Personal Musings category archive

Summarized by Delaware Liberal.

Balloon Juice has a different but related perspective.

Coincidence?

Or tradition?

The Democratic and Republic Parties are pretty much tied in terms of administrations that are remembered for ineptitude. Indeed, many historians believe that a Democrat, James Buchanan, is the current leader in ineptitude for his failure to do anything to avert the civil war, despite his having one of the most impressive resumes of anyone to serve in the office. (Interestingly enough, his successor, who had almost no experience in public service, is generally considered to have been one of the two or three best, if not the best, President.)

But why is that all the administrations that are remembered primarily for their corruption:

• Grant
• Harding
• Nixon
• Reagan (remember, more Reagan functionaries went to jail than did Nixon functionaries), and, in years to come,
• Bush the Minor

have been Republican?

Coincidence?

Or Tradition?

Or the inherent outcome of a bankrupt ideology?

McClatchy:

Whoever wins the presidency this November, it’s all but a slam dunk they’ll be working with a Democratic Congress. And it probably will be a stronger Democratic majority with more votes than it has today.

(snip)

“A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the party’s chief political operative for House races.

Golly gosh gee, Mr. Cole, I wonder why “A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party.”

Could it have something to to with its being dedicated to making the rich richer and the poor poorer, with sending our young to die for a lie, with undermining the Constitution of the United States of America, with selling out the nation to the highest bidder, and with having a deficit of moral principles that would have embarrassed Little Nicky Scarfo?

Hmmmmm.

Ya think?

NRA bans guns at their convention:

A small but startling sign welcomed the gun lovers who arrived at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering Friday.

“Firearms WILL NOT be allowed in Hall A during the Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum.”

So what if St. John McCrap was there? He’s already proclaimed himself as gun lover.

After all, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Just ask all the dead folks. They will tell you that they are just as dead as if someone rapped them in the head with a sap.

What’s a few AK-47s between friends, anyway?

Now, personally, I got no problems with guns.

Apparently, though, the Secret Service doesn’t really buy the whole NRA gun nut “guns don’t kill people” propaganda line.

Hmmmmm. Wonder why that is? Maybe, could be, that they realize that a person with a gun is somewhat more dangerous than a person with a bow and arrow?

I just have a problem, a big problem, with

Hypocrites.

The whole damned lot of them, McCrap included.

ASZ links to Terry Gross’s interview with John Hagee (no, I am not going to link to his place). NPR’s Fresh Air replayed the interview yesterday because so many MSM outlets have been playing excerpts of it during the past couple of weeks.

Prior to the 2006 congressional elections, radical right wing mullah John Hagee sat down for an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. While there was some immediate reaction to the interview two years ago (particularly from the Jewish community and those of us who were horrified by the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina), the outrage quickly faded. And when snakeoil salesman Hagee slithered back into the spotlight earlier this year to flex his political clout, I figured that John McCain would disavow Hagee’s support and that any controversy would fade into obscurity due to the legacy media’s blackout of anything remotely anti-McCain. Of course, that’s before Barack Obama’s preacher problem reared its ugly head.

My girlfriend couldn’t believe that he said what he said, that he would attribute the destruction of New Orleans, and the wasting of the lives of so many innocent persons, to the plans of a small number of persons to have a gay pride parade.

Frankly, nothing he said surprised me.

But she had never been exposed to this type of self-righteous Pharisaical Protestant nutcase before.

She couldn’t believe the hatred, the vengefulness, the vindictiveness that he somehow managed to find in what is supposed to be a Gospel of Love, and was able to express in the dulcet, gentle tones of a nurse singing a baby to sleep.

I don’t know how he finds hatred in love either. Perhaps he’s read too much Leviticus and not enough John.

Oh, yeah, and has deep-seated psychological needs I’m not qualified to diagnose, but that’s just a guess

It’s just that I’ve met his sort before.

So I wasn’t surprised.

Just disgusted.

Free audio books.

A while ago, I posted a link to a site offering free audio-books. Opie worried that they might be computer generated and his worries were right on target. I tried one out, and it had all the life of last year’s cornstalk.

Today, I was nosing around Project Gutenberg and discovered that they have added audio-books to their choices. Some of them are computer-generated, but almost 500 were done by people.

Even better, their Advanced Search feature allows you to specify which type you are interested in (as well as a number of other criteria). The couple that I looked at were available in Ogg Vorbis, Apple iTunes, mp3, and speex (whatever that is) formats.

Much of the work for Project Gutenberg is done by volunteers, so it is probably unreasonable to expect professional-quality narration.

I downloaded several Project Gutenberg text files and ran out (cyberly speaking) to get myself a reader for my cell phone.

A note about Project Gutenberg:

It rocks. But remember that every book there is in the public domain, that is, the copyright has expired. Don’t look there for the latest John Grisham thriller; you’ll have to find some other place to infringe on that copyright (try newsgroups). Nevertheless, it has thousands of titles, ranging from Mark Twain to Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud to Edward Hobbes to even Victor Appleton (pen name of the author of the Tom Swift books).

Follow the link, listen to the story, then ponder the empty heads and hearts who think that pasting magnetic yellow ribbons on the back of their vehicles or wearing flag pins is what patriotism or what supporting the troops, who serve honorably, even when serving dishonorable leaders, is all about.

Fair weather patriots, who care not that good men and women are asked to die for a lie, then cast off upon their return, like the little green army men I sometimes find left over from my sons’ youth in the back yard.

It’s less than 10 minutes. Not much for you to give when they give their health, their sanity, and their lives.

Go listen to it.

Tammie LeCompte is among (military wives fighting to get justice and treatment for their husbands–ed.). When her husband, Army Spc. Ryan LeCompte, came back to Fort Carson, Colo., after two tours in Iraq, he was a different man — angry, withdrawn and isolated. In 2007, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he eventually became so depressed and unable to function that doctors feared he might die.

So when Tammie LeCompte saw that the Army was not giving her husband intensive treatment — and, worse, his commanders were punishing him for not doing his job — she launched a campaign against the Army that eventually caught the ear of Congress. Today, doctors say that Tammie LeCompte’s battle may have saved her husband’s life.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

Senator Barack Obama involved himself in the VA email situation today by sending a letter to VA Secretary James Peake demanding an investigation into whether or not the Department of Veterans Affairs is under-diagnosing combat-related PTSD as a cost-cutting measure. Obama then requested hearings on the matter and, within hours, those requests were granted by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees.

I had to run out to a local shopping center today to make a deposit for my church.

I noticed that the space vacated by the independent dollar store had been filled.

By the Brandywine Republicans.

(For those of you not from these parts, this area of Delaware is known as Brandywine Hundred. It’s named after the Brandywine Creek, notable for having given is name to yet another battle that George Washington lost during the Revolutionary War–he only won two battles, the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Yorktown, and he wouldn’t have won the latter without the help of the French, but that’s another story).

Here’s the funky part.

When I followed the link to the Brandywine Republican website, there was nothing there but a splash page. Sort of a metaphor for the Republicanism, ain’t it.

Guess I have to start looking for a new shopping center. This one has lost its cachet.

St. John “Hundred Years War” McCain seems to have figured out that a hundred years of war may not be a good plank for his campaign.

So now he has scaled it down to five.

Like most predictions emanating from the Republican Party, this one appears also to have been snatched directly from thin air. Concomitantly (I’ve waited years to work that into a post), he has shown that he has truly turned into McBush:

“He laid out what his dream was … without offering one single solitary concrete way explaining how he’d do the things he stated,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Having studied the Iraq situation probably as much as anyone who also has to, like, you know, work for a living, my personal opinion is that, if we leave tomorrow, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in five years, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in 20 years, the damn place will go up in flames.

Why? Because we never should hadda oughta been there in the first place, and, by going there, we’ve opened a can of worms that will wiggle for generations. It wasn’t our can, it’s not our worms, but it sure as heck was our can opener.

This column offers a trenchant analysis of St. John of the Hundred Years’s new way of counting the days, as well as his full conversion to Bushieness (emphasis added):

If he believes what he is saying, then McCain is again showing only a passing understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. Even by the most generous assessments, it would take at least sixteen months to withdraw our troops from Iraq. To have the bulk of our troops home by January of 2013, with his preconditions having been met, would require that McCain somehow achieve this functioning democracy and dramatic decrease in violence within two years of taking office. From where does he imagine he will find political reconciliation? In what sense can he expect a reduction in violence, given no evidence that a long-term reduction is sustainable? It is simply not feasible to assume that our exit from Iraq, if it were to coincide with the happy ending McCain portends, could possibly happen in either 100 years or on his new shortened timeline.

It is far more likely, however, that McCain does not believe what he is saying, that he has not in fact, had a genuine change of heart. The conditions on the ground in Iraq have not changed. But the political conditions for this election have. This is not an honest assessment from the self-appointed king of straight talk. It is rather yet another false promise, uttered with a straight face, as an attempt to survive an election, and with no intent to follow through.

With comments that break with himself and the GOP, McCain is showing yet again that he has a willingness to lie that truly makes him a Bush Republican.

(This does not apply to anyone who resides in the same domicile as I.)

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

Boing Boing,

Via Mithras.

So, we’re sitting here watching the ball game when Shane Victorino hits a homerun.

Some guy in the stands catches it, turns around and gives it to this little girl, who looks to be about five, who’s sitting next to him.

She just turns the ball around in her hands while her father, who’s sitting on the other side of her, looks.

Then they are being led off by the ushers so she can get the ball signed by Victorino.

Baseball is such a great game.

. . . that come with your credit card bills. Robert Reich:

For years, banks and the credit card companies that service them have been sending us greater and greater sounding offers. But they’ve been hiding how much interest they’ll be charging and how they calculate the outstanding balance. It’s not unusual for them to suddenly increase annual interest rates, impose high penalty fees, even shorten billing cycles to make it harder to pay on time. Sure, they disclose their right to do all this stuff when you sign up, but it’s in print so small as to give you a headache even if you understand it.

In other words, they’re offering what look like great deals, but the deals are becoming nightmares for millions of Americans. Sound familiar? It’s just like what mortgage lenders were doing before the bust.

Don’t expect any help from the Current Federal Administration. After all, helping the little guy wouldn’t make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

One can have hopes.

The Republic Party is down in the dumps after losing a solidly Republican district in that bastion of progressiveness, Mississippi (emphasis added):

This was the third special election in as many months in which the Democrats have grabbed a traditionally Republican seat. In March, Bill Foster beat Jim Oberweis — a Republican endorsed by Sen. John McCain — to take over former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s old seat. Earlier in May, Louisiana Democrat Donald Cazayoux won over a heavily Republican district despite big spending from the GOP.

“This is as bad as I can remember since post Watergate,” said Shirley. “It was so bad in 1974 after Gerald Ford was nominated for Vice President that there was a special election for his congressional district, which had been Republican since the civil war, and it went Democratic… The fact is that these are comparable races. These are all three seats that have been in GOP hands for a long, long time… Ultimately voters want to know what a politician is going to do for them. What has happened with the Republican Party over the last eight years is that some of the consultants have decided it is too hard to define what we stand for so we are just going to paint Democrats as worse than us.“

And, on the news tonight, I heard a Republic operative argue that the voters “have lost confidence in the things we (Republicans–ed.) believe in.”

Au contraire, loser breath.

The fact is, the public has seen the results of the things the Republic Party believes in.

• An economy in tatters because of an ideological refusal to regulate misconduct on the part of the business, because, after all, businesses are wealthy and therefore must be moral.
• A city left to drown because of an inability to respond to emergencies (and, in my opinion, because the majority weren’t white folks, and therefore just weren’t all that important).
• A war conceived in perfidy, born in lies, and prosecuted by bozos.
• A tolerance for, nay, a fascination with doing things, which, had they been done by others and offered for sale, they themselves would condemn as pornographic (Caution: link not work or child safe).

But wait! There’s more!

• A hypocrisy of “family values” that involves trumpeting abstinence, monogamy, and heterosexuality, while patronizing prostitutes, soliciting homosexual sex in men’s rooms, targeting children for homosexual advances, and encouraging wife-swapping.

And, on top of it all, they have betrayed the sincere voters who believed that they actually meant what they said and would do what they promised.

No, it’s not that the voters have lost faith in what the Republic Party believes in.

It’s that, after the Republic Party has been in charge for the last few years, voters have seen what it actually believes in.

Their actions belie their words.

It is their actions which have undone them.

Now, we shall see, as the fall elections approach, what lying words they will unleash to again distract their supporters from their deeds.

Addendum:

Balloon Juice weighs in.

Several times today, I heard the phrase, “Republican brand.”

Apparently, the Republican Party thinks it has a marketing problem.

It doesn’t.

It has a problem of truth versus lies, of being and doing right versus being and doing wrong, of upholding the Constitution of the United States of America versus subverting it.

It’s about a proven record of deeds:

Misdeeds.

Contrary to the beliefs of the marketeers, marketing isn’t everything. All the marketing in the world cannot erase the shame that the phrase, “Republican brand,” the brand of wars for lies and of making the rich richer and the poor poorer, evokes.

You can market the sow’s ear all you want, and you still have a sow’s ear. And even if a lot of persons buy your sow’s ear, it’s still a damned sow’s ear.

Can anyone say, “The Republican Party, the Yugo of governance”?

Yugo. There’s a brand for you.

Q. What to Communism and NeoConservatism have in common?

A. Both of them share a naive fantasy that government is unnecessary and evil.

• Communism, because government is the arm of oppression for the bourgeoisie. After the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat would gradually wither away, as the natural virtue of the working class would lead to a paradise in which each contributed according to his abilities and each took according to (and only according to) his needs.

  Needless to say, it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie lead simply to a new ruling class, and the dictatorship of the proletariat never came about. All that came about were dictatorships.

  It’s called original sin, brother.

  That’s why Communism as an ideology is dead, dead, dead.

• NeoConservatives, because to them the government is the arm of the working class that leads to nasty things like OSHA, EPA, safety nets, and taxes. If the government were made to go away, the wealthy, whom the NeoConservatives idolize would not have to pay taxes or pay attention to the needs of the working class, while, at the same time, the invisible hand of the market will lead to a paradise on earth.

  
  (Aside: Of course, the question does come up, without government, who’s going to build and maintain the roads their chauffeurs need to drive them places or the schools needed to teach students how to say, “Do you want fries with that,” but, as long as they’ve got theirs, they have no cares . . . .)

  Well, it’s not going to work like that. The invisible hand of the market knows not morality.

  It’s called original sin, brother.

  That’s why NeoConservatism will be dead, dead, dead.

Both are empty, hollow beliefs that depend on a misreading of human nature, a misunderstanding of the social contract, and a perversion of natural law.

was at its best today:

Here is a view from the Art Museum towards City Hall:

Note the wedding parties getting their pictures taken. We saw at least five wedding parties having pictures taken. Wonder what kind of cut the Museum gets from the photogs?

Here is a view of Center City west (that means west of Broad Street–City Hall is at the intersection of Broad and Market; you can just see City Hall in the left side of the picture) from the Art Museum. I used to work just over there, in that building. No, the other one. Yeah, that’s the one.

Of course, these are just snapshots. None of them are as good as Phillybits’s work.

Republicans vote against Mother’s Day.

Yeah, I know it was just a stupid parliamentary ploy . . .

Accent on the stupid

. . . and I’m blowing it out of proportion,

but, dammit, if you act like a pack of clowns, the rest of us get to stand around you in a circle, giggle, point, and say, “There’s a pack of clowns!”

(Then, again, it was nowhere near as stupid as their War in Iraq and their annual so-called budgets and their fraudulent voodoo trickle-down economics.)

Ya know, it’s not the pet connection.

It’s the use of an industrial facility. Poor guy who they sent over there comes home in a box and they don’t even have the respect to use a funeral home.

They just truck ’em down the street to the nearest furnace.

The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement.

(snip)

Pentagon officials said they do not think that human remains and animal remains were ever commingled at the facility. “We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever at this point that any human remains were at all ever mistreated,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference hastily convened last night.

Regardless, the Pentagon will no longer permit crematories not located with funeral homes to handle the remains of U.S. troops, defense officials said.

H/T Karen for the story.

Florida and Michigan broke the party’s rules.

Consequently, the Booman’s arguments are irrelevant.

Valid, but irrelevant.

End of story.

. . . as I have pointed out before.

It is, admittedly, an emotional reaction, but it is real.

But it’s taking a more solid form. From the McDonald’s of newspapers:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

(Go here to see a discussion on the implication in the above quotation that hard-working Americans are, ipso facto, white Americans.)

The implications of her remarks, and, indeed, of her overall conduct during this campaign, leads me to a different set of willies.

It is certainly true that racism is a part of our society. It can be argued that racism is the original sin that stains the birth of the United States of America. The legacy of that sin and the continuing real live racism are all around us (I have fulminated about that before).

(Indeed, I have a good friend, whom I respect greatly, who is afraid that, if Senator Obama receives the Democratic nomination, the Senator will not live to see the election returns. Given the number of homegrown nutcases and racist terrorists we have, that is, sadly, not that far-fetched a fear. And I suspect that it is something Senator Obama has thought about. Nevertheless, if it does not deter him, neither should it deter others.)

That legacy of racism is what makes Senator Clinton’s argument that, despite her being an also-ran in the national results to date, she should be nominated because she is white, quite willie-inducing.

It is one thing to recognize that racism and bigotry are very real–and very dangerous–elements in our society. If you doubt that, go here (and, while you’re at it, kick in a little donation; Morris Dees is the real deal, a person who gave up a potentially lucrative career to fight for justice at the risk of his life).

It is quite another thing to argue that the Democratic Party should base its selection of its nominee for the office of the President of the United States on the United States’s legacy of racism.

I know that I am arguing a subtle difference. In my craft of writing, it would be called a difference of tone, which is defined as that quality of writing which conveys the author’s attitude to the reader.

The tone of Senator Clinton’s remarks, not only in this, but also in other instances, is not the tone of someone expressing a concern about the course and heritage of our society; it is the tone of someone gleefully wielding a weapon to her own ends.

It can be interpreted more sinisterly: that, as a white person, she is entitled to the nomination, whereas Senator Obama, as a not 100% white person, is not.

It is the tone of someone playing to racism for his or her own gain, the tone of Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and others of their kind.

Hillary Clinton gives me the willies.

More from Brendan and the Booman.

Addendum, 5/8/2008:

Time for a PFA. (That’s Protection from Abuse Order for those who don’t live in Delaware.)

Addendum, Sometime the Next Day:

Mithras.

Via Delaware Liberal.