Personal Musings category archive

Or, as John Cole titled his post, from which I shamelessly stole this, “Elections Have Consequences.”

While I was waiting for someone–anyone–to show up at the Bellefonte Cafe this evening, I got into a tangle with someone who was surprised that I support Obama (frankly, if the Democrats had nominated a dachshund, I would vote for it against any Republican).

(Based on stuff I overheard later, I think she might be favoring some Libertarian nutcase.)

I pointed out to her that “elections are not about who’s not running” and later offered her an Obama sticker.

Remember that my son has been in the line of fire for two tours because of Bush’s lies. He has served honorably a dishonorable regime.

So has this man.

Dammit, elections matter.

And vote right, which means vote Left.

Unless you like having blood on your hands.

. . . but I have stayed away from it because, well, as my mother used to say, just because.

Yet the Booman phrased it so well:

Yeah, I know that Democrats sometimes cheat on their spouse (sic), occasionally even with someone of the same sex, but why is it that Republicans are so consistently the ones preying on children, trolling in public bathrooms, and asking prostitutes to put them in diapers?

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to check out the list.

Family values my anatomy.

It is all sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, created solely to distract voters from the truth of Republicanism and to attract votes from the unwitting.

“Republican Family Values” is marketing, with no more sincerity or conviction than a commercial designed to get you to buy Cover Girl rather than Max Factor (which, incidently, are both made by the same manufacturer).

To quote that prescient philosopher, Mr. T, “Pity the fool” who bought their line of snake oil.

There is a sad, delicious irony in watching Republican economic theory and practices push the nation towards state ownership of the means of production.

If I hear one more commentary containing the words, “The market hates uncertainty,” I shall scream.

As I watch the Phillies game, I realize that the Fox Sports announcers are really really bad.

Bring back Harry Kalas for the playoffs.

At least he understands baseball.

Over at ASZ, Steve muses about what the phrase “overtly white” means, as the antonym to the phrase “overtly nonwhite,” as used below:

OK, maybe it is the English teacher in me, but that “overtly” is bugging me. I found it in this usage in the Washington Post this morning, in a quotation from a White Supremacist. The Post article is about the explosion of activity by racist groups on the internet in the last year or two, and how that explosion is being spurred by the candidacy of Barack Obama. Here’s the quote from the WaPo:

Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country’s first black president.

“I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.”

What the heck does that mean? If I’m having a hard time figuring out what “overty white” means, I’m having the devil of a time figuring out what “overtly nonwhite” means, especially as concerns Barack Obama. Let’s not parse this too much, but Obama is just as much white as he is black. Is that What Roper refers to, afraid that people will come back at him with the line I just used? “Overtly nonwhite,” then, means to him the mere color of his skin? Well, duh! That’s exactly what Roper means as he mangles the language, something the Harvard educated Obama is not likely to have done.

Well, this looks to me like what “overtly white” means in the context of Mr. Billy Roper’s statements and beliefs:

Racial epithets were spray-painted on the lawns of two houses and a playground in the Colton Meadow community near St. Georges on Friday night and Saturday morning.

Racial slurs in bold, yellow print were found on the lawns of homes of black and Hispanic families sometime Friday night, said county police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro.

The nearby children’s playground was marred with the words KKK, Jews and racial epithets as well as toilet paper.

Link to the full Washington Post story here.

My little three-bedroom one and half bath split clocks in at 1425 square feet. It’s plenty. In fact, as the kids have grown up and moved away, it’s gotten bigger.

And there’s no rule that says that every kid has to have his or her own room. Bunk beds work just fine.

When Martin Focazio and his wife were house-hunting in 2000, they fired some real estate agents unwilling to help them find exactly what they wanted: a small place.

“They couldn’t get out of their heads that, according to their calculations, I should have been able to buy this monstrous estate,” says Focazio, a consultant with Magnani Caruso Dutton, a digital-media agency. (He and his wife, who teaches part time, moved to this area after renting in New York City.)

“They were pushing us into these six-bedroom, five-bath, four-Jacuzzi monstrosities. It was fairly obscene stuff,” Focazio says.

Instead, the couple, since expanded to a family of five, settled into a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house on several acres in Upper Black Eddy, Bucks County.

I am extremely disappointed in Senator Obama’s position on Stinky Hoyer’s F. I. S. A. bill.

I won’t bother to go into the reasons. For my two or three regular readers, they will be obvious. For others, check here and here and here; their arguments are not necessarily my arguments, but close enough.

I sent the following email to Senator Obama:

I am extremely disapppointed with the Senator’s position on Mr. Hoyer’s FISA bill.

It is time to stop selling out our civil liberties and civil rights to the Bush Administration. They have demonstrated that they act in bad faith. Democrats should no longer be complicit in their misbehavior.

Every time I think the Republic Party can’t sink any lower, it proves me wrong. Apparently, the Honorable Mark Steven Kirk (R.-Ill.) thinks assassination is a joking matter.

Mr. Kirk looks young. He no doubt has no memories of waking up to his clock radio in 1968 and hearing news when there should have been music. And knowing, at that point, that something must be very wrong. And learning in a few minutes that Robert Kennedy had been killed.

Follow the link if you think you have the stomach to listen to the audio (emphasis added).

Surely the Don Wade show should be taken off the air. And maybe Congressman Kirk ought to be called out by the MSM for a “mistake” the GOP seems to make a bit too often.

Transcript:

DON WADE: In fact, yesterday in a conference call, Barack Obama’s advisers were asked, “If Osama bin Laden were caught, should he get to challenge his detention in U.S. courts?” And the advisers said that — should that right to challenge detention that they get at Gitmo based on the Supreme Court ruling, should that be applied to bin Laden? — and Obama’s advisers said, “Yes.”

KIRK: Yeah, and I would much rather have a policy where if we see Obama there’s a shoot-on-sight order.

DON WADE: Well, okay. I’m with you, but I don’t know whether that’s going to make 67 — well it might —

Scum.

Someone made a comment to this post to the effect that there was validity to conclusion that “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” because persons can have differing opinions.

Here is my response (slightly edited):

The way news is treated today has convinced a lot of people that opposite opinions are somehow equal opinions.

The facts make it clear that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before the American invasion, despite the statements of the Current Federal Administration. They also make it clear that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction prior to the American invasion (that’s why the inspectors kept finding nothing–and why Bush kept advancing the deadline; Bush knew they were finding nothing and wanted to cut them off before the findings were conclusive.)

Bush lied us into this war. And a certain number of fools drank the Kool-Aid with him.

It is one thing to have differing opinions.

But, if one of those opinions is based on falsehoods, there is only one word for it: Lie.

If someone chooses to base his opinions on lies, I reserve the right to call him or her out for being a fool.

The largest mall in Delaware has banned kids who are not accompanied by adults on Friday and Saturday evenings:

Teenagers in the habit of whiling away weekend nights in Delaware’s Christiana Mall are about to get a new crowd to run with: their mall-walking parents.

As of July 11, unaccompanied minors will be barred from Delaware’s largest shopping center after 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday nights.

Christiana is the first mall in the Philadelphia region to move to a teenager curfew, which has spread into dozens of malls nationwide since its inception in the mid-1990s. No mall in Pennsylvania or New Jersey is considering a similar policy.

(Full disclosure: I don’t like Christiana Mall and avoid it whenever possible. When I have to go to a mall, I go to Concord Mall, the Small Mall That Has It All.)

(Aside: You know what a mall is. It’s a place with one or two department stores, 50 clones of the Gap, and one men’s store. Except Christiana Mall is a large mall. It has 100 clones of the Gap and a Williams-Sonoma–where you can pay far too much money for cooking equipment you will never need for dishes you will never cook–and one men’s store.)

Over at DelawareLiberal, liberalgeek seems to have decided that this is some kind of discrimination, even equating it with discrimination against black persons.

I’ve reared my share of teenagers.

Actually, more teenagers than I ever expected to rear.

And I think liberalgeek is missing the point.

The point is this: Parents shouldn’t use malls as dumping grounds for their kids, on weekends or any other times. Even if it gives said parents a chance to relive why they decided to become parents in the first place.

Furthermore, kids should not be left roaming around unsupervised for hours at a time, singly or in groups. It is not the job of a store or a group of stores or a mall to supervise other persons’ kids.

And if the parents are not using the mall as a dumping ground, but rather the kids are dumping themselves there, a whole nother list of questions arises, like, for example, say, “Where the hell are the parents?”

My kids were not allowed to go to the mall to hang out–at least, not until they got their drivers’ licenses and could go there on their own legally. And by then, of course, they had almost attained the age of majority. And they still had to have permission to use the family vehicle or they had to find their own damned ride.

By then they had learned to amuse themselves in ways that did not require hanging around at the mall.

(And, no, I don’t want to know what those ways were.)

. . . is a training charlatan’s dream.

Diversity, Inc., on the other hand, is a pretty good magazine.

I submit this column for your consideration, especially if you are one of those folks who just don’t get what the fuss over race is all about.

So I’m not going to bother writing my own post.

I’m just going to refer you to Noz. I pretty much agree with what he said.

A few days ago, I accompanied my girlfriend to the doctor’s office–she was on light duty and not allowed to drive.

There was an older gentleman there–yeah, even older than me. Apparently he was a regular customer, because he was joking with the secretary. In the course of his comments, it came out that his grandson was in the Navy.

So I mentioned that my son was in the 82nd.

As the conversation progressed, I mentioned that I didn’t think much of my son’s boss.

And off he went. “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here blah blah blah.”

I said that, as regards Afghanistan, I agree completely; as regards Iraq, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and went back to reading Samuel Pepys Diary.

Later, my girlfriend complimented me on my restraint.

I said, “There’s no point in arguing with a true believer.”

But there is a larger point.

How can he believe that we are fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here, when there is no evidence that they (by which I assumed he meant Al Qaeda and their allies, as Iraq never posed a threat to the United States) were there in the first place?

Because he believes Bushie lies. Even after all that has happened to expose them.

That point is that there are persons out there who simply don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the world.

It is that ignorance which is the enemy.

Glenn Greenwald on Gingrich (follow the link for the full article):

Casually threatening Americans with the loss of a city unless they allow their Government to violate core constitutional guarantees is deranged fear-mongering in its most unadorned form, exactly what every two-bit tyrant tells his country about why they must be deprived of basic liberties. But what makes it all the more notable is how repeatedly Gingrich invokes this same deranged formulation in order to argue for a whole array of policies he supports — we better accept what Gingrich wants or else we’ll “lose a city”:

From The New York Sun, November 29, 2006, here’s Gingrich arguing that we also need to give up First Amendment rights:

A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism. . . .

“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. . . . “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”

By the time the Republicans Fear Mongers finish destroying American liberty, there will be nothing left of America worth fighting for.

(Aside: By the way, my father was a POW in WWII. No one called him a hero and he was ashamed of having been captured until the last couple of decades of his life, even though his unit had been completely overrun in the dead of night, despite reports from Military Intelligence that there were no enemy troops in the area. He was captured by the Germans and was not mistreated–he told me that, even when he wasn’t getting much food at the end of the war, the American POWs were no more deprived than their German guards. Shame that the persons we the Bushies have captured can’t make similar statements.)

From Michael D. at Balloon Juice; I think his comments are unduly harsh, but not out of the ball park–my thoughts below:

(Michael D. quotes the news):

McCain has repeatedly voted against amendments in the Senate that would have…covered such important services as improving care at veterans’ hospitals, providing mental health services to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse problems. [2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/2006]

In 2006, McCain voted against the Kerry amendment that would eliminate increased fees and co-payments for veterans in the TRICARE health care program by raising the discretionary spending limit by approximately $10 billion. The provisions would have been fully offset by eliminating creating corporate tax breaks. [2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006]

McCain was one of only 13 Republicans to vote against an amendment that added over $400 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. [2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/2006]

(Michael D. comments) . . . Even though I am now becoming more left leaning than I have ever been, I still had the impression that the media supports Democrats (or gives them a fairer hearing anyway). More and more, I am seeing that this is nowhere near the case. McCain gets a pass because is supposedly “a hero.” I’ve never been sure why he is a hero. He graduated 4th or 5th from the bottom of his class. He wrecked three of his own aircraft (if I remember correctly) and he was captured in Viet Nam. Unless I missed the part where he jumped on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow servicemen, I don’t know where the hero part comes in. But I digress.

Candidate McCain has done no more than hundreds of thousands of others.

Surviving does not make one a hero (though Candidate McCain’s refusal to take the easy way out warrants respect; this would appear to be the only hook on which to hang “hero”), except perhaps in some metaphysical sense that makes all of us who get on with life “heroes.”

And now his idea of supporting the troops is to deny them medical and educational benefits.

Television has turned “reality” into a bad word.

Yeah, reality is often bad, but not until Survivor and the rest of that crap has “reality” become a bad word.

How the heck else can Court TruTV get away with a slogan as oxymoronic as “Not Reality. Actuality.”

Furrfu.

It’s not his boy or girl or spouse or parent over there, is it? Republicans are so generous with the children of others.

The Booman has a lengthy discussion of the bogus comparison between occupying–that’s occupying, my friends–a hostile Iraq and having troops in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. You can follow the link to read it. I am not saying I agree with all his points–just most of them–but I think he frames the issues accurately.

Candidate McHack’s analogy fails on the surface.

Suffice to say that no Germans, Japanese, or South Koreans are blowing up American troops. Indeed, when American bases were established in those countries following World War II and the Korean War, the inhabitants of those countries had stopped blowing up American (and other occupying) troops, either through surrender (Japan and Germany) or through partition (Korea).

Candidate McMaverick doesn’t seem to realize that he’s comparing apples and oranges apples and shoes. On second thought, I expect that he does realize it, but can’t think of any other, better fiction to justify endless war.

A war conceived in deceit and based on lies.

Add one more lie: Iraq is like Germany, Japan, and Korea.

While listening to the coverage of the Current Federal Administrator’s trip to Europe, I found myself amazed that the reporters speak of his activities as if he still has any influence, credibilty, or moral authority.

Now that Senator Obama has secured the nomination, the racists are coming out from under their rocks.

Not that I am surprised. The ugliness is always there. Some folks think it is a card to be played for electoral gain.

It can be, and it has been a card, sometimes by implication, sometimes by blatant appeal.

But it has also been death and lynching and murder and the shame of this Republic.

And I fear we shall see more of it, blatant and disgusting. It’s the last refuge of a bankrupt ideology.

Link to Sadly, No! via Phillybits.