As always, the First Thursday of the month brings yet another edition of Drinking Liberally, Southeastern Connecticut version. The fun starts at 6:30 at the Bulkeley House, in New London at 111 Bank Street.
We can all obsess about our various anxieties about the campaign. There’s sure to be some good old fashioned Lieberman bashing mixed with hearty condemnations of the spineless Democrats. Join the fun!
One of my most frequent commenters pointed out that John McCain put Obama on a dollar bill some time ago. So it would appear that Obama wasn’t just speculating when he said they’d be pointing out that he doesn’t look like other presidents on the currency:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDTJDv4hevU&eurl[/youtube]
This line of attack would be truly baffling it it weren’t for the obvious subtext. The corporate media has done its best to ignore it, but David Gergen broke the code of silence on this on one of the Sunday shows:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfXvK84MPqQ[/youtube]
Funny thing. George Bush was a Texas governor who knew nothing about foreign affairs and was an obvious dunce. He had been picked for the job by a bunch of Republican hotshots who figured they could successfully sell him. He was a certifiable chickenhawk. Had his last name not been Bush, he’d have done time for insider trading, if not for going AWOL. He had no obvious qualifications, and in fact had a history of failure at almost everything he did. No one ever called him presumptuous. No one ever called him arrogant, though he is in fact both of those things. No one even called him unqualified, or at least no one in the national press.
The fact is that you have to be a little bit presumptuous and a little bit arrogant to run for president. I have been following politics since I was a kid. I can’t recall a presidential candidate that was attacked for being either presumptuous or arrogant. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the first one is a black man.
On the other hand, not many have been senile, although some have been dolts. We will not hear about McCain’s problem unless he demonstrates it in a very public forum, such as, let us fervently hope, the debates.
It’s going to be a long campaign. It was in late July and early August that John Kerry lost his race. Obama has to start hitting back. The McCain sleaze machine is driving the narrative. The media is used to letting the Republicans frame the issues. Unfortunately, Obama is going it alone. The Democrats are, as usual, AWOL themselves and are not pushing a counter-narrative. On the other hand, after Obama sort of threw Wes Clark under the bus, you can understand why they might be a little shy about going on the attack.
It’s pretty clear that this is going to be a dirty election. Obama has the choice of getting dirty, or losing. Just like Kerry. A modest suggestion. Suggest ever so subtly that McCain is, shall we say, losing it. At this point he appears to be already as senile as Reagan was when he left office. Videos like this ought to help make the case. Of course, they should be as selectively edited as McCain’s attack ads. And another thing, ever so politely tell the media to kiss your ass when they accuse you of going dirty.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVgT__TZNdQ[/youtube]
McCain is arguing that Obama isn’t ready to lead. It’s a natural response to say that McCain isn’t capable of doing so.
So far as the mainstream press is concerned, this incident never happened, except apparently it did. Anyway, it’s a funny video (via Suburban Guerilla):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFCl3EUMHSc[/youtube]
Yesterday took place the last Old Timers Day game to be held at the present Yankee Stadium. The front page of the Courant’s sports section (paper, not on-line edition) has a picture of an aged gnome identified as “Jogi Berra”. Jogi? Surely someone was asleep at the editor’s desk. I have decided to believe that this misspelling was occasioned by the fact that whoever made this mistake is too young to remember Yogi, or, or that matter, his namesake bear. How else explain this grievous error?
Were it any other Yankee I would let it go unnoticed, or even feel a bit of satisfaction. I am an inveterate Yankee hater, as are all us true Red Sox fans, but I think I speak for most of us when I say that even during the 50s, when the Yanks were at their peak and the Sox had reached their nadir, Yogi was always an exception. He transcended the despicable, abhorrent, abominable, contemptible, detestable, loathsome team of which he was a part. He further proved his worth by refusing to enter Yankee Stadium until the despicable etc. George Steinbrenner apologized to him for, essentially, being George Steinbrenner.
A great player, and a great guy, who deserved to play for Boston (well, he may not see it that way) and who surely deserves to have his name spelled correctly.
John McCain’s latest ad compares Obama to the Messiah, or, I suppose, claims that Obama has been doing so. Am I missing something? The negative line at the end seems like an afterthought. In any event, since when does the Messiah have to prove he’s ready to lead? He’s the Messiah, after all. This whole “celebrity” meme, which McCain has now taken to the third power, is puzzling. I guess the theory is that it goes after Obama where he’s strongest, but I’m not sure this line of attack is ultimately a winner, and it’s so ludicrous that it might cost McCain his biggest fans: the media, for as John Aravosis points out at the link above, these attacks are coming directly from him, not from an organization over which he can pretend to have no control.
A few weeks ago I went to my doctor for my biennial check-up. My EKG was abnormal, though he said it was likely a false positive. But since my father died quite young of a heart attack, it was only prudent to send me off for a stress test. I thought I aced it, since I got my heart up to target rate easily, and didn’t even breathe hard until it was over. But no, the stress test showed something suspicious, a possible “false positive” but just to be sure, I was scheduled for a cardiac catheterization, which I underwent today.
Let me pause here and state that I am something of an exercise freak. I swim from three to five miles a week, depending on my schedule. I ride an exercise bike at home, and a real bike on weekends. I have, in the process of all this testing discovered that my resting heart rate is in the 50s, my blood pressure is low, and my cholesterol readings are in a good range. That means I’m in just as good shape as George Bush, who has tons more time to exercise than do I.
Given all that, it seemed unfair that I was facing the possibility of being shuttled off to New Haven for a stent insertion, should the test today not go well. Naturally, though I had never experienced them before, I started to suspect that maybe I was, after all, having some sort of chest pains. By this morning, I was fairly sure I was New Haven bound. But no, it turns out that my false readings were caused by something I was born with, a Myocardial bridge, which is apparently fairly harmless. I merely had to spend the day coping with boredom (there’s a 4 hour recuperation period during which you have to lay down, not to mention the wait for the test itself, which started an hour later than scheduled) and the typical indignities incident to being in a hospital. The nurses, as always, were great. I don’t know how they do it. My wife was even greater. As a near professional worrier, she handled a great deal of that chore for me, in addition to being there today to keep an eye on me.
Anyway, though as it turns out I was never at any risk, I feel a bit like I’ve got a new lease on life. These kinds of incidents make you realize that despite the existence of people like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc., and the impending destruction of the planet by global warming, to mention just a few of the leading causes of indigestion (and high blood pressure for that matter), life is still pretty good, and as Louis Armstrong sings, It’s a Wonderful World.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnRqYMTpXHc[/youtube]
I love this song, and have wanted to post it for a long time. This seems like as good an excuse as any.
Back to politics, tomorrow.
For reasons not worth getting into, I may be unable to post for a few days. That means no Friday Night Music, in case anyone cares. I did post Crosby, Stills and Nash today, so that makes up for it a little bit.
We here in America sometimes let our “democratic” principles get the better of us. For instance, there is a school of thought that proposes that since requiring a majority to pass something is good, requiring a super-majority must be even better. In California, as in a number of other states, this has led to constitutional amendments requiring super majorities to pass state budgets. The result is predictable. A small minority can hold the majority hostage. The “super majority” requirement effectively empower the minority, which, having failed to win the support of the majority of voters, can nonetheless hold a state hostage until it gets its way. And of course, when Republicans are in the minority, they have no problem doing just that. California is currently without a budget. In typical Republican fashion, Arnold has reacted by cutting the salaries of low paid state workers to the minimum wage. A typical Republican reaction, of course. This is just one of many features of the California political system that comes courtesy of referenda, which taken together have made the nation’s largest state virtually ungovernable. This outcome, by the way, was not by chance, but by design of the proponents of these referenda, which have been sold as measures to provide tax relief, enhance democracy, control excess, etc. The intent was to prevent government from succeeding.
Which brings me around to Groton, where the Town Council will be considering the charter we proposed last week. We (the Charter Revision Commission) have rejected the idea of a budget referendum. On Tuesday, the Council holds a public hearing to get citizen input. My sources tell me that the Groton Long Point Selfish Citizens PAC is putting together a petition to demand a referendum. I’m sorry to say that Democrat Paulann Sheets still appears to be carrying water for these folks, as is our State Representative, Elissa Wright, who seems to be fine on state wide issues, but remains myopic on these local issues.
The Commission was required to issue a report to the Town Council, which we did. We did not discuss the budget referendum, except to say we decided against it, because the purpose of the report was to talk about what we did, not what we didn’t do. The two members of the commission who still favor a referendum penned a minority report (copy below if you’re interested), to which I responded on behalf of the other members, also attached below. While a budget referendum does not legally hand control of the budget process to the minority (as in California), it has the practical effect of doing just that. It is the method of choice on the local level for people who don’t want government to work to make sure government can’t work. In the main, by the way, these are folks who can’t or won’t get their hands dirty actually running for office and putting their views out their in the open for people to assess. They’d rather just destroy the work that dedicated people perform, in elections dominated by slogans about taxes in which low turnouts give them a dominant voice.
I certainly encourage everyone, whatever your views on this issue, to make them known to the Town Council. My sense is that an email to any single councilor will end up in the Public record, so if you can’t make it to the hearing, you can make your views known that way.
Harmony not quite so sweet as in the past, but that’s okay.
