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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..

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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McCain and Bloomberg: centrists both, if you disregard their positions on the issues

Saturday, February 9, 2008

I am horribly confused. Michael Bloomberg’s fantasy of running for president as a “centrist” candidate has officially foundered, according to Chuck Hagel, now that John McCain has locked up the Republican nomination. Why?

Well, apparently, according to the Times, Bloomberg is a moderate and a centrist, and so is McCain. These adjectives, in McCain’s case, are simply asserted as fact. (“Yes, the mayor’s chances are diminished by the success of Senator John McCain, a moderate candidate who has emerged as the Republican front-runner.”)

So, we are to believe, McCain and Bloomberg occupy the same mythical “center” of the ideological center, which is apparently located one half of the distance between liberal and conservative. That being the case, there’s not a speck of difference between them, so long as you don’t count their views on abortion rights, gay rights, aid to cities, the death penalty, gun laws, realistic views toward taxes (Bloomberg thinks that taxes are a necessary evil). Only in the weird and wonderful world of our corporate media could these guys be considered to represent similar political positions. They can’t both be “centrists”, if the word is to have any meaning.

In fact, from a brief review of the article on Bloomberg at Wikipedia, it appears that the only things of substance about which they truly agree is the advisability of the Iraq war and a craven allegiance to the interests of corporate America. Given the fact that the most Americans have long since come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq was a mistake and has been a miserable failure, it hardly seems like a position in favor of the war defines a central position in today’s political landscape. Nor does fealty to corporate America. But then again, maybe in the minds of the media, those positions define the center, at least their view of the “responsible center”. Apparently, judging from the tepid response Bloomberg’s fantasy candidacy engendered, the American people don’t agree.

What’s truly annoying about this article is the easy way in which the reporters label McCain a “moderate” or “centrist”; descriptions he himself eschews. The man is a certified right winger; he’s just not completely balls out crazy, though he’s a lot closer to being balls out crazy than most people realize. This is just another illustration of the fact that in this country, at the present time, the acceptable continuum of political thought consists of a mild liberalism on the left, to a theocratic/corporatist/totalitarian conservatism on the right. Lefty positions outside of that continuum (single payer health care, for instance, which is a fact of life in most rational democracies) are simply defined as being outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, while no right wing position, no matter how extreme (e.g., torture, “unitary executive”, i.e., presidential dictatorship) is out of bounds on the right. And so the media defined “center” drifts to the right, while the actual center drifts left.

Filed in Media, Presidential Politics | | Comments (5)

Friday Night Music: Jimmy Cliff

Friday, February 8, 2008

Many Rivers to Cross. The group singing with him is The Sounds of Blackness. This one starts a bit slow, so you have to be patient.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HWAIWsP5OM[/youtube]

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Drinking Liberally: A report

Friday, February 8, 2008

Our second Drinking Liberally went well last night. It was held at the Bulkeley House in New London, in the “Ice House”, which we liberals had all to ourselves. A few pictures, starting with a look at the facilities prior to the start of the festivities:

drinking-liberally-2008-02-0718-14-54-2008-02-07-at-18-14-52.jpg

A couple of crowd shots:

drinking-liberally-2008-02-0719-56-44-2008-02-07-at-19-56-34.jpg

drinking-liberally-2008-02-0719-54-52-2008-02-07-at-19-54-52.jpg

A not so crowded shot, of folks deep in conversation about weighty political issues (or not):

drinking-liberally-2008-02-0719-55-04-2008-02-07-at-19-55-04.jpg

And finally, Audrey Heard showing off her Iphone:

drinking-liberally-2008-02-0719-55-30-2008-02-07-at-19-55-28.jpg

Now we have to decide between the Ice House and the Harp and Hound as a permanent place to go. The pros and cons:

Ice House: Pros
Better food, more conveniently located between Waterford and Groton, better facilities, less likely to fill up with non-liberals as the evening wears on.
Cons: Relatively poor selection of beers on tap, perceived as being in dangerous location. This is actually not true as the parking lot is an extremely short walk from the entrance.

Harp and Hound Pros
Great Beer Selection, conveniently located for Groton residents who prefer not to cross the bridge.
Cons: Irish pub food (need I say more); relatively cramped quarters.

Those who’ve attended the first two sessions WILL BE POLLED on a permanent location. Whatever the ultimate choice I hope we can keep it going. People seemed to have a good time, judging by the fact that most of them stayed pretty late.

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