Monthly Archives: September 2008

Sing for Change Obama – a creepy idea whose time has passed

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A half-assed – but still valid – reason to vote for McCain .. because stuff like this is creepy and verging on evil.

The idea of a bunch of tots singing praises of the Dear Leader needs to be mocked until the adults in the room sheepisly admit that, yes, it’s really dumb to idolize a politician and program your children.

It’s like the 20th century didn’t even happen.  What in the f*** are you people thinking?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Update!

The first link is gone – but the song lives on!

And lyrics!

We’re gonna spread happiness
We’re gonna spread freedom
Obama’s gonna change it
Obama’s gonna lead ‘em

We’re gonna change it
And rearrange it
We’re gonna change the world.

The People Has Spoke

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Your representatives heard you when you demanded affordable housing, they heard you when you insisted that the programs were fine, and they have heard you when you insisted that Wall Street pay for it all by melting into a puddle of slag.

bailout_2 by you.

Yes, I know: simplistic. Also not everyone demanded all of that.  Still, this is Democracy and we get to live with our folly.  That includes your neighbor’s folly as well as your own.

If this gets real bad and fifty years from now historians look back and say ‘you know, if they’d voted ‘aye’ they could have saved themselves a whole lotta misery’, I hope the guys up on the barricade have the grace to feel like retards.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

I’ve Got a Bracelet, Too

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Real life provides better lines than fiction ever will.

Senator McCain: Long ramble about service, sacrifice, the suckitude of defeat.
Senator Obama: “Jim, let me just make a point. I’ve got a bracelet too. From, Sergeant, uh, uh, from the mother of, uh, Sergeant, Ryan David Jopek.”

He certainly does appear to be looking at his wrist for Sergeant Jopek’s name, doesn’t he?

Why is this a big deal?

The point of those bracelets is to remember the individual.  If you gotta look at the thing to recall the name, it sorta brings home the point that it’s there for political reasons, hunh? 

People in the military – and their families – are not blind to the reality that we’re an instrument of national policy [1].  But we prefer not to have that fact shoved into our faces by people who want to be the boss.

When President Obama pulls the trigger to invade Pakistan [2] we’d like to think he’s giving at least a passing thought to Joe Snuffy.

Not remembering the name of the guy you’ve said you would honor as an individual makes it hard to do that.

[1] War is a continuation of politics by other means – Clausewitz.

[2] Or any of the other eleventy-dozen countries where Al-Queda is operating.  If the world thought an ill-defined Bush Doctrine was a big deal just wait until we see the Obama Doctrine in action: Invade whomever we want whenever we want because a few dozen gomers are recruiting for an amorphous network of terrorists.[3]

[3] Add to this Representative Steve Kagen’s promise to interfere with free markets outside the jurisdiction of the United States, Senator Obama’s plan to draft high school kids into national service and we might be forgiven for asking people: You won’t vote Republican because Bush was a war monger, an idiot, and a guy who is reviled by right-thinking people everywhere .. but compuslory service, a promise to roll panzers across recognized national borders ‘just because’ and plans to keep people from making money in their own country .. this is somehow better?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

A Question…

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Last night during the debate, Senator Obama said:

The third thing we have to do is we’ve got to make sure that we’re competing in education. We’ve got to invest in science and technology. China had a space launch and a space walk. We’ve got to make sure that our children are keeping pace in math and in science.

And one of the things I think we have to do is make sure that college is affordable for every young person in America.

While I agree that we need to keep pace in Math & Science (or even, to move ahead in both), and while I think that affordable college is a worthy goal, not every job requires a college degree. Nor is every person a good fit for college.

So, Senator, my question is this. What about the young people who have no interest in, or desire for college? What about the ones who want to be plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, cabinet-makers, and the like? What will you do for them?

Will you be as generous in providing funding/financing for those who want to attend a trade school, or a 2-year college? What about grad school, for those whose chosen careers require post-graduate work?

And what about Americans who are NOT young, but finally have the opportunity to pursue a degree? Should it be affordable for them as well, or does your largesse only extend to YOUNG Americans? Which begs the question: at what point does a person stop being “young”?

I suppose, as long as I’m asking questions, I should also ask what you’re going to do about the young Americans who don’t qualify for college. Affordable college is great, but only if folks meet the entrance requirements. We can’t continue to dumb down the entrance requirements just to ensure that everyone can attend.

How will you make college affordable? Are you going to mandate tuition prices? I don’t understand how the federal gov’t has the right to mandate tuition fees for non-federal schools. Oh, you’re probably NOT going to mandate tuition – you’ll provide subsidies instead. But it’s an interesting fact that as federal aid increases, so do tuition prices, so increasing subsidies will have no real effect on the cost of attending college.

Notice I’m not asking you where the money’s going to come from – I know the answer to that. You’ll raise my taxes and make me pay for it. I suppose I should be grateful for having the opportunity to help others succeed, but somehow, gratitude isn’t the emotion that pops up when I think about this.

RIP, Mr. Newman

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Paul Newman has passed away at age 83. Cancer.

Not only will we remember him for those deep blue eyes that any red-blooded woman could get lost in forever, but for his faithfulness to Joanne Woodward, his wife since 1958. Playboy magazine asked him one time if he was ever tempted to stray. His reply: “I have steak at home- why go out for hamburger?”

Newman’s Own Foundation has issued a statement.

“Paul Newman’s craft was acting. His passion was racing. His love was his family and friends. And his heart and soul were dedicated to helping make the world a better place for all.

Paul had an abiding belief in the role that luck plays in one’s life, and its randomness. He was quick to acknowledge the good fortune he had in his own life, beginning with being born in America, and was acutely aware of how unlucky so many others were. True to his character, he quietly devoted himself to helping offset this imbalance.

We will miss you, sir.

An Old Mission Church Half Tumbled Down

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That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio – and perhaps all of the rest of Texas – first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour and a half, just before sunrise on a chill spring morning in 1836. People who come to visit today, with an image in their mind from the movies about it – from John Wayne’s version, and the more recent 2004 movie, or from sketch-maps in books about the desperate, fourteen-day siege are usually taken back to discover that it is so small. So I know, because I thought so the first time I visited it as an AF trainee on town-pass in 1978. And it is small – one of those Spanish colonial era buildings, in limestone weathered to the color of old ivory. That chapel is only a remnant of a sprawling complex of buildings. Itself and the so-called ‘Long Barracks’ are the only things remaining of what was once called the Mission San Antonio de Valero, given it’s better known appellation by a company of Spanish cavalry stationed there in the early 19th century – they called it after the cottonwood trees around their previous station of Alamo de Parras, in Coahuila. It was the northernmost of a linked chain of five mission complexes, threaded like baroque pearls on a green ribbon, and originally established to tend to the spiritual needs and the protection of local Christianized Indian tribes. The missions were secularized at the end of the 18th century, the lands around distributed to the people who had lived there. Their chapels became local parish churches – while the oldest of them all became a garrison.

There is in existence a birds-eye view map of San Antonio in 1873, a quarter century after the last stand of Travis and Bowie’s company that shows a grove of trees in rows behind the apse of the old chapel building. In the year that the map was made, the chapel and the remaining buildings were still a garrison of sorts – an Army supply depot, and the plaza in front of it a marshalling yard. One wonders if any of the supply sergeants of that time or any of the laborers unloading the wagons bringing military supplies up from the coast and designated for the garrisons of the Western frontier forts gave a thought to the building they worked in. Did they think the place was haunted, perhaps? Did they hear whispers and groans in the dark, think anything of odd stains on the floors and walls, of regular depressions in the floor where defensive trenches had been dug at the last? What did they think, piling up crates, barrels and boxes, in the place that the final handful of survivors had made their last stand, against the tide of Santa Anna’s soldiers flooding over the crumbling walls?

Probably not much– whitewash covers a lot. And a useful, sturdy building is just that – useful. By the 1870s, those Regular Army NCOs working in there were veterans of the Civil War, and perhaps haunted enough by their own war, just lately over. The growing city had spread beyond those limits that William Travis, David Crocket and James Bowie would have seen, looking down from those very same walls.

In 1836 that cluster of buildings, and the old church with it’s ornate niches and columns twisted like lengths of barley sugar sat a little distance from the outskirts of the best established provincial town in that part of Spanish and Mexican Texas, out in the meadows by a loop of clear, narrow river fringed by rushes and willows. San Antonio de Bexar, mostly shortened then to simply “Bexar”, was then just a close clustered huddle of adobe brick buildings around two plazas and the stumpy spire of the church of San Fernando. It is a challenge to picture it, in the minds eye, to take away the tall glass buildings all around, the lawns and carefully tended flowering shrubs, to ignore the sounds of traffic, the SATrans busses belching exhaust, and see it as it might have appeared, a hundred and sixty years ago. I think there would have been cottonwood trees, close by. Thirsty trees, they plant themselves across the west, wherever there is water in plenty, their leaves trembling incessantly in the slightest breeze. There might have also have been some fruit orchards planted nearby – the 1873 map certainly shows them. But otherwise, it would have been open country, rolling meadows star-scattered with trees, and striped across by two roads; the Camino Real, the King’s road, towards Nacogdoches in the east, and the road towards the south, towards the Rio Grande. In the distance to the north, a long blue-green rise of hills marks the edge of what today is called the Balcones Escarpment. It is the demarcation between a mostly flat and fertile plain which stretches to the Gulf Coast, and the high and windswept plains of the Llano, haunted by fierce and war-loving Indians.

This is the place where three very different men came to, in that fateful year that the Texians rebelled against the rule of the dictatorship of what the knowledgeable settlers of Texas called the “Centralistas” – the dictatorship of the central government in Mexico City.

(More to follow)

Clay Aiken’s Gay?

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I’m SHOCKED, shocked I tell you…

Other things I’m shocked about:

Senator Barack Obama is black.

Senator John McCain is white.

Governor Sarah Palin is hot.

Senator Joe Biden’s mouth moves faster than his brain.

700 billion dollars could possibly be spent on better things than bailing out rich guys who don’t know when to fold when they’re holding a pair of twos and there’s a nut flush showing on the table.

The Air Force is talking about bringing back Strategic Air Command and putting Space back in Colorado Springs.

Marines are just plain bad-ass.

Matt Damon is a fine writer/actor, but seriously, he should stay out of politics until he learns to Google.

Russia may not be the good buddies we thought they were in 1990.

Pakistan is shooting at U.S. troops on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

Bill Clinton seems to be undermining the Obama campaign.

David Blaine’s latest stunt was preempted by the President’s speech and nobody cared.

Most of the people in Survivor Gabon aren’t who they say they are.

Tulsa

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The Army tasks a brigade with a Homeland Security Mission.  Paul Watson – and 190 commentors-  promptly freak the f*** out and get their panties in a collective twist:

Ominously, the report states that, “The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.”

The unit would also be deployed to deal with hostile crowds of Americans in the aftermath of a massive economic depression, potential food riots and race riots, if one defines the term “crowd control” to match its reasonably applicable scenarios.

Calm down before you hurt yourself, please.

Stuff like this happens all the time – you just never notice.  Units get assignments like this like my Aunt Masie loads up on desert. It’s only news because of the novel command and control arrangement.

When you read about a battalion of Marines flying up to Yellowstone to help fight forest fires?  Secondary tasking.  The jarheads who deployed to support the National Guard in LA last time they had a riot?  Secondary tasking.  Those guys were already on call for that stuff and had a modest amount of training for the task.  Sometimes very modest but there you go.

And .. seriously.  So ‘they’ are planning an October Surprise.  What in the world is a brigade combat team going to do?  It’s a battalion of infantry, with guns and air support.  Call if 5,000 guys at the most.

It’s a big country.  If the entire place goes up in flame and smoke, a BCT is going to be a drop of water on a hot grill.

So the Army could send a brigade to take over … Tulsa.  And if they want Tulsa they can have it.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Pass the Popcorn

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Professor Larry Sabato on what happens if the electoral college is tied, throwing the contest to the House.

Summary: it’s going to be a rannygazoo bigger than a three-ring circus featuring Siamese elephants joined at the trunk and a three-legged ringmaster. And an international embarrassment.

I don’t get that last. What in the world is embarrassing about a representative democracy operating according to the rules? Okay, yes, turmoil, dreaded turmoil. But that’s part of the fun and a result of the system being what it is.

Loosen up, Prof, get the popcorn out and enjoy the show.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Coal – it’s awesome. Except when it’s not so awesome.

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Senator Obama: We’re for clean coal – it rocks.
Senator Biden: We sure are and it does!  What’s that sweetie? Oh wait, you’re a Green?  Aw man. Coal is the E-vil.  It’s bad.  Seriously.

You just know the guys running the war room at Obama for President’s Global Headquarters cringe when they watch ol’ Loose Lips on the news.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

The Bandar-Log

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Here we sit in a branchy row, thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do, all complete, in a minute or two—
Something noble and wise and good, done by merely wishing we could…

In following the current twists and turns of the current election season, with particular attention to the hackerish little creeps who think it is an excellent thing to break into email accounts… tell me, why is it a Good Thing and entirely justifiable for people in sympathy with the Obama campaign to break into Governor Palin’s yahoo account, looking for incriminating evidence of dark plots and deeds… but it was a Bad Thing for Richard Nixon’s cabal of plumbers to break into the Watergate looking for incriminating evidence of dark deeds and plots? Oh yes, that was before you were born, probably. But they made a movie about it, so you must have heard about Simply Teh Greatest Political Crime EVER!!!! Just sit down, and think about this real hard. And look up the definition of hypocrisy, while you are at it.

Bottom line, for those of you whose moral sense is situational – if it is a crime for free-lance or paid operatives to break into another party’s HQ, operating office, personal email account… whatever, on a fishing expedition – than it is a crime all the way around, no matter how justified you think you are in your motivation. Those of your friends, teachers, college professors and fellow Kossacks who may have been insisting otherwise? They are wrong. I would advise you to stop listening to people like that.

I would also stop paying much attention to our Major Media Creatures and those who keep popping out of their ol’ golden rolodex to screech about Sarah Palin. Just a quick look down some of those crazier rants (especially the ones by foreigners) about the suddenly front-and-center Governor of Alaska — her relative inexperience, all around tackiness, blue-collar-ness, lack of capital-F feminist credentials, religious beliefs, et cetera gives cause for serious head shaking. Jeeze, people, get a grip! Take a valium. (In the case of Heather Mallick, take a lot of valium. In the case of Sandra Bernhard, a lot of valium, a lot of scotch and please review a basic human anatomy text.) Pouring all this vitriol on someone you probably didn’t even know about three weeks ago seems kind of… I don’t know, unbalanced? She’s only been front and center on the major American political scene for three weeks, and she is already attracting a degree of odium usually reserved for someone who has been around for a bit, and done some bad things. Like a reckless, grandstanding, philanderer with a taste for shady friends. But enough about Bill Clinton.

And then there the not-terribly-surprising discovery by Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report that certain alleged and dubious factoids about Governor Palin which suddenly began sprouting like toadstools after a rain were actually planted by the minions and employees of a well-known and well-connected publicity firm, in the sure and certain knowledge that the howler monkeys of the KOSsacks left would fall on them as if on a tasty treat and repeat them incessantly.

All the talk we ever have heard, uttered by bat or beast or bird—
Hide or fin or scale or feather— Jabber it quickly and all together!
Excellent! Wonderful! Once again! Now we are talking just like men!

Of course, once this precious little piece of Astroturf was tracked to it’s originating point, everything got yanked, with the speed of a cartoon character at the end of a long piece of elastic band. Note to self – every time I start to notice the same poisonous little factoid appearing spontaneously and simultaneously in – blog entries and blog comments, from out of the mouths of the dumber Hollywood celebs and the sort of TV commenter who goes from rational to spittle-fleck rant in thirty seconds flat, I will assume that some busy little astoturfers have been at work, behind the scenes. And that someone like Rusty or another enthusiast will be able to track it back to the originating source. It’s not like you can launch damaging rumors without leaving any marks, people. The internet never forgets. The tracks are always there, especially when someone does a screen-capture or downloads a file.

Finally, the recent request from the Big O for his minions to really get out there and go all righteous in confronting those of us who are less than fully enamored – great idea! Yeah, people just love getting hectored and bulled, and called names like ‘racist’ and ‘hater’. My suggestion – put on a leather teddy, spike heels and fishnet stockings. Brandish a leather crop, too. You might not get anywhere politically with that scenario, but at least that part of the audience who is into playing kinky submissive games will get some cheap thrills, while the rest of us look on in amusement.

Damn, did this election season get interesting all of a sudden. Who’d a thunk it possible, back in January, 2008.