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

Friday, January 02, 2009

The Problem With Colorado And Delaware 

...the citizens of Delaware and Colorado should rise up in righteous, indignant protest against their respective Governors. If they won't, the Chambers of Commerce should register their fervent complaints. Each of these states has lost a United States Senator to the gaping maw of that insidious Obama political machine, but the Governors of these two states have steadfastly refused to draw attention to their states by creating or tolerating any sort of drama attendant to the selection of a replacement for Joe Biden or Ken Salazar...

This is simply wrong. There should be Drama, Attention, and maybe even a little bit of tantalizing Scandal associated with this sort of dramatic opportunity, if for only to demonstrate that these people know how to Play The Game. Maybe a Udall with a shady past or a snatch-and-grab operation to bring Bo Biden back to the States all trussed up like a digital camo-draped turkey in the back of some high-speed Deleware-based corporate jet. After all, President Obama could clean the mess up with pardons just after lunch on 1/20....

OK, juuuust kidding about that last thing. The bottom line is simple, though; there is such a thing as have a minimum of excitement in the filling of a vacant Senate seat, and two states that don't really deserve to be featured in their own ongoing dramas (given that each state only gets 2 (two) Senators, so New York or Illinois don't have anything over Colorado or Delaware) are sucking up all the oxygen in the room while two other states, neither of which have that strange sort of star power so motivated by the New York City - Chicago angst that has tainted American culture over the last several decades. Bad news for the Eastern media centers: it matters more to us out west that we are sending Jeff Merkley and Mark Udall to the United States Senate than whatever the outcome is of the brutal nonsensical Blagojevich/Kennedy nonsense you are so desperate to create and nurture...

Even more to the point, two other states have managed to address their vacancies without being part of the all-day-long cable news drama that has been cooked up for just two of the one hundred generally equal members of the US Senate. Residents of Colorado and Delaware should be upset, though, because this would have been their big chance to make a mark on the national stage, but it has - from a cable news standpoint - all been thrown away. They coulda been somebody, but they won't...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:02 PM 0 comments

Fighting The War On Terror, One Jumpy Bigot At A Time 

...just in case you thought things were starting to get back to normal, this lede should disabuse you of that notion:
Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

It's a fascinating story, really, that reveals much about the still-swirling psychic turmoil roiling many souls, not to mention certain attitudes about how members of a particular religion value life. The official story itself is sufficiently murky and stuffed with confusing and contradictory official statements that a reasonable person might just conclude that some folks may have overreacted just a little bit and now need to fall back on the vast, overreaching power of federal air travel regulations to cover their tracks...

The first issue here appears to be that those native-born American citizens who were booted off the AirTran flight may not actually have been guilty of saying anything inappropriate; the offense they might have committed was talking while looking Muslim. Either that, or various members of my immediate family who have occasion to fly really need to get their hands on the official List of Inappropriate Statements. These native-born American citizens certainly weren't aware they were saying anything that would set off such a remarkable chain of events, and I would hate to have my native-born relatives trapped in the same circumstances...

Another issue is, obviously, one of cultural misperception brought to you courtesy of those talking heads whose stock in trade has been pushing fear of scary brown people. The core of this group was two brothers traveling with their wives and young children and somebody decided - based on what was probably an otherwise off-hand comment - that they just might be intending to do...well, something...but possibly do what we all know scary brown people do with an airplane after 9/11, even - apparently - at the expense of their own wives and children. We've seen variants of this same general theme of Muslim scariness played out across the national political stage over the last couple of years, so there's no reason to deny that it has effectively seeped into the large empty crevasses found in the brains of some members of the traveling public...

A lesser but still interesting issue is how - or even whether - people recognize misunderstandings and move on. According to the detained travelers, the airline refused to rebook the nine passengers (which is within its rights) and the airline didn't really go out of its way to refute that. The TSA and airport police are being extremely circumspect in defining their precise roles in this whole clownshow in what sounds remarkably like an effort to deflect any blame from themselves, and the only party who seems to have done anything to actually help the detained travelers was the FBI, which assisted them in booking flights on a different airline...

We've seen this before, of course, and we will see it again, because those who've trafficking in fear and hate have been profoundly successful in certain segments of the population. Someone who has bought into their story heard somebody who looks just like the people they are supposed to be afraid of say something that - in that context - freaked him or her out and started an embarrassing chain of events that nobody from the airline to federal officials could stop; everybody was trapped by that initial misunderstanding by some jumpy travelers taught to be scared of brown people...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:45 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Happy New Year Fail 

...the new year is not starting out on sound footing in the Pacific Northwest. Another in a seemingly interminable Pacific storms is sweeping across the region on New Year's Day, and things are getting ugly...

At the moment of this writing, anyone trying to travel across the Washington Cascades is, quite simply, out of luck because all three mountain passes are closed by heavy snow or severe avalanche danger. At the same time, the heavy rain and melting of the low-elevation snow pack that accumulated over the last two weeks has led the National Weather Service to predict widespread flooding along Johnson Creek in the Portland Metro area and potentially major flooding along the Oregon Coast in portions of Tillamook and the small town of Nehalem. Homes and businesses will be flooded in all of these locations, which makes the High Wind Warnings, Winter Storm Warnings, and Avalanche Warnings pasted all over the rest of the region look like pretty small potatoes...

My prayers are with those in harm's way. This is not how you start a "Happy" New Year...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:19 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Happy New Year (Almost)!!! A Time-Sensitive Post 



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...on my TV, people in New Yawk are getting all crazy at the advent of the new year. Out here on the slippery, snowy-slushy eastern slopes of the Central Oregon Cascades, it's still 2 1/2 hours until we can call it quits on one of the more brutal years in my half-century of memory. The coming of a new calendar year is a somewhat arbitrary dividing line between the bad that was before and the hopeful new that will come, but this seems like a special time because of the new that the next year offers...

So, from my family to your family, may this new year offer the fulfillment of all those hopes and dreams that this last year - and so many years before - seemed so gruesomely and gleefully ready to crush. We enter the New Year with the useless pain and horror of the last eight years ready to slough off of our backs like so much dead skin and the promise of a new direction sitting only twenty tantalizing days away. The New Year toast/observation of Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem "Ring out, Wild Bells" has never seemed more appropriate than it does now:
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:20 PM 0 comments

Curious Aside Of The Day 

...one could create a veritable cottage industry geared solely to speculation as to just exactly why Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich named Roland Burris to fill Obama's vacant Senate seat at this particular time. In fact, cable news already has, so never mind that, but one thing that snuck out as a curious aside to the sudden wordstorm was a striking comment Burris is making this morning to TODAY’s Meredith Vieira:
“(Refusing to seat Burris) could give the appearance (of racism) to a lot of individuals — not only African-Americans...Is it racism that’s taking place? That’s the question that someone else could raise.”

Excuse me?

Did I miss something here? Was there some conversation that slipped past me since December 9th where Senate Democratic leaders entertained the possibility of seating a Blagojevich appointee? It seemed pretty clear from the outset, I thought, that they weren't going to be down with any person he might name to fill the vacancy, regardless of race, creed, or color...

One of the problems with my occasional powerful bouts of cynicism is that - in the grip of such an episode - I start seeing machinations where none may otherwise exist. I feel like I'm on the verge of one of those moments.

Burris' comment is so strange, so curiously jarring in the context of every public discussion about the likely refusal of the Senate to seat any nominee put forward by this particular Illinois governor that it's hard to imagine such a thought innocently popping into someone's head. Beyond that, it sounds almost too calculated to be dismissed as some sort of throwaway line. It smells like strategy and gamesmanship trying to masquerade as social concern in order to achieve some not-quite-obvious end...

Then again, maybe I'm just being too cynical...

Reflective Update:
I know that Congressman Bobby Rush was bringing up this very "racist" theme during the press conference yesterday, but I thought it was just a hyperbolic extension of his past observation that the seat should be filled by an African-American and not the early developmental stage of the primary argument for this appointment. I see now, courtesy of Jake Tapper's blog, that I was, as is occasionally the case, wrong. Linking definitive statements of both Senate Democratic leaders and the President-elect to the actions and words of Orval Faubus, George Wallace and Bull Connor puts a whole new spin on the idea of "talking points". It's also, as Tapper's last link notes, quite a distance from his views on 9 December 2008 about the Governor's right to name a replacement ...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:33 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Swear To God, In The Name Of Jesus, Can We Knock This Crap OFF?! 

...quick, without Googling the answer, tell me who gave either an invocation or benediction at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Or Lyndon Johnson's inauguration. Or Jimmy Carter's. Or either of Bill Clinton's inaugurations. NO GOOGLING!! Tell me now who - if anybody - offered a prayer of invocation or benediction on any of those occasions. More to the point, tell me what they said. Tell me how they ended their prayers. Did they invoke the name of Jesus? If so, how?

If you fail that rather simple test, as I suspect you will, please excuse me if I no longer care what you think about who may be delivering either the invocation or the benediction at the breathtakingly profound event that will be occurring on this next 20th day of January. The world is falling apart before our eyes, this country is falling apart under our very feet, and nothing about these realities have any meaningful thing to do with who is going to say what prayer to any particular God at any given moment during the inauguration of Barack Obama three weeks from today. When you decide to make an oversized issue out of who may be saying what prayer to which deity during a ceremony that has little to do with the prayers being said and everything to do with the installation of what a beleaguered country hopes will be a profoundly sane and directed administration focused on Lincoln's idea of a government of, by, and for the people, you lose your focus...

Yes, there are big social issues and who's on which side of the divide at play here. The problem I have with this whole divisive argument that made Rick Warren's selection as Invocator In Chief is that so much hard-headed stupidity is involved on both sided of the same-sex marriage debate. One side recoils in horror at the idea of granting a Biblical approval to what the other side sees as the granting of societal recognition of a simple legal contract whose actual legally enforceable terms - regardless of your socio-political views - are defined by the state rather than by the church. Both sides, however, want to fight over a word - "marriage" - rather than deal with the concept, despite the fact that many thousands of couples every year become "married" in the eyes of the state in ceremonies that are entirely secular, without a Bible in sight...

All of this baggage has spun its way all the way out to this strange fight over whether Rick Warren will in some manner, fashion, or form invoke the name of Jesus in his invocation prayer. Given the reality that he probably won't invoke either the Great Spaghetti Monster, Buddha, Baal, Ra, Jupiter, or the Mayan god Yum Kaax, it may be time to rely on the simple technology of the 'mute' button to get through this trying time...

The Bad News is out there for all to see: there will be a certain tip of the hat to a Christian tradition. A hated Liberal target will have a brief appearance on TV giving an invocation (and, yes I understand the whole Rick Warren - Measure 8 thing all the rest of his national history). Sometime later in the ceremony a much more acceptable hero of the civil rights movement will give the benediction and will possibly also pray "in the name of Jesus". As far as the state of the nation is concerned, neither of them matter. There is only one person who will be standing on that national stage that matters just after 11 am on 01/20/2009, and he isn't going to govern based on the expressed words of either of those prayer-givers any more than he is going to govern on the basis of the particular views of Yo-Yo Ma...

I'm going to be at work that day in any case, so none of this really matters to me on more levels than I really have the patience to explain, so let me just provide a simple, completely portable and universal hint:

Mute button.

Use it during all that prayer stuff.

Email me if Barack Obama declares in the course of his undoubtedly stirring rhetoric that he will found his administration on the solid rock of Rick Warren's "Purpose-Driven Life" or that the invocation prayer says all there is to say about the next four years. Otherwise, unless you can quote...without GOOGLING, damn it!...the invocation prayer for Bill Clinton's second inaugural ceremony, then how about you give this most recent conflict a rest...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:29 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 29, 2008

More Proof That Irony Is Not Yet Dead (As If You Needed It) 

...the headline itself tells the whole story:
U.S. seeks 147-year sentence in torture case

George W. Bush? Dick "Big Dick" Cheney? Rummy, perhaps? Maybe General Miller or Jay Bybee? Nope. Wrong, wrong, wrong (and wrong and wrong). The culprit in question is the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, Charles McArthur Emmanuel (aka Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr., an American citizen who was found guilty and awaits sentencing under a 1994 U.S. law criminalizing the commission of torture overseas...

The statute in question is Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C. The Bush administration version of the Justice Department, which most reasonable people have come to understand isn't the same thing as what real Americans would accept as a realistic representation of United States justice (much less what we would like to see as a Department of Justice), has decided to explore the outer limits of credulity with statements like:
"It undermines respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller in last week's filing.

and:
A recent Justice Department court filing describes torture...as a "flagrant and pernicious abuse of power and authority" that warrants severe punishment of Taylor.

You would have to be a fool to argue with any of these stern, profound statements by what has passed for the last eight years as a pale imitation of "The Best and The Brightest". Torture represents an undermining of respect for authority and a flagrant abuse of power; who is going to dispute that simple, raw fact. The U.S. law under which the conviction and upcoming sentencing of the younger Taylor has been pursued offers some rather vague definitions for what can be view as examples of torture. There are such things as "the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering":



or "the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality":



Make no mistake; the actions for which Emmanuel has been convicted are most certainly torture. The brutal, simple facts of his case make a sentence of his whole life plus as many years as it takes seems a simple enough enactment of justice. There are, however, other people out there who have their own questions to answer, and many of those people would be wise to abjure any offers of foreign travel for as long as any international statutes of limitations may exist. Waterboarding isn't mentioned in Emmanuel's conviction, nor is the outsourcing of any sort of 'aggressive interrogation techniques' to those countries not subject to Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C of the United States Code...

Torture, according to Bushco, is something other people do. We don't do that; we just ask a lot of questions that are accompanied by electrodes to fingertips and genetalia, the occasional simulated drowning, and frequent random violation of simple, basic moral precepts of the interviewees. None of those things violate either international law or US Code...because Gee Dub's minions and handlers say so. We will, on the other hand, prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who does all of that torture stuff...because we can. That's what "winners" get to do...

Anyone who says that Irony Is Dead just isn't paying attention anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:55 PM 0 comments

Not Just Another "10" List For 2008 

...it is, of course, a tradition beyond that of even the internets to compile a "Top 10" or "Bottom 10" list or some other compendium of the passing year's highlights and lowlights. Businessweekten of the worst preditions about 2008. Most of them are anchored in the financial world - not surprising for an enterprise named "Businessweek", I understand - and all of them demonstrate that most predictions about most things are just cheap talk, but my favorite (and the entry not about high finances or the economy) is Number 10:
 has decided to get in on the act, featuring what in their consideration are
10. A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, the title of a book by conservative commentator Shelby Steele, published on Dec. 4, 2007.

Mr. Steele, meet President-elect Barack Obama.
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:52 PM 0 comments

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