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Groton Dems Picnic

Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Groton Democratic Picnic was a great success. Great quantities of food were consumed, and much to our surprise, Barack Obama made a surprise appearance! Frankly, I was a bit disappointed. Maybe it was jet lag, or the letdown after the overseas trip, but to me he seemed a little stiff, besides being a little quiet. Hardly the inspiring speaker we’ve grown to know and love. Don’t get me wrong, he was still a hell of a lot more exciting and charismatic than John McCain, and he was infinitely patient posing for pictures. Here he is with the group (everyone but me—it’s good to be the photographer).

Kevin Clemency, Joe Courtney’s new field co-ordinator, made an appearance. That’s him below with Obama. Kevin has the unenviable task of stepping into the oversize shoes of his predecessor, Walter Kerr. Today was a baptism by fire, of sorts, since he had to pretend he was enjoying mixing with a bunch of geezers. He seemed to pull it off okay, so maybe he has a future in politics.

Kevin is trying to pull together some canvassers for Joe Courtney tomorrow. If you’d like to do your bit to get Joe re-elected, you can join the group at 12:30 at S.B. Butler school.

(The pictures seem to get a bit distorted when you view them in the posts. They look better if you click on them)

By the way, I want to say thanks again to Liz Duarte, who gave me a “Disappearing Civil Liberties Mug”. It has the entire Bill of Rights on it, each one of which disappears when you torture the mug by pouring hot liquid in it. My only criticism is that the Second Amendment should probably be exempted.

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Friday Night Music-Summertime

Friday, July 25, 2008

The Seasons right. I think I managed to find a version in which Brian Wilson actually appears. Check out the girls in the background.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9_ZPBhG47Y[/youtube]

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Dem Picnic Tomorrow

Friday, July 25, 2008

Better late than never, I guess. I forgot to post about this earlier in the week, what with one thing and another going on in my life.

Tomorrow from Noon to 3:00 PM the Groton Democratics will be having a picnic at Spicer Park in Noank. The suggested donation is $20.00. The basics will be supplied (hot dogs, hamburgers, etc.), but folks are encouraged to bring extras.

For those unfamiliar with Spicer Park, it really is a little gem, right on Beebe Cove. For Mapquesters, the address is 27 Spicer Avenue in Noank. Make sure you put Noank, not Groton, as apparently there is another Spicer Avenue that turns up if you search for Spicer Avenue in Groton. Here’s a few pictures of the location. First, a view from the water, then a couple of views from the park.

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Back to First Principles

Thursday, July 24, 2008

John McCain is building his entire campaign around the “surge”, which he claims to have created himself, and which, according to him, has brought, or will bring, peace and prosperity to Iraq. In the process of promoting the “surge” he has misrepresented its origin, its purpose and its results. Juan Cole has an excellent post today about the surge, and delivers a decidedly negative appraisal.

As those with memories recall, the surge was supposed to supply a breathing space to allow for political reconciliation. It has been a failure on those terms, so McCain/Bush talk about reduced levels of violence. As Cole points out, there’s a reason for that reduced violence:

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.

One of those refugees, apparently, is the woman blogger at Baghdad Burning, whose last post is dated October, 2007, from Syria, to which country she fled just about the time that violence in Iraq began to decline. So it appears that the surge decreased levels of violence because it created a situation in which the people doing the killing had nobody left to kill. Just one more Bush success story.

Cole’s entire post is recommended reading. Cole actually knows what he’s talking about, which is one of the reasons so few people listen to him

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Scam on the right

Thursday, July 24, 2008

It is a truism that a sucker is born every minute. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it doesn’t matter to scam artists as long as a reasonably high number of people are reliably gullible. It appears that the right wing suckers among us are getting fleeced with regularity.

Here’s the facts: An Iraq veteran is running for Congress against John Murtha. High Priestess of Evil Michelle Malkin doesn’t understand why he is being ignored, since he has raised a jaw dropping amount of money. Once again that “liberal media” is doing its nefarious worst. Well, not so fast:

In the most recent quarter Russell raised $669,534, almost all from out-of-state donors who presumably are on BMW Direct’s list of self-styled conservatives with a good track record of responding to direct-mail fundraising.

At the same time, he spent $442,990, almost all of it on expenses related to the direct mail effort and paid to BMW Direct and its affiliates (some of which share the same downtown Washington office).

The only expenses that appear to be spent on an actual campaign totaled about $20,000 for Web site design, a low-budget video and a campaign consultant based in Pennsylvania rather than Washington.

He reports having $269,953 in cash on hand. But he also reports debts totaling $242,521 — almost all for direct mail expenses to BMW Direct and its vendors.

So that leaves him only about $27,431 ahead — not much for a guy who’s raised a total of nearly $1 million this election cycle.

The folks at BMW have been very busy beavers for Republican candidates. (See here and here). It’s a great business model: collect money on behalf of sure losers; bill said sure losers for almost every dime you collect; then repeat. Apparently, these folks have a mailing list that would make P.T. Barnum turn green.

One could almost suspect that BMW Direct is a dirty tricks outfit operating out of the DNC, but apparently it’s not so.

It reminds me a bit of the Producers. These guys aren’t interested in winners. They’re looking for box office bombs. One must wonder whether the candidates could possibly be ignorant of all of this. Don’t they look at their own financial disclosures? Almost makes you wonder if the candidates themselves are in on the scam.

Filed in Republican Corruption | | Comments (1)

Public service announcement

Thursday, July 24, 2008

A friend and neighbor has asked me to remind my readers that Glen Beck is an a**hole.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (1)

But John Hagee likes him

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Via Atrios, from the Huffington Post:

If Barack Obama has a problem among Jewish voters, then Sen. Joseph Lieberman is in monumental trouble.

Among the most high-profile Jews in Congress, Lieberman is viewed far more unfavorably than the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a new poll. Only 37 percent of Jews view the Connecticut Independent in a favorable light compared to 48 percent who have a negative perception. As for Obama, 60 percent of Jews view him favorably while 34 percent view him unfavorably.

A bit of info on Hagee, to whose group Lieberman will give a speech today.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7706179979766534830&hl=en[/googlevideo]

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Straight talk

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c[/youtube]

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African reunion

Monday, July 21, 2008

This may be a hoax, it seems so unbelievable. But I prefer to believe it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U[/youtube]

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Half right

Monday, July 21, 2008

Obama, against all odds, appears to be winning (at least for the moment) the debate about Iraq. This is mainly because al-Maliki is no fool, and like the rest of the world, he is not interested in another four years of George Bush, brought to you by an increasingly befuddled McCain.

But we here have to hope that once firmly ensconced in the White House, Obama will re-think the other half of his Iraq policy: his commitment to throw additional troops into the quagmire that is Afghanistan. This may be smart politics in the short run, but all this may come back to haunt him in the White House. Juan Cole makes the case for withdrawal in clear concise prose.

We who admire him don’t want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Beware.

It may have been possible to “win” that war, but we screwed up there as we did everywhere else the past seven years, and it’s doubtful we can recover. Osama’s not there anymore, we don’t understand the culture, and Afghanistan has historically been a graveyard for would be imperialists. The British were culturally sensitive by comparison to us, and they got their asses handed to them in Afghanistan. Same with the Russians. We can’t keep bombing wedding parties and expect to win hearts and minds.

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