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

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Closed-Circuit For Chip Saltsman 

...since Chip Saltsman undoubtedly grew up clinging to every word of the daily broadcasts of Paul Harvey, main-stream A.M. radio's stern conservative voice back when Rush Limbaugh was just some half-bright baseball flack, he has undoubtedly heard that title phrase, so he knows what this means:

funny pictures of cats with captions

Personally, I believe it's time to step up to the plate and encourage...no, make that insist...that the Republican National Committee move NOW to make Chip Saltsman its new chairman. Any national party that has suffered the sort of electoral bloodbaths that the Republican's have endured over the last two election cycles can't help but improve its prospects by propping up one of its seemingly inexhaustible supply of brain-dead racist crackers as its leader...

While there are certainly other candidates for the RNC head honcho position who don't understand what's going on here (cue token black Republican Ken Blackwell), the otherwise obviously simple fact is that too many Republicans simply don't understand that Chip's little Christmas CD mailing is more than just a misguided jab at the Forty-Fourth President Of The United States. The Republican party will again matter when they seem to care about all Americans rather than caring about image; obsessing over "Barack the Magic Negro" at the expense of "The Star-Spanglish Banner" or some of the other gems on that charming little CD burn indicates that they still don't "get it"...

On the other hand, there isn't a reason in the world to distract them from their current obsession; the state of the nation and the world these days demonstrates that people who anchor their political philosophy to the premise that government is "the problem" shouldn't be allowed to govern. That doesn't mean, however, that they shouldn't be allowed - indeed, encouraged - to select leaders that prove that point...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:42 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

A Glimmer Of Light At The End Of A Dark Year 



...anybody who was there can verify that 1968 was a truly grim year, one that marked more endings than beginnings and the death of more dreams than any one year should have to endure. Tet, King, and Kennedy are merely the grim benchmarks for a year that also saw the beginning and end of the Prague Spring, rioting and death around the world, and the beginning of the six-year nightmare presidency of Richard Nixon (and that isn't close to being all as far as that miserable year was concerned). It was only in the very last days that there was a glimmer of how good we could be as a people rather than how bad we sometimes were...

Forty years ago today, Apollo 8 carried the first humans into orbit around a celestial body other than our own earth. Forty years ago tonight Anders, Lovell, and Borman read the first ten verses of Genesis Chapter 1 to us from almost 240,000 miles away. All these years later, it is almost impossible to convey to the majority of Americans who weren't either alive or aware on Dec. 24, 1968, just how incredible an event that was. Nov. 4, 2008, may be the closest thing to it a long time in terms of the powerful emotions of the moment and that sense of a fundamental shift from the way things were to the way they will be, but 2008 has been a grumpy, occasionally dispiriting year in the American conscience and not an ugly, deadly, angry, truly bad year like 1968...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:19 AM 0 comments

Monday, December 22, 2008

On Wishing For A White Christmas 

...I lived for a number of years in the Greater Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area along the Oregon-Washington border. No, they don't "do" snow very well. In their defense, though, they don't have any reason or history to "do" snow well. In all the years I lived in the area, I never once experienced a White Chrismas and - having moved there from Central Idaho - found all of the Christmas lights and decorations in the midst of dreary, dark, cloudy, rainy days to be somewhat disconcerting...

Historically, it simply doesn't snow in the Portland area. Yes, there will be perhaps one or two episodes during a given winter where they get either snow or freezing rain (freezing rain as a result of cold east winds from Eastern Orygun as a storm front moves in - thank the Columbia River and the Cascade Mountains for that - is a more common occurence than real live turn-the-ground-white snow, but even those events generally only last for a day or so and aren't all that likely during any given winter). This year, however, is special; Portland, Orygun, has been paralyzed for almost a week and a half by the sort of weather that one would normally only expect to see - and we have been seeing - out here east of the Cascade Range 4000 feet higher above sea level...

Nobody is dreaming of a White Christmas in Orygun's Willamette Valley this year. For better or worse, it's going to be the sort of grim reality that they may be occasionally wistful about but haven't ever actually looked forward to. Children are ecstatic, naturally, at having been gifted an extra week off because of school closures over the last several days; parents, at the same time, have been growing increasingly testy because they have either been fighting the weather or trapped at home because nobody has snow tires on their vehicles and those who didn't already know so are learning that even an SUV without proper winter traction tires isn't all that much better than nothing when the snow gets rolled down to white ice. These are people who would attack Bing Crosby with an ice scraper if he started crooning anywhere within arm reach...

Given all of this, I can only think of one Christmas gift to offer my former neighbors in the Portland Metro area:



...although, to be honest, this version might do a better job of boosting the sense of humor of a great many snowbound parents...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:01 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Counting Down The Minutes Until The Dangerous Idiots Are Gone 

...it is only because of his appearance on - where else - Faux News that Dick "Big Dick" Cheney could be considered to be conducting his final Victory Tour. Why someone with at least a modicum of common sense never thought to slap a big ol' padlock on the gates to Big Dick's "Undisclosed Location" is one of those mysteries that will never be sufficiently answered, but I guess that is what it is. In any case, the "Big News" today was Big Dick's dissing of Vice Presiden - elect Joe Biden over Biden's 'misunderstanding' of the Vice President's roll in the Federal Government...

Big Dick Sayz:
"He also said that the 'all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article I of the Constitution,'" Cheney said.

"Well, they're not. Article I of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch," he said.

That, of course, isn't what Biden said in his debate with Sarah Palin; he was referring specifically to the role of the Vice President in the context of a question about the Constitutionally-defined role of the Vice President. But that's OK; misrepresentation is a cornerstone of both wingnut political philosophy and right-wing punditry. One only has to witness "commentary" such as this from just after the VP debate to understand that...

None of this is hard; the only specified roles of the vice president are identified in Article 1 Section 3 and in the 25th Amendment. Article II, aside from describing method of election (as it is connected to the election of the President) and disqualification, does not define any particular role - much less anything beyond the mere acknowledgement of the existence of the position - for the vice president, despite the desperate insistence of various commentators who apparently haven't mastered either the meaning of the Constitution of the United States or the use of simple tools like Google...

John Nance Garner accurately described the Constitutional importance of the Vice Presidency seventy years ago by declaring it to be "not worth a bucket of warm piss." The U.S. Constitution doesn't pose much of a contradictory argument to this evaluation, and it was only with the advent of former Nixon acolyte Dick Cheney into the vice presidency that we began to see a breath-taking and disturbing redefinition of the role of the Vice President. That brutally disturbing time is about to pass, though, and all we are left with is counting the minutes until "Big Dick" and his self-serving minions are finally gone from the national stage and we can finally look forward to the restoration of something like a commonly understood role for the Vice President of the United States...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:09 PM 0 comments

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