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

Friday, July 14, 2006

Friday Night Deer Blogging For Fun and Relaxation 

...I gotta confess that I have been suffering from a serious case of writer’s block recently. That, coupled with the pressing business of keeping up with a sudden uptick of activity in the work setting and the realities of having a single dial-up line at home that needs to meet the needs of both on-line and off-line family activity (and I own a set of teenagers), has resulted in limited posting. At the same time, it’s not like nothing is happening: Iraq is growing closer to becoming a monumental disaster of our own making, the false good news of the economy is masking real pain that real people are feeling, the executive branch of the federal government seems to be marching unchallenged toward creating the sort of ruling class that we of a certain age only thought existed in novels like ‘1984' and ‘Animal Farm', and - tonight - perhaps over 25 thousand American citizens are trapped like wharf rats in the burning warehouse that has become Lebanon with no way out while the State Department uselessly encourages them to get the hell out of Dodge and George W. Bush refuses to say any single word that will prevent the attacking Israeli’s from including them in the list of innocent citizens who may be wounded or killed in the current action. Clearly in the face of all this, it is time to do a little bit of...

...Friday Night Deer Blogging



I don’t live in a ‘neighborhood’ in the normal sense, nor in a town in the usual sense. I mean, the area I live in looks sort of like a town, with a business district, an industrial park, motels, restaurants, grocery,hardware, and other stores, a parks-and-rec kid sports program, a medical clinic and a K-12 school system within whose boundaries over 10,000 people live. It just isn’t an incorporated community; we are simply a bunch of rural residents and little more than wards of the county government. Most of the thousands of people outside of the core commercial area along Hwy 97 in this South Central Oregon enclave live on parcels of land that are one acre or larger. We find things in our back yards that are a little beyond the normal suburban experience, such as deer using our outrageously expensive squirrel-proof bird feeder as a personal snack bar. While Rancho Jack K. has its own supply of domesticated cats and dogs and fish and cockatiels, I’ve come to the realization that all this pet blogging misses a piece of our reality. Why do pet-blogging when I can do wild quail blogging or nesting mountain bluebird blogging or bobcat-stalking-through-the-yard blogging (ok, so that was probably a one-time-only thing and I didn’t get the camera out in time) or...yes...even deer blogging? If the professionally accomplished yet alluring and remarkably flexible Mrs. Jack K. has her way, there will not be many future opportunities for this sort of deer blogging...



...if only because she chooses to not have her exotic bird feed mix become an afternoon delight for the local mule deer population (as the hurled rock shortly after these photo's would suggest). But there may well be more...

...or there may be other wildland wildlife...

...but at least no living creature will have to die in the effort...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:51 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Objectivity vs. Reality In the Indian Trust Fund War 

...it's a conflict that has been going on for a long time; longer than necessary; longer than any reasonable person could excuse; longer than anyone should have to tolerate. The simple fact of life is that the Indian Trust Fund, a trust established to manage the funds earned by individual Native Americans and tribes from oil and gas leases, grazing receipts, timber sale receipts, and other manners in which their land has earned them money has been mismanaged to a degree that - in the lilly white world of Wall Street - would have long ago resulted in indictments and jail terms for anyone not acquainted with or related to the Bush dynasty. In the sordid dark history of the treatment by European immigrants of the native societies of North America, this most recent chapter may just be another thing, but it is an important other thing because of the supposed epiphany that we Euro-Americans have undergone with regard to those people who already were living here when our ancestors arrived. If the last twenty years' history is any judge, American Indians are to be place high up on the list of most unfortunate ethnic groups in the world; if they had been blessed with the good fortune of being in some other downtrodden circumstances on another continent populated by people who either look sort of like us or have vast pool of oil lurking under their feet, we would have sent the Marines storming ashore years ago to relieve them from the pain of their oppression. But this isn't Beirut, Baghdad, or the Balkans; it's deep in the heart of the United States and represents little more that the appearance of a monumentally stupid, seemingly racist, and profoundly casual attitude towards a people to which the federal government has a trust responsibility to provide honest, honorable services...

A big shoe dropped in the long-running lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs yesterday, when the DC District Court of Appeals basically bodily hurled the Federal trial judge off of the case over a "loss of objectivity". On it's face, this seems like a run of the mill bit of judicial housekeeping. Unfortunately, that's not the real deal. The Federal District Court Judge, Royce Lamberth, has - over the course of several years - come to the quite reasonable conclusion that the BIA, as a result of ineptitide, intention, or just plain meanness, hasn't displayed the capability to manage either individual or tribal Indian accounts and isn't all that terribly interested in either fixing or owning up to the problems that have plagued the process for longer than some can remember. It may well be that, from a strictly judicial standpoint, this judge has shifted his weight too far to one side of Lady Justice's scales. It is, on the other hand, a simple fact in some minds that the Interior Department, dating back to the Clinton presidency and beyond, has displayed a remarkable sort of callous indifference to the various rulings and decisions that Judge Lamberth and others have made. This creates a dangerous precedent, however, because of the specific circumstances and the stakes that are involved. There is the clear objective appearance that one side in the ongoing lawsuit has been behaving badly and continues to display a lack of good faith. It is the job of the judge to compell the side that is behaving badly to clean up it's act; while Ludge Lamberth's rhetoric may be a bit hyperbolic, his observations are not demonstrably hitting wide of the mark. In light of the facts, some of us of a certain age may happen to recall a certain Judge John Sirica, who also stood accused of operating outside of some tight little idealistic box in the trial of a handful of defendents accused of breaking into Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel. Had it not been for his actions, the abuses, monkeywrenching, and cheap garden-variety criminal activity of the Nixon Administration may never have been uncovered...

The old saying "You aren't really paranoid if they actually are out to get you" has its corollary in this situation: you haven't really lost your objectivity if they actually are trying to screw with the system. It spells trouble for citizens with actually greviences against federal agencies if situations like this are allowed to continue. The defendent has effectively been allowed to go judge-shopping in an effort to find someone more interested in acting as a simple referee rather than actually seeking the truth that justice demands. Nixon should have been so clever...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:28 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Rove's Problem Inside the Tent 

...it has been sufficiently widely reported, to the point that the coming brutal wave of lies, misrepresentations, accusations, name-calling, and filth should come as no suprise, that Karl Rove is going to waddle back to the well one more time, snatching victory from defeat's gaping jaws by twisting Democratic advantages back on themselves to create liabilities from supposed strengths. Various sources have reported that the core of his strategy will be to turn Democratic objections to the manner to which the War on Terra, and specifically the bloody ongoing occupation of Iraq, is being conducted into a question of stick-it-out guts and - dare we speak the word - treason by the beady-eyed weasels who dare nuzzle up to the ripe teat offering freedom's mother's milk while trashing all the best efforts to maintain that freedom...

Well, why not? Rove has seldom - probably never - lost by engaging in this twisted, seemingly dangerous srategy of turning the opponent's strenght against him. It usually requires fellow travelers and supporters to do the actual heavy lifting, like in the case of the Swift Boat gang that so successfully went after the core of John Kerry's claim to service in Viet Nam, even in the face of heart-felt testimony by a life-long Republican who felt that his life had been saved by Kerry and was willing to step into the public glare to say it. Twisting that supposed strength back on itself until it at least appears to snap in the public eye has been a central Rovian tactic for just about forever, so playing that same game again seems like the logical ploy. This time, however, there's a bit of a problem...

Not only is Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a bit peeved by the actions that Bushco has taken in it's generally window-dressing "War on Terra", specifically with regard to spying on American citizens withouth their approval, but now Gee Dub and the gang have pissed off the House Intelligence Committee chairman, too. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., had to find out from whistleblowers about programs over which he feels the Intelligence committee should have had oversight, and it is probably most remarkable that he decided to vent on the Official Network Of The Republican National Committee about his objections to White House behavior...

It's been said enough, both here and on other more important and better-read sites on the internets, that the Republicans seem to have accelerated the process of entitlement, in-fighting, and dissipation that Democrats took 4 decades to finally fetch up against such that they were flung headlong from congressional power. Now we have another example that speaks volumes about either the response to the perils of supporting an unpopular president and his unpopular war or about the simple offense of an administration with a defined shelf-life pissing off members of Congress who have plans on staying aroung long after this clueless band of losers is finally ushered out the door. It's beginning to become clear that simple half-bright and half-true slogans may be a powerful tool for storming the ramparts of power, but they do not make for a sound foundation on which to build a ruling class. It may not happen this go-round (as they call it behind the chutes at any western rodeo), but you can feel the change coming. Any day that a member of the Republican leadership goes on their own safe cable channel to growl threats at their own president is - at least - an instructive day for any Democratic strategist looking for ways to blunt the likely Rovian attack strategies. More than anything else, this sort of thing creates a very real problem - preserved forever on video - for Unka Karl's plans for the upcoming election. All we can hope is that the Democrats are clever enough to know how to take advantage of the opportunity....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:37 PM 0 comments

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