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

Saturday, December 19, 2009

On The Twin Curses Of Perfidy And Emails 

...it probably isn't a very Christmas-y sort of night this evening out there somewhere in that D.C. Magic Land where one of Bart Stupak's staffer's lives. It might not even be all that sugar plum fairy warm and cozy in whatever WiFi-free redoubt that Stupak himself is holed up in this evening. Despite the fact that local weather patterns are setting up to provide both Stupak and his less-than-internet-savvy staffer with the wonderful marvel of a White Christmas, they both face the grim understanding that next Friday morning they will probably both find at least the dirty black residue of the coal that will be left in their stockings as a result of the office of Representative Bart Stupak (supposedly D-Mich) getting caught coordinating with the office of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Narcolepsy) in the aftermath of Sen. Ben Nelson offering up vote number 60 for the Democratic health insurance reform bill...

It would be bad enough - and has, I suppose, actually been bad enough - that neither Stupak or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are intellectually beefy enough to understand either the fundamental underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution or the teachings of Jesus and his disciples as expressed in the New Testament. All by itself, the sort of forced subjugation to a particular viewpoint that he supports is more of an Old Testament concept that you would normally see expressed by Southern Baptists as opposed to Roman Catholics like Stupak. But that really isn't the point here, just like the fact that he is a member of the C Street contingent of The Family isn't really the issue here (although that seems to be an odd crowd for a Catholic to be running with)...

The point here is that Stupak, through at least one member of his staff, has been flat-out busted working in concert with the office of the Republican Senate Minority leader to defeat the current iteration of health insurance reform. In Bart Stupak's world, this is no longer about trying to use his own small Democratic House coalition to control reproductive choices for people who - unlike him - can get pregnant. It is now all about consorting with the sorts of people who would move heaven and earth to simply and finally defeat Democratic efforts to reform some aspect of the disaster we know as health care for simple, callous political reasons. It's about working with Senate Republicans to kill a Democratic initiative...

Stupak has been caught out - courtesy of his faithful staffer - engaging in the sort of perfidy that defines what a 'soon-to-be-former' Person of Consequence looks like in party politics. It is bad enough that his misguided staffer got caught sending emails to the Catholic Bishops and minions from James Dobson's Family Research Council, but cc's to the offices of Mitch McConnell and Congressman Chris Smith (R-19th Century NJ) demonstrate with a cruel sort of finality which world Bart Stupak lives in. Disloyal treachery has its own ugly reward, of course, but the insidious 'forever' nature of emails makes tonight a very special moment for a couple of people in the World As Bart Stupak Knows It who have decided to throw any concept of being Democrats way deep into the trash bin and - courtesy of a fundamental lack of understanding of the e-world - let us all see who they actually are...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:30 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 18, 2009

When "The Birds And The Bees" Collide With Our Overtaxed Military 

...I probably shouldn't have laughed when I read the headline "Army general in Iraq bans pregnancy", but I did. The underlying subject isn't funny at all because of the volumes it speaks about the degree to which our military is stretched to - if not beyond - the limits of its collective endurance (either that, or there is pretty bodacious untapped Army recruiting theme lurking out there if-you-know-what-I mean-and-I-think-you-do). But, still, really now...

Army troops in northern Iraq have been ordered - on penalty of court marshal - to not get pregnant? Pregnancy is Banned? Pregnancy, at least as it has been explained to me by Mrs. Jack K., is an outcome. It is, as I understand it (as as evidenced by a couple of young adults who have been calling me "daddy" for nearly 21 years), the result of some other activity. I'm not sure I have a complete understanding of all this stuff, but I think I have the basics down pretty well, and because of that I'm not exactly sure how one goes about maintaining a straight face while banning outcomes. It's like delivering a case of "beans and frankfurters" MRE's to a combat outpost and then banning flatulence in the close confines of a Humvee or Bradley Fighting Vehicle...

I'm trying to picture how this new order might be received by the troops and their loved ones back home. Did Gen. Cucolo just reinforce prohibitions against sexual activity amongst the troops, or did he only step up the punishment for 'getting caught'? Is deployment to Northern Iraq an assignment to some weird sort of Club Med that - even though it suffers the absence of pearly white beaches, azure ocean waves, or bottomless Mojito's and neverending Corona's - demands that this sort of order needs to be issued to American troops in this surprisingly romantic theater of operations, or has the General simply decided to apply a creative solution to a problem that afflicts other commands with less creative commanders? Back on the home front, do we focus less on collecting phone cards and prepaid cell phones and candy and lip balm and hand sanitizers for those "support the troops" care packages and turn our attention to condoms, over-the-counter spermicides, and contraceptive sponges (and cookies; cookies are always good) in order to keep our troops out of an entirely new sort of harm's way?

It's the rational behind the order that is - and probably should be - the most disturbing aspect of this order. The fact that removing a pregnant soldier from the field creates a hole in any particular unit that can't be readily filled speaks volumes about the place we are in these days and the people who got us to this place. We continue to hang on an edge, lacking the resources to replace troops who need to leave a given theater before their tours are completed, whatever the reason. This reality does raise a question, though: what about soldiers who blow out an ACL in a pickup basketball game? Do they face a general court marshal if they need to be taken out of theater?
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:55 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 14, 2009

Joe's Problem With The Truth 

...it is painful to think that Joe Lieberman would struggle so much with his opinion on health care issues...oh, the hell with it; never mind. Joe Lieberman, going as far back as can be remembered, is a slick craven political animal with massively long, thick, permanently bespittled thumbs that serve him well in sensing what direction the wind is blowing at any given moment. He is also a man spurned, a "Dear John" in the classic World War II jilted lover context or the guy who got "Jodied" in the the Vietnam context that he doesn't really understand because of his Cheney-like ability to accrue draft deferments during that conflict...

Lieberman got smoked by a stone flat unknown in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Senatorial primary and had to battle back through the back door to hold his seat. It couldn't have done his sense of security or comity any good to see all his good and long-time Senate friends charging around the state campaigning for Ned Lamont, and the hunger for some soul-soothing moment of true and final revenge must have been burning deep ugly holes in his soul ever since. Or at least it would appear, because it is otherwise impossible to reconcile this from three months ago:



...with this from just one day ago:



Lieberman has his defenders, though, in this question of apparently craven flip-flopping and his apparently monumental struggles with both the truth and his actual core beliefs. No, wait; actually he doesn't. What he actually has is a "spokesman" out there taking a bullet for the Big Guy:
Lieberman's spokesman Marshall Wittmann said Lieberman's comments were made before the Senate health care bill, which includes health insurance subsidies, was finalized.

OK, so that's a nice start, but poor Marshall Wittmann is clearly heading toward the Box Canyon Of Rhetorical Irrelevancy with this line. It gets worse:
Wittmann said Lieberman believes the subsidies make a Medicare buy-in program redundant. A buy-in program would be an additional financial burden on the Medicare program, he said.

"This would be a redundant program that would unnecessarily put the Medicare program in greater financial jeopardy," Wittmann said.

Yes, Marshall Wittmann really said that (if the vast reportial resources of NBC are to be trusted). Taking the two points that Wittmann made in reverse order: (A) his Master believes that the very same Medicare buy-in program that he advocated just three months ago has now magically transformed into some evil thing that would 'unnecessarily put Medicare at risk', even though all by itself his proposal of three months ago and the recent compromise amongst Democrats present exactly the same risk to Medicare because both of them are independent of the subsidies program; and (2) there really isn't any way to characterize the Medicare buy-in as being 'redundant' to the proposed subsidies (which would support public purchase of otherwise noncompetitive private insurance plans) without rounding up every English-language dictionary on the fact of the planet and feeding the entire "R" section of each one into shredders so the word itself is no longer extant in print...

Medicare buy-in is a somewhat half-hearted attempt to create some vague shadow of a public option that would create the sort of competition that would perhaps reign in the cost of health insurance premiums. For a Lieberman spokesman to say that the buy-in is redundant and a threat to Medicare (even though it apparently wasn't the latter a couple of months ago) suggests one of two things: either that spokesperson was prodded out onto the national stage to either sell the Boss's new position or find a real job, or the spokesperson is a True Believer who should be considered a prime candidate for the captive breeding program intended to produce a new, vibrant future population of political halfwits...

Joe had no problem saying what he said back then and has no problem saying something completely different mere weeks later. Regardless of his motivations for the game-playing that he is currently engaging in, the fact is that he has a problem with the truth, not to mention a serious struggle with getting his own personal facts straight from one day to the next. In an otherwise perfect world, future generations of encyclopedias, in their descriptions of the final moral failure of the American political system, will feature Joe Lieberman's picture near the head of the entry....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Just Eleven More Shopping Days 

...and you're still wondering if finishing up that "honey-do" list is a legitimate Christmas gift...

funny pictures of cats with captions
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:28 PM 0 comments

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