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Democrats don’t blink

Friday, February 15, 2008

The House Democrats have had a spine implant. After the craven performance of the Senate they have redeemed their party and the nation, at least temporarily, by telling Bush to shove it on FISA. to the surprise of the White House, they didn’t “blink”, as they’ve done so often in the past.

Now they’re going to go home and find out that, lo and behold, they will not be subjected to negative feedback from constituents, most of whom have long since absorbed the fact that Bush is an incompetent fearmonger. The time has long since passed when Bush can sway the popular mind by talking about the bogeyman. Having defied him once, they may find it just a tad easier to do it again, and who knows, it may become a habit. The Dems might take a little advice from Hamlet:

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on.

Seriously, this is great news. If they stand fast they will speed the unraveling of the Bush dictatorship. For our parts, emails of support to our Congresspersons are in order.

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Whatever it is, they’re against it

Friday, February 15, 2008

I stand by my position that the Congress has very little business holding hearings on Roger Clemens steroids use, when it is unable to rein in the Bush dictatorship. That being said, I must say that doing so may have given the Democrats a little insight into how they can get the Republicans to complete their self destruction.

It seems obvious to any thinking person, particularly to sports fans, that Clemens is absolutely positively 100% allegedly guilty of the crimes charged. This is an issue about which many Americans are well informed, as it matters to them more than trivialities such as torture or destruction of the Constitution. They know the score about steroids and they’ve already made up their minds about Clemens. So it is somewhat of a surprise that the Republicans on the committee, rather than piling on Roger for all they were worth (like the Democrats did), chose to defend him. This was an equal opportunity chance for bipartisan grandstanding, and they blew it. It may even cost Chris Shays his seat. It appears that Republicans have developed Pavlovian habits of political response. Whatever position the Democrats take, the Republicans reflexively oppose them.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the Democrats took advantage of this reflex? How about holding hearings in favor of motherhood, or against accused terrorists, or pedophile priests. This is clearly a pathological problem for the Republicans, which the Democrats should exploit.

Thanks to Groucho, et. al. for the title

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Independent Thinking

Thursday, February 14, 2008

The Courant has seen fit to give one Robert Thorson a weekly column on its op-ed page. Mr. Thorson is a geology professor at UConn, so he presumably knows a lot about rocks. Unfortunately, he writes about politics, at least he did today. One must wonder why the Courant sees fit to give this person a weekly column, inasmuch as he appears to lack basic knowledge of our political system, both in theory and in practice. Perhaps, in this postmodern world, independent thinking equates to fact free thinking.

Today Mr. Thorson, a proud independent, bemoans the fact that he isn’t allowed to vote in the primary of his choosing. According to him, it is unfair for a political system to exist in which only people who declare affiliation with a party get to take a part in choosing that party’s nominee. This year, for instance, he was deprived of the right to vote in the Republican primary, where he wanted to cast a vote against Huckabee. A laudable ambition, perhaps, but precisely why should non-Republicans be allowed to deprive Republicans of the right to choose their own candidate, free of interference from folks like Thorson? Thorson never tells us.

I would submit to Mr. Thorson that if he changes his mind and decides to register, he might seriously consider finding a permanent home with the Republicans, as he appears to lack the ability to engage in logical thought and/or a basic fund of knowledge. (Take your pick). He’d fit right in over there. Consider this:

Looking from the sidelines, I hope Obama wins the nomination. But if his party picks Hillary, I probably will vote for McCain. Why? Because my vote will be guided by the political distance between any candidate and the ruinous neo-conservative political establishment in Washington today.

Now this is a man with a weekly column in a once respected newspaper. Perhaps I can clue him in on some basic facts. The Republicans have fractured this year along certain fault lines: corporate interests; religious whackjobs, and neo-cons. Romney represented the corporate types, and we all know the group to whom Huckabee appeals. What do you suppose that leaves McCain, the prophet of eternal war? Maybe Mr. Thorson should ask McCain’s foreign policy advisor, Bill Kristol or his other best friend, Joe Lieberman.

Never mind, I’ll make it easy.

Here is the political distance, in inches, between McCain and the ruinous neo-conservative political establishment in Washington today: zero. Precisely equal to the amount of time Thorson appears to have spent actually studying the candidates.

But it gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). According to Thorson McCain’s love affair with the Iraq war specifically and war generally will not translate into positive action, despite McCain’s oft proclaimed intentions to see it through to victory. Because why? Because the American people, who have not been able to stop Bush, will somehow stop McCain (yes, that’s right, we’re going to do it all by our lonesomes, somehow), despite the fact that he will be able to claim a mandate for eternal war by virtue of the fact that mindless dolts like Thorson just put him into office after running on a platform promising just that: eternal war.

As for Hillary, Thorson disqualifies her. Why?

Unfortunately, she’s a galaxy closer to business as usual than her competitors, in part because she voted to allow Bush his horrendous blunder.

Must I point out that McCain voted for it too, and has suggested starting in on Iran? Or that McCain has promised to keep us there for 100 years while Hillary at least claims to want to get us out? Or that McCain is pushing the meme that the recent escalation is working, despite the fact that it has clearly failed to achieve the results it was allegedly designed to achieve. What part of business as usual has McCain eschewed? He has embraced business as usual. Thorson might consider actually listening to McCain, instead of the idiot reporters who keep calling him a maverick.

Where does the Courant dig these people up? Why is this person inflicted on a helpless Connecticut every week?

Filed in Media, Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

Good news

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Donna Edwards wins her primary in Maryland. This may convince a few Congressional Democrats that there’s a price to be paid for becoming a captive to corporate interests..

Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

Why should I care whether Roger Clemens took steroids?

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Every Red Sox fan knows that there is no worm more low than a former member of the Boston Red Sox who voluntarily plays for the Yankees. Besides that, even when he was on the team, Roger Clemens was a gold plated [your choice of private body part here]. So, I have very little sympathy for Roger as he squirms before a Congressional panel.

Except for one thing. The Congresspersons who have dragged him to Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike, make even Roger look good. Time out of mind members of Congress have believed they can goose their own ratings by dragging Hollywood celebrities and sports stars in front of the cameras. The jocks, especially, are easy pickings. Not terribly well educated, on the whole, and not up to verbal sparring. They’re like deer in headlights, and it’s easy to make them look bad. A hell of a lot easier than actually having to adequately prepare to effectively question an Administration flunky, assuming said flunky will deign to testify.

Far easier, also, than doing an effective job of going after telecoms that are invading our privacy (immunity for them) or presidents that are shredding the constitution, or presidential henchpersons who blow Congress off and won’t even testify about things that are actually important. Why should we care, more than an eentsy teesny bit, about whether Roger Clemens takes steroids? Yet on this issue we have a bipartisan consensus that it is an important issue, inasmuch as it gives them a bipartisan excuse to grandstand, and it has the secondary and salutary effect of distracting us from the fact that they are not doing their real jobs. They can go after Roger because he can’t blow off their subpoenas, but they can’t and won’t go after Harriet Meirs, or Josh Bolton, or any of the rest of the crew that has told them to stuff it when they’ve made their feeble attempts to actually do the people’s business and investigate the sink of corruption that is the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration, through its Attorney General, has told them that it is not subject to the law. Roger Clemens’ steroid use evokes their righteous anger; George Bush’s imperial pretensions evokes barely a peep of protest.

Filed in Democrats, Hypocrisy | | Comments (0)

Something happening here, take two

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

I’m always suspicious of newspaper articles composed of man in the street anecdotes, but if this article from the (UK) Independent is accurate, then we may be in for a November election that even the Democrats can’t lose:

In the wealthiest suburbs of Virginia, a quiet revolution was under way yesterday as life-long republicans switched sides to vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.

So deep is the disillusionment with George Bush, so uninspiring the choice offered by the Republicans, that many life-long conservatives are abandoning the Grand Old Party to support a liberal black candidate.

…

Laura DeBusk, 37, a “stay-at-home-mom”, is one of the refuseniks who turned out yesterday for Mr Obama across Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC. In the past two presidential elections she voted for George Bush in the belief that he could best protect America from terrorists. It is a choice she now bitterly regrets.

But she has been inspired by Mr Obama’s offer to bring together Americans from all political persuasions: “A friend of mine called me up after she heard I was for Obama,” she said. “She told me she was as well. ‘We’re the Obama-mamas,’ she told me. And it’s true. He is so inspiring we are going to volunteer for his campaign.”

Along with many of her friends, Ms DeBusk has broken with the GOP for now. She is angry with Mr Bush over the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and the damage done to America’s reputation.

“You never know what somebody is going to do in the White House, but to me Barack Obama is a breath of fresh air,” she said while heading out the door to cast her first vote for a Democrat in the Virginia primary. “He just doesn’t seem beholden to anyone.

But if Mr Obama is denied the nomination, Ms DeBusk will not be supporting Hillary Clinton. “She is just too polarising, too divisive,” she said. “I will vote for McCain instead. He’s a decent man even if he is less inspiring.”

Maybe, just maybe, we folks on the front lines have deluded ourselves into believing that the Republican rank and file is as mindlessly partisan as the people for whom they’ve been voting the past few years. If McCain loses these white suburbanites to Obama in big numbers then he’s toast. Yet another reason to support Obama. If he runs the table from here on in, then, one would hope, the super delegates will see the writing on the wall and coalesce behind him.

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (0)

Shame 2.0

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The last time I used this title for a post, it was to bemoan the Democrats (including Joe Courtney’s) craven attempts to appease the unappeasable by voting to censure Moveon. This time it’s more serious: the Senate of the United States has voted to sanction lawbreaking by a wide margin, voting against Chris Dodd and in favor of telecom immunity. Bear in mind that the real purpose is not even to protect the telecoms. The real purpose is to cut off any possibility that we can learn the full extent of lawbreaking by the Bush Administration. This is very depressing.

It does make me feel better about one thing, though: my vote for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton, who allegedly opposed telecom immunity, couldn’t be bothered to make the vote. Still, the fact is that supposedly Hillary did oppose telecom immunity. So we have a huge number of Democrats voting to protect a Republican president against the expressed wishes of the next Democratic president. It does not bode well for the nation’s prospects next year, even if we win big. The member of our party, who rolled over for this president, will suddenly find reason to oppose the next one. If you want to know why, just follow the money.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism | | Comments (0)

That’s the way you do it

Monday, February 11, 2008

Charter Revision Commission meeting tonight, so I will merely pass on these videos that are all over the net by now. This is great stuff, beating up on McCain instead of each other.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs[/youtube]

And here’s another:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUKINg8DCUo[/youtube]

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

A Tale of Two Theatres (and a movie)

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Last night my wife and I, and another couple, decided to go to Pawcatuck to the corporate owned Regal Cinema Stonington 10 Cinemas to see Atonement. Yes, that’s right, there are 10 theatres. If we assume, conservatively, that each can hold 200 people, that means that at any given time there could be quite a few people queuing up to buy tickets, which in fact there were. When we got there the line was out the door, all waiting to buy $10.00 tickets from the single ticket seller. We shivered in the cold and rain until we finally got to the front of the line. The theatre has a huge lobby, which was practically empty. It apparently never occurred to anyone working there that the line to the ticket counter could snake around indoors. Better, apparently, to let people freeze in the rain. Eventually we arrived at the ticket window, at which point we were told that we were free to lay out $10.00 for the tickets, but there was no heat in the theatre where Atonement was playing, or the adjacent one, which was playing the only other movie we would consider watching. I can deal with cold if I’m moving, but sitting and shivering is not my cup of tea.

No effort, of course, had been made to let people know this salient fact before they committed their time to waiting in line. Nor, did management do what any reasonable person would have done under the circumstances: offer a steep reduction in price. No doubt there was no one around who could make such a momentous, though obvious decision. Per usual, it’s not even worth trying to complain about this sort of contemptuous treatment; the people who set policy are invisible, and you’d be lucky to get more than blank, uncomprehending stares from the front line, underpaid minions.

Luckily another patron had a blackberry or some other flavor of internet fruit, and found that the Old Mystick Art Theatre, now an Independent, was playing There Will Be Blood, so we decided to go there. There are four Theatres there, with about the same total level of staffing as the 10 Theatres in Pawcatuck. The folks were friendly, and they had heat. As an added bonus, the lack of corporate affiliation deprived us of the pre-movie commercials that are now so common, as well as the pre-movie trivia tests, etc., that also appear to be inescapable.

The movie, by the way, was excellent. How can you complain about a movie that condemns both Big Oil and whack-job religion? The acting was great, and the music, in my opinion, was perhaps the best suited to the on-screen action than in any movie I’ve ever seen.

Filed in Rants, The Arts | | Comments (1)

Filling your Ipod

Saturday, February 9, 2008

This software (TubeTV) is pretty cool, so I thought I would pass the word. It’s totally free. It will download and convert any youtube video (I think it works on other types of internet video too), convert it to Ipod format (some other formats as well) and put it in your Itunes Library. You have to tinker with some settings to make it work just right, but it’s not difficult.

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