<$BlogRSDURL$>

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

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Thank God I'm Not What I Could Be 

...if I were a cold-hearted, hard-eyed cynic, I would be more than happy to speculate that the arrest of Sherry Johnston on drug charges was little more than an effort to make sure that her son, Levi, didn't get cold feet about making his girl Bristol Palin an honest woman and, as we used to say back home in Idaho, give her baby a name...

Thankfully, I am not a cold-hearted, hard-eyed cynic, so thoughts like this never cross my mind...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:40 PM 0 comments

How To Flunk A College Journalism Class, The AP Way 

...before I elected to change my college major and abandon a degree in journalism for the fast-paced, exciting world of natural resource management, I had occasion to take a few courses revolving around the subject of writing straight news reports. If I had written something like this, I would have flunked out of college...

Clearly somebody at the Associated Press wants you to think that Rahm Emanuel is in trouble because of associations with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. To be clear, they don't want to inform you that he is in trouble; they want to lead you to the conclusion that he should be in trouble. As a result, somebody (we don't know who because there is no byline), has made sure to write a story filled with dark innuendo, baseless supposition offered as fact, and indictment founded on what can only charitably be called insinuation. There is much drama here when one first reads this report about all those suspicious connections between Emanuel and Blagojevich, but when it comes time to actually focus on what is being written, one finds that there is no 'there' there...

So they know each other. They have had occasion to interact in the past. That's not much to go on when trying to suggest that the "Senate Seat For Sale" case is going to be a "threat" to Emanuel. It certainly is enough to crank out a highly speculative and fact-free screed tossing around all sorts of accusations, but that style shouldn't come as any surprise since that is Faux News stock in trade. It isn't, on the other hand, enough for what is purportedly a straight news story by the straight news section of a major news syndicate. And it wouldn't have earned a passing grade in those old journalism classes back in the day....
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:46 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 19, 2008

Why Politics Needs A Shepherd's Crook 

...nobody of my acquaintance has ever seen a real live Vaudeville show since it trailed away in the 1930's. Lots of my contemporaries, on the other hand, have spent hours their parents no doubt considered "wasted" watching Looney Tunes, in particular all the variants of the Bugs Bunny Show, so even though the shepherd's crook "hook" was a vaudevillian creation for getting stone-cold losers off the stage, we saw enough of the same action to 'get it'. Today's performance by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich demonstrates perfectly why we as a nation suffer from the inability to use that "hook" as a means of getting people off the national stage when it's time for them to move on...

There probably exists some sort of narrow legal argument that Blagojevich didn't actually commit any sort of serious crime requiring federal prosecution and removal from office. He was just talkin', ya see. No harm; no foul. From a purely legal sense, that argument might just fly and serve to keep Blago from spending any time behind bars, but it ignores the reality. Blagojevich is, of course, innocent until proven guilty of whatever charges Pat Fitzgerald might want to offer up over time, but all of those trascripted words (f-bombs and all) suggest that, at the very least, he should be thinklng hard and fast about what he would like to do after government service...

There are other suitable examples to support the thesis that there needs to be a political hook: Larry Craig comes to mind, as does David Vitter. And, no, Vitter doesn't get a free pass solely on the basis of the expiration of the statue of limitation for the criminal liability of his taste in high-priced hookers. Blagojevich is now a part of that gang for one simple reason: regardless of whether he committed any crime for which he could be convicted, he talked about his constitutionally-mandated responsibility to fill a vacant United States Senate seat as if it were a commodity requiring remuneration for proper consideration. Regardless of criminality, even talking that way is a violation of public trust, and there isn't any room for some later effort to insist that you were just spouting off. Guys in bars and bloggers spout off; Governors don't have that luxury, or at least they don't if they nurture any hope of having their selections being considered legitimate...

There are just simply people out there on America's stage who don't understand that their act is failing. In the vaudevillian world, we would be spared further embarrassment by the shepherd's crook "hook" being used to drag underperformers off the stage. Sadly, we don't have that in politics; all we have is a mechanism that dictates that people caught out as losers take on the responsibility of calling themselves "out" and hooking themselves off the stage. As David Vitter showed us last year and as Rod Blagojevich has decided to show us now, the desire to hang on to elected office is a powerful force and only the reintroduction of the use of the shepherd's crook "hook" will suffice to finally get people like Blago off the national stage...

(edited to herd roaming sentence fragments back to the places I thought I had left them; remember, proofreading is your friend)
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Excuse Me While I Feign Surprised Outrage 

...so Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released a report that seriously calls into question whether Alberto Gonzalez (as White House Counsel) and Condoleezza Rice (as National Security Advisor) told the truth to Congress about whether the CIA had or had not cautioned the White House that reports about Iraq's efforts to procur unranium for a nuclear weapons program was too shaky to be included in a variety of speeches by Gee Dub and the gang. I'm shocked...SHOCKED, I say...that there might be evidence that minions of the Bush administration would have intentionally misled Congress in what was a clear rush to invasion even in real time when it was happening...

I'm somewhat less shocked that Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has said that he and the other minority members will not be endorsing the report. Rep. Issa would refuse to endorse a report affirming that he bathes more than once a week if such a report demonstrated that he was just another useless lackey shilling for a failed and brutally misguided policy that put him squarely on the wrong side of a growing divide in public opinion...

I would probably feel better about all of this if I were able to work up some sense of outrage, but my outrage meter shorted out a while ago in a spectacular burst of sparks, flame, and smoke. All of these revelations finally coming out in the last days of the longest eight years in American history are simply written confirmation of what we already knew in the first place. High-ranking public officials lying to Congress - Check. Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo covered up by acquiescent if not approving superiors - Check. Torture of prisoners in Iraq that rise to the level of war crimes condoned - if not mandated - by high-ranking public officials - Check. And the hits just keep rolling...

It isn't possible for anyone who has been paying even casual attention over the last eight years to even carry off a half-way credible pretense of being surprised or outraged by all the things that are slapping us in the face these days. George W. Bush and the people who made him who he was weren't all that terribly interested in spending much time trying to hide what they were all about and where they wanted to take us; they only spent as much time as it would take to get the right sound bites on the evening news so all those folks watching it over dinner could choke down the meatloaf quickly enough to be able to gasp out a half-strangled "Those Bastards!" to the giggling shock of their children. The "go/no go" question about sending our friends and neighbors off to war has always been to some degree a public relations campaign in a democracy; Bushco raised the effort to a level that would make all any highly paid network programming executive trying to push yet another "reality" program into the schedule weep with envy...

All of this worked at the time, for reasons having more to do with the compliance of the so-called Fourth Estate of the MSM than any actual skill at salesmanship, because the truth was sitting right out there in the open ready to be seen. So please forgive me if I happen to encounter some difficulty trying to gin up any really meaningful surprise or outrage over reports like this new one by Waxman. It's hard to get worked up over reports about things you already knew...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:30 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Why Contraception Exists - Strange Baby Name Edition 

...it isn't a well-known fact amongst the pro-birth, anti-contraception crowd that one of the most important reasons for contraception isn't to help people who want to have sex from making babies. One of the most important reasons for contraception is to help people who shouldn't be making babies have sex. Examples of this fundamental truth abound across the vast social and economic spectrum of this great country of ours (what the heck, maybe my own circumstances offer a compelling argument), but today's offering is certainly compelling...

Dad says he picked that particular name for his son because he liked it and it would be distinctive. Well, yeah, it is certainly hard to argue with that second part. All three children will no doubt have exciting and distinctive lives because of various components of their names, but - out here in that big ol' testy, cruel multicultural world in which we all live - people who willingly creates a new person should probably have a little bit of perspective about the long-term ramifications of the names that they hang on the kid. Failing that, they should at least have the perspective to understand why the kids may never write or call or visit anymore as they spend their golden years shivering in their refrigerator carton 'efficiency apartments' in some hobo village down by the river. Failing that, they really should consider contraceptive technology before the fact...

I would expand on this theme, but I need to go check to make sure that my second-born child, Conqueror Vlad Pillaging Rapist, is getting his homework done...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:00 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 15, 2008

Strange Tales From My Life: A Truly Odd "Snow Day" 

...celebration reigned supreme in the Grumpy household today, although it was primarily focused on the high school sophomore who, I suspect, would drink his own bathwater rather than go to school (and we need not mention that in his presence, if you don't mind, because planting contrary, defeatist thoughts in a still malleable young mind is wrong, thank you very much). His celebratory mood came about because of a two-hour school delay that turned into classes for the day being canceled, but the way that we got to that point is truly strange...

Yes, it had snowed and became cold over the last couple of days, but 1) snow in Central Oregon is to be expected in winter and it only snowed a few inches, and B) sure, it was cold, like 1 degree Fahrenheit cold, and the roads were absolute sheets of ice, but the roads are commonly just as slick and our Central Orygun school district has kept the schools open when temperatures were at least 15 degrees colder than they were this morning. Yet today the local school district started out with a late announcement of a two-hour delay which morphed into most of the district schools being closed for the day. The entire Pacific Northwest is locked in a little-noticed deep freeze with snow and frozen roads and massive school closures, so this particular addition wouldn't be noticed on its own (aside from the damage it does to the whole image we Orygun East-Siders nurture about being made of sterner stuff than those soft city folk living on the west side of the Orygun Cascades). The actual reason for my second-born's day off is, however, fascinating...

Turns out the reason was prosaically simple: they couldn't get the buses started. Locally, that sort of reason would normally look like a lame excuse, given the fact that winter is usually a cold and snowy time around these parts, but we live in a new world, one that contains a thing called Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) that was formulated in response to the need to reduce greenhouse gases. As it so happens, ULSD has some interesting properties that can result in it turning into a petrochemical jelly at a higher temperature that the old stuff. As it also happens, the transportation specialists of my local school district apparently didn't know about either this problem or specific remediation to address this problem; as a result, virtually none of the school buses would start this morning at 6:00...

I won't even bother to dwell on imagining the sense of panic that must have hung like an ugly fog over the local bus barns when faithful old buses that have faithfully fired up at temperatures at least 15 degrees lower that those seen this morning refused - like some recalcitrant rented mule - to even make some sort of halfhearted croaking noise. It is sufficient to just reflect on the fact that on a day that wasn't nearly as cold as it can get around these parts and without anything approaching as much snow as can come in one storm around these parts without the local schools being closed, we had a "snow day"...because the buses wouldn't start. In over fifty years spent primarly living in high cold Snow Country, I've never experienced or heard of this particular reason for a school closure. I'm making sure that my second-born understands just how lucky he is to have this unusual opportunity to add to his life story...not to mention how oh-so-very-lucky he is to have all this whole marvelous free day to address the extra chores that an unexpected day off from school can accrue...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:28 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 14, 2008

I've Got Yer White Christmas Right HERE! 

...it doesn't snow very often in Oregon's Willamette Valley, that broad flat band of lowlands between the Coast Range and the Cascades that is home to the majority of the state's population, including Portland, the state capital in Salem, and the homes of the two major universities in Corvallis and Eugene (that would be the Oregon State University Beavers and the University of Oregon Ducks, respectively). Unlike the higher, colder regions east of the Cascade Range where winter is a well-understood snowy season, the Willamette Valley usually experiences winter - and Christmas - as a dark rainy time rather than a Bing Crosby song or some sort of realization of those Norelco Santa ads from the '60's. To be plainly honest, 80% of the area population would cheerfully turn the dogs loose on anyone silly enough to be getting down with that "sleighbells in the snow" nonsense...

Given the wild winter weather that is gripping other parts of the country, it isn't particularly surprising that the brutal icy winter blast that the Portland metro area is being hammered by right now isn't making much national news. On the other hand, it never does, even when not much is going on elsewhere in the country, but tomorrow a good portion of the economic, educational, and governmental infrastructure of the most populous part of the state will be taking a snow day - and this action may, to some greater or lesser degree, extend through a good part of the week...

Sitting here on the east slope of the Orygun Cascades with a blizzard outside and a real-time right-now temperature of 6 degrees Fahrenheit, tonight's Portland-area closure I found most...ok, I'll admit it...amusing was the Winter Wonderland Christmas lights display laid out along the track at Portland International Raceway. While this cancellation is perfectly understandable, given that the streets around the Metro area are ice-skating rinks and most people around those parts don't even own snow tires (trust me on this; when I moved from the mountains of Central Idaho to the Portland Metro area thirty years ago, I endured endless verbal abuse for clattering around all winter long on studded tires), it's still good in an oddly perverse way to see that the cancellation of the Winter Wonderland because of winter wonderland conditions suggests that Irony still survives...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:01 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?