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I've been typing this while Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been shouting on my TV over my shoulder. The disparity with the noise we are hearing from Palin/McCain '08 is stark; it is the difference between a clear call for a new reality that responds to Lincoln's evocation of the better angels of our nature and a vicious gutter brawl outside some seedy gin joint. Republicans want to cast aspersions on the idea of one-party rule without actually exploring the most recent history of its ramifications or their own roles in making those most recent ramifications so painful to most American citizens. The bottom of the barrel is an ugly, slick, dark fetid place to be, but the desperate flailing of a host of at-risk Republicans demonstrates that when you don't have any other stable place on which to stand, the bottom of that barrel is where you find yourself...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:40 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Ted! Ted! He's Our Man! 

...the Republican party in Alaska has cooked up a fascinating argument in their efforts to make an entire silk evening outfit out of a sow's ear following Senator Ted Stevens' federal felony conviction: Vote for Uncle Ted anyway, so we can have a special election after he resigns in disgrace after the election and run a legitimate conservative candidate...

No; seriously. That's the plan...

It's a fascinating argument, made even more spicy by the conflict created in 2004 by a conflict created between legislative action and a ballot initiative regarding the naming of a temporary Senator prior to a special election in the event of of a vacancy. I long ago lost any sense of surprise at the remarkably feral cunning of political insiders, so this latest argument is something that only engenders a certain perverse sense of appreciation. It's a lame argument for reelecting Stevens, you betcha, but the embarrassing assuredness with which this most recent argument for a Stevens vote is advanced demonstrates, if nothing else, how completely corrupt the political parties' view (especially the Republicans' view) of the electoral process has become...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:46 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 27, 2008

So What IS The Arabic Word For Blackmail? 

...the answer, according to Google Translate, it is ابتزاز , and it is probably a word being used with some frequency today in whatever passes for Iraqi halls of power. Gen. Ray Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq, has delivered what in baseball is called a little chin music to the Iraqi government, threatening to cut off pretty much all military and civil support to the country if the Iraqis don't get their act together and agree to the Status of Forces Agreement by the end of the year...

It's a shame that the word "tar baby" has developed a pejorative racial connotation, because in the context of folklore across multiple cultures it is the perfect description of the situation that George W. Bush put us in with his self-serving, misguided, and disastrously mismanaged war of choice in Iraq. He is now forced to play an impossible game of chicken with a variety of Shiite sects - you know, the people we were supposed to be saving from brutality of Saddam's regime and who we made sure would have leadership roles in the new government - who would be more that happy to see us load up yesterday or sooner and hit the dusty trail south to embarkation points in Kuwait. It's a desperate game to play; Odierno's lame threat is one that some of the dissenting Shiite factions would be more than happy to see come to pass...and then there are the problems that would arise if the Sunni-based Sons of Iraq who are the real backbone of the success of "The Surge" suddenly aren't provided with either paychecks or protection from the Shiite majority any more...

There is almost a bizarre sort of twisted symmetry between the long-time progressive insistence to get out of Iraq sooner rather than later and the half-hearted threat by Bushco to pull the plug on Iraq if the SOFA isn't approved by New Year's day. Gee Dub and his gang have drawn a line in the Iraqi sand that too many elements of the fragile Iraqi political coalition would be more than happy to step across and the likely outcome of carrying through with this threat before the next President takes the oath of office would make any arguments about "who lost Iraq" short, brutal, and definitive, to the ultimate, final detriment of any sort of legacy that Gee Dub though he might salvage from the wreckage of his time in office. Barack Obama was running around U.S. during the primary season talking in measured tones about timelines for leaving Iraq and was called every version of "coward" and "traitor" that can be found in a 50-dollar thesaurus, but now Gee Dub's minions are placing bets they can't cover that threaten the sort of outcome that no Democratic nominee to the Presidency of The United States would have ever suggested for fear of replicating - or perhaps exceeding - the electoral beatdown of 1972...

It's a sure sign of desperation when we - the invaders and occupiers - are forced to try to blackmail a recalcitrant Iraqi government in order to maintain a situation that isn't nearly as close to "winner" as we have been told we should accept. This is what blackmail looks like, but it sure as hell isn't what "winning" was supposed to look like...

UPDATE : Edited to get the right friggin' language for the country (wot an idjit)...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:03 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Enduring Mystery Of Gordon Harold Smith 

...it probably isn't any sort of vexing mystery that Oregon would have a Republican serving in the US Senate, even though the governor and four of the five Congresspersons have been Democrats for a number of years now. Orygun has been a state of political moderation for half a century when it comes to state-wide offices; former governor Tom McCall and long-time Senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood were stark examples of the sort of Republicans that are notable mostly by their absence anymore and both Hatfield and Packwood were reelected to office when Democrats were holding the Governor's office...

No, it's no mystery that there would be Republicans in some state-wide office. What is the truly amazing mystery, though, is how Gordon Smith could ever become one of them. He comes from the right wing of the Orygun Republican party that dethroned its own State House Speaker Lynn Lundquist for being insufficiently reactionary and then eliminated him in the 1999 Republican primary back in the day when the wingnuts ran the Legislature. Gordon Smith isn't the Senior Senator from Orygun because he ran his conservative credentials out for all of us to see during the special election to replace the disgraced and resigned Bob Packwood back in 1996 and, as a result, lost to Ron Wyden. He figured the game out quickly, however, and in the process of being the only human being to every run for two different US Senate seats in one calendar year, became the Sudden Moderate that fall to win the vacant seat resulting from Mark Hatfield's retirement...

The reason for the mystery of Gordon Smith is simple: he has been - for four out of every 6 six years during his two Senate terms - The Invisible Man, the living embodiment of the Romulan Cloaking Device. He and his minions tout this lack of visibility as being his efforts to be successful working hard for Orygunians behind the scenes. The truth is that during those four out of every six years Gordo has been working hard for the right-wing agenda that has become the ruling philosophy of the Republican party. When it comes time for reelection, Smith offers himself as the underappreciated "other Democratic Senator" For Oregon, when the fact is that he is by nature and by the majority of his voting history a conservative Republican. Gordon Smith is opposed to a woman's right to control choices over her own body, is opposed to many forms of affirmative action, is opposed to tax reform that would help the vast majority of Oregonians who are just plain folks, and has a history of opposing a meaningful minimum wage when nobody is looking...

Gordo has been running what has come to be understood as a Classic Smith reelection campaign one more time, failing to mention that he is a Republican and failing to mention that he has a fairly reliable voting record as a conservative Republican while at the same time being sure to mention that he is a constant and close companion to both Ron Wyden and Barack Obama, among other Democrats of note. In response, both Wyden and Obama have taken the extraordinary step of running ads supporting Jeff Merkley - extraordinary because Wyden hasn't in the past engaged in any active campaigning against Smith and Obama hasn't previously filmed an ad for or against any Senate or House candidate in this particular election season...

Gordon Smith has always been fundamentally out of step with the general theme of state-wide office-holders that Oregonians have been electing for the last fifty years or more. He's been able to play a successful game by flying under the radar through most of his two terms while casting a few flashy late-term progressive-looking votes to gather up the low-information voters just in time for reelection, but it's time for all of that to end...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:22 PM 0 comments

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