Te Aworo

I thought I'd have more time today to post something, and maybe even have the chance to write some things for next week.

I'll be on vacation. I'll see about posting stuff, but I ain't promising. I leave you in the capable hands of Kat, and if ThumbPer can work out the password on the computer, he might post some stuff too.

See you on the 18th!

Things That Make You Go "Hmmmmm"

Senator Harold Ford, Jr...of New York???

His stature undoubtedly derives from his five consecutive terms as a United States representative and a bitterly contested campaign for the Senate, but Mr. Ford, 39, has introduced himself to New Yorkers as a self-assured, nattily dressed political insider on Fox, NBC and MSNBC.

Over the past two years, he become a regular on shows like "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press," pontificating on everything from death panels to Barack Obama's popularity.

The appearances have given Mr. Ford's name a familiar ring but have revealed little about his politics, which will become the subject of intense scrutiny over the next few weeks as he decides whether to run against Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand this fall. He has given himself 45 days to sound out potential donors and party leaders about a campaign.

Attentive readers of Simply Left Behind now have an explanation to this bizarre encounter your editor had two years ago. Not in a million years would I have imagined that it was leading up to this possibility, but the fact that he met with Joe Trippi in a quiet little restaurant (albeit not in the corner) certainly intimates Ford's intention to re-enter political life.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Ford, you may recall, had his hopes for Senate in Tennessee dashed in part by a race-baiting TV ad.So to a degree, his candidacy in a state less predisposed to listen to hate-mongering and more disposed to listening to issues is sort of "get even." Too, he's an intelligent man with good ideas who is not as liberal as many would pick him out to be, so he could be a sale in areas of New York State that Hillary Clinton carried with surprising regularity.

 

On the other hand, Kirsten Gillibrand has not exactly been a horrible Senator. She is, however, somewhat tainted by her unfortunate and necessary association with Governor David Patterson, whose approval ratings are abysmal, even if they have softened somewhat these past few weeks, Gillibrand has also carried a lot of the water for the Democrats in the Senate, voting strictly along party lines despite being more conservative than the party in general.

 

Which is saying a lot, considering how far to the right the party has had to move to pass legislation this year.

 

This has the earmarks of a White House wishlist, between this trial balloon and the pressure President Obama has placed on Patterson to forgo re-election. Patterson has led an oddly charmed life since that pressure was made public: no one serious, it seems, wants to run against him, except perhaps Andrew Cuomo. Republicans have shunned the race like Puritans in a sex club marathon.

 

My guess is, the budget outlook is so bleak, no one wants to be the one left standing when the music stops. In this regard, Patterson will likely thrive into a second term, simply because he hasn't backed down from the challenge.

 

But I digress.

 

The potential for a Gillibrand-Ford lock-up in the primary is interesting. Ford would likely capture most of the lower counties, like the city, Westchester, and Long Island, while Gillibrand would run strongly in the central parts of the state, like the Leatherstocking district and the Hudson Valley.

 

So the toss-ups would be the university towns way up north, like Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. Those are a strange admixture of blue collar whites who have suffered mightily in this Bush depression, and scholarly-types. Ford appeals to both, to be sure, but Gillibrand's support amongst the working class folks would be hard to crack.

 

Look for pressure brought to bear on Gillibrand to quit the race, and perhaps lock horns with Patterson for the governor's chair, or an offer of a post that would be hard to turn down (ambassador or sub-Cabinet appointment). I don't think the state party wants to have this on their hands after the 2009 state Senate debacle.

Great Moments In Twitter History

Sadly, No!, in response to complaints about a thread deconstructing a Tweet sent by some random cultural celebrity and basically demolishing it as the single most ridiculous form of communication ever devised, has created a thread of how Twitter would have been used in history. I post some examples here:

Naturally, the denizens couldn't help but chime in...

Elephant Butte said,

January 6, 2010 at 4:34

@Caesar OMFG et2 Bts?

It gets worse:

Felonious Monk said,

January 6, 2010 at 8:03

@Genghis
Plan 4 2nite: F#%* sum bitchzz, overrun West Asia, F(@# moar bitchzz. Holy Shit I luv my life.

So, yes...I took a swing or two:

actor212 said,

January 6, 2010 at 16:17

@MaryMagadalene U no who else got naled? Ur mom LOL!!!!!!!!!!

actor212 said,

January 6, 2010 at 16:19

@MaryToodLincoln Othr thn tht, how wuz plai?

Take your best shots, readers, either here or at Sadly, No!

Thunder And Lightning

Barack Obama showed some stones yesterday.

 

This shouldn't be news. I suspect the reason it is is the last administration was in woefully short supply of stones, particularly when it made mistakes. "Heckuva job, Brownie!"

After an earlier meeting with his security advisers, President Obama said US intelligence services had enough information to place the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a no-fly list, but had failed to connect the dots, adding: "That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it".

I should point out that the only person who suffered any consequences of the 9-11 terrorist attacks was Sibel Edmonds. Indeed, the only admission by anyone in authority in the Bush administration with respect to the 9-11 tragedy was from Condi Rice, which she called a  "failure of imagination".

 

As if terrorists bringing four planes down a month after the infamous August 6 PDB was like the release of "Avatar".

 

But I digress.

 

President Obama's point yesterday, that we had all the pieces but no one to put the puzzle together, was supposed to be solved by the Department of Homeland Security, set up by "President" Bush and alowed to squander seven years of financing to put on a dog and pony show of protecting Americans' security. We were given rainbows, told tweezers and nail scissors were deadly weapons (perhaps they anticipated an attack by an army of Jackie Chan clones), and asked to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting.

 

Instead of putting together an infrastructure that would in real time share information between agencies and prevent a lone terrorist from boarding a plane loaded down with explosives. Yes, Bush and his team stopped Richard Reid (for want of a lighter, admittedly on the "no-fly" list. Too bad Reid wasn't.), and then rested on their laurels.

 

Bush and Rove et al spent those last seven years wetting their pants trying to get us to wet ours, with continual incidents of false flag terror alerts (timed in election cycles, no less).

 

President Obama's inference, that intelligent people are now running the intelligence services so let's cut the crap, is an even better reaction than expected. Had Abdulmutallab (and I thought Ahmadinejad was hard to spell!) succeeded, I would hope the implication that heads would roll would be carrid out, starting with his own Cabinet pick, Janet Napolitano, who now has to work hard to persuade Americans she can handle what on the surface seems to be a job cut out for her. I'm sure the details are far more complex, however.

 

2009 was a difficult year for Obama, even tho the end showed glimmers of an administration that can reverse the deep troubles this nation is in. If this kick-off to campaign year 2010 is any indication, this should be a good year for Obama and the Democrats.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

In the forest, in the...nude? Well, sort of...:

(CBS)  While Tiger Woods remains holed up in seclusion more than a month after his Thanksgiving Day crash, never-before-seen images of the world's No. 1 golfer have surfaced in this month's Vanity Fair, reports CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor.

 

A bare-chested Woods graces the cover of the magazine -- Woods holding a dumbbell in each hand.

 

The shots, taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz back in January of 2006, give a rare glimpse into the life of the world's most guarded athlete.

The words I've heard bandied about here are "intense, dedicated, raw".

 

In other words, practically (save for "dedicated") the opposite of his persona.

 

There's a lesson here for all of us who admire celebrities: don't.

 

Don't admire anyone who hires a publicist or a manager or an agent or charge d'affaires. The image you are admiring is likely not what that person really is, and if you have to aspire to a fictional character, then aspire to fiction with your eyes open. Admire Captain Kirk, or Luke Skywalker, or Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

 

Or admire what Woods could have been, because it's clear he is not whom he was presented to be.

 

I have often wondered why we swallow these images whole. Part of me thinks it goes back to the Bible, and those tales of superhuman endurance and semi-divine men and women who walked our planet and left footprints that by rights we are unworthy to follow, but who probably were human to begin with.

 

Even Jesus had a temper, in other words, but we are offered him as a God who was perfect, which we should aspire to even tho we are guaranteed to fail. Similarly, we conflate heroism on humans, taking a talent or small act and assuming the entire soul follows in those footsteps. And vice versa. We assume evil is evil through and through, even if simple observation of the people around us shows that people are neither good nor bad, but a mix, so even saints and devils must have a little of both.

 

It's clear that Woods was not the ultranice citizen of the world he claimed to be. In these photos, he shows a complete narcissistic side of himself, a man in love with being Tiger Woods, a man who gives flinchingly to others of whom he is.

 

Ask Elin if you don't believe that last bit. In exchange for selling his soul, his essence, he signed a bondage agreement with a wife, his sponsors and a sport that values dignity and comportment above improved play or score. The scary bit is, what's going on in that sport that is going on in other sports, that golf is not talking about openly? How different will golf's image be once the steroid and amphetamine scandals erupt from the clubhouses?

 

How will golf survive? It won't attract the kind of sponsors it does now, upscale investment banks and luxury cars, and it won't be able to assume an image that's more down to earth (maybe if the LPGA was forced to play in bikinis and have implants, and the PGA was forced to play in Speedos and have full contact).

 

And maybe it shouldn't. Golf has always tried to walk a fine line between sport and diversion. Golf is a sport the way walking is a sport: it's a fine way to pass time if you've got gobs of it to waste, but to sit and watch someone engaging in it is an even bigger waste of time. In this regard, setting up a webcam on a busy street ought to be classified as sport.

 

And it dumbs down the definition of sport while it debases its true nature. Fractally, this reflects in Woods' own persona. He's dumbed himself down in order to fit into a sport that denies his true nature. The most interesting comment I've heard on the entire mess was on the Today Show this morning, when some yahoo told him to show up at the Masters riding a Harley, tattoos all over his arms, unshaven, win the tournament, throw away the green jacket and hook up with the first woman he comes across in the press tent after demolishing the competition.

 

I concur, actually. Be who you are, Tiger. Stop pleasing everyone else around you. You are the most talented golfer on the planet, and you shouldn't have to lower yourself to some image that others have of you.

 

Does it really matter if you earn $100 million a year or $50 million a year? Endorsements will come simply because of the talent. It may take a while, but you're very young and eventually people will not only forgive you, they'll come to see your point of view.

 

Fuck redemption. Teach the world a lesson about getting the fucking sticks out of its collective ass.

Truth Will Out

It may take twenty years, but eventually, truth will out:

The year 1989 changed the world. It moved us from a world of division and nuclear blackmail to one of new opportunity and unprecedented prosperity. It set the stage for our contemporary era: globalization, the triumph of free markets, the spread of democracy. It ushered in the great global economic boom that lifted billions out of poverty around the world and established America as the one and only superpower.

 

Yet it was a dangerous triumph, chiefly because we claimed it for our own and scarcely bothered to fully understand how this great change came to pass. We told ourselves stick-figure parables of defiance and good-versus-evil triumph, summed up in Ronald Reagan's clarion call: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

 

From the vantage point of 20 years, we should be wiser. The reality is that "our" victory in the Cold War was not what we thought it was, nor did it happen the way we think it did. Most painfully, the myths we spun about it have hurt the world and ourselves.

It was, in truth, a Pyrrhic victory that took more than 40 years to come about, and was more about the edificial nature of the Soviet Union and its weak economy than about America's "strong defense"...altho to be fair that had a large part to play in the drama, certainly in terms of speeding it up.

 

Meyer raises some interesting points beyond this obvious trope, that the United States and in particular the Reagan administration have been too quick and too self-centered in picking up all the credit.

 

Indeed, many myths, like populist revolt overthrowing the Warsaw Pact, come into question.

 

The central point is, the Soviet Union was doomed from the beginning. It was really a matter of time and economics.

 

Just as the fall of America was ordained in the early days of its creation: one nation was not under God, but several disparate islands of view. White, black, male, female, rich, poor, these groups, history shows, cannot all live under the same roof forever. It really is just a matter of time, as history demonstrates.

 

But note Meyer's third fallacy that came out of 1989:

A third myth is the most dangerous: the idea of the United States as emancipator, a liberator of repressed peoples. This crusading brand of American triumphalism has become gospel over the past two decades in certain foreign policy circles, especially among neoconservatives.

He has a point: every war we've engaged in, with the exception of one, since 1989 has been a patrician war of "freedom". The sole exception? Preventing ethnic cleansing in the former Warsaw Pact state of Yugoslavia.

 

Indeed, many of our wars for freedom have ended up oppressing sectors of population worse than before we arrived to fight (the Kurds after Gulf War I spring to mind), and most, if not all, have left the nation we've battled in far worse for the wear and war. This lesson is being demonstrated now in Iraq (and eventually Afghanistan) to our utter embarassment.

 

Imagine if we had invested that postwar "peace dividend" in our infrastructure, or education, or job retraining, or healthcare, and freed Americans instead of people who meant us no harm, caused us no harm, and whom we could have safely ignored (obviously, the Taliban and Al Qaeda do not fit this profile).

 

Imagine the trillions we would have shored up our economy with. Imagine actually going in and winning a quick war against Al Qaeda because we weren't tamping down Somalia in the 90s (or worrying ourselves over which orifice of what woman our President was filling, but I digress...).

 

It's a shame that it takes history to give us wisdom, that we do not learn from the mistakes of our ancestors or even from our elders, who fought and beat a hegemonic empire, likely the most powerful on the planet, to win our freedom. Practically by ourselves (the French helped).

 

Wouldn't we be ashamed if some other nation, say, Italy, came here and fought for our freedom for us?

 

Nobody Asked Me But....

1) Happy New Year, for what it's worth. According to Arthur C. Clarke, this was the year we were to make contact with an alien civilization. Me, I was just hoping for dolphins in my living room. That would have been cool.

2) It's also going to be the year of the Tiger, which will fall on Valentine's Day. We welcome our Chinese overlords.

3) So what will be the biggest stories of 2010? Here are my picks: Afghanistan, which I think will flare up and join Pakistan and India in a regional conflict that doesn't pit nation against nation (altho there will be plenty of bickering) but establishment versus insurgencies. A loose confederation of groups including but not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban will form a coalition in an attempt to deconstruct borders artificially imposed by Westerners.

4) Big Story #2: the destruction of Sarah Palin's political aspirations. The floodgates have crept open. I forsee revelations with respect to her personal dealings that will make past scandals look like Kiwanis Club level corruption.

5) Big Story #3: The economy will lag until the late spring when there will be a sudden surge in activity and hiring. Altho the unemployment numbers will not fall below ten percent, the turnaround will be real and will make people give Obama credit. Also, the Democrats will lose seats in the House and Senate, meaning the second half of Obama's first term will be devoid of anything much, forcing him to focus on international issues like Afghanistan and terrorism.

6) Big Story #4: Water. The impact of global climate change and warming has found its mark in the lesser developed nations, but the drought in the Western United States will become so severe that California will ration water south of Santa Barbara, and Las Vegas will all but be evacuated.

I learned my lesson from last year about making too many predictions...I mean, really, Cuba?...so I'm going to leave those out there as the four biggest stories of the year.

But I did call eight of the ten! ;-)

7) Blue blue blue blue moon...dididididadada

8) As a Finn, I have to say I'm very impressed by this.

9) When in doubt, suck!

10) The tree did it in the arboretum with a club.

Rush Limbaugh Deathwatch

Damn.

 

Early reports had him actually dead, which means he likely suffered a very serious attack before they were able to clamp him down with bungee cords to use the AED. I wonder what whaling vessel they called in?

 

But I digress.

 

Perhaps the time has come to pronounce Limbaugh "all but dead" and to determine what he will leave in his wake, besides a steaming trail of slug slime?

 

There's a small part of me, a very Christian, liberal part of me, that likes to think that deep down inside Rush is a scared little boy. You see, twenty, twenty-five years ago, this slug of a man, this Jabba The Nut, emerged with a shtick that saw him alter the reality of political talk in America, changed the direction of a major political party, and became a gravimetric force for evil.

 

Half-jokingly, so he could maintain the veneer of "comedian," Limbaugh launched anger as a weapon in the national political dialogue. Not that this hadn't happened before, Father Coughlin springs to mind, but the hatred that Coughlin spewed was not so much anti-American ideals as just random hatred.

 

Limbaugh, on the other hand, just hated that he was behind the times, and since he couldn't muster the effort to keep up, he set out to deliberately drag the nation back to him. It wasn't about advancing a political agenda. It was about self-promotion.

 

In that respect, Limbaugh had no qualms about stepping over boundaries that anyone who actually loved a nation would never set foot near, accusing anyone and everyone of being a Nazi or a commie, or an Islamofascist, or worse...a liberal!

 

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing

Rush conveniently forgets that, if not for liberals, Rush himself would be begging loose change in exchange for butt-fucks in the Kansas City railway station. Rush, you see, the bastion of conservative, up-by-the-boot-straps, rock-ribbed self-sufficiency, was on both welfare and unemployment insurance.

 

But now this hatred Limbaugh has spewed all over the land, this sludge of toxic waste, has morphed into something that, if it had been submitted to DC Comics, would have been laughed out of the office, and if it had been submitted to Mad Magazine, would have been met with stone-cold silence in its unbelievability.

 

Consider the birther movement. Consider the teabaggers. Consider the hatred spewing from the extreme right wing like an oil gusher that has not yet been capped.

 

I think Rush is terrified. I suspect it is this deep deep fear in him that forces him to marry every five years, to bloat up like a corpse in a cesspool, stopping only to blurt out what now sounds like almost moderate venom. He sees that the monster he has unleashed threatens to tear apart the very party he claims allegiance to, the party he claims he would like to see leading this nation. He sees that party slide into a cartoonish obscurity of obsolescence and obscenity. And with each passing election, he watches the internal strife of moderates versus radicals become more and more obvious, more and more spiteful, more and more divisive. And he watches his party become a footnote to history because of what he instigated.

 

He's lost the spotlight.

 

I don't give him much time.

The Right To Primacy

I have long believed, ever since Amy Carter, that the minor children of politicians should remain off-limits until they become of age. I didn't care much for the jokes about Jenna and Not-Jenna in the first Bush term, certainly I was disgusted when Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton "The White House Dog," and I'm pleased to see the right wing has kept hands off Sasha and Malia Obama.

 

Mostly. I'm not aware of any outright major blogging with respect to them and a quick Google search uncovers only the Beanie Babies controversy from February.

 

So it's with trepidation that I approach the news yesterday that Bristol Palin lost her fight to keep the records of her custody fight with Levi Johnston private.

 

See, Bristol Palin presents a problem: on the one hand, she was a minor when she was dragged out of the Arctic obscurity of Wassilla into the hot lights of the Minneapolis mayhem, and her private pain fully disclosed.

 

On the other, she presents prima facie evidence of at least Sarah Palin's inability to keep her own house in order, much less take over the White House.

 

My suspicion here is there's a reverse-discrimination issue at play, at least as far as the Chris Crocker wing of the GOP is concerned: after all, none of them had any problem when Al Gore's son was arrested for possession, calling that an example of the poor family values of the liberal Democratic party.

 

My instincts tell me that Bristol's name ought to be kept off the lawsuit. It's too late now, of course. Even if the ruling was reversed, it wouldn't take much to figure out which court docket was hers and to publish the details from it.

 

Which leads me to the dilemma. Legally, there is no question that the public's right to know is far smaller than the right to privacy that Tripp Palin is entitled to, and this is a nation of laws.

 

Right?

 

On the other hand, there's the whole nasty issue of Sarah Palin's exploitation of Tripp Palin. That cannot be ignored or denied, and that complicates the legal issue.

 

Part of Johnston's fight has been to protect his public image, which is his right to privacy such as he can maintain and the right to go about doing his business, whether it's being a public figure (which appears to be his destiny, however pathetic that career will be), from the smears and slanders of another public figure, Sarah Palin.

 

To privatize the records of these hearings is to shackle Johnston's hands from protecting himself. Indeed, his filings in this matter speak to that:

In an affidavit, he [Johnston] says he wants the case to be open to "public scrutiny as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious." He adds that he's referring not to Bristol but to her mom.

Clearly, there are no winners here, only losers, especially Tripp. My suspicion is the testimony and evidence presented at the trial will speak to both sides of the family being rather...ugly...with perhaps Bristol the only one coming out of it with any chance of an improved public image.

 

Sarah Palin will be forced to spin, spin, spin mightily the testimony. That Johnston has already landed a few pre-emptive blows in his interviews with regards to how Palin behaved behind the scenes tells me that's about all he was allowed to say by his lawyers, and that there's more, much more, to come.

 

Which would be consistent with her harping image from the campaig trail, the "pitbull with lipstick" writ small.

 

For my part, I'll likely ignore the trial, except to note when there will be real damage to Palin's Presidential aspirations.

 

But she really only has herself to blame for that. She could have been a better parent.

The Devil In The Details

When you bargain with the devil, sometimes you win. Most times, he wins.

 

You may recall back in '06 when Howard Dean decided to revitalize the party by energizing the machinery in all 50 states, regardless of traditional voting patterns. Everyone thought it was brilliant, because hey, it was Howard Dean. I thought it was idiotic.

 

But the results of the 2006 and 2008 Congressional and Presidential elections proved me wrong. Sort of.

 

Unfortunately, it has brought front and center the very wing of the Democratic party that we need to continue to run the country and there's the rub:

Before 2009, most Americans never heard of Sens. Ben Nelson, Max Baucus or Kent Conrad. More have heard of the Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman as a result of his Democratic vice presidential bid in 2000.

Yet now they are the movers and shakers in the Senate. Anyone who follows politics knows exactly who they are. It could not be further from 2005 when Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times wrote that "centrist Democrats today struggle with an unfriendly environment."

Throughout the Senate debate over health care, the centrists repeatedly forced the president's hand by insisting on changes to the legislation that made Obama's liberal base furious and which will constrain the impact of this legislation. Health care was the second major victory for centrists this year. They also were able to cut down the size of the economic stimulus bill back in February 2008.

Despite the poutrage from the liberal community, this is a simple fact: we can't run a 50 state strategy if we're going to lose the Baucuses, Nelsons and Conrads of the nation. How easy would it be to say to a voter in, say, Colorado "See what them libs did to Lieberman" and scare off a potential vote?

 

Let's turn back to CNN for a moment:

Why is this small group of senators so influential and will this change? The first reason has to do with the nature of the Democratic Party. Democrats have never been as ideologically disciplined as the Republicans, and they have been less successful containing party differences.[...]

The second factor behind the new kings of the hill has to do with the sharpening of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill. The impact of growing party polarization since the 1970s has meant that winning votes from the other party is extraordinarily difficult. Except for rare moments, neither party can count on winning significant blocks of votes from the other side of the aisle.[...]

Finally, institutions matter. The U.S. now has a Senate that operates as a supermajority. The Senate now requires 60 votes on any piece of legislation given that senators are willing to use the filibuster on almost any bill. If the majority party needs 60 votes to pass a bill, and it can't win votes from the other side, a handful of moderates wield tremendous power.

Expanding a voter base is a lot like breaking ground in a garden. You have to work the soil, amend it, fertilize it, then you can seed. Once you can begin growing things, you can thin and weed out the garden, thus insuring a healthier crop.

 

The basic flaw in the strategy of Karl Rove's attempt at a permanent Republican majority was in underestimating the ground that was shifting underneath him. He believed it was more solid than it was, but in point of fact, the number of solidly blue or red districts (much less states) in the nation is very small. And as CNN points out, generally you can count on 45% of any district to go Democratic, 45% to go Republican, meaning you are scrambling for less than ten percent of the vote.

 

Unless you can alter your party's image sufficiently that you can peel off voters from the other party who are frustrated with the lack of response from their own party. This is how Obama won in 2008. It wasn't the liberals that got him elected, altho the youth vote was a large factor.

 

Instead, it was the perception that he was not a radical Muslim liberal hippie pinko commie Volvo driver. Why do you think the radical ight chose the ridiculous tropes they did, day in and day out, to stain the man? 

 

And it's funny how our side missed that message completely, while the other voters got it almost from day one (and certainly the day after McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate).

 

So for now, we're stuck with these guys. If you read on in the linked article at CNN, you'll find the three options Obama and the party leadership have for dealing with them. If we as liberals are truly interested in helping this administration, we'll opt for Number Two:

The second option would be to use the power of the bully pulpit, as well as the famous but now forgotten campaign network from 2008, to go into the states of these senators and build grassroots pressure to vote with the party. Thus far, the president has been hesitant to take this path.

What if, rather than waiting for his instruction, we lifted the burden off his shoulders for him? You know, the man's a little busy and right now needs these guys but if we can get underneath their pins and start to push outward, they might decide they need to shift left a little in order to shore up their chances of winning re-election.

 

After all, ain't that what it all comes down to? It's all fine and dandy to have campaign money flowing in from corporations, but if you have no office, that tap gets shut off faster than beer in a Prohibition raid.

 

Ay, but then, the devil's in the details. How many of us really care that much?

A Modest Proposal

Little noticed in the hoopla over the failed terrorism attempt of Christmas Day, with the concurrent fingerpointing (these rules were instituted under the Bush administration, something jackasses like Rep. Peter King (R-Frontrunning Poser) seem to forget) was an item that made me think a little:

WUHAN, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) -- The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway with the world's fastest train journey at a 350-km-per-hour designed speed, started operation Saturday.

    Two passenger trains rolled out the Wuhan Railway Station and Guangzhou North Railway Station at about 9 a.m. and reached the terminals within three hours, compared with the previous 10 and a half hours.

    The service between Wuhan, a metropolis in central China, and Guangzhou City, a business hub in the southern Guangdong Province, was put into trial operation on Dec. 9, reaching a maximum speed of 394.2 km (ed. note: roughly 250 miles) per hour.

Not quite as fast as a jet airplane, but no one drove a train into the 90th floor of the World Trade Center, either. And given the delays in airline terminals sure to arise from this incident, bullet trains might begin to make more sense.

 

Several reasons drive train travel in Europe and Asia that seem not to affect Americans: higher fuel prices due to government taxes, shorter distances between hub cities, less developed road systems (really, the Autobahn and perhaps Englands motorways are about the closest any nation comes to the US interstate highway system) creating slower speeds and longer travel times, among other reasons.

 

Indeed, China may be the only nation who suffers from both the need to have citizens in two places at once as well as the staggering large distances between those places.

 

Now, Barack Obama did propose investing in high speed rail systems, particularly across the heartland of the United States. So far, the only firm proposal is for a rail link between Disneyland and Las Vegas (courtesy of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid). I'm not entirely sure what the advantage is for having this. Do you drop your kids off with Goofy in the morning and pick them up at night after you've blown the mortgage payment?

 

But I digress. We have an opportunity now to invest in something that a) makes sense to do, given the economic catastrophe that higher fuel prices will create shortly, b) can be shovel ready within months, c) would help wean us off foreign energy sources, d) could employ zero-emission power plants strung along the rail lines, e) would reinforce homeland security, both from a macroeconomic point of view as well as a micro-security viewpoint, and f) would give us a goal that most Americans can appreciate and wrap their minds around.

 

After all, rail travel has been around 150 years and there's a whole litany of romantic notions with regards to it. Imagine going from Chicago to Denver. It's a 17 hour drive. It's a three hour plane flight, plus two hours at security. At 660-odd miles and 250 mph on a train, it's 2 and one-half hours. And you're in downtown at both ends.

 

Makes sense, right?

A (War On) Christmas Carol - Coda

CODA


Jesus looked down, ten years later, to see what time had wrought.



Timmy had entered rehab, grown up, and began a modestly successful store for the wheelchair bound, selling surgical supplies and lifestyle-assisting devices. 



Marcus had been sentenced to twenty years to life, but because of the extenuating circumstances involving the sexual abuse of his wife, the judge threw the sentence out, and gave him three years in a minimum security prison, plus an additional ten years on probation. 



Barb had found work as a housemaid in the Bronx, and managed to duck most of the publicity, although occasionally someone would recognize her when she would shop for the family. When Mark was released from prison, and Timmy had completed rehab, they reunited. Mark began to work in as an apprentice on a construction site, and after a short while, completed his electrician's certification. Barb then quit her job as a maid, and went to work for Mark's boss as office manager and sales rep.



And Ed...Ed still toils silently in his own little private corner of hell, mocked constantly by circumstances and his own private Satan.



After all...he was privileged!

Fin

A (War On) Christmas Carol - Pt XIV

Ed fell for days without end, the constant flutter in his belly and tingling in his nether regions a testament to his continual downward progression. He neither sped up nor slowed down, but felt every molecule of air as it rushed past him. He hungered, thirsted, but had neither food nor water. But oh yes, he had waste products flowing out of him! It made for quite the sight.



*THUD*



For a moment, Ed lay there on the warm graveley ground, and assessed the damage. It felt like he had all his bones, with no extras. The fall should have killed him, yet he was conscious of all around him, including, as he opened his eyes, a pair of walking sneakers. Black. Velcro.



"Wel-hell! What have we here?" a male voice, purposely pitched higher into a sing-song tone, rang out in his near-deafened ears. "Hello, newbie."



Ed propped his hands under his shoulders and pushed up a few inches. The struggle to crane his neck upwards took forever and exhausted him. In silhouette, he saw a man of moderate age, wavy-haired with a widow's peak. He blinked, then slowly slid his legs under him to sit up.



"Don't speak, Hughes. You'll need your strength. As you may have gathered, you've had a long journey to an unpleasant place."



Ed tried to open his mouth and shuffle some syllables out, but found he didn't have the strength, sure enough. He let his eyes do the talking, and gave this stranger a blank stare.



"What's that? Three ghosts? So who am I? I'm surprised you haven't figured that one out yet, Amy, but keep pedalling. You're a shoo-in for the big girl X Games. Now, I have to figure out what to do with you..."



The stranger stopped talking, and gaudily rubbed his chin with his hand in a mockery of Ed. "Hmmmmmmmmmm...."



As he stood there, Ed managed to slip his feet under his torso, and began to squat, steadying himself with his palms on the ground.



"No no, newbie! No need to stand up! You have to learn to crawl before you can walk here! So what kind of skills do you have...let's see..." said the stranger as he scanned a clipboard he was carrying. "No. No. No. No. N----ahhhhhhhhhhhh! But no. No. No. No. No. Ever play the harmonica? No? Too bad, we would have use for you in the homophobe wing...no. No. No. Wait! No. No. Nnnnnnnnno! Well, you're pretty mnuch useless to me."



Ed stood up.



"Well, look at you, standing up, all proud of yourself. Bet you want to switch to the pull-up big boy pants now....Look, Hughes, here's the deal: you're a twisted sick son of a bitch who hates nearly everyone, yet has no usable skills. There's a special place for people like you who call the 'waaaaaaaahmbulance' anytime you feel the slightest bit injured, and you're in it. In fact, we have a special level reserved for you. No, no! Don't try to speak! Sit...well, no, because that rock's on fire, and you won't listen then, so stand and listen: Being good didn't mean lecturing other people on being good. It meant, well, being good. MOW-THE-ING the words was meaningless. You had to do good, and live by the teachings to be good. In your case, all you had was your mouth, so guess what? Down here, you lose your voice! Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, newbie?"



Ed took a deep breath, opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't remember how to form words. Or make sounds. For that matter, he had to force himself to exhale.



"I guess you do. Good. So your challenge throughout eternity is to try to get people to understand you somehow. It ought to be interesting to watch YOU relying on the compassion of other people. But I digress. Didn't it occur to you somewhere along the line that you might want to reconsider making fun of people who are different from you? Who needed your help? You had a platform to use to help people. Instead, you turned it into a weapon that, rather than unify your fellow citizens, served to highlight the differences, segregate the cultures, and ultimately, well, youuuuuuu fucked yourself, newbie, because the very people who could have been praying for your soul are the ones who you needed to persuade The Man Upstairs that you had earned a place at the banquet. I've watched the tape they send down with each newbie. It ain't pretty, the things you did, especially tearing that poor kid apart who lost his father on September 11. For that alone, I almost came up to claim your soul."



"Did you even read the Bible? Damn, son, because if you had, you'd know I was thrown down here for a lot less than you were, and that was before, y'know, the whole 'only begotten son' thing went on. You, you trampled on the Word and picked out the wrong bits to focus on. Honestly, I'm not sure how proud you have to be to focus on the trimmings and not on the main course of the meal. See, life isn't about you. It's about them," said Satan as he swept his arm outward, gesturing to all the other people around him. "Even I got that much. Do good by people, and people will do good by you."



"If it helps, you should have thought about it this way: The afterlife is like one giant game of 'Reverse Survivor', where everyone gets to vote you on the island, but only He can make you come down here. Get it now?"



Ed stared in disbelief, then slowly nodded his head.



"Good...now...about your job down here..."


Let Us Pray

Our Heavenly Father,

2,009 years ago, the Son of God was made incarnate. With this act, You renewed Your vow to mankind that You had grown up, that you had become a better God than He who destroyed mankind for being evil. That You had matured. That You had evolved. Thank you, Father.

In this holiday season, we ask You and Your Most Holy Gift to hear our prayers. At this time of the renewal of the vows of faith, we ask that You look down upon us, and help us in a critical time of need. Our planet is suffering degradations by the bucketful, and those who serve us forget that they are our servants; instead they serve mammon. We ask that You inspire them to higher goals.

We ask that you fill their hearts with the passion of position, that to do right is to do good and to do good is to do Your work here on earth.

We ask that You give us the patience to tolerate those who oppose our views with good humour and delicate persuasions. They are not many, but they are louder than they are large and in this nation, loud often substitutes for right.

We ask that You find it in his heart to fill our President with a reminder of where he came from and how hard it is, particularly now in this time of recession, for an individual to make his way thru the long cold nights and short brutal days.

We'll take care of the rest. We will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, help the poor, heal the sick. We can do that. We want to do this. We just need to move obstacles and inspire people and we know there is no rock so immovable that You cannot move it.

To Your cause, we re-dedicate ourselves. Amen.

A (War On) Christmas Carol - Pt XIII

Ed stared into the void of the hooded robe for what felt like an eternity. He had learned one thing as the world's most confrontational interviewer: he could make any man break with his glare.

Nothing. Not a reaction. No flinching. 



"Surely, something can prevent all this? Someone?..."



The hood stayed rock-steady still.



"What must I do?"



They rose once more...

"So this Happy Holidays...this is all a bunch of malarkey for you people, designed by liberals to destroy Christianity?"



"No, Ed, we don't want to destroy Christianity or Christmas or Christ. All we want is what Christians want: the right to practice our beliefs without reprisal or judgement. That's what this country was founded upon, and that's what we're entitled to in our Declaration: liberty and the pursuit of happiness."



"That's a load! This is a Christian nation! Our Founding Fathers were Christian and they even wrote about divine providence in the Constitution and the Declaration!"



"They also wrote about freedom of religion, which means that the government must respect all faiths, including the unfaithed, and by extension, so must society!"



"By taking the Christ out of Christmas?"



"No! But the holiday season has many more holidays than just Christmas."



"Oh shut up already! We'll be back after these messages..."

Ed felt the hand grip his shoulder once more, and they flew...up...east...to Long Island. Levittown, not Westbury. 



They settled to the ground like two leaves, and stood at a graveside. The freshly turned earth smelled sweet. There was a ceremony going on. They listened.

"...to Thy servant departed, that he may not receive in punishment the requital of his deeds who in desire did keep Thy will..." Father Tom intoned. 


A handful of people stood close by. A few scattered TV trucks, mostly NewsNet and its affiliates, and a smattering of gawkers, behind police tape about twenty yards away. Some carried signs: "Burn In Hell!", "Christians For Tolerance", and one or two carried old subway advertising boards. One bright light held up a "burning" Christmas tree, by pasting gold and red mylar to the branches.



Ed scanned the small group gathered graveside. There was Dad, of course, and two of Ed's three wives, and two of his children. Raquel looks like she skipped the service, but that's in keeping with her style: she was always jetting off somewhere. With someone. It was never enough for her.



And the head of NewsNet, a pixie-faced Aussie who made a boatload of money by first creating controversies and then attacking the same controversies. His master stroke? Publishing a book and then setting up a nationally telecast interview with a certain notorious killer, then killing the whole deal when his news division mercilessly attacked the idea. He made gobs of advertising money in the middle of the November sweeps, and still managed to release the book and make the million dollar advance back and much more. He was here all the way from Shanghai, with his lovely (fifth) wife.



And that was it.



Wait...that was it? None of the crew? OK, not Barb, but no one else?



"May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace."

With that, the hooded figure reached up and pulled his hood back. Before Ed stood a tall handsome North African man.

"I am Joshua, son of Joseph. Some have called me Jesus. Ed, I am here to judge you." 

With that, Jesus picked Ed up and flung him into the grave.


A (War On) Christmas Carol - Pt XII

The cold night air pierced Ed like an icicle dagger. He hadn't felt this cold since that a long time ago when he was struggling to make it as a reporter and the station sent him out to cover a blizzard. He had assumed he was working in-studio, but the wife of one of the editors complained about something he had said to her when he was drunk at the holid...Christmas party, and then grabbed her tit.



The hooded figure pointed...

Timmy was crying, sitting in his chair at the kitchen table. Barb was sobbing, practically beside herself, as the two female detectives offered her a handkerchief.



"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we have to go over this one more time. Can you tell us precisely what Mr. Hughes did to you last night?"



"I-it's hard for me to tell you. It's so embarassing."



"We understand, Ms. Croce, but please understand that we want to be fair to everyone involved. You said in your statement that he touched you. Where, precisely?"



"T-t-timmy...please go to your room for a while...OK...Ed...he...," and Barb pointed. "He sli-slid his hand up my dress, and tug-tugged away my panties, then f-f-fondled..."



"I'm very sorry, Ms. Croce. Please forgive us for asking these questions. We'll finish this up quickly so you can have some peace."



"Did he do anything else?"

"Y-y-es. He pulled out his...penis...and started telling me to...to....put it in my mouth."



The two detectives didn't need to exchange glances, but they did. This wasn't the first harassment claim against Hughes, altho the records were sealed when the settlement was quietly made, but there had been an arrest, of sorts. 



"Thank you, Ms. Croce. That will be all for now. Please accept our apologies again on this."



"Thank you, detectives."



The door closed quietly behind them, and Barb let out a wail, which made Timmy wheel into the room. "Oh, Timmy! I've lost your father! And I've lost my job!" She buried her head into his shoulder as he reached out and hugged her.



"That's alright, momma. We'll get by. Jesus is looking out for us, and we'll make it. Don't be scared."

Ed felt the hand grip his shoulder again, and they rose, settling near a cold street corner.

A young man in a wheelchair, nose dripping, wearing shabby gloves and clothes, sat with a cup in his lap.



"Anyone? It's Christmas. Please. Help me. I can't...I can't take much more!"



"Alright son, you can't stay here. The building management says you're creating a nuisance, blocking their sidewalk," the cop, reluctantly, said.



Ed looked up. It was the building he lived in. Used to live in. Whatever. He stared at the young man. It was Timmy, and it was almost....could he?



As Timmy wheeled himself away, he looked straight at Ed...and his look clearly said "You did this". 



"Jesus! Why?!? GOD BLESS US, EVERYONE!" Timmy cried as he wheeled down the block.


Christmas Music Blogging

Don't Be A Jerk (It's Christmas)
SpongeBob & The Hi-Seas

Christmas Music Blogging

Holy Shit, It's Christmas!
Red Peters

Proof That Wingnuttia Is A Pandemic

You may think that rightwing conservatism is a brand best kept bottled in the springs of Red State America, but then you'd miss all the imported goodness of fine British whine:

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

I'll get to that last clever construct shortly.

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word "global", as in "global economic crisis", meant: "It's not my fault". To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

Because, you see, no government has ever made a treaty with another sovereign nation.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

I wonder what planet Janet Daley lives on? The "will of the corporations who can afford to contribute millions to the coffers of those greedy and plastic-moraled enough to run for government" is the order of the day, madam.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational "legally binding agreements", what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous "democratic deficit" of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

Welcome to the party, pal! Decades late and a few marbles short, Ms Daley has suddenly awoken to the New World Order that George HW Bush and his scion have inflicted on America. She proves the adage that even the galactically stupid can somehow squeeze out a brain fart.

 

Only instead of seeing conspiracies in, say, oil pricing or outsourcing of jobs, Ms Daley chooses to focus on issues that, indeed, DO affect the entire planet. It's a little hard to solve global warming unilaterally, toots!

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Strawman in three....two....one...

Well, yes and no. Calling a problem "global" is meant to imply three different things: that it is the result of the actions of people in different countries; that those actions have impacted on the lives of everyone in the world; and that the remedy must involve pretty much identical responses or correctives to those actions. These are separate premises, any of which might be true without the rest of them necessarily being so. The banking crisis certainly had its roots in the international nature of finance, but the way it affected countries and peoples varied considerably according to the differences in their internal arrangements. Britain suffered particularly badly because of its addiction to public and private debt, whereas Australia escaped relatively unscathed.

You might think that, Ms Daley. But you'd be wrong. (note that one of those articles refers to a piece in the Dec. 2007 issue of The Economist calling the banking crisis almost to the day it breaks)

That a problem is international in its roots does not necessarily imply that the solution must involve the hammering out of a uniform global prescription: in fact, given the differences in effects and consequences for individual countries, the attempt to do such hammering might be a huge waste of time and resources that could be put to better use devising national remedies. France and Germany seem to have pulled themselves out of recession over the past year (and the US may be about to do so) while Britain has not. These variations owe almost nothing to the pompous, overblown attempts to find global solutions: they are largely to do with individual countries, under the pressure of democratic accountability, doing what they decide is best for their own people.

...mostly by borrowing from other nations. But it's not global, noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

The word "global" has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily "narrow" and self-serving. (Never mind that a "global agreement" will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations.) Nor is our era so utterly unlike previous ones, for all its technological sophistication. We have always needed multilateral agreements, whether about trade, organised crime, border controls, or mutual defence.

Global Thermonuclear Annihilation must have Ms Daley's vibrator set to stun. Suddenly, she acknowledges an internationalist community of longstanding, but hey, global agreements have never been around. The United Nations is a sham theatre created by the American right wing in order to placate the dirty Third Worlders.

 

But note too the rather silly claim that "a 'global agreement' will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations," when in point of fact, what held up the Copenhagen accords and kept the most powerful nation on the planet out of Kyoto was the limitation of power imposed by these agreements. Hmmmmmmmmm...you can't have it both ways, Ms Daley: either the most powerful nations on the planet impose their will or they do not.

 

Note too that she feels the Mafia rates a global agreement, but global warming which will create more devastation and destruction, corruption and criminality than the Mafia ever dreamed of, not so much.

 

I could go on, but suffice it to say that, for this American, the blatant idiocy of this column makes me think we may have a new columnist for Renew America. If she can slip into this country illegally.

 

A (war On) Christmas Carol - Pt XI

"Our top story...Conservative talk show host Ed Hughes was found murdered this morning. Police have a suspect in custody, but have not released his name yet."



Ed's deepest fears had come true. He knew he was controversial, but he always believed that no one would dare actually harm him. He never caused anyone any real harm, at least that he was aware of.



The hooded figure grabbed him by the shoulder and guided him once more upwards.

Barb held Timmy in her lap as they sat, waiting. Mark was led in, handcuffed, by two police officers who plopped him down in the seat across the table from them. The room was windowless, one bright lamp above them, with a large mirror on one wall.



"Mark, I'm so sorry. I should have left years ago, but we needed the money, and he'd never been as bad as that."



Mark sat, stone silent. He'd already met with his lawyer, and so would say nothing. Barb sensed this, and quickly changed the subject.



"Do you need anything, Mark? I can run home and bring it here."



"No. The arraignment will be first thing in the morning, and it's only for my own safety that they haven't taken me to Rikers. No telling what some cracker guard might have in mind. I'm scared, Barb," he said, almost adding he wished he'd hadn't done it.



"I know, baby. I know."



"Listen, you and the boy should leave. There's a pile of press outside the station, and so stop at the desk and see if they can get you home."

The figure swirled around Ed to watch his reaction. 

Nothing. He grabbed Ed's shoulder and pushed him forward and upward.

"Fiona, you need to come home. Ed's been killed....yes, I'm sure of it. The cops just left, and the news programs are all over it. I suspect you'll see it on the Beeb..." Here, John sneered. "...any moment now....Well, I can hold the funeral up for...six weeks? For heaven's sake, Fiona! This was your son too!...he did well, Fiona, no matter how awful you think he is. Damn you!"



And with that, John hung up the phone, and took another slug from the bottle of MacAllen's he'd opened after the cops left, belched, and aimed the remote and fired off an infrared beam to change the channel. "Bloody bastards. Probably some Jew who took offense at the Holocaust denial show. Bastards always find some nigger to do the dirty work, or a spic."

Ed cringed a little, listening to his father. He’d never had the nerve to tell his dad he worked for a Jew. He remembered the argument they’d had when little Eddie informed his dad that Christ was a Jew.



The hooded man seemed to stare at Ed, then turned on his heel and began walking.



"Wait! Is there anything I can do to prevent my death?"



The figure stopped, walked back and grabbed Ed by the shoulder and almost threw him skyward.