Oh, Would You Just Put A Sock In It, Barrack?

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Our President is on the teevee commenting on the violence in Iraq following the election.  Telling us Americans should be disturbed when they see a government using violence against a group of people peaceably gathered to express their dissatisfaction with the government. 

Where the fluck were you, Mr. Obama, when our government was doing just that in St. Paul last August?  Or should we only be disturbed when the government that’s violently stifling dissent is some pre-demonized Them. 

You, sir, are such a pathetic disappointment!

OMG

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russert-bye

Olberman is eulogizing Tim Russert on ‘Countdown’ on the eve of the one-year anniversary of his death, and I’m sitting here trying to control my gag reflex.

According to absolutely everybody, Tim Russert, popular NBC political reporter and host of the venerable Sunday morning talking-heads spectacle ‘Meet the Press,’ was the nicest guy who ever walked the earth.  I have no argument with that.  We all feel and say that kind of stuff when someone we’re very fond of suddenly checks out, and if they could just leave it at that, I wouldn’t be fighting a gag. 

But all this crap about what a fine reporter he was is more than I can handle.  Tim Russert was a horrible reporter and a literal icon for what is wrong with corporate media today.  His ‘Meet the Press’ was an uncritical platform for the Bush administration to make its case to the country without fear of criticism or fact checking of even their most absurd and obviously false assertions.  His famous interview with Cheney in the leadup to the unprovoked invasion of Iraq is the most shameful moment in modern American journalism.

So let’s pause and fondly remember Tim the nice guy and super dad, and let’s skip all the bullshit about what a fine reporter he was, eh? 

Virginia Says ‘No’ To Corporate Democrat McAuliffe

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beard-bears Last night, the tubes were full of the news that a relative unknown, Creigh (pronounced ‘Cree’—I woud have guessed ‘Cray’) Deeds had won the Virginia Gubernatorial Primary.  The headlines ran the gamut, from “Deeds Wins Primary,” to “Mr. Deeds One Step Closer to Going To Richmond,” to my favorite, “Anybody but McAuliffe.” 

Being a flatlander out here in the flyover part of Illinois, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know enough about the the situation in Virginia to have any sense of what this means to Virginians, but Boy, howdy! let me tell you how pleased I am to see McAuliffe knocked out of there.  I only hope that it turns out to be a stake through the heart of his political career. But I think he’s too well connected to power for that—a big part of what's most seriously wrong about the guy.

Our obstacles to making the best choices are no longer matters of Democrats vs. Republicans. The Republicans have taken care of that one all by themselves. However, one of The Bear's First Principals of Conflict states that in an intense prolonged conflict, the likelihood that the complete, sudden collapse of one of the parties will trigger the subsequent collapse of the the 'victor' party is directly proportional to the length and intensity of the conflict.

In other words, since the Republican party's response to their electoral repudiation last fall has been to become a laughing-stock, there's a very real danger of the Democrats doing exactly the same.

It's not a good idea to rush to judgment on what voters were saying when they threw out the Republicans last fall.  I mean, who are you going to vote for when your choices are between an OK but probably not thrilling Democrat and a member of the Clown Party who, if incumbent, was likely lurking somewhere near the helm, cheering as the captain sailed the ship over Niagra. Saying 'No more!' to Republican insanity is not the same as saying 'Yes, please!' to not-a-Republican, whoever s/he may be, and "May I have more, please.'

So the Democrats won. Why is nothing meaningful happening? Well, if you go back to The Bear's Principles, you'll see that in group conflict, there's always an element of what the Bear calls 'group identity ambiguity', somehow proportional to the degree of singularity of purpose that brings the group together in the first place. In simple English, there are always a certain number of folks who are in the wrong group.

As long as both sides are healthy and going at it tooth & nail, this isn't anything that can't be worked out over time. Allegiances change, people drift to the more appropriate group, others are exposed as frauds and shunned by the group, and some try to operate outside of the groups. But when the opposition group is suddenly removed from the scene, watch out! And that's where we are today in our Nation.

As often happens when the bad guys are put away, today's Democratic Party is discovering that it doesn't stand for much of anything in the absence of opposition. McAuliffe, the Clintons, the whole DLC thing represent Corporate America (with varying degrees of 'social responsibility' sensibilities permitted, as long as they don’t exceed corporate policy on charitable giving). They do not represent what I think America voted for last fall, and I am delighted to see my judgment ratified by the voters of Virginia. (Thus, the dancing bears.)

Brave Sir Robin Blue-Dog

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Thank you Eli at FDL for renewing our acquaintance with this wonderful Python clip.  The timing was perfect for my semi-depressed frame of mind.  (Time to lay off the news for a while I think.)  I may just have to find a torrent for a whole Monty Python movie.  I had completely forgotten how much fun it is, and it's gotta be cheaper than Prozac.

But the real fun is in the post that goes with it, in which Eli lays bare the manner in which the Blue-Dog Dems are beating a very brave retreat on the “public option” aspect of healthcare reform.  Please read and enjoy The Courage of the Conservadems at Firedog Lake.  And may the gods and godesses of delight and absurdity continue to entertain Eli for eternity.

More Random Thoughts (cont.)

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Public campaign financing, anyone?

I’ve been reading a lot of posts and hearing and seeing a lot of discussions in the media recently along these lines:  The 2008 elections were an overwhelming repudiation of the Republican party and the principles for which it stands.  Americans stood up last November and literally shouted “No more!” to Republicanism, wars of choice, and corporate control of the government.  So, if the good guys won so big (and they did!), why aren’t any of the big changes happening?  Why are Obama and Congress tippy-toeing around on things like universal health care and saving people’s homes and nationalizing and breaking up the banks as if the other guys still had the power and we can only accomplish that which has bipartisan support?

I think the answer is pretty obvious:  The “other guys” do still have all the power and bipartisanship has nothing to do with it.  Whether the officeholders call themselves Republicans or Democrats, with a few wonderful exceptions, the corporate interests still own our government.  And they’ll continue to own it until Americans demand that our political campaigns by financed by public money, and only by public money. 

An overwhelming percentage of Americans (I’ve seen polls ranging from 56% all the way up to a whopping 87%) want the country to change to a European-style, single-payer public health system.  But does single-payer have a chance in hell of even being seriously considered?  Not on your life!  Nor is it likely to be, as long as the health profiteers put billions and billions of dollars annually into the reelection coffers of our nation’s congresscritters.  Ditto the banks.  Ditto Wall Street (whatever that means). 

As long as it costs more than the GNP of a mid-sized country to be elected to public office, and as long as corporate interests are permitted to give game-changing sums to political candidates, we’re never going to have a government that’s interested in the needs of the working people they’re supposed to be looking out for.

With the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination, we’ve been seeing Obama on teevee a lot talking about how important it was in the selection process to pick a candidate from the most highly qualified whose decisions reflected a philosophy of standing up for the little guy against the forces of the big and powerful.  I guess that’s only for judges, eh?

Before the election, I responded to several polls about what should be the highest priority for the new administration with “None of the above:  Restore the constitutional balance of powers and roll back the whole unconstitutional ‘unitary presidency’ idea.”  After seeing what’s rolled out in the four months since Obama took office, I have a new answer for those pollsters:  Stop the corporate stranglehold on the American government.  Support public campaign financing now!

Credo, please leave me alone!

Seems like a day doesn’t go by when I don’t receive something from the Working Assets cell phone subsidiary, Credo.  They want me to switch my mobile service from AT&T to their politically correct correct Credo brand.  Today’s message came via snail mail in an appeal that compared Credo to AT&T and Verizon.  Did you know that AT&T and Verizon both support war, laugh about global warming, favor criminalizing abortion, oppose campaign finance reform, and are opposed to free speech?  Not a word about call or network quality.

There are three reasons why Credo isn’t for me:

  1. There are only two carriers whose very best phones receive a marginally acceptable signal in all the rooms of my ancient brick apartment, and Credo (Sprint) ain’t one of them.
  2. I spend 4 to 6 months of most years either at home in Spain or traveling elsewhere in Europe or Asia.  If I want to own one telephone with all my contacts and data and bookmarks and calendar and personal junk in it, it needs to operate on a GSM network, since they don’t (for the most part) use the U.S. CDMA standard that Sprint—Credo’s actual network provider—uses.  I’m stuck with AT&T or T-Mobile.
  3. The whole credo thing is about 90% hype.

Credo Mobile is not a telephone company.  It’s a mobile phone service reseller for Sprint, a company that’s no more ‘progressive’ than AT&T or Verizon (or any of the others).  If Credo had added a ‘Sprint’ column to the comparison chart they sent me today, it would have been just as dirty as the others.

If consumers ever looked beyond the shiny surface of crap like this, they’d realize that the more important message here is that the profits in the telecommunications industry are so obscenely huge that a reseller like Credo Mobile—a company that doesn’t own one stick of real telecommunications equipment—can afford to buy somebody else’s product and turn around and not only sell it to me at a competitive price, but also give me a $450 phone for $60, and give me $200 to buy out my AT&T contract and make generous contributions to good causes (they’re Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate contributor), and spam me by email and snail mail several times a week, and earn a decent return for their investors.

I grew up in Springfield, IL, one of the few municipalities left in the country that still has municipally owned and operated public utilities.  Springfield’s progressive Republican fathers, led by the amazing V.Y. Dallman, saw the wisdom of municipally-owned public utilities and oversaw the creation of City Water Light and Power Company, and still in 2009, Springfield has OK water and electricity (about all anybody can claim these days), and the lowest electric rates in the country.  It’s one of the few places where it’s actually less expensive to heat your home with electricity than with natural gas. 

A mobile phone provider that did that for its users would have my business in a second.  Until you do that, Credo, please lose my addresses.

And finally

One last thought on congregational animal names:  I was tickled to learn that the correct name for a congregation of bears is a sloth—further evidence that I am, indeed, a member in good standing of the bear family. 

More Random Thoughts (incomplete)

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Naming the beast

I’d been trying to come up with a clever name for collectively referring to the Bush insiders (Bushco) without hitting on anything that stood out, when it occurred to me that there are some really wonderful names in the world of wildlife for groups of the the same kind of animal (‘herd’, ‘flock’, etc.).  Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a delightfully ironic or comical name for a group of some disgusting and/or deceitful/mean/nasty wild critter, like a “slither” of shitsnakes or something?  (noi to my herptophile friends)

Looking for a place to start, I turned to one of my favorite wildlife sources of info-for-idiots, the US Geological Survey web site, where I learned that in educated-speak the generic word for groups of the same animal is ‘congregation.’  So let’s see if we can’t come up with a good animal avatar for the congregation of Bush insiders whose shenanigans brought our country to a point where the jury is still out on whether it will survive in recognizable form.

Right away, I discovered that if I’m going for a name that includes the whole gaggle, the project is harder than I thought it was gonna be.  I started by excluding all the names that were too generic:  most people are turned off by snakes, but there’s no punch in the name “nest” by itself.  The “Bush nest”?  Meh.

cheneyshark Then the task was to find the ones that were generic enough:  A shiver (of sharks)   evokes a delicious image of Chaney and his fellow dark warriors, and while a BushApeshrewdness (of apes) takes irony into uncharted territory when applied to Bush himself and his equally clueless department heads who loaded up our federal bureaucracy with ignorant, incompetent Liberty University graduates, where’s the animal family whose name both evokes the right kind of image and is general enough to include both the slick operators and the bumbling ideologues.

I love the idea of an obstinacy (of buffalo), but the animal has zero ick factor.  On the other hand, I kind of like the (biblical) ass for political metaphor, but the Bush Pace just doesn’t do anything.  A cowardice of curs is good, but nowhere near destructive enough.  I like the idea of a bloat of something, but the animal it names is the noble hippopotamus, capable of violence when provoked but otherwise pretty mellow fellows. 

The Bush IntrusionMy favorites so far are a cackle (of hyenas), a sounder (of swine), and a crash (of rhinos).   A deceit is tempting but I don’t have any idea what a lapwing is about.  Also attractive but either inappropriate or too obscure are an unkindness (of ravens), a murder (of crows—too obvious?), and a prickle (of porcupines).

But I think if I had to pick the official Grumblebear nickname for the Bush insiders right this very minute, I’d  go to the creepy place and start referring to them as the Bush Intrusion. 

“Intrusion” just kind of sums up the whole Bush nightmare, and in the animal world when you’re talking about an intrusion of something, you’re referring to an intrusion of cockroaches. 

I don’t know.  What are your thoughts?  Rather than insulting our friends in the animal world, maybe we should be throwing around candidates for an original name for a congregation of Bushies.  An ignorance of Bushies?  A failure of Bushies?  An arrogance . . ?  Wait, I’ve got it!  A frathouse of Bushies.  I think one of the rules for naming congregations is to try to stick to one-word names, but it’s damned difficult to come up with one word that even begins to express the soulless, venal, depraved, corrupt malignancy of George W. Bush’s presidential team. 

Cast your vote or offer your own suggestions in comments.