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McCain vs. McCain

Sunday, June 15, 2008

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnb2IrsU1Cg[/youtube]

Filed in Presidential Politics, The Real McCain | | Comments (1)

Polish Pride

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Both of my sisters have sons who graduated, one from college, one from high school, this year. They decided to have a little joint celebration. Where better than a place where we could also celebrate half our heritage (one quarter and perhaps some minor fractions in the case of the kids): the Polish National Home. If you’ve never been there, you have a treat in store. We were given hand written menus, from which we could choose our favorite Polish foods. High on the menu: the kielbasa plate, the pierogi plate, the Golumpki plate, and the Polish platter. I hereby admit that my Polish bona fides were seriously undermined when I read the menu, as I couldn’t even recognize the Golumpki, despite the generous number of vowels, as the dish that I had always called Gwumpki.

You could get each of the first three dishes for $8.95, or you could get the Polish Platter for $10.95, which, so far as we could tell when it arrived, consisted of all three of the first dishes piled on a single plate. Only one of the brave souls who unwittingly chose to eat this massive amount of food was able to make an appreciable dent in it.

But I have not come to praise Polish cuisine, as distinguished as it is. I have come to help spread the word about the early Polish pioneers who may, nay must, have saved America at its very birth. For on the way out of the hallowed hall, my son noticed this plaque affixed to a rock near the entrance (click to enlarge):

So, on October 1st of this year, as the Google confirms, we will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of the settling of North America by the People of Poland, who apparently were accompanied by some people from England. According to some, it was the Poles alone who saved the hapless English at Jamestown, thereby saving the colony, and by extension, all of America. From a Book review of the seminal work, Jamestown True Heroes, by Arthur L. Waldo:

In “Jamestown True Heroes,” Waldo expands on the information he first presented in “First Poles…” The book is over 250 pages and contains a wealth of photos and illustrations. Much of the information that’s presented is based upon the lost Memorialum Commercatoris manuscript, supposedly written by Zbigniew Stefanski, alleged to be one of the Jamestown Poles. According to Waldo, an individual offered to sell the privately published manuscript to the Polish Museum of Chicago, where he was able to view it. We’re told the deal ultimately fell through and the mysterious manuscript was withdrawn, never to be seen again.

It would seem from the previous comments of Karen Majewski to this forum that professional Polish American historians doubt the veracity of the missing manuscript.

…

The names and backgrounds of the Jamestown Poles, their experiences as glassmakers, homebuilders, and well-diggers are documented in the manuscript along with an account of the Poles saving Smith from an Indian attack! The reader is told that the Jamestown colony had
absolutely no chance of survival if not for these five(?) talented and virtuous Poles. Waldo makes the correlation that, since the Poles saved Jamestown, and without Jamestown, there would have been no Plymouth, the Poles are responsible for the existence of America!

I haven’t witnessed such a degree of unabashed ethnic pride since watching Michael Constantine play Papa Gus in “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding.”

It seems to me that the snark is uncalled for as is the skepticism of the “professionals”. Why should we doubt the existence of the Memorialum Commercatoris manuscript, in this, the age of the da Vinci code? Hey, if the Mormons are allowed to believe in the entire Book of Mormon, disappearing tablets and all, we Poles have every right to believe in the Memorialum, and consequently our primary role in saving the fledgling Jamestown colony. Waldo’s entire story just reeks of truthiness.

And how were we repaid for our heroic behavior on behalf of our incompetent Anglo-Saxon cousins? It appears that we Poles were subjected to the first documented voter suppression tactics in America, perhaps in history. That’s right, some 17th century Karl Rove tried to deprive us of our vote, but then, as opposed to now, truth and justice prevailed, at least for the Poles:

In 1619 the colonists were preparing to elect members of the new Virginia assembly. The governor announced that only men of English origin would be allowed to vote. The Poles responded to this announcement by laying down their tools. “No vote, no work” they announced.

This caused consternation and the court record of the Virginia Company for July 12, 1619, states: “Upon some dispute of the Polonians in Virginia, it was now agreed…they shall be enfranchised and made as free as any inhabitant there whatsoever.”

So, not only were we the first victims of voter suppression in the New World, we also organized the first strike. Apparently, the Poles were brought along in the first place because they had skills the adventuring English did not, so their work boycott was no empty threat. The above, by the way, is culled from sources other than the unjustly maligned Memorialum Commercatoris, sources that persons other than Mr. Waldo may access.

The Poles were granted equal rights, and they were allowed to vote, in the same year in which the first imported laborers from Africa were setting foot in Virginia. They unfortunately, didn’t have the leverage the Poles had, and they could not lay down their tools.

But that is another, sadder story. I write today to celebrate our Polish forefathers, few in number but huge in influence. Preservers of our first colony. The first Americans to fight for equal rights. All that, and Golumpkis too.

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Time of War

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Recently the Supreme Court ruled, by the slimmest of margins, that prisoners at Guantanamo have the right to file habeas corpus actions challenging their incarcerations. In today’s Times, Jonathan Mahler, writes that in doing so the Supreme Court has bucked precedent:

“The most important thing we do is not doing,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said of the Supreme Court’s abiding humility, its overwhelming preference to allow the people, through their elected representatives, to govern themselves.

And never is the court more reluctant to act than when faced with a challenge to the president during wartime. Consider the historical record.

The court has ruled against a president in a time of armed conflict no more than a handful of times, most famously in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, when it held that Harry S. Truman lacked the constitutional authority to seize the nation’s steel mills to avert a strike during the Korean War. The invocation of two words — military necessity — by a commander in chief was usually all it took to silence a majority of the justices.

So it is extraordinary that during the Bush administration’s seven years, nearly all of them a time of war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been prompted to push back four times. Last week’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have a right to challenge their detentions in the federal courts, marks only the most recent rebuke.

I would suggest that the five remaining more or less rational justices recognize something that Mahler does not: that we are not in a “time of war”, or that if we are, it has become a permanent state of war, therefore different in kind than previous wars in which there were, for instance, identifiable enemies and objective criteria by which to judge whether the war was over. Bush’s argument boiled down to this: The country is at war, therefore the president has untrammeled power. Whether the court would ever have accepted that is an open question, but there was another, usually unstated corollary. We will, henceforth always be at war, and therefore the president will always have untrammeled power. The question therefore is a stark one: does the Constitution limit the president, and secondarily the Congress, in a time of permanent war? If it doesn’t then the Constitution is a dead letter. Right now its survival depends on the vote of a single justice.

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National Press Club to give forum to anti-Obama liar

Saturday, June 14, 2008

I’ve been away most of the day. Just got back and saw this article in my newsreader:

A Minnesota man named Larry Sinclair has been going around the country spreading unfounded rumors about Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). Among other claims, he alleges that he and Obama used cocaine together and participated in homosexual acts in 1999. Sinclair’s claims are completely without any merit. He even took — and failed — a polygraph test.

Nevertheless, Sinclair will be speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on June 18. Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has pointed out that an event such as Sinclair’s is in keeping with neither the NPC’s purpose nor its ethics:

This is more evidence of the even handedness of our national media. They will give a forum to anyone who has anything scurrilous to say about any Democratic candidate for public office. Equal opportunity for all. What could be wrong with that?

Firedoglake has a petition up to pressure the Press Club into withdrawing its invitation. Giving someone the opportunity to speak at that forum implies that they are worthy of a respectful hearing. This guy is a demonstrable liar and should be treated as such.

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

Friday Night Music-The Doors

Friday, June 13, 2008

I don’t think I’ve done them yet, and they’re certainly in the pantheon. And there’s a Connecticut connection. Wasn’t there that little incident in Connecticut? Actual footage below the main attraction.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri-44UZw7EE&feature=related[/youtube]

Jim busted by New Haven’s finest:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htW4MCagbSg[/youtube]

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So many reasons to vote Republican

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Via Pharyngula, and apparently a lot of other places.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiQJ9Xp0xxU[/youtube]

We’ve got company tonight, so this is probably all for tonight.

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Josh Marshall on Joe’s future

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

In my continuing quest to lose my bet with MZ, I submit herewith a new video from Josh Marshall about everyone’s favorite cockroach: Joe Lieberman:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0HOKDIj5a8[/youtube]

This is a pretty good explanation of the way things stand right now, and the (hopefully) probable course in the future. Of course, true satisfaction, sublime schadenfreude, can only come if Obama wins the election. We could get seventy seats in the Senate and we won’t see Lieberman humiliated if McCain is elected, since Joe will be moving on to the cabinet.

Personally, I am becoming more and more convinced that even if we sweep the table, we won’t have Joe Lieberman to kick around anymore after the election. I think if Obama is elected, and we gain seats in the Senate, that Joe will take his final revenge and resign, allowing the lady with the empty head to appoint his successor. At that point all those legislators in Hartford who did nothing when they had the chance will jump up and down protesting that she has no right to steal the seat. Joe will get a highly paid position lobbying for AIPAC. There truly is no justice in this world, but we can always hope. Maybe he’ll be such damaged goods that no one would want him as a lobbyist.

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New York Times: McCain is a New Style Candidate

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Can’t stop myself from commenting on this morning’s Times which tells us that 2 New-Style Candidates Hit Old Notes on Economy.

The headline is repeated twice in the printed edition.

Like him or not, no one can deny that Obama is a new style candidate, at least in terms of the way he has organized his campaign and raised his money. But how, exactly, is McCain a new-style candidate? Was it the stirring speech he gave on the 3rd, or is it the legions of dedicated grass roots supporters that he has called up almost from nowhere? Is it the fact that he may be the first candidate in history to blaze new trails by selling golf gear on his website? Precisely how has McCain deviated from the tried and true Republican playbook: appealing (perhaps unsuccessfully, but still trying) to the ignorant and biased while obscuring his corporate friendly policy behind empty slogans.

In fact, the appellation is never really explained in the article, which itself makes the rather trivial point that Obama prefers economic solutions that involve government intervention (the traditional Democratic approach), while McCain prefers diverting more of our money to the rich and to large corporations (the traditional Republican approach). So what accounts for denominating McCain a “new style candidate”? Maybe the answer is in this paragraph:

Over all, the two candidates’ approaches — which come from one candidate who has been described as a maverick, and another who is often called “post-partisan” — each hew pretty closely to his party’s traditional economic playbook. And that is increasingly forming the basis of their attacks on one another as each links his opponent to unpopular presidencies.

That’s right, it appears that McCain gets to share in Obama’s glow because he has “been described as a maverick”. In fact, that’s true. The press has labelled him as such for years, on the strength of long ago minor apostasies from Republican fundamentalist teachings, each and every one of which he renounced years ago. But by calling him a new style candidate now, the Times implies that he is in fact a maverick, a proposition for which there is absolutely no evidence. Is this yet another example of the evenhandedness of the press? Why is it that evenhandedness always seems to have a rightward tilt?

Note: This piece was edited to add the funny golf link above. I highly recommend checking that out.

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

Yes we can

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Okay, I confess that I’m a softy and stuff like this gets to me. In this case I can blame it on my wife, who told me to put it up.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PJa3jaEVyM&feature=related[/youtube]

I’m sure there’s a similar McCain inspired video out there somewhere.

Filed in Presidential Politics, Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

Sleaze

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

According to Joe Lieberman’s people Obama was engaging in “sleazy” tactics when he let it be known that he gave Joe a talking to about, among other things, Joe’s “half-hearted denials of the false rumors that Obama is a Muslim”. Apparently it is not, in the current political environment, sleazy to insinuate that a candidate is a Muslim, (but why stop there, add “socialist” to boot) but it is sleazy for that candidate to try to put a stop to it. It’s also, apparently, not sleazy to sign on as a director of an organization formed to swift-boat Obama.

One of Obama’s worse mistakes was to destroy a little of his credibility with the anti-war crowd by speaking up for Joe at the 2006 Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner. We were told that Obama sought out Joe to act as his “mentor”. What we didn’t know, but could partly guess, was, “that Lieberman’s staff practically begged Barack Obama to come in and endorse him at a critical moment “, which Obama did.

It was a mistake, as things turned out. Obama lost a bit of credibility, and still earned Lieberman’s enmity when he did what Lieberman would have done under similar circumstances: endorsed the winner of the primary.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled speculating about Lieberman’s motives as he systematically trashes Democrats in general and Obama in particular. At this point it’s pretty clear it is not even mainly about ideology. Lieberman is a bitter old man. He actually believed that he was entitled to be Senator, and that no one, particularly his constituents, had any right to question his actions so long as he was “voting his conscience”, be it ever so warped. It’s an argument he would never apply to anyone else, and one that makes no sense in a representative system. He may have won the election in 2006, but whatever was left of his principles went into the shredder that day. From that day on he has been mainly interested in payback: revenge not only on the dirty hippies who denied him his nomination, but on all the elected Democrats who played by the rules and backed the party’s candidate.

If things go well, we will have a President Obama in January, and a Senate with up to 59 Democrats, not counting Lieberman. Wouldn’t it be delicious if, on top of all that, we get to see Lieberman exiled to his proper place to the back benches of the Republican party. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

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