The Grumpy Forester

What The Heck; Might As Well Make It Official

2010-07-08T20:51:00.001-07:00

Gone Fishin'

Time For Plan B

2010-05-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

...it's always good to have a plan and it never hurts, once you have that plan, to make sure to draw up a backup plan. According to documents that have come into the hands of Congressional investigators, Toyota may have had a plan to deal with unfavorable Congressional testimony regarding that little unintended acceleration problem that seemed to be plaguing several of its model lines: attack the critics. Now, there's something to be said for a strategy of attacking your critics; we lefties are all the time demanding that elected Democrats attack the usually moronic criticisms that the SCLM so cheerfully airs from right wing leaders, spokesmen, talking heads, and loose wackos roaming the airwaves. But, that is that and this is this and there is a pretty big difference between the two...

We could delve deeply into the "science vs. blathering" difference, because that's pretty big all by itself. No need, though, because what we are talking about here is the difference between some radio blowhard coked to the gills on Oxycontin fighting through the brain mists to transfer all those twisted hate-filled thoughts to his speech centers and the possibility that the subject of a Congressional investigation just might have been cogitating - at least for a while - the prospective value of going after some Congressional witnesses who disagreed with that subject's approach to solving a particular safety concern. There are, I am told, real live prison cells in the Capitol complex and - at the very least - the advertising agency executives advising Toyota would be well served by the understanding that there is little other than a can of WD-40 and a couple of overly frank emails that could spell the difference between another weekend with the trophy wife at the Hamptons beach house and cooling your heels alone with the cellar rats in a D.C. version of the Bastille, waiting for federal prosecutors to draw up witness intimidation charges that trump that Contempt of Congress vote that changed your weekend plans and put you here in the first place...

It may be some time before we understand, if we ever do, what the subject of the investigation and its paid advisers and pollsters had in mind, but it is clearly time to unlimber Plan B...

Brief Thoughts On Why One May Not Tell People What One Does

2010-05-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

...throughout the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States, there are thousands of employees who earn their daily bread by honorably defending the interests of the American people through the administration of contracts that deliver services, supplies, and the construction and maintenance of real property. Day in and day out, they try to do the best they can to make sure that the requirements of the Federal contracts that they are charged with administering are met...

And then there's this. The real irony about this report is that the Department of Defense maintains an online site that is the go-to location for all sorts of training on how to properly administer federal contracts. In fact, this go-to DOD site is approved as a source for fulfilling the annual training requirements necessary for all Federal contract administration employees to maintain their certification to handle contracts. And yet...

And yet, it is the very Department that offers what is considered in some circles to be the definitive training on contract administration that not only can't - one more time - seem able to guarantee best value for the country but also can't provide acceptable products for the ultimate customer, which - one more time - is our own troops. Somewhere out there, somebody has the job of making sure that the production line cranking out combat helmets met the required specifications. Somewhere out there, the job didn't get done. It may turn out that the failure to meet spec's is a simple technical issue involving chin straps or some such, but at first blush this is another unnecessary black eye delivered - courtesy of DOD contract specialists - to all those other people who get the job done right every day of the week all year long, every year, with little recognition and no reward other than a paycheck...

...because that's the way this stuff is supposed to work...

How Hard Can It Be?

2010-05-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

...I was going to make some idle sport of Sarah Palin most recent comments when I first read the AP report; you know, test out some other potential moves Obama would make if only he could, such as:

Obama would allow people to eat Christian babies if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.

Obama would gather up registered Republicans and Death March them on foot to internment camps in the New Mexico desert if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.

Obama would force all Americans to face toward Mecca and pray daily if if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.

But then, as I was reading through the story again, I realized that the back story wasn't that Palin is just running around the country saying whatever she thinks the crazy 30% of the population will eat up, or even that Palin probably wouldn't even be considered a contender for the 2012 Republican nomination if outlets like AP actually provided some sort of rational analysis to her bizarre litany of comments. No, the back story is that journalism as practiced by those razor sharp professionals of the AP is so easy that just about anybody with either sufficient fingers, toes, or elbows to type (or even a voice recognition system to provide Reasonable Accommodation in accordance with ADA) should be able to do this job to AP standards, regardless of any other training or experience...

I started getting to this point with this selection:

"...the only thing stopping Obama from gutting the Constitution's right to bare arms." (emphasis mine)

The critical issue of the right to bare arms has been discussed already during this first 18 months of the Obama regime, particularly with regard to Michele Obama's wardrobe selections. In fact, no less an elite-level journalist/blogger than Jake Tapper has weighed in on Barack Obama's own apparent beliefs when it comes to baring arms. What he thinks about firearm ownership and the meaning of the Second Amendment is less well known, but I think it's safe to say that either the unnamed AP reporter's or Palins' own wild conjecture is seriously off the mark...

But Wait, as Billy Mays used to say, There's More. Later in her speech, Palin referred to the vicious manner in which sow grizzlies defend their cubs and made a connection to Republican/Teabagger women who she said need to rise up and help take back the country. Said unnamed reporter failed to mention this connection by writing just this:

Palin challenged Republican women — "mama grizzlies," she called them — to help the Republicans "take this country back" and elect anti-abortion lawmakers.

The report, in the next sentence, offers - apparently with a completely straight, dedicated professional journalistic face - this helpful reference:

A grizzlie is a bear.

No, really, that's what the article says...

...or at least that's what it says right now, prior to some actual educated English-speaking editor frantically pulling the copy off line to fix it. I promise, I really tried to be charitable about this, but I just couldn't find my way. Aside from the fact that the reporter somehow felt it necessary to explain what a 'grizzlie' is, she or he wasn't even capable of spelling the bear's colloquial singular name correctly (that would be "grizzly' and Heaven forfend that there would have been a need to go all Latin with Ursus arctos horribilis just to make sure all y'all knew what a grizzly is), which is the sort of error than a 10-second Google search could have corrected. This is what led to my realization that Serious Professional Journalism clearly isn't as rigorous a profession as Serious Professional Journalists would like us to believe it is, especially when they are discussing the Information Age blight represented by the the unwashed vermin of blogtopia. This report represents just one example of the best work available from what is supposed to be a premier provider of straight-up Fourth Estate Media, and it should lead all the rest of us in the 'unwashed masses' bleachers to the realization that we, too, could be an AP reporter...

How hard can it be?

Update:
Screen shots, just in case the AP editors actually get around to reading a fixing the story....

My Own Private Antarctica

2010-05-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

...it is snowing outside. By which I mean "again". The Winter That Would Never Be has slowly morphed into the Spring That Won't Ever Come. In the larger context of the outside world, this doesn't amount to much; it's doesn't hold a candle to the reality of sitting along the Gulf Coast knowing that there is a vast slimy pool of spilled crude oil spreading across an area larger than a couple of European countries that may or may not be headed your way and having no more say in the matter than if you were duct-taped to the hood of a speeding truck barreling into some dark unknown madness...

But still, enough is enough. It's been over a month since the deadline for removal of our much-debated studded tires, yet the last vestiges of a winter that didn't amount to much keep lingering on and on. A week or so ago, my morning commute featured a several-mile-long Christmas Light Show where all manner of flashing light bars from police, emergency, Incident Response, and tow vehicles reflected gaily against the heavily falling snow, and I am certain that one Sheriff's Deputy managing the extrication of his own Crown Vic from the roadside ditch by one of those gaily flickering tow vehicles is glad that I didn't have a camera to contribute to whatever on-screen hell he will face at his next going-away/retirement/promotion party. I do, after all, know people...

Tempers are growing short, skin is growing pale, and there is a desperate darkness around the eyes of all those sun-worshiping outdoorsy types whose total buy-in on that "300 sunny days per year" Central Orygun hype is reflected by the usual seasonal ritualistic exchange of rooftop ski racks for rooftop bike racks. Those who cherish snow skiing are living in a wonderful dream world while the rest of us are trapped in a nightmare that seems to have no defined endpoint...

This, too, will pass, and not too far down the road we in this little corner of the world will be fretting over dry lightning or 8-year-olds burning ants with a magnifying glass - either one of which could end up burning down half the county - and all the talk about climate change will wander off into whatever corner such discussions go when they can't gain local traction. For now, on the other hand, it is time for My Own Private Antarctica to end...

The Last Refuge Of "Drill, Baybee, Drill" Scoundrels

2010-05-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

...it was to be expected, and it was delivered just about on time. Texas Governor Rick Perry, a man whose "best if used by" date is rapidly approaching as far as any of his desperate hopes for further political advancement are concerned, has decided to add to his already bulging Democratic oppo-research files by suggesting that we should all avoid falling to some sort of "knee-jerk" reaction to the ongoing BP oil spill disaster...

It is almost hard to put into words just how stupid this sort of comment really is. It isn't even necessary to scrounge around to find links to buttress counter-arguments; the simple fact is that a region that has not yet fully recovered from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the late summer of 2005 is now facing the sort of man-made disaster that could devastate its fisheries and coastal economies for decades to come...

This isn't a matter of odds or of "acts of God that can't be prevented". There is too much at stake to play the odds and God long ago stated his position on His views about people being stupid about stewardship of His creation. "Good Hair" Perry is hoping to ride his current poll lead to a virtual free pass to reelection as Texas governor, but his necessary pandering to all those Texas Big Oil special interests is a lame note that will fall on a lot of desperate ears along the Gulf Coast during these desperate days. Fact is, this current crisis is the perfect answer to the question of whether or not we should expand offshore oil exploration. It isn't a matter of odds; it's simply a matter of "what if". The "Drill, Baby, Drill" gang, represented in this case by Perry, don't want to address the "what if" because they have the luxury of playing with the past history of statistics. They are wrong, of course, because it only takes this one statistically improbable episode to make us realize just exactly what sort of fire we are playing with...

Perry is, of course, going to play the game by the rules his Big Oil overlords dictate, so it isn't in the least surprising that he would insist that we should all just chill. That is the last refuge of the pro-exploration gang; since you don't remember the last big oil field blowout a generation ago off the California coast, you shouldn't judge the looming ecological and economic Gulf Coast disaster as some sort of warning. It was "an act of God", after all; nothing to see here, please move along. Never mind that God laid out his rules a few millenia ago and this potentially massive disaster doesn't fall into any category that God identified in his new covenant. The last refuge of bought-and-paid-for scoundrels like Perry is a false and potentially blasphemous linkage to God to mask and hide the sorts of personally aggrandizing and enriching sins that Oiled-Up lackeys like Perry want to protect...

In Consideration of Why Anyone Can Be A Pundit

2010-04-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

...anyone can be a pundit at some level. You can write a letter to The Editor, start a blog, comment at major league websites and blogs, or in other ways fling your thoughts into the vast electronic river that flows through all of our lives...

That's Ground Level Punditry.

You can become a captivating writer who garners tons of hits on your blog, or you can become one of the trusted acolytes at some larger blog, or you can actually enter the world of the ink-stained wretches of journalism to have some sort of local voice...

That's Journey Level Punditry.

Or you can rise to the top of the mountain, gaining access to a national audience, regardless of your actual qualification to share any sort of meaningful opinion, via employment at a national media source. This is the region of rarefied air so lacking in oxygen that only a limited few favored beings ever develop the lung capacity to function successfully...

That is what I think of as Star Level Punditry.

The sad thing is that, while you can aspire to and perhaps successfully rise to that "Star" level, it will probably be necessary to check your intellectual capabilities at the door in order to walk through it. As an example, I simply offer this article, which by itself isn't so much a demonstration of my argument as it is a demonstration of where intellect "check-out" leads...

One can't help but wonder, while reading such articles as this, what strange calendar the Star Level Pundits are looking at. May Day is this coming weekend; we haven't even celebrated Mother's Day or Memorial Day or Labor Day, but we are many months into a fevered dialogue who's origin stretches back over a year about just how badly Democratic butts are going to get kicked in an election that is over five (as in FIVE[5] months away). This sort of conversation looks like nothing more that the mock draft talk leading up to the actualy real live NFL draft that ends up looking nothing like the vision painted during the run up...

May Day is on Saturday. It will be over five months before voters will actually select Representatives or Senators or a host of state, county, and local officials. It may be fun to game this whole system out and make predictions about What Will Be, but we are looking at the remainder of the spring, all of the summer, and a sliver of the fall before people will actually vote in an election that truly matters to the country. It really is a long time until the next election and there are many streams to cross before we get to that day. It is simply absurd to speculate about what the outcome of all those elections will be at this early date...

But that is, I suppose, what being a pundit at the Star Level is all about...

Say Hello To My Little Friend - The Rootkit Files

2010-04-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

...for Tony Montana (aka "Scarface"), it was an M203 grenade launcher attachment to his M16. For me, it has been KillDisk burned to a CD and launched from the boot menu. There is, it turns out, one surefire way to deal with a Win32 rootkit virus: scrub the hard drive and start over...

The freeware version of my little friend doesn't offer the full-on Department of Defense 5220.22 M standard of recovery-proof disk wiping that its own purchase version and some other disk wiping utilities provide, but it's good enough for my purposes. After spending several hours every single night for the past two week trying every imaginable thing - including sinking to the pits of desperation and calling the Dell tech service line - a few facts began to emerge from the inky blackness of my dilemma: my creaky old laptop probably wouldn't support the smallest readily available hard drive; the Dell-provided operating system reinstall disk (instead of real live XP CD's) wasn't bootable in the presence of an existing operating system; nobody I know had an XP operating system disk with a valid key; and my last straw-grasping idea of buying and installing Windows 7 was defeated because the old girl's architecture can't handle the required 1 gig of RAM. Since I really wasn't in the mood to buy a new computer right at the moment (a gadget guy I am most certainly not), I seemed to be at a technological impasse because of my inability to reformat the hard drive. That's when the light bulb finally went on...

Anyway, I'm back after many, many hours of installing and downloading, including a second rescrubbing and a second reinstall of the operating system (a word of advice: never install everything that comes on your recovery driver disk, especially if you are using an aftermarket wireless receiver), sailing the treacherous seas of Blogtopia in the company of an entire armada of freeware and purchased antispyware...except for McAfee. McAfee is bad juju on my laptop in any case (it came as part of the software bundle and I couldn't successfully reinstall it when I put in the new hard drive a couple of years ago), and Thursday's little update oopsie would have pushed me all the way over the edge if it was working and I had installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 on it, which I hadn't. Anyway, we'll see how this goes. So, anything been happening?

The Downside Of Technology

2010-04-17T20:05:00.001-07:00

...as it turns out, there are people out there who want to steal my life, or at least the parts of it that can bring them either profit or some strange emotional benefit that I will never understand in a million years. These people, who deserve nothing better than burial in a shallow unmarked grave alongside any one of the many, many remote dirt roads that I have traveled in the high wild places of the intermountain West over the last 35 years, have managed to defeat some of the best minds in the business in a pitched battle over who actually controls my creaky old laptop. So I sit now in an undisclosed location - as far as the keystroke logger/CPU controller/backdoor rootkit virus minions of evil are concerned - where I ponder my options: installing a new 40-gig hard drive (which is all my faithful 6-year-old friend will support) and enduring hours of reinstalling XP and drivers and software and downloading Service Packs and all the rest, or buying a new laptop...

On top of all the hours I have already spent trying to solve this infestation, the idea of devoting what is essentially a whole day to reinstalling what is actually ancient technology is a grim thing to face. At the same time, this whole intertubes thing has been tolerated by my financial advisor (that would be Mrs. Jack K.) only because it was relatively cost-free. All I can say is "Stay Tuned"...

Bizarro World Visits The Rest Of Us

2010-04-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

...after a week of pitched battles with various bits and pieces of both human and computer illnesses - the latter of which having caused me to revisit my opinions about application of the death penalty - I find myself tonight pondering the speed with which our current reality can pump its fat little legs to far outdistance just about any storyline your average fiction writer could ever hope to cook up in an otherwise fair race. The other night while cruising the intertubes during a brief interlude granted by my sinuses and a marginally effective malware scan, I found myself contemplating a couple of questions:

Question The First: How is it that the party that was in power in 2005 and stood by while New Orleans drowned decided to hold it's Southern Republican Leadership Conference in that same city in 2010?

Question The Second: How is it that this same remarkably shameless party can't come up with anything other than the same old retreaded speakers spouting the increasingly tiresome lame lies that seem tailored to do nothing more than fire up this year's version of the "base"? [sorry, religious conservatives, but you'll just have to tag along with this neo-libertarian 'base' and good luck to you with all that]

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference was truly a spectacle, featuring Newt "Family Values" Gingrich, Sarah "Half-Term Governor" Palin, and Liz "Pit Bull In Waiting" Cheney leering out at us from the TV screen screeching the sort of gibberish that reads like a parody if you are just working off of a transcript from which the speaker's name has been redactedThis is a perfect indicator in a larger sense of the sad state to which our political discourse has declined; it's not so much that people like this are saying these things because that is to be expected. It's that once again there is nothing even approaching a critical assessment of any sort of truth behind their drivel, only a flat presentation of it. Three people that one would think a party that actually respected its own oft-touted core values wouldn't allow within a country mile of a TV camera spent the end of last week standing at the dais as True Voices of the party faithful casually violating the 9th Commandment, and you'd have to dig pretty hard to find any sort of meaningful analysis of their bizarre statements...

The fact that this all went down in New Orleans, the city that Republicans as a matter of public policy turned their back on as it sank under Hurricane Katrina's rising water, only adds to the twisted fascination these broadcast screeds provided. I swear, it is going to be a long next couple of years...

Sunday Night Eagle Blogging

2010-04-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

...it has been a tough last several days for the Bald Eagle Stars of Odell Lake. They have been pummeled by ceaseless waves of late-season snow storms, including two that were preceded by official Winter Storm Warnings. The male disappeared for one stretch of over 30 hours, leading various watchers to fear a two-pronged version of "The Worst": his untimely demise and the abandonment of the nest - sooner rather than later - by the female. He returned finally to take up his spot in the nesting rotation, to much human rejoicing, but the celebration was cut short by a serious winter storm on Friday night that led to this:

There is a large female eagle sitting in a nest in this picture

It was a serious enough storm that I awoke to 6 inches of new snow and still have a wintry landscape lurking outside my window at this moment...

...that storm eventually passed on Saturday to the point that viewers could again see eagles sitting on a nest (which I might add, is generally a viewing experience of the 'paint drying'/'grass-growing' variety). But times can be tough at the crest of the Central Orygun Cascades any time of the year and, if you paused for a moment to think about it, you probably would find some other better place to try to incubate a clutch of eggs in April. Eagles aren't much into contemplation, though, and if they can get through this phase to the point that their eaglets actually hatch, the summer rearing season promises warmer weather and abundant fish from nearby Odell Lake. In any case, it's not like these two birds have made some sort of singular tragic nesting choice; while various viewers fretted, panicked, and obsessed over the male's disappearance and the Friday night snow-burial of the female (I mean, seriously, at 2:00 am local time Saturday morning, nothing resembling an eagle was visible in the nest), there were at least eight other pairs of eagles around the lake going through the same storm without the benefit of infrared cameras bearing witness to their own heroic efforts. Now we are back into it again, and the weather for the next several days won't be all that much better, with periods of snow or rain forecast through Thursday...

So How Tough Is My Job? ver. 2010.01

2010-03-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

...I haven't been posting much recently because I have been simply fried when I get home in the evening. It has been hard to work up even the most half-hearted outrage about all of the crazy things going down all around us and, I have to admit, I find myself almost limp with relief that the health care bill finally passed, regardless of its faults and failings, because it means so much to the future welfare of my second-born child as he approached adulthood. A couple of nights ago, however, I was jolted out of my doldrums by the news that 'we have an egg'...

That statement makes no sense unless you understand that my lovely bride has been involved for several years in the maintenance of a video camera aimed at a bald eagle nest perched above Odell Lake at the crest of the central Orygun Cascades several miles to the west of our humble abode. Wednesday evening the female laid an egg (a phrase that means good things in eagle circles) and the small world of people who love to watch such things on intertube feeds - yes, there is such a world - simply burst into flames from the excitement of seeing a potential new bald eagle in a relatively warm, dry nest. Then came Thursday night and this morning and a Winter Weather Advisory for the Central Orygun Cascades,
and what started out as a classic picture of a mommy bird (or, in this case, daddy bird, because they switch off on incubation duty) began to look like the sort of job that I really would have to think hard about accepting...

Parenting is hard enough as it is; it doesn't need to be made harder by late-season snow storms that lay down several inches of snow in the 'nursery'. At the same time, it does provide me with an intriguing perspective on how to evaluate all those perceived problems that I might otherwise think afflict my own life. I didn't manage any screen captures in the pre-noon hours when the storm was at its most intense, but I must confess that I pity any new visitor that might have stumbled onto the live video feed this morning; the shock and confusion of stumbling upon a live video feed of what appeared to be a dead eagle laying buried in a snow-covered nest would have created an ugly moment of repulsion and hate in the heart of a casual first time visitor...

For good or ill, though, we 'have an egg'. The nest camera (which provides a feed to a bald eagle exhibit at Portland's Washington Park Zoo) failed last year almost at the very moment that the baby eagle of the year was about to fledge (courtesy of a big thunderstorm that apparently zapped the system). There's a new camera in place this year - courtesy of a long story that I have been assured can never be told - and it has infrared capability so that nest activity can be seen all day and all night. If you would like to join that strange small world of eagle nest peeping Tom's, you can do so all day or all night...

Who knows; maybe I can start a Friday Eagle Blogging thread.

DADT: What Crazy Looks LIke

2010-03-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

...OK, so we know that there are a couple of certain mindsets at work deep in the heart of the US military that can argue against the idea that a person's sexual orientation shouldn't matter when it comes to the point of being willing to serve - and perhaps die - on behalf of our nation. In the first place, any effort to recruit 18-year-old kids into the military brings with it the same sort of social strictures and stigmas that can be found in high schools all across the nation. In the second place, there are things like the overall military problem with separation of Church and State...

And then there are the observations of Marine Gen. John Sheehan (Ret.), former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and recipient of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars (with a Valor Device), and two Purple Hearts. He perfectly captures a recent - if not current - management view of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in his comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee today, describing the failure of a Dutch contingent of NATO peace-keeping troops to prevent the 1995 Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica. Apparently the twin failures of The Rules of Engagement and of will on the part of the NATO commander in that particular episode of genocide were somehow trumped by by the fact of the Dutch army not having a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (or perhaps an outright ban on "those people serving in the military)...

Most craziness relies on a suspension of belief and a refusal to talk about the way things have been. This particular craziness fits that mold nicely. It relies on the suspension of belief in the whole history of the Bosnian conflict and a refusal to acknowledge that a lot of countries you really wouldn't want to take on in any situation less than a D-Day invasion don't have any particular problem with the sexual orientation of the troops. The General probably tipped his hand most completely at this point:

Sheehan claimed that sexual attraction between servicemembers of the same sex would have a negative impact on readiness, while attraction between men and women in gender-integrated units would not.

...so "normal" boys and girls thrown together in close proximity won't feel powerful urges, but gay and lesbian boys and girls will. Clearly the General has never chaperoned a high school field trip. When it comes to individual sexuality and service in the military, this is what "crazy" looks like...

On Asking Stupid Questions

2010-03-13T18:33:00.000-08:00

...this little story caught my eye today because it seems to me that it captures the raw essence of the hopelessness of ever seeing peace in what was once called Palestine. In fact, the story made me even chuckle a little because of its absurd tone-deafness: the Netanyahu government isn't going to investigate the actual decision to try to blow up peace talks by building homes in east Jerusalem but is instead going to investigate why the announcement was made just as Air Force 2 was touching down at the airport...

Joe Biden was "insulted"? Bet not. I'm willing to put a few dollars down on the proposition that Biden was - as we used to say back in the day - Pissed To The Max, not just about the fact that Israel decided to announce its decision about housing construction in east Jerusalem right at that moment but also that it was - one more time - going to move in a direction that most of the world sincerely doesn't believe it has a right to move in. The whole situation answers the question "Why isn't Jack K. the Vice President of the United States". OK... so it doesn't entirely answer the question, because there's a whole list that can be distilled down to 'because it would be a really bad idea', but part of the reason for why not is that I would have immediately gone back to the airport and flown that glistening 747 out of town as quickly as the engines could spool up (with maybe one rooftop high-speed wing-waggling "see ya, pal" pass over Bibi's digs thrown in, just to be cordial)...

Joe didn't do that, though. He stayed and glowered, and the insult was only part of it. In fact, it may have only been a small part of it, because you can only stay mad at stupid intransigence for so long before the whole effort just becomes a useless tiresome indulgence. The fact of the east Jerusalem housing is the problem; the timing of the announcement is just a simple artifact of the inability of right wingers everywhere to manage their message if they don't have the US media in on their game. If Bibi Netanyahu has any sort of agenda for stamping out wasteful spending, he could probably point it in the direction of this investigation because it is clearly a total waste of time and money. Nobody cares why his government is too stupid to figure out that the United States would be irked at the announcement of the housing construction in the middle of the Vice President's visit; why the announcement was made when it was is a stupid question to ask and misses the point entirely....

What everybody wants to know is why Bibi and his crew are seemingly trying to create the potential for more conflict and violence in the only Holy site shared by all three Abrahamic religions while offering a lame Bushco-like insistence that they really do want to have peace talks. It is for historians to decide what were the motivations of the Netanyahu government in metaphorically shoving a pie in Joe Biden's face. On the ground, in real time, the announced inquiry is a worthless exercise, asking stupid questions that nobody really cares about...

A Missive From Mike

2010-03-07T15:08:00.001-08:00

Dear Fellow American,

You have been selected from a sample of political leaders in your area to take part in a Nationwide Survey on the Obama Agenda called ASK AMERICA.

...this is how a letter I found in the mail box the other night begins. It came from the Republican National Committee (even has a blue facsimile signature by that political genius of a leader, Michael Steele) and goes on for two pages of widely-spaced text full of bullet points and numbered lists that convey the general impression that our beleaguered nations needs to turn its desperate eyes to the next Joseph McCarthy to stem the raging tsunami of Obama socialism threatening to sweep it away. The survey goes on for 32 questions, 31 of which generally are of the tone:

Do you think that Barack Obama sucks?

O Yes
O Majorly
O Well, Duh!
O Don't know

Question 32 asks "would you like to give lots of money or oodles of money to us?"

...I am, admittedly, just a little conflicted about this. On the one hand it is certainly flattering to finally be recognized as 'a political leader'. At the same time, the judgement of the RNC in spending money to send a survey to the likes of me is so seriously called into question that it tends to cheapen the accolade just a little bit. Still, I will not let my new friend Mike Steele down; I will absolutely fill this survey out because Mike wants America's voice to be heard. It's the least I can do, and answering "No" thirty two times won't unduly inconvenience me...

Of course I won't be sending any money (Mrs. Jack K. says I should tape a penny to the survey with a note saying that's what it - and the Republican party - are worth to me, but that's just harsh). And even though Mike asked me to use a postage stamp on the return envelope to help him save much-needed funds, I won't be doing that either. It says right there on the envelope that no postage is necessary if mailed in the US; a stamp on this envelope is one less stamp for all those other envelopes I need to mail, and economic conservatism starts at home, I say...

I can't really say why I got this survey. Perhaps the RNC is sending this thing to registered Independents in districts that McCain won last time. Perhaps my new friend Mike is just crazy. Perhaps the RNC thinks I won't have the guts to answer "No" 32 times and not use a stamp on the return envelope since my name is prominently displayed on the front of the survey. Whatever the reason, this certainly doesn't look like "A Game" material from the sort of cash-strapped national political organization that I would be looking to for leadership in these trying economic times. In fact, it looks pretty goofy to send me a blatantly push poll worded survey, but I'll do my part because my friend Mike wants to know what I think...

How Can We Say Goodbye, etc: Year Three

2010-03-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

...there ere are a very few special things that make my mind threaten to just simply shut down. This has become one of them:

"Brett Favre said Thursday he still hasn't decided whether he'll play again next season — and doesn't expect to make an announcement anytime soon."

Okay. Fine. Give us a call when you figure all of this out. In the meantime, understand that we've all moved beyond your personal battle against your own angst. Go or stay; it is up to you...

Fever Dreams and the Missing Olympics

2010-02-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

...as the Vancouver Olympics draw to a close, I find my one last moment of frustration: some strangely tall woman wandering the streets of a Canadian city on the other side of the continent seeking the core of Canada's comedic contribution to this great country of ours. This apparently was more important that any number of sporting events that could have been discussed...

As far as the family of NBC channels are concerned, this has been: Vancouver 2010 - the Lost Olympics....

The Downside of That High Wild Western Life

2010-02-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

...that there is a strong attraction to the idealistic dream of living out in those high, wild open spaces of the intermountain West - far from the Maddening Crowd, as it were - is a well-established fact. It isn't actually all that great all the time for us regular folks who really do live out here, of course, but never mind that. The point is that a remarkable assortment of people who are either famous or infamous (or who should seriously be considered for one or the other categories) seem to suffer a strange attraction to places that make up in difficult solitude and inconvenient distance for what they lack in actual services and convenient comfort...

We have living amongst us all sorts of movie stars and sports stars and other stars living out on all sorts of gated compounds and private communities and remote ranches. We never see them, of course, because they have 'People' to take care of their needs; either that or they have imported highly skilled makeup artists that allow them to infiltrate our small local societies disguised as actual locals, driving disheveled beat-up mid-nineties Chevy sedans while their $100K European rides hide in unseen barns on their vast estates. And that's cool; it's OK because the whole idea of living out here in the middle of nowhere is centered on the concept of being who you are at the moment, not who you are somewhere else or who you need to be or want to be on some larger stage...

The attraction may well reside in part in the fact that folks out here tend to leave each other alone. There are simple rules of life out here, and to a certain degree some of those rules reject other people's racial hatred and the lines drawn in the sand by those haters for no other reason than the fact that proving yourself is a matter of performance rather than of the color of your skin. Most of the time, and as most recently demonstrated by citizens of John Day, Orygun, the local folks don't care to cross those lines. Even at its simplest level, the idea that white supremacists would like to move into town and make the community the focal point for strange, dangerous racist passions is an idea that falls well over that line. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must reveal that I lived for several years in John Day, Orygun. In the spirit of further disclosure, I must admit that John Day, Orygun, is not some sort of peaceful Utopia free of racial tension; it is a small, primarily Caucasian town of about three thousand people who are inextricably tied to cattle grazing and logging, and you will drive for an hour or two at highway speed in any direction across the Eastern Orygun High Desert before you get to the next larger town (more to the point, you will not pass through another incorporated community during that drive). Most folks are nice, polite, and accepting enough, but a black woman who worked for Mrs. Jack K. and her two young boys were subjected to the sort of harassment and abuse by the minority of yahoos and jerks that one finds in these small towns that may explain why some twisted facsimile of the Aryan Nation may think that it can gain a foothold in this far corner of the high wild...

John Day, Orygun, is not a racist town in the crazy-eyed white supremacist sense, but it is also not a town that comfortably deals with racial issues on a day-to-day basis. I once had a fellow show up on my doorstep offering the argument that the community needed to rise up against a proposal to construct low-income housing just down the hill from me because to build this housing would attract "those Portland people" to our community. We both understood which non-white portions of 'those Portland people' he was referring to. I failed in my efforts to explain to him that our community had plenty of its own low income people who would benefit from this new housing and that no Portland resident of any race in his or her right mind would forsake big city services for cheap rents in a tiny cow town in eastern Orygun. That didn't resolve our debate, so I whipped out the Magnum and drove him away at gunpoint...

OK; so that last part didn't happen, but I did cordially invite him to get off my property and never come back. The episode wasn't actually instructive as to the community viewpoint, but it was instructive as to how these sorts of things can happen. Were you to ask them, the majority of people in this small, almost exclusively white, isolated Eastern Orygun town would insist that they don't have a racist bone in their bodies; as far as they know and as far as their remote life experiences are concerned, that wold be a true statement. With yesterday's protest, they took a step toward proving how they know that it is true. John Day may not be some ultimate Utopian center of interracial Peace and Love, but the best of its residents are willing to say in public that it will not be a center of racist hatred...

Rest In Peace, Capt. Phil

2010-02-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

...I don't care about Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods isn't a real person who does real work for a living and I could care less if his rightfully aggrieved Swedish model trophy wife chases him from their exclusive Florida enclave all the way to Casper, Wyoming, with a heart full of hate and a fist full of Big Bertha driver. I care about real people who do real things. Almost all of the time, those real people and their real lives, no matter how hard or brutal or heroic, are anonymous to all but their friends and loved ones, but once in a while there is the chance for a larger audience to drop in and see what it is all about. "Dangerous Catch" is a passion that I have acquired over the last several years, mostly because it provides a hard look into the working lives of otherwise anonymous men who live way farther out on that lonely remote "live/die" edge than most people could ever imagine, much less venture out toward...

When you think about it, what these men do for a living - captains and crews alike - is crazy (although I realize that the idea of walking off into a flaming forest armed with nothing more than Nomex clothing and a pulaski might look the same). But they have been my kind of crazy, and Capt. Phil Harris was a core part of that crazy group. He lived a real life in front of all of us, battling bad seas and cold crab beds and family issues and health issues and all the rest. I am probably most sad about the fact that we have been so obsessed with things that don't really matter that, despite the fact that Capt. Phil first suffered his stroke almost a month ago and passed away a couple of weeks ago, any real broader media acknowledgment of his passing only came in the last few days...

Fair seas and peaceful skies, Capt. Phil. You will be missed. I pray that God's peace and comforting healing will be with your family...

(photo courtesy of www.corneliamaria.com)

If I Ran Ford Motor Company...

2010-02-16T21:14:00.000-08:00

...I would be on the first flight out of Detroit tomorrow morning, on my way to Lake Mary, Florida, to meet with the members of the local school board to make them an offer that they could not refuse. They are in a bit of a bind right now because, as it so happens, their high school mascot logo (the Fighting Lake Mary Rams) is an exact duplicate of the logo that the Chrysler Corporation uses for its Dodge pickups. The Chrysler Corp. has noticed; the Chrysler Corp. is not amused...

If I were the CEO of Ford Motor Company, I would fly economy class or drive a Toyota Prius or hitchhike on a Chevy car carrier or make whatever travel arrangements necessary to get to the next meeting of the Lake Mary school board so that I may suggest that maybe they could be Mustangs, instead of Rams, and I would offer to license my company's Mustang symbol to them for 10 bucks a year. I would sweeten the deal by offering to pay for the expense (estimated by the Principal to be many, many tens of thousands of dollars) necessary to expunge all evidence of the offending Rams logo from the school campus. Tee shirts, backpacks, and benches for everyone!! Gymnasium center court logo needs to be replaced? Done!!

The reasons I would do this are few and simple, primarily centered on the fundamental that the bean counters and mindless minions at the Chrysler headquarters are just simply nuts. If one cares to spin a high school analogy out just a little bit, the picture in any high school year book beside the caption "Least Likely To Succeed" is going to be the entire corporate headquarters building of the Chrysler Corporation. This is a company that clearly doesn't get it, from a public relations standpoint; rather than celebrating any group that wants to hook up with them, the least of the Big Three managed to stagger haplessly into third place one more time, selling less than half as many full size "Ram" trucks as either Ford or General Motors in 2009. If bean counters and losers weren't at the helm of this rapidly sinking ship, there would probably be an opportunity to realize that supporting - rather than legally attacking - any group that might want to honor the Ram logo is A Good Thing. Chrysler's minions are, unfortunately, prisoners of a long-lost past, trapped in the blinding haze of a sort of reflected glory that hasn't actually been Chrysler's reality for a couple of decades...

If I ran Ford Motor Company, I do believe I would step in here - in a totally altruistic gesture, of course - to help this poor little Florida in its time of need. Lake Mary Mustangs, anyone?

How Slow Can You Go

2010-02-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

...it could have been an epiphanal moment as I listened to this story on Orygun Public Broadcasting just a little while ago. It wasn't, but it could have been, because I have spent this work holiday surrounded by various elements of modern technology. While exchanging a flurry of text messages with my first-born, I was editing this humble little blog's template to bring in Blogger comments (which I don't actually like all that much, but the utility is free) to replace Haloscan comments (which worked just fine for the last six years but is now "NEW AND IMPROVED" and costs money). After I wrapped all that up, I logged in remotely to the Borg to deal with some work issues from the disturbing comfort of my bedroom 'office' (and if I had packed my Borg laptop home, I could have logged into a Citrix site and been "virtual", which I can assure you is just exactly what I want to be on my day off yessireebob)...

At some point, the thought crossed my mind "whatever happened to reading books or watching TV or calling someone to exchange information...or even not doing work stuff unless I go to the trouble of actually driving to the work site to do it?" I'm certainly not a Luddite; the choices available to me in my line of work would consist of either being violently hurled out the front door of the office or quietly ushered out the back exit if I refused to learn each and every little bit of up-to-the-minute technology that is amusingly offered up as the newest, bestest work-easing time-saving thing; cell phones are - as far as the initial imagining of these devices is concerned - a pretty cool technology that I struggle to remember how I lived without (even as the Great State of Orygun declares that I had darned well better pull off to the side of the road if I want to chat on one). And I really, really wish I could get a Digital Video Recorder (and maybe even HDTV), but just playing out in my mind the likely trajectory of the discussion with my Financial Advisor in an effort to establish just what exactly is the need for such stuff makes me just be quiet and be happy that I have TV's that display color pictures...

Why, though, do I need cameras in my phones? Both my work and personal phones have them and neither is nearly as capable as the digital cameras that I have for both work and home. Why should cell phones have app's and Internet access and Bluetooth, and why would I want to wander around appearing to be babbling randomly to myself with some sort of device worthy of Lieutenant Uhura sticking out of my ear? Why do my cell phone voice mail inboxes have a pass code, when the bigger tragedy would be some bad guy having my friggin' phone rather than access to my voice mails?

The world has TIVO; I have TV Guide and a handy excuse to occasionally get out of some get-together I would otherwise drink my own bathwater rather than attend ("sorry, the Big Game is on then"). The world has 3G cell service and is headed fast toward 4G cell service; I have a couple of cell phones that let me call and text and don't work when I push that little "off" button and nobody charges me for anything but talking and texting (and, unlike my boss, I cannot harass my employees with Blackberry emails zooming in from every quadrant of the celestial map). The world has cutting edge laptop computers that can do fractal geometry while simultaneously streaming YouTube videos and updating MyFace sites and collecting Twitter feeds and playing GTA:SA, all of which can be stored - along with the entire contents of the Library of Congress - on their capacious hard drives; I have a 5-year-old Dell with a 40-gig hard drive and 2 USB ports...

I don't have any particular interest in setting the clock back to 1985. There is too much cool stuff out there, and most of what I think of as cool stuff is controllable by me. So I won't go back to 1985; 2005 is, on the other hand, negotiable...

The Disappearing Invasion

2010-02-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

...it was always a stupid idea, frankly, that the government of the United States was jumping all over the Haiti earthquake in a effort to exercise the opportunity to invade and occupy that star-crossed nation. "Invasion" and "Occupation" were charges raised by various individual observers from the left here in the US, but they were also broached by a representative of the French government. Given that the 'two war' strategy that the Pentagon has always employed as the foundation for its force planning has been proven to be woefully, tragically inadequate in the face of involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea that the US was somehow interested in involving itself in an occupation of Haiti was absurd on its own face. Ill will about the Monroe Doctrine die hard, though, both here and abroad, and even in times of dire need there will be those who, for whatever reason, fail to - or refuse to - understand some of the fundamental aspects of the short-term capabilities of the military to immediately respond to catastrophic events...

The rumblings about occupation are probably to be expected in this case; it is Haiti, after all, and both the United States and France have all sorts of history there. The reality is entirely different, especially if one looks at the need to respond to the looming humanitarian disaster presented by the Jan. 12 earthquake from the standpoint of mobilizing resources to remote places. People I know do this sort of thing all the time, every year, year after year, and those people would commit unspeakable acts if such behavior would offer a shot at having the resources of the military available to move all the personnel and all of their attendant supplies to wild land fires across the western United States. Without emergency declarations and a certain lag time, this doesn't normally happen, no matter how many homes may be at risk from conflagration...

Aside from all of that, it appears that the much-dreaded invasion and occupation of Haiti by US troops is starting to look not very much like that sort of thing. You don't pull troops out if you are planning an occupation, and you certainly don't leave a mere 13,000 troops to engage in the occupation of an entire country, especially when many of those troops may not be deployed for purposes of quelling the population at gunpoint (which is what 'occupation' is all about). It was always, as I said before, a stupid idea that the US would see this moment as the perfect time to occupy another sovereign nation - even one falling within the reach of that old Monroe Doctrine -
if for no other reason than the fact that there is no compelling national security reason to do so. As a result of the intrusion of harsh numerical reality, the "invasion" seems to be disappearing...

Firsts And Lasts

2010-02-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

...first time things are amazing, exciting, even occasionally wondrous for the power of the emotions that they fire up deep in our guts. The first bike ride without training wheels; the first time staying over night at a friend's house; the first time driving a car; the first time driving a car alone without parents shouting panicked instructions; the first kiss; "the First Time"...

Last time things are emotional, too, but are usually more poignant than uplifting (though they can possibly be both). That last walk through your parents' house before leaving to start your new life elsewhere; the last caress of a beloved childhood pet before you place it in the hole you dug out in a far corner of the back yard; the last goodbye to a friend or lover or loved one that you know you will probably never see again for a whole variety of reasons...

Over a remarkable span than covered less than 12 hours last night and early this morning, we had - if we wanted to join in - the opportunity to watch both a first and a last. Today, a good portion of the population of New Orleans spent the morning sucking down pain relievers like confectionery tablets out of a Pez dispenser in a desperate effort to calm heads and stomachs after the first Super Bowl victory by a football team that has been for the better part of half a century the picture next to the dictionary definition of the word 'hapless'. An entire city - and, for a moment, an entire nation - chanted "Who Dat" as last night's game supplanted the last episode of MASH as the most-watched TV program of all time...

Less than six hours later, anyone who wanted to stay up really late could watch the last nighttime launch of a space shuttle...and one of the last launches period of any space shuttle (photo courtesy of www.satnews.com):
...I'll admit it: I'm a space geek. I grew up in an era when Mom and Dad roused me from early-morning sleep to watch those first Mercury launches on the far side of the country at 4 and 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning. I remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM pad onto the lunar surface (sitting alone in Grandma E's Bremerton, WA, living room, screaming my lungs out at my parents and grandparents to come watch a moment of history that was far more important than whatever inane chattering they were engaged in; didn't work, and I watched it alone). I cheered space shuttle satellite launches and the advent of Sally Ride; I celebrated the Hubble launch and the repair missions. I remember where I was and how I felt about the Challenger's last failed mission and I woke the entire family up on that fateful early West Coast Saturday morning on 1 Feb 2003 when the news first broke about the reentry failure of Columbia...

I am a child of the space age, growing up at the same time that the US space program grew to maturity. Budgetary and societal issues have dictated that the era of human space flight - at least as far as US astronauts being flung into space on US-built space vehicles is concerned - is coming to an end this year. The mystery and majesty of an endeavor that captured the imagination of the Baby Boomer generation will see its curtain drawn down for a whole lot of reasons that either make perfect sense or make no sense whatsoever, depending on particular world views, but the bottom line for now is that Endeavor's last night launch is one of those Last Things...

Malware Hell In A Very Small Place

2010-01-31T20:44:00.000-08:00

...several days locked in "Death Match" head-to-head combat with a particularly nasty little piece of malware called "Internet Security 2010"...

Countless hours, including the better of nine hours just today...

Installation of a new anti-virus program (downloading the newest definitions, under the circumstances, made the days of 58k modems seem like the Good Old Days); researching the culprit on another computer, digging deeper into the bowels of Windows registries than any helpless, hapless computer duffer like me has any right or reason to dig; killing files and registry entries with the peculiar wild abandoned of a desperate, hopeless victim who can clearly see an imminent future where this faithful old laptop is soaked with snow blower gas and set on fire in the driveway...

It has been a far less than fruitful weekend spent solely in the effort to kill this ugly little bug that cropped up suddenly - out of nowhere - yesterday (my elitist Firefox smugness has taken a serious hit over this), and it is only by the grace of a loving, forgiving God that I am even typing these words right now. At that, I'm not all that confident that every single keystroke I type isn't being funneled into some dark hacker lair for later exploitative analysis. Not that I was looking for such a distraction, but this episode has certainly taken my mind off of my concerns about switching my comment system from Haloscan to something else after receiving their 'end of service' notification on Friday...

Tomorrow is a Monday that is looking better than usual, for some reason...

Bring Back Bobby Jindal

2010-01-27T19:39:00.000-08:00

...I am watching the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address right now, which is being delivered by the newly elected Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell. It is a truly painful experience on a couple of levels...

First - for those of us who may not have been sufficiently engaged in the Virginia gubernatorial race last fall - is the pain of realizing just how bad a candidate the Democrats must have offered if this particular remarkably life-like cardboard cutout could actually win the election. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that if I want to go up against a rather accomplished orator like Barack Obama, I'm going to pick some handsome white male (which seems to be the Republican strategy after Bobby Jindal's remarkable and vaguely spooky meltdown last year) who actually can read a speech without sounding like he's reading a speech to his classmates in his high-school speech class...

Second, it is absurd to try to create some Republican Potemkin Village like the disturbingly handsome and photogenic collection of Republicans collected in the Virginia statehouse that seemingly suggests that Americans from all walks of life and racial/ethnic backgrounds are all the way down with whatever it was he said (I confess that I hit the mute button about 4 minutes in to keep from injuring myself by toppling out of my chair from speech-induced somnolence). These are not the faces of the Republican party and it is simply an insult to all those Blacks and Asians and Hispanics - and even to a whole hosts of attractive young Euro-Americans - who haven't found any solace in the Republican message to try to suggest that there is some sort of broad support for whatever the message was (ibid - "mute button"). While the Republican producers of this odd little event did a good job of hiding the "applause" sign that - based on the style and delivery of Governor McDonnell's apparent speech class assignment - clearly must have been flaring up like sun spots at all the appropriate places, it still remains that there are not majorities of all those ethnic and racial categories that Republicans apparent have divided us into who accept or even tolerate Republican views on the great issues of the day...

I actually feel a little bit sad for the Republicans for cranking up another rather lame attempt to respond to an Obama speech. I almost feel most sorry for the dude in the uniform behind the Governor, because I suspect that someone...somewhere...is going to raise the question of why anyone is showing up in uniform to be seen in a prominent spot behind the person making a solely political statement in the SOTU response. The State of the Union speech at least has some attachment to the Constitution requirement to make an annual report to Congress; there is no corresponding requirement of a response by the party out of power, and to involve one's self in what is a purely political exercise opens up all sorts of personal disciplinary and legal risks for anyone who wants to show up wearing a uniform...

Jindal's performance last year may have been a political disaster that gave the children nightmares and scared the cats under the sofa, but it at least has some entertainment value because of its pure strangeness. Tonight's performance was simply embarrassingly lame with all of its stiff, stilted amateurish oratory, stale message, and manufactured cheering. Bring back Bobby Jindal, I say!! Make the Republican response interesting - or at least amusing - again!

When Mail Fraud Is A Policy

2010-01-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

...so the Republican National Committee, as part of the on-going efforts by Chairman Michael "Keepin' It Real" Steele to keep it real, has sent out letters labeled "Official Document" in the finest tradition of Publisher's Clearing House that combine 'we need money' dunning letters with supposed "Census Surveys" to people all across the nation. The letters, of course, don't contain an actual Census of Congressional Districts, despite what all the heavy-duty capitalized "Do Not Destroy" lingo on the envelope says; they include a set of remarkably lame push-polling questions delivered by Postal employees who have better things to do rather than being delivered directly to your telephone by some stammering half-witted hireling who seems less than regretful about interrupting your dinner...

I suppose it's important in their own minds for Steele and the Republican National Committee to combine fund raising with a survey - one that they apparently would like you to think of as an Official Do-Not-Destroy Census document (and I'm sure its timing being coincident with the start of the actual real live U.S. Census is a simple accident of timing) - that asks questions like "Do you agree or disagree with the current B. Hussein Obama administration's proposal to kill cuuute cute cute little kittens and warm snuggly adorable little puppies to produce luxuriant sleeping robes from their skins for the illegal immigrants who will be sitting at the front of the lines at all the doctor's offices and health clinics after the Government takeover of health care?"...

Lord knows Michael and his...well, OK, not "supporters", but maybe "fellow travelers... need the money in order to tap into the rising tide of Tea Baggerdom sweeping the nation. At least, that is what we are told by those experts who talked at length about the Permanent Republican Majority and the advent of Dow Jones averages on the high side of 30,000. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Mikey and the RNC might tippy-toe right up to the very edge of mail fraud to rake in some bucks and collect meaningless survey data that nobody but FAUX News and the RNC's ad writers will have any use for. After all, those same 'Permanent Republican Majority'/'Dow at 30K' talking heads have been telling us that last week's SCOTUS decision on McCain-Feingold won't actually have all that much real impact on real American's lives, so fund raising under the fairly obvious sheep's cloak of a bogus Official "Census" mailing is apparently called for to try to refill Republican coffers...

I think the observation of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who is a Democrat who received the mailing at his official residence (apparently news travels slow in Republican circles), perfectly captures the value of this so-called Republican Census:

"The Republicans have said they want to get a bigger tent," Schweitzer told The Associated Press, "so perhaps they are trying to lure a politician into the Republican Party that can actually balance a budget."

A "Who Dat?" Kind Of Night

2010-01-24T21:03:00.000-08:00

...I don't want to talk about politics tonight for a whole lot of reasons, but I can't help wanting to talk about a couple of things...

I am a stone cold sucker for great sports stories, because I am even more a fan of a variety of sports than I am of politics - and the gulf is starting to grow more expansive every day recently. The N'awlins Saints are the story of the year, in my mind. A rookie head coach and what was essentially an injured, supposedly washed-up cast-off San Diego Charger quarterback took hold of a devastated, still-suffering city and, finally, picked up and carried that city and its still suffering residents on their own two backs to a place that it has never been. I don't have a dog in the Super Bowl fight - again - but I will be a part of the "Who Dat" nation in two weeks, regardless of my appreciation of the talents of Peyton Manning...

While surfing the TV after the game, I stumbled across BET's UNCF tribute to Lionel Ritchie, which prompted a flood of memories of a time when I actually had a full head of hair and far less adipose tissue than that which now haunts me. In its own way, this provided another "Who Dat" moment in its own perverse way; it allowed me to reflect on a part of my musical past - one that my teenage children seem incapable of either appreciating or understanding - that appears to be long dead culturally, in the same way that my questionable contributions to the future of our great nation view my appreciation of the early Beatles or the Beach Boys. It is almost impossible to explain to them why a particular cover of the Lionel Ritchie/Diana Ross hit "Endless Love" even matters, much less trumps the original. I've decided to not even try; I will only offer Mariah Carey and Luther Vandross in a remarkable version of a song that was part of the soundtrack to a life that my children can't appreciate but probably should learn to understand when their own minds turn to the question of "why am I here" (if you know what I mean)...

On Not Being Sad To See This Day End

2010-01-22T19:05:00.000-08:00

...a number of years ago (that number being in the double digits and, no, I don't want to talk about it), I was leading a group of people working on data collection in a burned-over area from a late-summer forest fire. It was January, we were working on exposed upper slopes of the Western Orygun Cascades, and the gusting winds from the winter storm wrapped around us made the sloppy wet falling snow actually blow uphill across the steep exposed slopes on which we toiled. The normal good-natured bitching about the weather in the earlier hours of the day began to take on a more desperate, keening tone after a cold, miserable, and extremely short lunch break spent hunkering down on the leeward side of the least dangerous-looking dead trees surrounding us...

Except for this one guy. He was one of those truly elemental creatures you run into occasionally in my line of work, the kind who loves every aspect of being Out There, regardless of the conditions or circumstances. He was the sort who just might bare his chest to the howling worst that Mother Nature could offer and shout "Bring It On, Baby", were it not for the socially norming understanding that those around him who didn't share his absolute love for Mother Nature's raw challenges just might grab the largest piece of woody material they could lay hands on and beat him senseless just to shut him up...

...and he was simply devouring the day. "It can't get too bad for me", he kept saying as other conversations increasing drifted toward the idea of going back to college and getting that accounting degree that Momma always talked about. As the afternoon blew on, however, his celebration of living an uncompromised Life In The Heart Of Nature became more muted, even as others contemplated the directions their lives might take if the first thing they did on getting back to the office was to resign. At the end of the day, we trudged, stumbled, and dragged ourselves down the side of the mountain through the mud and wind and gloppy wet snowfall back to the crew rig, wet and cold in a way that the manufacturers of our rain gear and "miracle" wicking undergarments apparently couldn't imagine possible. We loaded our equipment into the back of the truck in grim silence and crawled into the cab to begin the delicate heater system balancing act between providing warmth and managing window steam sufficiently to be able to see where we were going...

From somewhere behind me, I heard the subdued voice of Nature Man breaking the unusual - in fact remarkably atypical - end of the day crew cab silence: "Y'know. I have to say...I'm not really sad to see this day end."

That's the way I feel tonight, even though the pure physical reality of this moment is so far removed from that miserable afternoon a couple of decades ago. I'm sitting comfortably in my warm home dressed in shorts and a tee shirt instead of behind the damp cold steering wheel of a smelly wet government-marked Chevy Suburban out in the middle of some wind-swept snow-raked hillside, but my mind is in almost the same place it was all those years ago. Today marks the end of the week, in a working sense, and this has been a week that simply no longer deserves to live...

From Monday on, I had the opportunity to see the disturbing reaffirmation of a very real possibility that my Type 1 diabetic teenager will enter adult life having virtually no chance of finding affordable health care insurance because of his 'preexisting condition', courtesy of the election of a wingnut Republican to the seat once held by Teddy Kennedy in the US Senate. My disgust with that particular repudiation of all that it means to be a person - or the parent of a person - branded with the Devil's Mark of "Preexisting Condition" was reinforced, in the aftermath of Brown's Massachusetts victory, by Congressional Democrats displaying the kind of timorous waffling that makes Dunkirk look like an absolute unalloyed victory in retrospect. All of this was followed on Thursday by stark proof of the George W. Bush version of the statement "Elections Have Consequences", when the conservative, judicially activist SCOTUS team manufactured from the spare conservative Senatorial majority that he enjoyed created, out of whole cloth, the idea that Corporations are people, too...

In the course of just a few remarkable days, my son's hopes of being able to find affordable health insurance to cover the breath-taking expenses of the tools needed to keep his disease from controlling both his life and his life expectancy took a severe beating. That beat-down came both from the direct likelihood of the Republican "just say no" strategy finally bearing its ugly fruit with the addition of a 41st Senator and from the predictable coming campaign by certain big-money corporate and special interests targeted directly against the reelection of those Members of Congress who might actually care - if even in an abstract way - about what kind of life my son can live...

After over 30 years of eyebrow-deep involvement in the emotionally-freighted world of natural resource management, I have learned - if nothing else - that the weekend matters. It's a time to step away: watch sports, read novels, get to the high country, or do whatever else that might transport the mind away from the stress of that 'real life' that otherwise calls for obsessive attention to detail and patient consideration of aggressively opposing viewpoints. It will be harder this weekend to step away from all the noise and smoke, however, because so much of what went on this week has huge implications for my family and my own emotional self. I suppose that all of what went on this week is what makes me reflect back on a particular memory from a couple of decades ago and say that I'm not sad to see this day, and this week, end...

For Sale: High Mileage; One Owner

2010-01-18T19:57:00.000-08:00

...I have to confess that, once in a while, you see a deal come by that is just too good pass up, if only you hadn't made the mistake of making fun of that geeky Gates kid back in middle school in Seattle. If you had decided to hang with him and Paul Allen and their other two friends instead of slamming them inside their lockers, you could probably be first in line today to be the first person on your block to own a space shuttle...

I don't know about you but - to me - having space shuttle Atlantis sitting in the front yard is way cooler than controlling a foundation or owning the Seahawks (especially the latter, especially over the last couple of years). On the other hand, if you had befriended those little nerds and been their protector from the cruelty of your friends and maybe got in on the ground floor of what would become Microsoft with them, you would be living in some sort of gated community now with the kind of monster CCR's that would prevent you from parking it on the front yard anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, who's going to buy a space shuttle to put out in the backyard by the pool and the guest house?

But still...I'd write a check for that baby right this minute, if only I had been afforded the chance to make that smart choice all those years ago back at the Lakeside School, which I didn't...

Because I grew up in Idaho. Another opportunity lost, I'm afraid...

Stipulated: Joe Lieberman Is A Putz

2010-01-13T19:22:00.000-08:00

...ok, so that probably isn't a stipulation that falls into the category of "Breaking News", but this Politico report reinforces any impression that any reasonable person may have regarding Lieberman's total abandonment of any pretense of actual concern for the plight of any real people. It's been pretty clear since his reelection that his primary goal in life was to be a jerk to Democrats as a form of personal retribution. Essentially, Lieberman has sacrificed his Constitutional responsibility of representation, as well as the well-being of his constituents, on the alter of his own bruised ego. We already knew that simply because we didn't see him fleeing across the parking lot to avoid any suggestion that he would even tolerate being in the same room as a proposal that he serve as John McCain's running mate in 2008, but the hits just seem to keep on coming...

The Politico story merely is the most recent crumbling brick in that slimy wall of lies that is part of the political house in which Joe Lieberman lives. Of Course he wrote a personal letter to Harry Reid; all the better to preserve his personal options. Of Course he didn't come right out in the letter stating that he would oppose the Medicare plan; that would tip the hand he fully intended to play. Lieberman had no interest other than flexing his own muscle for the sole purpose of showing those Democrat bastards who turned their backs on him in his hour of need just exactly who is the boss around here, which is why even the most sympathetic treatment he could hope to get - from Politico - clearly demonstrates that entire rooms full of Democratic legislators and staffers were unable to gather from either his statements or his conveniently-produced "confidential" letter that he actually had deal-stopper concerns about aspects of the Senate Health Care Reform bill prior to his star turn on a Sunday talk show...

Timing is everything. Lieberman wrote a letter; if he was smart - and he clearly is - he made sure that it was an official hard-copy correspondence rather than an email, which guaranteed that Harry Reid probably wouldn't even see it before Lieberman strolled onto the "Face The Nation" set to fire an unexpected four-torpedo spread into the deal Reid thought he had agreement on. It's a move that the most skilled Mafia hitman would have to sit back and admire for its shear audacity: compose a "personal and confidential" letter expressing views that are totally contradictory to any viewpoint you have previously shared with Senate leadership; run it through your staff system so it takes all day to get it completed but is still dated Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009; make sure that it isn't delivered either electronically or by hard copy until sometime later in the day of Friday, Dec. 11, when the Majority Leader's office is powering down for the weekend and can't respond immediately; plaster your own face all over the TV on Sunday pulling the plug on Health Care legislation in its then-current form, comfortable in the knowledge that you created a CYA 'get out of jail free' document that you can wave around to 'prove' your sincerity and 'timely' objection, even though that whole thing is a total sham because nobody had the chance to address or even respond to the concerns raised in your cleverly useless letter...

To be honest, Lieberman didn't play all that smartly clever a game, as far as the 'inside baseball' aspect of this story is concerned. He did, however, lay down a paper trail to roll out before his electoral constituents (the people of Connecticut) and his natural constituents (beady-eyed weasels everywhere). That paper trail is most likely bogus, as far as any sort of reality-based community is concerned, but Joe Lieberman is a putz. When you're a putz, connections to actual reality don't matter...

The Trent Lott Problem

2010-01-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

...much is being made about the reported comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid concerning Barack Obama that is found in the Mark Halperin/John Heilemann book about the 2008 presidential campaign. On the face of it, his notation of Obama's lack of a "Negro dialect" ("unless he chooses to have one") has a certain taint of racial insensitivity, but it is probably just simply the product of a clumsy choice of words by an old white guy from a lily-white state who didn't have sufficient staff support to keep him sufficiently up to speed on latter-day nomenclature to steer him clear of the sort of statements that that have plunged him into the crisis of leadership in which he now finds himself...

There is a huge outcry now, primarily from Republicans, that is attempting to draw a direct parallel to the trouble that Trent Lott found himself in back in 2002 that finally led him to resign as Senate Majority leader...and that is the Trent Lott Problem...

Lott may in fact have a racist bone or two in his body - I don't have any evidence to argue one way or another on that point, other than his voting record - but it has always seemed to me that his comments at Strom Thurmond's ninety-somethingth birthday party about how we'd all be better off had he been elected president when he ran for the office was little more than a casual unthinking off-the-cuff bit of homage to a Grand Old Man of the Party and not an affirmation of Thurmond's segregation party platform. Even though I would not have had a single qualm in 2002 about supporting any sort of proposal to set Lott adrift on an iceberg for the sake and survival of the nation, it seemed to me that he was quite simply getting railroaded straight out of town over comments that were made outside of any sort of historical context and were simply pretty words offered in homage to an old man. As it so happens, I was on the wrong side of the 'equal sign' on the Lott/Thurmond issue - for reasons that I don't actually understand and will probably never accept - and poor ol' Trent had to walk the plank over his comments...

As a result of all that past history, we find ourselves fetched up against the shoals that we are trapped against today. Harry Reid said things that were stupidly insensitive (but not necessarily surprising) that are being compared to Trent Lott's comments back in the dayp, which were themselves stupid and insensitive to people of color, whether or not either man realized it. Lott lost track of - or perhaps never really understood - what Thurmond was all about, and that is a different place than the one in which Reid found himself in when he said what he said. That is where the Trent Lott problem lives for Democrats and for Reid, however, because both episodes live at one margin or another of what we understand as race relationships. Reid's commments in that context are nothing compared to Lott's comments, but both have the taint of racism...

Hence the Trent Lott Problem; what Reid said lives in an entirely different plane than the potential meaning behind what Lott said (regardless of what Lott actually meant), but there appears to be a moment of equivalency in the world of political media. So, for the near future, we will be hammered with one version or another of the question "when will Harry Reid resign from leadership like Trent Lott was forced to?", regardless of whether or not we are actually talking about the same thing...

I Think I See The Problem

2010-01-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

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...y'see, in some other world...say for example, Dr. Pangloss's 'otherwise perfect world', perhaps, there would be all sorts of actual journalistic checks and balances that would discourage Rudy Gualini from even saying something like this:

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Giuliani said. "We've had one under Obama."

Rudy, in that otherwise perfect world, would learn that he would be hounded off the set of "Good Morning, America" by such a savagely bloody and vicious attack by the show's hosts that he would be lucky to ever be able to play any role on the stage of American politics other than the crazy uncle in the basement. His political currency would be valued somewhere south of Monopoly money if he even dallied with the idea of making such an outrageous statement...or at least it would in that otherwise perfect world...

We don't live in that world, sadly enough. We live in a grimy world of smarmy lies and vaguely shaded half-truths that pass for the supposed statement of facts. Rudy says what he says, reinforcing the idea that a lie that is repeated often enough becomes the truth, and George Stephanopoulos sits there with a Gomer Pyle buck-toothed grin soaking it all up, apparently never once firing up enough brain cells to critically evaluate how Rudy's statements square with even the first draft of history that has been laid down regarding The Year Of Our Lord 2001, when George W. Bush was President of the United States. Even beyond his failure to pursue the factual reality of Sept. 11, 2001, Stephanopoulos apparently can't summon the slightest hint of curiosity to inquire as to how Rudy squares his patter with the equally factual reality of the story of shoe bomber Richard Reid that played out three months after nine-eleven...

I think I see the problem here. We appear to be afflicted with a bunch of people hungering to be the ruling class who would better serve us by being beer-drunk passed out over the air cleaner of an '88 Dodge Aries who are being facilitated by a collection of so-called journalists who look like nothing less than the south-side view of a north-bound horse. There isn't any plausible explanation for George's failure to explore Rudy's statements other than the rather casual fact that the supposed 'opinion-maker' interviewers like Stephanopoulos - whether they are doing the big time Sunday Talking Head shows or diving into the fluffy weekday morning shows - are little more than enablers. We knew that already, of course, because we have been able to collect a long, tragically rich history of supposed journalists sitting on their hands while various politicians spout any vacuous nonsense that comes to mind, but this little episode - where even clearly-established history is passed over as if it never happened - finally ratifies a clear understanding of the failure of the media to be a faithful arbiter of the truth...

EXCLUSIVE: Jumped Shark Devours Newsweek's Michael Isikoff In Self-Defense

2010-01-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

...wait!! What!? Would your faithful servant actually suggest that the man who essentially made his bones stoking the fires of the Clinton Impeachapalooza should be consumed by a thoughtless cold-blooded piscean killing machine just because he doesn't even seem to have a sufficiently vague grasp of journalistic ethics to keep this sort of intentionally divisive tripe from seeing the light of day?

Well, no. I would never suggest such a thing.

That would be ridiculous.

I am a far bigger fan of Orcas, but "jumped the killer whale" just doesn't have any cred on the street, so any suggestion that a Newsweek 'superstar' should be devoured by an intelligent, warm-blooded mammalian killing machine that may have well-reasoned malice aforethought would simply be a lost, wasted metaphor...

This entire report looks like little more than a journalistic hatchet job more worthy of FAUX News than some entity that still - rightly or wrongly - considers itself to be a real-live old school Fourth Estate enterprise. From the headline on down, it is a wealth of innuendo and carefully shaded suppositions, none of which provides anything approximating the barest hint that we are looking at anything that even rises to the level of that infamous 6 August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing...

The inflammatory headline says "Obama Got Pre-Christmas Intelligence Briefing About Terror Threats to "Homeland", but what are the facts of the story?

Did the briefing mention Yemen? No.

Did it include any mention of the potential of an African national being involved? Well, no, not really.

Did the briefing have any information that suggested that anyone at the mid-level or higher layers of the US government had "threads" that could have been pulled together to make Barack Obama go all Harrison Ford and clamber on board Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas day and personally take down Umar Abdulmutallab? Nope.

Was there anything - any little piece of evidence at all - available to anybody who either gave or received the briefing that would point to a Nigerian man getting on a US-bound flight in the capital city of the Netherlands for the express purpose of blowing up his plane over Detroit? Get real!! Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) couldn't get any farther inland than Bangor, Maine, and his only real crime was "Moon Shadow".

Yes, there were "threads". No, they didn't point to Abdulmutallab, and the fact that his dad tried to raise red flags reflect more on the intelligence structure that Gee Dub's administration left behind rather than on the efforts of the current administration. More to the point, none of this mattered in that EXCLUSIVE Breaking news report about the briefing that Isikoff is so breathlessly taken by...

There were failures in any number of systems that allowed Abdulmutallab to get on Northwest Flight 253 on Dec. 25. There was not, on the other hand, a single thing offered by this EXCLUSIVE Isikoff "report" that suggests that the upper levels of the Obama administration had a single clue to go on in order to interdict this particular terrorist attack. The headline and the reporting look good, though, in the sort of newly discovered context of a media that somehow lost its voice when Republicans were in charge but suddenly doesn't feel constrained about 'speaking "truth" to power' now that Democrats have hands on all those levers of power...

Forests And Trees, Anti-Terror Division

2009-12-31T19:17:00.000-08:00

...aside from all the finger-pointing going on right now in the intelligence community and amongst various critics dug out of the woodwork by Politico in this story, there is still one really important point that is being missed:

The Guy Got On An Airplane...

Regardless of any information that any particular officer of the federal government had in his or her possession at any given moment, The Guy Got On An Airplane...

Yes, there appear to be ongoing problems with various agencies and departments being able to play well together, but that doesn't actually surprise me. My years of exposure to the Fed Borg have caused me to develop a simple philosophy that I call the Rule of Concentric Circles:

Employees tend to occupy a native environment controlled by an 'us vs. them' mentality that is bounded at varying levels of intensity in outwardly expanding circles. There is the 'us' in a room vs. 'them' in the rest of the office; there is the 'us of the office vs. the 'them' of offices in other locations; then there is the 'us' of our organization vs. the 'them' of other organizations. Finally there is the big encompassing 'us' vs. all those 'thems' who represent some other culture or state or movement. There can be any number of extra circular boundaries in between, adding layers to this construct, but there are always those next outer circular boundaries defining where some version 'them' lives. There is, of course, a certain sort of bond as we move across the adjacent boundary to the next larger version of 'us', but as you move across those boundaries to outer circles, the valence of that bond tends to weaken.

So, sure, there are turf wars between groups who - from the outside - would seem to an objective observer to be otherwise naturally disposed to work together for the good of the order. That problem surely needs to be fixed (though, for the life of me, I don't know how one goes about doing that in light of the ancient animosities and historic disagreeable relationships amongst various intelligence and security agencies without resorting to performance incentives like directed reassignment to Afghanistan for failure to cooperate), but it misses the main point...

Anti-terrorist intelligence work has never been the sole forward edge of the battle area (FEBA) in the effort to keep militants and wackos and lone wolves from threatening the lives of air travelers. We have been subjecting ourselves to varying degrees of personal scrutiny in our efforts to get on a commercial airliner for a few decades now, and the reality of strangers forking through our suitcased underwear, pawing through our carry-ons, and sending our camera bags full of precious memories through powerful x-ray machines has been around far longer than the TSA. Those security screening lines have long been a primary FEBA, initially because most folks didn't care to have their Seattle-to-Phoenix itinerary include an intermediate stop in Havana. The Guy Got On An Airplane, and the problem isn't so much that a couple of jackbooted Federal Lackeys (as my friends and neighbors so lovingly label we Fed Borg types) couldn't see their way clear to talk to each other; the problem is that the airport security system failed. Forget that there were little cartoon arrows with "he's the one" balloon captions pointing at this guy as he moved through the system because of the available information; the fact is that He Got On That Plane and, even if his dad hadn't been a stand-up guy or if he was just some lone actor with a head full of hate and some interesting contacts, He Still Would Have Gotten On That Flight...

The trees are blocking the view of the forest here; the point that is being missed is obvious. The most important failure that apparently came close to resulting in a tragedy over Detroit on Christmas day was the failure of the passenger screening process. It's true that there are plenty of waypoints where this particular fellow could have and should have been identified and interdicted, but the fact remains that some guy was able to get onto a commercial flight with a pants-load of PETN and a loaded syringe he wasn't forced to explain. At one important level, it doesn't matter what his human connections were; those two important facts are what matters to most of us who go through all those hassles of putting ourselves and our loved ones onto commercial flights...

List? We Don't Need No Stinkin' List!

2009-12-31T17:25:00.000-08:00

...this is the time of year, of course, where we are inundated with Top Ten "Best/Worst/Most of" lists, and this year we are facing a bit of a double whammy because we are not only running up against the back end of the Gregorian fantasy of a "year" but are also even facing the end of a decade. Or maybe not; it all depends whether you think counting starts with 0 or 1 (I've always been a "count to 10" kind of guy myself, but somebody who has the pull to do so says we start counting decades at 'zero', so there you are). In this case, I don't really have a real problem with ending the decade tonight, because it is a decade that deserves more than any in recent experience to be beaten with a shovel until it quits wiggling...

This hasn't been a decade that deserves any sort of enumeration of lists of ten of anything. This decade deserves to mostly be bitterly remembered for the number '8'; specifically, it deserves to be remembered - as a warning, if for no other reason - for eight years starting on the Constitutionally mandated date of Jan. 20, 2001, and ending (mercifully, but far too late) on Jan. 20, 2009. You could probably crank out any number of lists of Bottom 10 or 20 or 50 lists just accounting for the assault on our personal freedoms, civil rights, or democratic ideals as a result of the cheap shills, fixers, and neo-despots who carried George W. Bush on their shoulders through the White House door and straight into the Oval Office on that first day. They gave him a massive, shiny desk and a purty rug for it to set on, propped him up in a sumptuous leather chair, and told him not to touch anything...

The Smart People took over and began taking crowbars and clawhammers to just about anything that looked like it might represent a common understanding of who we are. Any legitimate timeline of the Bush administration's domination of this departing decade demonstrates, aside from the raw war-mongering bellicosity of the whole thing, a wholesale effort to stamp out just about any aspect at any level of The American Dream. The only thing that even vaguely and perversely looked like a saving grace in Bushco's effort to shift the social services burden to the middle class through massive tax cuts to the wealthy and businesses was the fact that - at the same time - they were working like rabid feral dogs trying to tear apart those social services. Pell Grants, 'Teach For America', and stem cell research were just the tips of this ugly iceberg...

The putative representatives of the idea of keeping government out of peoples' lives brought us the Patriot Act, wiretapping of just about any person for any reason, banning of 'the morning after pill', and direct interference in the end-of-life decision of one single person. These supposed defenders of America's freedom established, through law and Executive Directive, a virtual roadmap for the creation of a dictatorship under the flimsiest of "national emergency" circumstances (and if I were the 44th President of The United States I would be sending weekly cards, Candygrams, and notes to the Republican leadership thanking them for the foresight of doing some of the heavy lifting on these items, just for the pure joy of keeping them up nights)...

Through the auspices of the office of the vice president, they dared Senate Democrats with a 'nuclear option' of blowing up the practice of filibuster over judicial nominations; in hindsight, since we ended up with Roberts and Alito anyway, it was a dare the Democrats probably should have taken. They essentially rewrote over 750 laws passed appropriately under the terms of the US Constitution by crafting "signing statements" that without actual Constitutional authority or any testing in Constitutionally-authorized courts gutted those laws to greater or lesser degrees...

One could, with sufficient time and inclination, write a fairly passable "Declaration of Independence" against the brutal reality of those eight wasted years that sit like a huge dung-beetle smack dab in the heart of this departing decade. I don't have either the time or the inclination, so a hearty wave goodbye will have to suffice. It is ironic, as I think about it, that one creation that GWB's minions certainly wouldn't care to point pridefully toward is the vibrant on-line political community that fought against everything GeeDub and his handlers tried to do. On the other hand, the current interactions of that community may suggest that Will Rogers' famous observation about 'not belonging to an organized party' doesn't even get all the way to the nut of the matter...

In any case, I don't need no stinkin' list...or, if I do, that list only need consist of 8 years off of the last decade's calendars. Or failing that, the list only needs one entry: Bush-43. That works just fine for me...

And I Missed It

2009-12-30T18:37:00.000-08:00

...when you are an alumnus of the University of Idaho, there are certain things that you have been trained to accept, sort of in the same fashion that planaria are trained, by the use of various powerful painful stimuli. You learn to accept that nobody who lives more than a day's drive from the Palouse knows how to properly pronounce the name of the community (long 'o' at the end, not the 'cow' sound used when saying the name of the Ruskie capitol); you learn to come to grips with verbal abuse accruing from the historical accident of an occasional publicly prominent nitwit having spent a few months on campus. Most of all, you learn to cope with the sort of long-suffering patience that can only come from long years of witnessing doom and failure in intercollegiate athletic endeavors...

This afternoon, for the first time in just about forever and perhaps only the second time since the glaciers last receded, the Idaho Vandals played in a college bowl game against Bowling Green University in the Humanitarian Bowl at, of all places, Bronco Stadium on the campus of long-time arch rival Boise State University. In the course of the last 30 seconds of the fourth quarter, the boys in Silver and Gold pulled out a wild, improbable victory, Live On ESPN...and I missed it.

Why I missed it doesn't really matter - suffice it to say that family duty called me away when there was 1:30 left to go and the score was tied at 35. I missed it. The Vandals drove 66 yards in three plays in the last 30 seconds and went for two to win instead of kicking the PAT that would have sent the game to overtime. Even had I not missed it, I didn't have any Vandal paraphinalia to wave because I'm - well - a Vandal and we don't (especially those of use from the '70's) do a lot of gear-waving. We don't have much experience in doing that in any case, and those of us who live in Orygun's bifurcated Duck/Beaver country would be crazy to even try: Vandal fan clubs exist in Orygun but they operate like spy cells, speaking only in code and holding meetings in cold, candle-lit barns and root cellars like some modern manifestation of the French Resistance...

There was a time - not all that long ago, in fact - when I could take pride in the fact that both the national and the regional directors of my FedBorg agency were Vandals. I could at least point to the fact that those leaders and others farther down the org chart were graduates of the University of Idaho during those unruly "how's your school doing" confabs that usually erupted when talk turned to the prospects of the Oregon Ducks or the Oregon State Beavers amongst my locally-born coworkers. Tonight I can stand on my own, however, howling to that rare Blue Moon that my Vandals won. In fact, the headline tomorrow should read "Vandals Win On The Hideous Blue Boise State Smurf Turf"...... just because, for reasons that only alumni of the University of Idaho could posssibly understand. But still, a group of players who don't have any understanding if the pain we Idaho students felt in the 1970' brought it all home.

And I missed it...

Random Thoughts: Air Travel Edition

2009-12-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

...is there going to be any more hassle-freighted experience over the next little while than being a Nigerian passenger on a Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?. I mean, everybody (including my first-born traveling back to Georgia in a couple of days) is going to have to deal with more issues than just a couple of days ago on any flight, but certain prospective passengers will no doubt receive special attention...

News You Can Use, Ver. 2.0.1 - The Merry Christmas Edition

2009-12-22T19:28:00.000-08:00

...it's always comforting to know that the good folks at the Associated Press are looking out for our interests, fighting that stalwart Fourth Estate fight for us. Tonight, for example, we learn that one great way of making sure that we reduce our odds of facing an IRS tax audit is to try to avoid earning $200k per year or more. I'm sure that we can all use this helpful tip to avoid those disquieting moments sitting in front of a hard-eyed IRS auditor pawing disgustedly through your shoe box labeled "Medical Receipts"...

Not only that, but if you do find yourself subjected to an audit and are behind on your taxes and are unemployed, the IRS - oh, lucky day - has payment tools to help you make up for your failure to do your part to support our society...which, as you well know, is a Socialist Commie concept because 'Socialist' and 'Society' both come from the same root word, which in itsownself can only give you comfort, knowing that RNC Chairman Michael Steele will come bursting through the IRS auditor's typically SocioCommie closed door - bandoliers flying and RNC-approved Teabagger-endorsed semiautomatic assault rifle blazing - to rescue you from that aforementioned hard-eyed SocioCommieFascist jackbooted federal tax thug and save you from the brutal subjugation of paying some penurious "debt" to Obama's (SOCIALIST) society...

So there you have it. Simple tools for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; make sure you keep your income down, and rely on Mike Steele to save you if that tax thing goes bad because he knows what "flipping the bird" is all about. This is truly News You Can Use...

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On The Twin Curses Of Perfidy And Emails

2009-12-19T19:30:00.000-08:00

...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...

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

2009-12-18T18:55:00.000-08:00

...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?

Joe's Problem With The Truth

2009-12-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

...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....

Just Eleven More Shopping Days

2009-12-13T20:28:00.000-08:00

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

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Random Winter Storm Warning Friday Night Thoughts

2009-12-11T20:20:00.000-08:00

-- For those of us who do not play golf, who have no interest in learning to play golf unless retirement affords the time to do so, and who have watched PGA telecasts about as much as we have watched episodes of "Lost" or "American Idol" (in other words, not at all), there is one question: Is there some emotion we should feel at the news that Tiger Woods is going on an indefinite hiatus from playing golf? OK, so maybe there are two questions, the second being: Why the hell should we care whether or not Tiger Woods is embarking on a journey to patch up his marriage, since we didn't really care that he was married in the first place?

-- Since both the heavy lifters and well-paid minions of the NCAA Football Bowl Championship Series (BCS) insist that a playoff system would be an overpoweringly oppressive burden on the academic endeavors and travel plans/costs of both the student-athletes involved and all those other non-athlete students, alumni, and hanger's-on whose fees and contributions help pay for the gold-plated football programs in those six most God-blessed conferences comprising the BCS, does that mean that students attending the colleges competing in the FCS (formerly known as NCAA 1A) playoffs are inferior academic institutions? Are schools like Montana, William & Mary, Appalachian State, Villanova, Stephen F. Austin, and New Hampshire somehow lesser institutions of higher learning than schools in the Pac-10 or Big 10 or the SEC such that they can make the sacrifices necessary to have a college football playoff system? What about NCAA Division II schools? Or Division III schools?

-- When the clock struck midnight last evening, I became fully eligible for retirement. It is a strange and slightly embarassing circumstance to find oneself in, mostly because the FedBorg establishes its retirement-eligible age at a full 10 years earlier than the usually understood retirement/Social Security age of 65 that pretty much all the rest of working America works with. I sit here this evening, unretired, marveling at the idea that anyone would consider making such a move at this age. There is still work to do; there are still battles to be fought, and a quick glance over my shoulder reveals that a rather brutally casual bipartisan disregard over the last couple of decades for adequate funding to pay for the kind of work that I do has resulted in there being nobody back there behind me to carry on the good fight. It doesn't matter anyway, because my financial advisor - who also doubles as the mother of my children - has assured me that the concept of retirement need not enter my decision space as long as those children insist on attending post-secondary institutions of learning...

-- It is almost sad, but certainly understandable, that tonight's snow and freezing rain in the southern Willamette Valley are creating the sort of winter driving conditions that seem over the top there but would look like just another winter day over here in Southern Central Orygun. I would like to think that all those people out there driving around with me are sufficiently skilled to handle snow and ice, but I live in an area through which many thousands of people who are unfamiliar with such driving skills pass every year; unfortunately for me and mine, a pretty good percentage of those other drivers are in one way or another examples of those West-siders who experience a Stage V melt-down at the very sight of road ice. Thank God for a furnace, a well-stocked fireplace, and no place that I need to go on a night like this....

I Ask Myself Why

2009-12-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

...from Politico, we learn that the Ol' Maverick, John McCain, has assumed an odd sort of leadership role - or at least that of leading spokesman - for the Republican party. It's an odd position for him to be in not the least because he has never been all that much a figurehead in Republican circles, in large part because of his maverickiness or irascibility or hard-headed contrariness or whatever it was that has made him stake out positions in the past that at least looked to be a departure from the party line, even if some of those apparent schisms were barely skin deep...

There is, of course, the obvious question: Why John McCain? Why the guy who was decisively rejected by American voters just over a year ago? And I'm not asking "how dare he?", but rather why does the media keep rolling him out there week after week, day after day, to share his observations about all that is wrong with the Obama administration (complete with the occasional repudiation of McCain's own past positions on the issues)?

Actually, this line of questioning can threaten to go meta if one dwells on it just a bit. What we are seeing right now is that the only three voices belonging to people who have some - if occasionally limited - background as actual politician types that can be heard through the drone of all those fabulously paid talking heads on radio and TV are McCain, Sarah Palin, and "Big Dick" Cheney. Think about that: a guy who got his head handed to him in the last election cycle, the running mate that helped to bring him down and appears to thought by a strong majority of US citizens as stone cold crazy, and a former Vice President who left office being held in slightly lower esteem by his fellow Americans than an anesthetic-free root canal; these are the three authoritative voices that are brought to the fore by the MSM...

Is there a point at which the Powers That Be of the Party of No decided that a failed presidential candidate, a person who did more for Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live than for her party's electoral prospects, and perhaps the least popular vice president in American history should be the troops to carry the fight against the Democrats? The truth may be that is there isn't any such thing as 'the Powers That Be' behind the Republican curtain; the Keystone Cops nature of the Republican side of the New York 23rd Congressional district special election arguably suggests that may be true. I suppose, as Dr. Thompson might once have said, even the rancid cream rises to the top, and when your other choices are people like a faux-hiphop walking verbal time bomb like Michael Steele or Mr. Narcolepsy himself, Mitch McConnell, you're not working with a very deep bench to begin with...

But still...really? It's McCain, Palin, and Cheney whose pearls of wisdom are cast before the MSM to provide what is essentially the Republican viewpoint on war, the economy, and climate change. I admit it's entertaining to watch, but I ask myself "Why?"...

Tramps Like Us At Teh Kennedy Center

2009-12-06T20:27:00.000-08:00

...back in the mid-1970's, there was a constant anthem providing the musical background to all those smoky Friday and Saturday nights that I and some of my friends were living in a couple of local college hangout bars in Moscow, Idaho. It was Bruce Springsteen - The Boss - along with the E Street Band that at one point or another during the night would be blaring out of the corner speakers, inviting us to draw a parallel between Asbury Park, NJ, and the relatively remote PacNW wheat-farmer/cowtown lives we were trying to escape.

Tonight, Springsteen and four other Giants (including Dave Brubeck, who informs another part of my musical life) will be honored at the Kennedy Center. I and my buddies are all mid-fifties curmudgeonly old farts now, but - even without calling them to verify their opinions - I can guarantee that this is what we would have wished those nights would have looked like:

(edited to make the obvious title change)
(and Clarence Clemons is still a God)

What The Start Of A Bad Day Looks Like

2009-12-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

...an on-call Portland, Orygun, police officer who lives in the somewhat far-flung suburb of Damascus walked out of his house yesterday morning and started his unmarked Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chevy Impala to warm it up, went back inside to get his child, and came back out to find a warm spot on the driveway where his official police vehicle used to be...

The "good news" for the as-yet unnamed PPB officer is that the vehicle has been recovered elsewhere in Clackamas County (condition as yet unknown). The "BAD NEWS" for said unnamed PPB officer comes from the tenth page of this PPB document issued earlier this year under the signature of his boss, Portland Chief of Police Rosanne S. Sizer:

Never leave your car running or the keys in the ignition when you’re away from it, even for “just a minute.”

As a general rule, you can suspect right up front that any morning during which your car disappears from your driveway has all the makings for the start of a bad day. That particular fact aside, walking out the door to find an empty rectangle of melted frost on the driveway tracing out the spot where the city-owned vehicle that your boss says shouldn't ever be left idling unattended was left sitting idling unattended pretty much sends the message that you are about to have a Bad Day...

This is pretty much what "sucks to be you, man" looks like...

The New War Between The States

2009-12-02T20:18:00.001-08:00

...if the Evergreen State shared a border with Arkansas, there would be a border fence going up right now, complete with armed guard towers having interlocking fields of fire and crossing points staffed with National Guard rifle platoons. Thankfully for the beleaguered Washington taxpayers, they are separated from A Place Called Hope and all the rest by a couple of time zones and a good portion of fly-over country, so Washington Governor Christine Gregoire simply saw fit today to instruct the Dept. of Corrections to deny acceptance of any Arkansan parolee...

Arkansan corrections authorities, of course, are honoring the memory of former Governor Mike Huckabee by noting that they did nothing wrong in the instance of formerly alive alleged cop-killer Maurice Clemmons. They certainly understand how folks in Washington might be a bit miffed at that former governor's claim that a needless tragedy was cause in part by a failure of the Washington legal system, but as far as they are concerned they did everything by the book so none of this is their fault. The folks in Washington feel the same way, too, and I'm just enough of a parochial little PacNW hayseed to suspect that the Left Coasters may have prior claim to that particular high ground, because my admittedly biased reading of the various stories about Gregoire's order suggests that Washington state was facing a somewhat limited series of options because of the failure of Arkansas officials to take specific actions...

Having said that, there is clearly enough blame to go around regarding the question of why this guy was even walking the streets to begin with. None of it should detract from the plain fact that Mike Huckabee has once again proven that he is a dark, dangerous gift that keeps on giving in more ways than could ever be imagined...

When Which Critics Matter

2009-11-30T19:51:00.000-08:00

...for all it's many, many faults as a supposed journalistic enterprise, Politico can probably be forgiven today's effort regarding Mike Huckabee's prominent role in the killing of four police officers just down the road from Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base on Sunday. As a generally right wing mouthpiece that once every great long while is the blind pig finding an acorn, it is probably understandable that the Politico editors would focus on the spittle-flected outrage of Malkin and the RedState gang whose readers are its natural constituency. The reporting misses the point that a great many commentators on the left have expressed similar sentiments over the last 24 hours, but it tells the important story...

If you were hoping that there would come a moment where you didn't run the risk of stumbling across the Right Rev. Michael Huckabee pontificating all over your 46" 1080p screen in the unfortunate event that you stumbled across his FAUXNews program, that hope was dashed somewhere between his commuting the sentence of accused shooter Maurice Clemmons in 2000 and yesterday's tragedy. The fact that he created his own second "Willie Horton" moment (Wayne DuMond being the first) with his Clemmons clemency decision virtually guarantees that you will have Mike Huckabee to 'kick around' on the multimedia display screen of your choice for many years to come. And that is why the Politico focus on the winger outrage can be given a pass in this instance...

Mike Huckabee is done - seriously "stick a fork in him" done - as far as national, regional, or local political campaigning is concerned. Aside from the fact that not even the most ardent Pharisee winger conservatives in Spokane or Deer Park or Dayton or Ellensburg or any other conservative stronghold in Washington state would ever vote for him after that lame 'failure of the Washington judicial system' he trotted out today, the simple fact is that Mikey is toast with the Republican base. Those previously mentioned winger mouthpiece outlets are doing the work that lefties fearful of Huckabee's comfortable glibness could never hope to get done: they are tearing down whatever credibility Huckabee could ever hope to have as a serious candidate for national office as a clear result of his failure as the sort of 'law and order' kind of guy that the Republican base could get behind. These critics - and Politico - are showing a moment when which critics matter...

Wither Goest A Secular Nation?

2009-11-23T19:21:00.000-08:00

...there a plenty enough fascinating aspects to the current dispute between Congressman Patrick Kennedy and his Rhode Island diocese Bishop Thomas Tobin over Kennedy's support of abortion rights, but there are even more outside questions that are just as fascinating. As the story documents, public figures such as John Kerry and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have run afoul of various segments of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over their support for a woman's right to control what happens to her body...

Clearly, the biggest immediate issue is the effort of a religious entity to to control the actions of public officials who have roles to play in the conduct of a secular government established by a secular Constitution. While there are any number of Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Unitarians, Brethren, and others who are in one way or another involved in one or another of the three branches of Federal governance, none of them have any claim to the steering wheel, especially given that the Constitution of the United States doesn't grant any one or all of them any particular priority of importance. In fact, that guiding document specifically proscribes the involvement of any of these sects in governance, and there was a particular wisdom in that decision by the Founding Fathers transcending the somewhat more limited span of religious perspectives of the day than what we know in these times...

We live in a complex society, and the fact that the Roman Catholic leadership can find congress with Southern Baptists on any subject at all is a perfect example of how crazy religious alliances can be and why governance should rightfully be secular. It's all well and good that the supposedly celibate Catholic leadership can come together with the wingnut Pharisee Republican base (where "Pope" = "Antichrist") to oppose the right for a woman to have a say over her reproductive choices to the point that The Church will deny the Eucharist to those public officials who fall short of its expectations, but somewhere down the road the issues of "just war" and the death penalty are going to mess up this comfy alliance and somebody is going to get poked in the eye and THEN where are you gonna be, Mr. Smartypants [/everymom]...

A more interesting set of questions in the face of this effort by The Church to influence secular public policy is that set of questions involving the composition of the Supreme Court of the United States. Six of the nine Justices are adherents to the Roman Catholic Church. Will any one or all of them be denied the Eucharist if they are to find that the US Constitution supports the idea of abortion? How does the Church-constructed threat to one's eternal soul at the risk of a Church-disapproved decision influence members of the judiciary who are obliged to render judgments in a secular setting? OK, so this is a pretty theoretical venue because we know how Scalia and those two Bushco backbenchers are going to vote - and Clarence Thomas is going to do whatever Fat Tony says in any case, but the Kennedy/Kerry/Sebelius experience raises some interesting issues regarding adherence to the First Amendment and the protections of the rights of those of us who don't want to be subject to the specific teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. My man Martin Luther started the Reformation over the selling of indulgences by Catholic leaders; the risk we run as a secular nation now is the specter of the Roman Catholic Church turning from the the retail sale of salvation to a more reliable act of extortion. What the Bishop in this Kennedy case is doing is nothing less than threatening a public official responsible for nonreligious crafting and administration of public law with eternal separation from his spiritual foundation because of actions taken on behalf of a population that in large part - if pure evidence is any judge - doesn't want to live in a Roman Catholic theocracy...

This all certainly does raise questions about how - or even if - we can live as a secular nation free from the influence of any particular religious sect...

And Yet Another Example Of Wingnut Craziness

2009-11-20T19:20:00.000-08:00

...it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the suggestion offered by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver to have November 25 - the day before Thanksgiving - commemorated by Congressional Resolution as "Complaint Free Wednesday" demonstrated that A) it is a fool's errand to underestimate the fervor with which the winger right will cling to the only strategy that it has these days and, II) some members of the Pharisee component of the wingnut Right should either abandon their pretense of connection to Christianity or start reading their Bibles a little more closely to at least make a show of trying to catch up with the rest of us...but more on that in a moment...

Rep. Cleaver's resolution would seem, on the one hand, to be just a little bit of overkill. After all, the very next day is generally designated by cultural fiat to be intended to serve a similar purpose. Aside from the grim reality of a Cleveland Browns/Detroit Lions game being this year's pre-feast football entertainment, we all are supposed to understand that this is the day where we assess those temporal blessings that we do have, however few they may be, and be thankful for them. On the other hand, it is arguable that a separate day set aside to just simply not complain and instead take stock of the ledger of one's life in preparation for a celebration of thanks (aside from that Browns/Lions matchup, of course) is a moment unto itself that is worthy of consideration. The two events that anchor the Christian calender - Christmas and Easter - have precursor days that set up the theme of those events (Christmas Eve and Maundy Thursday/Good Friday). Why can't a secular holiday like Thanksgiving have a precursor day, too?

The apparent answer from the right wing, if the response to Rep. Cleaver's suggestion is an accurate reflection (and there's no history to argue that it isn't), is a resounding "NO". The 'outraged response' quotes in the story are instructive in their own right, demonstrating beyond any question that an otherwise unobservant public might have that the whining is a strategy rather than a response. What is even more instructive, however, is this sort of comment:

"I want you to show me where in the Bible it says I shouldn't complain. I haven't seen anything where Jesus asked us not to complain."

It's actually a little disappointing to see the failure of a Methodist minister to offer a more robust rebuttal of this misguided wingnut argument. "The Bible" actually has a couple of examples of situations where Jesus by word or parable told those around him (and presumably us, by inference) to not complain:

The parable of the vineyard workers recorded in Matthew 20: 1-16

Jesus dining with "the sinner" Zacchaeus the tax collector in Luke 19: 1-9

The parable of the lost son in Luke 15: 11 - 32

And, of course, various parts of the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew , such as Matt. 5: 5 and 5: 9, along with Matt 7: 1-6

If you claim that you can't find anywhere in the Bible where Jesus in one way or another told you not to complain, you might want to consider going out and buying a Bible so you can actually read it...

Playing The Rubes

2009-11-13T21:27:00.000-08:00

...there has been a lot of commentary today about the revelation that the Republican National Committee has, for the better part of the last two decades, offered its employees a health care plan that included coverage for elective abortions, even though the RNC has opposed this particular concept since just after God made dirt. What all of the winger outrage and the wild flailing of RNC Chairman Michael Steele's efforts at damage control, one fact simply refuses to disappear...

The Republican National Committee knew - or should have known - what was covered by the insurance plan that it contracted with CIGNA to provide. It is simply impossible to believe that the RNC has been such a slipshod organization over the last two decades that it wasn't capable of engaging in the simplest act of actually reading up on the terms and conditions of the employee health care plan that it was paying for. The last eight Bushco years clearly demonstrated that the people who had their hands on the wheel of the Republican party weren't interested in doing much more than paying lip service to the concerns of the Republican "base", and it may even go deeper than that. What we know is that this elective abortion coverage goes as far back as the administration of George H. W. Bush; what we don't know is how much farther back the coverage extends...

For any social conservative who understands the presentation of health care plans and who can do the math, this has to be a really bad day. At the very least, today's revelation says that the Republican leadership is insufficiently sophisticated and informed about health care issues to be trusted with making the big decisions that actually matter; at the worst, today's revelation demonstrates that the RNC has been playing its base for rubes for the last 18 years by making all sorts of anti-choice noise while at the same time offering its own employees the sort of health benefit that only liberals - and the majority of Americans - could love....

Based on the rhetorical history alone, it is impossible to contemplate a Republican party leadership that doesn't know exactly what is in the health care plan for its National Committee employees. That's what makes this such a great story; they knew. They've always known, even back in 1991. From then until now, the reality-based branch of the Republican party has been reflected in the health care plan offered to RNC employees and it is only now that the wingnut Tea-Bagger branch that has recently decided that it is destined to be the salvation of the Grand Old Party has discovered the truth about the national committee...

They're all rubes....

DARN That Librul Media!

2009-11-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

...any whining you may have heard in the past from Moose Hunt Barbie about the vicious partisan attacks launched against her by that left wing harpy Katie Couric or the supercilious dismissiveness of the well-known Commie fellow traveler Charlie "In What Way" Gibson is about to be joined by a new round of whining about this mean-spirited partisan hatchet job just administered by those Socialist lackey fact-checkers at the Associated Press...

The notion that Palin might take the opportunity in her new ghost-written autobiography (or manifesto or fantasy tome or quasi-historical novel or whatever it is) to stretch, twist, and hammer previously recognizable facts into some dark one-off doppelgänger of the truth shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone who has been more than a casual observer to this strange trailer trash soap opera to which we've been subjected over the last 15 months. Mishandling facts has been an occupational disease afflicting politicians of all stripes on this continent that may well date back to the first efforts of the Clovis people to elect clan leaders, but it has seemed to pass from avocation to vocation for politicians like Palin and others in this generation of Fox News Republicans who have come to understand that "The Message" is the 'truth' for The Base, regardless of what the truth actually is. Even beyond that, this right wing Fox News generation has had a pretty good run on the national media stage, where every absurd commentary and insane statement has been reported by the MSM in a straightforward fashion as if any of these ramblings actually had traction with a meaningful percentage of the population - which, in almost every case - they didn't...

It's actually a bit of a surprise that the AP has engaged in this bit of fact-checking, given the fact that its own Washington bureau has struggled mightily over the last 18 months (and has far too often failed) to stand up straight enough for the top of its collective head to hit the "You Must Be This Tall" line on the sign next to the entrance to the Edward R. Murrow Memorial Room Of Big Boy Fourth Estate Journalism. For whatever reason, though, the AP did actually slap on that Groucho Marx false nose and eyeglass disguise to trick the book distributor into giving it a pre-release copy of Palin's book, saving you and me from the grim prospect of actually having to sacrifice a good 45 minutes of our remaining time on earth sitting in a quiet corner of our local Big Box Book Store paging through this book before slipping it back onto the "New Release" display, only slightly worse for wear (after all, somebody has to do that whole 'book break-in' thing for all those wingers unfamiliar with the concept). For that effort, I'm grateful to the AP, even though I suspect that the effort is little more than snatching at low-hanging fruit rather than some sort of sea change in how the AP views its responsibility as a journalistic endeavor. After all, how do the Powers That Be at the Associated Press explain their general failure to so publicly fact-check the works of Ann Coulter back in the day when she actually seemed to matter?

The AP is going to find itself flung into the Flaming Pits Of Hell into which all liberals - especially including all members of the media who don't have right wing talk show cred, despite a history of uncritical reporting of right wing swill - will be sent when the True Believers finally gain ascendency. The AP certainly doesn't deserve such a horrible fate - based on the overall body of its faithful work - but this particular fact-checking moment challenges the Sarah Palin story line in which the crazy side of winger world is so strongly invested, so the AP will have to live with the ignomny of being part of that ugly hateful librul media...at least for now...

Taking Bets On How This Ends

2009-11-11T16:20:00.001-08:00

...it isn't really much of a surprise that Reuters is reporting that Lou Dobbs is set to announce that he's leaving CNN. He has become almost a caricature of his own self with his passionate ranting about all those evil brown people streaming across our southern border and - demographics being what they are - his going-away party at CNN's world-wide headquarters probably won't be all that tearful an affair.

What is left unreported in this news flash is what ol' Lou's future plans might be. I've got "FAUX News" and the points. Any takers?

A Fond Look Back At The Bush Administration

2009-11-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

...there are very few reasons to reminisce about the late and generally unlamented disaster that was called the administration of George W. Bush. History will probably show those eight long years to be a grim joke played on American citizens by a feral band of yes-men, fixers, and hustlers who never encountered any national issue - either great or small - that thew couldn't twist around into some pure raw financial windfall for the benefactors and patrons that essentially bought Bushco's ticket into the White House. There is, however, at least one reason to look back fondly on that era, especially the period after September 11, 2001:

At least during that era, we could live with the comfort of Dick "Big Dick" Cheney being incommunicado, hiding out in one or another "undisclosed location". Yes, there was the occasional muttering, angry emergence on some Sunday political show, looking for all the world like one of those 'world of nature' movies where one of Jacques Cousteau's divers would get too close to a moray eel fetched up in some coral hidey-hole, but for the most part we didn't have to listen to ol' "Big Dick" all that much. Now that he is free of the strictures of spending all of his time underground, all that is over and that's a darned shame, because these days you can't swing a dead possum without hitting a podium behind which cranky ol' 'Big Dick' is looming, carrying on about the failure of courage the Obama administration is showing over the conflict in Afghanistan...

It is ever so slightly possible, if you will grant me this indulgence, that we wouldn't be in the leaky boat we are in right now if Bushco principles like 'Big Dick' had decided to express as much concern over "winning" the war against Terra in Afghanistan way back in 2002 or 2005 or 2008 as they - and he - are now. These days, we seem destined to be graced with repeated calls for massive infusion of troops to Afghanistan by one of the primary architects of the abandonment of our earlier efforts in Afghanistan in order to invade a sovereign nation that posed the unspeakably terrifying threat of launching paper mache remote-controlled UAV's laden with nuclear chick pea bombs from rogue Iraqi garbage scows anchored off the Eastern Seaboard.

Or something like that...

Why we even need to be exposed to the likes of 'Big Dick' Cheney at all when it comes to the very military action in Afghanistan that he readily abandoned in lieu of the much more profitable invasion of Iraq over six years ago is a question for historians to sort out. All we can know is that we should look back fondly on the last administration if only because we didn't have to listen to 'Big Dick' Cheney's mewling half-witted nonsense like we do these days...

As We Consider Why MSM Themes Matter More Than Reality

2009-11-03T21:17:00.000-08:00

...all you need to know, as far as the MSM is concerned, is that Obama has suffered a stinging defeat for his hoped-for agenda, all because a really lousy candidate for Governor of Virginia got the stuffing beat out of him and a sitting Governor of New Jersey who suffered from a certain personally profound unpopularity failed in his effort to secure a second term. On the other hand, as of this moment, the MSM is for some reason refusing to discuss the fact that the race for the seat in New York's 23rd Congressional District is going to be won by a Democrat for the first time since God made dirt...

It's an interesting view of analysis, or at least what passes for analysis in these latter days of the decline of Main Stream Media as a real live Fourth Estate. The bottom line in tonight's elections is pretty simple, however. The Democrats just lost two Governor's offices to Republicans who will immediately begin cutting taxes for the rich and eliminating programs and reducing services for everybody else, a prospect to which I say "Good; maybe even Great!" I have long been a disciple of de Tocqueville's long-ago observation that “in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve" when it comes to state and local elections. If all those de-energized '08 Obama voters in New Jersey and Virgina want to send him a message by sitting on their hands this time around, they can now check off that "mission accomplished" box and live with the consequences for the next four years...

On the other hand, in the in-focus race that really mattered up in New York's North Country, the much- discussed power of the tea baggers to bring the Republican Base back to majority dominance has resulted in a Democrat winning the seat for the first time since the end of the Civil War. The tea baggers weren't really interested in talking about those two governor's races because they are sufficiently sentient to grasp the difference in power balance between holding a Governor's office and holding a seat in either the US House or US Senate. New York's 23rd District mattered in a way that no Governor's election ever could because the 'baggers understand that it is only within the halls of Congress that they can achieve their ultimate goals of nation-wide political and social change...

...and they failed. They lost every which way and managed to construct a narrative for the New York 23rd special election that will provide future generations of political operative with a manual on either how to - or how not to - throw away a clear poltical advantage, depending on which way those future generations want to swing. What they didn't do was demonstration how to win when competing outside their weight class...

We may well not here much about that tomorrow, though, because the MSM is clearly so anxious to construct a theme addressing the decline of the influence of the current president. That theme construction will be manifested by the loss of two formerly Democratic Governorships, while the loss of one more Republican seat in the House of Representatives - which just yesterday was going to be its own manifestation of the rising power of the tea bagger right with Hoffman's inevitable victory - will be lost in all that other noise about how the loss of the Governorships in...wait for it now...New Jersey and Virginia...spin out the threat of eventual DOOM for the current administration...

Tonight We Are All Ducks

2009-10-31T21:29:00.002-07:00

...I'm not even an Oregon native, but I chose to endure the slings and arrows hurled at me by both Mrs. Jack K and others because of my decision to stay home - rather than attending a long-scheduled church function - to watch one of my adopted Orygun teams play the hated University of Southern California Trojans in the raucous confines of Autzen Stadium tonight...

The root circumstances of my boosterism are somewhat ironic, given that I lived and worked for several years within the direct local Duck sphere of influence and, during that tour, I terrorized my Duck-loving coworkers by spending every football season week wearing a baseball cap of the team that Oregon would be playing that Saturday. It worked as a bit of workplace harassment back then because the Ducks weren't a very good team; sometimes the Civil War game against Orygun State (which I also root for these days) was a contest to see who could finish the season with at least one Pac-10 win...

Things are a lot different than they were twenty years ago in the bad old days. Regardless of the native differences of current residents, we are all Ducks tonight...

Partial Scores: Teabagger Wingnuts 1, Republican Sanity O

2009-10-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

...this afternoon saw a huge victory for those rock-ribbed forces of ideological purity in the Republican party, as the Republican nominee in the special election for the Congressional seat in New York's 23rd district abruptly withdrew from the contest after virtually every big name from the party's right wing swarmed into the state in support of her right-wing opponent running as a third party candidate. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, this is a huge victory for the Beckian teabagger wing of the Republican party, and probably not all that bad an omen fo.r the rest of us...

Dede Scozzafava's self-defenestration isn't all that surprising, given the fact that every failed loser and overly pumped-up unelected who-said of the teabagger wing of what was once an actual national party seemed uncommonly anxious to trample over any little old ladies or children standing in the way of their wild stampede down various jetways to catch flights to Oswego or Watertown. She actually did something that has become an uncommon grace for Republicans: she did the honorable thing for the sake of a party that clearly has no interest whatsoever in welcoming anyone into its tent who doesn't cleave to a particularly twisted sort of political philosophy. This moment is, all by itself, a Big Win for Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and all those other folks who have captured the hearts and minds of a particular constituency but haven't actually won anything for a lot longer than most people realize...

The incumbent that Scozzafava hoped to replace was a relatively moderate Republican serving in a district that Obama won in 2008 and was selected by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Army. How her withdrawal affects the upcoming election will only be answered on Tuesday, although it should be noted that the local Republican party felt that she, a hated RINO in the eyes of the massed forces of outsiders who stormed into the contest, was the best candidate in the context the political reality of the district. The special election will be an interesting event to observe in its own right, but this strange moment of political theater is, all by itself, instructive of the direction the Republican party is headed...

Reform And My Half A Loaf

2009-10-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

...it's all too easy to be disappointed and angry -even bitterly so - at what appears to be just another massive el foldo job by Congressional progressives in the sausage-making exercise that is the effort to craft health care reform. It is becoming clear that there won't be any such thing as a robust public option included in whatever bill finally is voted on; in fact, the possibility exists that there won't ever be a vote on the Senate floor for any bill that has even the slightest whiff of a public option, if the public musings of Joe Lieberman (for whom there is no longer any reason for Senate Democratic Caucus members to resist the urge to physically hurl out the door) are any judge...

I find myself perfectly bifurcated on this subject. On the one hand, I care about what happens to people and I want to see every American - regardless of means - have access to health care. For my whole adult life, I have seen (and railed against the necessity for) coin jars sitting at checkout counters in virtually every little small town I've lived in with the picture of somebody who couldn't otherwise pay for an available disease treatment. I once stood in the parking lot behind the Elks Lodge in John Day, Orygun for an hour after work (no, I'm not a member; it also served during the day as the parking lot for the office where I worked) arguing with a strongly libertarian coworker about the pure failure of morality that was represented by a circumstance where the health care system in the richest, most powerful country on this planet forced families to essentially grovel in the public square for money on behalf of loved ones (all too frequently children) to pay for potentially life-saving medical treatments that were readily available - as long as they could be paid for. There was, I argued that night and have argued to this day, no possible way for this country to lay claim to the title of "Greatest Nation in the World" as long as coin jars next to cash registers hold the last desperate, singular hope for survival for any American citizen. That is the obscene reality of health care coverage as we now know it, and that is the reason we need a robust public option...

On the other hand, I am the parent of a teenager who is a Type I diabetic. Talk about the absolute king hell master of preexisting conditions. Because I can shelter my two children for only so long with my FedBorg "gold-plated" insurance, I have reason to be concerned about my second-born child's access to health care insurance that will mitigate the otherwise outrageous cost of insulin and test strips and all the other little bits and pieces required to make for a sustainable life. Even without the public option, the various proposed reform bills promise a far better future for my second-born child than what now passes for the current world of health care insurance, one where my younger child might never be able to find insurance under any circumstances. Some sort of strong public option would be better for him than what the various bills in play will offer, but that clearly isn't going to happen, so he - and I - are faced with that proverbial Half A Loaf. I will be forced to be grateful to get to that insufficient point, because it is so much better than the current grim reality of the unavailability of health insurance at any price that my son will otherwise face. The way this whole debate is playing out still sucks, though...and it really sucks because the Beaten Dog Democrats on the progressive side of the caucus are the legislators who have decided to ensure that my son and I need to be happy with that half a loaf...

Fly Me WHERE?!?

2009-10-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

...there has been a certain amount of talk over the last day or so about the circumstances of Northwest flight 188, which on Wednesday night went on an unscheduled tour of northern Wisconsin at 37,000 feet before finally finally wandering back to the southwest to land at its intended destination in Minneapolis. What fascinates me most about this story is the reaction of the passengers...

I am not a frequent flier by any means. The last time someone had the muscle and force of will to stuff me into a narrow fragile aluminum tube so I could hurtle through a hostile, brutally cold and unsustainable environment 6 long miles above Mother Earth's warm loving embrace (that someone being Mrs. Jack K.), there was no such thing as the TSA and it would be 15 years before idea that people would willingly fly airliners into buildings became a grim reality. I have, on the other hand, become something of a personal travel agent and concierge for Mrs. Jack K. and our eldest child, scheduling flights between the eldest's East Coast college and our Orygun Cascades east-slope redoubt, and as a result I understand lots of things about arrival/departure times and the availability of flight-tracking websites like FlightView. I also have certain understanding of what I should see out the window near the end of a flight, even if that flight is in a holding pattern and even if all that is going on at night. What amazes me the most about this story is that nobody (at least none of the interviewed passengers) seemed to even understand that they had flown an extra 300 miles before finally getting on the ground; passengers even seemed to accept the premise that they were circling in a holding pattern when a simple gander out the window would have suggested that such a thing wasn't actually happening...

What we seem to be facing with this story is the perfect manifestation of the Bovination Of The Air Travel Public. That once-glamorous ideal of the jet-setter being whisked across the face of the planet in the capable - and sometimes vaguely erotic - care of an airline that had no greater desire than to make several confining hours in a fragile aluminum tube nothing less than a cultural and gustatory delight is all gone now. Air travelers are now lucky to think of themselves as the favored cows in a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, hoping for nothing better than to finally, someday, arrive at their intended destination with a minimum of human insults or assorted poking, prodding, and strip-searching. There really isn't any other way to explain how the 144 passengers of Northwest flight 188 could unwittingly endure an extra 300 miles of flight before finally arriving at their scheduled destination, only to be surprised by a swarm of law enforcement officers swarming onto the plane when they finally arrived...

Tell Me Again Why Chicago Violence Argued Against Getting The Olympics?

2009-10-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

...one of the almost celebratory notes that a whole host of wingnuts - and, to be honest, a few lefties, too - touted in regard to Chicago's ( and, by direct inference, President Obama's) unsuccessful bid to win the 2016 Summer Olympics was the idea that Chicago is a Failed City where innocent people die at an alarming rate as a result of brutal gang violence totally out of keeping with the spirit of the Olympic Movement...

It turns out, ironically enough, that Chicago's problem may well be that it just isn't sufficiently interesting to be an Olympic venue. Rio de Janeiro, the winner of the contest to be the first venue to host a summer Olympiad during its own winter season, is a much more lively place as far as criminal behavior is concerned. Chicago's punks are clearly going to have to step up their game if they want to be part of some successful effort to secure a future Olympic bid...

Breaking: Obama Doesn't Travel to Crawford

2009-10-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

...swear to God, I read this AP story and I have no idea where to start. Apparently I am supposed to feel some sort of concern or perhaps outrage or - I don't know - that sort of burbling uncomfortable bloated feeling that eating too many cucumbers can lead to. But I'm conflicted, y'know? I find myself asking one of those fundamental base-line questions that would usually be the sort of query to crop up in the science-based community in which I live:

"So What?"

"Obama travels." "Members of his Cabinet and administration travel." "He and they travel to states that were important to Obama's electoral victory." "That travel costs money." And that's it; that's the context of the story. The Associated Press apparently had neither the interest or the motivation to actually engage in the art of journalism to explore how travel by members of the Obama administration compares to travel by members of other presidential administrations - either recently or dating back to the days of the Wright brothers or in any other context. All we can gather from this bit of "journalism" - and, at that, only by inference based on paying attention during the eight long, grim years of the previous administration - is that Obama hasn't been spending nearly as much down time at Camp David and some Potemkin "Ranch" in Texas as the previous occupant of the White House (trips that cost some unknown amount of money that the AP apparently doesn't have the resources to research)...

It is a disturbing sign of these strange times that the idea of "activist government" earns all sorts of negative press; the mere idea of the current administration being out there on the street (which costs money) pushing a new agenda as opposed to the last administration's practice firing out edicts from behind the impassive, cold, imposing walls of the federal executive bureaucracy is apparently too foreign a concept of the practice of democracy for today's weak facsimile of "journalists" to be able to come to terms with. We've seen this before, of course, when there was actual serious reporting about the outrage generated by the Obama's taking an evening trip to New York to catch a Broadway play, even though there was never any sort of meaningful exploration of the cost of flying the previous president to Crawford to cut brush...

"So what" isn't part of the traditional journalistic "five w's"
, but it works pretty well as a measurement of whether a story actually matters. All we actually know as a result of this AP piece is that Barack Obama doesn't spend most weekends offline at Camp David or some other remote hideout and that his people travel to places, rather than writing letters to places. "Blue state vs. Red state" doesn't matter, mostly because the AP 'reporters' didn't flesh out the travel habits of previous administrations. The only "Breaking News" here is that Obama isn't in Crawford this weekend...

Why Huckabee Should Never Be In The White House Without A Visitor's Pass

2009-10-10T19:19:00.002-07:00

...there has been WAY too much discussion about Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize over the last couple of days, most of it by people who couldn't at gunpoint name the last five Nobel Peace Prize winners in any case. The bottom line of this whole episode is simply that a small gaggle of people who live in a place that looks a lot like Alaska if you subtract all the crazy wingnuts and the stain of a recent governorship decided on a recipient for reasons of their own. That particular fact, all by itself, makes former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's most recently reported comment a pure demonstration of Republican failure:

"[T]he better response," Huckabee insisted, "is simply to allow those on the left to explain what he did in his first two weeks as President that merited such recognition."

In an otherwise perfect world, the line of "those on the left" willing to rise to this challenge would probably circle the globe - at the equator - a couple of times. If this otherwise glib and humorous darling of a certain sect of the Pharisee right would have broadened his challenge to the moderate and liberal Christian community (instead of limiting it to his world view of Godless Naziocommunist lefties), that line could probably extend from here to the moon, were there only enough space suits to go around...

Huckabee can pull off the appearance of being an engaging guy who is bright enough to engage in pleasant conversation, but his current role as a FAUX talking head is exposing some serious intellectual flaws in his game plan for being a meaningful player in the next presidential election cycle. The above-referenced quote is a prime example of the fundamental problem of gravitas that Huckabee faces: insofar as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is concerned, "those on the left" have nothing to explain. We on the left didn't name Obama the Peace Prize winner; we on the left didn't nominate Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize; there are plenty of "those on the left" who are just as dismissive of this particular award as most of the talking heads on the right such as Huckabee, although - unlike Mike - they are able to actually articulate well-thought-out objections in complete sentences...

"Those on the left" have nothing to explain. "Those on the left" didn't nominate or vote for Barack Obama in the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize contest. The only people who have any explaining to do are those on the right, like Mike Huckabee, who have become such hopelessly lost souls obsessed with the quest for power as its own reward that they will challenge anything that is - in its own right - good for this country...

Maybe Mike can explain how Henry Kissinger (1973) is the most recent Republican winner and Theodore Roosevelt (who wouldn't even be allowed in the door of any Republican caucus these days) is the only other Executive Branch Republican to win the prize (as opposed to Obama, Carter, and Gore over the last seven years). Perhaps Mike, with all of his seminary training, can explain why his people can't seem to rise to the occasion and practice what Jesus preached sufficiently to earn the Prize. If he can't do so, the only way he should ever gain access to the White House is as part of a tour group, because he just simply isn't good enough be there any other way...

Sometimes I Sits and Thinks...

2009-10-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

...and sometimes, as Satchel Page so famously said, sometimes I just sits. There's a framed poster-sized version of this quote displayed over a luridly-drawn poster of a red bar stool that has hung in the master bathroom of every place I've lived over the last 27 years courtesy of Mrs. Jack K. (I like to think of it as part of her dowry). Today, with the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the subsequent reaction, reaction to reactions, and reactions to those reactions to the original reactions, I've found that that both just sitting and sitting and thinking have their own singular values in trying to work through the various wars that the left and right are waging against each other and themselves...

Today's chronology of events is straightforward and - at the same time - fascinating in its display of emotional color. First came the announcement; then came a remarkable variety of reactions, including disparaging comments by spokesmen for the Afghan Taliban, Hamas, as well as from Michael Steele , the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and a gift that should well keep on giving and giving to the Democratic Party. All of this was followed by a response by a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, which was itself followed by Update/Postscript chidings by Progressive Intertubes Icon Glenn Greenwald and other lesser but highly visible commentators (this link being just one example) directed against the DNC's response and anyone who, for whatever reason, supported that bit of aggressive language...

In those moments when I sits and thinks, I can understand the revulsion that Greenwald and other progressives are expressing toward a piece of DNC commentary that appears to reek of the same sort of 'fer us or agin us' chatter that Americans faced through most of the duration of the Siege On Sensibility that was the presidency of George W. Bush. Throughout the desperate bulk of that horrible time, honest country-loving patriots who only wanted this country and its citizens and government to be the best that they could be were branded as traitors because they didn't toe some twisted, self-serving line that Bushco had drawn for reasons that only our children - or their children - will truly have sufficient purchase of a host of too many still-secret facts to be able to understand. At first glance, those Progressives who object to the DNC engaging in the same sort of rhetoric that sent too many of us flocking to official Canadian government websites looking for immigration info during those dark Bushco years seem to be making a powerful argument for the return of decency to our national political discourse...

But, as I sits and thinks, I wonder: how is it that there are so many voices on the left decrying the DNC saying that the Republican party has thrown its lot in with the Taliban and Hamas concerning this Peace Prize thing while, at the same time, there isn't a whisper of objection to Rep. Alan Grayson's observations about the Republican health care 'plan' being to "not get sick" or "die quickly"? How is it that one particular example of intentionally inflammatory language - drawing an obvious connection between anti-Obama comments by American antagonists and the Republican party - is a bad thing that we should be big enough to get beyond while another example of intentionally inflammatory language - positing that the Republican health care plan consists entirely of the idea tha they want us to die quickly - is an example of Democrats finally 'growing a spine'?

When I just sits, all of this current kerfluffle makes for great television. When I sits and thinks, however, I have to wonder why - in the eyes of some lefties - Alan Grayson is the hero and the DNC is the goat...

What Really Makes Beck Cry

2009-10-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

...it's only another snap shot, reflecting one racing leg of a marathon that has most of its miles left to be run, but this is the sort of thing that should probably make Glenn Beck cry real tears:

AP Poll: Obama's job approval rises amid concerns

More than anything else, the month-by-month trend of this poll suggests that all Roger Ailes's horses and all of Roger Ailes's men can't put together an attack that sticks, besides all their efforts to the contrary. There are plenty enough complaints about the direction in which we are heading as a country from both sides of that mythical political divide and there are plenty enough cable news pundits available to offer critical declamations about the failed Obama presidency with regard to the that failed direction, led by - but by no means exclusive to - FAUX News. Unfortunately for Roger Ailes, all of his investment in attempting to destroy a Democratic presidency has, over the last month of intensive effort, been of little more value than sand pounded down a rathole...

That's the sort of thing that should make Glenn Beck get all weepy for real...

Snow On Oct. 4; The Panic Sets In

2009-10-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

...imagine my surprise...no, check that; imagine my horror at watching snow pour down from the skies yesterday and today. Realized Winter Storm Warnings producing heavy, wet, sloppy stuff, occasionally as light showers and sometimes as full-on blizzards, until there were four inches on the ground. Now, don't get me wrong; there can be something magical about a soft white blanket of powder sparkling in all its simple purity and innocence under a dry cold midwinter sun, and I am certainly still a sucker for the simple old-fashioned idea of a White Christmas...

But...

Winter on the Eastern slopes of the Orygun Cascades can be - and usually is - a long-running event, a grueling marathon where common features like "the lawn" and "the street" are usually hidden from view by layers of snow and ice from sometime in November until early May. There are decks to shovel, a roof to rake or shovel, a snow blower to run and maintain, snow plow operators to pay (my road doesn't get plowed unless I hire someone to do it), and far too many days where my desire to own environmentally responsible daily commuter vehicles runs up against a dark passion to own a fleet of SUV's - big ones, with massively studded snow tires that spit out chunks of ice-coated asphalt like rifle bullets. Given all this, two solid days that look just exactly like winter, even though the calender says we are only in the first couple of days of October, present a truly grim prospect indeed...

Somewhere out there under the snow is the lawn-watering hose needing to be taken in for the winter draped across an expanse of grass that still needs to be mowed one last time, the furniture and barbecue on the back deck that needs to be put in the garage, downed trees that need to be cut into firewood, and the greenhouse that was still cranking out product a couple of days ago. The idea that this may be the start of winter a month and a half early is a grim prospect indeed, and Mrs. Jack K. and I have comforted each other with the insistence that this is just a fleeting winter flirtation, more a warning than a commencement...

Still, an independent observer would probably be able to see the panic in our eyes...

So THAT'S What Happened To Biosphere II

2009-10-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

...sometimes it seems as though the entire population of The Village - and not just its right-wing component - serves as an answer to the trivia question "So what did they finally end up doing with that Biosphere II thing, anyway?" Moving the entire D.C. pundracray into that formerly abandoned isolated and self-contained facility can be the only explanation that I can come up with for both the commentary during the run up to and the after-action analysis of President Obama's trip to Copenhagen to make Chicago's case for hosting the CMGLXXIVDZ (at least I think that's it; I've never been good with Roman numerals but we're talking 2016 here) Summer Olympiad...

Based on a carefully calibrated and mathematically rigorous poll that I conducted today, the methodology of which consisting primarily of listening to various prominent national sports talk radio shows and talking to the few people who were around the office on a Friday, the passion driving a desire to see the International Olympic Committee select Chicago as the venue for the '16 Summer Olympics seemed to hover somewhere around the level of interest about Tom Delay's prospects for taking it all on "Dancing With The Stars". Truth be told, interest in the Bugman's prospects might have held a slight edge. Out in the brisk fall air of the Real World, it was pretty difficult today to find anyone not having some direct connection to Chicago who really cared all that much about who spent time touting for whichever city that might actually be picked to host a Summer Olympics almost seven years from now...

Inside the hermetically-sealed confines of what I guess we should call Politisphere I, circumstances were profoundly different. In that remote, isolated setting, the fact that Obama went to Denmark on a failed mission reinforced building memes: the failure of the Chicago bid was a defeat for Obama, too; the stunning first-round defeat of the Chicago bid meant that Obama and his handlers were either naive or not ready for Prime Time; his image and, in all likelihood, his agenda may well be permanently destroyed by this ill-fated effort and his own personally embarrassing defeat...

Clearly, in the view of the oh-so-smart Villagers who apparently know so much more than all the rest of us who live actual lives in an actual world with a whole host of actual pressing issues, the fact that Obama went to Denmark to assist in making the pitch for Chicago was a Huge Mistake because it didn't pan out. In this strange construct, the Only Logical Conclusion is that the remaining 80 % of his first term will be a fetid hog wallow of failure because the entire world now questions whether he has what it takes to lead us to...well...somewhere now that he has failed to lead us to Chicago in 2016. The fact that it is a challenging task to find anyone outside of the State of Illinois who cares one way or another about who will be hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics doesn't matter; the triple-glazed viewports providing those precious limited views outside Politisphere I are too thick to allow the Politinaut occupants to even hear the conversational murmurings of those of us living our daily lives outside the wall. They don't understand that a sizable majority of us don't actually care all that much about either the Chicago Olympic bid or their own analysis that the outcome of the IOC vote is Obama's own Waterloo on Wacker Drive...

Out here in the real world, the majority of whose residents - when they have the time - watch something other than Faux Noise or any other cable 'news' opinion spewer, folks may be able to formulate an opinion (if asked) about "what Obama's trip to Copenhagen means" that provides grist to all sorts of trenchant analysis regarding the functional capability of the current presidency. None of this matters all that much, however, because most of those respondents couldn't afford to travel to the greater Chi-town Metro Area to get a live glimpse of events in any case. We can probably leave the subject at this point: when most Americans don't really care all that passionately where the 2016 Olympiad is held or whether the President spent a few hours making arguments on behalf of a particular venue, does it really matter what a self-agrandizing cohort of isolated, tone-deaf politinauts think? I thought not...

Oh, The Joys Of The Northwest Lifestyle!

2009-09-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

...now this doesn't matter to me specifically, since I live a few hours drive or, to put it in geographic terms, two mountain ranges and a broad valley away from the Orygun Coast, but I have to admit that I have never, ever seen this sort of map from the Portland office of the National Weather Service:

So not only do those folks to the west of me get to decide just how much they trust the Tsunami forecasts that have been issued over the last several hours that claim only a one- to two-foot increase in beach water heights, but they also get to weigh the provided information against the fact that whatever is likely to go down is going to go down after dark, when you can't see much in any case. Whatever is about to play out will either be a louder than normal episode of crashing sea surf outside the windows of those living on or visiting the coast tonight or will be a leading news story tomorrow...

It's probably a good thing, every once in a while, to be reminded that the potential of volcanic activity or raging wildfire aren't the only arguments against whatever reasons we Pac-NW'ers offer for willingly choosing to live in a strange and elemental environment. We don't have to deal with hurricanes or tornadoes, by and large, but we have our share of natural events to deal with and Heaven only knows why we do so...

Well, Actually, Why Not Try This?

2009-09-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

...whatever gland it is that makes me more or less a progressive usually begins, I have to admit, to start pumping all sorts of icky secretions into my bloodstream when I read a story like this one. But every once in a while - and this is one of those "whiles" - I stop and say to myself "well, why not?" After all, the otherwise strange and disturbing behavior described in the story is all about the campaign for the position of adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard. This is, after all, a story from South Carolina, perhaps the only member of the Union whose state-wide and national leaders are causing it to creep dangerously close to being a place where another declaration of secession would be met with either derision or fond wishes of good fortune...

Why South Carolina is the only state to actually vote for the commander of its own National Guard is a bit of strangeness that shall be left for the citizens of the Palmetto State to explain. The bottom line is that it is what it is, and if you are going to be campaigning for that position, why not have a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle? This is all about leadership of the National Guard, after all, and holding a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle doesn't seem all that much different than a raffle for a nice shotgun at some state's Ducks Unlimited convention or one for a 30.06 at some regional hunter's association gathering. It's all about fund-raising in all of these cases, after all...

It all makes perfect sense as a campaign fund-raising event in a red-blooded patriotic American State like South Carolina, except for that one nagging question in the back of my mind: why is a person campaigning for the opportunity to be commander of the United States National Guard troops in the State of South Carolina holding a raffle where the winner receives a Soviet Socialist Communist AK-47 assault rifle? Is a red-blooded patriotic American weapon like the Colt AR-15 not good enough? Is Soviet resident Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov the person that a candidate for adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard wants to recognize, as opposed to the lesser known but no less influential (and American) Eugene Stoner?

But never mind that. Raffling a Soviet Communist Socialist AK-47 as a fund-raising and attention-gathering gambit is a clever idea, so why not try it...

Is MSNBC Late To The Bullet=Buying Party?

2009-09-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

...the short answer to that question would appear to be "well, Yeah!". It is just a little bit disturbing to see this story being offered up this late in the day; the lack of virtually all common calibers of ammunition has been long-running issue that has resulted in my second-born and I shutting down our weekend target practice hobby five full months ago because we couldn't find either .22 LR or .270 Win ammo in what we now understand was "back in the day"...

Shelves empty of ammunition boxes have been the rule, rather than the exception, for MANY months, dating back to Obama's election. Every excuse in the world has been offered from across the local sporting goods counter since early in the year for why the ongoing shortage exists, and the more chilling of those excuses have been tied one way or another to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

This MSNBC story seems to be, at the very least, "old news" in every sense of the term. There are numerous issues that come into play when one considers the reasons for the ongoing ammunition shortage - and the MSNBC article hits some of those points - but this isn't "Breaking News" or any sort of newly plowed ground by any stretch of the imagination...

Quick Thoughts On The Fundamental Failure Of The Emmy's

2009-09-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

...OK, so Neil Patrick Harris has been doing a wonderful job tonight as host of the Prime Time Emmy's and it has been a somewhat interesting show to watch after the completion of the Giants' win over the Cowboys. That former part is probably a given, and probably not a good thing for Harris if his strongest primary career vibe is going to become "Best Award Show Host Evah!" as a result of his superb efforts as host of the Toni Awards and and some other celebrations. But never mind that, because I am simply outraged at one of the awards, which quite simply shines a bright spotlight on the fundamental failure of the Emmy's...

A couple of the categories deal with reality shows and hosts/talking heads of those reality shows. Deadliest Catch is nowhere to be seen; only those strange "let's drag a bunch of people together into an artificial environment" shows are nominated for 'reality' Emmy's. This failing to acknowledge one of the most gripping programs on television that really is a "reality" TV show, as opposed to the sort of manufactured event that all these other 'reality' shows represent, is an outrageous display of ignorance of the true art of the genre. On the other hand, it may also explain why there even such a thing as FAUX News....

A Startling Peak Behind The Beltway Curtain

2009-09-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

...it's not so much the team roster of the seven former CIA Directors who wrote today's letter asking President Obama to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to stop the investigation of potential criminal actions by CIA interrogators that should be of a large general concern. That's not the problem; the problem is that they thought that the act of making a public request that the President direct the Attorney General to not pursue potential criminal wrongdoing was the right thing to, regardless the circumstances...

There is the obvious partisan problem, of course, with the mix of former Directors who have signed the letter - most of them having served under Republican presidents - but that shouldn't keep us from taking our eye off the hanging curve ball that their argument presents. What they are doing is asking the President of the United States to exercise his authority of office to stop an investigation of possible violation of Federal and international law and treaties to which the United States is legally bound. It's that simple...

One can only gather that they collectively slept through the Watergate scandal and (although it is a most imperfect example) the runup to the Clinton impeachment trial. It shouldn't be necessary to point out to these gentlemen that the holder of the office of Attorney General is supposed to be, above all others, the ONE presidential appointee who operates independent of the wants, hopes, and desires of the occupant of the White House. Many Federal agencies have Offices of Inspector General whose sole job is supposed to be to independently investigate inappropriate behavior within those agencies, even though the eight years of the previous administration may have have led people to forget that such a concept exists. The office of Attorney General exists on the same plane in one sense but also exists far above that plane in another national sense...

It is simply startling that all these former CIA Directors could find their way to a place where they felt it was OK to go public with a request that the President of the United States should stop a legitimate investigation of possible violations of laws and treaties by an authority that is supposed to be operating as an independent entity operating beyond the reach of politics. This may well be the most revealing glimpse behind the Beltway curtain that you are ever going to get, a glimpse that offers the suggestion there are places where people who should know better don't agree that the Rule of Law applies to them and that the President should violate the independence of the Attorney General's office for reasons that make no sense whatsoever in the larger American sense...

Dog Fights Out Back In The Winger Alley

2009-09-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

...we will leave it to Politico and the website once known as Time Magazine to talk on our behalf about just exactly who is The Big Dog on The Winger Porch, because Lord knows that to have to deal with that subject directly is about as attractive a proposition as digging up a leaking septic tank with our own teeth. Still, as sordid and smarmy as this understated but clearly ego-powered leadership battle between Rushbo and El Weepo Wacko Becko may be, it is a fascinating look inside the battle for what is becoming the real battle for the mantle of leadership of the Republican party...

Forget about Michael Steele (OK, so that's too easy). Forget about John Boehner in the House or whoever is the minority leader in the Senate these days ("Mitch" something or other keeps crossing my mind). The fight for control of the soul of the Republican party is being fought on your TV and radio and it is no longer an issue of 'message', but has become one of who is The Preeminent Messenger. This story is absolutely pregnant with undercurrents of egomania and tantalizing whiffs of raw competition that, as a rule, usually provide the markers pointing to the one specific point in time where any movement imploded on itself. It's hard to decide which of these two particular kinds of crazy better benefits the greater good, given that neither of them have had much traction in the larger electoral population over the last four years...

What is clear, however, is that these two need to fight it out...in public...as often as possible so we know who the Big Dog really is. It would be a good thing for the rest of us to know just exactly who is in charge of the Republican party, given that Steele and Boehner and that other guy aren't....

Where The Increasing Shortage Of Clawfoot Bathtubs Can Lead

2009-09-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

...I blame all those "when the time is right" commercials for a nearly tragic story like this one. There simply aren't enough clawfoot bathtubs in the whole wide world to fulfill all the middle-aged male fantasies fired up by all those inescapable dueling bathtub commercials, and this is where the resulting desperate search for a suitable substitute can lead:

Police said two 44-year-olds had climbed into a dumpster to be alone just after 6 p.m. Saturday when two men interrupted them and demanded their belongings...

Aside from the fact that there is a couple in their mid-forties trying to move heaven and earth to make sure their names never see the light of police-blotter day, we clearly have an episode that can be pointed to any time somebody asks the question "what does TMI actually mean, anyway?"

The Most Trusted Name In Yellow Journalism

2009-09-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

...I was bustling around in a motel room this morning in Ashland, Oregon, with CNN as background noise as the family and I packed up to head back home after a couple of days catching performances at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when this suddenly became Breaking News. All progress toward getting checked out ground to a halt and we watched a strange, scary, gripping drama play out into...well...into nothing other than another desperate and misguided scramble to be first to the screen in the wildly competitive cable news market with The Hot News Of The Moment, regardless of whether that "News" is meaningful, relevant, or even actually true...

My first thought on the realization that there was no "there" there was that I, too, would defend company reporting skills and techniques the way Kyra Philips did, for no other reason than to try to divert the embarrassment of the moment in some other direction. My second thought was a remembrance of those crazy Paula/Monica days during the wet, ugly spring and hot, humid summer of 1998 when it seemed that every news cycle seemed to feature the confessions of yet another woman who had dallied with the President of The United States, none of which proved to be true even though they received at least one news cycle of credence...

A Story From My Life: a few years ago while I was driving around out in the woods on the Eastern slope of the Orygun Cascades, my FedBorg truck radio (programmed to hear both my agency's transmissions and to scan those of surrounding local, county, state, and federal jurisdictions) began spilling out a gripping drama. One of the tour boat plying the waters of Crater Lake National Park thirty miles to the south of my location had struck some sort of underwater obstruction and was sinking. Tourists were in the water and at least one of them was experiencing medical problems that looked like a heart attack. The other tour boat was ordered to deploy to the site to begin attempting a rescue, while National Park Service fire crews were directed to the Cleetwood Cove Trailhead to prepare to carry casualties out to the North Rim and requests were made for Medivac helicopters from both Bend and Medford...

I was wildly punching the AM/FM dash radio buttons, trying to find some sort of report on this developing story, all the while debating on whether or not to make a cell call to the office to let my coworkers know that they may have some sort of emergency response to address. That dilemma was solved when a voice came over the spied-upon frequency to announce - just as that star-crossed tour boat must be slipping with a grim finality beneath the crystal-blue waters of Crater Lake - that "this portion of the exercise has now ended" and that "the second segment of the exercise will begin at 1300 hours at..."

Hearing chatter on a frequency that isn't yours is to just hear noise. I knew that already, but it was instructive to be reacquainted with this lesson in that moment. Failure to exercise due journalistic diligence with regard to chatter heard on a frequency that isn't yours is another matter altogether when we are talking about one of the big-time 24/7 cable news networks; at the very least, it is simply sloppy work on any old average day, and to engage in such a failure on the eight Nine/Eleven anniversary is to show - once again - why the depths of the failure of the Fourth Estate have not yet been plumbed...

The saddest part of this sad failure of journalistic responsibility is that nobody from CNN will lose his or her job for failing to engage in actual journalism, but some career member (or several career members) of the Coast Guard will lose his or her job for failing to anticipate that CNN employees would fail to be 'journalists' in any true sense of the term. In the "he said/she said" world in which we live, there is plenty of blame to share, but the bottom line is that CNN failed and, in it's failure, caused problems that didn't need to ever happen...

Wherein I Ask Myself "Why Bother?"...And Struggle For An Answer

2009-09-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

...most of the reason that I have blogging so infrequently over the last few weeks can be found in the reality-based aspects of real life. Won't bore you with the details; wouldn't be right. But beyond all that real life going on in the background, I have to confess that there are nights when I really wonder why I should even care anymore (and, to be specific, I only do this because of wonkish caring and a bit of personal therapy; I have understood since I first slipped into this vicious blog posting addiction over seven years ago in a far different place and time that it was really all about me and my need to vent)...

Let it be sufficient to say that I am frustrated...and, dare I day it...bored beyond a level that I would ever have calculated a long-time politics wonk like me could ever get to, and it is all because of the current health care debate. Sadly; ironically, even, given the place we should have arrived at finally after all those long dark years in a grim cold wilderness of Republican dominance and what all that meant, it is the party for which I always color in the little box with my No. 2 pencil out here on the ultra-conservative Eastern Cascade slope of "vote-by-mail" Oregon. It's the majority party Democrats who have finally made me feel old and tired and wondering why I should bother...

Penalties for people at three times the poverty rate who don't go out and get health insurance, coupled with the lack of a public option of health coverage that would make the health insurance giants play an honest pricing game, is - and let us be absolutely precise, circumspect, and genteel about this - pure, unadulterated evil. That it is being proposed by conservative Democrats, who have made more noise than I ever want to hear for the rest of my life about not delving into Socialist 'big government' programs, truly demonstrates that these odd creatures were not able to pass through the Looking Glass with anything approaching Alice's ease suffered serious, debilitation brain slashes from all those broken shards...

I understand, and have frequently argued, that the pure idea of a "Democratic Majority" wasn't all that progressives might thing it was cracked up to be. Democrats can get elected to the Senate in some states and to the House in some districts because they look a lot more like Republicans than the sort of Democrat that the modern party could recognize. That's fine as far as it goes, and the simple existence of Blue Dogs and the DLC are products of that particular political reality; sometimes, no matter how much you scrinch up your eyes and wish and hope and pray, the reality is that you can get "more" Democrats or "better" Democrats, but your chances of getting both at the same time are unlikely in a host of states and districts, where the vote is predicated more on current political tides and less on what needs to be considered a generally failed Democratic ability to articulate or defend anything resembling progressive values...

Were I a betting man, I would place the milk money on this whole exercies being just one more failed effort at health care/insurance reform. In my most positive moments (which are becoming fewer and farther between), though I am not a betting man, I just might be persuaded to lay down some cash on the less risky proposition that whatever does emerge will at best be meaningless for most Americans and at worst be little more than a windfall for an insurance industry that will do whatever it takes to maintain as much of the current status as possible. It may well be that, as conservative talking heads insist, that most Americans are all good with their health care insurance, but this was never about them in any case. The whole thing was supposed to be about those Americans who didn't have insurance or lost it through job loss, or lost it as a result of rescission. We have officially lost our way in this whole debate, and it is mostly the fault - by either omission or commission - of people who claim to be Democrats...

Somewhere out there, far beyond the insulated, calculating world of big-time politics and big political money, there are places where where pure simple reason resides. It resides with the little people who don't have blogs or talking heads or lobbyists. That place doesn't have a voice, though; its concerns are getting lost in the current "debate", and it is entirely the fault of the Democratic party that this particular voice is lost. That's what is finally making me feel tired and old; that is what, finally, makes me wonder why I should ever again bother to waste my time advocating traditional Democratic causes like health care for all of our citizens, when even a certain significant subset of elected Democrats don't seem to care about these traditional Democratic causes...

The Strange Parallel Universe Of The Associated Press

2009-09-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

...so the A.P., which generally failed miserably to do actual journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war and which failed miserably to do actual journalism while the Bush administration ran roughshod over the Constitution of the United States and which has failed miserably to do any actual journalism in covering the ginned-up August "outrage" over health care reform and which failed miserably to cover the "cost of war" in that war of choice in Iraq that it failed miserably to do actual journalism about in the first place...yes, that A.P. has decided that NOW is the time to - in its eyes - do some actual journalism and ignite a firestorm by running photo's of a young Marine in his last moments of life after being severely wounded by an RPG in southern Afghanistan...

Despite the fact that the young Marine's father objected - twice - to the use of the photo in question, the A.P. felt that it was absolutely imperative that it send the photo out 'on the wire':

The Associated Press reported in a story about deliberations about that photo that “after a period of reflection,” the news service decided “to make public an image that conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe I hang out in the wrong places with slightly older gentlemen who personally witnessed the grimness of combat in Southeast Asia, or maybe I don't understand because I grew up in the 1960's watching "the grimness of war" every night at dinnertime as as American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Vietnamese civilians were shot, blown up, napalmed, strafed, and bombed in living color on TV. Whatever the reason, I already got it, without even needing to be there. As the baby boomer son of a WWII combat vet, I sat through more than enough adult conversations about all those acceptable memories that my dad and his friends shared, sprinkled with occasional oblique references to bad times that they clearly didn't want to revisit (especially in the presence of young prying ears) that I really think I probably got it at a fairly young age...

War is Hell. I understand that. Most people understand that. If you don't understand that War is Hell, I have a list of movies, documentaries, and premium cable TV series that you should watch, sitting a couple of feet away from the closest 50-inch 1080P 120 Hz HiDef flat panel you can find. It will all be pretend in the moment, but it will do. It's hard to imagine, however, that there is anybody who is so isolated from the world and so divorced from the obvious examples of pain and sacrifice that have characterized our Iraqi experience that such a person needs this particular invasive photo to be somehow reconnected to the idea that War Is Hell...

Whatever rational the A.P. has relied on to decide just now to publish an incredibly painful photograph to let us all know that War is Hell, despite the repeated objections of a grieving parent, absolutely escapes me, especially given the ample opportunities that it was afforded during the previous Republican administration to make that same point concerning our occupation of Iraq. The angry objections of the family, the leader of the American Legion, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates speak volumes to the "wisdom" of this decision and what it actually says about the abjectly failed depths to which this once-valuable 'fourth estate' has sunk...

The decision by the A.P. to put Julie Jacobson's photo's on the wire and its subsequent explanation for why it did so are nothing less than an insult to our collective intelligence. The corporate statements are simply bizarre:

"We understand Mr. Bernard's anguish. We believe this image is part of the history of this war. The story and photos are in themselves a respectful treatment and recognition of sacrifice." AP senior managing editor John Daniszewski

Think about that for a moment. "The history of this war" is Daniszewski's rationale for the opportunity to provide family and friends of a particular Marine with an entire lifetime of being able to seeing some of his last moments far from their loving, comforting reach on the far side of the planet. Never mind all of the complicity that this particular news outlet has for the diversion of attention and resources to a wasteful and wasted effort in Iraq, where tens of thousands of Iraqis and over four thousand Americans suffered the ultimate brutality of the grim reality of war. The publication of this one particular photo (over the repeated objection of the family) was not a "respectful treatment" of sacrifice; it was simply a cheap bit of war voyeurism by an organization that felt like it hit some war-porn jackpot and wanted to exploit that jackpot now that pro-war Republicans were in decline, and the Hell with those who might be forever hurt by this big 'scoop'...

The A.P. has had any number of opportunities to 'recognize sacrifice' in this same grim way for the last six years of the Iraq war, and it didn't do much of that so as long as Bushco was in charge. That all by itself raises interesting questions about motivations, but at the very least we can see this as a manifestation of the strange other universe in which the so-called journalists of the A.P. live...

Other Heroes

2009-08-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

...as I begin to write this, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the actual title of this post will be. All I know is that two brave men tried to do the best they could to protect the people in their charge, and it all went horribly, terribly wrong...

Someday there will come a writer who is both sufficiently experienced in the up-front madness that is the wild maelstrom of front-line wildland firefighting and sufficiently skilled in the writing art to truly express the raw emotions of a singular desperate moment that forces people to pick from a decision matrix that no random person on the street would agree to if you walked up to her or him and offered the sort of "go/no go" options that these people faced. I'm not that writer; I fail on both accounts, having been one of those people who get dragged into the wildland firefighting world at "cooks and bottle-washers" time (which, over the years, has actually come around pretty often) and not having sufficient writing skills to truly capture what The Fog Of War looks like in this particular setting...

Still, I must pay my tribute.

Two men, concerned beyond all else with the safety of the people for whom they were responsible, set out to find a route away from their burned-over fire camp in the middle of a fire that has been exhibited extreme behavior. They did the best they could...and that is all we can ever ask of the people that we expect to go in harm's way every day without ever acknowledging their risk and potential sacrifice with the sorts of honors and ceremony that we accord to those who journey across oceans to Afghanistan and Iraq. They did what they did because that, when it comes down to "bottom line" time, is what they were supposed to do. They offered themselves up to be the people who needed to be in a place that most people wouldn't take all the money in the world to be, all because somebody had to be in that place at that moment. Some people - only a very few, admittedly, but enough - understand just exactly what all that means and, to those few, they will always be remembered...

They were heroes, too...

The Politics Of A Giant's Passing

2009-08-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

...aside from the fact that this particular Politico story fails at the fundamental analysis level on the subject of why Norm Coleman ended up being the Junior Senator of Minnesota for one term, there are interesting nuggets to chew on with regard to the never-right wings response to the passing of Edward Kennedy...

Wingers are in a tight spot right at this moment. They rightfully feel they are on the right side of the media narrative in their efforts to kill health care reform, but they are now faced with the passing of one of the most aggressively passionate liberal voices of the Senate and a new, respectful impetus for his decades-long push for the sorts of reforms to the health care/insurance situation in this country that would leave your average Blue Dog Democrat flailing around on his hands and knees like a feed-lot steer...

So the political war game is on, with the first salvos fired by the right wing punditocracy. They are already saying that it would somehow defame the legacy of Edward Kennedy to do the very sort of thing that he advocated doing for over four decades. They are already saying that tying Ted Kennedy's name to any sort of meaningful health care reform that would be found unsuitable to their corporate masters is somehow a blasphemy to his name and legacy, even though the most casual evaluation of Kennedy's efforts demonstrate that the current discussion of health care options falls far short of the place he wanted to be. In their desperate effort to disconnect Kennedy's efforts and his passing from the current health care debate, the wingers have finally tipped their hand and demostrated that 'fail' is their desired outconme....

Ted Kennedy's passing is just about the worst thing that could happen to the Republican opponents to health care reform. His battle against brain cancer humanized the whole debate in a way that they have been trying to downplay for a couple of decades. The Republican party leadership (that would be the talking heads, since there is no leadership in the elected cohort of the Republican party) is doing its best to invoke the wrong-headed and misguided image of the failed reporting of the Wellstone memorial for no better reason than the fact that they think the same sort of commentary worked to win the day back in 2002...

These are different days. Jesse Ventura isn't Governor: Norm Coleman isn't lurking in the wings; and there isn't any question about the incumbent Senator's views on the subject that is stimulating all the discussion about naming rights or legacy. It's a bit ironic, I suppose, that the same people who want to pretend that Ronald Reagan is still alive are so quick to dismiss a far more accomplished public figure from the other side of the fence...but that's what the politics of a Giant's passing looks like anymore...

Gibberish And Lies

2009-08-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

...why it has taken so long for any outlet of the SCLM to finally getting around to mentioning what this AP report reveals tonight is anybody's guess, but this highlights one of the core elements of the argument for both health care reform and the inclusion of a "public option". As has become so unfortunately common for supposedly journalistic endeavors like the AP, however, a certain measure of gibberish and lies is offered as straight reporting without any effort to provide context or contrary views. Tonight's example of that fundamental journalistic failure is represented by the quotes by Blue Cross lobbyist Alissa Fox...

First the gibberish:

"You can have a very competitive market and still have companies with a high market share..."

Now, I wasn't at all happy with all those Economics classes I had to take in college, but I did pay attention. All those painful hours lead me to believe that this is clearly one of those "Cue Barney Frank" moments, because Ms. Fox's observation can only charitably be considered a case of visitation by a life form from another planet. There isn't really any other logical explanation for accepting such a statement as anything approach some real truth, and I'm sure the former CEO's of General Motors and Chrysler wouldn't agree with the idea that dramatically unequal market shares suggest an very competitive market. In any case, the lobbyist's proposition is - on it's face - purely preposterous. There is no such thing as "a very competitive market" if one of the competitors has "a high market share"; the only competition is amongst the laggards and bottom-feeders fighting for scraps left behind by the Big Dog dominating the market, and that isn't in any way representative of a "competitive market"...

Second, let's address the lies...or what we may more charitably call "misrepresentations":

Fox points to the federal employee health program, which also covers members of Congress. It offers a total of more than 260 options and 10 nationwide plans. Despite all the choices, about 60 percent of federal workers pick a Blue Cross plan.

Yes, there are 10 nation-wide plans for federal employees. But there a couple of inherent lies in this claim:

A) Those 10 national "plans" are represented by only six companies in my state, and half those 10 plans are offered by only two.

2) Most of those other 200-plus options are regional - sometimes microscopically regional, so they don't have the opportunity to be compared qualitatively with the national plans, even though they may in all ways be superior...

To be honest, this "and we're still the most popular" argument is questionable at best as some sort of defense of the twin postulations that "Bigger is Better" and "There's Still Competition". Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, many federal employees live in places where there aren't all that many health plan choices other than the national plans and Blue Cross undoubtedly benefits in these instances by name recognition more than any superiority in coverage (I mean, how many Department of Agriculture employees are going to go with Mail Handlers when a better known entity like Blue Cross is there). I have never been a Blue Cross member (mostly related to the vicious aftermath of my mother's unsuccessful battle against cancer) and the best - and by "best" I mean by far superior - health care plans that I have had over the last three decades have been local plans that would have driven Blue Cross out of business if they had ever decided to extend their reach...

Numbers may inform stories, but they don't tell stories. The idea that market dominance is some sort of good thing in the world of health care insurance is absurd on its own face; despite that obvious fact, it's gonna be an ugly uphill fight against the well-heeled Big Dogs fighting to maintain their dominance in the arena of health care insurance if this sort of gibberish and lies are going to be granted unexamined prominence...

LIghting Political Backfires

2009-08-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

...so, when I read this, I have to ask "Why Am I Not Surprised?" At the same time, when I dig into the article (and You Can, TOO!) and read professional Bush 'War on Terra' apologist Frances Townsend stepping up to refute, without either proof or any hope of ever providing proof, the whole idea that some sort of sordid political motivation had anything to do with otherwise seemingly random elevation of those bizarre M&M's colored threat levels, I have to ask "Why Am I Not Surprised?"

We find ourselves in the interesting position of witnessing two contrary efforts to light political backfires, intended for directly conflicting reasons to salvage two separate political reputations for the sake of history. The available public evidence is pretty clear: Tom Ridge is right and Frances Townsend is wrong. At the largest scale, Sept. 11, 2001, was less an American outrage/tragedy and more an unmeasurably huge political gift that kept on giving for the cold-minded lizard people who actually ran things in the Bushco White House. Tom Ridge wants you to know that the evidence will show that he tried to do the right thing; Frances Townsend wants you to know that the evidence isn't actually evidence, even though it is, and never mind all that loss of Constitutionally-endowed freedoms and all those unnecessary invasions and all those unnecessarily dead people...

In the wildland firefighting world, you light a backfire to burn out a defensible space to stop the advancing flames. In two different political contexts, that's what we're seeing here...

59 Shots, One Kill

2009-08-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

...I believe that police officers have one of the most difficult jobs in the world. They face, day after day, the sort of dirty underbelly of American life that many people would be hard to convince even exists to the degree that it does, even though it maybe sometimes be just down the street. Despite an adult lifetime of dealing with people who weren't necessarily favorably disposed to seeing me show up, I have only on a couple of occasions felt as though having an axe-handle within reach might be a good idea. Police officers have to deal with that emotional concern on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times in any given day. Any individual contact, at any moment, could escalate into a life-threatening situation with no warning...

Theirs is a dangerous profession, and we expect them to defend us from the Bad Guys while following The Rules and making sure, for our own peace of mind, that they return home safely to their own families every night. Every once in a while, though, there comes a story that shakes our faith just a little bit...

Yes, the guy had a criminal record. Yes, he was waving a .44 Magnum rifle around and seemed unstable. But the report, if it is to be trusted, says that all six of the officers were armed with .45 caliber sidearms and at least some of them unloaded their clips into him, reloaded, and fired some more over that one half of a Mad Minute. Somehow, 43 wounds from 59 .45 caliber rounds fired in what the police dashcam videos suggest were three volleys of shots sound just a wee bit excessive. I'm thinking primarily about this statement:

Some officers emptied their magazines, reloaded and fired again, while others didn't fire all their bullets, (police spokeswoman Jerri) Weary said.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that if I have time to eject a clip and slam in another one to resume fire against a single target that is also being shot at with .45 caliber weapons by five of my coworkers at fairly close range, I might just have crossed that bright border line between "acceptable behavior" and "excessive force". Presuming that they were packing weapons that fired .45 ACP rounds, 59 shots and 43 wounds suggests that we are probably dealing with the latter possibility...

Even if this was a case of 'suicide by cop', 59 shots and 43 hits in three volleys over somewhat less than half a minute seems like remarkably enthusiastic cooperation in the fulfillment of that death wish...

Wherein We Discuss The Wormy Vermin Opposed To Health Care Reform

2009-08-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

...I have to confess that I haven't had much of anything to say, either here or in comments on other blogs or to family or friends or neighbors or anybody else, about the raging health care/insurance/system/program debate that has pretty much chewed up all the oxygen in the room over the last several weeks. I haven't had much to say because I fear that I won't be able to make much of a coherent argument without dissolving into the sort of hate-filled spittle-flecked ranting that seems to be the only argument that the wingnut side of this debate has going for it, and going there just doesn't seem to make much sense to me...

It's not that I don't have any concerns about health care reform. I have friends; I have family; I have seen people who I personally know and care deeply for get blindsided and devastated both emotionally and financially by decisions of for-profit health insurance companies that offered those people I care for a range of options that extended only from "die" to "permanent indebtedness". As it so happens, I have one of those spiffy special Cool Guy health insurance programs that is exactly like the stuff that Members Of Congress have. Aside from the fact that my FEHBA plan doesn't cover - without several fairly expensive rider components - much of anything in the way of dental or vision benefits, it is a pretty good deal that covers most of the costs of my blood pressure medication and my second-born's insulin and other supplies vital to the management of his Type 1 diabetes...

But that latter fact is the point where the current state of the health care system crosses over the event horizon into Total Fail. My kid - for that matter both of my kids - are on that ugly backside of the health care debate. One or both of them are my personal version of the people who will fall through the cracks if the Republican party is successful in killing health care reform. I'm going to be OK because of my career choices (at least as far as basic coverage is concerned), but at least one of my kids will have to enter into the Big Kid world facing the prospect - in a difficult economic environment - of trying to either snare a job with health benefits or one that pays enough to afford him the opportunity to both keep a roof over his head and pay over $600 a month for the absolute basic necessities to stay alive...

The Republican party doesn't care about this. It does not give a wit whether or not my kids live or whether they die because of a lack of affordable health care. It, and the wormy vermin of the health insurance industry that would cheerfully stand on the sidelines while my children are forced to make life-shortening decisions just so those corporations can properly offer dividends to their investors, has no interest in seeing a change to the status quo. My Congressman, Republican Greg Walden, will likely be the only one of the five members of the House of Representatives from the State of Oregon to not hold anything looking like a 'town hall' meeting, and he probably doesn't need to do so anyway. He's on what's starting to look like the winning side, after all; the lies and the misrepresentations about health care reform have started to wiggle their way into the public discourse as "fact", so it's starting to look like this deal is pretty much done, and native-born American citizens like my children are going to be faced with health care options that are no better than they would have had available to them even if we had never gone down this powerfully divisive road to begin with...

I completely understand that mine is not a unique story; there are millions of American citizens who have been brutalized by - or been put at risk of being brutalized by - the current state of affairs that passes for 'health care' in the United States. It is an absolutely failed system that will, in that current incarnation being supported by the Republican party and its patrons, leave millions of citizens behind...including (and this is more important to me) the children that I brought into this world with a promise that everything would be alright. Turns out that I may have been wrong about that promise that I made in those first moments after each of them were born. Turns out that nominally human-like creatures who would have better served society by being eaten by wharf rats are trying to make sure that my children can never feel any sense of security regarding their health care options and may well suffer to a degree that I swore they never should at the hands of these wormy vermin...

On How Journalism Dies

2009-08-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

...if this report at Politico is true - a concept that all by itself triggers all sorts of wild riptides of cognitive dissonance - the New York Times has demonstrated, once and for all, why wingnut bullies are so effortlessly effective at stealing all the other kids' lunch money out there on the journalistic playground. The structure of the complaint by John Solomon, the Washington Times Executive Editor, is a classic example of intentionally misdirected conservative outrage: How DARE the NYT disparage the fine World Class Objective Journalism of the Washington Times newsroom staff! The only problem, and one that the leadership at the NYT can't seem to understand (but that leadership couldn't or wouldn't figure out Judith Miller back in the day, so there's no surprise here), is that there isn't any particular reason for the Washington Times to object to this particular line from the NYT story:

..."an outlet decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times...."

Objectively, the Washington Times is an outlet that is decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama. While Mr. Solomon may want to make his newsroom staff shed hot angry tears at the alleged suggestion that all of their earnest efforts of Pure Journalism have been ground into dust by a few harsh words in the pages of the Gray Lady, the fact remains that the political leanings of the editorial leadership of news outlets has generally informed the manner in which those outlets have addressed and pursued "hard news" since sometimes before the day that Johannes Gutenberg first cooked up that movable type thing...

There's no need to be merely speculative about this, though. Let's go to the tape, Bob...

There's this 'straight news' story about how Obama is going back to the well six months into his presidency by blaming Bushco for the problems he faces. It is perfectly true, with regard to the basic facts, but ignores both the fact that Obama's observation is itself objectively true and that George W. Bush and his minions were still playing this same game six years after Bill Clinton left the White House...

There's this fascinating 'straight news' story that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that matters, but that consumed precious time and resources in the newsroom that finds itself so horrifically aggrieved by NYT accusations of partisanship. Apparently you can only tip your hat to the journalistic excellence on display here as the newsroom staff of the Washington Times cuts to the heart of all that matters, revealing in an exclusive report that people who object to a Democratic presidency are starting to buy stuff online that expresses their disgust with the whole idea of a not-Caucasian 'liberal' Democrat living in the White House; the on-line comment thread reaffirms just how objective this report is. This certainly demonstrates "News You Can Use"...

Probably the most useful example of the objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom (which, if one understands Mr. Solomon correctly, is located on some desert island many thousands of miles distant from the editorial office spaces) is this particular recent EXCLUSIVE story about concerns raise by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about some aspects of some of the health care bills that are circulating through the House of Representatives. The objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom is fully on display in this article:

A) Early in the article, the opinions of Dr. Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University disparaging elements of various House health care reform bills somehow neglect to mention that Dr. Chandra isn't actually a real live medical doctor speaking some sort of truth to power. He is, in fact, a 'doctor' of economics captured in the thrall of 'free market' health care processes that have nothing to do with effective delivery of health care and everything to do with the study of health care delivery as an economic activity...

2) The objectively journalistic reporting of the 4-2 vote to release the report neglects to mention that the two "Independent" members of the Commission on Civil Rights who voted with two Bush Republicans are, respectively, a law professor who is a contributor to a conservative blog called "The Right Coast" and the Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation...

This is the sort of objective journalistic excellence that the NYT apparently disparaged when it characterized the Washington Times as being 'decidedly opposed' to the mere fact of Barack Obama. Assuming that the Political report about this little "inside baseball" disagreement is accurate (see above), what we really have here is a perfect example of the sort of institutional cowardice that has destroyed any understandable sense of what the 'fourth estate' was supposed to be about. The NYT story in question was exactly correct in identifying the Washington Times as being a politically-motivated adversarial voice to any initiative offered by the Obama administration and only the simplest fool would attempt to argue that the selection of stories that the newsroom staff are directed to feature and pursue is not somehow connected to the larger political and editorial philosophy of the "outlet". If the leadership of the NYT decideds that it needs to offer an apology to the Washington Times, you will know all you need to know about how, why, and where real journalism died...

Note To Self

2009-08-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

...as the following clip demonstrates, if you don't actually know much about a subject that you worked hard to muscle to the front of the town hall meeting line to prattle on about in front of all those cameras, don't agree - under any circumstances whatsoever - to go on Hardball, even though you think this may be your shot to become the next Joe the Plumber and you think that's a good thing. Exhibit A:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In real time, this got so brutal that I turned away to watch "Baseball Tonight" on ESPN. So, note to self; just say NO...

Speaking Truth To Deather Power

2009-08-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

...every so often (as in "once a week or so") my local wingnut fishwrap slips in a column on the weekday editorial page from somebody other than the normal desperate fare of a Kristol or a Krauthammer or a Brooks, presumably in order to support its own argument that it is something other than a print version of "fair and balanced" FAUX News. The effort is usually pretty lame, so I have to confess that it was a bit of a shock to see this particular column by Froma Harrop in tonight's paper...

I haven't seen much talk about this particular piece (it is probably an arguable fact that The Providence Journal isn't a major player in political commentary), but I've been kinda busy with real life the last several days, so maybe I just missed all the to-ing and fro-ing. Regardless, Ms. Harrop simply nails it with this column, at least as far as my narrow perspective as a parent is concerned...

The reaction of aging supporters of the whole "deather" argument opposing health care (or health insurance reform, if you prefer) has been bothering me for a few weeks now. My younger child is standing on the verge of moving out into a strange and difficult work situation. Assuming he can find a job in these difficult times, the odds are pretty good that his job won't have health benefits. As a Type 1 diabetic, he will be facing at least $500 per month in costs to just simply stay alive if there isn't a health plan out there that he can afford to purchase. At the same time, the very same senior citizens who don't believe he should have a "public optioin" insurance plan availabe to him will continue to see their physicians and get their drugs to treat their Type II diabetes - a disease that is almost entirely the result of poor choices they made over decades, even though they were told over and over that they should know better and do better - courtesy of Medicare coverage that my son has to pay for with his payroll and income taxes...

Like I said above, Harrop absolutely stuck the landing on this one. Since created YouTube-friendly flashmob action seems to rule the day in this healthcare debate, it is clearly time to round up a bus full of uninsured twenty-something Type 1 diabetics to drive around to all of these town hall meetings to front up against the birthers and deathers and all the rest of the fascist forces that want to kill heath care reform with noise alone. Far too many of these "greedy geezers" are an embarrassment to any clear understanding of that whole concept of 'paying it forward' that we thought they, our parents, were trying to teach us. Their selfish hunger to make sure they "get theirs" at the expense of the rest of the country, even though they may not get that "theirs" is a socialist program, is something that their grandchildren - who have to pay for all that "theirs" even though they can't afford their own health insurance - probably aren't going to understand...

A Country Music Post....Because I Can

2009-08-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

...I can point to almost the exact point on the road map of my life where I began to listen to country/western music for enjoyment. It was during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, when I first started working at my small home-town radio station. For reasons I still don't understand, the station manager decided I should work the time slot from sign-on at 5 a.m. until 7 a.m. Monday through Friday (there's an attractive proposition for a teenager: get up at four o'clock in the morning every day). Even though there was a strict programing format at this MOR AM station, I reasoned that the only other people who were up at that time of the morning were Central Idaho working folk like loggers and ranchers and wheat farmers, and I figured that they would probably be more interested in hearing country music than the mild early 70's Top 40 pop music that filled most of the pie slices on each hour's circular playlist chart...

Long story short, I threw out the format, playing mostly country music, and nearly got fired. It was only through influence-peddling by my parents, who responded to friends' questions concerning why I had quit playing "good" music and had gone back to that "hippie-dippy" stuff (I used my real name on the air, and - it being a small town - everybody knew whose strangely deep-voiced kid I was) by saying that I would be fired if I didn't follow the format, that my job was saved. Since some of those friends were major advertisers, pressure was applied (although I didn't know that until later), and the station manager revealed to me that he had had an epiphany about the early morning format and I should keep doing what I had been doing. In any event, I started playing mostly country music because I thought it responded to the likely audience (on night shifts, I smuggled in the music I listened to: albums by Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, The Who, Pink Floyd, Chicago, and other groups whose singles didn't often show up in our playlist stack; nearly got fired for that, too). I ended up playing country music because some of it - not all of it (I'm looking at you, Conway Twitty), but some of it - had a raw emotional purity that captured my attention...

Some of it, I must also admit, was just simply fun to listen to...

I'm recounting this history of mine to set the context for headline that caught me by surprise this evening: "Country duo Brooks & Dunn to break up". OK, so this isn't on the scale of the Beatles breaking up, but - in the world of country music - it is pretty big stuff. Other people somewhere down the line will need to decide how they stack up against Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline in that whole "Greatest Music Evah" competition, but Brooks and Dunn are the most successful country music duet of all time and, in an interesting side note, one of the few country music acts that I have actually ever spent money on (my purchases of CD's and digital music generally runs toward various jazz genres; figure that one out)...

A lot of the most successful airplay released by Brooks and Dunn are their up-tempo honky tonk songs (and if you haven't ever spent a night drinking and dancing in a small smokey cow/logger/farmer bar...well...you have the wrong Bucket List), but some of their greatest music can be found in the ballads that featured Ronnie Dunn's spectacular voice. I'm a little bit sad tonight at the loss of further additions to that particular part of their body of work, but I survived the breakup of the Beatles and any number of other groups that I loved to listen to; I'll get over this, too...

In the meantime, one of my favorite songs and an example of the work of Brooks and Dunn; a "duet" with another giant of country music, Reba McEntire:

The Confessions Of A Bank Failure Statistic

2009-08-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

...I suppose I should have expected that my bank would fail. I mean, it's not like I have any particular experience dealing with my bank going under in the past, but I am one of those people who used to be a customer of First Interstate Bank. I know what it's like, even in the best of economic times, to wake up one morning to find that the perfectly good bank that holds all of one's checking accounts, savings accounts, and various loans has now become some entirely different corporate entity that will, before all is said and done, plunge one's entire financial life into a frenzied maelstrom of account number confusion that eventually makes it rather easy to come with a quick answer to the question "so, sure, I could rent a Cat™ D9 R with some special options, but what would I do with it?"...

If for no other reason, I should have anticipated the possibility of the 'karma' thing...

The obvious solution - or at least so I thought on the heels of that Wells Fargo experience (incorrectly, as it apparently turned out) - was to place my bet on and my money in a small "hometown" bank run by the guy down the street who understood the community's financial pulse. I was WRONG, but I didn't know that until I stopped by my local branch early Saturday morning to extract some cash from my branch's ATM for an unexpected and unplanned weekend trip, only to notice that the employee parking spaces were remarkably fully occupied for an early Saturday morning and that there was a Community First press release taped to the left side of the ATM machine announcing the failure and takeover by Home Federal Bank of Nampa, Idaho...

And this may be one of the truly interesting aspects of this whole "Banks In Trouble" story. Even though I have been a faithful and responsible customer of this bank for 15 years (it was called "The Bank of Prineville" when I decided to abandoned my acquired Wells Fargo masters back then), I never received any direct indication that my bank was in trouble. There were, on reflection, warning signs that probably would have tipped me off if I only understood how to read the tea leaves; it was about at the time that regulators were sending warning notices to my bank last spring that I started receiving regular notices telling me that overdraft coverage was a privilege rather than a right. I found this to be a curious notification, given that I have never had an overdraft, but I never was able to make any sort of logical connection between those exhortations and bank troubles. I don't think I'll miss that clue again...

As the linked article shows, however, there was lots of stuff going on in the background. It's perfectly understandable that all of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, since I'm confidant that I'm not the only customer who would, on learning about the shaky underpinnings of my bank, show up with a friendly harmless smile and a burlap bag insisting that the nice ladies behind the teller window fork over all my money so I could do the responsible thing and bury it in Mason jars on my property out back behind the septic drain field. On the other hand, I can assure you that it is a pretty grim situation when you find yourself hitting the road for an unplanned emergency 750-mile weekend road trip having suddenly and unexpectedly discovered that at some point circumstances will probably force you to flash a card under the nose of some vendor of either food or lodging that prominently bears the name of a bank that the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities and the FDIC have declared no longer exists...

We can leave aside for now the prospect of having one's bank being taken over by a financial institution based in Southern Idaho. As a Central Idaho native, I'm not at all down with all that, but that discussion is for another day...

Wherein We Explore The Benefits Of A "Former Diplomats In Space" Program

2009-08-04T20:15:00.001-07:00

...maybe this should be done formally:

Whereas the government of the United States is exploring the revitalization of the manned exploration of space, featuring in the near term a return to the moon and later missions to asteroids and the neighborhood of Mars, and;

Whereas the the United States is in need of finding suitable candidates to staff these long-duration space flights, and;

Whereas the current economic conditions in the United States have forced former diplomats into misguided opportunities for commentary, despite the fact that they still cling desperately to their own failed neoconservative constructs of how the United States should relate to the rest of this little blue marble's residents and nonwithstanding a wealth of evidence suggesting that they understand neither the dynamics of international relationships or the impact of incessant warmongering drum-beating on the actual definable security of the United States, and;

Whereas there is a clear and compelling need to find productive employment for these former diplomats so that American citizens may be spared the disgusting prospect of seeing them offering useless and demonstrably wrong-headed commentary on the efforts of other American citizens to solve problems with words rather than laser-guided weapons, as well as the dire prospect of those American citizens being viewed as extremely expendable soldiers in some undefined war against those with whom these former diplomats so desperately want to engage in armed conflict, and;

Whereas it is fully time to move on and try something other than the practices and philosophies of the eight grim years of the previous presidential administration, so strongly advocated by these neoconservative former diplomats, that have elevated the United States of America as a political entity to a level of global mistrust and outright hatred only previously experienced by Nazi Germany and the Roman Empire;

Be it resolved that the United States should, at the earliest available opportunity, induct these former diplomats into the astronaut corps for immediate assignment to the Internional Space Station. While there, they can train for forthcoming deep-space missions where they can engage in productive research rather than wasting time and resources on the planet's surface sharing their useless thoughts about what is happening on this good earth.

It looks like a win-win proposal to me....

Things You Don't See Every Day

2009-08-02T16:22:00.001-07:00

...it's not all that terribly uncommon around these parts to have the random severe thunderstorm. Usually they are detected by National Weather Service Doppler radar in Pendleton (way off in northeastern Orygun) or Medford (down yonder in the southwestern part of the state). Because we have extremely poor radar coverage here in Central Orygun, sometimes that unexpected screeching radio EAS tone making you jump out of your skin comes as a result of trained storm spotters shouting to be heard about the pounding hail to NWS meteorologists about how "it seems to be a might stormy at the moment". What you don't see very often is something like this:

...what's even more interesting (in a sort of "wow, those wharf rats running around in the kitchen sure are big" way) is that the vast expanse of lovely plum shade identifying a Severe Thunderstorm Watch comes to us courtesy of The NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma...you know, the tornado people...

I don't recall ever seeing a Severe Thunderstorm Watch area this large around these parts (it extends a ways to the north of the map view) and I certainly don't recall Norman, OK, ever weighing in on the subject before. So, yeh, there's something you don't see every day...

It's Hard Out Here For A...erm..uh...Blue Dog

2009-07-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

...Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) is incensed. He is outraged! He is, in fact, acrimonious!! Like Father Mulcahy, he may well be persuaded to violence. Why, you may ask, would Congressman Taylor be be in such a dire emotional state? It is quite simple, dear reader; Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform has dared to accuse him of being a party to the dirty political business of actually arriving at a compromise that would allow a health care reform bill to move out of Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee...

Rep. Taylor, in his fit of extreme pique, called Grover and his gang "lying sacks of scum" and, I must confess, I am in that rather large cohort of American citizens who would find no particular objective argument with his assessment. As it so happens, however, Rep Taylor's extreme outrage is directed at ATR's suggestion that he is acting like a Democrat who actually wants to find some way of reforming health care that will actually benefit his constituency and other Americans. And that, my friend, twists his tail more painfully than you could ever imagine, because Rep. Taylor is a DINO's DINO, representing in many respects the last vestiges of the Strom Thurmond branch of the Democratic party that still exists in the Deep South...

Rep. Taylor is pretty clear in stating that he will have no truck with all this touchy-feely health care reform nonsense if it means taxes, near-term deficit spending, or another Gawd-awful 'Govnmint' program. In all fairness, he has been fairly consistent over the years in opposing deficit-increasing proposals - including Gee Dub's disastrous tax cuts, which is why "baby-drowneder" Grover and his gang are after Taylor in the first place. At the same time, Taylor is not the sort of guy you are going to turn to seeking support for the idea that every American citizen should have a right to guaranteed, affordable health care...

Rep. Taylor is a pimp for a host of political viewpoints that haven't had any sort of traction in the mainstream of Democratic policy for a couple of decades; if he were to announce first thing Monday morning that he had decided, after long heartfelt discussions with his family and his priest, that he was going to follow his heart and switch political affiliation to the Republican party, no one would notice. It is perversely amusing, though, to see him slinging around phrases like "sacks of scum" (apparently, as a Roman Catholic, he can't call his targets 'scumbags') directed toward a group whose criticism almost every other Democrat would just simply ignore...

Too Much (And Too Little) Of A Good Thing

2009-07-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

...so you're sitting there looking out the window at the old '93 Bronco out in the driveway, with all its physical wear and tear from 195,000 miles of faithful service, and you're thinking "this 'cash for clunkers' thingie might be just the ticket to getting me into a new ride with better gas mileage"...

The good news is that you would be right, because the Kelly Blue Book value of this rig is about $1300 (assuming "fair" condition and average XLT trim level options)...

The bad news is that you may be too late. The "Cash For Clunkers" program, officially known as the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, was supposed to be in play from last Friday, 24 July, until 1 November or until the $1 billion in the fund was exhausted (although many dealers decided to roll the dice and book deals before the official start). However, the prospect that 13 CARS Program deals per dealership already on the books is an accurate statistical average for all of the 23,000 dealerships who signed up for the program means that car buyers may well have burned through that $1,000,000,000 in one week...

The early returns suggest this program has been so wildly successful that its Republican opponents can do little more than look back wistfully to those morning-dew-bespeckled halcyon days when they had nothing more to worry about than a strange, crazed ticket of presidential and vice-presidential candidates that called into question why any clear-thinking American voter would trust their party to walk the family dog, much less run the country. The program has clearly been too much of a good thing in the sense that it exposed a pent-up but natural desire of people to buy new fuel-efficient vehicles to replace the old beaters that economic circumstances forced them otherwise to hang on to...

On the other hand, it's too little of a good thing because its creators failed to accurately estimate just how much demand there might be out there for just such a program. It shall be left to the economist gurus to pick the point at which increased car purchases as a result of federal subsidies crosses some "good idea/bad idea" line, but as far as pumping new car sales and improving the environmental 'green-ness' of cars actually on the road, the money that has been committed and could (and should) still be committed to expand the program looks like a lot better deal from a 'money well spent' standpoint than all those shrink-wrapped pallets of Jacksons that have been shipped to Iraq over the last six years...

This admittedly unattributed suggestion that the CARS program will end after one week is a truly gobsmacking moment, because the breathtaking overrun of its own established parameters suggests that not even those people we are fervently trusting to lead us out of this current economic wasteland don't fully understand all the in's and out's of the trouble we're in...

"Too Little, Too Late" Coming Home To Roost

2009-07-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

...this AP story is truly grim, describing the ways in which American soldiers coming home from Iraq with deeply buried psychic wounds that were insufficiently addressed by the command structure at Fort Carson went on to murder people once they got back home to Colorado. The piece contains all the usual 'right words' by Fort Carson personnel insisting that all the right things are being done to treat troops who have been struggling to turn off the 'in harm's way' switch once they get back to "the world", as home was called back in the Vietnam era...

The problem I have with this AP report is that it is all too little, too late. Daniel Zwerdling of National Public Radio began covering the story about inadequate mental health care and aggressive actions by NCO's and officers at Fort Carson to browbeat returning troops into "manning up" and ignoring their own mental health issues almost three years ago (click on the sound files; the print transcripts apparently no longer exist)...

The AP article folds uncomfortably but naturally into the framework that Danny Zwerdling built back in December of 2006. As different pieces of one larger history, the two story lines (with Zwerdling and NPR taking the checkered flag by a couple of years) highlight the fact that military culture hasn't matured all that much over the last 35 years as far as addressing the mental health of soldiers are concerned. The AP story is illuminating insofar as it provides a new opportunity to identify the pressures of a dangerous combat setting that can lead individuals to do otherwise inexplicable things, but the story in itself isn't new...

I'll Take No For A Hundred, Alex

2009-07-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

...the question offered by the headline of this AP article is, in itself, fascinating in a perverse way:

Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?

Given all the forces in play and stakes at play in this whole "health care reform" debate (and that in itself is a misnomer, because what is mostly being fought over is changes to how health insurance would pay for health care), the very last thing that needs to be mentioned is just how the people who stand to gain the most from the failure the failure to include a public option are the people who are the ultimate driving force behind seeing this whole brutal process through to the end...

So I pick "No" to the prospect of lobbyists being the driving force behind seeing this thing through to the end. These aren't people who have your or my best outcomes in mind; they represent corporate interests looking to make money out of the whole health system thing, which is the fundamental problem with health care coverage in the United States in the first place. They are the people who first trotted out "Harry and Louise" 15 years ago in a successful effort to kill any sort of health care coverage for all Americans...

They are the reason that there a fundraiser being held in the area to help defray the medical costs for a kid who spent some time in the grips of the health care system recently because he was struck by lightning. They are the reason that checkout counters all across the country have had plastic jars with money slits cut in the top and a pasted-on picture of some child in need of a liver or a kidney or a heart or some radical medical treatment sitting next to the cash register. They are the reason that people that I know - and, very likely, people you know - are losing their homes because of the combined pressures of a difficult economy and major medical bills either not covered by paid-for insurance or not covered because of a lack of insurance...

The idea of health care industry lobbyists being the life-force keeping this thing on the rails suggests the prospects of an outcome that the word "grim" doesn't come close to being suitable to describe...

Kicking The Raptor Out Of The Nest

2009-07-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

...the fascinating thing about today's Senate vote to kill funding for further production of F-22 Raptors isn't so much the final tally (58-40 against), but the frankly weird distribution of the votes along the political spectrum. You can almost map the states in which parts and pieces of the F-22 are manufactured by looking at the way that Senators voted on the question. The outcome of this vote is, paradoxically, perhaps the first actual real-live bipartisan vote that the Obama administration has been able to garner over it's first six months...

The likes of Shelby, Lugar, Bond, Ensign, Gregg, DeMint, and Coburn voted "Yes" on the amendment, joining with amendment co-sponsor John McCain to eliminate funding for a state-of-the-art 'gee whiz' Buck Rodgers stealth air-superiority fighter that cost $40,000 an hour to fly and may suffer the delamination of its mission-critical stealth radar-deflecting coating if flown through a rain shower. On the other hand, the likes of Boxer, Feinstein, Dodd, Cantwell, Murray, and Byrd voted "No" in an effort to sustain the manufacture of a weapons system that the people for whom it is intended keep insisting that they don't want (and, yes, there is a chance that those military officials are advocating the reasoning of the current administration for purposes of job security, but the fact remains that the Pentagon has been pushing back against ongoing F-22 production for a few years now...although Rummy was involved, which raises a whole 'nother set of questions about motivations)...

Today's Senate vote was the perfect example of the power of the very military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about being actually in action on the slippery fields on which political games are played. Various components of the F-22 are cranked out in factories in no less than 44 states, and it's not hard to figure out where some of those 44 states are when one looks at Democratic votes...

There is, of course, the whole 'protection' vote that party Whips earn their street cred keeping track of, and that may well play a role in this particular moment; some of these seemingly bizarre Democratic votes are probably votes targeting further electoral success for Senator's in 'soft' seats because the count showed that the amendment would pass without specific votes. After all, it's not like that's never happened before...

And That's The Way It Was

2009-07-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

...there are moments that you mark in life, markers in your own personal history that that are planted in your brain like some sort of organic waypoint on the GPS map of your life. The end-of-file marker for the trace of my upbringing was cast tonight with the news that Walter Cronkite passed away this late afternoon...

The Record shows that the The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC was the most-watched evening news program from the day that Cronkite first settled into the anchor's chair on April 16, 1962, until the summer of 1968, when The CBS Evening News began to make inroads. But even in those years before Uncle Walter became the preeminent evening news anchor in terms of viewership, the truth in my life was simple: Cronkite was the voice and face to which to which my extended family turned for news. Walter Cronkite told me one cold, clear snow-blanketed school day in 1963 when I was home for lunch (I only lived a couple of blocks from school and always went home for lunch because that's what Mom wanted) that President Kennedy had died, and that glimpse of emotion he showed - as Mom tried to shove me out the door to get back to school - was a strangely raw episode that created a connection to the power of that historic moment in my third-grade mind. I was sitting in my grandparent's living room in Bremerton, Washington, just three days shy of 40 years ago today, shouting at Mom and Dad and Grandma and Gramdpa to step away from the kitchen table to watch as Cronkite described and became verklempt in the moments after Neil Armstrong's descent down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module "Eagle" to put the first human footprints on the Moon's surface...

In the ugly 15 months before that powerful high of Apollo 11, Walter Cronkite told me about the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the crazed loss of control by both the Democratic party and the City of Chicago at the Democratic National convention, and how the outcome of the Tet offensive in South Vietnam (for which he donned his older persona of "war correspondent", complete with helmet and flak vest, in order to visit the scene) spelled the end of any chance for anything looking like "Victory" for the American commitment to that conflict. What he didn't tell me and my family in that last instance, because nobody outside the White House could understand it at the time, was that he was describing the final cruel puzzle piece that demonstrated to President Lyndon Johnson that it was time to step back and pull the plug on a long, storied political career by announcing that he would not stand for reelection...

Walter Cronkite is the epitome of 'the life well lived'. He operated at the pointy edge of the journalist's spear as a war correspondent during WW II, flying in B-17's over Germany and dropping into into swampy openings in the Netherlands in a glider full of 101st Airborne troops during the much-debated Operation Market-Garden, and covered George Patton's Third Army as it marched to the relief of that same 101st Airborne division surrounded by a portion of Hitler's last-gasp offensive at the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a sailor and had a taste for high-performance race cars, and did work that isn't even being talked about tonight like his narration of "The 20th Century". I will remember till my dying day the pitched battles between a prepubescent me and my not terribly supportive parents over what we were going to watch in those hours before the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, with me refusing to understand why they didn't want to relive through "The 20th Century" - one more time, with the comfortable baritone voice of Uncle Walter leading them through it - all those difficult times that formed their lives but that were the subject of textbook history to me...

A couple of weeks ago, we were unwillingly indulged in a seemingly neverending reflection on the life of Michael Jackson. For those of us of 'a certain age', the far-too-soon passing of Jackson had a particular bit of interest because he was a contemporary. Walter Cronkite won't get the same sort of acknowlegement that Jackson received and that's a shame on all of us, because Cronkite mattered to any pure understanding of what American culture and society is about in a way that the Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson in that same period of time (or even later, for that matter) could never hope to connect with...

He hasn't had much of a public profile over the last few years, but just knowing that Walter Cronkite was out there somewhere has served as a comforting influence over the years since his retirement, as if there might be some chance that he would come storming out of the background to go after a subsequent failed Administration. That won't be happening, however, so it is more than appropriate to honor him with that final sign-off:

That's the way it is...and that's the way it was....

All That Needs To Be Said

2009-07-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

...lots of chatter today at the Sotomayor confirmation hearing about Ricci v. DeStafano. Bits of talk about the newest political confirmation battle that could be characterized as Frank Ricci V. People for the American Way. It's all gripping stuff, guaranteed to stir the juices of Beltway insiders and Village People...

There's only one thing wrong with that whole kerfuffle: somebody screwed up on the directive to follow the script and let some people loose where the steno-pad minions of the MSM could accidentally stumble across them and commit unfortunate moments of unplanned acts of journalism:

"I hope she doesn't get confirmed, rendering those types of decisions," said (Rene) Archambault, a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city. "If you were an astronaut, would you want to fly on the shuttle built by the lower bidder? ... I think you would want the best candidate."

Forget "missing the basic point". In fact, forget all of the issues the City of New Haven thought they might be facing because of their promotion test results. All that needs to be said is 'be sure to focus on the comments of a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city'. It's an amazing corollary to the sense of white male exceptionalism that permeates the questions that Republican Senators seemed intent on focusing on all day long today in the Sotomayor confirmation hearing; "white" is the norm and "white" is the benchmark, and any commentary that suggests there is something other than "white" out there that could be considered to be a part of the 'norm' is simply reverse racism in full bloom...

When "Newsmakers" Aren't

2009-07-12T18:30:00.000-07:00

...today, apparently, you couldn't swing a road-kill possum on the set of any national TV political gabfest without hitting a Republican Congressional leader insisting that the Obama stimulus program, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was a big ol' floppy failure and swearing that they would drink their own bathwater before they would support further stimulus efforts. Whether it be Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona on ABC's This Week, future presidential candidate Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia on FAUX News Sunday, or the ol' Maverick McCain hizownself on Press The Meat, the message was consistent: No More Total Like Really Fail Stimulus...

It's almost hard to pick a place to start with all of this, except to mourn - right up front - the tragic waste of so many brave American electrons in such a needless exercise. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen think ARRA is successful. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen support further stimulus spending. The ink recording their actions with regard to the first stimulus package is still drying on history's pages; it documents that, of the 218 Republicans currently taking up wasted space in the 111th Congress of the United States, not one of them in the House of Representatives voted for the ARRA and only three of them in the Senate - at the time of the vote - supported it (and that was back in those heady days of wild optimism for the future of the party when there were actually 219 Republicans because Arlen Specter hadn't yet fled down his own personal ratline to supposedly safer, more firm footing in the Democratic majority)...

They wanted - and want - tax cuts, not spending, for the same reasons that Republicans have always wanted tax cuts instead of spending except when they are actually running the whole show and decide to go with tax cuts and spending (said spending usually in the form of budget earmarks that look remarkably just exactly like the sort of appropriations found in the ARRA, and usually for the same stated reason of economic stimulation). They wanted - and want - tax cuts because they know that the idea of more money in the paycheck sounds powerfully attractive to the average voter, even though that component part of the usual Republican tax cut proposal pays mere lip service to such nonsense while lavishing an embarrassing largess of increased wealth on those Sugar Daddies of the corporate world who actually pay the bills that keep Republicans on the stage...

It's all nonsense, of course, and it doesn't take an economic SouperGeenyus with a Nobel Prize on his resume to get to the bottom of all this. Tax cuts aren't any sort of stimulus in times like these. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are behind on their mortgage payments and facing the loss of their homes. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are living in homes that are worth less than the principle on their mortgages. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who fear that they may be the next recipients of a layoff notice or letter announcing the closure of their place of employment. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who have seen their 401(k) investments diminish to the point where they won't even be able to afford store-brand catfood for dinner if they retire. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who don't even have a job (which, depending on which measure of actual unemployment you pick, could be up to 20% of the available workforce). And, given the usual target of the bulk of Republican tax cuts, those tax cuts aren't going to stimulate investment spending and employment creation by businesses because there isn't going to be any demand for their goods and services for all those other reasons and a few others...

The AP story includes the sort of crude, twisted observation that explains just exactly why the MSM is clinging desperately to its tenuous grip as the Fourth Estate:

Republicans lined up Sunday in opposition to a second economic stimulus package, a rare demonstration of unity from an out-of-power political party in search of a rallying cry against President Barack Obama. [emphasis added]

No, seriously; that's what it says. The actual truth of all those disturbing Republican heads floating around on your TV screen is that there has been a remarkable amount of party unity; "The Party of NO" is not a DFH slogan created out of whole cloth, but is in fact a reality-based assessment of the Republican strategy that crawled out of the smoking wreckage of the '08 election. There is nothing newsworthy about Republican Congressional leaders elbowing aside makeup artists and shoving interns to the floor in their rush to get out in front of the klieg lights and studio cameras to assert their insistence that another stimulus package Will Not Stand. If there was any news at all about Republicans with regard to the stimulus package, it happened a couple of months ago and was all about the irony of the manner in which those same Republican naysayers by and large employed those same sharp elbows to take claim for the distribution of ARRA funds once the Democrats had put the money into play without their help. The MSM doesn't really have the skillz to do 'irony', though, so we are left with the "sky=blue/water=wet" non-news that Republican leaders are opposed to further stimulus funding. I'm pretty sure that Edward R. Murrow would not be proud...

A Friendly Piece Of Advice

2009-07-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

...for those, such as Politico writer Josh Gerstein and anyone who wants to take his concerns that he outlines in his insidious little story about the impact that Sonya Sotomayor's Type 1 diabetes may have on her ability to serve as an Associate Justice on the SCOTUS, I have one friendly little piece of advice:

Don't go there.

No; seriously. Do not travel down this trail. Those people who have been living with Type 1 diabetes don't want to hear it and those of us who have spent years - 8 years in my case - or face years to come trying to convince their children who have this form of diabetes that they can lead full, meaningful lives absolutely, positively DO NOT WANT TO HEAR IT...

Type 1 (frequently called "juvenile" because of the usual time of onset) diabetes is an autoimmune disease that is poorly understood by the population at large because it is not all that common. Even now, here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, I have people saying about my diabetic second-born "oh, that poor dear; he can't eat anything with sugar, can he?". There is no particular understanding that managing Type 1 diabetes is mostly - as I have written many time in the past - a math exercise involving the balancing of grams of carbohydrate intake vs. the units of insulin necessary to account for metabolizing those carb's (with the amount of exercise being a bit of a wild card character that needs to be factored in). Because of that lack of understanding, there is a subsequent lack of understanding of what is actually meant by Sotomayor's efforts to exert tight control over her blood sugar...

Now for the technical part:

The normal range of blood sugars that most doctors wants to see for an adult Type 1 diabetic is around 80 to 120 milligrams per deciliter, which most closely approximates the normal blood sugar values for the rest of us whose pancreatic function hasn't fled to the hills. The A1c value (a measure of how much glucose is sticking to red blood cells) that those doctors - including my second-born's endocrinologist - are looking for is somewhere between 6 and 7.5, with 7 being a "good" number and anything between 6 and 7 being an excellent number with respect to long-term health prospects. The long term health issue here is that 'sticky' red blood cells burdened with a load of extra glucose cause damage to the smallest capillary blood vessels in the body, resulting in circulatory failure in the extremities (particularly the feet and legs), the eyes, and internal organs like the kidneys. But let us get back to the point of all of this...

This Politico article is, to my eyes as the parent of a Type 1 diabetic rather than as a Dirty Fricking Hippy liberal, just another piece of work intended to create a space within which discrimination against an otherwise fully functional American citizen can be made acceptable. Sotomayor isn't about to be vetted for a position as the captain of a passenger airliner or a ship; she is not asking to become an air traffic controller or a member of a Marine rifle platoon. She has not been nominated for any position that has some sort of erratic and unpredictable physical demand that would result in her efforts to tightly control her blood sugar putting her at physical risk. She has been nominated for a position that - from the standpoint of physical demand and management of her diabetes - looks a whole lot like the jobs she has held over the last seventeen years, never mind those other years of work in NYC or in private practice...

There's a simple bottom line to understand here; in a few small, dark, fetid corners of the grim world where the remnant survivors of the failure of conservative governance live, a new angle on an old form of discrimination is being pushed quietly onto the table. What Gerstein's piece tries to suggest in a nudging way without coming right out and saying it is that Sonya Sotomayor is not qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice because she is a Type 1 diabetic. What this posited argument is saying is that, along with not being a True-Blue Caucasian, she is somehow fatally flawed because her pancreas don't produce insulin to regulate her blood sugar in the same way you and I expect. What this posited argument is saying is that all those years of effort by those of us who are the parents of diabetic children to convince them that their lives can still be productive and meaningful have been essentially a lie and and a waste of time, because in the strange shadowy world of the wingnut mindset we are the creators of lesser beings who do not deserve to have a shot at any sort of life that matters...

The ultimate harm that we parents of children who are juvenile diabetics have fought for longer than wingnut idiots like Josh Gerstein have been around has been centered on the whole question of what our children can be when they grow up. The fundamental failure of faux journalists like Gerstein to actually try to understand what Type 1 diabetes means as a lifestyle and the simply absurd suggestion fronted by Gerstein that her status as a diabetic might...maybe...wink wink nudge nudge...be a disqualifying factor to Sotomayor's nomination is the sort of dismissive and discriminatory attitude that turns otherwise placid people like me (no, seriously) into flaming activists. What is being suggested by Gerstein's piece is that the profoundly sedentary job of being a SCOTUS justice is somehow beyond the physical capabilities of a person who is a Type 1 diabetic. It apparently doesn't matter in the case of this particular attack that there isn't any evidence that she has suffered from a failure of performance owing to her diabetes as a Federal District judge or Circuit Court of Appeals Judge or NYC prosecutor or counsel in private practice...

This is grasping at any opportunity to carry out a wingnut hatchet job, pure and simple. Beyond that, it is purely offensive even beyond the otherwise usual offensive racism that has tinged Republican statements of objection to Sotomayor's nomination from the outset. And, because of the ham-handed way that conservatives are handling this part of Sotomayor's story, this is now personal for a whole lot of people...

People who write for Politico aren't bright enough to figure this all out, but members of the Senate of The United States had better be able to do so. Being a Type 1 diabetic is no more a disqualifying factor for service in the judiciary than being a Type 2 diabetic is for serving in either the judiciary, legislative, or executive branches. In fact, being a Type 1 diabetic shouldn't be a disqualifying factor for any judicial nomination in any case, and it hasn't been on two separate occasions in Sotomayor's case, but it is now the case that people with the journalistic ethics of hyenas and the human compassion of mealworms are weighing in on the subject...

One more time, let me suggest a bit of friendly advice:

Just don't go there. As the parent of a Type 1 diabetic, I can assure that you will not like how the day turns out...

Oh, To Be A United States Senator For A Day...Or Two

2009-07-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

...I confess that there aren't very many days when the thought "how GREAT would it be to be a US Senator" crosses my mind. Generally it seems like a job that, by and large, sucks if you have any interest in maintaining those moral scruples that your parents and teachers and mentors worked so hard to drill bone-deep into your psyche. It doesn't seem like sleep would come easy most any night if a person really wanted to cling to those values and at the same time operate in that strange D.C. world where it's necessary - on a daily basis - to travel down roads to places that used car salesmen would refuse to visit at gunpoint. But there are moments - and this is shaping up to be one of them - where I almost wish there was a ticket booth available to by a ticket for that ride for just a couple of days...

Think of it: some guy, one who has no particular legal experience and whose only claim to fame is being the primary plaintiff name in a lawsuit that lost at both the District and Appellate federal court levels - on the basis of existing case law - and only finally won at the SCOTUS level because of a bare majority opinion that flings stare decisis to the winds, is going to belly up to the witness table in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to share his thoughts on why Sonia Sotomayor is unfit to be given a life-time appointment to the country's high court. More to the point, this witness - who is your go-to guy when it comes to saving lives and property but probably not the person you would turn to for legal advice - is apparently going to attempt to explain why Sotomayor is unfit to replace the retiring SCOTUS Associate Justice who arrived at the same conclusion that she did...

Oh, the questions I could ask of Mr. Ricci as he settles in for his "Joe the Plumber" moment - and make no mistake about that part; this is the same sort of effort to "put a human face" on the horrors of a Sotomayor SCOTUS appointment that Republican strategists have deluded themselves into thinking were productive with the original version last fall. Those questions rattling around in my "Senator For A Day" dream just come tumbling out, mostly because of the cheap political theater that Senate Republicans want to trot out onto the national stage:

"What, exactly, are your views, Mr. Ricci, on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?"

"What examples of past reverse descrimination in the New Haven fire department do you have, Mr. Ricci?"

"How do you feel about Griggs v. Duke Power Company (401 U.S. 424 (1971)) in general, Mr. Ricci?"

"What history do you have, Mr. Ricci, of developing race-neutral tests for promotion to Fire Captain and Lieutenant, and how does that inform your opinion that the decision of the three-judge panel of the Second District Court of Appeals was flawed?"

"And, Mr. Ricci, how does any such expertise square with the fact that black employees are so profoundly underrepresented in leadership positions in the New Haven Fire Department compared to their percentage in the general population and lower ranks of Department employees?"

Like I said, this is all "Joe the Plumber" stuff that Republicans are trying to peddle, and the sense of outrage they are trying to crank up will sell on the usual street corners, but not in a lot of places out there in the real world. It finally reduces the judicial confirmation process to a cheap, meaningless sideshow instead of a moment of great import - both in the near term and as part of the long view of American history - and guarantees that nothing less than a comet strike on the North American continent will ever get us back to some sort of balanced evaluation of judicial nominees in whatever cave the huddled survivors pick to be the place where the ultimate rebuilding starts. It does, however, look like a fun game to play if you have an E ticket for a seat on the dais of Senatorial Power, and it would be great to have that ticket for a day...

Can I Come Work At Your Place?

2009-07-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

...it is almost impossible to describe how unhappy this sort of news makes your average public servant feel. That sad, sinking feeling that civil servants feel at the revelation of this bit of information has nothing whatsoever to do with possible failures to properly fight the evil Islamofascist forces that are arrayed against us or the risks that these security failures could represent to our thoroughly American way of life...

No; no, that isn't the issue. The issue that so severely affects federal civil service employees as a result of this GAO report can be boiled down to the simplest of questions: Why the Hell do they have to go through all the daily nonsense of the security charade required to simply get to their desks every day when there is a reasonable chance that any old meth-addled "patriot" could walk through the door and step into the men's room to mix up an explosive device large enough to bring the building down around their ears?

This is little more than another example of how the failure of the last administration is a "gift" that keeps on giving. The efforts of Bushco to protect any and all of us from the Eveeel Terrasts was never much more than lip service and - as in the case of this disturbing story - we are probably not through finding out just how badly we were served by those clowns when it came all the way down to actually keeping us safe...

In the meantime, I just might be interested in moving into any vacant desks you might have around your office...as long as it isn't in a Federal facility. I have my own pencils, pens, paper, and laptop, if that helps, and I can be so quiet you won't even know I'm around. Think of me as being "Free To A Good Home"...