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The Grumpy Forester

• July 08, 2010
• 20:51

  What The Heck; Might As Well Make It Official

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  Gone Fishin'

  
• May 15, 2010
• 18:12

  Time For Plan B

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...it's always good to have a plan and it never hurts, once you have that plan, to make sure to draw up a backup plan. According to documents that have come into the hands of Congressional investigators, Toyota may have had a plan to deal with unfavorable Congressional testimony regarding that little unintended acceleration problem that seemed to be plaguing several of its model lines: attack the critics. Now, there's something to be said for a strategy of attacking your critics; we lefties are all the time demanding that elected Democrats attack the usually moronic criticisms that the SCLM so cheerfully airs from right wing leaders, spokesmen, talking heads, and loose wackos roaming the airwaves. But, that is that and this is this and there is a pretty big difference between the two...
  
  We could delve deeply into the "science vs. blathering" difference, because that's pretty big all by itself. No need, though, because what we are talking about here is the difference between some radio blowhard coked to the gills on Oxycontin fighting through the brain mists to transfer all those twisted hate-filled thoughts to his speech centers and the possibility that the subject of a Congressional investigation just might have been cogitating - at least for a while - the prospective value of going after some Congressional witnesses who disagreed with that subject's approach to solving a particular safety concern. There are, I am told, real live prison cells in the Capitol complex and - at the very least - the advertising agency executives advising Toyota would be well served by the understanding that there is little other than a can of WD-40 and a couple of overly frank emails that could spell the difference between another weekend with the trophy wife at the Hamptons beach house and cooling your heels alone with the cellar rats in a D.C. version of the Bastille, waiting for federal prosecutors to draw up witness intimidation charges that trump that Contempt of Congress vote that changed your weekend plans and put you here in the first place...
  
  It may be some time before we understand, if we ever do, what the subject of the investigation and its paid advisers and pollsters had in mind, but it is clearly time to unlimber Plan B...
  
• May 14, 2010
• 20:09

  Brief Thoughts On Why One May Not Tell People What One Does

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...throughout the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States, there are thousands of employees who earn their daily bread by honorably defending the interests of the American people through the administration of contracts that deliver services, supplies, and the construction and maintenance of real property. Day in and day out, they try to do the best they can to make sure that the requirements of the Federal contracts that they are charged with administering are met...
  
  And then there's this. The real irony about this report is that the Department of Defense maintains an online site that is the go-to location for all sorts of training on how to properly administer federal contracts. In fact, this go-to DOD site is approved as a source for fulfilling the annual training requirements necessary for all Federal contract administration employees to maintain their certification to handle contracts. And yet...
  
  And yet, it is the very Department that offers what is considered in some circles to be the definitive training on contract administration that not only can't - one more time - seem able to guarantee best value for the country but also can't provide acceptable products for the ultimate customer, which - one more time - is our own troops. Somewhere out there, somebody has the job of making sure that the production line cranking out combat helmets met the required specifications. Somewhere out there, the job didn't get done. It may turn out that the failure to meet spec's is a simple technical issue involving chin straps or some such, but at first blush this is another unnecessary black eye delivered - courtesy of DOD contract specialists - to all those other people who get the job done right every day of the week all year long, every year, with little recognition and no reward other than a paycheck...
  
  ...because that's the way this stuff is supposed to work...
• 18:07

  How Hard Can It Be?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...I was going to make some idle sport of Sarah Palin most recent comments when I first read the AP report; you know, test out some other potential moves Obama would make if only he could, such as:
  

  Obama would allow people to eat Christian babies if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.
  
  Obama would gather up registered Republicans and Death March them on foot to internment camps in the New Mexico desert if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.
  
  Obama would force all Americans to face toward Mecca and pray daily if if he thought he and his Democratic allies could get away with it.
  

  
  
  But then, as I was reading through the story again, I realized that the back story wasn't that Palin is just running around the country saying whatever she thinks the crazy 30% of the population will eat up, or even that Palin probably wouldn't even be considered a contender for the 2012 Republican nomination if outlets like AP actually provided some sort of rational analysis to her bizarre litany of comments. No, the back story is that journalism as practiced by those razor sharp professionals of the AP is so easy that just about anybody with either sufficient fingers, toes, or elbows to type (or even a voice recognition system to provide Reasonable Accommodation in accordance with ADA) should be able to do this job to AP standards, regardless of any other training or experience...
  
  I started getting to this point with this selection:
  

  "...the only thing stopping Obama from gutting the Constitution's right to bare arms." (emphasis mine)

  
  The critical issue of the right to bare arms has been discussed already during this first 18 months of the Obama regime, particularly with regard to Michele Obama's wardrobe selections. In fact, no less an elite-level journalist/blogger than Jake Tapper has weighed in on Barack Obama's own apparent beliefs when it comes to baring arms. What he thinks about firearm ownership and the meaning of the Second Amendment is less well known, but I think it's safe to say that either the unnamed AP reporter's or Palins' own wild conjecture is seriously off the mark...
  
  But Wait, as Billy Mays used to say, There's More. Later in her speech, Palin referred to the vicious manner in which sow grizzlies defend their cubs and made a connection to Republican/Teabagger women who she said need to rise up and help take back the country. Said unnamed reporter failed to mention this connection by writing just this:
  

  Palin challenged Republican women — "mama grizzlies," she called them — to help the Republicans "take this country back" and elect anti-abortion lawmakers.

  
  The report, in the next sentence, offers - apparently with a completely straight, dedicated professional journalistic face - this helpful reference:
  

  A grizzlie is a bear.

  
  No, really, that's what the article says...
  
  ...or at least that's what it says right now, prior to some actual educated English-speaking editor frantically pulling the copy off line to fix it. I promise, I really tried to be charitable about this, but I just couldn't find my way. Aside from the fact that the reporter somehow felt it necessary to explain what a 'grizzlie' is, she or he wasn't even capable of spelling the bear's colloquial singular name correctly (that would be "grizzly' and Heaven forfend that there would have been a need to go all Latin with Ursus arctos horribilis just to make sure all y'all knew what a grizzly is), which is the sort of error than a 10-second Google search could have corrected. This is what led to my realization that Serious Professional Journalism clearly isn't as rigorous a profession as Serious Professional Journalists would like us to believe it is, especially when they are discussing the Information Age blight represented by the the unwashed vermin of blogtopia. This report represents just one example of the best work available from what is supposed to be a premier provider of straight-up Fourth Estate Media, and it should lead all the rest of us in the 'unwashed masses' bleachers to the realization that we, too, could be an AP reporter...
  
  How hard can it be?
  
  Update:
  Screen shots, just in case the AP editors actually get around to reading a fixing the story....
  
  
  
  
  
• May 10, 2010
• 19:07

  My Own Private Antarctica

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...it is snowing outside. By which I mean "again". The Winter That Would Never Be has slowly morphed into the Spring That Won't Ever Come. In the larger context of the outside world, this doesn't amount to much; it's doesn't hold a candle to the reality of sitting along the Gulf Coast knowing that there is a vast slimy pool of spilled crude oil spreading across an area larger than a couple of European countries that may or may not be headed your way and having no more say in the matter than if you were duct-taped to the hood of a speeding truck barreling into some dark unknown madness...
  
  But still, enough is enough. It's been over a month since the deadline for removal of our much-debated studded tires, yet the last vestiges of a winter that didn't amount to much keep lingering on and on. A week or so ago, my morning commute featured a several-mile-long Christmas Light Show where all manner of flashing light bars from police, emergency, Incident Response, and tow vehicles reflected gaily against the heavily falling snow, and I am certain that one Sheriff's Deputy managing the extrication of his own Crown Vic from the roadside ditch by one of those gaily flickering tow vehicles is glad that I didn't have a camera to contribute to whatever on-screen hell he will face at his next going-away/retirement/promotion party. I do, after all, know people...
  
  Tempers are growing short, skin is growing pale, and there is a desperate darkness around the eyes of all those sun-worshiping outdoorsy types whose total buy-in on that "300 sunny days per year" Central Orygun hype is reflected by the usual seasonal ritualistic exchange of rooftop ski racks for rooftop bike racks. Those who cherish snow skiing are living in a wonderful dream world while the rest of us are trapped in a nightmare that seems to have no defined endpoint...
  
  This, too, will pass, and not too far down the road we in this little corner of the world will be fretting over dry lightning or 8-year-olds burning ants with a magnifying glass - either one of which could end up burning down half the county - and all the talk about climate change will wander off into whatever corner such discussions go when they can't gain local traction. For now, on the other hand, it is time for My Own Private Antarctica to end...
  
• May 03, 2010
• 20:56

  The Last Refuge Of "Drill, Baybee, Drill" Scoundrels

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...it was to be expected, and it was delivered just about on time. Texas Governor Rick Perry, a man whose "best if used by" date is rapidly approaching as far as any of his desperate hopes for further political advancement are concerned, has decided to add to his already bulging Democratic oppo-research files by suggesting that we should all avoid falling to some sort of "knee-jerk" reaction to the ongoing BP oil spill disaster...
  
  It is almost hard to put into words just how stupid this sort of comment really is. It isn't even necessary to scrounge around to find links to buttress counter-arguments; the simple fact is that a region that has not yet fully recovered from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the late summer of 2005 is now facing the sort of man-made disaster that could devastate its fisheries and coastal economies for decades to come...
  
  This isn't a matter of odds or of "acts of God that can't be prevented". There is too much at stake to play the odds and God long ago stated his position on His views about people being stupid about stewardship of His creation. "Good Hair" Perry is hoping to ride his current poll lead to a virtual free pass to reelection as Texas governor, but his necessary pandering to all those Texas Big Oil special interests is a lame note that will fall on a lot of desperate ears along the Gulf Coast during these desperate days. Fact is, this current crisis is the perfect answer to the question of whether or not we should expand offshore oil exploration. It isn't a matter of odds; it's simply a matter of "what if". The "Drill, Baby, Drill" gang, represented in this case by Perry, don't want to address the "what if" because they have the luxury of playing with the past history of statistics. They are wrong, of course, because it only takes this one statistically improbable episode to make us realize just exactly what sort of fire we are playing with...
  
  Perry is, of course, going to play the game by the rules his Big Oil overlords dictate, so it isn't in the least surprising that he would insist that we should all just chill. That is the last refuge of the pro-exploration gang; since you don't remember the last big oil field blowout a generation ago off the California coast, you shouldn't judge the looming ecological and economic Gulf Coast disaster as some sort of warning. It was "an act of God", after all; nothing to see here, please move along. Never mind that God laid out his rules a few millenia ago and this potentially massive disaster doesn't fall into any category that God identified in his new covenant. The last refuge of bought-and-paid-for scoundrels like Perry is a false and potentially blasphemous linkage to God to mask and hide the sorts of personally aggrandizing and enriching sins that Oiled-Up lackeys like Perry want to protect...
• April 28, 2010
• 20:00

  In Consideration of Why Anyone Can Be A Pundit

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  ...anyone can be a pundit at some level. You can write a letter to The Editor, start a blog, comment at major league websites and blogs, or in other ways fling your thoughts into the vast electronic river that flows through all of our lives...
  
  That's Ground Level Punditry.
  
  You can become a captivating writer who garners tons of hits on your blog, or you can become one of the trusted acolytes at some larger blog, or you can actually enter the world of the ink-stained wretches of journalism to have some sort of local voice...
  
  That's Journey Level Punditry.
  
  Or you can rise to the top of the mountain, gaining access to a national audience, regardless of your actual qualification to share any sort of meaningful opinion, via employment at a national media source. This is the region of rarefied air so lacking in oxygen that only a limited few favored beings ever develop the lung capacity to function successfully...
  
  That is what I think of as Star Level Punditry.
  
  The sad thing is that, while you can aspire to and perhaps successfully rise to that "Star" level, it will probably be necessary to check your intellectual capabilities at the door in order to walk through it. As an example, I simply offer this article, which by itself isn't so much a demonstration of my argument as it is a demonstration of where intellect "check-out" leads...
  
  One can't help but wonder, while reading such articles as this, what strange calendar the Star Level Pundits are looking at. May Day is this coming weekend; we haven't even celebrated Mother's Day or Memorial Day or Labor Day, but we are many months into a fevered dialogue who's origin stretches back over a year about just how badly Democratic butts are going to get kicked in an election that is over five (as in FIVE[5] months away). This sort of conversation looks like nothing more that the mock draft talk leading up to the actualy real live NFL draft that ends up looking nothing like the vision painted during the run up...
  
  May Day is on Saturday. It will be over five months before voters will actually select Representatives or Senators or a host of state, county, and local officials. It may be fun to game this whole system out and make predictions about What Will Be, but we are looking at the remainder of the spring, all of the summer, and a sliver of the fall before people will actually vote in an election that truly matters to the country. It really is a long time until the next election and there are many streams to cross before we get to that day. It is simply absurd to speculate about what the outcome of all those elections will be at this early date...
  
  But that is, I suppose, what being a pundit at the Star Level is all about...
  
• April 24, 2010
• 19:16

  Say Hello To My Little Friend - The Rootkit Files

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  ...for Tony Montana (aka "Scarface"), it was an M203 grenade launcher attachment to his M16. For me, it has been KillDisk burned to a CD and launched from the boot menu. There is, it turns out, one surefire way to deal with a Win32 rootkit virus: scrub the hard drive and start over...
  
  The freeware version of my little friend doesn't offer the full-on Department of Defense 5220.22 M standard of recovery-proof disk wiping that its own purchase version and some other disk wiping utilities provide, but it's good enough for my purposes. After spending several hours every single night for the past two week trying every imaginable thing - including sinking to the pits of desperation and calling the Dell tech service line - a few facts began to emerge from the inky blackness of my dilemma: my creaky old laptop probably wouldn't support the smallest readily available hard drive; the Dell-provided operating system reinstall disk (instead of real live XP CD's) wasn't bootable in the presence of an existing operating system; nobody I know had an XP operating system disk with a valid key; and my last straw-grasping idea of buying and installing Windows 7 was defeated because the old girl's architecture can't handle the required 1 gig of RAM. Since I really wasn't in the mood to buy a new computer right at the moment (a gadget guy I am most certainly not), I seemed to be at a technological impasse because of my inability to reformat the hard drive. That's when the light bulb finally went on...
  
  Anyway, I'm back after many, many hours of installing and downloading, including a second rescrubbing and a second reinstall of the operating system (a word of advice: never install everything that comes on your recovery driver disk, especially if you are using an aftermarket wireless receiver), sailing the treacherous seas of Blogtopia in the company of an entire armada of freeware and purchased antispyware...except for McAfee. McAfee is bad juju on my laptop in any case (it came as part of the software bundle and I couldn't successfully reinstall it when I put in the new hard drive a couple of years ago), and Thursday's little update oopsie would have pushed me all the way over the edge if it was working and I had installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 on it, which I hadn't. Anyway, we'll see how this goes. So, anything been happening?
• April 17, 2010
• 20:05

  The Downside Of Technology

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...as it turns out, there are people out there who want to steal my life, or at least the parts of it that can bring them either profit or some strange emotional benefit that I will never understand in a million years. These people, who deserve nothing better than burial in a shallow unmarked grave alongside any one of the many, many remote dirt roads that I have traveled in the high wild places of the intermountain West over the last 35 years, have managed to defeat some of the best minds in the business in a pitched battle over who actually controls my creaky old laptop. So I sit now in an undisclosed location - as far as the keystroke logger/CPU controller/backdoor rootkit virus minions of evil are concerned - where I ponder my options: installing a new 40-gig hard drive (which is all my faithful 6-year-old friend will support) and enduring hours of reinstalling XP and drivers and software and downloading Service Packs and all the rest, or buying a new laptop...
  
  On top of all the hours I have already spent trying to solve this infestation, the idea of devoting what is essentially a whole day to reinstalling what is actually ancient technology is a grim thing to face. At the same time, this whole intertubes thing has been tolerated by my financial advisor (that would be Mrs. Jack K.) only because it was relatively cost-free. All I can say is "Stay Tuned"...
  
  
  
  
  
  
• April 08, 2010
• 19:54

  Bizarro World Visits The Rest Of Us

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  ...after a week of pitched battles with various bits and pieces of both human and computer illnesses - the latter of which having caused me to revisit my opinions about application of the death penalty - I find myself tonight pondering the speed with which our current reality can pump its fat little legs to far outdistance just about any storyline your average fiction writer could ever hope to cook up in an otherwise fair race. The other night while cruising the intertubes during a brief interlude granted by my sinuses and a marginally effective malware scan, I found myself contemplating a couple of questions:
  

  Question The First: How is it that the party that was in power in 2005 and stood by while New Orleans drowned decided to hold it's Southern Republican Leadership Conference in that same city in 2010?

  
  

  Question The Second: How is it that this same remarkably shameless party can't come up with anything other than the same old retreaded speakers spouting the increasingly tiresome lame lies that seem tailored to do nothing more than fire up this year's version of the "base"? [sorry, religious conservatives, but you'll just have to tag along with this neo-libertarian 'base' and good luck to you with all that]

  
  The Southern Republican Leadership Conference was truly a spectacle, featuring Newt "Family Values" Gingrich, Sarah "Half-Term Governor" Palin, and Liz "Pit Bull In Waiting" Cheney leering out at us from the TV screen screeching the sort of gibberish that reads like a parody if you are just working off of a transcript from which the speaker's name has been redactedThis is a perfect indicator in a larger sense of the sad state to which our political discourse has declined; it's not so much that people like this are saying these things because that is to be expected. It's that once again there is nothing even approaching a critical assessment of any sort of truth behind their drivel, only a flat presentation of it. Three people that one would think a party that actually respected its own oft-touted core values wouldn't allow within a country mile of a TV camera spent the end of last week standing at the dais as True Voices of the party faithful casually violating the 9th Commandment, and you'd have to dig pretty hard to find any sort of meaningful analysis of their bizarre statements...
  
  The fact that this all went down in New Orleans, the city that Republicans as a matter of public policy turned their back on as it sank under Hurricane Katrina's rising water, only adds to the twisted fascination these broadcast screeds provided. I swear, it is going to be a long next couple of years...
  
• April 04, 2010
• 17:25

  Sunday Night Eagle Blogging

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it has been a tough last several days for the Bald Eagle Stars of Odell Lake. They have been pummeled by ceaseless waves of late-season snow storms, including two that were preceded by official Winter Storm Warnings. The male disappeared for one stretch of over 30 hours, leading various watchers to fear a two-pronged version of "The Worst": his untimely demise and the abandonment of the nest - sooner rather than later - by the female. He returned finally to take up his spot in the nesting rotation, to much human rejoicing, but the celebration was cut short by a serious winter storm on Friday night that led to this:
  There is a large female eagle sitting in a nest in this picture
  
  It was a serious enough storm that I awoke to 6 inches of new snow and still have a wintry landscape lurking outside my window at this moment...
  
  ...that storm eventually passed on Saturday to the point that viewers could again see eagles sitting on a nest (which I might add, is generally a viewing experience of the 'paint drying'/'grass-growing' variety). But times can be tough at the crest of the Central Orygun Cascades any time of the year and, if you paused for a moment to think about it, you probably would find some other better place to try to incubate a clutch of eggs in April. Eagles aren't much into contemplation, though, and if they can get through this phase to the point that their eaglets actually hatch, the summer rearing season promises warmer weather and abundant fish from nearby Odell Lake. In any case, it's not like these two birds have made some sort of singular tragic nesting choice; while various viewers fretted, panicked, and obsessed over the male's disappearance and the Friday night snow-burial of the female (I mean, seriously, at 2:00 am local time Saturday morning, nothing resembling an eagle was visible in the nest), there were at least eight other pairs of eagles around the lake going through the same storm without the benefit of infrared cameras bearing witness to their own heroic efforts. Now we are back into it again, and the weather for the next several days won't be all that much better, with periods of snow or rain forecast through Thursday...
• March 26, 2010
• 19:26

  So How Tough Is My Job? ver. 2010.01

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I haven't been posting much recently because I have been simply fried when I get home in the evening. It has been hard to work up even the most half-hearted outrage about all of the crazy things going down all around us and, I have to admit, I find myself almost limp with relief that the health care bill finally passed, regardless of its faults and failings, because it means so much to the future welfare of my second-born child as he approached adulthood. A couple of nights ago, however, I was jolted out of my doldrums by the news that 'we have an egg'...
  
  That statement makes no sense unless you understand that my lovely bride has been involved for several years in the maintenance of a video camera aimed at a bald eagle nest perched above Odell Lake at the crest of the central Orygun Cascades several miles to the west of our humble abode. Wednesday evening the female laid an egg (a phrase that means good things in eagle circles) and the small world of people who love to watch such things on intertube feeds - yes, there is such a world - simply burst into flames from the excitement of seeing a potential new bald eagle in a relatively warm, dry nest. Then came Thursday night and this morning and a Winter Weather Advisory for the Central Orygun Cascades,
  and what started out as a classic picture of a mommy bird (or, in this case, daddy bird, because they switch off on incubation duty) began to look like the sort of job that I really would have to think hard about accepting...
  
  Parenting is hard enough as it is; it doesn't need to be made harder by late-season snow storms that lay down several inches of snow in the 'nursery'. At the same time, it does provide me with an intriguing perspective on how to evaluate all those perceived problems that I might otherwise think afflict my own life. I didn't manage any screen captures in the pre-noon hours when the storm was at its most intense, but I must confess that I pity any new visitor that might have stumbled onto the live video feed this morning; the shock and confusion of stumbling upon a live video feed of what appeared to be a dead eagle laying buried in a snow-covered nest would have created an ugly moment of repulsion and hate in the heart of a casual first time visitor...
  
  For good or ill, though, we 'have an egg'. The nest camera (which provides a feed to a bald eagle exhibit at Portland's Washington Park Zoo) failed last year almost at the very moment that the baby eagle of the year was about to fledge (courtesy of a big thunderstorm that apparently zapped the system). There's a new camera in place this year - courtesy of a long story that I have been assured can never be told - and it has infrared capability so that nest activity can be seen all day and all night. If you would like to join that strange small world of eagle nest peeping Tom's, you can do so all day or all night...
  
  Who knows; maybe I can start a Friday Eagle Blogging thread.
• March 18, 2010
• 20:19

  DADT: What Crazy Looks LIke

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...OK, so we know that there are a couple of certain mindsets at work deep in the heart of the US military that can argue against the idea that a person's sexual orientation shouldn't matter when it comes to the point of being willing to serve - and perhaps die - on behalf of our nation. In the first place, any effort to recruit 18-year-old kids into the military brings with it the same sort of social strictures and stigmas that can be found in high schools all across the nation. In the second place, there are things like the overall military problem with separation of Church and State...
  
  And then there are the observations of Marine Gen. John Sheehan (Ret.), former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and recipient of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars (with a Valor Device), and two Purple Hearts. He perfectly captures a recent - if not current - management view of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in his comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee today, describing the failure of a Dutch contingent of NATO peace-keeping troops to prevent the 1995 Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica. Apparently the twin failures of The Rules of Engagement and of will on the part of the NATO commander in that particular episode of genocide were somehow trumped by by the fact of the Dutch army not having a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (or perhaps an outright ban on "those people serving in the military)...
  
  Most craziness relies on a suspension of belief and a refusal to talk about the way things have been. This particular craziness fits that mold nicely. It relies on the suspension of belief in the whole history of the Bosnian conflict and a refusal to acknowledge that a lot of countries you really wouldn't want to take on in any situation less than a D-Day invasion don't have any particular problem with the sexual orientation of the troops. The General probably tipped his hand most completely at this point:
  

  Sheehan claimed that sexual attraction between servicemembers of the same sex would have a negative impact on readiness, while attraction between men and women in gender-integrated units would not.
  

  
  ...so "normal" boys and girls thrown together in close proximity won't feel powerful urges, but gay and lesbian boys and girls will. Clearly the General has never chaperoned a high school field trip. When it comes to individual sexuality and service in the military, this is what "crazy" looks like...
• March 13, 2010
• 18:33

  On Asking Stupid Questions

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this little story caught my eye today because it seems to me that it captures the raw essence of the hopelessness of ever seeing peace in what was once called Palestine. In fact, the story made me even chuckle a little because of its absurd tone-deafness: the Netanyahu government isn't going to investigate the actual decision to try to blow up peace talks by building homes in east Jerusalem but is instead going to investigate why the announcement was made just as Air Force 2 was touching down at the airport...
  
  Joe Biden was "insulted"? Bet not. I'm willing to put a few dollars down on the proposition that Biden was - as we used to say back in the day - Pissed To The Max, not just about the fact that Israel decided to announce its decision about housing construction in east Jerusalem right at that moment but also that it was - one more time - going to move in a direction that most of the world sincerely doesn't believe it has a right to move in. The whole situation answers the question "Why isn't Jack K. the Vice President of the United States". OK... so it doesn't entirely answer the question, because there's a whole list that can be distilled down to 'because it would be a really bad idea', but part of the reason for why not is that I would have immediately gone back to the airport and flown that glistening 747 out of town as quickly as the engines could spool up (with maybe one rooftop high-speed wing-waggling "see ya, pal" pass over Bibi's digs thrown in, just to be cordial)...
  
  Joe didn't do that, though. He stayed and glowered, and the insult was only part of it. In fact, it may have only been a small part of it, because you can only stay mad at stupid intransigence for so long before the whole effort just becomes a useless tiresome indulgence. The fact of the east Jerusalem housing is the problem; the timing of the announcement is just a simple artifact of the inability of right wingers everywhere to manage their message if they don't have the US media in on their game. If Bibi Netanyahu has any sort of agenda for stamping out wasteful spending, he could probably point it in the direction of this investigation because it is clearly a total waste of time and money. Nobody cares why his government is too stupid to figure out that the United States would be irked at the announcement of the housing construction in the middle of the Vice President's visit; why the announcement was made when it was is a stupid question to ask and misses the point entirely....
  
  What everybody wants to know is why Bibi and his crew are seemingly trying to create the potential for more conflict and violence in the only Holy site shared by all three Abrahamic religions while offering a lame Bushco-like insistence that they really do want to have peace talks. It is for historians to decide what were the motivations of the Netanyahu government in metaphorically shoving a pie in Joe Biden's face. On the ground, in real time, the announced inquiry is a worthless exercise, asking stupid questions that nobody really cares about...
• March 07, 2010
• 15:08

  A Missive From Mike

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  Dear Fellow American,
  
  You have been selected from a sample of political leaders in your area to take part in a Nationwide Survey on the Obama Agenda called ASK AMERICA.

  
  ...this is how a letter I found in the mail box the other night begins. It came from the Republican National Committee (even has a blue facsimile signature by that political genius of a leader, Michael Steele) and goes on for two pages of widely-spaced text full of bullet points and numbered lists that convey the general impression that our beleaguered nations needs to turn its desperate eyes to the next Joseph McCarthy to stem the raging tsunami of Obama socialism threatening to sweep it away. The survey goes on for 32 questions, 31 of which generally are of the tone:
  

  Do you think that Barack Obama sucks?
  
  O Yes
  O Majorly
  O Well, Duh!
  O Don't know

  
  Question 32 asks "would you like to give lots of money or oodles of money to us?"
  
  ...I am, admittedly, just a little conflicted about this. On the one hand it is certainly flattering to finally be recognized as 'a political leader'. At the same time, the judgement of the RNC in spending money to send a survey to the likes of me is so seriously called into question that it tends to cheapen the accolade just a little bit. Still, I will not let my new friend Mike Steele down; I will absolutely fill this survey out because Mike wants America's voice to be heard. It's the least I can do, and answering "No" thirty two times won't unduly inconvenience me...
  
  Of course I won't be sending any money (Mrs. Jack K. says I should tape a penny to the survey with a note saying that's what it - and the Republican party - are worth to me, but that's just harsh). And even though Mike asked me to use a postage stamp on the return envelope to help him save much-needed funds, I won't be doing that either. It says right there on the envelope that no postage is necessary if mailed in the US; a stamp on this envelope is one less stamp for all those other envelopes I need to mail, and economic conservatism starts at home, I say...
  
  I can't really say why I got this survey. Perhaps the RNC is sending this thing to registered Independents in districts that McCain won last time. Perhaps my new friend Mike is just crazy. Perhaps the RNC thinks I won't have the guts to answer "No" 32 times and not use a stamp on the return envelope since my name is prominently displayed on the front of the survey. Whatever the reason, this certainly doesn't look like "A Game" material from the sort of cash-strapped national political organization that I would be looking to for leadership in these trying economic times. In fact, it looks pretty goofy to send me a blatantly push poll worded survey, but I'll do my part because my friend Mike wants to know what I think...
• March 04, 2010
• 21:51

  How Can We Say Goodbye, etc: Year Three

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  ...there ere are a very few special things that make my mind threaten to just simply shut down. This has become one of them:
  

  "Brett Favre said Thursday he still hasn't decided whether he'll play again next season — and doesn't expect to make an announcement anytime soon."

  
  Okay. Fine. Give us a call when you figure all of this out. In the meantime, understand that we've all moved beyond your personal battle against your own angst. Go or stay; it is up to you...
• February 27, 2010
• 22:54

  Fever Dreams and the Missing Olympics

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  ...as the Vancouver Olympics draw to a close, I find my one last moment of frustration: some strangely tall woman wandering the streets of a Canadian city on the other side of the continent seeking the core of Canada's comedic contribution to this great country of ours. This apparently was more important that any number of sporting events that could have been discussed...
  
  As far as the family of NBC channels are concerned, this has been: Vancouver 2010 - the Lost Olympics....
• 19:43

  The Downside of That High Wild Western Life

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  ...that there is a strong attraction to the idealistic dream of living out in those high, wild open spaces of the intermountain West - far from the Maddening Crowd, as it were - is a well-established fact. It isn't actually all that great all the time for us regular folks who really do live out here, of course, but never mind that. The point is that a remarkable assortment of people who are either famous or infamous (or who should seriously be considered for one or the other categories) seem to suffer a strange attraction to places that make up in difficult solitude and inconvenient distance for what they lack in actual services and convenient comfort...
  
  We have living amongst us all sorts of movie stars and sports stars and other stars living out on all sorts of gated compounds and private communities and remote ranches. We never see them, of course, because they have 'People' to take care of their needs; either that or they have imported highly skilled makeup artists that allow them to infiltrate our small local societies disguised as actual locals, driving disheveled beat-up mid-nineties Chevy sedans while their $100K European rides hide in unseen barns on their vast estates. And that's cool; it's OK because the whole idea of living out here in the middle of nowhere is centered on the concept of being who you are at the moment, not who you are somewhere else or who you need to be or want to be on some larger stage...
  
  The attraction may well reside in part in the fact that folks out here tend to leave each other alone. There are simple rules of life out here, and to a certain degree some of those rules reject other people's racial hatred and the lines drawn in the sand by those haters for no other reason than the fact that proving yourself is a matter of performance rather than of the color of your skin. Most of the time, and as most recently demonstrated by citizens of John Day, Orygun, the local folks don't care to cross those lines. Even at its simplest level, the idea that white supremacists would like to move into town and make the community the focal point for strange, dangerous racist passions is an idea that falls well over that line. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must reveal that I lived for several years in John Day, Orygun. In the spirit of further disclosure, I must admit that John Day, Orygun, is not some sort of peaceful Utopia free of racial tension; it is a small, primarily Caucasian town of about three thousand people who are inextricably tied to cattle grazing and logging, and you will drive for an hour or two at highway speed in any direction across the Eastern Orygun High Desert before you get to the next larger town (more to the point, you will not pass through another incorporated community during that drive). Most folks are nice, polite, and accepting enough, but a black woman who worked for Mrs. Jack K. and her two young boys were subjected to the sort of harassment and abuse by the minority of yahoos and jerks that one finds in these small towns that may explain why some twisted facsimile of the Aryan Nation may think that it can gain a foothold in this far corner of the high wild...
  
  John Day, Orygun, is not a racist town in the crazy-eyed white supremacist sense, but it is also not a town that comfortably deals with racial issues on a day-to-day basis. I once had a fellow show up on my doorstep offering the argument that the community needed to rise up against a proposal to construct low-income housing just down the hill from me because to build this housing would attract "those Portland people" to our community. We both understood which non-white portions of 'those Portland people' he was referring to. I failed in my efforts to explain to him that our community had plenty of its own low income people who would benefit from this new housing and that no Portland resident of any race in his or her right mind would forsake big city services for cheap rents in a tiny cow town in eastern Orygun. That didn't resolve our debate, so I whipped out the Magnum and drove him away at gunpoint...
  
  OK; so that last part didn't happen, but I did cordially invite him to get off my property and never come back. The episode wasn't actually instructive as to the community viewpoint, but it was instructive as to how these sorts of things can happen. Were you to ask them, the majority of people in this small, almost exclusively white, isolated Eastern Orygun town would insist that they don't have a racist bone in their bodies; as far as they know and as far as their remote life experiences are concerned, that wold be a true statement. With yesterday's protest, they took a step toward proving how they know that it is true. John Day may not be some ultimate Utopian center of interracial Peace and Love, but the best of its residents are willing to say in public that it will not be a center of racist hatred...
• February 20, 2010
• 20:14

  Rest In Peace, Capt. Phil

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I don't care about Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods isn't a real person who does real work for a living and I could care less if his rightfully aggrieved Swedish model trophy wife chases him from their exclusive Florida enclave all the way to Casper, Wyoming, with a heart full of hate and a fist full of Big Bertha driver. I care about real people who do real things. Almost all of the time, those real people and their real lives, no matter how hard or brutal or heroic, are anonymous to all but their friends and loved ones, but once in a while there is the chance for a larger audience to drop in and see what it is all about. "Dangerous Catch" is a passion that I have acquired over the last several years, mostly because it provides a hard look into the working lives of otherwise anonymous men who live way farther out on that lonely remote "live/die" edge than most people could ever imagine, much less venture out toward...
  
  When you think about it, what these men do for a living - captains and crews alike - is crazy (although I realize that the idea of walking off into a flaming forest armed with nothing more than Nomex clothing and a pulaski might look the same). But they have been my kind of crazy, and Capt. Phil Harris was a core part of that crazy group. He lived a real life in front of all of us, battling bad seas and cold crab beds and family issues and health issues and all the rest. I am probably most sad about the fact that we have been so obsessed with things that don't really matter that, despite the fact that Capt. Phil first suffered his stroke almost a month ago and passed away a couple of weeks ago, any real broader media acknowledgment of his passing only came in the last few days...
  
  Fair seas and peaceful skies, Capt. Phil. You will be missed. I pray that God's peace and comforting healing will be with your family...
  
  (photo courtesy of www.corneliamaria.com)
• February 16, 2010
• 21:14

  If I Ran Ford Motor Company...

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I would be on the first flight out of Detroit tomorrow morning, on my way to Lake Mary, Florida, to meet with the members of the local school board to make them an offer that they could not refuse. They are in a bit of a bind right now because, as it so happens, their high school mascot logo (the Fighting Lake Mary Rams) is an exact duplicate of the logo that the Chrysler Corporation uses for its Dodge pickups. The Chrysler Corp. has noticed; the Chrysler Corp. is not amused...
  
  If I were the CEO of Ford Motor Company, I would fly economy class or drive a Toyota Prius or hitchhike on a Chevy car carrier or make whatever travel arrangements necessary to get to the next meeting of the Lake Mary school board so that I may suggest that maybe they could be Mustangs, instead of Rams, and I would offer to license my company's Mustang symbol to them for 10 bucks a year. I would sweeten the deal by offering to pay for the expense (estimated by the Principal to be many, many tens of thousands of dollars) necessary to expunge all evidence of the offending Rams logo from the school campus. Tee shirts, backpacks, and benches for everyone!! Gymnasium center court logo needs to be replaced? Done!!
  
  The reasons I would do this are few and simple, primarily centered on the fundamental that the bean counters and mindless minions at the Chrysler headquarters are just simply nuts. If one cares to spin a high school analogy out just a little bit, the picture in any high school year book beside the caption "Least Likely To Succeed" is going to be the entire corporate headquarters building of the Chrysler Corporation. This is a company that clearly doesn't get it, from a public relations standpoint; rather than celebrating any group that wants to hook up with them, the least of the Big Three managed to stagger haplessly into third place one more time, selling less than half as many full size "Ram" trucks as either Ford or General Motors in 2009. If bean counters and losers weren't at the helm of this rapidly sinking ship, there would probably be an opportunity to realize that supporting - rather than legally attacking - any group that might want to honor the Ram logo is A Good Thing. Chrysler's minions are, unfortunately, prisoners of a long-lost past, trapped in the blinding haze of a sort of reflected glory that hasn't actually been Chrysler's reality for a couple of decades...
  
  If I ran Ford Motor Company, I do believe I would step in here - in a totally altruistic gesture, of course - to help this poor little Florida in its time of need. Lake Mary Mustangs, anyone?
• February 15, 2010
• 18:53

  How Slow Can You Go

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  ...it could have been an epiphanal moment as I listened to this story on Orygun Public Broadcasting just a little while ago. It wasn't, but it could have been, because I have spent this work holiday surrounded by various elements of modern technology. While exchanging a flurry of text messages with my first-born, I was editing this humble little blog's template to bring in Blogger comments (which I don't actually like all that much, but the utility is free) to replace Haloscan comments (which worked just fine for the last six years but is now "NEW AND IMPROVED" and costs money). After I wrapped all that up, I logged in remotely to the Borg to deal with some work issues from the disturbing comfort of my bedroom 'office' (and if I had packed my Borg laptop home, I could have logged into a Citrix site and been "virtual", which I can assure you is just exactly what I want to be on my day off yessireebob)...
  
  At some point, the thought crossed my mind "whatever happened to reading books or watching TV or calling someone to exchange information...or even not doing work stuff unless I go to the trouble of actually driving to the work site to do it?" I'm certainly not a Luddite; the choices available to me in my line of work would consist of either being violently hurled out the front door of the office or quietly ushered out the back exit if I refused to learn each and every little bit of up-to-the-minute technology that is amusingly offered up as the newest, bestest work-easing time-saving thing; cell phones are - as far as the initial imagining of these devices is concerned - a pretty cool technology that I struggle to remember how I lived without (even as the Great State of Orygun declares that I had darned well better pull off to the side of the road if I want to chat on one). And I really, really wish I could get a Digital Video Recorder (and maybe even HDTV), but just playing out in my mind the likely trajectory of the discussion with my Financial Advisor in an effort to establish just what exactly is the need for such stuff makes me just be quiet and be happy that I have TV's that display color pictures...
  
  Why, though, do I need cameras in my phones? Both my work and personal phones have them and neither is nearly as capable as the digital cameras that I have for both work and home. Why should cell phones have app's and Internet access and Bluetooth, and why would I want to wander around appearing to be babbling randomly to myself with some sort of device worthy of Lieutenant Uhura sticking out of my ear? Why do my cell phone voice mail inboxes have a pass code, when the bigger tragedy would be some bad guy having my friggin' phone rather than access to my voice mails?
  
  The world has TIVO; I have TV Guide and a handy excuse to occasionally get out of some get-together I would otherwise drink my own bathwater rather than attend ("sorry, the Big Game is on then"). The world has 3G cell service and is headed fast toward 4G cell service; I have a couple of cell phones that let me call and text and don't work when I push that little "off" button and nobody charges me for anything but talking and texting (and, unlike my boss, I cannot harass my employees with Blackberry emails zooming in from every quadrant of the celestial map). The world has cutting edge laptop computers that can do fractal geometry while simultaneously streaming YouTube videos and updating MyFace sites and collecting Twitter feeds and playing GTA:SA, all of which can be stored - along with the entire contents of the Library of Congress - on their capacious hard drives; I have a 5-year-old Dell with a 40-gig hard drive and 2 USB ports...
  
  I don't have any particular interest in setting the clock back to 1985. There is too much cool stuff out there, and most of what I think of as cool stuff is controllable by me. So I won't go back to 1985; 2005 is, on the other hand, negotiable...
• February 13, 2010
• 19:09

  The Disappearing Invasion

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  ...it was always a stupid idea, frankly, that the government of the United States was jumping all over the Haiti earthquake in a effort to exercise the opportunity to invade and occupy that star-crossed nation. "Invasion" and "Occupation" were charges raised by various individual observers from the left here in the US, but they were also broached by a representative of the French government. Given that the 'two war' strategy that the Pentagon has always employed as the foundation for its force planning has been proven to be woefully, tragically inadequate in the face of involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea that the US was somehow interested in involving itself in an occupation of Haiti was absurd on its own face. Ill will about the Monroe Doctrine die hard, though, both here and abroad, and even in times of dire need there will be those who, for whatever reason, fail to - or refuse to - understand some of the fundamental aspects of the short-term capabilities of the military to immediately respond to catastrophic events...
  
  The rumblings about occupation are probably to be expected in this case; it is Haiti, after all, and both the United States and France have all sorts of history there. The reality is entirely different, especially if one looks at the need to respond to the looming humanitarian disaster presented by the Jan. 12 earthquake from the standpoint of mobilizing resources to remote places. People I know do this sort of thing all the time, every year, year after year, and those people would commit unspeakable acts if such behavior would offer a shot at having the resources of the military available to move all the personnel and all of their attendant supplies to wild land fires across the western United States. Without emergency declarations and a certain lag time, this doesn't normally happen, no matter how many homes may be at risk from conflagration...
  
  Aside from all of that, it appears that the much-dreaded invasion and occupation of Haiti by US troops is starting to look not very much like that sort of thing. You don't pull troops out if you are planning an occupation, and you certainly don't leave a mere 13,000 troops to engage in the occupation of an entire country, especially when many of those troops may not be deployed for purposes of quelling the population at gunpoint (which is what 'occupation' is all about). It was always, as I said before, a stupid idea that the US would see this moment as the perfect time to occupy another sovereign nation - even one falling within the reach of that old Monroe Doctrine -
  if for no other reason than the fact that there is no compelling national security reason to do so. As a result of the intrusion of harsh numerical reality, the "invasion" seems to be disappearing...
• February 08, 2010
• 19:49

  Firsts

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  ...first time things are amazing, exciting, even occasionally wondrous for the power of the emotions that they fire up deep in our guts. The first bike ride without training wheels; the first time staying over night at a friend's house; the first time driving a car; the first time driving a car alone without parents shouting panicked instructions; the first kiss; "the First Time"...
  
  Last time things are emotional, too, but are usually more poignant than uplifting (though they can possibly be both). That last walk through your parents' house before leaving to start your new life elsewhere; the last caress of a beloved childhood pet before you place it in the hole you dug out in a far corner of the back yard; the last goodbye to a friend or lover or loved one that you know you will probably never see again for a whole variety of reasons...
  
  Over a remarkable span than covered less than 12 hours last night and early this morning, we had - if we wanted to join in - the opportunity to watch both a first and a last. Today, a good portion of the population of New Orleans spent the morning sucking down pain relievers like confectionery tablets out of a Pez dispenser in a desperate effort to calm heads and stomachs after the first Super Bowl victory by a football team that has been for the better part of half a century the picture next to the dictionary definition of the word 'hapless'. An entire city - and, for a moment, an entire nation - chanted "Who Dat" as last night's game supplanted the last episode of MASH as the most-watched TV program of all time...
  
  Less than six hours later, anyone who wanted to stay up really late could watch the last nighttime launch of a space shuttle...and one of the last launches period of any space shuttle (photo courtesy of www.satnews.com):
  ...I'll admit it: I'm a space geek. I grew up in an era when Mom and Dad roused me from early-morning sleep to watch those first Mercury launches on the far side of the country at 4 and 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning. I remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM pad onto the lunar surface (sitting alone in Grandma E's Bremerton, WA, living room, screaming my lungs out at my parents and grandparents to come watch a moment of history that was far more important than whatever inane chattering they were engaged in; didn't work, and I watched it alone). I cheered space shuttle satellite launches and the advent of Sally Ride; I celebrated the Hubble launch and the repair missions. I remember where I was and how I felt about the Challenger's last failed mission and I woke the entire family up on that fateful early West Coast Saturday morning on 1 Feb 2003 when the news first broke about the reentry failure of Columbia...
  
  I am a child of the space age, growing up at the same time that the US space program grew to maturity. Budgetary and societal issues have dictated that the era of human space flight - at least as far as US astronauts being flung into space on US-built space vehicles is concerned - is coming to an end this year. The mystery and majesty of an endeavor that captured the imagination of the Baby Boomer generation will see its curtain drawn down for a whole lot of reasons that either make perfect sense or make no sense whatsoever, depending on particular world views, but the bottom line for now is that Endeavor's last night launch is one of those Last Things...
  
  
• January 31, 2010
• 20:44

  Malware Hell In A Very Small Place

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  ...several days locked in "Death Match" head-to-head combat with a particularly nasty little piece of malware called "Internet Security 2010"...
  
  Countless hours, including the better of nine hours just today...
  
  Installation of a new anti-virus program (downloading the newest definitions, under the circumstances, made the days of 58k modems seem like the Good Old Days); researching the culprit on another computer, digging deeper into the bowels of Windows registries than any helpless, hapless computer duffer like me has any right or reason to dig; killing files and registry entries with the peculiar wild abandoned of a desperate, hopeless victim who can clearly see an imminent future where this faithful old laptop is soaked with snow blower gas and set on fire in the driveway...
  
  It has been a far less than fruitful weekend spent solely in the effort to kill this ugly little bug that cropped up suddenly - out of nowhere - yesterday (my elitist Firefox smugness has taken a serious hit over this), and it is only by the grace of a loving, forgiving God that I am even typing these words right now. At that, I'm not all that confident that every single keystroke I type isn't being funneled into some dark hacker lair for later exploitative analysis. Not that I was looking for such a distraction, but this episode has certainly taken my mind off of my concerns about switching my comment system from Haloscan to something else after receiving their 'end of service' notification on Friday...
  
  Tomorrow is a Monday that is looking better than usual, for some reason...
  
• January 27, 2010
• 19:39

  Bring Back Bobby Jindal

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  ...I am watching the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address right now, which is being delivered by the newly elected Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell. It is a truly painful experience on a couple of levels...
  
  First - for those of us who may not have been sufficiently engaged in the Virginia gubernatorial race last fall - is the pain of realizing just how bad a candidate the Democrats must have offered if this particular remarkably life-like cardboard cutout could actually win the election. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that if I want to go up against a rather accomplished orator like Barack Obama, I'm going to pick some handsome white male (which seems to be the Republican strategy after Bobby Jindal's remarkable and vaguely spooky meltdown last year) who actually can read a speech without sounding like he's reading a speech to his classmates in his high-school speech class...
  
  Second, it is absurd to try to create some Republican Potemkin Village like the disturbingly handsome and photogenic collection of Republicans collected in the Virginia statehouse that seemingly suggests that Americans from all walks of life and racial/ethnic backgrounds are all the way down with whatever it was he said (I confess that I hit the mute button about 4 minutes in to keep from injuring myself by toppling out of my chair from speech-induced somnolence). These are not the faces of the Republican party and it is simply an insult to all those Blacks and Asians and Hispanics - and even to a whole hosts of attractive young Euro-Americans - who haven't found any solace in the Republican message to try to suggest that there is some sort of broad support for whatever the message was (ibid - "mute button"). While the Republican producers of this odd little event did a good job of hiding the "applause" sign that - based on the style and delivery of Governor McDonnell's apparent speech class assignment - clearly must have been flaring up like sun spots at all the appropriate places, it still remains that there are not majorities of all those ethnic and racial categories that Republicans apparent have divided us into who accept or even tolerate Republican views on the great issues of the day...
  
  I actually feel a little bit sad for the Republicans for cranking up another rather lame attempt to respond to an Obama speech. I almost feel most sorry for the dude in the uniform behind the Governor, because I suspect that someone...somewhere...is going to raise the question of why anyone is showing up in uniform to be seen in a prominent spot behind the person making a solely political statement in the SOTU response. The State of the Union speech at least has some attachment to the Constitution requirement to make an annual report to Congress; there is no corresponding requirement of a response by the party out of power, and to involve one's self in what is a purely political exercise opens up all sorts of personal disciplinary and legal risks for anyone who wants to show up wearing a uniform...
  
  Jindal's performance last year may have been a political disaster that gave the children nightmares and scared the cats under the sofa, but it at least has some entertainment value because of its pure strangeness. Tonight's performance was simply embarrassingly lame with all of its stiff, stilted amateurish oratory, stale message, and manufactured cheering. Bring back Bobby Jindal, I say!! Make the Republican response interesting - or at least amusing - again!
• January 25, 2010
• 19:58

  When Mail Fraud Is A Policy

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  ...so the Republican National Committee, as part of the on-going efforts by Chairman Michael "Keepin' It Real" Steele to keep it real, has sent out letters labeled "Official Document" in the finest tradition of Publisher's Clearing House that combine 'we need money' dunning letters with supposed "Census Surveys" to people all across the nation. The letters, of course, don't contain an actual Census of Congressional Districts, despite what all the heavy-duty capitalized "Do Not Destroy" lingo on the envelope says; they include a set of remarkably lame push-polling questions delivered by Postal employees who have better things to do rather than being delivered directly to your telephone by some stammering half-witted hireling who seems less than regretful about interrupting your dinner...
  
  I suppose it's important in their own minds for Steele and the Republican National Committee to combine fund raising with a survey - one that they apparently would like you to think of as an Official Do-Not-Destroy Census document (and I'm sure its timing being coincident with the start of the actual real live U.S. Census is a simple accident of timing) - that asks questions like "Do you agree or disagree with the current B. Hussein Obama administration's proposal to kill cuuute cute cute little kittens and warm snuggly adorable little puppies to produce luxuriant sleeping robes from their skins for the illegal immigrants who will be sitting at the front of the lines at all the doctor's offices and health clinics after the Government takeover of health care?"...
  
  Lord knows Michael and his...well, OK, not "supporters", but maybe "fellow travelers... need the money in order to tap into the rising tide of Tea Baggerdom sweeping the nation. At least, that is what we are told by those experts who talked at length about the Permanent Republican Majority and the advent of Dow Jones averages on the high side of 30,000. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Mikey and the RNC might tippy-toe right up to the very edge of mail fraud to rake in some bucks and collect meaningless survey data that nobody but FAUX News and the RNC's ad writers will have any use for. After all, those same 'Permanent Republican Majority'/'Dow at 30K' talking heads have been telling us that last week's SCOTUS decision on McCain-Feingold won't actually have all that much real impact on real American's lives, so fund raising under the fairly obvious sheep's cloak of a bogus Official "Census" mailing is apparently called for to try to refill Republican coffers...
  
  I think the observation of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who is a Democrat who received the mailing at his official residence (apparently news travels slow in Republican circles), perfectly captures the value of this so-called Republican Census:
  

  "The Republicans have said they want to get a bigger tent," Schweitzer told The Associated Press, "so perhaps they are trying to lure a politician into the Republican Party that can actually balance a budget."

  
• January 24, 2010
• 21:03

  A "Who Dat:?" Kind Of Night

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  ...I don't want to talk about politics tonight for a whole lot of reasons, but I can't help wanting to talk about a couple of things...
  
  I am a stone cold sucker for great sports stories, because I am even more a fan of a variety of sports than I am of politics - and the gulf is starting to grow more expansive every day recently. The N'awlins Saints are the story of the year, in my mind. A rookie head coach and what was essentially an injured, supposedly washed-up cast-off San Diego Charger quarterback took hold of a devastated, still-suffering city and, finally, picked up and carried that city and its still suffering residents on their own two backs to a place that it has never been. I don't have a dog in the Super Bowl fight - again - but I will be a part of the "Who Dat" nation in two weeks, regardless of my appreciation of the talents of Peyton Manning...
  
  While surfing the TV after the game, I stumbled across BET's UNCF tribute to Lionel Ritchie, which prompted a flood of memories of a time when I actually had a full head of hair and far less adipose tissue than that which now haunts me. In its own way, this provided another "Who Dat" moment in its own perverse way; it allowed me to reflect on a part of my musical past - one that my teenage children seem incapable of either appreciating or understanding - that appears to be long dead culturally, in the same way that my questionable contributions to the future of our great nation view my appreciation of the early Beatles or the Beach Boys. It is almost impossible to explain to them why a particular cover of the Lionel Ritchie/Diana Ross hit "Endless Love" even matters, much less trumps the original. I've decided to not even try; I will only offer Mariah Carey and Luther Vandross in a remarkable version of a song that was part of the soundtrack to a life that my children can't appreciate but probably should learn to understand when their own minds turn to the question of "why am I here" (if you know what I mean)...
  
  
• January 22, 2010
• 19:05

  On Not Being Sad To See This Day End

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  ...a number of years ago (that number being in the double digits and, no, I don't want to talk about it), I was leading a group of people working on data collection in a burned-over area from a late-summer forest fire. It was January, we were working on exposed upper slopes of the Western Orygun Cascades, and the gusting winds from the winter storm wrapped around us made the sloppy wet falling snow actually blow uphill across the steep exposed slopes on which we toiled. The normal good-natured bitching about the weather in the earlier hours of the day began to take on a more desperate, keening tone after a cold, miserable, and extremely short lunch break spent hunkering down on the leeward side of the least dangerous-looking dead trees surrounding us...
  
  Except for this one guy. He was one of those truly elemental creatures you run into occasionally in my line of work, the kind who loves every aspect of being Out There, regardless of the conditions or circumstances. He was the sort who just might bare his chest to the howling worst that Mother Nature could offer and shout "Bring It On, Baby", were it not for the socially norming understanding that those around him who didn't share his absolute love for Mother Nature's raw challenges just might grab the largest piece of woody material they could lay hands on and beat him senseless just to shut him up...
  
  ...and he was simply devouring the day. "It can't get too bad for me", he kept saying as other conversations increasing drifted toward the idea of going back to college and getting that accounting degree that Momma always talked about. As the afternoon blew on, however, his celebration of living an uncompromised Life In The Heart Of Nature became more muted, even as others contemplated the directions their lives might take if the first thing they did on getting back to the office was to resign. At the end of the day, we trudged, stumbled, and dragged ourselves down the side of the mountain through the mud and wind and gloppy wet snowfall back to the crew rig, wet and cold in a way that the manufacturers of our rain gear and "miracle" wicking undergarments apparently couldn't imagine possible. We loaded our equipment into the back of the truck in grim silence and crawled into the cab to begin the delicate heater system balancing act between providing warmth and managing window steam sufficiently to be able to see where we were going...
  
  From somewhere behind me, I heard the subdued voice of Nature Man breaking the unusual - in fact remarkably atypical - end of the day crew cab silence: "Y'know. I have to say...I'm not really sad to see this day end."
  
  That's the way I feel tonight, even though the pure physical reality of this moment is so far removed from that miserable afternoon a couple of decades ago. I'm sitting comfortably in my warm home dressed in shorts and a tee shirt instead of behind the damp cold steering wheel of a smelly wet government-marked Chevy Suburban out in the middle of some wind-swept snow-raked hillside, but my mind is in almost the same place it was all those years ago. Today marks the end of the week, in a working sense, and this has been a week that simply no longer deserves to live...
  
  From Monday on, I had the opportunity to see the disturbing reaffirmation of a very real possibility that my Type 1 diabetic teenager will enter adult life having virtually no chance of finding affordable health care insurance because of his 'preexisting condition', courtesy of the election of a wingnut Republican to the seat once held by Teddy Kennedy in the US Senate. My disgust with that particular repudiation of all that it means to be a person - or the parent of a person - branded with the Devil's Mark of "Preexisting Condition" was reinforced, in the aftermath of Brown's Massachusetts victory, by Congressional Democrats displaying the kind of timorous waffling that makes Dunkirk look like an absolute unalloyed victory in retrospect. All of this was followed on Thursday by stark proof of the George W. Bush version of the statement "Elections Have Consequences", when the conservative, judicially activist SCOTUS team manufactured from the spare conservative Senatorial majority that he enjoyed created, out of whole cloth, the idea that Corporations are people, too...
  
  In the course of just a few remarkable days, my son's hopes of being able to find affordable health insurance to cover the breath-taking expenses of the tools needed to keep his disease from controlling both his life and his life expectancy took a severe beating. That beat-down came both from the direct likelihood of the Republican "just say no" strategy finally bearing its ugly fruit with the addition of a 41st Senator and from the predictable coming campaign by certain big-money corporate and special interests targeted directly against the reelection of those Members of Congress who might actually care - if even in an abstract way - about what kind of life my son can live...
  
  After over 30 years of eyebrow-deep involvement in the emotionally-freighted world of natural resource management, I have learned - if nothing else - that the weekend matters. It's a time to step away: watch sports, read novels, get to the high country, or do whatever else that might transport the mind away from the stress of that 'real life' that otherwise calls for obsessive attention to detail and patient consideration of aggressively opposing viewpoints. It will be harder this weekend to step away from all the noise and smoke, however, because so much of what went on this week has huge implications for my family and my own emotional self. I suppose that all of what went on this week is what makes me reflect back on a particular memory from a couple of decades ago and say that I'm not sad to see this day, and this week, end...
• January 18, 2010
• 19:57

  For Sale: High Mileage; One Owner

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  ...I have to confess that, once in a while, you see a deal come by that is just too good pass up, if only you hadn't made the mistake of making fun of that geeky Gates kid back in middle school in Seattle. If you had decided to hang with him and Paul Allen and their other two friends instead of slamming them inside their lockers, you could probably be first in line today to be the first person on your block to own a space shuttle...
  
  I don't know about you but - to me - having space shuttle Atlantis sitting in the front yard is way cooler than controlling a foundation or owning the Seahawks (especially the latter, especially over the last couple of years). On the other hand, if you had befriended those little nerds and been their protector from the cruelty of your friends and maybe got in on the ground floor of what would become Microsoft with them, you would be living in some sort of gated community now with the kind of monster CCR's that would prevent you from parking it on the front yard anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, who's going to buy a space shuttle to put out in the backyard by the pool and the guest house?
  
  But still...I'd write a check for that baby right this minute, if only I had been afforded the chance to make that smart choice all those years ago back at the Lakeside School, which I didn't...
  
  Because I grew up in Idaho. Another opportunity lost, I'm afraid...
• January 13, 2010
• 19:22

  Stipulated: Joe Lieberman Is A Putz

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  ...ok, so that probably isn't a stipulation that falls into the category of "Breaking News", but this Politico report reinforces any impression that any reasonable person may have regarding Lieberman's total abandonment of any pretense of actual concern for the plight of any real people. It's been pretty clear since his reelection that his primary goal in life was to be a jerk to Democrats as a form of personal retribution. Essentially, Lieberman has sacrificed his Constitutional responsibility of representation, as well as the well-being of his constituents, on the alter of his own bruised ego. We already knew that simply because we didn't see him fleeing across the parking lot to avoid any suggestion that he would even tolerate being in the same room as a proposal that he serve as John McCain's running mate in 2008, but the hits just seem to keep on coming...
  
  The Politico story merely is the most recent crumbling brick in that slimy wall of lies that is part of the political house in which Joe Lieberman lives. Of Course he wrote a personal letter to Harry Reid; all the better to preserve his personal options. Of Course he didn't come right out in the letter stating that he would oppose the Medicare plan; that would tip the hand he fully intended to play. Lieberman had no interest other than flexing his own muscle for the sole purpose of showing those Democrat bastards who turned their backs on him in his hour of need just exactly who is the boss around here, which is why even the most sympathetic treatment he could hope to get - from Politico - clearly demonstrates that entire rooms full of Democratic legislators and staffers were unable to gather from either his statements or his conveniently-produced "confidential" letter that he actually had deal-stopper concerns about aspects of the Senate Health Care Reform bill prior to his star turn on a Sunday talk show...
  
  Timing is everything. Lieberman wrote a letter; if he was smart - and he clearly is - he made sure that it was an official hard-copy correspondence rather than an email, which guaranteed that Harry Reid probably wouldn't even see it before Lieberman strolled onto the "Face The Nation" set to fire an unexpected four-torpedo spread into the deal Reid thought he had agreement on. It's a move that the most skilled Mafia hitman would have to sit back and admire for its shear audacity: compose a "personal and confidential" letter expressing views that are totally contradictory to any viewpoint you have previously shared with Senate leadership; run it through your staff system so it takes all day to get it completed but is still dated Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009; make sure that it isn't delivered either electronically or by hard copy until sometime later in the day of Friday, Dec. 11, when the Majority Leader's office is powering down for the weekend and can't respond immediately; plaster your own face all over the TV on Sunday pulling the plug on Health Care legislation in its then-current form, comfortable in the knowledge that you created a CYA 'get out of jail free' document that you can wave around to 'prove' your sincerity and 'timely' objection, even though that whole thing is a total sham because nobody had the chance to address or even respond to the concerns raised in your cleverly useless letter...
  
  To be honest, Lieberman didn't play all that smartly clever a game, as far as the 'inside baseball' aspect of this story is concerned. He did, however, lay down a paper trail to roll out before his electoral constituents (the people of Connecticut) and his natural constituents (beady-eyed weasels everywhere). That paper trail is most likely bogus, as far as any sort of reality-based community is concerned, but Joe Lieberman is a putz. When you're a putz, connections to actual reality don't matter...
• January 11, 2010
• 20:49

  The Trent Lott Problem

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  ...much is being made about the reported comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid concerning Barack Obama that is found in the Mark Halperin/John Heilemann book about the 2008 presidential campaign. On the face of it, his notation of Obama's lack of a "Negro dialect" ("unless he chooses to have one") has a certain taint of racial insensitivity, but it is probably just simply the product of a clumsy choice of words by an old white guy from a lily-white state who didn't have sufficient staff support to keep him sufficiently up to speed on latter-day nomenclature to steer him clear of the sort of statements that that have plunged him into the crisis of leadership in which he now finds himself...
  
  There is a huge outcry now, primarily from Republicans, that is attempting to draw a direct parallel to the trouble that Trent Lott found himself in back in 2002 that finally led him to resign as Senate Majority leader...and that is the Trent Lott Problem...
  
  Lott may in fact have a racist bone or two in his body - I don't have any evidence to argue one way or another on that point, other than his voting record - but it has always seemed to me that his comments at Strom Thurmond's ninety-somethingth birthday party about how we'd all be better off had he been elected president when he ran for the office was little more than a casual unthinking off-the-cuff bit of homage to a Grand Old Man of the Party and not an affirmation of Thurmond's segregation party platform. Even though I would not have had a single qualm in 2002 about supporting any sort of proposal to set Lott adrift on an iceberg for the sake and survival of the nation, it seemed to me that he was quite simply getting railroaded straight out of town over comments that were made outside of any sort of historical context and were simply pretty words offered in homage to an old man. As it so happens, I was on the wrong side of the 'equal sign' on the Lott/Thurmond issue - for reasons that I don't actually understand and will probably never accept - and poor ol' Trent had to walk the plank over his comments...
  
  As a result of all that past history, we find ourselves fetched up against the shoals that we are trapped against today. Harry Reid said things that were stupidly insensitive (but not necessarily surprising) that are being compared to Trent Lott's comments back in the dayp, which were themselves stupid and insensitive to people of color, whether or not either man realized it. Lott lost track of - or perhaps never really understood - what Thurmond was all about, and that is a different place than the one in which Reid found himself in when he said what he said. That is where the Trent Lott problem lives for Democrats and for Reid, however, because both episodes live at one margin or another of what we understand as race relationships. Reid's commments in that context are nothing compared to Lott's comments, but both have the taint of racism...
  
  Hence the Trent Lott Problem; what Reid said lives in an entirely different plane than the potential meaning behind what Lott said (regardless of what Lott actually meant), but there appears to be a moment of equivalency in the world of political media. So, for the near future, we will be hammered with one version or another of the question "when will Harry Reid resign from leadership like Trent Lott was forced to?", regardless of whether or not we are actually talking about the same thing...
  
• January 08, 2010
• 19:50

  I Think I See The Problem

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...y'see, in some other world...say for example, Dr. Pangloss's 'otherwise perfect world', perhaps, there would be all sorts of actual journalistic checks and balances that would discourage Rudy Gualini from even saying something like this:
  

  "We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Giuliani said. "We've had one under Obama."

  
  Rudy, in that otherwise perfect world, would learn that he would be hounded off the set of "Good Morning, America" by such a savagely bloody and vicious attack by the show's hosts that he would be lucky to ever be able to play any role on the stage of American politics other than the crazy uncle in the basement. His political currency would be valued somewhere south of Monopoly money if he even dallied with the idea of making such an outrageous statement...or at least it would in that otherwise perfect world...
  
  We don't live in that world, sadly enough. We live in a grimy world of smarmy lies and vaguely shaded half-truths that pass for the supposed statement of facts. Rudy says what he says, reinforcing the idea that a lie that is repeated often enough becomes the truth, and George Stephanopoulos sits there with a Gomer Pyle buck-toothed grin soaking it all up, apparently never once firing up enough brain cells to critically evaluate how Rudy's statements square with even the first draft of history that has been laid down regarding The Year Of Our Lord 2001, when George W. Bush was President of the United States. Even beyond his failure to pursue the factual reality of Sept. 11, 2001, Stephanopoulos apparently can't summon the slightest hint of curiosity to inquire as to how Rudy squares his patter with the equally factual reality of the story of shoe bomber Richard Reid that played out three months after nine-eleven...
  
  I think I see the problem here. We appear to be afflicted with a bunch of people hungering to be the ruling class who would better serve us by being beer-drunk passed out over the air cleaner of an '88 Dodge Aries who are being facilitated by a collection of so-called journalists who look like nothing less than the south-side view of a north-bound horse. There isn't any plausible explanation for George's failure to explore Rudy's statements other than the rather casual fact that the supposed 'opinion-maker' interviewers like Stephanopoulos - whether they are doing the big time Sunday Talking Head shows or diving into the fluffy weekday morning shows - are little more than enablers. We knew that already, of course, because we have been able to collect a long, tragically rich history of supposed journalists sitting on their hands while various politicians spout any vacuous nonsense that comes to mind, but this little episode - where even clearly-established history is passed over as if it never happened - finally ratifies a clear understanding of the failure of the media to be a faithful arbiter of the truth...
• January 01, 2010
• 18:57

  EXCLUSIVE: Jumped Shark Devours Newsweek's Michael Isikoff In Self-Defense

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...wait!! What!? Would your faithful servant actually suggest that the man who essentially made his bones stoking the fires of the Clinton Impeachapalooza should be consumed by a thoughtless cold-blooded piscean killing machine just because he doesn't even seem to have a sufficiently vague grasp of journalistic ethics to keep this sort of intentionally divisive tripe from seeing the light of day?
  
  Well, no. I would never suggest such a thing.
  
  That would be ridiculous.
  
  I am a far bigger fan of Orcas, but "jumped the killer whale" just doesn't have any cred on the street, so any suggestion that a Newsweek 'superstar' should be devoured by an intelligent, warm-blooded mammalian killing machine that may have well-reasoned malice aforethought would simply be a lost, wasted metaphor...
  
  This entire report looks like little more than a journalistic hatchet job more worthy of FAUX News than some entity that still - rightly or wrongly - considers itself to be a real-live old school Fourth Estate enterprise. From the headline on down, it is a wealth of innuendo and carefully shaded suppositions, none of which provides anything approximating the barest hint that we are looking at anything that even rises to the level of that infamous 6 August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing...
  
  The inflammatory headline says "Obama Got Pre-Christmas Intelligence Briefing About Terror Threats to "Homeland", but what are the facts of the story?
  
  Did the briefing mention Yemen? No.
  
  Did it include any mention of the potential of an African national being involved? Well, no, not really.
  
  Did the briefing have any information that suggested that anyone at the mid-level or higher layers of the US government had "threads" that could have been pulled together to make Barack Obama go all Harrison Ford and clamber on board Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas day and personally take down Umar Abdulmutallab? Nope.
  
  Was there anything - any little piece of evidence at all - available to anybody who either gave or received the briefing that would point to a Nigerian man getting on a US-bound flight in the capital city of the Netherlands for the express purpose of blowing up his plane over Detroit? Get real!! Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) couldn't get any farther inland than Bangor, Maine, and his only real crime was "Moon Shadow".
  
  Yes, there were "threads". No, they didn't point to Abdulmutallab, and the fact that his dad tried to raise red flags reflect more on the intelligence structure that Gee Dub's administration left behind rather than on the efforts of the current administration. More to the point, none of this mattered in that EXCLUSIVE Breaking news report about the briefing that Isikoff is so breathlessly taken by...
  
  There were failures in any number of systems that allowed Abdulmutallab to get on Northwest Flight 253 on Dec. 25. There was not, on the other hand, a single thing offered by this EXCLUSIVE Isikoff "report" that suggests that the upper levels of the Obama administration had a single clue to go on in order to interdict this particular terrorist attack. The headline and the reporting look good, though, in the sort of newly discovered context of a media that somehow lost its voice when Republicans were in charge but suddenly doesn't feel constrained about 'speaking "truth" to power' now that Democrats have hands on all those levers of power...
• December 31, 2009
• 19:17

  Forests And Trees, Anti-Terror Division

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  ...aside from all the finger-pointing going on right now in the intelligence community and amongst various critics dug out of the woodwork by Politico in this story, there is still one really important point that is being missed:
  
  The Guy Got On An Airplane...
  
  Regardless of any information that any particular officer of the federal government had in his or her possession at any given moment, The Guy Got On An Airplane...
  
  Yes, there appear to be ongoing problems with various agencies and departments being able to play well together, but that doesn't actually surprise me. My years of exposure to the Fed Borg have caused me to develop a simple philosophy that I call the Rule of Concentric Circles:
  
  

  Employees tend to occupy a native environment controlled by an 'us vs. them' mentality that is bounded at varying levels of intensity in outwardly expanding circles. There is the 'us' in a room vs. 'them' in the rest of the office; there is the 'us of the office vs. the 'them' of offices in other locations; then there is the 'us' of our organization vs. the 'them' of other organizations. Finally there is the big encompassing 'us' vs. all those 'thems' who represent some other culture or state or movement. There can be any number of extra circular boundaries in between, adding layers to this construct, but there are always those next outer circular boundaries defining where some version 'them' lives. There is, of course, a certain sort of bond as we move across the adjacent boundary to the next larger version of 'us', but as you move across those boundaries to outer circles, the valence of that bond tends to weaken.

  
  
  So, sure, there are turf wars between groups who - from the outside - would seem to an objective observer to be otherwise naturally disposed to work together for the good of the order. That problem surely needs to be fixed (though, for the life of me, I don't know how one goes about doing that in light of the ancient animosities and historic disagreeable relationships amongst various intelligence and security agencies without resorting to performance incentives like directed reassignment to Afghanistan for failure to cooperate), but it misses the main point...
  
  Anti-terrorist intelligence work has never been the sole forward edge of the battle area (FEBA) in the effort to keep militants and wackos and lone wolves from threatening the lives of air travelers. We have been subjecting ourselves to varying degrees of personal scrutiny in our efforts to get on a commercial airliner for a few decades now, and the reality of strangers forking through our suitcased underwear, pawing through our carry-ons, and sending our camera bags full of precious memories through powerful x-ray machines has been around far longer than the TSA. Those security screening lines have long been a primary FEBA, initially because most folks didn't care to have their Seattle-to-Phoenix itinerary include an intermediate stop in Havana. The Guy Got On An Airplane, and the problem isn't so much that a couple of jackbooted Federal Lackeys (as my friends and neighbors so lovingly label we Fed Borg types) couldn't see their way clear to talk to each other; the problem is that the airport security system failed. Forget that there were little cartoon arrows with "he's the one" balloon captions pointing at this guy as he moved through the system because of the available information; the fact is that He Got On That Plane and, even if his dad hadn't been a stand-up guy or if he was just some lone actor with a head full of hate and some interesting contacts, He Still Would Have Gotten On That Flight...
  
  The trees are blocking the view of the forest here; the point that is being missed is obvious. The most important failure that apparently came close to resulting in a tragedy over Detroit on Christmas day was the failure of the passenger screening process. It's true that there are plenty of waypoints where this particular fellow could have and should have been identified and interdicted, but the fact remains that some guy was able to get onto a commercial flight with a pants-load of PETN and a loaded syringe he wasn't forced to explain. At one important level, it doesn't matter what his human connections were; those two important facts are what matters to most of us who go through all those hassles of putting ourselves and our loved ones onto commercial flights...
• 17:25

  List? We Don't Need No Stinkin' List!

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this is the time of year, of course, where we are inundated with Top Ten "Best/Worst/Most of" lists, and this year we are facing a bit of a double whammy because we are not only running up against the back end of the Gregorian fantasy of a "year" but are also even facing the end of a decade. Or maybe not; it all depends whether you think counting starts with 0 or 1 (I've always been a "count to 10" kind of guy myself, but somebody who has the pull to do so says we start counting decades at 'zero', so there you are). In this case, I don't really have a real problem with ending the decade tonight, because it is a decade that deserves more than any in recent experience to be beaten with a shovel until it quits wiggling...
  
  This hasn't been a decade that deserves any sort of enumeration of lists of ten of anything. This decade deserves to mostly be bitterly remembered for the number '8'; specifically, it deserves to be remembered - as a warning, if for no other reason - for eight years starting on the Constitutionally mandated date of Jan. 20, 2001, and ending (mercifully, but far too late) on Jan. 20, 2009. You could probably crank out any number of lists of Bottom 10 or 20 or 50 lists just accounting for the assault on our personal freedoms, civil rights, or democratic ideals as a result of the cheap shills, fixers, and neo-despots who carried George W. Bush on their shoulders through the White House door and straight into the Oval Office on that first day. They gave him a massive, shiny desk and a purty rug for it to set on, propped him up in a sumptuous leather chair, and told him not to touch anything...
  
  The Smart People took over and began taking crowbars and clawhammers to just about anything that looked like it might represent a common understanding of who we are. Any legitimate timeline of the Bush administration's domination of this departing decade demonstrates, aside from the raw war-mongering bellicosity of the whole thing, a wholesale effort to stamp out just about any aspect at any level of The American Dream. The only thing that even vaguely and perversely looked like a saving grace in Bushco's effort to shift the social services burden to the middle class through massive tax cuts to the wealthy and businesses was the fact that - at the same time - they were working like rabid feral dogs trying to tear apart those social services. Pell Grants, 'Teach For America', and stem cell research were just the tips of this ugly iceberg...
  
  The putative representatives of the idea of keeping government out of peoples' lives brought us the Patriot Act, wiretapping of just about any person for any reason, banning of 'the morning after pill', and direct interference in the end-of-life decision of one single person. These supposed defenders of America's freedom established, through law and Executive Directive, a virtual roadmap for the creation of a dictatorship under the flimsiest of "national emergency" circumstances (and if I were the 44th President of The United States I would be sending weekly cards, Candygrams, and notes to the Republican leadership thanking them for the foresight of doing some of the heavy lifting on these items, just for the pure joy of keeping them up nights)...
  
  Through the auspices of the office of the vice president, they dared Senate Democrats with a 'nuclear option' of blowing up the practice of filibuster over judicial nominations; in hindsight, since we ended up with Roberts and Alito anyway, it was a dare the Democrats probably should have taken. They essentially rewrote over 750 laws passed appropriately under the terms of the US Constitution by crafting "signing statements" that without actual Constitutional authority or any testing in Constitutionally-authorized courts gutted those laws to greater or lesser degrees...
  
  One could, with sufficient time and inclination, write a fairly passable "Declaration of Independence" against the brutal reality of those eight wasted years that sit like a huge dung-beetle smack dab in the heart of this departing decade. I don't have either the time or the inclination, so a hearty wave goodbye will have to suffice. It is ironic, as I think about it, that one creation that GWB's minions certainly wouldn't care to point pridefully toward is the vibrant on-line political community that fought against everything GeeDub and his handlers tried to do. On the other hand, the current interactions of that community may suggest that Will Rogers' famous observation about 'not belonging to an organized party' doesn't even get all the way to the nut of the matter...
  
  In any case, I don't need no stinkin' list...or, if I do, that list only need consist of 8 years off of the last decade's calendars. Or failing that, the list only needs one entry: Bush-43. That works just fine for me...
• December 30, 2009
• 18:37

  And I Missed It

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  ...when you are an alumnus of the University of Idaho, there are certain things that you have been trained to accept, sort of in the same fashion that planaria are trained, by the use of various powerful painful stimuli. You learn to accept that nobody who lives more than a day's drive from the Palouse knows how to properly pronounce the name of the community (long 'o' at the end, not the 'cow' sound used when saying the name of the Ruskie capitol); you learn to come to grips with verbal abuse accruing from the historical accident of an occasional publicly prominent nitwit having spent a few months on campus. Most of all, you learn to cope with the sort of long-suffering patience that can only come from long years of witnessing doom and failure in intercollegiate athletic endeavors...
  
  This afternoon, for the first time in just about forever and perhaps only the second time since the glaciers last receded, the Idaho Vandals played in a college bowl game against Bowling Green University in the Humanitarian Bowl at, of all places, Bronco Stadium on the campus of long-time arch rival Boise State University. In the course of the last 30 seconds of the fourth quarter, the boys in Silver and Gold pulled out a wild, improbable victory, Live On ESPN...and I missed it.
  
  Why I missed it doesn't really matter - suffice it to say that family duty called me away when there was 1:30 left to go and the score was tied at 35. I missed it. The Vandals drove 66 yards in three plays in the last 30 seconds and went for two to win instead of kicking the PAT that would have sent the game to overtime. Even had I not missed it, I didn't have any Vandal paraphinalia to wave because I'm - well - a Vandal and we don't (especially those of use from the '70's) do a lot of gear-waving. We don't have much experience in doing that in any case, and those of us who live in Orygun's bifurcated Duck/Beaver country would be crazy to even try: Vandal fan clubs exist in Orygun but they operate like spy cells, speaking only in code and holding meetings in cold, candle-lit barns and root cellars like some modern manifestation of the French Resistance...
  
  There was a time - not all that long ago, in fact - when I could take pride in the fact that both the national and the regional directors of my FedBorg agency were Vandals. I could at least point to the fact that those leaders and others farther down the org chart were graduates of the University of Idaho during those unruly "how's your school doing" confabs that usually erupted when talk turned to the prospects of the Oregon Ducks or the Oregon State Beavers amongst my locally-born coworkers. Tonight I can stand on my own, however, howling to that rare Blue Moon that my Vandals won. In fact, the headline tomorrow should read "Vandals Win On The Hideous Blue Boise State Smurf Turf"...... just because, for reasons that only alumni of the University of Idaho could posssibly understand. But still, a group of players who don't have any understanding if the pain we Idaho students felt in the 1970' brought it all home.
  
  And I missed it...
• December 27, 2009
• 16:20

  Random Thoughts: Air Travel Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...is there going to be any more hassle-freighted experience over the next little while than being a Nigerian passenger on a Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?. I mean, everybody (including my first-born traveling back to Georgia in a couple of days) is going to have to deal with more issues than just a couple of days ago on any flight, but certain prospective passengers will no doubt receive special attention...
• December 22, 2009
• 19:28

  News You Can Use, Ver. 2.0.1 - The Merry Christmas Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's always comforting to know that the good folks at the Associated Press are looking out for our interests, fighting that stalwart Fourth Estate fight for us. Tonight, for example, we learn that one great way of making sure that we reduce our odds of facing an IRS tax audit is to try to avoid earning $200k per year or more. I'm sure that we can all use this helpful tip to avoid those disquieting moments sitting in front of a hard-eyed IRS auditor pawing disgustedly through your shoe box labeled "Medical Receipts"...
  
  Not only that, but if you do find yourself subjected to an audit and are behind on your taxes and are unemployed, the IRS - oh, lucky day - has payment tools to help you make up for your failure to do your part to support our society...which, as you well know, is a Socialist Commie concept because 'Socialist' and 'Society' both come from the same root word, which in itsownself can only give you comfort, knowing that RNC Chairman Michael Steele will come bursting through the IRS auditor's typically SocioCommie closed door - bandoliers flying and RNC-approved Teabagger-endorsed semiautomatic assault rifle blazing - to rescue you from that aforementioned hard-eyed SocioCommieFascist jackbooted federal tax thug and save you from the brutal subjugation of paying some penurious "debt" to Obama's (SOCIALIST) society...
  
  So there you have it. Simple tools for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; make sure you keep your income down, and rely on Mike Steele to save you if that tax thing goes bad because he knows what "flipping the bird" is all about. This is truly News You Can Use...
  
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• December 19, 2009
• 19:30

  On The Twin Curses Of Perfidy And Emails

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it probably isn't a very Christmas-y sort of night this evening out there somewhere in that D.C. Magic Land where one of Bart Stupak's staffer's lives. It might not even be all that sugar plum fairy warm and cozy in whatever WiFi-free redoubt that Stupak himself is holed up in this evening. Despite the fact that local weather patterns are setting up to provide both Stupak and his less-than-internet-savvy staffer with the wonderful marvel of a White Christmas, they both face the grim understanding that next Friday morning they will probably both find at least the dirty black residue of the coal that will be left in their stockings as a result of the office of Representative Bart Stupak (supposedly D-Mich) getting caught coordinating with the office of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Narcolepsy) in the aftermath of Sen. Ben Nelson offering up vote number 60 for the Democratic health insurance reform bill...
  
  It would be bad enough - and has, I suppose, actually been bad enough - that neither Stupak or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are intellectually beefy enough to understand either the fundamental underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution or the teachings of Jesus and his disciples as expressed in the New Testament. All by itself, the sort of forced subjugation to a particular viewpoint that he supports is more of an Old Testament concept that you would normally see expressed by Southern Baptists as opposed to Roman Catholics like Stupak. But that really isn't the point here, just like the fact that he is a member of the C Street contingent of The Family isn't really the issue here (although that seems to be an odd crowd for a Catholic to be running with)...
  
  The point here is that Stupak, through at least one member of his staff, has been flat-out busted working in concert with the office of the Republican Senate Minority leader to defeat the current iteration of health insurance reform. In Bart Stupak's world, this is no longer about trying to use his own small Democratic House coalition to control reproductive choices for people who - unlike him - can get pregnant. It is now all about consorting with the sorts of people who would move heaven and earth to simply and finally defeat Democratic efforts to reform some aspect of the disaster we know as health care for simple, callous political reasons. It's about working with Senate Republicans to kill a Democratic initiative...
  
  Stupak has been caught out - courtesy of his faithful staffer - engaging in the sort of perfidy that defines what a 'soon-to-be-former' Person of Consequence looks like in party politics. It is bad enough that his misguided staffer got caught sending emails to the Catholic Bishops and minions from James Dobson's Family Research Council, but cc's to the offices of Mitch McConnell and Congressman Chris Smith (R-19th Century NJ) demonstrate with a cruel sort of finality which world Bart Stupak lives in. Disloyal treachery has its own ugly reward, of course, but the insidious 'forever' nature of emails makes tonight a very special moment for a couple of people in the World As Bart Stupak Knows It who have decided to throw any concept of being Democrats way deep into the trash bin and - courtesy of a fundamental lack of understanding of the e-world - let us all see who they actually are...
• December 18, 2009
• 18:55

  When "The Birds And The Bees" Collide With Our Overtaxed Military

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I probably shouldn't have laughed when I read the headline "Army general in Iraq bans pregnancy", but I did. The underlying subject isn't funny at all because of the volumes it speaks about the degree to which our military is stretched to - if not beyond - the limits of its collective endurance (either that, or there is pretty bodacious untapped Army recruiting theme lurking out there if-you-know-what-I mean-and-I-think-you-do). But, still, really now...
  
  Army troops in northern Iraq have been ordered - on penalty of court marshal - to not get pregnant? Pregnancy is Banned? Pregnancy, at least as it has been explained to me by Mrs. Jack K., is an outcome. It is, as I understand it (as as evidenced by a couple of young adults who have been calling me "daddy" for nearly 21 years), the result of some other activity. I'm not sure I have a complete understanding of all this stuff, but I think I have the basics down pretty well, and because of that I'm not exactly sure how one goes about maintaining a straight face while banning outcomes. It's like delivering a case of "beans and frankfurters" MRE's to a combat outpost and then banning flatulence in the close confines of a Humvee or Bradley Fighting Vehicle...
  
  I'm trying to picture how this new order might be received by the troops and their loved ones back home. Did Gen. Cucolo just reinforce prohibitions against sexual activity amongst the troops, or did he only step up the punishment for 'getting caught'? Is deployment to Northern Iraq an assignment to some weird sort of Club Med that - even though it suffers the absence of pearly white beaches, azure ocean waves, or bottomless Mojito's and neverending Corona's - demands that this sort of order needs to be issued to American troops in this surprisingly romantic theater of operations, or has the General simply decided to apply a creative solution to a problem that afflicts other commands with less creative commanders? Back on the home front, do we focus less on collecting phone cards and prepaid cell phones and candy and lip balm and hand sanitizers for those "support the troops" care packages and turn our attention to condoms, over-the-counter spermicides, and contraceptive sponges (and cookies; cookies are always good) in order to keep our troops out of an entirely new sort of harm's way?
  
  It's the rational behind the order that is - and probably should be - the most disturbing aspect of this order. The fact that removing a pregnant soldier from the field creates a hole in any particular unit that can't be readily filled speaks volumes about the place we are in these days and the people who got us to this place. We continue to hang on an edge, lacking the resources to replace troops who need to leave a given theater before their tours are completed, whatever the reason. This reality does raise a question, though: what about soldiers who blow out an ACL in a pickup basketball game? Do they face a general court marshal if they need to be taken out of theater?
• December 14, 2009
• 20:46

  Joe's Problem With The Truth

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it is painful to think that Joe Lieberman would struggle so much with his opinion on health care issues...oh, the hell with it; never mind. Joe Lieberman, going as far back as can be remembered, is a slick craven political animal with massively long, thick, permanently bespittled thumbs that serve him well in sensing what direction the wind is blowing at any given moment. He is also a man spurned, a "Dear John" in the classic World War II jilted lover context or the guy who got "Jodied" in the the Vietnam context that he doesn't really understand because of his Cheney-like ability to accrue draft deferments during that conflict...
  
  Lieberman got smoked by a stone flat unknown in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Senatorial primary and had to battle back through the back door to hold his seat. It couldn't have done his sense of security or comity any good to see all his good and long-time Senate friends charging around the state campaigning for Ned Lamont, and the hunger for some soul-soothing moment of true and final revenge must have been burning deep ugly holes in his soul ever since. Or at least it would appear, because it is otherwise impossible to reconcile this from three months ago:
  
  
  
  ...with this from just one day ago:
  
  
  
  Lieberman has his defenders, though, in this question of apparently craven flip-flopping and his apparently monumental struggles with both the truth and his actual core beliefs. No, wait; actually he doesn't. What he actually has is a "spokesman" out there taking a bullet for the Big Guy:
  

  Lieberman's spokesman Marshall Wittmann said Lieberman's comments were made before the Senate health care bill, which includes health insurance subsidies, was finalized.

  
  OK, so that's a nice start, but poor Marshall Wittmann is clearly heading toward the Box Canyon Of Rhetorical Irrelevancy with this line. It gets worse:
  

  Wittmann said Lieberman believes the subsidies make a Medicare buy-in program redundant. A buy-in program would be an additional financial burden on the Medicare program, he said.
  
  "This would be a redundant program that would unnecessarily put the Medicare program in greater financial jeopardy," Wittmann said.

  
  Yes, Marshall Wittmann really said that (if the vast reportial resources of NBC are to be trusted). Taking the two points that Wittmann made in reverse order: (A) his Master believes that the very same Medicare buy-in program that he advocated just three months ago has now magically transformed into some evil thing that would 'unnecessarily put Medicare at risk', even though all by itself his proposal of three months ago and the recent compromise amongst Democrats present exactly the same risk to Medicare because both of them are independent of the subsidies program; and (2) there really isn't any way to characterize the Medicare buy-in as being 'redundant' to the proposed subsidies (which would support public purchase of otherwise noncompetitive private insurance plans) without rounding up every English-language dictionary on the fact of the planet and feeding the entire "R" section of each one into shredders so the word itself is no longer extant in print...
  
  Medicare buy-in is a somewhat half-hearted attempt to create some vague shadow of a public option that would create the sort of competition that would perhaps reign in the cost of health insurance premiums. For a Lieberman spokesman to say that the buy-in is redundant and a threat to Medicare (even though it apparently wasn't the latter a couple of months ago) suggests one of two things: either that spokesperson was prodded out onto the national stage to either sell the Boss's new position or find a real job, or the spokesperson is a True Believer who should be considered a prime candidate for the captive breeding program intended to produce a new, vibrant future population of political halfwits...
  
  Joe had no problem saying what he said back then and has no problem saying something completely different mere weeks later. Regardless of his motivations for the game-playing that he is currently engaging in, the fact is that he has a problem with the truth, not to mention a serious struggle with getting his own personal facts straight from one day to the next. In an otherwise perfect world, future generations of encyclopedias, in their descriptions of the final moral failure of the American political system, will feature Joe Lieberman's picture near the head of the entry....
• December 13, 2009
• 20:28

  Just Eleven More Shopping Days

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...and you're still wondering if finishing up that "honey-do" list is a legitimate Christmas gift...
  
  
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures
• December 11, 2009
• 20:20

  Random Winter Storm Warning Friday Night Thoughts

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  -- For those of us who do not play golf, who have no interest in learning to play golf unless retirement affords the time to do so, and who have watched PGA telecasts about as much as we have watched episodes of "Lost" or "American Idol" (in other words, not at all), there is one question: Is there some emotion we should feel at the news that Tiger Woods is going on an indefinite hiatus from playing golf? OK, so maybe there are two questions, the second being: Why the hell should we care whether or not Tiger Woods is embarking on a journey to patch up his marriage, since we didn't really care that he was married in the first place?
  
  -- Since both the heavy lifters and well-paid minions of the NCAA Football Bowl Championship Series (BCS) insist that a playoff system would be an overpoweringly oppressive burden on the academic endeavors and travel plans/costs of both the student-athletes involved and all those other non-athlete students, alumni, and hanger's-on whose fees and contributions help pay for the gold-plated football programs in those six most God-blessed conferences comprising the BCS, does that mean that students attending the colleges competing in the FCS (formerly known as NCAA 1A) playoffs are inferior academic institutions? Are schools like Montana, William & Mary, Appalachian State, Villanova, Stephen F. Austin, and New Hampshire somehow lesser institutions of higher learning than schools in the Pac-10 or Big 10 or the SEC such that they can make the sacrifices necessary to have a college football playoff system? What about NCAA Division II schools? Or Division III schools?
  
  -- When the clock struck midnight last evening, I became fully eligible for retirement. It is a strange and slightly embarassing circumstance to find oneself in, mostly because the FedBorg establishes its retirement-eligible age at a full 10 years earlier than the usually understood retirement/Social Security age of 65 that pretty much all the rest of working America works with. I sit here this evening, unretired, marveling at the idea that anyone would consider making such a move at this age. There is still work to do; there are still battles to be fought, and a quick glance over my shoulder reveals that a rather brutally casual bipartisan disregard over the last couple of decades for adequate funding to pay for the kind of work that I do has resulted in there being nobody back there behind me to carry on the good fight. It doesn't matter anyway, because my financial advisor - who also doubles as the mother of my children - has assured me that the concept of retirement need not enter my decision space as long as those children insist on attending post-secondary institutions of learning...
  
  -- It is almost sad, but certainly understandable, that tonight's snow and freezing rain in the southern Willamette Valley are creating the sort of winter driving conditions that seem over the top there but would look like just another winter day over here in Southern Central Orygun. I would like to think that all those people out there driving around with me are sufficiently skilled to handle snow and ice, but I live in an area through which many thousands of people who are unfamiliar with such driving skills pass every year; unfortunately for me and mine, a pretty good percentage of those other drivers are in one way or another examples of those West-siders who experience a Stage V melt-down at the very sight of road ice. Thank God for a furnace, a well-stocked fireplace, and no place that I need to go on a night like this....
• 10:06

  And I Ask Myself Why

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...from Politico, we learn that the Ol' Maverick, John McCain, has assumed an odd sort of leadership role - or at least that of leading spokesman - for the Republican party. It's an odd position for him to be in not the least because he has never been all that much a figurehead in Republican circles, in large part because of his maverickiness or irascibility or hard-headed contrariness or whatever it was that has made him stake out positions in the past that at least looked to be a departure from the party line, even if some of those apparent schisms were barely skin deep...
  
  There is, of course, the obvious question: Why John McCain? Why the guy who was decisively rejected by American voters just over a year ago? And I'm not asking "how dare he?", but rather why does the media keep rolling him out there week after week, day after day, to share his observations about all that is wrong with the Obama administration (complete with the occasional repudiation of McCain's own past positions on the issues)?
  
  Actually, this line of questioning can threaten to go meta if one dwells on it just a bit. What we are seeing right now is that the only three voices belonging to people who have some - if occasionally limited - background as actual politician types that can be heard through the drone of all those fabulously paid talking heads on radio and TV are McCain, Sarah Palin, and "Big Dick" Cheney. Think about that: a guy who got his head handed to him in the last election cycle, the running mate that helped to bring him down and appears to thought by a strong majority of US citizens as stone cold crazy, and a former Vice President who left office being held in slightly lower esteem by his fellow Americans than an anesthetic-free root canal; these are the three authoritative voices that are brought to the fore by the MSM...
  
  Is there a point at which the Powers That Be of the Party of No decided that a failed presidential candidate, a person who did more for Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live than for her party's electoral prospects, and perhaps the least popular vice president in American history should be the troops to carry the fight against the Democrats? The truth may be that is there isn't any such thing as 'the Powers That Be' behind the Republican curtain; the Keystone Cops nature of the Republican side of the New York 23rd Congressional district special election arguably suggests that may be true. I suppose, as Dr. Thompson might once have said, even the rancid cream rises to the top, and when your other choices are people like a faux-hiphop walking verbal time bomb like Michael Steele or Mr. Narcolepsy himself, Mitch McConnell, you're not working with a very deep bench to begin with...
  
  But still...really? It's McCain, Palin, and Cheney whose pearls of wisdom are cast before the MSM to provide what is essentially the Republican viewpoint on war, the economy, and climate change. I admit it's entertaining to watch, but I ask myself "Why?"...
• December 06, 2009
• 20:27

  The Boss And The Kennedy Center Honors

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...back in the mid-1970's, there was a constant anthem providing the musical background to all those smoky Friday and Saturday nights that I and some of my friends were living in a couple of local college hangout bars in Moscow, Idaho. It was Bruce Springsteen - The Boss - along with the E Street Band that at one point or another during the night would be blaring out of the corner speakers, inviting us to draw a parallel between Asbury Park, NJ, and the relatively remote PacNW wheat-farmer/cowtown lives we were trying to escape.
  
  Tonight, Springsteen and four other Giants (including Dave Brubeck, who informs another part of my musical life) will be honored at the Kennedy Center. I and my buddies are all mid-fifties curmudgeonly old farts now, but - even without calling them to verify their opinions - I can guarantee that this is what we would have wished those nights would have looked like:
  
  
  
  (edited to make the obvious title change)
  (and Clarence Clemons is still a God)
• December 04, 2009
• 19:44

  What The Start Of A Bad Day Looks Like

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...an on-call Portland, Orygun, police officer who lives in the somewhat far-flung suburb of Damascus walked out of his house yesterday morning and started his unmarked Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chevy Impala to warm it up, went back inside to get his child, and came back out to find a warm spot on the driveway where his official police vehicle used to be...
  
  The "good news" for the as-yet unnamed PPB officer is that the vehicle has been recovered elsewhere in Clackamas County (condition as yet unknown). The "BAD NEWS" for said unnamed PPB officer comes from the tenth page of this PPB document issued earlier this year under the signature of his boss, Portland Chief of Police Rosanne S. Sizer:
  

  Never leave your car running or the keys in the ignition when you’re away from it, even for “just a minute.”

  
  As a general rule, you can suspect right up front that any morning during which your car disappears from your driveway has all the makings for the start of a bad day. That particular fact aside, walking out the door to find an empty rectangle of melted frost on the driveway tracing out the spot where the city-owned vehicle that your boss says shouldn't ever be left idling unattended was left sitting idling unattended pretty much sends the message that you are about to have a Bad Day...
  
  This is pretty much what "sucks to be you, man" looks like...
• December 02, 2009
• 20:18

  The New War Between The States

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...if the Evergreen State shared a border with Arkansas, there would be a border fence going up right now, complete with armed guard towers having interlocking fields of fire and crossing points staffed with National Guard rifle platoons. Thankfully for the beleaguered Washington taxpayers, they are separated from A Place Called Hope and all the rest by a couple of time zones and a good portion of fly-over country, so Washington Governor Christine Gregoire simply saw fit today to instruct the Dept. of Corrections to deny acceptance of any Arkansan parolee...
  
  Arkansan corrections authorities, of course, are honoring the memory of former Governor Mike Huckabee by noting that they did nothing wrong in the instance of formerly alive alleged cop-killer Maurice Clemmons. They certainly understand how folks in Washington might be a bit miffed at that former governor's claim that a needless tragedy was cause in part by a failure of the Washington legal system, but as far as they are concerned they did everything by the book so none of this is their fault. The folks in Washington feel the same way, too, and I'm just enough of a parochial little PacNW hayseed to suspect that the Left Coasters may have prior claim to that particular high ground, because my admittedly biased reading of the various stories about Gregoire's order suggests that Washington state was facing a somewhat limited series of options because of the failure of Arkansas officials to take specific actions...
  
  Having said that, there is clearly enough blame to go around regarding the question of why this guy was even walking the streets to begin with. None of it should detract from the plain fact that Mike Huckabee has once again proven that he is a dark, dangerous gift that keeps on giving in more ways than could ever be imagined...
• November 30, 2009
• 19:51

  When Which Critics Matter

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...for all it's many, many faults as a supposed journalistic enterprise, Politico can probably be forgiven today's effort regarding Mike Huckabee's prominent role in the killing of four police officers just down the road from Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base on Sunday. As a generally right wing mouthpiece that once every great long while is the blind pig finding an acorn, it is probably understandable that the Politico editors would focus on the spittle-flected outrage of Malkin and the RedState gang whose readers are its natural constituency. The reporting misses the point that a great many commentators on the left have expressed similar sentiments over the last 24 hours, but it tells the important story...
  
  If you were hoping that there would come a moment where you didn't run the risk of stumbling across the Right Rev. Michael Huckabee pontificating all over your 46" 1080p screen in the unfortunate event that you stumbled across his FAUXNews program, that hope was dashed somewhere between his commuting the sentence of accused shooter Maurice Clemmons in 2000 and yesterday's tragedy. The fact that he created his own second "Willie Horton" moment (Wayne DuMond being the first) with his Clemmons clemency decision virtually guarantees that you will have Mike Huckabee to 'kick around' on the multimedia display screen of your choice for many years to come. And that is why the Politico focus on the winger outrage can be given a pass in this instance...
  
  Mike Huckabee is done - seriously "stick a fork in him" done - as far as national, regional, or local political campaigning is concerned. Aside from the fact that not even the most ardent Pharisee winger conservatives in Spokane or Deer Park or Dayton or Ellensburg or any other conservative stronghold in Washington state would ever vote for him after that lame 'failure of the Washington judicial system' he trotted out today, the simple fact is that Mikey is toast with the Republican base. Those previously mentioned winger mouthpiece outlets are doing the work that lefties fearful of Huckabee's comfortable glibness could never hope to get done: they are tearing down whatever credibility Huckabee could ever hope to have as a serious candidate for national office as a clear result of his failure as the sort of 'law and order' kind of guy that the Republican base could get behind. These critics - and Politico - are showing a moment when which critics matter...
• November 23, 2009
• 19:21

  Wither Goest A Secular Nation?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there a plenty enough fascinating aspects to the current dispute between Congressman Patrick Kennedy and his Rhode Island diocese Bishop Thomas Tobin over Kennedy's support of abortion rights, but there are even more outside questions that are just as fascinating. As the story documents, public figures such as John Kerry and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have run afoul of various segments of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over their support for a woman's right to control what happens to her body...
  
  Clearly, the biggest immediate issue is the effort of a religious entity to to control the actions of public officials who have roles to play in the conduct of a secular government established by a secular Constitution. While there are any number of Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Unitarians, Brethren, and others who are in one way or another involved in one or another of the three branches of Federal governance, none of them have any claim to the steering wheel, especially given that the Constitution of the United States doesn't grant any one or all of them any particular priority of importance. In fact, that guiding document specifically proscribes the involvement of any of these sects in governance, and there was a particular wisdom in that decision by the Founding Fathers transcending the somewhat more limited span of religious perspectives of the day than what we know in these times...
  
  We live in a complex society, and the fact that the Roman Catholic leadership can find congress with Southern Baptists on any subject at all is a perfect example of how crazy religious alliances can be and why governance should rightfully be secular. It's all well and good that the supposedly celibate Catholic leadership can come together with the wingnut Pharisee Republican base (where "Pope" = "Antichrist") to oppose the right for a woman to have a say over her reproductive choices to the point that The Church will deny the Eucharist to those public officials who fall short of its expectations, but somewhere down the road the issues of "just war" and the death penalty are going to mess up this comfy alliance and somebody is going to get poked in the eye and THEN where are you gonna be, Mr. Smartypants [/everymom]...
  
  A more interesting set of questions in the face of this effort by The Church to influence secular public policy is that set of questions involving the composition of the Supreme Court of the United States. Six of the nine Justices are adherents to the Roman Catholic Church. Will any one or all of them be denied the Eucharist if they are to find that the US Constitution supports the idea of abortion? How does the Church-constructed threat to one's eternal soul at the risk of a Church-disapproved decision influence members of the judiciary who are obliged to render judgments in a secular setting? OK, so this is a pretty theoretical venue because we know how Scalia and those two Bushco backbenchers are going to vote - and Clarence Thomas is going to do whatever Fat Tony says in any case, but the Kennedy/Kerry/Sebelius experience raises some interesting issues regarding adherence to the First Amendment and the protections of the rights of those of us who don't want to be subject to the specific teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. My man Martin Luther started the Reformation over the selling of indulgences by Catholic leaders; the risk we run as a secular nation now is the specter of the Roman Catholic Church turning from the the retail sale of salvation to a more reliable act of extortion. What the Bishop in this Kennedy case is doing is nothing less than threatening a public official responsible for nonreligious crafting and administration of public law with eternal separation from his spiritual foundation because of actions taken on behalf of a population that in large part - if pure evidence is any judge - doesn't want to live in a Roman Catholic theocracy...
  
  This all certainly does raise questions about how - or even if - we can live as a secular nation free from the influence of any particular religious sect...
• November 20, 2009
• 19:20

  And Yet Another Example Of Wingnut Craziness

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the suggestion offered by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver to have November 25 - the day before Thanksgiving - commemorated by Congressional Resolution as "Complaint Free Wednesday" demonstrated that A) it is a fool's errand to underestimate the fervor with which the winger right will cling to the only strategy that it has these days and, II) some members of the Pharisee component of the wingnut Right should either abandon their pretense of connection to Christianity or start reading their Bibles a little more closely to at least make a show of trying to catch up with the rest of us...but more on that in a moment...
  
  Rep. Cleaver's resolution would seem, on the one hand, to be just a little bit of overkill. After all, the very next day is generally designated by cultural fiat to be intended to serve a similar purpose. Aside from the grim reality of a Cleveland Browns/Detroit Lions game being this year's pre-feast football entertainment, we all are supposed to understand that this is the day where we assess those temporal blessings that we do have, however few they may be, and be thankful for them. On the other hand, it is arguable that a separate day set aside to just simply not complain and instead take stock of the ledger of one's life in preparation for a celebration of thanks (aside from that Browns/Lions matchup, of course) is a moment unto itself that is worthy of consideration. The two events that anchor the Christian calender - Christmas and Easter - have precursor days that set up the theme of those events (Christmas Eve and Maundy Thursday/Good Friday). Why can't a secular holiday like Thanksgiving have a precursor day, too?
  
  The apparent answer from the right wing, if the response to Rep. Cleaver's suggestion is an accurate reflection (and there's no history to argue that it isn't), is a resounding "NO". The 'outraged response' quotes in the story are instructive in their own right, demonstrating beyond any question that an otherwise unobservant public might have that the whining is a strategy rather than a response. What is even more instructive, however, is this sort of comment:
  

  "I want you to show me where in the Bible it says I shouldn't complain. I haven't seen anything where Jesus asked us not to complain."

  
  It's actually a little disappointing to see the failure of a Methodist minister to offer a more robust rebuttal of this misguided wingnut argument. "The Bible" actually has a couple of examples of situations where Jesus by word or parable told those around him (and presumably us, by inference) to not complain:
  
  The parable of the vineyard workers recorded in Matthew 20: 1-16
  
  Jesus dining with "the sinner" Zacchaeus the tax collector in Luke 19: 1-9
  
  The parable of the lost son in Luke 15: 11 - 32
  
  And, of course, various parts of the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew , such as Matt. 5: 5 and 5: 9, along with Matt 7: 1-6
  
  If you claim that you can't find anywhere in the Bible where Jesus in one way or another told you not to complain, you might want to consider going out and buying a Bible so you can actually read it...
• November 13, 2009
• 21:27

  Playing The Rubes

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there has been a lot of commentary today about the revelation that the Republican National Committee has, for the better part of the last two decades, offered its employees a health care plan that included coverage for elective abortions, even though the RNC has opposed this particular concept since just after God made dirt. What all of the winger outrage and the wild flailing of RNC Chairman Michael Steele's efforts at damage control, one fact simply refuses to disappear...
  
  The Republican National Committee knew - or should have known - what was covered by the insurance plan that it contracted with CIGNA to provide. It is simply impossible to believe that the RNC has been such a slipshod organization over the last two decades that it wasn't capable of engaging in the simplest act of actually reading up on the terms and conditions of the employee health care plan that it was paying for. The last eight Bushco years clearly demonstrated that the people who had their hands on the wheel of the Republican party weren't interested in doing much more than paying lip service to the concerns of the Republican "base", and it may even go deeper than that. What we know is that this elective abortion coverage goes as far back as the administration of George H. W. Bush; what we don't know is how much farther back the coverage extends...
  
  
  For any social conservative who understands the presentation of health care plans and who can do the math, this has to be a really bad day. At the very least, today's revelation says that the Republican leadership is insufficiently sophisticated and informed about health care issues to be trusted with making the big decisions that actually matter; at the worst, today's revelation demonstrates that the RNC has been playing its base for rubes for the last 18 years by making all sorts of anti-choice noise while at the same time offering its own employees the sort of health benefit that only liberals - and the majority of Americans - could love....
  
  Based on the rhetorical history alone, it is impossible to contemplate a Republican party leadership that doesn't know exactly what is in the health care plan for its National Committee employees. That's what makes this such a great story; they knew. They've always known, even back in 1991. From then until now, the reality-based branch of the Republican party has been reflected in the health care plan offered to RNC employees and it is only now that the wingnut Tea-Bagger branch that has recently decided that it is destined to be the salvation of the Grand Old Party has discovered the truth about the national committee...
  
  They're all rubes....
  
  
  
• 18:08

  DARN That Librul Media!

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...any whining you may have heard in the past from Moose Hunt Barbie about the vicious partisan attacks launched against her by that left wing harpy Katie Couric or the supercilious dismissiveness of the well-known Commie fellow traveler Charlie "In What Way" Gibson is about to be joined by a new round of whining about this mean-spirited partisan hatchet job just administered by those Socialist lackey fact-checkers at the Associated Press...
  
  The notion that Palin might take the opportunity in her new ghost-written autobiography (or manifesto or fantasy tome or quasi-historical novel or whatever it is) to stretch, twist, and hammer previously recognizable facts into some dark one-off doppelgänger of the truth shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone who has been more than a casual observer to this strange trailer trash soap opera to which we've been subjected over the last 15 months. Mishandling facts has been an occupational disease afflicting politicians of all stripes on this continent that may well date back to the first efforts of the Clovis people to elect clan leaders, but it has seemed to pass from avocation to vocation for politicians like Palin and others in this generation of Fox News Republicans who have come to understand that "The Message" is the 'truth' for The Base, regardless of what the truth actually is. Even beyond that, this right wing Fox News generation has had a pretty good run on the national media stage, where every absurd commentary and insane statement has been reported by the MSM in a straightforward fashion as if any of these ramblings actually had traction with a meaningful percentage of the population - which, in almost every case - they didn't...
  
  It's actually a bit of a surprise that the AP has engaged in this bit of fact-checking, given the fact that its own Washington bureau has struggled mightily over the last 18 months (and has far too often failed) to stand up straight enough for the top of its collective head to hit the "You Must Be This Tall" line on the sign next to the entrance to the Edward R. Murrow Memorial Room Of Big Boy Fourth Estate Journalism. For whatever reason, though, the AP did actually slap on that Groucho Marx false nose and eyeglass disguise to trick the book distributor into giving it a pre-release copy of Palin's book, saving you and me from the grim prospect of actually having to sacrifice a good 45 minutes of our remaining time on earth sitting in a quiet corner of our local Big Box Book Store paging through this book before slipping it back onto the "New Release" display, only slightly worse for wear (after all, somebody has to do that whole 'book break-in' thing for all those wingers unfamiliar with the concept). For that effort, I'm grateful to the AP, even though I suspect that the effort is little more than snatching at low-hanging fruit rather than some sort of sea change in how the AP views its responsibility as a journalistic endeavor. After all, how do the Powers That Be at the Associated Press explain their general failure to so publicly fact-check the works of Ann Coulter back in the day when she actually seemed to matter?
  
  The AP is going to find itself flung into the Flaming Pits Of Hell into which all liberals - especially including all members of the media who don't have right wing talk show cred, despite a history of uncritical reporting of right wing swill - will be sent when the True Believers finally gain ascendency. The AP certainly doesn't deserve such a horrible fate - based on the overall body of its faithful work - but this particular fact-checking moment challenges the Sarah Palin story line in which the crazy side of winger world is so strongly invested, so the AP will have to live with the ignomny of being part of that ugly hateful librul media...at least for now...
• November 11, 2009
• 16:20

  Taking Bets On How This Ends

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it isn't really much of a surprise that Reuters is reporting that Lou Dobbs is set to announce that he's leaving CNN. He has become almost a caricature of his own self with his passionate ranting about all those evil brown people streaming across our southern border and - demographics being what they are - his going-away party at CNN's world-wide headquarters probably won't be all that tearful an affair.
  
  What is left unreported in this news flash is what ol' Lou's future plans might be. I've got "FAUX News" and the points. Any takers?
• November 05, 2009
• 19:36

  A Fond Look Back At The Bush Administration

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there are very few reasons to reminisce about the late and generally unlamented disaster that was called the administration of George W. Bush. History will probably show those eight long years to be a grim joke played on American citizens by a feral band of yes-men, fixers, and hustlers who never encountered any national issue - either great or small - that thew couldn't twist around into some pure raw financial windfall for the benefactors and patrons that essentially bought Bushco's ticket into the White House. There is, however, at least one reason to look back fondly on that era, especially the period after September 11, 2001:
  
  At least during that era, we could live with the comfort of Dick "Big Dick" Cheney being incommunicado, hiding out in one or another "undisclosed location". Yes, there was the occasional muttering, angry emergence on some Sunday political show, looking for all the world like one of those 'world of nature' movies where one of Jacques Cousteau's divers would get too close to a moray eel fetched up in some coral hidey-hole, but for the most part we didn't have to listen to ol' "Big Dick" all that much. Now that he is free of the strictures of spending all of his time underground, all that is over and that's a darned shame, because these days you can't swing a dead possum without hitting a podium behind which cranky ol' 'Big Dick' is looming, carrying on about the failure of courage the Obama administration is showing over the conflict in Afghanistan...
  
  It is ever so slightly possible, if you will grant me this indulgence, that we wouldn't be in the leaky boat we are in right now if Bushco principles like 'Big Dick' had decided to express as much concern over "winning" the war against Terra in Afghanistan way back in 2002 or 2005 or 2008 as they - and he - are now. These days, we seem destined to be graced with repeated calls for massive infusion of troops to Afghanistan by one of the primary architects of the abandonment of our earlier efforts in Afghanistan in order to invade a sovereign nation that posed the unspeakably terrifying threat of launching paper mache remote-controlled UAV's laden with nuclear chick pea bombs from rogue Iraqi garbage scows anchored off the Eastern Seaboard.
  
  Or something like that...
  
  Why we even need to be exposed to the likes of 'Big Dick' Cheney at all when it comes to the very military action in Afghanistan that he readily abandoned in lieu of the much more profitable invasion of Iraq over six years ago is a question for historians to sort out. All we can know is that we should look back fondly on the last administration if only because we didn't have to listen to 'Big Dick' Cheney's mewling half-witted nonsense like we do these days...
• November 03, 2009
• 21:17

  As We Consider Why MSM Themes Matter More Than Reality

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...all you need to know, as far as the MSM is concerned, is that Obama has suffered a stinging defeat for his hoped-for agenda, all because a really lousy candidate for Governor of Virginia got the stuffing beat out of him and a sitting Governor of New Jersey who suffered from a certain personally profound unpopularity failed in his effort to secure a second term. On the other hand, as of this moment, the MSM is for some reason refusing to discuss the fact that the race for the seat in New York's 23rd Congressional District is going to be won by a Democrat for the first time since God made dirt...
  
  It's an interesting view of analysis, or at least what passes for analysis in these latter days of the decline of Main Stream Media as a real live Fourth Estate. The bottom line in tonight's elections is pretty simple, however. The Democrats just lost two Governor's offices to Republicans who will immediately begin cutting taxes for the rich and eliminating programs and reducing services for everybody else, a prospect to which I say "Good; maybe even Great!" I have long been a disciple of de Tocqueville's long-ago observation that “in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve" when it comes to state and local elections. If all those de-energized '08 Obama voters in New Jersey and Virgina want to send him a message by sitting on their hands this time around, they can now check off that "mission accomplished" box and live with the consequences for the next four years...
  
  On the other hand, in the in-focus race that really mattered up in New York's North Country, the much- discussed power of the tea baggers to bring the Republican Base back to majority dominance has resulted in a Democrat winning the seat for the first time since the end of the Civil War. The tea baggers weren't really interested in talking about those two governor's races because they are sufficiently sentient to grasp the difference in power balance between holding a Governor's office and holding a seat in either the US House or US Senate. New York's 23rd District mattered in a way that no Governor's election ever could because the 'baggers understand that it is only within the halls of Congress that they can achieve their ultimate goals of nation-wide political and social change...
  
  ...and they failed. They lost every which way and managed to construct a narrative for the New York 23rd special election that will provide future generations of political operative with a manual on either how to - or how not to - throw away a clear poltical advantage, depending on which way those future generations want to swing. What they didn't do was demonstration how to win when competing outside their weight class...
  
  We may well not here much about that tomorrow, though, because the MSM is clearly so anxious to construct a theme addressing the decline of the influence of the current president. That theme construction will be manifested by the loss of two formerly Democratic Governorships, while the loss of one more Republican seat in the House of Representatives - which just yesterday was going to be its own manifestation of the rising power of the tea bagger right with Hoffman's inevitable victory - will be lost in all that other noise about how the loss of the Governorships in...wait for it now...New Jersey and Virginia...spin out the threat of eventual DOOM for the current administration...
• October 31, 2009
• 21:29

  Tonight We Are All Ducks

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I'm not even an Oregon native, but I chose to endure the slings and arrows hurled at me by both Mrs. Jack K and others because of my decision to stay home - rather than attending a long-scheduled church function - to watch one of my adopted Orygun teams play the hated University of Southern California Trojans in the raucous confines of Autzen Stadium tonight...
  
  The root circumstances of my boosterism are somewhat ironic, given that I lived and worked for several years within the direct local Duck sphere of influence and, during that tour, I terrorized my Duck-loving coworkers by spending every football season week wearing a baseball cap of the team that Oregon would be playing that Saturday. It worked as a bit of workplace harassment back then because the Ducks weren't a very good team; sometimes the Civil War game against Orygun State (which I also root for these days) was a contest to see who could finish the season with at least one Pac-10 win...
  
  Things are a lot different than they were twenty years ago in the bad old days. Regardless of the native differences of current residents, we are all Ducks tonight...
• 19:52

  Partial Scores: Teabagger Wingnuts 1, Republican Sanity O

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this afternoon saw a huge victory for those rock-ribbed forces of ideological purity in the Republican party, as the Republican nominee in the special election for the Congressional seat in New York's 23rd district abruptly withdrew from the contest after virtually every big name from the party's right wing swarmed into the state in support of her right-wing opponent running as a third party candidate. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, this is a huge victory for the Beckian teabagger wing of the Republican party, and probably not all that bad an omen fo.r the rest of us...
  
  Dede Scozzafava's self-defenestration isn't all that surprising, given the fact that every failed loser and overly pumped-up unelected who-said of the teabagger wing of what was once an actual national party seemed uncommonly anxious to trample over any little old ladies or children standing in the way of their wild stampede down various jetways to catch flights to Oswego or Watertown. She actually did something that has become an uncommon grace for Republicans: she did the honorable thing for the sake of a party that clearly has no interest whatsoever in welcoming anyone into its tent who doesn't cleave to a particularly twisted sort of political philosophy. This moment is, all by itself, a Big Win for Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and all those other folks who have captured the hearts and minds of a particular constituency but haven't actually won anything for a lot longer than most people realize...
  
  The incumbent that Scozzafava hoped to replace was a relatively moderate Republican serving in a district that Obama won in 2008 and was selected by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Army. How her withdrawal affects the upcoming election will only be answered on Tuesday, although it should be noted that the local Republican party felt that she, a hated RINO in the eyes of the massed forces of outsiders who stormed into the contest, was the best candidate in the context the political reality of the district. The special election will be an interesting event to observe in its own right, but this strange moment of political theater is, all by itself, instructive of the direction the Republican party is headed...
• October 30, 2009
• 19:19

  Reform And My Half A Loaf

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's all too easy to be disappointed and angry -even bitterly so - at what appears to be just another massive el foldo job by Congressional progressives in the sausage-making exercise that is the effort to craft health care reform. It is becoming clear that there won't be any such thing as a robust public option included in whatever bill finally is voted on; in fact, the possibility exists that there won't ever be a vote on the Senate floor for any bill that has even the slightest whiff of a public option, if the public musings of Joe Lieberman (for whom there is no longer any reason for Senate Democratic Caucus members to resist the urge to physically hurl out the door) are any judge...
  
  I find myself perfectly bifurcated on this subject. On the one hand, I care about what happens to people and I want to see every American - regardless of means - have access to health care. For my whole adult life, I have seen (and railed against the necessity for) coin jars sitting at checkout counters in virtually every little small town I've lived in with the picture of somebody who couldn't otherwise pay for an available disease treatment. I once stood in the parking lot behind the Elks Lodge in John Day, Orygun for an hour after work (no, I'm not a member; it also served during the day as the parking lot for the office where I worked) arguing with a strongly libertarian coworker about the pure failure of morality that was represented by a circumstance where the health care system in the richest, most powerful country on this planet forced families to essentially grovel in the public square for money on behalf of loved ones (all too frequently children) to pay for potentially life-saving medical treatments that were readily available - as long as they could be paid for. There was, I argued that night and have argued to this day, no possible way for this country to lay claim to the title of "Greatest Nation in the World" as long as coin jars next to cash registers hold the last desperate, singular hope for survival for any American citizen. That is the obscene reality of health care coverage as we now know it, and that is the reason we need a robust public option...
  
  On the other hand, I am the parent of a teenager who is a Type I diabetic. Talk about the absolute king hell master of preexisting conditions. Because I can shelter my two children for only so long with my FedBorg "gold-plated" insurance, I have reason to be concerned about my second-born child's access to health care insurance that will mitigate the otherwise outrageous cost of insulin and test strips and all the other little bits and pieces required to make for a sustainable life. Even without the public option, the various proposed reform bills promise a far better future for my second-born child than what now passes for the current world of health care insurance, one where my younger child might never be able to find insurance under any circumstances. Some sort of strong public option would be better for him than what the various bills in play will offer, but that clearly isn't going to happen, so he - and I - are faced with that proverbial Half A Loaf. I will be forced to be grateful to get to that insufficient point, because it is so much better than the current grim reality of the unavailability of health insurance at any price that my son will otherwise face. The way this whole debate is playing out still sucks, though...and it really sucks because the Beaten Dog Democrats on the progressive side of the caucus are the legislators who have decided to ensure that my son and I need to be happy with that half a loaf...
  
• October 23, 2009
• 19:36

  Fly Me WHERE?!?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there has been a certain amount of talk over the last day or so about the circumstances of Northwest flight 188, which on Wednesday night went on an unscheduled tour of northern Wisconsin at 37,000 feet before finally finally wandering back to the southwest to land at its intended destination in Minneapolis. What fascinates me most about this story is the reaction of the passengers...
  
  I am not a frequent flier by any means. The last time someone had the muscle and force of will to stuff me into a narrow fragile aluminum tube so I could hurtle through a hostile, brutally cold and unsustainable environment 6 long miles above Mother Earth's warm loving embrace (that someone being Mrs. Jack K.), there was no such thing as the TSA and it would be 15 years before idea that people would willingly fly airliners into buildings became a grim reality. I have, on the other hand, become something of a personal travel agent and concierge for Mrs. Jack K. and our eldest child, scheduling flights between the eldest's East Coast college and our Orygun Cascades east-slope redoubt, and as a result I understand lots of things about arrival/departure times and the availability of flight-tracking websites like FlightView. I also have certain understanding of what I should see out the window near the end of a flight, even if that flight is in a holding pattern and even if all that is going on at night. What amazes me the most about this story is that nobody (at least none of the interviewed passengers) seemed to even understand that they had flown an extra 300 miles before finally getting on the ground; passengers even seemed to accept the premise that they were circling in a holding pattern when a simple gander out the window would have suggested that such a thing wasn't actually happening...
  
  What we seem to be facing with this story is the perfect manifestation of the Bovination Of The Air Travel Public. That once-glamorous ideal of the jet-setter being whisked across the face of the planet in the capable - and sometimes vaguely erotic - care of an airline that had no greater desire than to make several confining hours in a fragile aluminum tube nothing less than a cultural and gustatory delight is all gone now. Air travelers are now lucky to think of themselves as the favored cows in a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, hoping for nothing better than to finally, someday, arrive at their intended destination with a minimum of human insults or assorted poking, prodding, and strip-searching. There really isn't any other way to explain how the 144 passengers of Northwest flight 188 could unwittingly endure an extra 300 miles of flight before finally arriving at their scheduled destination, only to be surprised by a swarm of law enforcement officers swarming onto the plane when they finally arrived...
• October 17, 2009
• 20:53

  Tell Me Again Why Chicago Violence Argued Against Getting The Olympics?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...one of the almost celebratory notes that a whole host of wingnuts - and, to be honest, a few lefties, too - touted in regard to Chicago's ( and, by direct inference, President Obama's) unsuccessful bid to win the 2016 Summer Olympics was the idea that Chicago is a Failed City where innocent people die at an alarming rate as a result of brutal gang violence totally out of keeping with the spirit of the Olympic Movement...
  
  It turns out, ironically enough, that Chicago's problem may well be that it just isn't sufficiently interesting to be an Olympic venue. Rio de Janeiro, the winner of the contest to be the first venue to host a summer Olympiad during its own winter season, is a much more lively place as far as criminal behavior is concerned. Chicago's punks are clearly going to have to step up their game if they want to be part of some successful effort to secure a future Olympic bid...
• October 13, 2009
• 20:20

  Breaking: Obama Doesn't Travel to Crawford

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...swear to God, I read this AP story and I have no idea where to start. Apparently I am supposed to feel some sort of concern or perhaps outrage or - I don't know - that sort of burbling uncomfortable bloated feeling that eating too many cucumbers can lead to. But I'm conflicted, y'know? I find myself asking one of those fundamental base-line questions that would usually be the sort of query to crop up in the science-based community in which I live:
  
  "So What?"
  
  "Obama travels." "Members of his Cabinet and administration travel." "He and they travel to states that were important to Obama's electoral victory." "That travel costs money." And that's it; that's the context of the story. The Associated Press apparently had neither the interest or the motivation to actually engage in the art of journalism to explore how travel by members of the Obama administration compares to travel by members of other presidential administrations - either recently or dating back to the days of the Wright brothers or in any other context. All we can gather from this bit of "journalism" - and, at that, only by inference based on paying attention during the eight long, grim years of the previous administration - is that Obama hasn't been spending nearly as much down time at Camp David and some Potemkin "Ranch" in Texas as the previous occupant of the White House (trips that cost some unknown amount of money that the AP apparently doesn't have the resources to research)...
  
  It is a disturbing sign of these strange times that the idea of "activist government" earns all sorts of negative press; the mere idea of the current administration being out there on the street (which costs money) pushing a new agenda as opposed to the last administration's practice firing out edicts from behind the impassive, cold, imposing walls of the federal executive bureaucracy is apparently too foreign a concept of the practice of democracy for today's weak facsimile of "journalists" to be able to come to terms with. We've seen this before, of course, when there was actual serious reporting about the outrage generated by the Obama's taking an evening trip to New York to catch a Broadway play, even though there was never any sort of meaningful exploration of the cost of flying the previous president to Crawford to cut brush...
  
  "So what" isn't part of the traditional journalistic "five w's"
  , but it works pretty well as a measurement of whether a story actually matters. All we actually know as a result of this AP piece is that Barack Obama doesn't spend most weekends offline at Camp David or some other remote hideout and that his people travel to places, rather than writing letters to places. "Blue state vs. Red state" doesn't matter, mostly because the AP 'reporters' didn't flesh out the travel habits of previous administrations. The only "Breaking News" here is that Obama isn't in Crawford this weekend...
• October 10, 2009
• 19:19

  Why Huckabee Should Never Be In The White House Without A Visitor's Pass

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there has been WAY too much discussion about Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize over the last couple of days, most of it by people who couldn't at gunpoint name the last five Nobel Peace Prize winners in any case. The bottom line of this whole episode is simply that a small gaggle of people who live in a place that looks a lot like Alaska if you subtract all the crazy wingnuts and the stain of a recent governorship decided on a recipient for reasons of their own. That particular fact, all by itself, makes former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's most recently reported comment a pure demonstration of Republican failure:
  

  "[T]he better response," Huckabee insisted, "is simply to allow those on the left to explain what he did in his first two weeks as President that merited such recognition."

  
  In an otherwise perfect world, the line of "those on the left" willing to rise to this challenge would probably circle the globe - at the equator - a couple of times. If this otherwise glib and humorous darling of a certain sect of the Pharisee right would have broadened his challenge to the moderate and liberal Christian community (instead of limiting it to his world view of Godless Naziocommunist lefties), that line could probably extend from here to the moon, were there only enough space suits to go around...
  
  Huckabee can pull off the appearance of being an engaging guy who is bright enough to engage in pleasant conversation, but his current role as a FAUX talking head is exposing some serious intellectual flaws in his game plan for being a meaningful player in the next presidential election cycle. The above-referenced quote is a prime example of the fundamental problem of gravitas that Huckabee faces: insofar as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is concerned, "those on the left" have nothing to explain. We on the left didn't name Obama the Peace Prize winner; we on the left didn't nominate Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize; there are plenty of "those on the left" who are just as dismissive of this particular award as most of the talking heads on the right such as Huckabee, although - unlike Mike - they are able to actually articulate well-thought-out objections in complete sentences...
  
  "Those on the left" have nothing to explain. "Those on the left" didn't nominate or vote for Barack Obama in the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize contest. The only people who have any explaining to do are those on the right, like Mike Huckabee, who have become such hopelessly lost souls obsessed with the quest for power as its own reward that they will challenge anything that is - in its own right - good for this country...
  
  Maybe Mike can explain how Henry Kissinger (1973) is the most recent Republican winner and Theodore Roosevelt (who wouldn't even be allowed in the door of any Republican caucus these days) is the only other Executive Branch Republican to win the prize (as opposed to Obama, Carter, and Gore over the last seven years). Perhaps Mike, with all of his seminary training, can explain why his people can't seem to rise to the occasion and practice what Jesus preached sufficiently to earn the Prize. If he can't do so, the only way he should ever gain access to the White House is as part of a tour group, because he just simply isn't good enough be there any other way...
• October 09, 2009
• 20:17

  Sometimes I Sits and Thinks...

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...and sometimes, as Satchel Page so famously said, sometimes I just sits. There's a framed poster-sized version of this quote displayed over a luridly-drawn poster of a red bar stool that has hung in the master bathroom of every place I've lived over the last 27 years courtesy of Mrs. Jack K. (I like to think of it as part of her dowry). Today, with the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the subsequent reaction, reaction to reactions, and reactions to those reactions to the original reactions, I've found that that both just sitting and sitting and thinking have their own singular values in trying to work through the various wars that the left and right are waging against each other and themselves...
  
  Today's chronology of events is straightforward and - at the same time - fascinating in its display of emotional color. First came the announcement; then came a remarkable variety of reactions, including disparaging comments by spokesmen for the Afghan Taliban, Hamas, as well as from Michael Steele , the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and a gift that should well keep on giving and giving to the Democratic Party. All of this was followed by a response by a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, which was itself followed by Update/Postscript chidings by Progressive Intertubes Icon Glenn Greenwald and other lesser but highly visible commentators (this link being just one example) directed against the DNC's response and anyone who, for whatever reason, supported that bit of aggressive language...
  
  In those moments when I sits and thinks, I can understand the revulsion that Greenwald and other progressives are expressing toward a piece of DNC commentary that appears to reek of the same sort of 'fer us or agin us' chatter that Americans faced through most of the duration of the Siege On Sensibility that was the presidency of George W. Bush. Throughout the desperate bulk of that horrible time, honest country-loving patriots who only wanted this country and its citizens and government to be the best that they could be were branded as traitors because they didn't toe some twisted, self-serving line that Bushco had drawn for reasons that only our children - or their children - will truly have sufficient purchase of a host of too many still-secret facts to be able to understand. At first glance, those Progressives who object to the DNC engaging in the same sort of rhetoric that sent too many of us flocking to official Canadian government websites looking for immigration info during those dark Bushco years seem to be making a powerful argument for the return of decency to our national political discourse...
  
  But, as I sits and thinks, I wonder: how is it that there are so many voices on the left decrying the DNC saying that the Republican party has thrown its lot in with the Taliban and Hamas concerning this Peace Prize thing while, at the same time, there isn't a whisper of objection to Rep. Alan Grayson's observations about the Republican health care 'plan' being to "not get sick" or "die quickly"? How is it that one particular example of intentionally inflammatory language - drawing an obvious connection between anti-Obama comments by American antagonists and the Republican party - is a bad thing that we should be big enough to get beyond while another example of intentionally inflammatory language - positing that the Republican health care plan consists entirely of the idea tha they want us to die quickly - is an example of Democrats finally 'growing a spine'?
  
  When I just sits, all of this current kerfluffle makes for great television. When I sits and thinks, however, I have to wonder why - in the eyes of some lefties - Alan Grayson is the hero and the DNC is the goat...
  
  
  
• October 06, 2009
• 21:00

  What Really Makes Beck Cry

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's only another snap shot, reflecting one racing leg of a marathon that has most of its miles left to be run, but this is the sort of thing that should probably make Glenn Beck cry real tears:
  

  AP Poll: Obama's job approval rises amid concerns

  
  More than anything else, the month-by-month trend of this poll suggests that all Roger Ailes's horses and all of Roger Ailes's men can't put together an attack that sticks, besides all their efforts to the contrary. There are plenty enough complaints about the direction in which we are heading as a country from both sides of that mythical political divide and there are plenty enough cable news pundits available to offer critical declamations about the failed Obama presidency with regard to the that failed direction, led by - but by no means exclusive to - FAUX News. Unfortunately for Roger Ailes, all of his investment in attempting to destroy a Democratic presidency has, over the last month of intensive effort, been of little more value than sand pounded down a rathole...
  
  That's the sort of thing that should make Glenn Beck get all weepy for real...
• October 04, 2009
• 19:11

  Snow On Oct. 4; The Panic Sets In

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...imagine my surprise...no, check that; imagine my horror at watching snow pour down from the skies yesterday and today. Realized Winter Storm Warnings producing heavy, wet, sloppy stuff, occasionally as light showers and sometimes as full-on blizzards, until there were four inches on the ground. Now, don't get me wrong; there can be something magical about a soft white blanket of powder sparkling in all its simple purity and innocence under a dry cold midwinter sun, and I am certainly still a sucker for the simple old-fashioned idea of a White Christmas...
  
  But...
  
  Winter on the Eastern slopes of the Orygun Cascades can be - and usually is - a long-running event, a grueling marathon where common features like "the lawn" and "the street" are usually hidden from view by layers of snow and ice from sometime in November until early May. There are decks to shovel, a roof to rake or shovel, a snow blower to run and maintain, snow plow operators to pay (my road doesn't get plowed unless I hire someone to do it), and far too many days where my desire to own environmentally responsible daily commuter vehicles runs up against a dark passion to own a fleet of SUV's - big ones, with massively studded snow tires that spit out chunks of ice-coated asphalt like rifle bullets. Given all this, two solid days that look just exactly like winter, even though the calender says we are only in the first couple of days of October, present a truly grim prospect indeed...
  
  Somewhere out there under the snow is the lawn-watering hose needing to be taken in for the winter draped across an expanse of grass that still needs to be mowed one last time, the furniture and barbecue on the back deck that needs to be put in the garage, downed trees that need to be cut into firewood, and the greenhouse that was still cranking out product a couple of days ago. The idea that this may be the start of winter a month and a half early is a grim prospect indeed, and Mrs. Jack K. and I have comforted each other with the insistence that this is just a fleeting winter flirtation, more a warning than a commencement...
  
  Still, an independent observer would probably be able to see the panic in our eyes...
  
• October 02, 2009
• 18:40

  So THAT'S What Happened To Biosphere II

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...sometimes it seems as though the entire population of The Village - and not just its right-wing component - serves as an answer to the trivia question "So what did they finally end up doing with that Biosphere II thing, anyway?" Moving the entire D.C. pundracray into that formerly abandoned isolated and self-contained facility can be the only explanation that I can come up with for both the commentary during the run up to and the after-action analysis of President Obama's trip to Copenhagen to make Chicago's case for hosting the CMGLXXIVDZ (at least I think that's it; I've never been good with Roman numerals but we're talking 2016 here) Summer Olympiad...
  
  Based on a carefully calibrated and mathematically rigorous poll that I conducted today, the methodology of which consisting primarily of listening to various prominent national sports talk radio shows and talking to the few people who were around the office on a Friday, the passion driving a desire to see the International Olympic Committee select Chicago as the venue for the '16 Summer Olympics seemed to hover somewhere around the level of interest about Tom Delay's prospects for taking it all on "Dancing With The Stars". Truth be told, interest in the Bugman's prospects might have held a slight edge. Out in the brisk fall air of the Real World, it was pretty difficult today to find anyone not having some direct connection to Chicago who really cared all that much about who spent time touting for whichever city that might actually be picked to host a Summer Olympics almost seven years from now...
  
  Inside the hermetically-sealed confines of what I guess we should call Politisphere I, circumstances were profoundly different. In that remote, isolated setting, the fact that Obama went to Denmark on a failed mission reinforced building memes: the failure of the Chicago bid was a defeat for Obama, too; the stunning first-round defeat of the Chicago bid meant that Obama and his handlers were either naive or not ready for Prime Time; his image and, in all likelihood, his agenda may well be permanently destroyed by this ill-fated effort and his own personally embarrassing defeat...
  
  Clearly, in the view of the oh-so-smart Villagers who apparently know so much more than all the rest of us who live actual lives in an actual world with a whole host of actual pressing issues, the fact that Obama went to Denmark to assist in making the pitch for Chicago was a Huge Mistake because it didn't pan out. In this strange construct, the Only Logical Conclusion is that the remaining 80 % of his first term will be a fetid hog wallow of failure because the entire world now questions whether he has what it takes to lead us to...well...somewhere now that he has failed to lead us to Chicago in 2016. The fact that it is a challenging task to find anyone outside of the State of Illinois who cares one way or another about who will be hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics doesn't matter; the triple-glazed viewports providing those precious limited views outside Politisphere I are too thick to allow the Politinaut occupants to even hear the conversational murmurings of those of us living our daily lives outside the wall. They don't understand that a sizable majority of us don't actually care all that much about either the Chicago Olympic bid or their own analysis that the outcome of the IOC vote is Obama's own Waterloo on Wacker Drive...
  
  Out here in the real world, the majority of whose residents - when they have the time - watch something other than Faux Noise or any other cable 'news' opinion spewer, folks may be able to formulate an opinion (if asked) about "what Obama's trip to Copenhagen means" that provides grist to all sorts of trenchant analysis regarding the functional capability of the current presidency. None of this matters all that much, however, because most of those respondents couldn't afford to travel to the greater Chi-town Metro Area to get a live glimpse of events in any case. We can probably leave the subject at this point: when most Americans don't really care all that passionately where the 2016 Olympiad is held or whether the President spent a few hours making arguments on behalf of a particular venue, does it really matter what a self-agrandizing cohort of isolated, tone-deaf politinauts think? I thought not...
• September 29, 2009
• 21:20

  Oh, The Joys Of The Northwest Lifestyle!

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...now this doesn't matter to me specifically, since I live a few hours drive or, to put it in geographic terms, two mountain ranges and a broad valley away from the Orygun Coast, but I have to admit that I have never, ever seen this sort of map from the Portland office of the National Weather Service:
  
  
  
  
  
  So not only do those folks to the west of me get to decide just how much they trust the Tsunami forecasts that have been issued over the last several hours that claim only a one- to two-foot increase in beach water heights, but they also get to weigh the provided information against the fact that whatever is likely to go down is going to go down after dark, when you can't see much in any case. Whatever is about to play out will either be a louder than normal episode of crashing sea surf outside the windows of those living on or visiting the coast tonight or will be a leading news story tomorrow...
  
  It's probably a good thing, every once in a while, to be reminded that the potential of volcanic activity or raging wildfire aren't the only arguments against whatever reasons we Pac-NW'ers offer for willingly choosing to live in a strange and elemental environment. We don't have to deal with hurricanes or tornadoes, by and large, but we have our share of natural events to deal with and Heaven only knows why we do so...
• September 27, 2009
• 20:08

  Well, Actually, Why Not Try This?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...whatever gland it is that makes me more or less a progressive usually begins, I have to admit, to start pumping all sorts of icky secretions into my bloodstream when I read a story like this one. But every once in a while - and this is one of those "whiles" - I stop and say to myself "well, why not?" After all, the otherwise strange and disturbing behavior described in the story is all about the campaign for the position of adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard. This is, after all, a story from South Carolina, perhaps the only member of the Union whose state-wide and national leaders are causing it to creep dangerously close to being a place where another declaration of secession would be met with either derision or fond wishes of good fortune...
  
  Why South Carolina is the only state to actually vote for the commander of its own National Guard is a bit of strangeness that shall be left for the citizens of the Palmetto State to explain. The bottom line is that it is what it is, and if you are going to be campaigning for that position, why not have a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle? This is all about leadership of the National Guard, after all, and holding a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle doesn't seem all that much different than a raffle for a nice shotgun at some state's Ducks Unlimited convention or one for a 30.06 at some regional hunter's association gathering. It's all about fund-raising in all of these cases, after all...
  
  It all makes perfect sense as a campaign fund-raising event in a red-blooded patriotic American State like South Carolina, except for that one nagging question in the back of my mind: why is a person campaigning for the opportunity to be commander of the United States National Guard troops in the State of South Carolina holding a raffle where the winner receives a Soviet Socialist Communist AK-47 assault rifle? Is a red-blooded patriotic American weapon like the Colt AR-15 not good enough? Is Soviet resident Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov the person that a candidate for adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard wants to recognize, as opposed to the lesser known but no less influential (and American) Eugene Stoner?
  
  But never mind that. Raffling a Soviet Communist Socialist AK-47 as a fund-raising and attention-gathering gambit is a clever idea, so why not try it...
• September 23, 2009
• 20:42

  Is MSNBC Late To The Bullet=Buying Party?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the short answer to that question would appear to be "well, Yeah!". It is just a little bit disturbing to see this story being offered up this late in the day; the lack of virtually all common calibers of ammunition has been long-running issue that has resulted in my second-born and I shutting down our weekend target practice hobby five full months ago because we couldn't find either .22 LR or .270 Win ammo in what we now understand was "back in the day"...
  
  Shelves empty of ammunition boxes have been the rule, rather than the exception, for MANY months, dating back to Obama's election. Every excuse in the world has been offered from across the local sporting goods counter since early in the year for why the ongoing shortage exists, and the more chilling of those excuses have been tied one way or another to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.
  
  This MSNBC story seems to be, at the very least, "old news" in every sense of the term. There are numerous issues that come into play when one considers the reasons for the ongoing ammunition shortage - and the MSNBC article hits some of those points - but this isn't "Breaking News" or any sort of newly plowed ground by any stretch of the imagination...
• September 20, 2009
• 21:16

  Quick Thoughts On The Fundamental Failure Of The Emmy's

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...OK, so Neil Patrick Harris has been doing a wonderful job tonight as host of the Prime Time Emmy's and it has been a somewhat interesting show to watch after the completion of the Giants' win over the Cowboys. That former part is probably a given, and probably not a good thing for Harris if his strongest primary career vibe is going to become "Best Award Show Host Evah!" as a result of his superb efforts as host of the Toni Awards and and some other celebrations. But never mind that, because I am simply outraged at one of the awards, which quite simply shines a bright spotlight on the fundamental failure of the Emmy's...
  
  A couple of the categories deal with reality shows and hosts/talking heads of those reality shows. Deadliest Catch is nowhere to be seen; only those strange "let's drag a bunch of people together into an artificial environment" shows are nominated for 'reality' Emmy's. This failing to acknowledge one of the most gripping programs on television that really is a "reality" TV show, as opposed to the sort of manufactured event that all these other 'reality' shows represent, is an outrageous display of ignorance of the true art of the genre. On the other hand, it may also explain why there even such a thing as FAUX News....
• September 18, 2009
• 19:54

  A Startling Peak Behind The Beltway Curtain

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's not so much the team roster of the seven former CIA Directors who wrote today's letter asking President Obama to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to stop the investigation of potential criminal actions by CIA interrogators that should be of a large general concern. That's not the problem; the problem is that they thought that the act of making a public request that the President direct the Attorney General to not pursue potential criminal wrongdoing was the right thing to, regardless the circumstances...
  
  There is the obvious partisan problem, of course, with the mix of former Directors who have signed the letter - most of them having served under Republican presidents - but that shouldn't keep us from taking our eye off the hanging curve ball that their argument presents. What they are doing is asking the President of the United States to exercise his authority of office to stop an investigation of possible violation of Federal and international law and treaties to which the United States is legally bound. It's that simple...
  
  One can only gather that they collectively slept through the Watergate scandal and (although it is a most imperfect example) the runup to the Clinton impeachment trial. It shouldn't be necessary to point out to these gentlemen that the holder of the office of Attorney General is supposed to be, above all others, the ONE presidential appointee who operates independent of the wants, hopes, and desires of the occupant of the White House. Many Federal agencies have Offices of Inspector General whose sole job is supposed to be to independently investigate inappropriate behavior within those agencies, even though the eight years of the previous administration may have have led people to forget that such a concept exists. The office of Attorney General exists on the same plane in one sense but also exists far above that plane in another national sense...
  
  It is simply startling that all these former CIA Directors could find their way to a place where they felt it was OK to go public with a request that the President of the United States should stop a legitimate investigation of possible violations of laws and treaties by an authority that is supposed to be operating as an independent entity operating beyond the reach of politics. This may well be the most revealing glimpse behind the Beltway curtain that you are ever going to get, a glimpse that offers the suggestion there are places where people who should know better don't agree that the Rule of Law applies to them and that the President should violate the independence of the Attorney General's office for reasons that make no sense whatsoever in the larger American sense...
• September 17, 2009
• 20:08

  Dog Fights Out Back In The Winger Alley

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...we will leave it to Politico and the website once known as Time Magazine to talk on our behalf about just exactly who is The Big Dog on The Winger Porch, because Lord knows that to have to deal with that subject directly is about as attractive a proposition as digging up a leaking septic tank with our own teeth. Still, as sordid and smarmy as this understated but clearly ego-powered leadership battle between Rushbo and El Weepo Wacko Becko may be, it is a fascinating look inside the battle for what is becoming the real battle for the mantle of leadership of the Republican party...
  
  Forget about Michael Steele (OK, so that's too easy). Forget about John Boehner in the House or whoever is the minority leader in the Senate these days ("Mitch" something or other keeps crossing my mind). The fight for control of the soul of the Republican party is being fought on your TV and radio and it is no longer an issue of 'message', but has become one of who is The Preeminent Messenger. This story is absolutely pregnant with undercurrents of egomania and tantalizing whiffs of raw competition that, as a rule, usually provide the markers pointing to the one specific point in time where any movement imploded on itself. It's hard to decide which of these two particular kinds of crazy better benefits the greater good, given that neither of them have had much traction in the larger electoral population over the last four years...
  
  What is clear, however, is that these two need to fight it out...in public...as often as possible so we know who the Big Dog really is. It would be a good thing for the rest of us to know just exactly who is in charge of the Republican party, given that Steele and Boehner and that other guy aren't....
• September 15, 2009
• 20:54

  Where The Increasing Shortage Of Clawfoot Bathtubs Can Lead

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I blame all those "when the time is right" commercials for a nearly tragic story like this one. There simply aren't enough clawfoot bathtubs in the whole wide world to fulfill all the middle-aged male fantasies fired up by all those inescapable dueling bathtub commercials, and this is where the resulting desperate search for a suitable substitute can lead:
  

  Police said two 44-year-olds had climbed into a dumpster to be alone just after 6 p.m. Saturday when two men interrupted them and demanded their belongings...

  
  Aside from the fact that there is a couple in their mid-forties trying to move heaven and earth to make sure their names never see the light of police-blotter day, we clearly have an episode that can be pointed to any time somebody asks the question "what does TMI actually mean, anyway?"
• September 11, 2009
• 19:53

  The Most Trusted Name In Yellow Journalism

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I was bustling around in a motel room this morning in Ashland, Oregon, with CNN as background noise as the family and I packed up to head back home after a couple of days catching performances at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when this suddenly became Breaking News. All progress toward getting checked out ground to a halt and we watched a strange, scary, gripping drama play out into...well...into nothing other than another desperate and misguided scramble to be first to the screen in the wildly competitive cable news market with The Hot News Of The Moment, regardless of whether that "News" is meaningful, relevant, or even actually true...
  
  My first thought on the realization that there was no "there" there was that I, too, would defend company reporting skills and techniques the way Kyra Philips did, for no other reason than to try to divert the embarrassment of the moment in some other direction. My second thought was a remembrance of those crazy Paula/Monica days during the wet, ugly spring and hot, humid summer of 1998 when it seemed that every news cycle seemed to feature the confessions of yet another woman who had dallied with the President of The United States, none of which proved to be true even though they received at least one news cycle of credence...
  
  A Story From My Life: a few years ago while I was driving around out in the woods on the Eastern slope of the Orygun Cascades, my FedBorg truck radio (programmed to hear both my agency's transmissions and to scan those of surrounding local, county, state, and federal jurisdictions) began spilling out a gripping drama. One of the tour boat plying the waters of Crater Lake National Park thirty miles to the south of my location had struck some sort of underwater obstruction and was sinking. Tourists were in the water and at least one of them was experiencing medical problems that looked like a heart attack. The other tour boat was ordered to deploy to the site to begin attempting a rescue, while National Park Service fire crews were directed to the Cleetwood Cove Trailhead to prepare to carry casualties out to the North Rim and requests were made for Medivac helicopters from both Bend and Medford...
  
  I was wildly punching the AM/FM dash radio buttons, trying to find some sort of report on this developing story, all the while debating on whether or not to make a cell call to the office to let my coworkers know that they may have some sort of emergency response to address. That dilemma was solved when a voice came over the spied-upon frequency to announce - just as that star-crossed tour boat must be slipping with a grim finality beneath the crystal-blue waters of Crater Lake - that "this portion of the exercise has now ended" and that "the second segment of the exercise will begin at 1300 hours at..."
  
  Hearing chatter on a frequency that isn't yours is to just hear noise. I knew that already, but it was instructive to be reacquainted with this lesson in that moment. Failure to exercise due journalistic diligence with regard to chatter heard on a frequency that isn't yours is another matter altogether when we are talking about one of the big-time 24/7 cable news networks; at the very least, it is simply sloppy work on any old average day, and to engage in such a failure on the eight Nine/Eleven anniversary is to show - once again - why the depths of the failure of the Fourth Estate have not yet been plumbed...
  
  The saddest part of this sad failure of journalistic responsibility is that nobody from CNN will lose his or her job for failing to engage in actual journalism, but some career member (or several career members) of the Coast Guard will lose his or her job for failing to anticipate that CNN employees would fail to be 'journalists' in any true sense of the term. In the "he said/she said" world in which we live, there is plenty of blame to share, but the bottom line is that CNN failed and, in it's failure, caused problems that didn't need to ever happen...
• September 08, 2009
• 20:09

  Wherein I Ask Myself "Why Bother?"...And Struggle For An Answer

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...most of the reason that I have blogging so infrequently over the last few weeks can be found in the reality-based aspects of real life. Won't bore you with the details; wouldn't be right. But beyond all that real life going on in the background, I have to confess that there are nights when I really wonder why I should even care anymore (and, to be specific, I only do this because of wonkish caring and a bit of personal therapy; I have understood since I first slipped into this vicious blog posting addiction over seven years ago in a far different place and time that it was really all about me and my need to vent)...
  
  Let it be sufficient to say that I am frustrated...and, dare I day it...bored beyond a level that I would ever have calculated a long-time politics wonk like me could ever get to, and it is all because of the current health care debate. Sadly; ironically, even, given the place we should have arrived at finally after all those long dark years in a grim cold wilderness of Republican dominance and what all that meant, it is the party for which I always color in the little box with my No. 2 pencil out here on the ultra-conservative Eastern Cascade slope of "vote-by-mail" Oregon. It's the majority party Democrats who have finally made me feel old and tired and wondering why I should bother...
  
  Penalties for people at three times the poverty rate who don't go out and get health insurance, coupled with the lack of a public option of health coverage that would make the health insurance giants play an honest pricing game, is - and let us be absolutely precise, circumspect, and genteel about this - pure, unadulterated evil. That it is being proposed by conservative Democrats, who have made more noise than I ever want to hear for the rest of my life about not delving into Socialist 'big government' programs, truly demonstrates that these odd creatures were not able to pass through the Looking Glass with anything approaching Alice's ease suffered serious, debilitation brain slashes from all those broken shards...
  
  I understand, and have frequently argued, that the pure idea of a "Democratic Majority" wasn't all that progressives might thing it was cracked up to be. Democrats can get elected to the Senate in some states and to the House in some districts because they look a lot more like Republicans than the sort of Democrat that the modern party could recognize. That's fine as far as it goes, and the simple existence of Blue Dogs and the DLC are products of that particular political reality; sometimes, no matter how much you scrinch up your eyes and wish and hope and pray, the reality is that you can get "more" Democrats or "better" Democrats, but your chances of getting both at the same time are unlikely in a host of states and districts, where the vote is predicated more on current political tides and less on what needs to be considered a generally failed Democratic ability to articulate or defend anything resembling progressive values...
  
  Were I a betting man, I would place the milk money on this whole exercies being just one more failed effort at health care/insurance reform. In my most positive moments (which are becoming fewer and farther between), though I am not a betting man, I just might be persuaded to lay down some cash on the less risky proposition that whatever does emerge will at best be meaningless for most Americans and at worst be little more than a windfall for an insurance industry that will do whatever it takes to maintain as much of the current status as possible. It may well be that, as conservative talking heads insist, that most Americans are all good with their health care insurance, but this was never about them in any case. The whole thing was supposed to be about those Americans who didn't have insurance or lost it through job loss, or lost it as a result of rescission. We have officially lost our way in this whole debate, and it is mostly the fault - by either omission or commission - of people who claim to be Democrats...
  
  Somewhere out there, far beyond the insulated, calculating world of big-time politics and big political money, there are places where where pure simple reason resides. It resides with the little people who don't have blogs or talking heads or lobbyists. That place doesn't have a voice, though; its concerns are getting lost in the current "debate", and it is entirely the fault of the Democratic party that this particular voice is lost. That's what is finally making me feel tired and old; that is what, finally, makes me wonder why I should ever again bother to waste my time advocating traditional Democratic causes like health care for all of our citizens, when even a certain significant subset of elected Democrats don't seem to care about these traditional Democratic causes...
• September 04, 2009
• 19:22

  The Strange Parallel Universe Of The Associated Press

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...so the A.P., which generally failed miserably to do actual journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war and which failed miserably to do actual journalism while the Bush administration ran roughshod over the Constitution of the United States and which has failed miserably to do any actual journalism in covering the ginned-up August "outrage" over health care reform and which failed miserably to cover the "cost of war" in that war of choice in Iraq that it failed miserably to do actual journalism about in the first place...yes, that A.P. has decided that NOW is the time to - in its eyes - do some actual journalism and ignite a firestorm by running photo's of a young Marine in his last moments of life after being severely wounded by an RPG in southern Afghanistan...
  
  Despite the fact that the young Marine's father objected - twice - to the use of the photo in question, the A.P. felt that it was absolutely imperative that it send the photo out 'on the wire':
  

  The Associated Press reported in a story about deliberations about that photo that “after a period of reflection,” the news service decided “to make public an image that conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.

  
  Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe I hang out in the wrong places with slightly older gentlemen who personally witnessed the grimness of combat in Southeast Asia, or maybe I don't understand because I grew up in the 1960's watching "the grimness of war" every night at dinnertime as as American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Vietnamese civilians were shot, blown up, napalmed, strafed, and bombed in living color on TV. Whatever the reason, I already got it, without even needing to be there. As the baby boomer son of a WWII combat vet, I sat through more than enough adult conversations about all those acceptable memories that my dad and his friends shared, sprinkled with occasional oblique references to bad times that they clearly didn't want to revisit (especially in the presence of young prying ears) that I really think I probably got it at a fairly young age...
  
  War is Hell. I understand that. Most people understand that. If you don't understand that War is Hell, I have a list of movies, documentaries, and premium cable TV series that you should watch, sitting a couple of feet away from the closest 50-inch 1080P 120 Hz HiDef flat panel you can find. It will all be pretend in the moment, but it will do. It's hard to imagine, however, that there is anybody who is so isolated from the world and so divorced from the obvious examples of pain and sacrifice that have characterized our Iraqi experience that such a person needs this particular invasive photo to be somehow reconnected to the idea that War Is Hell...
  
  Whatever rational the A.P. has relied on to decide just now to publish an incredibly painful photograph to let us all know that War is Hell, despite the repeated objections of a grieving parent, absolutely escapes me, especially given the ample opportunities that it was afforded during the previous Republican administration to make that same point concerning our occupation of Iraq. The angry objections of the family, the leader of the American Legion, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates speak volumes to the "wisdom" of this decision and what it actually says about the abjectly failed depths to which this once-valuable 'fourth estate' has sunk...
  
  The decision by the A.P. to put Julie Jacobson's photo's on the wire and its subsequent explanation for why it did so are nothing less than an insult to our collective intelligence. The corporate statements are simply bizarre:
  

  "We understand Mr. Bernard's anguish. We believe this image is part of the history of this war. The story and photos are in themselves a respectful treatment and recognition of sacrifice." AP senior managing editor John Daniszewski
  

  
  Think about that for a moment. "The history of this war" is Daniszewski's rationale for the opportunity to provide family and friends of a particular Marine with an entire lifetime of being able to seeing some of his last moments far from their loving, comforting reach on the far side of the planet. Never mind all of the complicity that this particular news outlet has for the diversion of attention and resources to a wasteful and wasted effort in Iraq, where tens of thousands of Iraqis and over four thousand Americans suffered the ultimate brutality of the grim reality of war. The publication of this one particular photo (over the repeated objection of the family) was not a "respectful treatment" of sacrifice; it was simply a cheap bit of war voyeurism by an organization that felt like it hit some war-porn jackpot and wanted to exploit that jackpot now that pro-war Republicans were in decline, and the Hell with those who might be forever hurt by this big 'scoop'...
  
  The A.P. has had any number of opportunities to 'recognize sacrifice' in this same grim way for the last six years of the Iraq war, and it didn't do much of that so as long as Bushco was in charge. That all by itself raises interesting questions about motivations, but at the very least we can see this as a manifestation of the strange other universe in which the so-called journalists of the A.P. live...
• August 31, 2009
• 19:56

  Other Heroes

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...as I begin to write this, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the actual title of this post will be. All I know is that two brave men tried to do the best they could to protect the people in their charge, and it all went horribly, terribly wrong...
  
  Someday there will come a writer who is both sufficiently experienced in the up-front madness that is the wild maelstrom of front-line wildland firefighting and sufficiently skilled in the writing art to truly express the raw emotions of a singular desperate moment that forces people to pick from a decision matrix that no random person on the street would agree to if you walked up to her or him and offered the sort of "go/no go" options that these people faced. I'm not that writer; I fail on both accounts, having been one of those people who get dragged into the wildland firefighting world at "cooks and bottle-washers" time (which, over the years, has actually come around pretty often) and not having sufficient writing skills to truly capture what The Fog Of War looks like in this particular setting...
  
  Still, I must pay my tribute.
  
  Two men, concerned beyond all else with the safety of the people for whom they were responsible, set out to find a route away from their burned-over fire camp in the middle of a fire that has been exhibited extreme behavior. They did the best they could...and that is all we can ever ask of the people that we expect to go in harm's way every day without ever acknowledging their risk and potential sacrifice with the sorts of honors and ceremony that we accord to those who journey across oceans to Afghanistan and Iraq. They did what they did because that, when it comes down to "bottom line" time, is what they were supposed to do. They offered themselves up to be the people who needed to be in a place that most people wouldn't take all the money in the world to be, all because somebody had to be in that place at that moment. Some people - only a very few, admittedly, but enough - understand just exactly what all that means and, to those few, they will always be remembered...
  
  They were heroes, too...
• August 27, 2009
• 20:25

  The Politics Of A Giant's Passing

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...aside from the fact that this particular Politico story fails at the fundamental analysis level on the subject of why Norm Coleman ended up being the Junior Senator of Minnesota for one term, there are interesting nuggets to chew on with regard to the never-right wings response to the passing of Edward Kennedy...
  
  Wingers are in a tight spot right at this moment. They rightfully feel they are on the right side of the media narrative in their efforts to kill health care reform, but they are now faced with the passing of one of the most aggressively passionate liberal voices of the Senate and a new, respectful impetus for his decades-long push for the sorts of reforms to the health care/insurance situation in this country that would leave your average Blue Dog Democrat flailing around on his hands and knees like a feed-lot steer...
  
  So the political war game is on, with the first salvos fired by the right wing punditocracy. They are already saying that it would somehow defame the legacy of Edward Kennedy to do the very sort of thing that he advocated doing for over four decades. They are already saying that tying Ted Kennedy's name to any sort of meaningful health care reform that would be found unsuitable to their corporate masters is somehow a blasphemy to his name and legacy, even though the most casual evaluation of Kennedy's efforts demonstrate that the current discussion of health care options falls far short of the place he wanted to be. In their desperate effort to disconnect Kennedy's efforts and his passing from the current health care debate, the wingers have finally tipped their hand and demostrated that 'fail' is their desired outconme....
  
  Ted Kennedy's passing is just about the worst thing that could happen to the Republican opponents to health care reform. His battle against brain cancer humanized the whole debate in a way that they have been trying to downplay for a couple of decades. The Republican party leadership (that would be the talking heads, since there is no leadership in the elected cohort of the Republican party) is doing its best to invoke the wrong-headed and misguided image of the failed reporting of the Wellstone memorial for no better reason than the fact that they think the same sort of commentary worked to win the day back in 2002...
  
  These are different days. Jesse Ventura isn't Governor: Norm Coleman isn't lurking in the wings; and there isn't any question about the incumbent Senator's views on the subject that is stimulating all the discussion about naming rights or legacy. It's a bit ironic, I suppose, that the same people who want to pretend that Ronald Reagan is still alive are so quick to dismiss a far more accomplished public figure from the other side of the fence...but that's what the politics of a Giant's passing looks like anymore...
  
• August 22, 2009
• 20:23

  Gibberish And Lies

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...why it has taken so long for any outlet of the SCLM to finally getting around to mentioning what this AP report reveals tonight is anybody's guess, but this highlights one of the core elements of the argument for both health care reform and the inclusion of a "public option". As has become so unfortunately common for supposedly journalistic endeavors like the AP, however, a certain measure of gibberish and lies is offered as straight reporting without any effort to provide context or contrary views. Tonight's example of that fundamental journalistic failure is represented by the quotes by Blue Cross lobbyist Alissa Fox...
  
  First the gibberish:
  

  "You can have a very competitive market and still have companies with a high market share..."

  
  Now, I wasn't at all happy with all those Economics classes I had to take in college, but I did pay attention. All those painful hours lead me to believe that this is clearly one of those "Cue Barney Frank" moments, because Ms. Fox's observation can only charitably be considered a case of visitation by a life form from another planet. There isn't really any other logical explanation for accepting such a statement as anything approach some real truth, and I'm sure the former CEO's of General Motors and Chrysler wouldn't agree with the idea that dramatically unequal market shares suggest an very competitive market. In any case, the lobbyist's proposition is - on it's face - purely preposterous. There is no such thing as "a very competitive market" if one of the competitors has "a high market share"; the only competition is amongst the laggards and bottom-feeders fighting for scraps left behind by the Big Dog dominating the market, and that isn't in any way representative of a "competitive market"...
  
  Second, let's address the lies...or what we may more charitably call "misrepresentations":
  

  Fox points to the federal employee health program, which also covers members of Congress. It offers a total of more than 260 options and 10 nationwide plans. Despite all the choices, about 60 percent of federal workers pick a Blue Cross plan.

  
  Yes, there are 10 nation-wide plans for federal employees. But there a couple of inherent lies in this claim:
  
  A) Those 10 national "plans" are represented by only six companies in my state, and half those 10 plans are offered by only two.
  
  2) Most of those other 200-plus options are regional - sometimes microscopically regional, so they don't have the opportunity to be compared qualitatively with the national plans, even though they may in all ways be superior...
  
  To be honest, this "and we're still the most popular" argument is questionable at best as some sort of defense of the twin postulations that "Bigger is Better" and "There's Still Competition". Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, many federal employees live in places where there aren't all that many health plan choices other than the national plans and Blue Cross undoubtedly benefits in these instances by name recognition more than any superiority in coverage (I mean, how many Department of Agriculture employees are going to go with Mail Handlers when a better known entity like Blue Cross is there). I have never been a Blue Cross member (mostly related to the vicious aftermath of my mother's unsuccessful battle against cancer) and the best - and by "best" I mean by far superior - health care plans that I have had over the last three decades have been local plans that would have driven Blue Cross out of business if they had ever decided to extend their reach...
  
  Numbers may inform stories, but they don't tell stories. The idea that market dominance is some sort of good thing in the world of health care insurance is absurd on its own face; despite that obvious fact, it's gonna be an ugly uphill fight against the well-heeled Big Dogs fighting to maintain their dominance in the arena of health care insurance if this sort of gibberish and lies are going to be granted unexamined prominence...
  
• August 20, 2009
• 20:25

  LIghting Political Backfires

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...so, when I read this, I have to ask "Why Am I Not Surprised?" At the same time, when I dig into the article (and You Can, TOO!) and read professional Bush 'War on Terra' apologist Frances Townsend stepping up to refute, without either proof or any hope of ever providing proof, the whole idea that some sort of sordid political motivation had anything to do with otherwise seemingly random elevation of those bizarre M&M's colored threat levels, I have to ask "Why Am I Not Surprised?"
  
  We find ourselves in the interesting position of witnessing two contrary efforts to light political backfires, intended for directly conflicting reasons to salvage two separate political reputations for the sake of history. The available public evidence is pretty clear: Tom Ridge is right and Frances Townsend is wrong. At the largest scale, Sept. 11, 2001, was less an American outrage/tragedy and more an unmeasurably huge political gift that kept on giving for the cold-minded lizard people who actually ran things in the Bushco White House. Tom Ridge wants you to know that the evidence will show that he tried to do the right thing; Frances Townsend wants you to know that the evidence isn't actually evidence, even though it is, and never mind all that loss of Constitutionally-endowed freedoms and all those unnecessary invasions and all those unnecessarily dead people...
  
  In the wildland firefighting world, you light a backfire to burn out a defensible space to stop the advancing flames. In two different political contexts, that's what we're seeing here...
• August 19, 2009
• 20:22

  59 Shots, One Kill

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I believe that police officers have one of the most difficult jobs in the world. They face, day after day, the sort of dirty underbelly of American life that many people would be hard to convince even exists to the degree that it does, even though it maybe sometimes be just down the street. Despite an adult lifetime of dealing with people who weren't necessarily favorably disposed to seeing me show up, I have only on a couple of occasions felt as though having an axe-handle within reach might be a good idea. Police officers have to deal with that emotional concern on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times in any given day. Any individual contact, at any moment, could escalate into a life-threatening situation with no warning...
  
  Theirs is a dangerous profession, and we expect them to defend us from the Bad Guys while following The Rules and making sure, for our own peace of mind, that they return home safely to their own families every night. Every once in a while, though, there comes a story that shakes our faith just a little bit...
  
  Yes, the guy had a criminal record. Yes, he was waving a .44 Magnum rifle around and seemed unstable. But the report, if it is to be trusted, says that all six of the officers were armed with .45 caliber sidearms and at least some of them unloaded their clips into him, reloaded, and fired some more over that one half of a Mad Minute. Somehow, 43 wounds from 59 .45 caliber rounds fired in what the police dashcam videos suggest were three volleys of shots sound just a wee bit excessive. I'm thinking primarily about this statement:
  

  Some officers emptied their magazines, reloaded and fired again, while others didn't fire all their bullets, (police spokeswoman Jerri) Weary said.

  
  Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that if I have time to eject a clip and slam in another one to resume fire against a single target that is also being shot at with .45 caliber weapons by five of my coworkers at fairly close range, I might just have crossed that bright border line between "acceptable behavior" and "excessive force". Presuming that they were packing weapons that fired .45 ACP rounds, 59 shots and 43 wounds suggests that we are probably dealing with the latter possibility...
  
  Even if this was a case of 'suicide by cop', 59 shots and 43 hits in three volleys over somewhat less than half a minute seems like remarkably enthusiastic cooperation in the fulfillment of that death wish...
• August 16, 2009
• 20:13

  Wherein We Discuss The Wormy Vermin Opposed To Health Care Reform

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I have to confess that I haven't had much of anything to say, either here or in comments on other blogs or to family or friends or neighbors or anybody else, about the raging health care/insurance/system/program debate that has pretty much chewed up all the oxygen in the room over the last several weeks. I haven't had much to say because I fear that I won't be able to make much of a coherent argument without dissolving into the sort of hate-filled spittle-flecked ranting that seems to be the only argument that the wingnut side of this debate has going for it, and going there just doesn't seem to make much sense to me...
  
  It's not that I don't have any concerns about health care reform. I have friends; I have family; I have seen people who I personally know and care deeply for get blindsided and devastated both emotionally and financially by decisions of for-profit health insurance companies that offered those people I care for a range of options that extended only from "die" to "permanent indebtedness". As it so happens, I have one of those spiffy special Cool Guy health insurance programs that is exactly like the stuff that Members Of Congress have. Aside from the fact that my FEHBA plan doesn't cover - without several fairly expensive rider components - much of anything in the way of dental or vision benefits, it is a pretty good deal that covers most of the costs of my blood pressure medication and my second-born's insulin and other supplies vital to the management of his Type 1 diabetes...
  
  But that latter fact is the point where the current state of the health care system crosses over the event horizon into Total Fail. My kid - for that matter both of my kids - are on that ugly backside of the health care debate. One or both of them are my personal version of the people who will fall through the cracks if the Republican party is successful in killing health care reform. I'm going to be OK because of my career choices (at least as far as basic coverage is concerned), but at least one of my kids will have to enter into the Big Kid world facing the prospect - in a difficult economic environment - of trying to either snare a job with health benefits or one that pays enough to afford him the opportunity to both keep a roof over his head and pay over $600 a month for the absolute basic necessities to stay alive...
  
  The Republican party doesn't care about this. It does not give a wit whether or not my kids live or whether they die because of a lack of affordable health care. It, and the wormy vermin of the health insurance industry that would cheerfully stand on the sidelines while my children are forced to make life-shortening decisions just so those corporations can properly offer dividends to their investors, has no interest in seeing a change to the status quo. My Congressman, Republican Greg Walden, will likely be the only one of the five members of the House of Representatives from the State of Oregon to not hold anything looking like a 'town hall' meeting, and he probably doesn't need to do so anyway. He's on what's starting to look like the winning side, after all; the lies and the misrepresentations about health care reform have started to wiggle their way into the public discourse as "fact", so it's starting to look like this deal is pretty much done, and native-born American citizens like my children are going to be faced with health care options that are no better than they would have had available to them even if we had never gone down this powerfully divisive road to begin with...
  
  I completely understand that mine is not a unique story; there are millions of American citizens who have been brutalized by - or been put at risk of being brutalized by - the current state of affairs that passes for 'health care' in the United States. It is an absolutely failed system that will, in that current incarnation being supported by the Republican party and its patrons, leave millions of citizens behind...including (and this is more important to me) the children that I brought into this world with a promise that everything would be alright. Turns out that I may have been wrong about that promise that I made in those first moments after each of them were born. Turns out that nominally human-like creatures who would have better served society by being eaten by wharf rats are trying to make sure that my children can never feel any sense of security regarding their health care options and may well suffer to a degree that I swore they never should at the hands of these wormy vermin...
• August 14, 2009
• 19:35

  On How Journalism Dies

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...if this report at Politico is true - a concept that all by itself triggers all sorts of wild riptides of cognitive dissonance - the New York Times has demonstrated, once and for all, why wingnut bullies are so effortlessly effective at stealing all the other kids' lunch money out there on the journalistic playground. The structure of the complaint by John Solomon, the Washington Times Executive Editor, is a classic example of intentionally misdirected conservative outrage: How DARE the NYT disparage the fine World Class Objective Journalism of the Washington Times newsroom staff! The only problem, and one that the leadership at the NYT can't seem to understand (but that leadership couldn't or wouldn't figure out Judith Miller back in the day, so there's no surprise here), is that there isn't any particular reason for the Washington Times to object to this particular line from the NYT story:
  

  ..."an outlet decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times...."

  
  Objectively, the Washington Times is an outlet that is decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama. While Mr. Solomon may want to make his newsroom staff shed hot angry tears at the alleged suggestion that all of their earnest efforts of Pure Journalism have been ground into dust by a few harsh words in the pages of the Gray Lady, the fact remains that the political leanings of the editorial leadership of news outlets has generally informed the manner in which those outlets have addressed and pursued "hard news" since sometimes before the day that Johannes Gutenberg first cooked up that movable type thing...
  
  There's no need to be merely speculative about this, though. Let's go to the tape, Bob...
  
  There's this 'straight news' story about how Obama is going back to the well six months into his presidency by blaming Bushco for the problems he faces. It is perfectly true, with regard to the basic facts, but ignores both the fact that Obama's observation is itself objectively true and that George W. Bush and his minions were still playing this same game six years after Bill Clinton left the White House...
  
  There's this fascinating 'straight news' story that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that matters, but that consumed precious time and resources in the newsroom that finds itself so horrifically aggrieved by NYT accusations of partisanship. Apparently you can only tip your hat to the journalistic excellence on display here as the newsroom staff of the Washington Times cuts to the heart of all that matters, revealing in an exclusive report that people who object to a Democratic presidency are starting to buy stuff online that expresses their disgust with the whole idea of a not-Caucasian 'liberal' Democrat living in the White House; the on-line comment thread reaffirms just how objective this report is. This certainly demonstrates "News You Can Use"...
  
  Probably the most useful example of the objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom (which, if one understands Mr. Solomon correctly, is located on some desert island many thousands of miles distant from the editorial office spaces) is this particular recent EXCLUSIVE story about concerns raise by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about some aspects of some of the health care bills that are circulating through the House of Representatives. The objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom is fully on display in this article:
  
  A) Early in the article, the opinions of Dr. Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University disparaging elements of various House health care reform bills somehow neglect to mention that Dr. Chandra isn't actually a real live medical doctor speaking some sort of truth to power. He is, in fact, a 'doctor' of economics captured in the thrall of 'free market' health care processes that have nothing to do with effective delivery of health care and everything to do with the study of health care delivery as an economic activity...
  
  2) The objectively journalistic reporting of the 4-2 vote to release the report neglects to mention that the two "Independent" members of the Commission on Civil Rights who voted with two Bush Republicans are, respectively, a law professor who is a contributor to a conservative blog called "The Right Coast" and the Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation...
  
  This is the sort of objective journalistic excellence that the NYT apparently disparaged when it characterized the Washington Times as being 'decidedly opposed' to the mere fact of Barack Obama. Assuming that the Political report about this little "inside baseball" disagreement is accurate (see above), what we really have here is a perfect example of the sort of institutional cowardice that has destroyed any understandable sense of what the 'fourth estate' was supposed to be about. The NYT story in question was exactly correct in identifying the Washington Times as being a politically-motivated adversarial voice to any initiative offered by the Obama administration and only the simplest fool would attempt to argue that the selection of stories that the newsroom staff are directed to feature and pursue is not somehow connected to the larger political and editorial philosophy of the "outlet". If the leadership of the NYT decideds that it needs to offer an apology to the Washington Times, you will know all you need to know about how, why, and where real journalism died...
• August 12, 2009
• 22:08

  Note To Self

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...as the following clip demonstrates, if you don't actually know much about a subject that you worked hard to muscle to the front of the town hall meeting line to prattle on about in front of all those cameras, don't agree - under any circumstances whatsoever - to go on Hardball, even though you think this may be your shot to become the next Joe the Plumber and you think that's a good thing. Exhibit A:
  

  Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

  
  In real time, this got so brutal that I turned away to watch "Baseball Tonight" on ESPN. So, note to self; just say NO...
• 20:28

  Speaking Truth To Deather Power

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...every so often (as in "once a week or so") my local wingnut fishwrap slips in a column on the weekday editorial page from somebody other than the normal desperate fare of a Kristol or a Krauthammer or a Brooks, presumably in order to support its own argument that it is something other than a print version of "fair and balanced" FAUX News. The effort is usually pretty lame, so I have to confess that it was a bit of a shock to see this particular column by Froma Harrop in tonight's paper...
  
  I haven't seen much talk about this particular piece (it is probably an arguable fact that The Providence Journal isn't a major player in political commentary), but I've been kinda busy with real life the last several days, so maybe I just missed all the to-ing and fro-ing. Regardless, Ms. Harrop simply nails it with this column, at least as far as my narrow perspective as a parent is concerned...
  
  
  The reaction of aging supporters of the whole "deather" argument opposing health care (or health insurance reform, if you prefer) has been bothering me for a few weeks now. My younger child is standing on the verge of moving out into a strange and difficult work situation. Assuming he can find a job in these difficult times, the odds are pretty good that his job won't have health benefits. As a Type 1 diabetic, he will be facing at least $500 per month in costs to just simply stay alive if there isn't a health plan out there that he can afford to purchase. At the same time, the very same senior citizens who don't believe he should have a "public optioin" insurance plan availabe to him will continue to see their physicians and get their drugs to treat their Type II diabetes - a disease that is almost entirely the result of poor choices they made over decades, even though they were told over and over that they should know better and do better - courtesy of Medicare coverage that my son has to pay for with his payroll and income taxes...
  
  Like I said above, Harrop absolutely stuck the landing on this one. Since created YouTube-friendly flashmob action seems to rule the day in this healthcare debate, it is clearly time to round up a bus full of uninsured twenty-something Type 1 diabetics to drive around to all of these town hall meetings to front up against the birthers and deathers and all the rest of the fascist forces that want to kill heath care reform with noise alone. Far too many of these "greedy geezers" are an embarrassment to any clear understanding of that whole concept of 'paying it forward' that we thought they, our parents, were trying to teach us. Their selfish hunger to make sure they "get theirs" at the expense of the rest of the country, even though they may not get that "theirs" is a socialist program, is something that their grandchildren - who have to pay for all that "theirs" even though they can't afford their own health insurance - probably aren't going to understand...
  
• August 10, 2009
• 19:18

  A Country Music Post....Because I Can

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I can point to almost the exact point on the road map of my life where I began to listen to country/western music for enjoyment. It was during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, when I first started working at my small home-town radio station. For reasons I still don't understand, the station manager decided I should work the time slot from sign-on at 5 a.m. until 7 a.m. Monday through Friday (there's an attractive proposition for a teenager: get up at four o'clock in the morning every day). Even though there was a strict programing format at this MOR AM station, I reasoned that the only other people who were up at that time of the morning were Central Idaho working folk like loggers and ranchers and wheat farmers, and I figured that they would probably be more interested in hearing country music than the mild early 70's Top 40 pop music that filled most of the pie slices on each hour's circular playlist chart...
  
  Long story short, I threw out the format, playing mostly country music, and nearly got fired. It was only through influence-peddling by my parents, who responded to friends' questions concerning why I had quit playing "good" music and had gone back to that "hippie-dippy" stuff (I used my real name on the air, and - it being a small town - everybody knew whose strangely deep-voiced kid I was) by saying that I would be fired if I didn't follow the format, that my job was saved. Since some of those friends were major advertisers, pressure was applied (although I didn't know that until later), and the station manager revealed to me that he had had an epiphany about the early morning format and I should keep doing what I had been doing. In any event, I started playing mostly country music because I thought it responded to the likely audience (on night shifts, I smuggled in the music I listened to: albums by Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, The Who, Pink Floyd, Chicago, and other groups whose singles didn't often show up in our playlist stack; nearly got fired for that, too). I ended up playing country music because some of it - not all of it (I'm looking at you, Conway Twitty), but some of it - had a raw emotional purity that captured my attention...
  
  Some of it, I must also admit, was just simply fun to listen to...
  
  I'm recounting this history of mine to set the context for headline that caught me by surprise this evening: "Country duo Brooks & Dunn to break up". OK, so this isn't on the scale of the Beatles breaking up, but - in the world of country music - it is pretty big stuff. Other people somewhere down the line will need to decide how they stack up against Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline in that whole "Greatest Music Evah" competition, but Brooks and Dunn are the most successful country music duet of all time and, in an interesting side note, one of the few country music acts that I have actually ever spent money on (my purchases of CD's and digital music generally runs toward various jazz genres; figure that one out)...
  
  A lot of the most successful airplay released by Brooks and Dunn are their up-tempo honky tonk songs (and if you haven't ever spent a night drinking and dancing in a small smokey cow/logger/farmer bar...well...you have the wrong Bucket List), but some of their greatest music can be found in the ballads that featured Ronnie Dunn's spectacular voice. I'm a little bit sad tonight at the loss of further additions to that particular part of their body of work, but I survived the breakup of the Beatles and any number of other groups that I loved to listen to; I'll get over this, too...
  
  In the meantime, one of my favorite songs and an example of the work of Brooks and Dunn; a "duet" with another giant of country music, Reba McEntire:
  
  
  
• August 09, 2009
• 18:43

  The Confessions Of A Bank Failure Statistic

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I suppose I should have expected that my bank would fail. I mean, it's not like I have any particular experience dealing with my bank going under in the past, but I am one of those people who used to be a customer of First Interstate Bank. I know what it's like, even in the best of economic times, to wake up one morning to find that the perfectly good bank that holds all of one's checking accounts, savings accounts, and various loans has now become some entirely different corporate entity that will, before all is said and done, plunge one's entire financial life into a frenzied maelstrom of account number confusion that eventually makes it rather easy to come with a quick answer to the question "so, sure, I could rent a Cat™ D9R with some special options, but what would I do with it?"...
  
  If for no other reason, I should have anticipated the possibility of the 'karma' thing...
  
  The obvious solution - or at least so I thought on the heels of that Wells Fargo experience (incorrectly, as it apparently turned out) - was to place my bet on and my money in a small "hometown" bank run by the guy down the street who understood the community's financial pulse. I was WRONG, but I didn't know that until I stopped by my local branch early Saturday morning to extract some cash from my branch's ATM for an unexpected and unplanned weekend trip, only to notice that the employee parking spaces were remarkably fully occupied for an early Saturday morning and that there was a Community First press release taped to the left side of the ATM machine announcing the failure and takeover by Home Federal Bank of Nampa, Idaho...
  
  And this may be one of the truly interesting aspects of this whole "Banks In Trouble" story. Even though I have been a faithful and responsible customer of this bank for 15 years (it was called "The Bank of Prineville" when I decided to abandoned my acquired Wells Fargo masters back then), I never received any direct indication that my bank was in trouble. There were, on reflection, warning signs that probably would have tipped me off if I only understood how to read the tea leaves; it was about at the time that regulators were sending warning notices to my bank last spring that I started receiving regular notices telling me that overdraft coverage was a privilege rather than a right. I found this to be a curious notification, given that I have never had an overdraft, but I never was able to make any sort of logical connection between those exhortations and bank troubles. I don't think I'll miss that clue again...
  
  As the linked article shows, however, there was lots of stuff going on in the background. It's perfectly understandable that all of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, since I'm confidant that I'm not the only customer who would, on learning about the shaky underpinnings of my bank, show up with a friendly harmless smile and a burlap bag insisting that the nice ladies behind the teller window fork over all my money so I could do the responsible thing and bury it in Mason jars on my property out back behind the septic drain field. On the other hand, I can assure you that it is a pretty grim situation when you find yourself hitting the road for an unplanned emergency 750-mile weekend road trip having suddenly and unexpectedly discovered that at some point circumstances will probably force you to flash a card under the nose of some vendor of either food or lodging that prominently bears the name of a bank that the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities and the FDIC have declared no longer exists...
  
  We can leave aside for now the prospect of having one's bank being taken over by a financial institution based in Southern Idaho. As a Central Idaho native, I'm not at all down with all that, but that discussion is for another day...
• August 04, 2009
• 20:15

  Wherein We Explore The Benefits Of A "Former Diplomats In Space" Program

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...maybe this should be done formally:
  
  Whereas the government of the United States is exploring the revitalization of the manned exploration of space, featuring in the near term a return to the moon and later missions to asteroids and the neighborhood of Mars, and;
  
  Whereas the the United States is in need of finding suitable candidates to staff these long-duration space flights, and;
  
  Whereas the current economic conditions in the United States have forced former diplomats into misguided opportunities for commentary, despite the fact that they still cling desperately to their own failed neoconservative constructs of how the United States should relate to the rest of this little blue marble's residents and nonwithstanding a wealth of evidence suggesting that they understand neither the dynamics of international relationships or the impact of incessant warmongering drum-beating on the actual definable security of the United States, and;
  
  Whereas there is a clear and compelling need to find productive employment for these former diplomats so that American citizens may be spared the disgusting prospect of seeing them offering useless and demonstrably wrong-headed commentary on the efforts of other American citizens to solve problems with words rather than laser-guided weapons, as well as the dire prospect of those American citizens being viewed as extremely expendable soldiers in some undefined war against those with whom these former diplomats so desperately want to engage in armed conflict, and;
  
  Whereas it is fully time to move on and try something other than the practices and philosophies of the eight grim years of the previous presidential administration, so strongly advocated by these neoconservative former diplomats, that have elevated the United States of America as a political entity to a level of global mistrust and outright hatred only previously experienced by Nazi Germany and the Roman Empire;
  
  Be it resolved that the United States should, at the earliest available opportunity, induct these former diplomats into the astronaut corps for immediate assignment to the Internional Space Station. While there, they can train for forthcoming deep-space missions where they can engage in productive research rather than wasting time and resources on the planet's surface sharing their useless thoughts about what is happening on this good earth.
  
  It looks like a win-win proposal to me....
• August 02, 2009
• 16:22

  Things You Don't See Every Day

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's not all that terribly uncommon around these parts to have the random severe thunderstorm. Usually they are detected by National Weather Service Doppler radar in Pendleton (way off in northeastern Orygun) or Medford (down yonder in the southwestern part of the state). Because we have extremely poor radar coverage here in Central Orygun, sometimes that unexpected screeching radio EAS tone making you jump out of your skin comes as a result of trained storm spotters shouting to be heard about the pounding hail to NWS meteorologists about how "it seems to be a might stormy at the moment". What you don't see very often is something like this:
  
  
  ...what's even more interesting (in a sort of "wow, those wharf rats running around in the kitchen sure are big" way) is that the vast expanse of lovely plum shade identifying a Severe Thunderstorm Watch comes to us courtesy of The NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma...you know, the tornado people...
  
  I don't recall ever seeing a Severe Thunderstorm Watch area this large around these parts (it extends a ways to the north of the map view) and I certainly don't recall Norman, OK, ever weighing in on the subject before. So, yeh, there's something you don't see every day...
  
  
  
• July 31, 2009
• 18:56

  It's Hard Out Here For A...erm..uh...Blue Dog

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) is incensed. He is outraged! He is, in fact, acrimonious!! Like Father Mulcahy, he may well be persuaded to violence. Why, you may ask, would Congressman Taylor be be in such a dire emotional state? It is quite simple, dear reader; Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform has dared to accuse him of being a party to the dirty political business of actually arriving at a compromise that would allow a health care reform bill to move out of Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee...
  
  Rep. Taylor, in his fit of extreme pique, called Grover and his gang "lying sacks of scum" and, I must confess, I am in that rather large cohort of American citizens who would find no particular objective argument with his assessment. As it so happens, however, Rep Taylor's extreme outrage is directed at ATR's suggestion that he is acting like a Democrat who actually wants to find some way of reforming health care that will actually benefit his constituency and other Americans. And that, my friend, twists his tail more painfully than you could ever imagine, because Rep. Taylor is a DINO's DINO, representing in many respects the last vestiges of the Strom Thurmond branch of the Democratic party that still exists in the Deep South...
  
  Rep. Taylor is pretty clear in stating that he will have no truck with all this touchy-feely health care reform nonsense if it means taxes, near-term deficit spending, or another Gawd-awful 'Govnmint' program. In all fairness, he has been fairly consistent over the years in opposing deficit-increasing proposals - including Gee Dub's disastrous tax cuts, which is why "baby-drowneder" Grover and his gang are after Taylor in the first place. At the same time, Taylor is not the sort of guy you are going to turn to seeking support for the idea that every American citizen should have a right to guaranteed, affordable health care...
  
  Rep. Taylor is a pimp for a host of political viewpoints that haven't had any sort of traction in the mainstream of Democratic policy for a couple of decades; if he were to announce first thing Monday morning that he had decided, after long heartfelt discussions with his family and his priest, that he was going to follow his heart and switch political affiliation to the Republican party, no one would notice. It is perversely amusing, though, to see him slinging around phrases like "sacks of scum" (apparently, as a Roman Catholic, he can't call his targets 'scumbags') directed toward a group whose criticism almost every other Democrat would just simply ignore...
  
• July 30, 2009
• 18:52

  Too Much (And Too Little) Of A Good Thing

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...so you're sitting there looking out the window at the old '93 Bronco out in the driveway, with all its physical wear and tear from 195,000 miles of faithful service, and you're thinking "this 'cash for clunkers' thingie might be just the ticket to getting me into a new ride with better gas mileage"...
  
  The good news is that you would be right, because the Kelly Blue Book value of this rig is about $1300 (assuming "fair" condition and average XLT trim level options)...
  
  The bad news is that you may be too late. The "Cash For Clunkers" program, officially known as the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, was supposed to be in play from last Friday, 24 July, until 1 November or until the $1 billion in the fund was exhausted (although many dealers decided to roll the dice and book deals before the official start). However, the prospect that 13 CARS Program deals per dealership already on the books is an accurate statistical average for all of the 23,000 dealerships who signed up for the program means that car buyers may well have burned through that $1,000,000,000 in one week...
  
  The early returns suggest this program has been so wildly successful that its Republican opponents can do little more than look back wistfully to those morning-dew-bespeckled halcyon days when they had nothing more to worry about than a strange, crazed ticket of presidential and vice-presidential candidates that called into question why any clear-thinking American voter would trust their party to walk the family dog, much less run the country. The program has clearly been too much of a good thing in the sense that it exposed a pent-up but natural desire of people to buy new fuel-efficient vehicles to replace the old beaters that economic circumstances forced them otherwise to hang on to...
  
  On the other hand, it's too little of a good thing because its creators failed to accurately estimate just how much demand there might be out there for just such a program. It shall be left to the economist gurus to pick the point at which increased car purchases as a result of federal subsidies crosses some "good idea/bad idea" line, but as far as pumping new car sales and improving the environmental 'green-ness' of cars actually on the road, the money that has been committed and could (and should) still be committed to expand the program looks like a lot better deal from a 'money well spent' standpoint than all those shrink-wrapped pallets of Jacksons that have been shipped to Iraq over the last six years...
  
  This admittedly unattributed suggestion that the CARS program will end after one week is a truly gobsmacking moment, because the breathtaking overrun of its own established parameters suggests that not even those people we are fervently trusting to lead us out of this current economic wasteland don't fully understand all the in's and out's of the trouble we're in...
  
• July 26, 2009
• 20:34

  "Too Little, Too Late" Coming Home To Roost

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this AP story is truly grim, describing the ways in which American soldiers coming home from Iraq with deeply buried psychic wounds that were insufficiently addressed by the command structure at Fort Carson went on to murder people once they got back home to Colorado. The piece contains all the usual 'right words' by Fort Carson personnel insisting that all the right things are being done to treat troops who have been struggling to turn off the 'in harm's way' switch once they get back to "the world", as home was called back in the Vietnam era...
  
  The problem I have with this AP report is that it is all too little, too late. Daniel Zwerdling of National Public Radio began covering the story about inadequate mental health care and aggressive actions by NCO's and officers at Fort Carson to browbeat returning troops into "manning up" and ignoring their own mental health issues almost three years ago (click on the sound files; the print transcripts apparently no longer exist)...
  
  The AP article folds uncomfortably but naturally into the framework that Danny Zwerdling built back in December of 2006. As different pieces of one larger history, the two story lines (with Zwerdling and NPR taking the checkered flag by a couple of years) highlight the fact that military culture hasn't matured all that much over the last 35 years as far as addressing the mental health of soldiers are concerned. The AP story is illuminating insofar as it provides a new opportunity to identify the pressures of a dangerous combat setting that can lead individuals to do otherwise inexplicable things, but the story in itself isn't new...
• July 25, 2009
• 19:38

  I'll Take No For A Hundred, Alex

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the question offered by the headline of this AP article is, in itself, fascinating in a perverse way:
  

  Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?

  
  Given all the forces in play and stakes at play in this whole "health care reform" debate (and that in itself is a misnomer, because what is mostly being fought over is changes to how health insurance would pay for health care), the very last thing that needs to be mentioned is just how the people who stand to gain the most from the failure the failure to include a public option are the people who are the ultimate driving force behind seeing this whole brutal process through to the end...
  
  So I pick "No" to the prospect of lobbyists being the driving force behind seeing this thing through to the end. These aren't people who have your or my best outcomes in mind; they represent corporate interests looking to make money out of the whole health system thing, which is the fundamental problem with health care coverage in the United States in the first place. They are the people who first trotted out "Harry and Louise" 15 years ago in a successful effort to kill any sort of health care coverage for all Americans...
  
  They are the reason that there a fundraiser being held in the area to help defray the medical costs for a kid who spent some time in the grips of the health care system recently because he was struck by lightning. They are the reason that checkout counters all across the country have had plastic jars with money slits cut in the top and a pasted-on picture of some child in need of a liver or a kidney or a heart or some radical medical treatment sitting next to the cash register. They are the reason that people that I know - and, very likely, people you know - are losing their homes because of the combined pressures of a difficult economy and major medical bills either not covered by paid-for insurance or not covered because of a lack of insurance...
  
  The idea of health care industry lobbyists being the life-force keeping this thing on the rails suggests the prospects of an outcome that the word "grim" doesn't come close to being suitable to describe...
  
  
• July 21, 2009
• 20:22

  Kicking The Raptor Out Of The Nest

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the fascinating thing about today's Senate vote to kill funding for further production of F-22 Raptors isn't so much the final tally (58-40 against), but the frankly weird distribution of the votes along the political spectrum. You can almost map the states in which parts and pieces of the F-22 are manufactured by looking at the way that Senators voted on the question. The outcome of this vote is, paradoxically, perhaps the first actual real-live bipartisan vote that the Obama administration has been able to garner over it's first six months...
  
  The likes of Shelby, Lugar, Bond, Ensign, Gregg, DeMint, and Coburn voted "Yes" on the amendment, joining with amendment co-sponsor John McCain to eliminate funding for a state-of-the-art 'gee whiz' Buck Rodgers stealth air-superiority fighter that cost $40,000 an hour to fly and may suffer the delamination of its mission-critical stealth radar-deflecting coating if flown through a rain shower. On the other hand, the likes of Boxer, Feinstein, Dodd, Cantwell, Murray, and Byrd voted "No" in an effort to sustain the manufacture of a weapons system that the people for whom it is intended keep insisting that they don't want (and, yes, there is a chance that those military officials are advocating the reasoning of the current administration for purposes of job security, but the fact remains that the Pentagon has been pushing back against ongoing F-22 production for a few years now...although Rummy was involved, which raises a whole 'nother set of questions about motivations)...
  
  Today's Senate vote was the perfect example of the power of the very military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about being actually in action on the slippery fields on which political games are played. Various components of the F-22 are cranked out in factories in no less than 44 states, and it's not hard to figure out where some of those 44 states are when one looks at Democratic votes...
  
  There is, of course, the whole 'protection' vote that party Whips earn their street cred keeping track of, and that may well play a role in this particular moment; some of these seemingly bizarre Democratic votes are probably votes targeting further electoral success for Senator's in 'soft' seats because the count showed that the amendment would pass without specific votes. After all, it's not like that's never happened before...
  
• July 17, 2009
• 18:58

  And That's The Way It Was

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there are moments that you mark in life, markers in your own personal history that that are planted in your brain like some sort of organic waypoint on the GPS map of your life. The end-of-file marker for the trace of my upbringing was cast tonight with the news that Walter Cronkite passed away this late afternoon...
  
  The Record shows that the The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC was the most-watched evening news program from the day that Cronkite first settled into the anchor's chair on April 16, 1962, until the summer of 1968, when The CBS Evening News began to make inroads. But even in those years before Uncle Walter became the preeminent evening news anchor in terms of viewership, the truth in my life was simple: Cronkite was the voice and face to which to which my extended family turned for news. Walter Cronkite told me one cold, clear snow-blanketed school day in 1963 when I was home for lunch (I only lived a couple of blocks from school and always went home for lunch because that's what Mom wanted) that President Kennedy had died, and that glimpse of emotion he showed - as Mom tried to shove me out the door to get back to school - was a strangely raw episode that created a connection to the power of that historic moment in my third-grade mind. I was sitting in my grandparent's living room in Bremerton, Washington, just three days shy of 40 years ago today, shouting at Mom and Dad and Grandma and Gramdpa to step away from the kitchen table to watch as Cronkite described and became verklempt in the moments after Neil Armstrong's descent down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module "Eagle" to put the first human footprints on the Moon's surface...
  
  In the ugly 15 months before that powerful high of Apollo 11, Walter Cronkite told me about the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the crazed loss of control by both the Democratic party and the City of Chicago at the Democratic National convention, and how the outcome of the Tet offensive in South Vietnam (for which he donned his older persona of "war correspondent", complete with helmet and flak vest, in order to visit the scene) spelled the end of any chance for anything looking like "Victory" for the American commitment to that conflict. What he didn't tell me and my family in that last instance, because nobody outside the White House could understand it at the time, was that he was describing the final cruel puzzle piece that demonstrated to President Lyndon Johnson that it was time to step back and pull the plug on a long, storied political career by announcing that he would not stand for reelection...
  
  Walter Cronkite is the epitome of 'the life well lived'. He operated at the pointy edge of the journalist's spear as a war correspondent during WW II, flying in B-17's over Germany and dropping into into swampy openings in the Netherlands in a glider full of 101st Airborne troops during the much-debated Operation Market-Garden, and covered George Patton's Third Army as it marched to the relief of that same 101st Airborne division surrounded by a portion of Hitler's last-gasp offensive at the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a sailor and had a taste for high-performance race cars, and did work that isn't even being talked about tonight like his narration of "The 20th Century". I will remember till my dying day the pitched battles between a prepubescent me and my not terribly supportive parents over what we were going to watch in those hours before the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, with me refusing to understand why they didn't want to relive through "The 20th Century" - one more time, with the comfortable baritone voice of Uncle Walter leading them through it - all those difficult times that formed their lives but that were the subject of textbook history to me...
  
  A couple of weeks ago, we were unwillingly indulged in a seemingly neverending reflection on the life of Michael Jackson. For those of us of 'a certain age', the far-too-soon passing of Jackson had a particular bit of interest because he was a contemporary. Walter Cronkite won't get the same sort of acknowlegement that Jackson received and that's a shame on all of us, because Cronkite mattered to any pure understanding of what American culture and society is about in a way that the Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson in that same period of time (or even later, for that matter) could never hope to connect with...
  
  He hasn't had much of a public profile over the last few years, but just knowing that Walter Cronkite was out there somewhere has served as a comforting influence over the years since his retirement, as if there might be some chance that he would come storming out of the background to go after a subsequent failed Administration. That won't be happening, however, so it is more than appropriate to honor him with that final sign-off:
  
  That's the way it is...and that's the way it was....
• July 14, 2009
• 20:52

  All That Needs To Be Said

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...lots of chatter today at the Sotomayor confirmation hearing about Ricci v. DeStafano. Bits of talk about the newest political confirmation battle that could be characterized as Frank Ricci V. People for the American Way. It's all gripping stuff, guaranteed to stir the juices of Beltway insiders and Village People...
  
  There's only one thing wrong with that whole kerfuffle: somebody screwed up on the directive to follow the script and let some people loose where the steno-pad minions of the MSM could accidentally stumble across them and commit unfortunate moments of unplanned acts of journalism:
  

  "I hope she doesn't get confirmed, rendering those types of decisions," said (Rene) Archambault, a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city. "If you were an astronaut, would you want to fly on the shuttle built by the lower bidder? ... I think you would want the best candidate."

  
  Forget "missing the basic point". In fact, forget all of the issues the City of New Haven thought they might be facing because of their promotion test results. All that needs to be said is 'be sure to focus on the comments of a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city'. It's an amazing corollary to the sense of white male exceptionalism that permeates the questions that Republican Senators seemed intent on focusing on all day long today in the Sotomayor confirmation hearing; "white" is the norm and "white" is the benchmark, and any commentary that suggests there is something other than "white" out there that could be considered to be a part of the 'norm' is simply reverse racism in full bloom...
• July 12, 2009
• 18:30

  When "Newsmakers" Aren't

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...today, apparently, you couldn't swing a road-kill possum on the set of any national TV political gabfest without hitting a Republican Congressional leader insisting that the Obama stimulus program, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was a big ol' floppy failure and swearing that they would drink their own bathwater before they would support further stimulus efforts. Whether it be Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona on ABC's This Week, future presidential candidate Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia on FAUX News Sunday, or the ol' Maverick McCain hizownself on Press The Meat, the message was consistent: No More Total Like Really Fail Stimulus...
  
  It's almost hard to pick a place to start with all of this, except to mourn - right up front - the tragic waste of so many brave American electrons in such a needless exercise. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen think ARRA is successful. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen support further stimulus spending. The ink recording their actions with regard to the first stimulus package is still drying on history's pages; it documents that, of the 218 Republicans currently taking up wasted space in the 111th Congress of the United States, not one of them in the House of Representatives voted for the ARRA and only three of them in the Senate - at the time of the vote - supported it (and that was back in those heady days of wild optimism for the future of the party when there were actually 219 Republicans because Arlen Specter hadn't yet fled down his own personal ratline to supposedly safer, more firm footing in the Democratic majority)...
  
  They wanted - and want - tax cuts, not spending, for the same reasons that Republicans have always wanted tax cuts instead of spending except when they are actually running the whole show and decide to go with tax cuts and spending (said spending usually in the form of budget earmarks that look remarkably just exactly like the sort of appropriations found in the ARRA, and usually for the same stated reason of economic stimulation). They wanted - and want - tax cuts because they know that the idea of more money in the paycheck sounds powerfully attractive to the average voter, even though that component part of the usual Republican tax cut proposal pays mere lip service to such nonsense while lavishing an embarrassing largess of increased wealth on those Sugar Daddies of the corporate world who actually pay the bills that keep Republicans on the stage...
  
  It's all nonsense, of course, and it doesn't take an economic SouperGeenyus with a Nobel Prize on his resume to get to the bottom of all this. Tax cuts aren't any sort of stimulus in times like these. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are behind on their mortgage payments and facing the loss of their homes. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are living in homes that are worth less than the principle on their mortgages. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who fear that they may be the next recipients of a layoff notice or letter announcing the closure of their place of employment. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who have seen their 401(k) investments diminish to the point where they won't even be able to afford store-brand catfood for dinner if they retire. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who don't even have a job (which, depending on which measure of actual unemployment you pick, could be up to 20% of the available workforce). And, given the usual target of the bulk of Republican tax cuts, those tax cuts aren't going to stimulate investment spending and employment creation by businesses because there isn't going to be any demand for their goods and services for all those other reasons and a few others...
  
  The AP story includes the sort of crude, twisted observation that explains just exactly why the MSM is clinging desperately to its tenuous grip as the Fourth Estate:
  

  Republicans lined up Sunday in opposition to a second economic stimulus package, a rare demonstration of unity from an out-of-power political party in search of a rallying cry against President Barack Obama. [emphasis added]
  

  No, seriously; that's what it says. The actual truth of all those disturbing Republican heads floating around on your TV screen is that there has been a remarkable amount of party unity; "The Party of NO" is not a DFH slogan created out of whole cloth, but is in fact a reality-based assessment of the Republican strategy that crawled out of the smoking wreckage of the '08 election. There is nothing newsworthy about Republican Congressional leaders elbowing aside makeup artists and shoving interns to the floor in their rush to get out in front of the klieg lights and studio cameras to assert their insistence that another stimulus package Will Not Stand. If there was any news at all about Republicans with regard to the stimulus package, it happened a couple of months ago and was all about the irony of the manner in which those same Republican naysayers by and large employed those same sharp elbows to take claim for the distribution of ARRA funds once the Democrats had put the money into play without their help. The MSM doesn't really have the skillz to do 'irony', though, so we are left with the "sky=blue/water=wet" non-news that Republican leaders are opposed to further stimulus funding. I'm pretty sure that Edward R. Murrow would not be proud...
  
• July 10, 2009
• 18:55

  A Friendly Piece Of Advice

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...for those, such as Politico writer Josh Gerstein and anyone who wants to take his concerns that he outlines in his insidious little story about the impact that Sonya Sotomayor's Type 1 diabetes may have on her ability to serve as an Associate Justice on the SCOTUS, I have one friendly little piece of advice:
  
  Don't go there.
  
  No; seriously. Do not travel down this trail. Those people who have been living with Type 1 diabetes don't want to hear it and those of us who have spent years - 8 years in my case - or face years to come trying to convince their children who have this form of diabetes that they can lead full, meaningful lives absolutely, positively DO NOT WANT TO HEAR IT...
  
  Type 1 (frequently called "juvenile" because of the usual time of onset) diabetes is an autoimmune disease that is poorly understood by the population at large because it is not all that common. Even now, here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, I have people saying about my diabetic second-born "oh, that poor dear; he can't eat anything with sugar, can he?". There is no particular understanding that managing Type 1 diabetes is mostly - as I have written many time in the past - a math exercise involving the balancing of grams of carbohydrate intake vs. the units of insulin necessary to account for metabolizing those carb's (with the amount of exercise being a bit of a wild card character that needs to be factored in). Because of that lack of understanding, there is a subsequent lack of understanding of what is actually meant by Sotomayor's efforts to exert tight control over her blood sugar...
  
  Now for the technical part:
  
  The normal range of blood sugars that most doctors wants to see for an adult Type 1 diabetic is around 80 to 120 milligrams per deciliter, which most closely approximates the normal blood sugar values for the rest of us whose pancreatic function hasn't fled to the hills. The A1c value (a measure of how much glucose is sticking to red blood cells) that those doctors - including my second-born's endocrinologist - are looking for is somewhere between 6 and 7.5, with 7 being a "good" number and anything between 6 and 7 being an excellent number with respect to long-term health prospects. The long term health issue here is that 'sticky' red blood cells burdened with a load of extra glucose cause damage to the smallest capillary blood vessels in the body, resulting in circulatory failure in the extremities (particularly the feet and legs), the eyes, and internal organs like the kidneys. But let us get back to the point of all of this...
  
  This Politico article is, to my eyes as the parent of a Type 1 diabetic rather than as a Dirty Fricking Hippy liberal, just another piece of work intended to create a space within which discrimination against an otherwise fully functional American citizen can be made acceptable. Sotomayor isn't about to be vetted for a position as the captain of a passenger airliner or a ship; she is not asking to become an air traffic controller or a member of a Marine rifle platoon. She has not been nominated for any position that has some sort of erratic and unpredictable physical demand that would result in her efforts to tightly control her blood sugar putting her at physical risk. She has been nominated for a position that - from the standpoint of physical demand and management of her diabetes - looks a whole lot like the jobs she has held over the last seventeen years, never mind those other years of work in NYC or in private practice...
  
  There's a simple bottom line to understand here; in a few small, dark, fetid corners of the grim world where the remnant survivors of the failure of conservative governance live, a new angle on an old form of discrimination is being pushed quietly onto the table. What Gerstein's piece tries to suggest in a nudging way without coming right out and saying it is that Sonya Sotomayor is not qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice because she is a Type 1 diabetic. What this posited argument is saying is that, along with not being a True-Blue Caucasian, she is somehow fatally flawed because her pancreas don't produce insulin to regulate her blood sugar in the same way you and I expect. What this posited argument is saying is that all those years of effort by those of us who are the parents of diabetic children to convince them that their lives can still be productive and meaningful have been essentially a lie and and a waste of time, because in the strange shadowy world of the wingnut mindset we are the creators of lesser beings who do not deserve to have a shot at any sort of life that matters...
  
  The ultimate harm that we parents of children who are juvenile diabetics have fought for longer than wingnut idiots like Josh Gerstein have been around has been centered on the whole question of what our children can be when they grow up. The fundamental failure of faux journalists like Gerstein to actually try to understand what Type 1 diabetes means as a lifestyle and the simply absurd suggestion fronted by Gerstein that her status as a diabetic might...maybe...wink wink nudge nudge...be a disqualifying factor to Sotomayor's nomination is the sort of dismissive and discriminatory attitude that turns otherwise placid people like me (no, seriously) into flaming activists. What is being suggested by Gerstein's piece is that the profoundly sedentary job of being a SCOTUS justice is somehow beyond the physical capabilities of a person who is a Type 1 diabetic. It apparently doesn't matter in the case of this particular attack that there isn't any evidence that she has suffered from a failure of performance owing to her diabetes as a Federal District judge or Circuit Court of Appeals Judge or NYC prosecutor or counsel in private practice...
  
  This is grasping at any opportunity to carry out a wingnut hatchet job, pure and simple. Beyond that, it is purely offensive even beyond the otherwise usual offensive racism that has tinged Republican statements of objection to Sotomayor's nomination from the outset. And, because of the ham-handed way that conservatives are handling this part of Sotomayor's story, this is now personal for a whole lot of people...
  
  People who write for Politico aren't bright enough to figure this all out, but members of the Senate of The United States had better be able to do so. Being a Type 1 diabetic is no more a disqualifying factor for service in the judiciary than being a Type 2 diabetic is for serving in either the judiciary, legislative, or executive branches. In fact, being a Type 1 diabetic shouldn't be a disqualifying factor for any judicial nomination in any case, and it hasn't been on two separate occasions in Sotomayor's case, but it is now the case that people with the journalistic ethics of hyenas and the human compassion of mealworms are weighing in on the subject...
  
  One more time, let me suggest a bit of friendly advice:
  
  Just don't go there. As the parent of a Type 1 diabetic, I can assure that you will not like how the day turns out...
  
• July 09, 2009
• 20:08

  Oh, To Be A United States Senator For A Day...Or Two

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I confess that there aren't very many days when the thought "how GREAT would it be to be a US Senator" crosses my mind. Generally it seems like a job that, by and large, sucks if you have any interest in maintaining those moral scruples that your parents and teachers and mentors worked so hard to drill bone-deep into your psyche. It doesn't seem like sleep would come easy most any night if a person really wanted to cling to those values and at the same time operate in that strange D.C. world where it's necessary - on a daily basis - to travel down roads to places that used car salesmen would refuse to visit at gunpoint. But there are moments - and this is shaping up to be one of them - where I almost wish there was a ticket booth available to by a ticket for that ride for just a couple of days...
  
  Think of it: some guy, one who has no particular legal experience and whose only claim to fame is being the primary plaintiff name in a lawsuit that lost at both the District and Appellate federal court levels - on the basis of existing case law - and only finally won at the SCOTUS level because of a bare majority opinion that flings stare decisis to the winds, is going to belly up to the witness table in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to share his thoughts on why Sonia Sotomayor is unfit to be given a life-time appointment to the country's high court. More to the point, this witness - who is your go-to guy when it comes to saving lives and property but probably not the person you would turn to for legal advice - is apparently going to attempt to explain why Sotomayor is unfit to replace the retiring SCOTUS Associate Justice who arrived at the same conclusion that she did...
  
  Oh, the questions I could ask of Mr. Ricci as he settles in for his "Joe the Plumber" moment - and make no mistake about that part; this is the same sort of effort to "put a human face" on the horrors of a Sotomayor SCOTUS appointment that Republican strategists have deluded themselves into thinking were productive with the original version last fall. Those questions rattling around in my "Senator For A Day" dream just come tumbling out, mostly because of the cheap political theater that Senate Republicans want to trot out onto the national stage:
  
  "What, exactly, are your views, Mr. Ricci, on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?"
  
  "What examples of past reverse descrimination in the New Haven fire department do you have, Mr. Ricci?"
  
  "How do you feel about Griggs v. Duke Power Company (401 U.S. 424 (1971)) in general, Mr. Ricci?"
  
  "What history do you have, Mr. Ricci, of developing race-neutral tests for promotion to Fire Captain and Lieutenant, and how does that inform your opinion that the decision of the three-judge panel of the Second District Court of Appeals was flawed?"
  
  "And, Mr. Ricci, how does any such expertise square with the fact that black employees are so profoundly underrepresented in leadership positions in the New Haven Fire Department compared to their percentage in the general population and lower ranks of Department employees?"
  
  Like I said, this is all "Joe the Plumber" stuff that Republicans are trying to peddle, and the sense of outrage they are trying to crank up will sell on the usual street corners, but not in a lot of places out there in the real world. It finally reduces the judicial confirmation process to a cheap, meaningless sideshow instead of a moment of great import - both in the near term and as part of the long view of American history - and guarantees that nothing less than a comet strike on the North American continent will ever get us back to some sort of balanced evaluation of judicial nominees in whatever cave the huddled survivors pick to be the place where the ultimate rebuilding starts. It does, however, look like a fun game to play if you have an E ticket for a seat on the dais of Senatorial Power, and it would be great to have that ticket for a day...
• July 08, 2009
• 20:50

  Can I Come Work At Your Place?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it is almost impossible to describe how unhappy this sort of news makes your average public servant feel. That sad, sinking feeling that civil servants feel at the revelation of this bit of information has nothing whatsoever to do with possible failures to properly fight the evil Islamofascist forces that are arrayed against us or the risks that these security failures could represent to our thoroughly American way of life...
  
  No; no, that isn't the issue. The issue that so severely affects federal civil service employees as a result of this GAO report can be boiled down to the simplest of questions: Why the Hell do they have to go through all the daily nonsense of the security charade required to simply get to their desks every day when there is a reasonable chance that any old meth-addled "patriot" could walk through the door and step into the men's room to mix up an explosive device large enough to bring the building down around their ears?
  
  This is little more than another example of how the failure of the last administration is a "gift" that keeps on giving. The efforts of Bushco to protect any and all of us from the Eveeel Terrasts was never much more than lip service and - as in the case of this disturbing story - we are probably not through finding out just how badly we were served by those clowns when it came all the way down to actually keeping us safe...
  
  In the meantime, I just might be interested in moving into any vacant desks you might have around your office...as long as it isn't in a Federal facility. I have my own pencils, pens, paper, and laptop, if that helps, and I can be so quiet you won't even know I'm around. Think of me as being "Free To A Good Home"...
• July 06, 2009
• 21:13

  How To Get Written Out Of Teh Will, NOT Michael Jackson Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...if you really...no, really want to make sure that you don't have to deal with all those guilt issues resulting from missing Thanksgiving Day dinner at Grandma's house, this is probably the way to go...
  
  If, on the other hand, you had a covetous eye on Grandma's antique china hutch for that sad day when it comes time to divvy up her mortal belongings, or - at least in my nuclear family - don't want to find yourself needing to sign up for a Peace Corps tour in a remote tribal village in Benin in order to get away from some really angry parents, siblings, and other members of your extended family, you might want to find another way of filling up those moments of extreme listless boredom...
• July 02, 2009
• 19:50

  OK, So I'm Probably Missing Something Here...

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...but I really - no, seriously, REALLY - don't think that the idea of assessing fines of "more than $1,000" to people who don't choose to have medical insurance is a very good idea. Don't misunderstand; I think everybody should have medical insurance, but that thought leads me to the idea of 'single payer' rather than 'slap a fine on your shiney butt for not having insurance'...
  
  Like I said, however, I may be missing something here...
  
  I will confess that my Central Idaho upbringing has tinged my liberal viewpoint with a certain libertarian coloration, which isn't all that surprising given the cultural insistence where I grew up that you simply didn't mess in other people's lives. To me, the ideal of progressive beliefs is founded in the principle that people should be left alone to make their own decisions. That's the basis if my support for same-sex unions, a woman's right to control those most personal decisions about the fate of her body, and a whole host of other issues. That long-held philosophy is couched in personal choice and responsibility writ large, in a way that on reflection looks disturbingly a lot more like the old-school conservative/libertarian mindset that surrounded me in my formative years than the strange, controlling place that the modern brand of Republic/Fascist conservatism has tried to take us...
  
  I'm still trying to work through all of this, but I realize that the idea of requiring individuals to have medical insurance was one of Obama's campaign planks. I didn't agree with that idea at the time (there's that Idaho thing cropping up). I don't agree now with the idea of penalties for those who don't have medical insurance; and I would really hope that somebody could come up with a better example of why this is "A Good Thing" than a comparison to state-mandated auto insurance....
  
  That comparison simply doesn't work. State-mandated minimum auto insurance requirements are generally limited to liability coverage for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that somebody else will have recourse to monetary recovery if I screw up while behind the wheel and cause harm to them in the subsequent accident. Mandated auto insurance is all about protecting you from me, even though I am paying for it. Mandated medical insurance is all about...well, I suppose its about protecting me from me...or from the world...or from my decades-long failure to wash my hands before eating lunch, or from some other bad health thing that might be facing me...
  
  Mandated auto insurance is all about fault and recovery; Obama's campaign thoughts and this particular bill appear to be about forcing people to sign up for a health care choice or pay a fine for the consequences of not having made that choice. At this first glance, that looks like the exact opposite of anything actually resembling either a 'single payer' system or a 'pubic option' insofar as those medical coverage choices are understood. More to the point, the whole idea that American citizens will be fined for failing to sign up for some specific medical insurance plan will provide fuel for just about any 'Socialist/Communist/Fascist "control your life"' commercial that Republicans could ever dream of running in next year's Congressional elections. Selecting health care options - or actually choosing not to have a health care option for reasons having nothing to do with affordability - is a supremely personal choice, and mandating punishment for not having made a selection is not going to sell well in a lot of places...
  
  But I'm probably missing something here. It's happened before...
• June 30, 2009
• 20:11

  The Happiest Man In The World

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I have to confess that I'm not all that excited tonight about the final victory of Al Franken in the Minnesota US Senatorial race, mostly because I don't have any particular faith that a "filibuster-proof Democratic majority" will ever manifest itself in any meaningful legislation. There are too many United States Senators in the Democratic caucus who hold their seats only because they straddle the philosophical lines on all sorts of issues and will step away from any sense of Democratic unity if the outcome exposes them to reelection risk by a carefully constructed Republican challenge targeting the centrist or center right voters in their states. It's not about what polls suggest that voters believe in and support (those results usually come down on the Democratic side of the line); it's about framing and narrative and media coverage, which far too many Democrats continually demonstrate that they haven't figured out yet...
  
  But never mind that. None of it is the Big News tonight. The Big News tonight is that we can, in this one brief glimmering moment, point directly to the Happiest Man In The World. It's not Al Franken, by the way; no, the Happiest Man In The World is Minnesota Governor Tim "Bridge Inspection? What Bridge Inspection?" Pawlenty. Think about it; not that long ago Governor Pawlenty was having to deal with the failure of the Republican National Convention as a democratic process and of his own callous misunderstanding of the importance of infrastructure inspection as something that state funding should support. Today, however, all of that stuff has been swept down the memory hole and he is rolling into the Independence Day weekend having spent the last fortnight watching one of his most viable challengers for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination plummet from the heights like a piece of space junk...
  
  Beyond that, he has been able to sit in some quiet corner of his expansive executive office reading the new Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin. All by itself, this occasionally unflattering story is an Oppo Research goldmine for both Pawlenty's people and Democrats, if the need were to arise somewhere down the road. If you are the sort that naturally sees yourself looking just right standing up there on that hammered-together falsework in front of the White House on a frosty late January noontime next to Chief Justice John Roberts in 2013, anything that makes another of your most likely competitors look like a long night trapped in a closet with rabid wharf rats is - as Martha would say - "a good thing"...
  
  Even beyond all of that, just this afternoon Pawlenty was able to sit quietly over in the Lurkers' Corner while Norm Coleman threw him a lifeline the size of a coastal old-growth Douglas fir by finally conceding to Al Franken. This saved Pawlenty from the personal pain of deciding whether to adhere to his mandated responsibility of issuing an election certificate on the heals of the Minnesota Supreme Court decision or to saddle up with the right-wing outriders that are the Republican base and wait for some alleged Federal Court intervention. He really was in a bind here: do the Right Thing subsequent to the Minnesota Supreme Court decision and be vilified by the True Believers who wanted to fight this battle to the death at the Federal level, or find some wiggle room and tack to a Middle Way that would clearly abandon the True Believers but earn the respect of enough voters in the amorphous "middle" to make up for that perceived 'abandonment' when it was time for the deal to go down the next time people stepped behind the curtain to vote for a presidential nominee...
  
  It was a Good Day for Al Franken, but it has been a GREAT DAY - and a great couple of weeks - for Tim Pawlenty. He truly should be the Happiest Man In The World right now...
• June 29, 2009
• 21:25

  The Shamwow Guy Moves In

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...poor Billy Mays isn't even in the ground yet and here comes the Shamwow guy (apparently "Vince" is his name) pushing some chopping device on my late-night version of Hardball...
  
  It's bad enough that Mays has been snatched away from us at the very moment that his ESPN 360 commercials suggested the degree to which he had broken through to the cultural mainstream. But now we have this strange creature who hunches around and leans into the camera like some 21st Century reimagining of Marty Feldman's "Eyegore" from Young Frankenstein and apparently threatens to be some sort of heir-apparent. This is a programming outrage of which MSNBC should be embarrassed (especially on a night when it has alleged White House Correspondent Chuck Todd hosting a talking head political opinion show)...
  
  OK...so the Shamwow guy popping up on my screen tonight is not all that much an outrage, but the timing here on the Left Coast feels a bit tacky, and it seems to be a more interesting thing to talk about than how the utterly predictable judicial activism by the five conservative SCOTUS members in creating new affirmative action law out of whole cloth is some sort of repudiation of the 2nd Circuit Court decision to which Sonia Sotomayor was a party, even though she is nominated to replace David Souter, who supported her Appeals Court decision in Ricci v DeStefano...
  
  It's been a long day and I just don't have the patience for that sort of idiocy tonight...
• June 26, 2009
• 19:48

  So Maybe This Is What Happens In The Winger BlogWorld

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...some stories simply do not have enough meat on their bones. This is one of them. I personally can't help but indulging in fanciful imagining of some tragic incident where the guy wants to write a blog post blaming Obama for Mark Sanford's Argentinian tryst and his wife tells him that's a stupid thing to do because Rush">[">Rush] covered it already and that what he should post about is how Obama is going to put us all in internment camps once he gets the new Census data. He calls her an idiot because, he says, Michelle Bachmann is already all over that one...
  
  One insulting accusation about a lack of creativity leads to another, and that bag of Cheetos is laying there on the desk next to the keyboard.
  
  Mom finally gets tired of all the wild violent noises coming from the basement between her boy and that evil gold-digger witch he hooked up with and brought home when the bottom fell out of the fast food middle-shift manager job market. She calls 911...
  
  OK, so the reality may well be far more prosaic than this, but given the stuff we see coming out of wingers these days, how can you ever be sure...
• June 24, 2009
• 19:05

  ZOMG!! Can You Feel The OUTRAGE!?! (Dana Milbank Edition)

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the basic story line as to what will now apparently go down in the annals of White House Correspondent Outrage as the "Blogger Stab In The Heart Of Journalistic Integrity" is pretty well understood, so there's no need to replow that ground. What is interesting, however, is the absolute outrage...OUTRAGE, I say, at this perfidious example of the White House stacking the deck when it comes to what questions might be asked at a presidential press conference...
  
  The only problem is that the face of this outrage - perhaps even the only spokesperson for it from any reputable news outlet, in fact - seems to be Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. To be sure, he is more than doing his part to cover for apparent White House sycophants like Jake Tapper, who - unlike Milbank - is actually a current member of the White House press corp and yet somehow missed the opportunity to mention this outrage in his ABC News blog. Milbank, on the other hand, has turned his outrage as a former White House Correspondent into a cottage industry, expressing that outrage not only here, but also on this WaPo blogpost and - to make sure you get the message - in the">[">the] above referenced NPR "All Things Considered" piece...
  
  What seems to actually be powering this powerful outrage (which did get hashed over a bit at today's White House briefing - about 2/3rds of the way down in the transcript) is the specter of someone who is not a Villager in good standing being allowed to ask a question, rather than whether the person asking the question was planted. There is all sorts of high-minded talk about "perception" and 'scripting' and such, but the real burr under their saddles is the fact that the White House encouraged someone with actual subject-specific knowledge to come in and ask a question that may well matter to people outside the village...
  
  These are the same people, mind you, who served as little more than handmaidens and stenographers to the recent and unlamented Bush administration until his approval ratings were so much lower than used car salesmen and personal injury lawyers that it was finally safe to chew on the press secretary's leg just a bit. The damage that Bushco wreaked on us and our country was already done by then, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter so much to the current and former White House Correspondents who failed both us and their own self-averred status as "The Fourth Estate" back in the day when they had the chance to actually matter. What matters anymore is that a stinking blogger showed up to ask a rather tough question from an Iranian citizen (which wasn't, by the by, all that much different than the question asked by FAUX News' Major Garrett) and that the White House encouraged that DFH blogger to be at the presser to ask that question that it neither vetted or knew beforehand and that Obama ACTUALLY CALLED ON HIM (insert your own version of 'ZOMG' here). And that, in the MSM world, is WRONG...apparently for some reason or other...
  
  Milbank makes sure to take pains to invoke the name of Jeff Gannon for reasons that he would undoubtedly be able to provide a plausible-sounding explanation, regardless of the fact that there isn't any discernible connection or identifiable equal sign that could connect those two things out here in the real world. That, in itself, is probably instructive as to what the complaint of the White House correspondent Villagers, both past and present, are all about...
• June 23, 2009
• 20:07

  On Congress Members Health Insurance...One More Time...From The

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...for the last several days, I've seen posters and commenters at various lefty blogs raging at the refusal of so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators threatening to bring down any efforts at health insurance reform by saying in one way or another "Let's take away their FREE health care and see how they like it then, the smarmy bastids!!?"
  
  Stirring 'to the ramparts' rhetoric, that; wrong, but truly stirring. Let's revisit the health insurance program offered to Honorable Members of the Congress of the United States one last time, shall we?
  
  Members of the Congress of the United States are eligible to enroll in the very same health benefits plan that is available to all those other two million federal employees; it is called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), and it is generally a program that offers health insurance provided by private companies - some of whom are strange creatures created by the program itself but private companies nonetheless - and that are paid for by both an employer and employee contribution. Many of these plans offer extremely limited dental and vision benefits, but those limitations can be overcome by the purchase of a 'rider' policy (all of which is paid for by the employee...or Senator) that will offer more generous coverage in those areas...
  
  This is the 2009 premium/employer contribution structure for Senators, Representatives, and grumpy foresters for the more prominent plans. Based on over three decades of observation, my take is that this is not all that dissimilar to many private employers' insurance plans. Yes, the 'employer contribution' in this case is payed for by taxpayers. On the other hand, some portion of the price you pay for a variety of goods and services from the private sector represents the same sort of employer contribution. The main difference between that overhead cost and your tax payments covering your Senator's government contribution lies in your understanding of whether or not buying an American-made kitchen appliance (Frigidare or Maytag, for example) is actually different than buying new bridges or paving overlays or pothole patching or aircraft carriers or elements of relief and respite for the least amongst us offered by a host of social programs. We are the employers, and we contribute to the health care plans of those who work for us as they do things on our behalf...or not, as the case may be, but there are some straight-up differences between the products and services provided by industry and those provided by government...
  
  The bottom line of this little screed is simple and - I must confess, because of the reality of life - self-serving. Members of Congress do not have FREE health care; they pay a premium and there is an employer contribution (albeit one that is made courtesy of taxpayer funding). Members of Congress contribute less of their gross pay to that health insurance program than most other federal employees, but that is a function of their pay grade and isn't really different from any number of private sector companies that offer health care plans for employees. The problems we are seeing with so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators fighting against some sort of public option is all about politics and not about any "free" health care that they supposedly enjoy. It's about insurance industry lobbyists and the MSM echo chamber that gives soapboxes to Republicans even though no credible polling data suggests that there is any public support for the Republican desire to torpedo anything that looks like health care reform. It's not about "free health care" for members of Congress...
• June 22, 2009
• 20:30

  When To Spill The Beans

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I gotta confess, when I first heard over the weekend that New York Times reporter David Rohde and Afghan reporter Tahir Ludin had managed to escape from their Taliban captors in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on Friday, my first thought was "Hot Damn!! Excellent!!" My second thought was "Wait! What?"...
  
  An understandable reaction on my part, I suppose, because it turns out that I was only one of pretty much a whole planet full of people who didn't know that David Rohde was even missing, much less a captive of the Taliban. This episode does raise some intriguing questions about the role of the media, but - sadly - none of those questions appear to have any sort of coherent basis. On the one hand, there are questions about the fundamental trustworthiness of the MSM in the face of a breathtaking conspiracy on the part of no less than 40 major news organizations - along with our own government - to conceal the very fact of Rohde's capture. This particular viewpoint is offered and debated by Kelly McBride, an instructor of journalistic ethics (I promise, God as my witness, that this is not considered to be an oxymoron) at the Poynter Institute in this NPR interview. Listen to the audio, because there is a lot more meat on the bones than the print teaser suggests...
  
  Another question, as raised by a pundit at the conservative National Post, goes to that whole "goose and gander" thing, asking why it was so important to conceal the identity, not to mention the simple fact, of a reporter hostage, not just this one time but as a reprise of an episode last year involving CBC reporter Mellissa Fung when the same sort of restraint and secrecy wasn't applied equally to other hostages who were either not "big time" mainstream journalists or part of that particular club at all...
  
  There is clearly room to find a bit of concordance with both of these positions, if only because they bring up serious issues about the role of the media in this world in which we are sentenced to live. For anyone who hasn't decided to adopt the role of barnacle on the hull of American life, the twin ideas of media secrecy and media selectivity in reporting these stories can be powerful motivators for reinforcing the disturbing viewpoint that there simply isn't any agent out there looking out for any of us little guys who don't matter. Rather than engaging in a media blackout if any of us were to fall into the clutches of some evil terrorist cabal, we would be safe in laying a bet on the prospect of bulky trucks driving all over the flower beds and crushing the sprinkler system as the cable networks fought for space in our front yards to bring the latest "Breaking News" to their viewers...
  
  Then, of course, there is as always that third question raised by those who simply can't look beyond their own personal agenda to be able to come to grips with what all of this is about anyway. This is a good example of that bizarre non sequitur argument that says, in effect, "Oh, sure, you can keep a secret now, but what about when torturing helpless detainees was necessary to defend the Homeland from Terra? Hunh, Bub? What about that?" Fortunately for the rest of us who long ago started looking for a quiet, peaceful, isolated South Pacific island that could serve as a Neocon repopulation center, Lewis Carroll covered this ground a century and a half ago with the Mad Hatter so we don't have to...
  
  There is a point, even though certain neocon commentators can't seem to claw their way to it, to all of this, and that is 'when - and why - do you spill the beans on a situation like the one David Rohde was in. I haven't decided where exactly I find myself on this, although I do have to confess to leaning toward the "why not tell the story" crowd, if only because I have always hated the MSM's insistence on prying into the darkest, most desperate corners of everybody else's lives at the worst possible moment and wonder why they should be accorded some special privilege be spared those moments. This is clearly an "ethics panel" moment for the MSM to examine just exactly when or whether they spill the beans...
  
  Wake me when the MSM gets beyond its own sense of exceptionalism and makes that moment happen, OK?
• June 21, 2009
• 18:05

  Today's "Why Am I Not Surprised" Moment

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...shrouded back there somewhere in the mists of history, there was a time (in fact, up through 2004) when a person who finished second in the race for the presidency of the United States would take some time off from the public stage. It was almost a form of tradition that a candidate who had been repudiated by American voters - or, as was Al Gore's case in 2000, a 5-vote majority of Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices, even though American voters had actually repudiated his opponent - would step back, assume a low profile, and abjure offers to share his opinion on the day's events for some decent interval of a year or two or three. It was an understandable tradition, given that the loser's judgement had already been assessed and found wanting (Al Gore excepted, of course), so a failed candidate could easily be excused for wondering why he should bother. Clearly, when it comes to the MSM and the most recent loser, John McCain, that tradition is as dead as the bundling board...
  
  Not satisfied to simply rest after his star turn leading the charge to make a bad situation in Iran worse, McCain today was granted another opportunity by the MSM to offer his plan for how to escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula beyond the breaking point. His plan isn't all that surprising, since McCain comes from that bellicose branch of the Republican party that seeks conflict not because of confused, underinformed and misguided neoconservative Pax Americana theories but because of a visceral urge to blow things up...
  
  Maybe his war jones is getting all cranked up here because the US Naval vessel that may well be tasked to intercept the North Korean freighter Kang Nam is the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer DDG-56, otherwise known as USS McCain. Or, who knows, maybe he doesn't even know that little factoid and is just running on the same muscular philosophical war-fuel that has informed his world-view for his entire public life. Make no mistake about this; the ol' Maverick has never been opposed to military conflict for it's own sake and has only been a 'maverick' in the eyes of his own party over the terms rather than the fact of use of military force. His early-career opposition to Reagan's foray into Lebanon was all about objectives and his objections to W's war in Iraq were about tactics rather than about actual strategic issues...
  
  In that internal world of his own construct, it may be that McCain is actually becoming a bit of a softy as he ages. The wildly absurd threats of retaliation by the North Korean regime have been sounding far more like the pronouncements of Henery Hawk from those old Foghorn LeghornLooney Toons episodes than the statements of a government grounded in any particular sense of reality. Given all that, why not just sink the damned ship if you believe you have "hard evidence" of cargo violating U.N. resolutions? After all, in Big John's mind, we had "hard evidence" that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and that all the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms and petal-strewn streets if only we would remove Saddam's oppressive yoke of subjugation from its collective shoulders, and that all panned out just the way he called it, right?
  
  What McCain is advocating here is calling North Korea's bluff, because that's what you do when you think you are the biggest, meanest dog on the porch and you don't really care all that much who gets bitten in the ensuing melee. I am not surprised at all by his suggested approach to dealing with this issue because that's the sort of solution John McCain would be expected to give to any sort of foreign policy crisis, but a couple of questions still remain: whatever happened to the days when the guy who got his presidential candidate butt kicked - in part for advocating just this sort of solution to a testy foreign policy issue - looked in the mirror and saw a guy who didn't really need to be contributing to this conversation at this moment? And whatever happened to the days when the MSM had the decency and fundamental respect for us little people to ignore the clamoring voices of people like McCain that we so recently firmly rejected at both the Congressional and presidential level as the sort of candidates that we wanted to be speaking in our collective name?
• June 18, 2009
• 21:17

  That's SENATOR To You, General!!

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...offered without comment, except to say that a longer clip would have afforded the opportunity to actually hear the General's anal orifice trying to crawl all the way back up into his upper GI tract for protection:
  
  
• 20:09

  Oh, And One More Thing....

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I don't really have anything more to add to the sordid John Ensign story. I just thought this shot was way too awesome to pass up in light of the paradox that is his current circumstances vs. his history of moral pronouncements...
  
  Actually, so I do have a couple of things to add:
  
  1) While I don't have any particular feeling one way or another about whether this silver-haired Lothario engaged in some sort of "sordid" affair (because I'm not interested at all in people's personal lives when they don't intersect with mine), I feel a powerful urge to use the same language that the scrintchy-eyed faux moralists on the Pharisee right (such as...oh, say...John Ensign, for example) would use if it were a Democrat (such as...oh, say...Bill Clinton, for example) whose failure of marital fidelity was being discussed.
  
  2) Despite anything I may have written, implied, or suggested in that previous post, I am enjoying the daylights out of this little tragedy and look forward to what appear to be many shoes that remain to be dropped as this story unfurls and expands...
  
  Photo Credit: (AFP/File/Karen Bleier)
• June 17, 2009
• 20:38

  W\hen All You Have Is A Bomber, Every Problem Is A Target

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...why John McCain is getting so much face time with his criticism of Obama's response to the Iranian strife while Senator Richard Lugar's views are not is something of a mystery.......OK, it isn't really, given the history of the MSM over the last 15 - 20 years....but, still, at long last, have these people no decency?
  
  This report isn't the fault of Politico - even though most of that outfit's writers would probably cheerfully crawl across a parking lot full of broken glass while under constant live machine gun fire if there was the chance of finding something on the other side reflecting badly on the Obama administration. No, this one is on CNN, which - one more time, just like the day before on NBC - granted a forum to the guy who got his butt handed to him in last November's referendum on who would be the best person to lead the country (in part because of his bellicose refusal to step away from the saber-rattling that has become the failed hallmark of Republican foreign policy) so that he could once again prove that the old saying about partisanship ending at the ocean's edge is only operative in a Republican's mind if the president is, in fact, a Republican...
  
  John McCain has a pretty sparse history of having been right on any foreign policy issue that mattered over the last quarter century (his opposition to Reagan's deployment of Marines to Lebanon being a notable exception) and is not viewed as a foreign policy expert, unlike his collegue Richard Lugar. His answer to many foreign policy issues is one or another version of parking a carrier battle group off the offending country's coast. McCain represents the bomber pilot's variant of the old "when all you have is a hammer" saw to a degree that another bomber pilot of an earlier generation - George McGovern - could never have even thought of aspiring to, much less lowering himself to emulate...
  
  McCain is wrong once again; wrong on the basics and wrong on the policy. More to the point, he seems not to understand the nuance of the very specific history that the United States shares with Iran. Support of the desires of the opposition is in fact taking sides, regardless of how noble the motives might be for doing so, and could play into the hands of the ruling regime in the very way that Senator Lugar - who has actually thought about such matters - implied. The ol' Maverick used to be a naval aviator - an attack pilot flying a bomb-dropping ground attack aircraft - and seems to not have moved beyond the aggressive mindset that is required for that line of work. That mindset doesn't really play well in the realm of foreign policy most of the time, so it's just a little bizarre that we can't seem to be rid of this guy and his ill-considered observations on "what should the US do" in this particular case...
• 19:08

  On A Contrarian View Of "Analysis"...The Ensign Files

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it is an article of faith in the world of conventional wisdom that Nevada Sen. John Ensign's confession to an extramarital affair is another headache that the Incredible Shrinking Republic-Fascist party could do without. In fact, this A.P. analysis illustrates that point perfectly...
  
  I have a contrarian view which I'm going to present very quietly, just this once, never to repeat again. The fact that I have a contrarian view shouldn't be surprising; I live in Orygun, after all, and I believe there is a section in the Orygun Revised Statutes mandating serious penalties for failing to do so (that's how we explain the historical fact of Republicans like Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, and Bob "Boxed Wine" Packwood, all of whom tended to fit uncomfortably into their party back in the day and wouldn't get out of a primary campaign these days)....
  
  At any rate, as I was saying, I have a quiet little contrarian view to the conventional wisdom about Ensign's hypocritical little sexual romp. This is probably exactly what the Republic-Fascist party needs, for one simple reason: the only way that this shrinking minority can ever realistically return to the state of being an actual long-term player at anything other than a regional level is to cast off the hegemony of it's one true current base. That base is the socially ultra-conservative religious Pharisee base (insisting beyond all evidence to the contrary that it is somehow affiliated with Christianity) that has wrapped its sweaty mitts around the levers of power - and teenage boys and strangers in public restrooms and prostitutes and other sexual objects other than its spouses - for the last 20 years and it's hold isn't likely to be broken until somebody steps up to the potter's wheel to form a new Republican party out of the raw clay left over from the sort of Republican party that once held sway in places like Orygun...
  
  I grew up around a lot of Republicans - seriously, a lot of Republicans, mostly of the old more libertarian mindset - back up in the hills and hollers above Central Idaho's Clearwater River and I don't think any of those old Idaho hillbillies would even deign to acknowledge the image that their party tends to project these days. Why they wouldn't have been pleased with Ensign's infidelity in any objective sense, his pious insistence on using the power of the Federal Government to pry into and control people's personal lives - coupled with that little "daliance" of his - would have guaranteed his return to the private world no later than the next election cycle. The old Republican party had a shot, here and there, at reaching out back in the day to all those center-whatever voters because its candidates didn't normally - as a rule, outside of Bible-belt regions - spit out the kind of tripe that True Believers (even if they frequently aren't True Practitioners) keep spouting as the foundation of their political aspirations these days. Extramarital affairs aren't ever a good idea for anyone seeking or looking to hold onto political office, but Republican hopes for a party worth messing with as a national entity simply aren't going to come close to seeing fruition of that dream ntil somebody figures out that it's time to step away from the morally vacuous Promise Keepers like Ensign, Vitter, Foley, and all the rest...
  
  Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
• June 15, 2009
• 20:21

  On Why The MSM Doesn't Like Bloggers

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...on Saturday last (June 13), Bryan at Why Now wrote this post about the obvious evidence of fraud represented by the reported Iranian election results...
  
  The Associated Press finally has a story, first published less than two hours ago, mulling over just how it could be that the Iranian election could be declared after a matter of hours when 40 million hand-written ballots needed to be counted "by hand". Apparently, the MSM has finally tumbled to the very same idea that Bryan reached on Saturday: how do you count so many ballots without voting machines or tabulator equipment in such a short period of time?
  
  As Bryan pointed out...on Saturday... you don't. Yet even today, the awesome power of the MSM - as so ably represented by the AP - hasn't quite been able to figure that out. It can only report that such a remarkable electoral "loaves and fishes" moment is "suspicious"...
  
  That's why the MSM doesn't like bloggers. Bloggers are smarter and faster than the MSM...
• 19:35

  Doesn't Anybody Around Here Watch SciFi?!

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the lede says it all:
  

  After more than 120,000 years trapped beneath a block of ice in Greenland, a tiny microbe has awoken. The long-lasting bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on other planets.

  
  Seriously, what part of the underlying plot line of at least one SciFi Channel movie every other day or so are these Penn State researchers missing, for God's sake? Ancient/foreign microbes are the fourth leading cause of death for science fiction B-movie bit actors, trailing only natural disasters, little understood spiritual forces like the undead, and large, ungainly yet vicious alien life forms (many of which may well be your next door neighbor under the influence of those same ancient/foreign microbes)...
  
  These people are playing with fire and they need to be stopped!! Otherwise, the normally placid rural farmland and wooded copses of the Nittany Valley will be swarming with legions of strange, angry, murderous beasts bearing a startling resemblance some sort of twisted variant of a Pennsylvania dairy cow...or maybe even Joe Pa. I mean, who knows where this could lead?
• June 10, 2009
• 18:56

  Mike And The Mushy Middle

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...Mike Huckabee sounded the clarion call today for all True Believers to rally behind those core conservative values that are the only hope for bringing the Republic-Fascist Party back to power. Those of us who hope that the Republic-Fascist Party never in our lifetime comes back to power can only wish him the best of luck in this bit of political evangelism that he is pushing...
  
  Show me a member of the Congress of the United States who decided to run on clearly stated conservative policies in any sort of swing-state or swing-district election, and the odds are really good that I can show you a person who these days has the word "former" attached to his legislative title. Even for those incumbents who try to step away from their own foul history, what is there to run on? Smaller government? Lower taxes? Gays, guns, and God? That hasn't been working too well for them in the last couple of election cycles and they've pretty much mined all the ore they are going to find out there in the electorate on those issues anyway. There really is such a thing as the Mushy Middle; it matters, despite the occasional insistence by commentators on either end of the political spectrum that it doesn't; and it clearly needs to stand up on its own hind feet and get a little respect. That Mushy Middle has been telling the Republic-Fascist party in various polls and elections since 2006 that it's out there and really hasn't been buying into those clearly stated conservative policies Repub's have been pushing but not implementing...
  
  Obviously, the Mushy Middle is another name for moderates and the Repub's are edging up to the ragged edge of losing the only meaning they have in political life - the power of the Senate filibuster (at least theoretically) - because so many of the leader-wannabe's think that all of those moderates don't matter. Mike Wannabee has joined the right-wing chorus, insisting that what the American people are really hungering for is more talk about banning abortion, denying equal rights to gays and lesbians, and slashing the budget in order to get rid of all those pesky socialist programs that protect air and water and worker's rights and the opportunity to stave off the prospect of giving up the suburban rambler for a family-sized shopping cart underneath some federally-financed bridge in these desperate economic times that the Mushy Middle is confronting. I can't think of any better thing to do than send Mike an encouraging missive. You Go, Mike...
• June 08, 2009
• 20:15

  A Party In Search Of Its Own Rodney King

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...these days, the Republic-Fascist party is starting to look remarkably like the Los Angeles Police Department officers who were caught on tape making damned sure that convicted felon Rodney King didn't nurture any more thoughts about trying to evade pursuing officers in a car chase. For those who missed the credit roll, the weak-minded yet fervent "Base" of the Republic-Fascist party plays the role of the LAPD officers in this remake; anybody who looks anything like a moderate Republican plays the part of King himself, but - in a strange plot twist - Newt Gingrich has decided to take over all the "Rodney King" speaking roles (especially those uttered during those riots after that first acquittal) even though he has traditionally fought to get one of those really juicy LAPD roles...
  
  Rodney King asked during the midst of the rioting "...can we all get along?" It's a question of forbearance and comity that would most appropriately come from someone who has the cred to raise the question as a result of being the target of a big-time professional stomp-down. In this odd remake of the failure of the Republican part to actually capture the imagination of the voting public, that question is now being asked by one of the leading architects of the very circumstances in which the current Republic-Fascist party now finds itself. Newt Gingrich was THE leader of the movement that took an axe to any of the ropes that lashed moderate Republicans to the base that he helped to create as the most important primary election voting block that the party would ever have. Now, in the deep vacuum of space created by the failure of the party to create or nurture anybody who passes as a 'leader' without provoking a powerful cringe reflex in the rest of the populace, Newt wants to step up to be that one healing force and sane voice calling for a more inclusive Republican party...
  
  Seriously.
  

  "I am happy that Dick Cheney is a Republican," Gingrich said at the annual Senate-House fundraising dinner. "I am also happy that Colin Powell is a Republican."

  
  There isn't any better evidence than this that Newt sees an opening to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Over the course of his Congressional career, you would have had to waterboard him to get him to say something like this, because Newt didn't during that time draw a breath the exhalation of which would result in the forming of such a sentence. He isn't an inclusive, embracing kind of guy...
  
  Newt clearly wants to be the new "Kumbaya" guy for the Republic-Fascist party; sadly, for him, Newt isn't a guy who has been stomped into a mudhole in the debate over what the Republican party truly means. Newt can't be the party's Rodney King, no matter how hard he tries; he has too much history living on the wrong side of that particular set of tracks. But his effort to assume that role is going to be fun to watch...
• June 07, 2009
• 20:24

  Twitter In The Hands Of An Angry (Republican) God

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the filibuster rules of the U.S. Senate will probably stand in the way, but I really think that there should probably be a law passed - for a couple of reasons - that bars members of that body from establishing Twitter profiles and sharing their personal thoughts with the rest of us. I offer as Exhibit No. 1 today's efforts by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R -Iowa), which are as follows:
  

  Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.

  
  

  Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a 'hammer' u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL.

  
  OK, so first of all, we are clearly able to see what the real burr is under Senator Grassley's saddle: President Obama is hangin' in Paris and Chuck isn't. Chuck is working overtime; he's even working weekends, although the plural is probably just a little overboard, given that the Senate just got back from a two-week break in honor of Memorial Day - which careful observers will note only grants some - but not all - regular taxpayers one single day off. But never mind that; Senator Grassley has his nose to the grindstone while the President is galavanting around some Frenchy place. The Honorable Gentleman is toiling away in the salt mines of legislative business after a too-short Memorial Day recesss - which followed an apparently too-short Easter recess - while some liberal young pretender to the throne is stylin' around taking in the sights in the City of Lights (I am confident that the 140-character limit for Tweets is all that prevented him from bringing up that date-night trip to New York City)...
  
  The other problem with Grassley stepping out onto the raw cutting edge of communication technology is the very real risk that his constituents will tumble to the conclusion that - at the very least - he has thumbs too thick to allow him to be trusted with the people's business. I mean, set aside for a minute the whole idea that he could get all pissed off at a president of the other party commenting on health care and decide - solely for reasons of pique - that he is no longer interested in playing nice with the other kids in the most superannuated day care center in the history of the world. In any sort of real world, that kind of tantrum is the type of thing that gets you sent off to the Loser's Lunch Table in the cafeteria to sit with the kids who made too much of a big deal about all their on-line World of Warcraft victories scored on Prom Night. That isn't the sort of emotion worthy of a United States Senator, so never mind that, either; that's probably not what he was getting at, right?
  
  We should focus instead on his raw abilities when it comes to sending tweets. On this point, Chuck comes close to Epic Fail. The brave new world of text-based Intertubes communication relies first and foremost on spelling and punctuation. Thick thumbs get in the way of that First Principle, and these Tweets suggest that, pouting and partisan gameplaying aside, Chuck Grassley should probably hand his CrackBerry over to one of his assistants. These most recent Twitter entries may express his true feelings, but they represent a failure of articulation in the online world that would embarrass a 14-year-old. It is hard to rally anybody other that the committed base to a particular position if you are going to rely on Twitter posts that make you sound like some out-of-control 'tweener who's parents won't be likely to notice all the missing bottles in the liquor cabinet after tonight's date night when you were left alone and in charge...
• June 06, 2009
• 19:16

  A Final Bit Of Justice For Engine 57

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  Raymond Lee Oyler stands convicted of intentionally starting a fire in the wee hours of the morning of 26 October, 2006, at the bottom of San Gorgonio Peak near the Southern California town of Cabazon during a Santa Ana wind event. By 0800 hours, Incident Command staff were aware that the five-man crew of San Bernardino National Forest Engine 57, which was engaged in structure protection in the small community of Twin Pines, had been burned over by the wind-driven maelstrom that came to be named the Esperanza Fire. All five crew members died...
  
  Yesterday, Oyler was sentenced to death, and - in total contravention to both my carefully nurtured progressive and Christian proclivities - I said to myself "YES!". What is probably worse for the sake of both my immortal soul and my self-subscribed progressive credentials, I don't think I will ever feel bad about my reaction...
  
  As I have previously written both here and elsewhere, wildland firefighting can be a brutally dangerous thing to do, just as the more commonly understood job of structural firefighting is dangerous. However, wildland firefighting can present some circumstances that differentiate it from normal urban/suburban structural firefighting because wildland fires - especially during the initial attack phase of urban interface fires like the Esperanza Incident that led to the Engine 57 tragedy - are frequently fought from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead of solely trying to deny fuel to the flame front to stem its advance, firefighters set up shop at locations near defensible homes that will sooner rather than later - in violation of any sane understanding of where a good place to be is - be right in the middle of the Beast...
  
  Going up against the Beast belly to belly is the closest thing there is to experiencing the reality of combat without that whole 'people shooting at you' thing. The risks involved in the wild confusion of initial attack, especially in the case of structure protection, are sufficiently dire without having to fold into the mix the idea that firefighters have to be out there accepting and dealing with all those raw starkly defined dangers because somebody decided to intentionally start that fire...
  
  Yesterday's sentencing was one small bit of final justice for Jason McKay, Jess McLean, Daniel Hoover-Najera, Mark Loutzenhiser, and Pablo Cerda and those they left behind. The crew of Engine 57 did what was expected of them. They understood and accepted that expectation, even though they shouldn't have had to be where they were in the first place were it not for some twisted obsession that we can never understand. They will always be remembered by all of us who have ever stood in the middle of some dark smokey Hell over the years and tried to do the job we were sent in there to do...
  
• June 05, 2009
• 22:04

  Sixty-Five Years Ago Today

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  ...13,000 aircraft. 5,ooo ships. 160,000 soldiers...
  
  
  The sheer numbers of that singular day 65 years ago are astounding, and the tens of thousands of individual stories are a precious resource that will hopefully never be lost or forgotten, even though we are losing the storytellers by the tens and hundreds every day. The morning of 6 June 1944 is the one of those very specific moments where a line can be drawn on the long scroll of history to mark where the outcome mattered to the whole world. If the Allies made it ashore to establish a defensible beachhead and begin moving inland across the Normandy countryside, it would mean the beginning of the end of Hitler's dreams of a racially pure empire. If those troops were driven back into the sea, the war would last many months - if not years - longer and, although opinions vary about the eventual outcome, the world would have been a much different place...
  
  That is why we remember...
• June 03, 2009
• 21:15

  Another Example Of "All You Need To Know About Republicans"

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  ...personally, I think Lindsay Graham sounds more like Huckleberry Hound than does Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, but regardless of all that, Graham's comment today is profoundly instructive about what should from here on out be clearly understood to the "Party of 'No'" nonstrategy of the Republic-Fascist Party":
  

  "She needs to prove to me and others ... that, if they found themselves in litigation with a Latina woman, you fill in the blanks, that she would give you a fair shake..."

  
  This is what conservative middle=aged white male exceptionalism looks like. Just for a moment, reflect back over the entire sad history of American jurisprudence and - just for the pure hell of it - plug a few different words in here and there in Graham's statement. Imagine for a moment the circumstances of a black man in litigation with a white man in front of a middle-aged white male judge; or imagine a Latina woman in litigation with that same guy in front of that same judge; go ahead and shoot the moon, in fact, and imagine any minority in litigation with that same white guy and that same white guy judge. Ask yourself the corresponding question: would that judge give you a "fair shake"?
  
  The answer to these alternative scenarios has far too often been for far too long simple and stark: "No". Huckleberry Graham's supposedly heartfelt concerns about SotoMayor's judicial philosophy and temperment are stunning examples of the arrogant sense of entitlement that old white guys have accrued to themselves over the history of this great nation of ours. Privileged old white guys have been making law affecting the lives of people who are nothing like them and whose lives they could never hope to understand for over 200 years and there are more examples than any sane person has the patience to shake a stick at of situations where some non-white person came out on the short end on that same stick when the people sitting at that other desk and the robed figure up front behind that big ol' desk of power were white guys...
  
  Huckleberry Graham's comments are a simple but telling embarrassment to any white guy of any age who aspires to be a fully actualized citizen. His observations are a clear manifestation of the inherent racism that serves as the underpinning of that hallowed "base" that Graham and other Senate Republic-Fascists absolutely must please if they want to stay on the Federal payroll in D.C. His comments after his meeting with Sonia Sotomayor have been presented without much in the way of analysis of their actual meaning. Not much analysis is necessary, however; he's telling you all you need to know about Republicans...
• June 02, 2009
• 21:43

  What Is A Body To Do?

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  ...there are days - in fact there have been a lot of days recently - where the pressures and stresses of personal life have made me question the fundamental premise of whether or not it matters to care about the pressing national issues of the day. There are plenty of much more famous people, after all, who are ready, willing, and able to wring their collective hands over those national issues. There are plenty of talented writers who have the time to tolerate listening to dead-ender racists like Pat Buchanan (which came to mind only because he is over my shoulder and once again over the top on my TV), and I really appreciate their efforts because I just don't have the time and have to struggle even trying to care right now in any case...
  
  There are still the occasional moments where I can snap out of my funk, and this news from today - which I find is being typically under-reported by the MSM - is one of them. Think about it: a 3-0 Federal appeal court decision out the the Second Circuit (including panel member Sonia Sotomayor) repudiated the SCOTUS Second Amendment ruling on D.C.' gun laws, declaring that decision not applicable to States, which D.C. ain't. Just as the Winger Wurlitzer starts cranking up the usual noise about "liberals snatching our guns out of our hands", word comes that a three-judge panel out of the Seventh Circuit arrived at the exact same conclusion, with two members of the unanimous panel being Reagan appointee's...
  
  That whistling sound you thought you heard a moment ago was the wind going out of certain winger sails at the thought of losing the "gun rights" argument for such a simple, anti-intellectual reason as the fact that otherwise respected jurists from both sided of the philosophical aisle reject the premise that the original SCOTUS ruling applied in any context other than on Federal reserves (which Washington, DC, is). As will prove to be the case in other aspects of this silly, half-baked morality play of a nomination that is the only hope wingers seem to think they have left of regaining relevance, a sympathizer or right-wing fellow traveler would have to at some point look at at the smoking hulk of a derailment that this line of argument represents and simply ask the hopelessly whiny minority party question: What Is A Body To Do?"...
• May 30, 2009
• 19:28

  And Now For News That Really Matters

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  ...in what is considered to be a stunning upset, viral Intertubes sensation Susan Boyle finished second in the finals of "Britian's Got Talent", a Simon Crowell creation that answers the unasked question of what the love child produced by a dalliance between "The Ed Sullivan Show" and Crowell's own "American Idol" would look like. One more time, for those who didn't get all the relevant handouts at the beginning of class, real life demonstrated itself to be nothing like the movies...but that, after all, is why we go watch movies in the first place, isn't it?
  
  Ms. Boyle probably need not worry about What It All Means, though. If the history of "American Idol" is any measure (which it may or may not, given differences in the contests and whatever pop culture disparities that may exist between Mother England and the former Colonies), there is a certain hope for someone who doesn't win one of Crowell's contests. Jennifer Hudson, who has had a tragic recent history, finished seventh in the third "American Idol" season, and went on to win both a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and a Grammy Award. Kellie Pickler, who finished sixth in Idol's fifth season, is making a name for herself on the Country/Western music scene. And then, of course, there's Bucky Covington, Chris Daughtry, Kimberley Locke, and Josh Gracin (Stay With Me is a song you don't play if the kids aren't yet asleep), all of whom found commercial success after being booted from American Idol...
  
  If her original gazillion-YouTube-hit version of "I Dreamed A Dream" (or, for that matter, her smoky version of the classic torch song "Cry Me A River") is any measure, Susan Boyle will do just fine. She should be able to dream a dream that is far more positive than the lyrics of that song that made her so famous...
• May 28, 2009
• 19:42

  "Kodak Moments" And War Crimes

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  ...I have to confess that I don't have any particular desire to see any more detainee torture photographs of the sort that the ACLU is digging for. I've seen enough already...
  
  I get it already, OK?
  
  People in the employ of the United States of America did things to other people in a captive, controlled setting that a previous generation of people in the employ of the United States of America tried, convicted, and either executed or imprisoned a yet another group of people (hereafter known as "the losers") for having committed the same or similar outrages against Americans who where held in a captive, controlled setting...
  
  The pictures we have already had the distinct displeasure of seeing have been enough to ruin the careers of several enlisted personnel and - in some cases - the wrong officers, and at the same time have failed to cause either Congress or the Obama administration to take any sort of meaningful gander at the responsibility that either Pentagon or Bush administration officials bear for having ordered what far too many experienced military personnel have immediately identified as a somewhat crude but quite realistic approximation of the sort of SERE training that they have themselves been subject to, albeit in a much shorter and more protected way...
  
  To be perfectly honest (and perhaps to plunge me forever in the fiery brimstone sea of those who are insufficiently progressive), I can't honestly see a reason to see any more 'detainee torture' pictures. Anyone who wasn't already offended by the past Abu Ghraib photos has a particular political mindset that probably isn't going to be tipped off top dead center by the revelation of alleged rape photos. Anyone who was - like me - outraged by that first set of photos will only be kept inflamed by the new photos, assuming they represent the sort of images that the Daily Telegraph claimsto have, but we really shouldn't be any more fired up by the revelation of new pictures than we should have already been by the previously released pictures, because the purport depravity of these contested photos (if the Daily Telegraph is to be trusted, and I can't honestly think of a reason why it has earned that right) is really, honestly only one casual step farther beyond what we've seen already...
  
  War Crimes were committed, and they were committed not by a few rogue elements but by military personnel operating under the direction of higher authority that extended all the way to various offices in the White House. It may be that new photos of Americans raping babies would finally tip the scales in this ongoing conversation, but there doesn't appear to be any such pictures and the shots that are purported to exist won't, in the first case, ever end on TV and, in the second case, therefore won't matter in the larger national discussion...
  
  But even if they do, I keep finding myself circling back to the First Principle of this whole discussion: If what the American people have already seen isn't enough to send them streaming into the streets clamoring for redress from those people who did bad things in our names, those American people aren't paying all that much attention to the subject anyway...
  
  All the existing evidence points to the proposition that war crimes were committed at the direction of Bush administration officials at the highest levels but that only low-ranking minions were actually punished. That hasn't mattered, though, at the national level - regardless of who is in charge - and all we are left with is the grim fact that a host of even more brutal prisoner treatment than we have actually seen in the past is just another "Kodak Moment" and not some sort of turning point....
• May 27, 2009
• 20:06

  On How We Should Finally Have An Honest Talk About Diabetes

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  ...I am the parent of a type I diabetic teenager who was originally diagnosed at about the same age as Sonia Sotomayor. I have spent the last eight years fighting two wars: one with the outside world that still - after years of advancements and improvements in the manner in which insulin-dependent diabetes is treated - views those who are so "afflicted" as being somehow fragile and less than fully capable of performing as fully successful human beings, and another with my own child who has suffered beat-down after beat-down as he discovered that he couldn't become a soldier and couldn't get a commercial pilot's license and couldn't do just about any damned other thing that little boys have said for eons that they wanted to be as they worked through the issues of "what do I want to be when I grow up"...
  
  Life conspires against children who are type I diabetics, throwing up all sorts of roadblocks that are undoubtedly well-meaning but serve to reinforce in the minds of those children the whole idea that they may somehow be fragile or "special" in a bad way or somehow unworthy of consideration for certain fields of endeavor. A parent's job in the face of this mess is to fight back - both in the world of the child and in the larger world that the child faces - and state in the most aggressive terms possible that, yes, in fact, MY CHILD can do almost all of those things about the world has its timorous questions, and he can do them well and successfully. All the world needs to do in almost every case is give a little bit of space to his need to measure his blood sugar and not freak out when he starts poking needles in his body to inject the insulin that keeps him alive...
  
  I have to confess that I am something of a militant parent in this regard and aggressively encourage my kid to do his blood sugar test and administer his insulin shot in as public a setting as possible any time we are eating out (it helps that I have willing teenage co-conspirator looking to freak people out for whatever reason I have forgotten over the years as to why 16-year-olds might want to freak people out). It is in this light that I am both profoundly respectful of the circumstances of Obama's first SCOTUS nominee and ready to pick up an axe handle to go looking for those who want to make her diabetes an issue. It is, also, in this light that I listened with bated breath to the NPR "All Things Considered" piece tonight about Sonia Sotomayor's type I diabetes...
  
  In the world of my dreams, the nomination of a type I diabetic to the position of Associate Justice to the Supreme Court of The United States will highlight the fact that there are very many fields of endeavor that are not closed off to people who face a lifetime of dealing with this particular issue. In the world of my dreams, those winger Senators who have fought so hard against embryonic stem cell research will have a sudden moment of epiphany that reveals to them what that whole issue is actually all about. In the world of my dreams, my kid and a whole bunch of other kids living with the same circumstances that my kid faces every day will understand that there is still a life out there, perhaps not one that looks anything like the sort of action hero life that every kid wants to grow up to live, but the sort of life that actually matters at both the personal level and to the larger world...
  
  To be honest, as the parent of a type I diabetic, I find it offensive that we even need to be having this conversation in today's world. It is beyond strange to me that this particular "affliction" should garner attention when we have no idea what medications treating blood pressure or heart disease or type II diabetes or any other sort of medical problem any of the other eight SCOTUS justices are now taking or were taking at the point of their confirmation hearings. It's time for an honest conversation about diabetes, rather than some SCLM treatment of the subject (and yes, tonight we will toss Huffpo into that mix). Sadly, we aren't living in a space where any particular honest discussion of that issue will happen...
• May 26, 2009
• 19:53

  Stare Decisis? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Stare Decisis!

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  ...in the dawning of this new era where we will be awash in chatter about why or why not Sonia Sotomayor should be confirmed as the newest member of SCOTUS, it is probably instructive to think back to an earlier confirmation discussion in which the concept of stare decisis became a kitchen table topic and how any sort of honor to that concept played out in a Supreme Court decision issued just today. This particular past discussion, one that took place just a very few years ago, provides just about all the ammunition necessary to defend against the right wing meme about activist jurists that is starting to crank up again now that they have an actual name to attack...
  
  Way, way back in September of 2005, John Roberts sat in front of the Senate Judiciary committee answering questions regarding his fitness to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of these United States. During the course of his confirmation hearing, Roberts (with that metaphorical stack of Bibles looming just over his right shoulder), worked up a sweat trying to assure the Committee members that he was the sort of stand-up guy who would accord the utmost respect to previous SCOTUS decisions because of the well-understood value of making SCOTUS law-interpreting ensure "predictability, stability and legitimacy." In a rather under-reported decision issued today, Chief Justice Roberts and his merry band of conservative activist justices overturned a relatively recent SCOTUS decision that ruled that police could not initiate interrogation of a suspect after the suspect's assertion of the right to an attorney at an arraignment or similar proceeding...
  
  This isn't Dred Scott we're talking about here. Nor is it the sort of discussion about stare decisis with regard to Roe v. Wade that both Roberts and Alito dissembled about so effectively a couple of years ago. This is directly about both one element of the building right-wing criticism of Sotomayor's recent reversals at the hands of the current SCOTUS and today's relatively under-reported reversal of Associate Justice John Paul Stevens very own majority opinion in that 1986 case. Today we heard all sorts of right wing talk about how members of the SCOTUS should rule on the facts and not on the basis of personal emotions or life experiences and should not have a history of being reversed by a higher court, while at the same time Tony Scalia was being revealed in his majority opinion to be deciding to overturn past SCOTUS precedent based solely on personal emotion rather than any sort of understanding of Constitutional precedent and, at the same time, reversing a Supreme Court decision whose majority opinion was written by a sitting member of the current Court...
  
  
  I suppose I should gather from today's winger commentary that - shocking though this may be - that Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is somehow no longer qualified to be a member of SCOTUS owing to his new-found history of having decisions to which he has been a party being reversed by the full court. It's a stupid idea on its face, but it shouldn't be surprising from the folks who were rightfully removed from majority status by the Amerocan people. We will, sadly, have to put up with all their nonsense for the next couple of months during this looming SCOTUS nomination battle, but today's Supreme Court ruling - with its profound lack of respect for precedent as well as its complete right-wing reset of the rights of the accused - sufficiently informs us as to the actual respect that Republic-Fascists have for the "rule of law"...
• May 23, 2009
• 20:37

  What?!!?!? His Middle Name Isn't Tiberius?!?

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  ...having just finally engineered an opportunity to get the nucular family (all due homeage to G. W. Bush) to a theatrical big screen showing of "Star Trek", I have to admit I'm all fired up about the idea of zinging around in outer space. It is in this particular emotional context that I sit down in front of my cranky ol' laptop to find that Charles F. Bolton, Jr., has been nominated by President Obama to be the new head honcho at NASA...
  
  Bolton is a guy with a personal history of the sort that you would expect to see characterized in some movie about courage and service and sacrifice down at the multiplex on a Saturday night. He's a Naval Academy graduate who went to the
  Dark Side of Marine Corps aviation as an A6 Intruder pilot and who flew into space as either pilot or mission commander on four separate Shuttle missions...
  
  It will be interesting to see what sort of games the Republic-Fascist minority will want to play with this Democratic nomination in an effort to demonstrate that there is 'something' wrong with that nomination. There may well be 'something' that they can hook onto, if only because there is always 'something' these days for the minority party to refer to, whether or not it actually matters to real Americans...
  
  If the last several weeks provide any glimpse of the future, this is what we know: somehow, sometime soon, Mitch McConnell will be explaining to us, courtesy of the MSM, why his own remarkably meager military service leads him to a clear understanding as to why a long-time Marine Officer with 100 combat missions and four trips into space in his log book isn't just exact the sort of person that needs to take over the national space agency. Let's face it; Bolden's middle name isn't "Tiberius", so it's hard to imagine any Republic-Fascist supporting him as NASA administrator if there is any even faint hope that James T. Kirk is somehow available...
• May 19, 2009
• 20:15

  What "Turning A Corner" Looks Like In Wingnut Land

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  ...apparently, in the sweaty, twisted world of the Republican party, there is heartening evidence that they have finally Turned A Corner. Or at least this is the mindset in the especially sweaty, twisted, and oh-so-very-threatened world of (for the time being) Republican National Committee chairman Michael "Laugh-A-Minute" Steele, if his speech today is any measure...
  
  It's a curious corner-turning that Steele claims to be seeing, if the next route segment is supposed to be a resurgence of the Republican Party. In just the last couple of weeks, the party over which he has only a nominal and rapidly diminishing influence has:
  
  A) lost a special congressional election in New York's traditionally Republican-dominant District 20, a contest that only the most starry-eyed liberal pundits predicted the party stood a chance of losing...
  
  B) watched as a very senior member of its Senate Caucus leave the party because he, as an admittedly 'feet of clay' moderate who tended to vote with the party about 97% of the time, realized that his kind of mealy-mouthed parsing of issues from a so-called 'moderate' standpoint would be a stone cold loser in a primary contest...
  
  C) embraced the whole "tea-bagging" revolution, even though many of the people who showed up for these little protests were the sorts of fiscally conservative Ron Paul supporter/libertarian folks to whom the Republican party has only paid lip service over the last two decades while engaging in its firm effort to focus on feeding that social issues beast that has been its core...
  
  D) decided to get back to some "new" message that isn't any different from the message it has been pushing for over a decade, even though the party hasn't ever carried through on the promise of consummating that message after several years of control of all the branches of Federal Government and has been bleeding party-registered supporters because of that quite singular failing...
  
  This isn't 'Turning A Corner'; this is mistaking a shadow for a corner and - on making that turn - smashing face-first into the wall that's sitting where you thought was the empty space on the other side of the corner you thought you were turning. When it comes to the Republic-Fascist party, this is a corner-turning that I can fully support...
  
• May 15, 2009
• 18:45

  Mother And Baby Are Doing Fine

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  ...there has been a fascinating - dare I say it - even gripping little drama going on somewhere down in the basement of the Intertubes over the last 36 days, involving a pair of bald eagles, a nest high in an old fir tree overlooking a lake near the crest of the Oregon Cascades, and the brutal reality of high-mountain spring weather that can make you wonder for just a moment how it is that there are any eagles at all...
  
  A few years ago the Oregon Zoo and several cooperators (including the U.S. Forest Service NatureWatch program) worked to install a live-feed video camera on a bald eagle nest above Odell Lake in the Central Oregon Cascades. The idea was to produce real-time video of an active nest that could be displayed on a set of TV screens installed in an interpretive display in the "Eagle Canyon" portion of a recently constructed exhibit at the zoo called "The Great Northwest". Technological problems plagued the first couple of nesting seasons, and a failed nesting effort (most likely due to incredibly nasty weather during the incubation season last year) denied the opportunity to watch a baby eagle grow up last year (I have a close personal connection to one of the people involved in this effort and - believe me - there was a tremendous amount of sadness when the nest and failed egg were abandoned)...
  
  This spring, however, the featured eagle pair (named in a contest - and I am not kidding - Cascade and Lady Odell) appeared out of the blue, with no prior nest preparation at all (which is somewhat unusual), produced an egg, and began the rather arduous process of trying to hatch it. A small cadre of obsessed eagle-cam watchers has been hanging onto every live feed video moment (the link to paste into a QuickTime viewer "open url" box is [vbxevents.powerstream.net] if you would like to become similarly obsessed) and talking back and forth to each other and posting videos and screen grabs on a good ol' fashioned bulletin board discussion group over the last 36 days. Somewhere around 5:30 pm (PDT) this evening, they were granted the outcome they have been hoping for over the last month or so (I could almost smell the cigar smoke through the monitor)...
  
  Birth Announcement
  
  Cascade and his lovely bride Lady Odell are pleased to announce the arrival of their much anticipated offspring "Baby Odell" sometime over the last 12 hours. "Baby Odell" clocks in at approximately 5 inches long and weighs roughly three ounces. Mother (and father, who spent a pretty good amount of time sitting on the egg himself) and baby are - as of this moment - doing well...
  
  ...and visitors to the Oregon Zoo may finally have the opportunity to see what a bunch of hard-working, dedicated people hoped to give them the opportunity to see five years ago...
• May 14, 2009
• 19:29

  On The Danger Of Wearing Bow Ties

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...on this, the occasion of my one thousandth effort to type words into a post for my own personal blog (as opposed to my posting efforts at a couple other places over the years), it is time that we visit the dangers that can accrue from being a conservative who for far too long styled around in public with a bow tie. Bow ties are a pernicious yet unrecognized blight on the intellectual capacity of the American public because of the singular way that they deny oxygen-enriched blood to the brain, and the tragic consequences of ignoring that threat are no better demonstrated than by this collection of strange observations by that most famous of bow tie wearers, George F. Will...
  
  I'm too tired and beat up from real life to spend much otherwise better-spent time to actually mess around with all the things that Will brings out in his piece. All I have the energy to say is "what the hell are you talking about?". George has decided to pick this point in our particular construction of American history to declare that Obama's efforts to dig our economy out of the hole that Bushco put us in is, in point of fact, some sort of latter day socialism and representative of a particular and dangerous sort of lawless political corruption...
  
  Think about that for a minute.
  
  After all the issues of torturing people to confess to nonexistent connections between al Quada and Iraq, after the finally fulfilled desire to make us less free as a nation through the passage of various iterations of the Patriot Act, after all the issues surrounding what appears to have been an unsupportable and illegal wiretapping of American citizens, after many hundreds of 'signing statements' that imposed a totally unsupportable concept of an imperial presidency on a country that had no particular history of an executive operating outside of the Constitutional construct; after all this and much, much more, it is only now that George Will has 'problems' with the exercise of executive power that leads him to the strange concluson that the current administration is operating in some strange dangerous space outside the bounds of law...
  
  I blame the ties and, as a scientist (at least insofar as the late and unlamented Gee Dub gang would crank out such labels), I have one simple bit of advice...
  
  Let all of this be a lesson to the fashion conscious: Don't wear bow ties. They cut off brain blood flow, robbing you of any normal sense of right or wrong or what actually is "corruption" or "lawlessness" and may not even seem to be all that much different from waterboarding...apparently...
  
  You've been warned...
  
• May 12, 2009
• 19:24

  Oh, Please, Lord; Let Me Live Long Enough

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:  l   [edit]

  ...there is a simple primitive human fascination with watching things crash and burn. Aside from conjuring a sort of strange congratulatory sense of "there, but for the Grace of God, go I...this time", witnessing moments of violent destruction feed some sort of primal understanding about survival, impermanence, and failure. How else to explain the popularity of auto racing, professional wrestling, thousands of people flocking into cold Sunday morning streets to watch a building implosion, or "American Idol". We now can enjoy a new opportunity to indulge in our obsession by watching the train wreck that the Republican party is becoming, and the most recent chance to indulge in this dirty little vice of ours comes from Florida Governor Charlie Crist's announcement that he's going to run for the U.S. Senate...
  
  Yes!1!@@! There will be a bitterly-fought Republican primary challenge over a shot at Mel Martinez's Senate seat, because the relatively popular governor (apparently with the general electorate, at least) doesn't fit the bill for the true believers of that much-to-be-cherished Republican base. This is great stuff, involving potential repudiation of the sitting governor by his famous predecessor, party intrigue, and the specter of party pack animals slashing at each other with glistening bloody fangs over the rapidly diminishing fate of the party. I can only pray that I live long enough to witness a primary fight to the death between a candidate who sufficiently appeals to state-wide voters in Florida to have won the Governor's seat against a guy who represents everything that the Club for Growth, FAUX news, Rush Limbaugh, the wingnut fringe "core", and the fadings edges of the anti-Castro vote simply cannot live without...
  
  OK, so I'm not planning on checking out anytime soon and don't have any reason to expect any such thing, but things do happen (especially when you drive the road I do twice a day to get to work and back home again). Things happen, but I pray that they don't, because this upcoming Republican Senatorial primary campaign is going to be one for the ages, and I don't want to miss it (because of all the craziness that the contest portends) even from the entire otherwise uncaring other side of the country...
• May 10, 2009
• 18:50

  Buying Bullets In the Land Of The Wingnut

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...so I took my second-born out today to purchase what - in the state of Orygun - are essentially lottery tickets for special youth hunt deer and elk tags for this fall's hunting season. (Long story short: Orygun offers youth-only hunts in selected state hunting units for 12-17 Y.O.'s who have taken the state hunter safety course and are accompanied by an unarmed person 21 or older. Kid wants to hunt; might as well show him just how much colder and wetter and unsuccessful hunting can be than those TV outdoor shows and video games suggest.)...
  
  There wasn't any problem at all buying his "draws" (the hunting units for which he wanted to compete in the June drawing for hunting tags), but those shelves behind the counter that should be stacked with all manner and caliber of ammunition sat virtually empty with only a couple of boxes of strange calibers like .260 and .280. There weren't even the normal stacks of 500-round boxes of .22LR ammo that we usually rely on for our target practice use (for those who don't do firearms, a 500-round 'brick' of .22 bullets costs about the same as a 20-round box of larger caliber hunting rifle ammo, so the math is pretty easy if you have a penchant for going out to some backwoods rock pit to shoot at pop cans and targets). When asked, the guy behind the counter essentially confirmed that the same thing is going on in my little corner of Wingnutia that is happening across the country: people are hoarding ammunition because they FEAR Obama is going to take away their guns or restrict their access to ammunition...
  
  It was a bad moment. I suddenly found myself being overcome by the ugly sense that I was about to find myself in agreement with the Republic-Fascist party insistence that the public school system has failed our country. How else to explain a complete lack of understanding of either the actual political composition of the Congress of the United States or the actual powers that a president has under the terms of the Constitution and case law...
  
  "Law" is the operative word here. I learned 40 years ago - back in another time when "liberals" had a fierce death-grip on the levers of power - that Congress made laws and the Executive branch - led by the President - carried out those laws. Gun ownership laws are laws and ammunition taxation laws are laws; the only authority the Executive branch has is to promulgate regulations that fulfill the intent of those laws. In fact, the SCOTUS the limits of Executive Orders to do more than that in the 1952 case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer which, while it didn't settle some of the basic issues of federal seizure of private property, did establish that a president cannot either create or nullify Congressional law by Executive Order...
  
  Clearly, somewhere or other that moment went off the rails for a great many of my friends and neighbors, many of whom in my poverty-stricken part of the world - ironically enough - rely on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and a host of other social programs that the Wingnut politicians for whom they usually vote would kill in a heart beat if opportunity and majority were ever to present themselves. And that leads, in a sort of backwards "inverse pyramid" observation, to the first of those issues I raised above: it doesn't take much of a Souper Genyus to take a gander at the composition of the United States Senate and come to a pretty clear understanding of the dim chances that any sort of significant gun control legislation actually has out here in the real world. Given the number of Democratic Senators who are either - depending on your taste in political terminology - 'Blue Dogs' or 'moderates', it's beyond the bounds of reality that any sort of legislation that "takes away gun rights" would even be able to muster a simple majority, much less garner a filibuster-proof margin...
  
  None of all of this even addresses that one simple "Ghost Buster" question that these wing/gun nuts apparently don't have the intellectual capacity to address: if Obama and his Socialist/Fascist/Muslim minions are going to try to take our guns and ammo away from us, "Who Ya Gonna Call"?
  
  The military? Not likely. The whole concept of "lawful order", not to mention both the Posse Comitatus Act and the supposed conservative bent of military personal, would argue against the local National Guard company coming out of its barracks to try to impose some sort of extralegal presidential will on the locals...
  
  The "Black Helicopter/Jack-booted Thug" civilian Federal employee workforce"? Get real, now. While there are about two million Federal civil service employees, the majority of them would probably pose a far greater threat to themselves and their coworkers than to the general population if they were to be issued body armor, firearms, and orders to confiscate The Peoples' Firearms. The totality of Federal civilian personnel that actually have law enforcement and weapons training have enough to do just trying to keep up with their current jobs, much less trying to disarm a population many times their size that has them seriously outgunned in many small towns in terms of simple numbers alone...
  
  
  OK, OK, I apologize. I know better. Rational thought and logic have no greater value than Monopoly money in Wingnut World, even though the only examples of presidential behavior that have dangerously challenged commonly-understood Constitutional limits over the last four decades have occurred with Republicans in office. Still, the reaction of those around me - and apparently by a whole bunch of folks around the country - is just simply silly, if not half-bright. Dare I say it...this is pure wingnut behavior...
• May 07, 2009
• 20:10

  When They Say It's Not About The Money

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...as the oft-quoted saying goes, "when they say it's not about the money, it's about the money". In the fetid hothouse environment of national electoral politics, that very word - 'politics' - can readily replace 'the money', and Senator David Vitter (R-D.C. Madam Phone List/Adult-sized Huggies) demonstrates with a lame halfhearted effort how that whole thing works...
  
  David Vitter was, of course, the biggest prize to be found on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's infamous phone list. He did all the things that any Pharisee conservative Member of Congress would do in the event that there wasn't an actual airport bathroom arrest and video evidence of a subsequent interrogation (h/t to Larry Craig): he apologized to God and his family and Louisiana voters and said all the accusations were politically motivated. Inquiring minds might linger on why all that other stuff is necessary if the accusations are just some sort of politically motivated attack, but Louisiana politics have always been a mystery to me, so I guess I should never mind that bit...
  
  Vitter has a bit of an electoral problem, though, because all of this stuff is going to come up again, regardless of God's - or Vitter's wife's - abundant grace-filled forgiveness. He's got to do something - anything - that will show that he's not spending all that taxpayer-funded time in D.C. frolicking in diapers and playing "Spank Me, Mommy" in hourly-rate motels along the banks of the Potomac. He needs to show that he is On The Job, doing the work that the people of the Great State Of Louisiana sent him to Gomorrah Along The Potomac to do...
  
  In an ongoing effort to display the sort of lip-service that he has for so long paid to his hurricane-ravaged constituents, Vitter has decided that the best course of action is to put a Senatorial hold on the confirmation of Craig Fugate to be the head of FEMA. He claims that this is a principled stand that he is taking on behalf of the hurricane-ravaged citizens of his state, even though he has forsaken his own opportunities to make a principled stand for some of those same hurricane-ravaged residents when the question was about affordable housing in New Orleans - a question that was affirmatively supported by just about every elected state and Federal official except for David Vitter....and George W. Bush...
  
  Vitter says now that his hold on Fugate's nomination as FEMA director is all about the business of the people and not about politics. His questions and complaints are things that he could have addressed over the last several years, but his reelection is coming up soon, so now is apparently the time to raise those issues that he's been grappling with so silently for so long. In the meantime, a highly regarded emergency management expert sits on the sidelines while the start of the hurricane season creeps ever closer and an unusually early wildfire season burns down the western United States....
  
  Even given all this, Diaper Dave wants you to understand that it's not about politics; it's about the peeps. As is usually the case, that's all you need to know about Diaper Dave's motiviation...
• May 06, 2009
• 19:23

  The Danger Of A Divine Right

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it is being reported this evening on the MSM on the mounting pressure for some sort of action - any responsive sort of action - that could be directed against Jay Bybee and John Yoo in response to their efforts to make the path smooth for Bushco's desire to torture 'high-value' prisoners. What I find most interesting about this article is elements of defense being offered by supporters, especially the idea that Yoo's work "taps into the founders' understanding of the executive"...
  
  Cue the Double-Take Moment here...
  
  I confess right up front that I am not a constitutional scholar; heck, I'm not all that much a scholar in my own field of study. I do, on the other hand, have a working understanding of the big-ticket items of U.S. History, including that part of our history revolving around the insurgency that led to our independence from our British masters. Pretty much every instinct of the majority of the Founding Fathers opposed a monarchy, and there isn't all that much evidence suggesting that they were all down with the idea of an elected constitutional monarchy. In fact, American history suggests that the majority of the framers of the Constitution were strongly interested in establishing checks and balances, negating the whole idea of the Divine right of Kings that monarchy - whether it be electoral or as a product of primogeniture would lead to. The memos cranked up by the Office of Legal Counsel to justify actions that have repeatedly been defined as torture under both Federal and international law have the ugly heft of a 'divine right of kings' moment, a simple 'in your face' rejection of constitutional checks and balances in favor of the 21st Century's answer to Richard Nixon's dangerous claim that the things that a president does are legal by some mysterious extra-constitutional power of the office...
  
  American history is absolutely stiffly packed with examples of presidents who took liberties with their Constitutional powers and has only a paltry few examples of the Constitution actually winning (or the people winning, in the total absence of concern by a simple ancient piece of parchment). Most of those examples of liberty-taking, when looked at through the long lens of time, leave us shaking our heads and wondering what the hell people were thinking at the time to allow such extra-legal behavior. We have a wonderful opportunity right now to come to an understanding of what was going on during all those past episodes as we watch the unfolding debate over whether an administration can make torture OK in contradiction to a human lifetime of national and international prohibitions against acts of torture. The big danger of failing to hold accountable those who created a legal framework for torture is that it fosters the idea that 'its not illegal if the President says it isn't'. That is the road down which "the Divine Right of Kings" lies, and that's a tremendously dangerous route to travel...
• May 03, 2009
• 17:31

  I'm Here To Help

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...enough electrons have died in a collective effort to adequately capture the ridicule that the whole idea of the new Republican sensing effort known as the National Council for a New America deserves that I won't go there. Wouldn't be right; wouldn't be the sort of thing that a church elder like myself should engage in. No, I believe in reaching out and helping my fellow Americans in their time of trouble. In that light, helpful advice is what is in order...
  
  Since I have to travel occasionally in the line of work, I understand how hard it can be to be alone in a strange city away from my family. There is a clear path, it seems to me, to help the members of this blue ribbon panel to avoid this unpleasant experience since Heaven knows McCain and Romney deserve some time off the road and Jindal needs to take a break from dragging all those heavy bags of campaign contributions back from all those fund-raising trips he's been making all over the United States. The panel members could probably avoid a great deal of separation from their families that love them and miss them by doing two simple things:
  
  1) Have the Council staff round up all the reputable deep-drilled political polling results dating from Jan. 1 to Nov. 4 of last year, for every state and district where Republicans lost when they were thinking they had a shot at winning. This information could be sent - along with the speeches, talking points, platforms, and commercials by each Democratic and Republican candidate in each race - to the panel member's home e-mail addresses, where they could sit in their sumptuously appointed dens and study the information at their leisure.
  
  2) Ask Roger Ailes (the bad one) to burn some DVD's of FAUX news coverage and talk shows covering that same time period and send them next-day-air to each of the panel members to watch either on their massive flat panel TV's or on their computers (John McCain's daughter could probably help his with the technical aspects of this one and maybe even supply some pithy New Republican commentary at the same time, kind of like a live version of those "background information" segments that any movie DVD worth its salt has anymore).
  
  It should be relatively simple - dare one say it, child's play - to be able to compare what their candidates and their official cable network mouthpiece were saying compared to what actually mattered to the American voter. There is, however, an ever-so-slim chance the members of this top-notch blue ribbon panel may not be able to tease out what these particular tea leaves are actually trying to tell them; after all, they and the rest of the party had all of this information in front of them in real time during the campaign and couldn't figure it out. Maybe in the quiet comfort of familiar settings, they will be able to move outside the box a bit, though, and reach that much-needed political epiphany that has so far escaped them and at the same time reduce their individual and collective carbon footprint a bit (OK, so maybe not so much for Jindal, who seems intend on visiting every state in the nation in his effort to not run for president, as Bryan at Why Now? would say)...
  
  Assuming the members of the blue ribbon panel either aren't interested, capable, or willing to save themselves time away from home by employing the simple steps listed above, they will need to address a few items that will be vitally necessary in order for them to get a true sense of What Americans Want. In fact, if they hope to derive any meaningful value from this journey on which they are about to embark, there are things that they just simply must do:
  
  A) Schedule all travel, lodging, and rental cars through an on-line 'cheap fares' site (I use Orbitz, but there many other fine sites available). Make sure to select the cheapest possible ticket prices, the lowest-cost lodging, and the least expensive rental car. If they need to get in touch with real American people, might as well start off by scheduling travel the same way real American people do, even if it means facing that second layover be an eleven-hour stint in the Salt Lake City airport and the drive from the destination airport at 4:15 am to the CheapBox one-star motel on the outskirts of town is in a Ford Focus (which is a fine American-made car owned by many real American people, by the way)...
  
  B) Travel alone. No staff to make smooth the path; no detours to VIP lounges or special TSA treatment. Find your own gates, boys; get your own luggage, secure your own car and drive to your own motel. The rest of us do it all the time; heck, my college sophomore daughter has done it several times even though she never previously had never flown or been further east than the Orygun/Idaho border. You can do it, too...
  
  C) Only hold forum/town hall meetings in places where Republicans lost. Any meeting held in any Congressional district currently served by a Republican or in any state where the majority of State and Federal office-holders are part of the current crop of Republicans are a waste of time and precious non-renewable energy resources (back to that carbon footprint thing). Anyone who schedules or countenances such a useless venue should be forced to read and write a book report on "An Inconvenient Truth" and watch everything Michael Moore has ever done...
  
  D) Establish strict admittance requirements for those forum/town hall meetings. Allow no one who voted for a Republican candidate within fifty yards of the entrance. Use tear gas, rubber bullets, or Tasers as necessary to drive away anyone who claims to be a Republican voter. These particular control measures obviously won't need to be employed all that much, since registered Republicans are only slightly less rare than leprechauns these days, but - still - take no chances. These people have little FAUX News icons for eye pupils and will only want to talk about birth certificates, abortion, and gay marriage. The panel can throw them a bone by setting up Free Speech zones somewhere on the far side of the next county (something that Republicans can do in their sleep anymore after eight years of Gee Dub) , surrounded by cyclone fencing and heavily armed local law enforcement personnel (again, staff "in their sleep" work), and hirelings toting dummy FAUX News minicams so these folks think they actually matter, a myth that the most recent election effectively dispelled...
  
  E) Don't ask those assembled groups of Americans "what do you want"; ask them "why do we suck?" "What do you want" isn't a serious question; the American people have expressed pretty clearly in the last two election cycles what they want and Republicans haven't fit very comfortably into that picture. The whole "National Council for a New America" thing may turn out to be more than a dog and pony show if they actually ask the latter question of real Americans who would rather personally pump their own septic tanks than vote for a Republican candidate. Pay attention; take notes; don't make sourpuss faces when they criticize all those useless tax-cut plans, taxation and fund raising policies (ahem...Haley) or ridicule lame observations about "volcano monitoring" (especially if you are anywhere in the Pacific Time Zone, Piyush - fair warning and all that). The blue ribbon panel has a couple of strikes against it before the boys even steps into the batter's box (and that's strike number one, "boys"). That other strike is a blue ribbon panel comprised of a failed Republican presidential primary nominee who only struck sparks with the voting public as a result of a story about a dog with stomach problems strapped to the top of the family car, a failed Republican general election presidental nominee who has a great war hero backstory but sometimes appears to be something of an unaimed loose cannon, a likely future Republican presidental primary nominee who scared children during his response to Obama's SOTU address and doesn't come across as a deep thinker in any case, a guy who has a checkered history as Republican National Committee chairman and Mississippi Governor, and the son who Mom and Dad probably wish would have gone on to be President of the United States instead of his brother. There's also the complicating factor that not a single one of these panel members could even most charitably be considered the sort of "moderate" Republican that would have any hope of successfully reaching out to the vast majority of American voters who have rendered that classic Epic Fail verdict on their party over the last couple of elections...
  
  I believe that these natural disadvantages can be overcome if the members of the National Council for a New America blue ribbon panel will simple follow my humbly offered suggestions. I furthermore believe that democracy is best served by competing parties offering compelling and realistic alternative solutions to the problems facing the United States (which, of course, automatically disqualifies most of the Republican party, including pretty much all of the panel members as well as intriguing and highly visible outliers like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, right off the bat). In that spirit, I think that a great deal of public value could come from this blue ribbon panel if only it will institute my suggestions, and that's why I'm here to help. That's the kind of guy I am...
  
  
• May 01, 2009
• 19:47

  Wishin' And Hopin' And Thinkin' And Prayin'

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...OK, so this clearly isn't what Burt Bacharach had in mind when he and Hal David wrote that song back in the early 1960's, but the first line certainly seems to fit the mood that Senate Republicans are in these days as a result of the news that Associated Supreme Court Justice David Souter has decide to retire. On the other hand, maybe their unrequited lust for a return to power may fit with the lyrics after all, because there is suddenly a whole lot of really negative wishin' and hopin' going on, as Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) demonstrated:
  

  "This came unexpectedly, so people will have to evaluate what it means to the agenda, and the majority leader will have to take that into the account,” Cornyn said. “Regulatory reform, patent reform, health care reform ... I'm not sure if we can do all of it at the same time, so this may push some of these items farther back on the agenda. I do expect judicial nomination to suck up quite a bit of oxygen."

  
  Given the fact that most of us out here in the real world have to deal with a great many important issues simultaneously without the ability to dictate pace or due dates every damned day, Cornyn is - only in the most charitable context - suggesting that Republicans aren't sufficiently equipped intellectually to deal with more than just a couple of issues at a time. If one were to accept this most charitable context, all I can say is "Thank God Republican Senators aren't qualified to serve at any level from Incident Commander down to Squad Leader on a wildfire", because the outcome would most likely be deadly and disastrous...
  
  Although that whole 'insufficiently intellectually equipped' thing is probably a given in any case, it is simply the case that Senate Republicans are setting the stage for a massive public fight, one that they will launch mostly for purposes of encouraging their beleaguered base and picking off a few of the more right-leaning Independents that abandoned them in the last election. Even though they were staunch supporters of the right of a president to have an up or down vote for judicial nominees over the last few years of the Bushco regime and even toyed with the idea of the "nuclear option" back in '05, they will once again rely on their long-standing strategic hope that the American people will be as bone-deep bovine stupid as Republican strategy has always relied on us to be, hoping that we won't remember how things went down the last time they had their sweaty mitts on the levers of power...
  
  Life sucks when you don't matter; Senate Republicans don't want to be in that place so they are going to try to matter by causing as much trouble as they can during the upcoming confirmation process, regardless of the nominee. Back when times were good and they were Kings Of The World, managing the process was easy to do, but 'now' isn't 'back then' and they really don't have any control over the process aside from opportunities to cause the sort of trouble that they desperately hope will rally voters to their cause. Wishin' and Hopin' may not be the best political strategy, but it's all they have left right now...
• April 30, 2009
• 19:57

  Doing Things That Are Illegal In The Real World

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...anybody who spends any time lingering around the evil newspaper-destroying world of the lefty intertubes knows all about the 'rebranding' effort that the Republic-Fascist party has decided to launch. A great deal of much-deserved ridicule has been hurled at the idea that "Maverick" John McCain, Jeb "Bush Lite" Bush, Haley Barbour (for God's sake, of all people), Bobby "Volcano Man" Jindal, and Mitt "I am not a Cultist; Vote For Me...Please" Romney can comprise the brain trust that will somehow create a coherent message that would bring the R-F party back to electoral prominence...
  
  The reality-based fact is that none of these figureheads matter because they aren't actually out-front spokesmen for the party. In fact, any sort of 'rebranding' message that they might cook up in order to broaden the party's appeal would be considered false and misleading advertising out here in the real world - the sort of thing that is subject to investigations and legal action - because, for better or for worse, none of these people matter much right now. They aren't the face of the party. They aren't the people that are actually carrying what is and will continue to be the R-F message to the general population. That role is being filled by chatterers like Tom Delay, Dick "Big Dick" Cheney, a host of ferret-faced cable news network "true believers" who continue to spout the old talking points, and the Big Party Leader Dittohead Dog hisownself...
  
  Anything that this group tries to crank out as some sort of New Republic-Fascist Message is going to run hard up against the rhetoric of all those characters, along with the occasional unforeseen eruption by party members like Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Homophobia) that demonstrate the true underpinnings of the party. This celebrity-heavy 'rebranding' cabal can't help but create a so-called message that will be little more than false advertising, an effort to present to an otherwise unsuspecting public a statement of the principles of the R-F party that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual beliefs of the hardcore party faithful who run that show. Drug manufacturers and diet supplement pushers get into big legal trouble for misrepresenting the quality and value of their products. The Republic-Fascist party should be held to the same standard...
• April 28, 2009
• 21:49

  For When You Think You're Having A Tough Day At The Office

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...imagine trying to successfully 'hatch' your project in the top of an old-growth fir tree at the crest of the Orygun Cascades...
  
  ...during what is laughingly referred to around these parts as "Spring"...
  
  (courtesy the Odell Lake Eagle Cam)
• 19:18

  The Strange Colors Of Irony

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...personally, I think that Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic party is, on balance, a plus, although not for all of that "60 Votes" filibuster-busting stuff that has dominated news reporting and commentary. I don't have any illusions that Specter is going to transmorgrify into some sort of rock-solid progressive vote (although Pennsylvania finally has a Democratic Senator who to some degree supports a woman's right to choose).
  
  The benefit I see resides more in the realm of "another Bad News Day for Republicans", wherein a well-recognized, long-serving, senior member of the Republican caucus lets the whole world know that his party has abandoned the principles that made him a well-recognized, long-serving, senior member of that party. This isn't Richard Shelby or Ben Nighthorse Campbell we're talking about here, nor is it Jim Jeffords. This is a person that the vast minimally-informed middle of the American populace are likely to recognize by name and by photo, and that sort of defection damages the Republic-Fascist party to a degree that they and - so far as I can tell, from watching some of the cable news offerings tonight - a large part of the polotical commentariat don't appear to understand...
  
  The argument can clearly be made that Specter made his wild leap based on simple personal political calculations rather than as a result of differences over personal philosophical philosophy, at least if blogtopia and a million words spewing from the mouths of all those strange floating cable TV heads are to be correctly understood. The poll numbers were obvious (and actually pretty cheery for Democrats, because a victorious Pat Toomey would have been stomped into a mudhole by any Democrat who could pass the 'mirror-fog' test) and the obvious RNC theme that Arlen Was Goin' DOWN wasn't likely to lead somewhere down the road to any sort of Kumbaya moment between Specter and whatever the hell poses as the leadership of the Republic-Fascist Party these days...
  
  The most surprising chitter I've witnessed tonight was Tweety Matthews's star turn on "Countdown" (transcripts not yet available at this writing). In his...well...I guess "rant" would most do it justice...Tweety was no less than a human iteration of a spitting cobra, spewing all sorts of deadly venom about what he apparently views as little less than treason/sedition by another feckless political animal looking no farther down the road than the waypoint of the next election. He went on to a degree that would make any normal person really question whether Arlen Specter could trust his own personal safety if he found himself in the same room as Tweety. Truly an amazing rant...
  
  First of all, the question comes to mind "well, why not?" It is clearly a leap to say that Specter - or pretty much any other politician who has dipped from the well of political power - does anything for purely altruistic reasons, but my early upbringing in the world of politics taught me that an elected official has at least some responsibility to represent the views of his or her constituency. A recent poll suggests that Specter's recent actions are doing just that, with Democrats and Independents (who by the way, represent the winning majority in a statewide general election) are far more happy with him than are the rapidly dwindling numbers of right-wing registered Republicans desperate to do their part to make their party little more relevant than the Constitution Party . This is what marks the strange colors that political irony can come dressed in. Regardless of whatever self-serving personal political calculations may have gone into Specter's decision, he made the sort of move that others have made in the past, abandoning a long-held political affiliation when that political apparatus to which he was connected finally and completely abandoned and rejected him. He had the room to do so because of a wealth of polling information suggesting that the general election voters responsible for putting and keeping him in office (the only people, in fact, to whom he must eventually answer) actually support him far more than they do the nominal candidate that his own party was anxious to run against him...
  
  Arlen Specter was one of the few things the Republic-Fascist party had going for it in terms of reaching out to the larger American community that simply hasn't been buying its strange Pharisee/money-changer base over the last couple of election cycles. Despite all of his faults, he turned out to be an unrecognized marker on their trail back to electoral success. Specter won't be all that much of a meaningful pickup for the Senate Democratic caucus, but his loss to the Republican party is a rich, colorful irony...
• April 26, 2009
• 18:33

  Wherein We Discuss Why Appointed Positions Aren't "UnFilled"

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...one of the interesting side stories that is percolating to the surface in this situation where we are faced with trying to figure out whether or not to freak out about this new swine flu outbreak is the factoid that Obama's Department of Health and Human Services has a number of leadership positions that haven't been filled by Senate confirmation, including...OMG...the Secretary of HHS. It's a silly and dangerous observation and a place that you would think responsible journalists who both understand how the Federal government works and understand their ethical responsibility to avoid unnecessarily burdening an already battered American populace with unnecessary stress would try not to go, but you would be wrong - probably because you got bumped off the track by that "responsible" part...
  
  I've heard or read the mention of this "HHS doesn't have all its people in place to address this looming threat" theme a few times today, but since Politico decided to headline and lead the above-linked story with that theme, let's refer to them for the purposed of this exercise (after all, any link, like publicity, is good, right?). One of the things that those who choose to engage in a career of purveying half-truths, occasionally poorly-researched observations, and politically-motivated personal opinions masquerading as objective reporting - that is, political reporters - don't seem to understand in the same way that those who choose three or more decades of Federal service do understand is that the Federal bureaucracy, being something like a force of nature, often operates under the terms of the laws of nature. One of the primary laws to which that bureaucracy adheres is that old favorite "Nature abhors a vacuum", and this is where the implied message that all those key positions are 'unfilled' comes seriously adrift...
  
  While it is possibly true that the appointed position of Assistant Deputy Associate Undersecretary of Health and Human Services For Lunchroom Vending Machine Concessionaire Management may be vacant, posing a disquieting threat of candy shortages in lunchrooms throughout the Department, any position that matters has a person filling that slot, because the vacuum must be filled. Those people are called "Acting", they usually have full authority to carry out the duties of the job, and they are usually - and in the case of political appointee positions, almost always - sufficiently qualified or even more qualified to do the job than whatever political appointee who eventually moves into the office. Even if they may not be more qualified - as may be the case with the acting Secretary of HHS, who is a Bush appointee and essentially an accountant - they stand on the shoulders of a career staff that make all the recommendations on which they need to act...
  
  It's the worker bees that matter, not the political appointees, when the alarms go off; that's where 'journalists' who have no experience in or understanding of what actually goes in in the trenches of Federal bureaucracy in a government not controlled by the late and profoundly unlamented Bushco regime miss the point. The Politico story makes sure to mention that the Director of the Centers for Disease Control is merely a hole-filler, but what that report fails to mention is that acting CDC director Dr. Richard Besser bumped up to that job from his position as head of CDC's public health emergency preparedness and response section, which would seem to be a critical skill to have in this particular circumstance. It also fails to mention that there even is such a thing as an acting Surgeon General; there is one, however, and his name is Rear Admiral Steven K. Galson and he has a career's worth of medical experience and did work as an epidemiological investigator for the CDC...
  
  Most Executive departments, as well as the agencies that are their component parts, are devilishly complex entities that rely on a combination of Administration direction and the skill and experience of career employees to function. All up and down the line, there are always positions that are "unfilled" and rely on somebody moving up from below to fill in as an 'Acting'. These are less violent civil service versions of the sorts of battlefield promotions that have made for such stirring military stories over the last couple of centuries of American history. That's the way it works; people step up and get on with it until such time as circumstances present an appointed leader to move into that particular box on the org chart. It isn't necessary that a given president's people are 'in place'; it only matters that the people who are 'in place' are competent to provide advice to Executive leadership and follow the president's direction. Put quite simply, there usually aren't - and in this case certainly aren't - much in the way of "holes"...
• April 24, 2009
• 19:18

  Just Another WTF! Moment in Wonderland By The Potomac

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the quotes themselves let you know how stupid the movers and shakers of the Republik-Fascist party think you are:
  

  Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor nominated to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), faces a potential filibuster from Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
  
  Johnson has been criticized for her previous work as head of legal policy for NARAL Pro-Choice America and for criticizing the OLC's counterterrorism policies during the Bush administration.
  
  "She may be good somewhere else, but she's not good there," said Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah.
  
  Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama said that, as a former Justice Department lawyer, he's concerned about Obama packing the agency with liberals. He opposed Hill and questions the nominations of Hamilton and Johnsen.
  
  "There is a growing frustration in the Judiciary Committee about a pattern of far-left nominees," Sessions said. "I believe the president deserves deference, but he's about used all the deference he's going to get out of me."

  
  All of this comes from an article at CQ Politics about the irritation that the Democratic Senate leadership is experiencing as a result of this year's version of minority Republik-Fascist scorched earth political maneuvering of the sort that stood the members of that party in such good stead back during the Clinton administration as the party marched toward its triumphant but oh-so-brief ascendancy to power. While the anchor of the story is the sudden objection to the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, the fight over Dawn Johnson's nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel demonstrates the pure, dirty street-fighting instincts that have separated Republic-Fascist Senators from their usually spineless Democratic colleagues over the last couple of decades...
  
  The solution to this "chafing" is simple, of course, if the majority party has the stones to go down that road. The last clingy whining vestige of the Republik-Fascist Senate majority back in 2005 threatened to invoke that solution, in fact giving it the name of the Nuclear Option (thank you, Trent Lott, for that one measurable contribution to history), where a parlimentary ruling by "Big Dick" Dick Cheney would spark the mechanism that would snuff the whole idea of cloture and introduce the concept of simple majority rule to the staid, hallowed halls of the Senate side of the Congress of the United States when the subject turns to confirmation of presidential nominees. Given the fact that the Republic-Fascist party is clinging by a single Senate vote to any semblance of relevance (which, as everybody understands, informs the desperate battle Norm Coleman continues to wage in Minnesota, as opposed to the relatively short fight that Jim Tedisco waged against Democrat Scott Murphy in New York's Congressional District 20 special election to replace Kirsten Gillibrand), a renewed threat of implementation of the Nuclear Option for nominations - even those that aren't to the federal courts - might just be the way to go. Given that Republic-Fascist Senators haven't grown comfortable with the idea of being in the minority, it may be necessary to push the Nuclear Option all the way through...
  
  There is a simple absurd lack of reality to Republic-Fascist complaints about some of the Obama nominees. Filling upper levels of the Executive Branch with people who hold views in keeping with those of the new president is a long-held tradition, and Republic-Fascist Senators didn't have any problem with that concept back in the early days of Reagan, GHW Bush, or Bush '43'. To express the idea that the forty-fourth president is somehow "stacking" the Executive Branch with fellow travelers is little more than playing to the native political illiteracy of the average FAUX News constituency. Winners get to pick their team players; loosers get to mumble their complaints. What the losers shouldn't get to do - especially when they teeter on the finely-honed edge of not mattering anymore - is dictate the team member selections of the winners. Republic-Fascist Senators didn't have any problem with all of this back in the day when they strode like giants across the land; it may be that it will require nothing less than threats to revisit the Nuclear Option to remind them - in order to make all these WTF! moments go away - that they probably would do well to not have a problem with all of this now...
  
  
• April 21, 2009
• 21:32

  Jane Harmon's Strange Conversation

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...while I was making dinner tonight and listening to NPR's "All Things Considered" (a personal tradition that extends back almost as long as that program has been on the air), I heard the strangest conversation between Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and NPR's Robert Siegel...
  
  What I found most strange was her continued insistence that she needs - in fact, we all need - to hear the NSA wiretap tapes to see if she actually said the things she is accused of saying. I will confess that I couldn't hope to remember the specifics of most phone calls I dealt with four years ago; I do believe, however, that I may just possibly recall the fact, if not the specifics, of whether or not I participated in a phone call four years ago that explored my participation in an effort to seek leniency for two Israeli spies in exchange for chairmanship of a Congressional committee that I would otherwise run over puppydogs and little old ladies to get my hands on...
  
  Her Big Moment on NPR sounded, in real time, like a PR disaster of the sort that screams "Contested Seat" in 2010; subsequent review of the transcript doesn't fix that. While Rep. Harmon may not have heard of the particular concept, the fact remains that it's best not to insist on "proof" and "transcripts" of particular conversations as if you are an otherwise disinterested third party when all those "proofs" and "transcripts" would be all about YOU. "We don't know if there was a phone call" just doesn't work when you are alleged to be at one end of that phone call, and to turn this into some twisted sort of third-person discussion. That sort of declamation is - at best - simply strange and - at worst - the sort of lame dissembling that makes members of Congress look just like the mobbed-up crooks that so many of their fellow Americans think they are in the first place...
• April 20, 2009
• 21:15

  Showing Texas The Door

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...Texas Governor Rick Perry launched his campaign for his reelection (and, perhaps, later national office) last week by coyly tea-bagging the idea of seceding from the United States. In one brilliant stroke, he demonstrated not only why he should never be allowed in the White House except as part of a scheduled tour but also why serious consideration should be given to this whole secession idea. Aside from the fact that he couldn't bring himself to categorically repudiate the idea of splitting the Union of the United States, his toying around with this newest wingnut fascination with secession raised the question: Do We Even Actually Need Texas?
  
  Despite all of the positive cultural influences that Texas citizens have provided to this great nation of ours over the years, it may well be time, when the Governor obliquely threatens to consider the secession option, to ask the question "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" Some of the answers to that question:
  
  George W. Bush
  Karl Rove (not really a product of Texas, but his long-time Bush association pushes him across the finish line)
  Alberto Gonzales
  Kay Bailey Hutchison
  John Cornyn
  Dick Armey
  Tom Delay
  Phil Gramm (think sub-prime mortgages, but there's really no reason to stop there)
  Ron Paul
  Enron
  Exxon Mobile Corp.
  The Dallas Cowboys (but not, I hasten to add, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. They are a franchise all by themselves that could easily be transported anywhere in the United States, such as Central Orygun, just for one random example)
  
  ...and that's just a quickly-crafted mini-list of all those wonderful contributions that the Great State Of Texas has contributed over the last several years. Given the nature of this list, it is really hard to argue with the proposition that Texas should secede from the Union. In fact, given this sort of contribution, even ol' Abe Lincoln might find himself having serious reservations about engaging in a Civil War against a seceding state that chooses to tout someone like Tom Delay as a native son...
  
  There have been a few cultural contributions that residents in Texas have made to the greater good of the nation over the last couple of decades, but in all honesty "Austin City Limits" could be offered by the BBC or the CBC and still get the same audience. The Austin music scene will still be the Austin music scene, regardless of the national flag flying over that scene. There may even be some other redeeming values to Texas that might argue against allowing secession, but - for the life of me - I can't think of one right at this moment, at least as long as that new nation would honor American passports. Maybe, just maybe, showing Texas the door isn't such a bad thing after all...
  
• April 19, 2009
• 17:42

  Why It's Important To Remember Things

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...last week, the Dept. of Homeland Security released a report on threats of domestic terrorism. For reasons that probably are founded in everything from attempts to gain political advantage to the well-understood concern by various winger pundits about just how shaky the moral ground on which they are standing is, some people haven't been taking that report all too well...
  
  Despite all of the outrage pouring out of the starboard side of the commentariat, the fact is that there are those of us who remember things. Those of us who remember things don't really give a damn about their manufactured umbrage or the dump truck loads of useless defensive words they are trying to throw up like a smoke screen to hopefully hide the view of those things we remember. So much has gone on over time that they really hope, for the sake of their commercial value as commentators as well as their own personal value as humans, that there will be enough people who don't remember so that they can keep spewing things that occasionally cross the line of what is or isn't dangerous eliminationist rhetoric while obscuring those things that we remember, just in case they are asked to explain their words after the next time...
  
  For the bipedal jellyfish who gain their entire world view from FAUX News, it will probably work. For those of us who remember where we were fourteen years ago today when two true-blue American patriots acted on eliminationist themes, it doesn't work even one little bit. Americans acted out against other Americans, not in some single spur-of-the-moment unhinged act of violence, but in a carefully planned attack involving numerous separate steps, and they did it because a third subset of 'Americans' led them to believe that it was the "right" thing to do...
  
  That's why it's important to remember things...
  AP photo courtesy of Oklahoma City Bombing.com
• April 15, 2009
• 20:52

  The Coming Teabagger Revolution Vs. Your Lying Eyes

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the numbers are rolling in from around the country and the message is clear, as is displayed by the AP headline:
  

  Tens of thousands rally at tax day 'tea parties'
  

  
  Well, that just says it all, doesn't it.
  
  Clearly, there is a swelling tsunami wave of 'nonpartisan' grassroots unrest sweeping across this great nation of ours, organized by hundreds of 'concerned citizens' backed by right-wing 'foundations' funded by fabulously wealthy right-wing 'philanthropists' and aggressively promoted by a right-wing cable TV channel that has finally abandoned all pretense of being a real live hard 'news' network. This "citizen revolt" is a remarkable display of the power of a spontaneous expression of outrage...in the same way that tossing a lit match onto a pile of gas-soaked rags is a display of spontaneous combustion...
  
  According to the AP report, "tens of thousands" of angry Americans poured into the streets to protest...well...something, although whether that "something" was being on the losing side for the first time in 15 years or whether it was about there not being a White Republican male in the White House is still a point that is up for debate. The raw facts are pretty simple:
  
  -- this upwelling of righteous American anger about the current path down which our country is traveling managed to bring out - all across the country - numbers of protesters that are several single-digit percentage points larger (hell, let's be charitable; the numbers may run into the low teens of percentage points larger) than a single free Decembrists performance at Portland's Tom McCall Waterfront Park that features a guest appearance by Democratic presidential primary campaign candidate Barack Obama...
  
  -- this sweeping demonstration of the power of average citizens to come together to protest an unaccountable and out-of-control Federal government was able, in several major metropolitan areas, to attract as many empowered average citizens as were allowed into a high school gymnasium on the brutal, remote, desolate, sparsely populated High Desert of Central Orygun, deep in the heart of reliably Republican country, to see Barack Obama in a primary campaign appearance...
  
  OK, so the second point is admittedly unfair.
  
  The reason there were about 2000 people at the Obama rally in Bend, Orygun, was because that was the limit imposed by free ticket availability and the insistence of the Fire Marshall. Had organizers known that the weather was going to be so nice that day and planned for an outdoor venue, there would have probably been twice as many people able to attend the Obama event, rendering any comparison between that primary campaign event and the overwhelming outpouring of citizen indignation displayed by today's various tea party events available to much larger population centers absolutely silly...
  
  But never mind all that silly numbers stuff. Revolution is at hand! The overpowering outrage that common, salt-of-the-earth working folk like you and me - and we are beginning to wonder a bit about you, "comrade", just so you know - is sweeping the nation as Tens Of Thousands flow into the streets like some sort of molten human magma consuming and subsuming all the evil lying in its path. It may not look like much right now, given that either of the two NASCAR Sprint Cup races at Bristol Motor Speedway will attract far more spectators than all of the Tea Parties combined, but this is a building force, I tell ya...
• April 14, 2009
• 21:21

  Where Will YOU Be On Tuesday Nights?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...with all the crap, garbage, and nonsense on television these days (I'm looking at YOU, cable news talking heads), there are still a few shows in this reality-based world that have the power to wrap themselves around the deeper primitive recesses of the Cerebellum and truly drag you into a world that you most likely don't - and can't possibly ever - really know. Discovery Channel has had such a show for the last few years, and with tonight's debut of the fifth season of "Deadliest Catch", what has become my own personal TV crack is up and running again...
  
  I won't even pretend that I can explain why this particular show grips me more than something like "Ax men" (created and produced by the same people who bring us "Deadliest Catch) except to say that I have spent the last fifty-mumblemumble years around PacNW loggers, so that particular story line is a far more familiar gig. Doesn't even matter, though; "Deadliest Catch" season Five starts tonight, and I know where I am going to be...
• April 12, 2009
• 14:53

  The Case Of The Curious Backstory

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...so in the course if watching the breathless cable news coverage of Capt. Richard Phillips' rescue from Somalian pirates, I came across a curious backstory. Not the observation by the FAUX news anchor carrying on about the "long" 25-meter shots taken by the Navy snipers; highly trained Navy snipers could hit these guys with my open-sight Ruger 10/22 target practice plinker at 25 meters; heck, I could take 'em out at 25 meters with my plinker. No, what caught my attention was the Very Deep Concern that this event may cause an escalation of violence by the pirates in the future...
  
  I found this odd because the French have been roaring about the region acting like Rambo, rescuing hostages and capturing or killing Somalian pirates (and, unfortunately, a hostage) for the last year without anyone seeming to be interested in raising this point. Why is it only coming up now? Is it because some of the pirates and their confederates are finally getting international press attention because of a dramatic hostage standoff involving an American and are taking the opportunity to shoot their mouths off about revenge and escalation? Is it because an American citizen and the U.S. Navy are involved? Or (and this is somewhat related, I suppose) is this Deep Concern just another manifestation of the sense of exceptionalism that still permeates so many corners of our public discourse?
  
  If anybody were needing to be concerned about retaliation and escalation, you would think it would be the French. Yet that subject had not been broached until today - or at least the cable news talking heads were discussing it as if it were a new issue brought on by today's action, and I've not heard any such talk in the aftermath of the French rescue missions. It seemed like a discordant, jangly sort of aside to the jubilation over today's rescue, and struck me as a curious backstory in the context of what's been happening around the Horn of Africa...
• April 10, 2009
• 19:29

  Liquidating Pac-NW History

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

  Tags:    [edit]

  ...the news, when it came yesterday, was a bit shocking:
  

  A Delaware bankruptcy court on Thursday approved the liquidation sale of all remaining merchandise of 57-year-old G.I. Joe’s Holdings Co.

  
  ...back in the day, which in this case is defined as over three decades ago when I first moved to the Greater Portland/Vancouver Metropolitan Area, there were any number of suppliers of outdoor equipment but only two big-league outlets that were the go-to stores for laying one's hands on a wide variety of decent-quality products. One was REI and the other was G.I. Joe's...
  
  While they served similar purposes in providing various sorts of equipment for someone seeking to explore the rich array of outdoor recreation experiences, they were a particular study in contrasts. REI was a co-op and sort of a membership store with only two outlets - the Mother Ship in Seattle and the satellite store at Portland's Jantzen Beach along the Columbia River - that catered to climbers and backpackers (honoring the spirit of full disclosure, my membership number is six digits long, which seemed all wet-behind-the-years rookie-like in those days when standing in line behind someone whose card showed a membership number that was only three - or even two - numbers long). G.I. Joe's seemed more egalitarian, offering a broader array of outdoor goods that may have been less than the absolute best but were more affordable and served a broader spectrum of outdoor enthusiasts like car-campers and fisherpeople and hunters without requiring some sort of membership...
  
  Over the last twenty years, sadly, G.I. Joes - which had become an icon of sorts in the Pac-NW - began to morph into just another one of those high-end profit margin sporting goods retailers. Quality of products might have been first-rate, but prices were, too, and the whole feel of the business that Edward M. Orkney first cranked up when he moved his military surplus business from a tent to a real live building on Vancouver Avenue in north Portland over half a century ago. The name change from "G.I. Joe's" to “Joe’s Sports, Outdoors and More" a couple of years ago by the new outsider ownership struck a discordant notes with anyone who has spent any time living in the Pacific Northwest, but it would be hard to find anyone up here in the northwest corner of the US map who would have - before the fact - pegged this as the moment where the end began...
  
  G.I. Joe's wasn't a national institution and it never - unlike REI or Starbucks or Nike or Microsoft - never grew beyond being a regional enterprise confined to the Northwest, but it had a history born from the musty smell of Army canvas and odd olive drab material that could be used for exploring the vast richness of the high wild country on the cheap. As of today, though, the definitive end of the end has begun and there will soon be a host of empty buildings where an outdoor recreation store having roots extending farther back than my personal history used to operate. "Joe's" never was quite the same as the "G.I. Joe's" of my past used to be, but it was a connection to a long-lost past, and its supposedly "fire sale" liquidation is just another example of the loss of identity that has been plaguing the Pacific Northwest...
• April 08, 2009
• 19:22

  Bring Back The Jeep Carriers

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...a few months ago when the coverage of Somalian pirates was the Subject Of The Month, I got to thinking about the problems that are said to plague efforts to combat the predation on civilian sea traffic of the coast of Somalia. The solution, it seemed at the time, was to bring back the concept of the "Jeep Carriers" that served such an important role in World War II. With today's gripping story of the crew of an American-flagged merchant ship crewed by Americans who fought back against their pirate captors, the idea of jeep carriers crawled back into my mind again...
  
  The failure of the current concept of force projection by the major sea powers and those who want to join that elite club is plainly demonstrated by the havoc that the Somalian pirates have been wreaking in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. While many navies have supplied vessels to the effort to protect commercial shipping, the glaring problem is that all of these resources are just that: ships. There is essentially no provision for air cover that could respond in minutes rather than hours or days to individual attacks on commercial ships. This is where the escort carrier concept crept into my mind...
  
  Escort carriers were a slower, smaller, less technologically sophisticated version of large fast attack fleet carriers that the British, Americans, and Japanese used to redefine warfare on the high seas. While the American versions of these baby flat tops generally served in virtual anonymity in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, they did figure prominently in one of the most important Pacific sea battles during WWII, when the jeep carriers and destroyer/destroyer escort screen of Taffy 3 (officially designated Task Unit 77.4.3) went nose to nose with a far more powerful Japanese surface force and (with the assistance from aircraft from the escort carriers of the other two elements of the Task Force) turned back the last-gasp "Hail Mary Pass" effort by the Japanese to turn the tide of the war back in its favor. The more notable but unremarked role of escort carriers, however, was their role in the Atlantic blunting the effectiveness of the German submarine assault on the cargo lifeline between the United States and Great Britain...
  
  That latter piece of history is what made me start thinking. Why not start cranking out jeep carriers? The answer, of course, is obvious; we have nowhere near the manufacturing capacity that we had during WWII to support this sort of output, where we went from converted C-class merchant ships (such as the Bogue class carriers) to the hull-up purposed-built Casablanca class escort carriers spit out like so many widgets by the Kaiser shipyards that once existed in the greater Portland, Orygun, Metropolitan Area (actually across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington). We built a huge gaggle of jeep carriers back then, but probably couldn't come close to getting there now without some serious commitment to a new wartime industrial footing...
  
  The problem facing the world's navies today in terms of responding to this 21st century version of the Barbary pirates is quite simple: the amount of ocean needing to be covered to deter this century's pirates is far too large to be handled by surface ships, and in the whole world there are less than two dozen aircraft carriers of any type that could expand on that deterrent effect and a number of those ships are more suited to amphibious assault support than air superiority. Many of them, in fact, are more like our own Tarawa and Wasp class amphibious assault ships which don't - by the way - count against the number of American fleet aircraft carriers...
  
  And maybe that is the answer: put a couple of Amphibious Assault Groups into the Arabian Sea. Trade a few transport helicopters for more Harrier jets on the hanger deck and have a combination of Sea Cobra attack helicopters and LCAC's to assist in interdiction and patrol duties in the way that the Jeep Carriers performed that duty back in the olden days. We won't anytime soon see the sort of effort that led to the construction of those Jeep Carriers and there isn't any current evidence that there is a latter-day Stephan Decatur out there ready to use guile and personal heroism to rescue us from this latter-day pirate scourge. Regardless of all that, it's clearly time to thinking about bringing back the Jeep Carriers, or at least fall back on something that has that same sort of philosophical look....
  
• April 07, 2009
• 19:39

  As The Whole World Misses The Real Ted Stevens Story

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it has been a remarkable couple of days. First, the Holder-led Justice Department asks a trial judge for permission to withdraw its charges and set aside the conviction. The judge not only does that, but also appoints a special prosecutor to investigate whether the federal prosecutors committed criminal acts. Throughout all of this strange trip, various commentators are referring to all of this as an "exoneration" of Ted Stevens...
  
  It is truly strange to watch the aging Alaskan "Hulk" almost dancing as best as he can in the unwarranted spring sunshine while his defenders - many of them experienced federal legislators and lawyers who otherwise would be expected to know better - spin out variations on the old Ray Donovan line "Where do I go to get my reputation back?". In Uncle Ted's case, the answer is probably...oh, I don't know...maybe the mythical town of Cicely, or maybe, just maybe, nowhere, given that these last few days haven't set up the moment where his reputation can even be reclaimed...
  
  Given the problems of simple journalistic ethics that have beset it over the last few years, it is surprisingly the Associated Press that actually has taken the time to honestly address this whole "exoneration" meme when most other major media has ignored the subject. "Presumed innocence" is a ship that sailed a long time ago for Ted Stevens. The issues of misconduct by federal prosecutors don't even go halfway toward toward addressing the fact that many of the charges against Stevens have not been refuted or otherwise put to rest by the recent actions of the Justice Department. The stained glass window, the fish sculpture, and the massage chair are all things that weren't adequately addressed by the defense; more to the point, whether the contractor accurately recalled a conversation or properly valued the remodeling work on Uncle Ted's "cabin", the question of whether the work was properly paid for by the property owner hasn't been addressed...
  
  Ted Stevens hasn't been exonerated of anything; he has only been saved from conviction by the sort of prosecutorial overreach that has become far too common at all levels of the system over the last decade or more as government attorneys began to push the envelope in the hope that increasingly conservative Federal courts would support their actions. As quotes from the AP article suggest, Uncle Ted lost his presumption of innocence when he was convicted of things that do not bear on questions of misbehavior by federal prosecutors. Even on those issues in question, there isn't any suggestion that he Did The Right Thing; there are only questions about the actions of federal lawyers. The real Ted Stevens story is that he may well make it across the county line for no other reason than the malfeasance of federal lawyers rather than any compelling evidence that he wasn't actually involved in the kinds of actions that he was accused of being wrapped up in...
• April 06, 2009
• 20:55

  Let The Games Begin

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...Bob Gates has made his cut on the military budget, and that noise you hear isn't the wind cutting past your window. It is, in fact, the sound of Honorable Members of both the House Of Representatives and the Senate - from both parties - registering complaints that have more to do with the success or failure of defense-related industries in their states than with the actual defense of the "homeland", although that latter reason will be offered up frequently over the next few months...
  
  The basics of Gates' vision are pretty straightforward: the F-22 Raptor would become a specialty weapon like the F-117 Nighthawk, with only 187 planes being built; the armored vehiclesFEBA transport core of the the Future Combat System wouldn't be built; Barack Obama would still be clattering around in variants of the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King helicopter that first came into service the year he was born. There would also be a refreshing reassessment of that whole "Star Wars" missile defense system that has dogged us for the better part of three decades...
  
  This will not stand the scrutiny of Congress, of course, and it won't be at all about whether or not President Obama needs a new helicopter (even though that's the subject of conversation a few weeks ago). It is going to be all about whether or not businesses in the Congressional districts and states that would build the parts and pieces for the new presidential helicopter are going to be affected....or the states involved in the construction of the Raptor or the Future Combat Systems Infantry Carrier Vehicle or any one of a couple dozen other systems. It is as it was when it comes to these discussions, because the funding for these systems are a cheap and easy way to direct earmarks without falling directly into the mudpit where accusations of "pork" are so casually tossed around. This isn't "pork", after all; it's "Homeland Security"...or whatever...
  
  The real fun will start in a few weeks where the noise will rival the most ungodly mating season caterwalling ever heard on the Serengeti plain. Democrats and Republicans alike will molt out of their former skins and plunge their newly slicked-up bodies into the scrum that the funding of the military-industrial complex has become. There won't be a torch-lighting ceremony per se, but this is the point where the games will begin.... intended to be the
• April 05, 2009
• 18:38

  On How Newt Should Be Allowed In The White House

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...public tours are offered of the White House to groups of 10 or more. If one were to sit down and actually think about any and all circumstances under which Newt Gingrich should be allowed inside the doors, having him round up all his friends, ex-wives, and GOPAC executives and call his Congressman to see if he could get hooked up with some tour tickets is the only sensible way in which he should ever set foot in that building. If he can't come up with 10 people from that list, he could probably give South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford a call to round out the roster, because that's probably the only way Sanford should be allowed in the White House either...
  
  This isn't a decision to be made lightly. Based on both of their performances on FAUX News Sunday, neither of these two should ever be allowed into any of the White House recesses where actual decisions are made. More to the point, neither of them should ever be allowed anywhere close to the Office of the President, if their track record coupled with today's performance is any indication. Gingrich spun a strange fantasy scenario apparently founded on some variant of a "24" worldview that might have been script-doctored by Tom Clancy, suggesting that we "disable" the missile using some deep double-secret technology that only he is apparently privy to...
  
  In the first place, the most likely technology available to "disable" the missile outside of a Clancy novel is called "shoot it down. Not very stealthy, that, which leads to the next question for The Man Who Would Love To Be President: So, what then, Genius? Aside from the fact that I have way more scratch in this game than Newt does - unless he wants to buy some property out here next to me on the West Coast that might just be reachable by a lucky North Korean shot - what exactly is the end-game here? If we are supposedly dealing with a regime that is so unstable that we simply cannot tolerate the most remote prospect of it developing a long-range ICBM program and will "disable a test to prevent that, what exactly is our post-'disabling' response when this dangerously unstable regime decides to respond as threatened by flinging a few short-range missiles at South Korea or Japan? Do we plant a couple of nukes on Pyongyang? Do we invade? And if we do invade, with what forces? Or do we fire up our aerial assets and carpet-bomb all of North Korea's military facilities and surround civilian areas, which has always been such a 'hearts and minds' winner? And what exactly is your plan for addressing concerns that China might have about turning its client state and neighbor into a molten glassy landscape or the northern half of a newly-united US client state? Inquiring minds, especially those still reeling from the brutal nonsense that passed as foreign policy during the 43rd presidency, would like to know what the next step and Plan B would look like...
  
  Newt, of course, is a man with a history, the sort of fellow that we have known for a long time was too many bubbles off level to ever be the person sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office through any means other than by some sort of magnanimous invitation by the rightfully elected occupant. Mark Sanford doesn't have that sort of history, and there are those who say he has an eye on a presidential run and is working on the kinds of smooth moves that will take him all the way. Sadly, even though he was sitting right there next to Newt talking World War III, he is working on developing a history of his own that demonstrates that he is just another chatty, blustery wingnut who doesn't have - in tribute to this weekend's men's and women's NCAA Final Four - anything looking like a strong move to the basket. According to the Politico report of his appearance (I SHALL not register with FAUX News to get my own copy), Gov. Sanford said this:
  

  “In the countryside of South Carolina, at some point, you’ve got to back up words with action. …

  
  Stop right there.
  
  He said more, trying to demonstrate his stern rock-ribbed "kill 'em all" Republican chops, but that little bit is the important piece. Mark Sanford has been making big noise about turning down major chunks of the stimulus package or spending it in ways not intended by its creators. Apparently, however, in an effort to truly demonstrate how tough and hard-nosed he actually is, he folded like a nine-high Texas Hold 'Em hand and proceeded to lay all the blame for his crass failure at leadership on the South Carolina legislature. The majority Republican leadership in both houses of the South Carolina General Assembly are, predictably, not amused...
  
  So there it is: two short-list names for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination campaign showing their stuff on the most favorable venue they could hope to find, and one of them - who deserves to be best remembered (aside from his marital circumstances) for his disastrous inability to think strategically that led to the 1995 federal government shutdown and which transmorgrified Bill Clinton from a failed one-term president to a likely candidate for the top ten president list - decides to go off like some ugly half-bright reprise of George W. Bush on an important foreign relations issue that has tremendous significance to several of our allies. Sitting by his side (at least visually) is a Southern governor, one who has recently demonstrated that out there in the South Carolina countryside there are apparently those who back up their words with actions that are little more than capitulation and crass self-serving recriminations directed against their own putative allies, even as he tries to convince us that he has some otherwise undetectable moral fiber that will make him respond forceably to some external threat. What was displayed today was one guy who tried to crash the country back in '95 because he didn't like his Air Force One seating assignment and another who can't stick with the courage of his own talking-point convictions...
  
  These are people who haven't demonstrated the moxie or moral fiber to successfully run for the presidency of the United States, much less actually make the sorts of wise decisions that the office demands, if today's FAUX News performance is any measure. Give 'em a White House tour; heck, give them that "special" personal show that lets them spend a minute or two sitting behind that big desk in the Oval Office. That's as close as either of these two ever need to get to the levers of power...
  
  
• April 03, 2009
• 19:37

  The Games They Play - Richard Burr Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the strategy Republicans have adopted for getting back to majority status in DC has become clear and well-remarked upon over the last several weeks: monkey-wrench, scheme, oppose, and fulminate on any media outlet that will have them. As today's example we need look no farther than Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who - though there is no evidence that he has come any closer to military service than the distance between his chair and the witness table in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room - has decided to effectively (though not officially, according to his staff) place a hold on the confirmation of Tammy Duckworth to the position of Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs...
  
  Even though the former sales executive had, as the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services committee, ample opportunity to ask questions of the serving Army National Guard major who demonstrated far more allegiance to the concept of "duty, honor, country" than anything his bio suggests, he still has unanswered questions that, for reasons that mysteriously can't be explained, he isn't able to reveal to a curious public. Inquiring minds can only imagine what sort of questions a person having only a layman's view of Veterans Administration issues might still have for an Iraq War veteran who not only has had full exposure to VA processes with regard to wounded military personnel but also has served with notable distinction as the Director of the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs for over two years. Maybe those unanswered questions are along the lines of "what's it like to fly a helicopter?". Perhaps he's wanting to know, since his experience as a sales executive doesn't provide a suitable knowledge baseline, whether she thinks it's appropriate that a double-amputee war-veteran field-grade officer who is still in service in the National Guard should be running for political office and expressing criticism toward his heroic former president who sent her and several hundred thousand others to Iraq and then failed to redeem the responsibility of taking care of those who came back wounded in mind and body...
  
  On the other hand, maybe he's just messing around, engaging in the sort of intransigent nay-saying that the half-witted "strategists" that are all the Republican party has left have assured is the way back to the land of milk and honey. Smart money would probably snap up this option, especially if there is an over/under on efforts to poison Tammy Duckworth's future political opportunities. She is actually a dangerous opponent for Republicans: a person of color who responded to her nation's call despite personal misgivings and who, having coming damned close to giving that last full measure in service to her nation, came out the other side with beliefs that are antithetical to everything the current iteration of the Republican party believes in. This is a "twofer" moment for Burr, providing opportunities to both dig through the 'oppo' research for something to tag Duckworth with for purely political reasons and, at the same time, impede the efforts of the Obama administration to put its own people in place while complaining about the failure of the Obama administration to get people in place. It's fairly uncommon to see official or unofficial holds placed on the confirmation of otherwise highly qualified nominees to sub-Cabinet positions for reasons that can't - or won't - be explained in the face of simple questions, which leads naturally to the conclusion that holds like this one are a strategy rather than a meritorious objection. Burr's objection to Tammy Duckworth's confirmation is all part of the obstructionist 'Just Say No' game that the Republicans have decided to play...
• March 31, 2009
• 21:32

  How To Know You Live In The Middle Of Friggin' Nowhere

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the facts as presented are well-known locally and easy to understand. Even if I wanted to, which I don't, I could not hop in the car and drive a short distance to my local iPhone distributor and pick up one of those icons of the New World In Which We Live. In fact, the state of technology out here in the hinterlands of Central Oregon is so bad that the local birdcage liner actually put the looming advent of our own ability to finally lay our greasy mitts on a real live legal unhacked AT&T iPhone on today's front page...
  
  I'm not sure which is the most embarrassing: that faux "tree" in the photo, or the fact that the local newspaper felt the need to make a front-page story of the opportunity that those of us out here in Nowheresville may finally be about to realize where we can turn up our elitist noses at the opportunity to have an iPhone. My 2.5G phone works just fine, thanks, and I don't really think that this is - or needs to be - front page news.....but that's what happens when you live in the middle of friggin' nowhere...
• 19:35

  Getting On With Getting On With It

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...in the annals of American foreign policy history, there are few initiatives that represent clear failure to the degree that our policy with regard to Cuba has displayed. While you don't have to read very far to find examples of Fidel Castro's efforts to be a bad actor in both the Western Hemisphere and Africa, you don't even have to read that far to find far more dramatic examples of 'bad actor' action by the former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, both of which are countries with whom we have been connected by a whole host of personal, commercial, and political threads despite their own advocacy of forms of socialism very similar (if not at some times identical) to the political system in place in Cuba...
  
  Despite all the the really bad places that there are out there in the world, Cuba is the only country on this little blue marble that I know of that I - as a supposedly free-will crusader for democracy - am forbidden by federal law to visit. I can't travel there, I can't do business there, and I can't even sent more than a few bucks to anybody I might know there (which I don't) without running afoul of the stern, long, muscular arm of my own Federal government, and I haven't been able to do that for most of my fifty-some-odd years of life. Neither have you, if you are a citizen of the United States, mostly because a small cabal of conservatives who were either in the thrall of those bygone days of Commie-fighting or who held their office at the behest of a small but politically active anti-Castro Cuban expatriates said you couldn't do those things. Fifty years on, none of that worked and by its failure indicated pretty clearly that it never was going to work. American foreign policy regarding Cuba offers the new definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again for two generations with the unfulfilled expectation of a different outcome...
  
  We opened trade and cultural links over the years to China and the USSR with an eye toward bringing the total wonderfulness of our different system to their citizens in hopes of swaying the populace and thereby influencing their choice of governance. Not so with Cuba, largely because of that politically active expatriate population...until now. It may well be that a part of that "Change" that Obama has been prattling on about for the last couple of years will be a change in our relationship with Cuba, if pending Congressional action is any indication. These are short little baby steps toward a new relationship with Cuba, to be sure, but the strange blend of supporters pushing the idea of a new and more open legally-defined relationship between the United States and Cuba suggests that we may finally be taking that first tentative move toward getting on with it...
  
  The reigning US policy toward Cuba over the last half-century has been allowed to stand because Cuba didn't matter, rather than because Cuba mattered all that much. China mattered, both politically and economically, so Nixon went to China (yes, I am oversimplifying it just a bit). The former Soviet mattered both politically and economically on a few more levels than did China, so Nixon's successors dealt with the USSR and the several states that resulted from its dissolution. Cuba, on the other hand, has not mattered all that much to the United States either politically or economically since the Spanish-American War. Because Cuba didn't matter all that much, the activism of those who fled the Castro regime, coupled with the finely-honed vestigial anti-Communism of folks like Jesse Helms that was looking for a home after we brought China and Russia in from the cold, has been the sole fuel powering the strange little bit of foreign policy discontinuity that our approach to Cuba has represented. Maybe, despite the ongoing efforts of the honorable Senators Robert Menendez and Mel Martinez, we can finally get beyond the last vestiges of the old Cold War...
• March 29, 2009
• 18:38

  The 'Victory' That Never Was

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the reason that Barack Obama will end up being blamed for losing the war in Iraq that George W. Bush's minions were so anxious to start and managed so abysmally can be found in this story. As is usually the case anymore, this McClatchy report runs rings around the typically lame Associated Press effort, laying out in grim detail for anyone who has bothered to pay attention over the last couple decades just exactly how the house of cards that Gee Dub and the neocons slapped together will fall apart. That it is going to happen on somebody else's watch is the good news for the engineers of this looming disaster, because they can safely rely on the general lack of critical analytical skills by the SCLM and its own fawning attention to the dimwitted pronouncements of those same engineers and their enablers regarding all the ways they think the Obama administration is getting it all wrong...
  
  The reality that the neocon's dream of Iraq becoming a shining beacon of democracy in the heart of the Middle East was an all-in bet in a losing game has been explained in far more articulate ways for several years at many other sites. It is sufficient to say, however, that Iraq was - and is - simply a careless cartographic artifice that fell to the British to manage as a Mandate (like the British Mandate of Palestine) after the Ottoman Empire got laid on the chopping block at the end of The Great War. What was happening in both cases was little more that the last gasping dying breaths of good old fashion European colonialism, and the whole rest of the world has been pointedly engaged in trying come to terms with the mess left by that last stab at "empire" for the last two generations...
  
  There isn't a "Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock" moment for Iraq, no Squanto or Samoset or First Thanksgiving to create a common cultural or religious benchmark for the people of Iraq around which they could build something that looks like a cohesive national society. There is, instead, a long-subjugated Shiite majority that is otherwise a minority in the Islamic world (with only the nation of Iran as a friend), a Sunni minority that finds itself a target of Shiite anger, and a Kurdish population that is far more interested in carving out a recognized nation of its very own from the edges of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey than it is in getting tangled up in the current iteration of 14 centuries of Sunni-Shiite religious politics...
  
  Those newly documented problems that appear to be cropping up between our installed Iraqi government and our own recruited "Sons of Iraq" suggest just exactly the sort of disturbing inability of Shiite's and Sunni's to come together for the good of the country that most thinking people predicted seven years ago when the Bushco henchmen decided to roll out the public relations initiative supporting the invasion of Iraq. They got their way in that debate and stampeded us into an invasion and occupation that uselessly wasted lives and destroyed any semblance of moral authority that the United States ever held in the Middle East. What's worse, they made it across the county line ahead of the posse that would have brought them to the sort of righteous judgement that they so richly deserve for the looming failure that their dream of a democratic Iraq will become. Iraq will become Obama's problem and a part of his own presidential legacy, even though almost every nut and bolt of our current involvement was manufactured by George W. Bush...
  
  We haven't "won" in Iraq; we may never actually "win" there. All the talk by various Bushco minions is simply nonsensical jibber-jabber. The president who insisted in his first run for that office that we should never be involved in nation-building decided to fling himself fully into that very activity for reasons that will never find comfortable resolution with his campaign rhetoric or with the realities of this post-9/11 world we were constantly being told we were inhabiting. The Bad News for the current president is that the ongoing failure of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite leaders in Iraq is going to be tallied on his score card rather than on that of his predecessor's. We hadn't really 'won' in Iraq by November 4, 2008, and we probably never will, but the loss - if (when) it comes - will probably be charged to Obama. The So-Called Liberal Media and Republican wingnuts who wanted to start the war to begin with will make sure to make that happen...
• March 27, 2009
• 19:17

  Don't Pay The Ransom, Honey; I Escaped

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...as it turns out, spending an unexpected week in the secluded technological desert otherwise known as the in-laws place on the central coast of Washington state, cut off from the usually comfortable tools afforded to the outside world by a host of grim circumstances too terrible to recount here, can be profoundly compounded by the too-late discovery that last summer's recovery from a tragic hard drive crash somehow failed to include installation of the modem drivers necessary to actually take advantage of a service like Budget Dialup. As one crawls back into the 21st Century, one learns certain things....
  
  One learns that Mt. Redoubt has finally got around to obscuring Sarah Palin's view of Russia by erupting after several weeks of threatening rumbling. This is small potato news for lots of lots of people - such as Bobby Jindal, one would presume - but having gone through a few nearby volcanic eruptions of my own over the years and knowing what the whole idea of volcanic ash raining from the sky can mean, I have tremendous sympathy for those folks having to deal with this situation. One also learns that - for reasons that at first glance wouldn't seem to make sense from a simple hydrologic standpoint - the Red River is threatening to flood Fargo, North Dakota, even though the area is still gripped in a pretty realistic facsimile of a typically freezing cold North Dakota winter. The Red River is a special circumstance, however, being a river that flows north into Canada and, because of that unusual situation, results in rather frequent flooding as meltwater tries to move north into still frozen country...
  
  And then, of course, one learns today that the University of Notre Dame, home of Touchdown Jesus and those Fighting Irish in South Bend, Indiana, is actually not anything much other than than a more historically prominent version of Bob Jones University when it comes to the question of whether it is appropriate to invite the President of the United States to speak at it's commencement ceremony. My old departed friend Paul Harvey would know the right thing to say in this particular case: "Closed circuit for the President; tell them to 'shove it'. Paul Harvey....Good Day!"...
  
  OK, so there's a pretty good chance that he wouldn't actually say something like that, given the circumstances, but I choose to believe that my return to the 21st Century is a signal that anything could be possible....
  
• March 20, 2009
• 18:52

  What Playing Both Ends Against The Middle Looks Like

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...having received their marching orders from party leader Rush Limbaugh, Senate Republicans are embarking on an "all hands on deck" defense of the very AIG retention bonuses that they were expressing outrage about just a couple of days ago. It truly is a remarkable spectacle, if only because of the way their sudden opposition to doing something that they contend may be illegal stands in such stark contrast to their virtually simultaneous insistence that Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner should have have done...well, something...to stop these payments from being made. As has become glaringly apparent with regard to so many issues over the last couple of months, however, the Republican view of occupying the role of "loyal opposition" isn't actually accompanied by even a faint glimmer of an alternative solution...
  
  Set aside for a moment the sudden fawning adoration that Senate Republicans have discovered for the Constitution and The Rule Of Law after the last eight destructive years. Set aside, for that matter, the sudden gripping Fear that that has swept over AIG employees as a result the death threats that are a direct manifestation of the wild eliminationist rhetoric that their amply compensated Republican scullions have been tolerating, if not encouraging, over the last several years. This is all about the dangerous game that Republicans have decided to play, one where they replace any faint resemblance of an idea with little more than a concerted effort to engage in a scorched-earth policy of simply criticizing and opposing in order to keep the economic crisis going and blow up public confidence in the Congressional Democratic majority and the Obama administration...
  
  It has never been a Republican idea to be supportive of the little people when the chips are down, especially if to do so would run up against the interests of their corporate masters. That institutional history fits nicely with what appears to be the only game plan Republicans have in their effort to try to get back on the track of creating that "permanent majority" they were so happy to chitter on about just four short years ago. They have the opportunity to milk favorable media attention when it's time to express outrage about those AIG bonuses and then fire a brace of torpedoes into any effort to address that issue when they are hopeful that NCAA basketball March Madness is going to be occupying far more attention around the country when it actually comes time to do something about it...
  
  I have to confess that, as far as the amount of these bonuses is concerned, I must hang my head in shame as I confess that I feel that the actual monetary value of the retention bonuses is meaningless. In itself, that particular pile of cash wouldn't get you one-third of the way across whatever body of water over which you wanted to build your own "Bridge To Nowhere". It's importance is mostly symbolic, representing the sort of 'Masters Of The Universe' largesse that the entitled expect to receive, whether as a result of performance or - as is insisted in this case - as a result of the need to have them fix the problems they caused because they are the only people who know where all the bodies are buried. After a week of Republican outrage about these bonus payments, we are now seeing a fall-back that is couched mostly in some sort of strange argument about bills of attainder being offered by people who over the first decade of the 21st Century never seemed to stumble across a Constitutional precept they that they felt a need to defend, all because any effort to actually reclaim that money is a challenge to their corporate masters and doesn't play into the destructive narrative they want to construct...
  
  
  Expressions of outrage to appeal to us minions and legislative intransigence to appeal to their masters; that describes the full scope of the Republican plan. It's all about playing both ends against the middle without actually having to step out and offer some sort of solution, because a solution runs counter to Republican plans. Our own experience of failure, pain, and desperation - primarily as a result of that Republican intransigence - is the primary Republican waypoint back to majority leadership and command of the White House china. It doesn't matter what's happening to you because you have never really mattered beyond your acceptance of what was called the Bush agenda (or earlier was referred to as the Reagan Revolution). Senate Republican leaders are enacting - without exactly saying so - the "fail" strategy that their party leader espoused on his radio program, and cloaking that strategy in all sorts of verbiage intended to distract you from seeing that they are - in fact - engaging in simple political games and playing both ends against the middle...
• March 19, 2009
• 19:36

  What Passes For National News From The Oregon Outback

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the two thirds of Oregon that lay east of the crest of the Cascade Mountains doesn't often make news that hits the national radar screen. All by itself, that's probably not surprising, given that the region, which is larger that several individual northeastern states (and maybe larger than a couple , can be generalized as vast unpopulated expanses of deserts and forested mountains with a few widely scattered population centers containing fewer residents than any single New York City borough and a number of small, frequently unincorporated communities. The unit of measure for distances between communities is usually 'hours' rather than 'miles' with that time unit being defined as "when traveling at 10-15 mph over the posted speed limit". We have issues out here, and we have the same sorts of problems and concerns that afflict the rest of the country and that are frequently featured in all those "person on the street" cultural stories that keep cropping up in the national media feed. For some strange reason, we don't get picked up for those stories...
  
  What we get are racy mayor pictures, pregnant husbands, and now - courtesy of NPR - "The Biggest Loser" comes to Fossil...
  
  Fossil is the quintessential small eastern Orygun town: the sort of place where a certain breed of people have put down deep roots in a part of the country where most other folks would never end up traveling through unless they had some real reason for doing so. Oddly enough, I have had reason to travel through Fossil many times through the 1990's while driving Oregon Route 19 from the John Day Valley to Interstate 84 along the Columbia River. The view of Main Street (credit: Howard Berkes, NPR) is a pretty accurate representation of the community. Whatcha see is whatca get. It is the sort of exceedingly small town that those of us who have spent our lives living "out in the middle of nowhere" would look at and say 'I could live here' because we long ago learned how to address the fact that there isn't a mall or Whole Foods Market or Home Depot/Lowes or SuperMegaHumongo Safeway/Fred Meyers/Walmart/Whatever Store right down the street. Not to go all "Prairie Home Companion", but patience is the ultimate virtue in places like Fossil or John Day or Burns or Mitchell because you end up relying on catalogs and the hope of some high-speed version of the intertubes rather than being able to take a short drive to buy the things you want or need...
  
  The NPR story is respectful in its own way...but, still. Out here on the east side of the Orygun Cascades we have lots of issues going on. In the major Central Orygun center of Bend, there is an ongoing controversy about public funding of a transit system. In Central Orygun's Deschutes county, there is a building controversy over the electoral defeat of a "local rule" that would have required the installation of expensive septic systems in south county to achieve the county government's desire to protect ground water from a perceived threat by nitrate pollution. On the East Side of the Orygun Cascades, weeks of debate of how economic recovery stimulus money should be spent will address the mitigation of the sorts of fire risks that have over the last decade resulted in large wildfires that forced people from their homes and destroyed some of those homes but didn't make the news because this isn't California...
  
  One of the variations of a famous Brendan Behan quote is "All publicity is good, except an obituary notice." That represents a snarky cynicism reflecting a mindset that most eastern Orygun residents wouldn't normally buy into in any case, but at least in this case the national story from Eastern Orygun is somewhat uplifting rather than simply prurient, so maybe progress is being made...
• March 15, 2009
• 19:00

  A Contract I Would LOVE To Have

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  ...clearly, I don't understand the concept of "the bonus". We don't have "bonuses" in my business; we have "Certificates of Merit" that are coupled with a cash award of varying amounts and an employee only gets one of these because somebody thinks the performance of some extraordinary work and the prospect of doing a bunch of paperwork to honor that performance is worth the effort and recognition. We also have "non-monetary" awards - ranging from coats to backpacks to hats to coffee cups and just about anything else you could imagine - that usually have some sort of 'company' logo that dictates that there are some places you can take those things and some logger bars where you probably shouldn't....
  
  All of these "bonuses" are geared more toward recognition than anything else; while I don't have the numbers at hand, I would suspect that my 'company' hasn't given out the amount of money to which AIG claims to be contractually committed over the last 104 years of my 'company's' existence. It is interesting to note, in fact, that during the presentation of our monetary "Certificate of Merit" awards, which like the non-monetary awards are usually presented at some group meeting, the actually monetary value isn't even mentioned. It would be considered to be in poor taste to even think about doing so...
  
  The ability to earn these awards is, I suppose, in our "contract", to the degree that we actually have one with our employer and to the degree that the existence of such an opportunity to receive an award is established in regulation and tradition. Unlike the employees of American International Group (AIG), though, the folks in my 'company' aren't guaranteed any sort of "bonus" as a result of passing the mirror-fogging test. Over there, where whole fleets of federal dump trucks have been backing up to the bailout dump chute and pouring in tons of tightly-bound packets of G-notes to keep AIG afloat after the revelation that in the last quarter it lost more money than any other corporation in the history of the world, the idea of 'earning' a bonus is apparently a matter of contract law rather than of performance...
  
  As a person who has spent most of the last 30 years reading, preparing, and administering contracts, I'd love to get my hands on this one. I don't want it in my sweaty mitts so much to mine it for opportunities for criticism; the whole idea of a contract that apparently guarantees a "bonus" in the face of corporate performance that sets a new standard for failure across all of human history speaks loudly enough by itself to the criminal absurdity of such supposed contract language. No...oh NoNoNo...I want to see this contract so I can figure out how folks like me can set up such a sweet deal. Since actual job performance doesn't appear to have any bearing on finding a little something extra in the paycheck out there in the financial side of that private sector that Republicans are always touting as the solution to all of our nation's ills, I want to figure out how I and my coworkers can get in on some of this action...
• March 14, 2009
• 19:56

  Grandpa K.'s Lesson: A Bit Of Sanity For Food Safety

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  ...Grandpa K. was a farmer his whole life. His father moved the family from back east to the high prairies of Central Idaho in the late nineteenth century to homestead a small chunk of land that Grandpa K. eventually took over, where wheat was grown and a few head of dairy cattle were tended and a subsistence vegetable garden was raised and where my father was raised. In his middle age, a series of medical afflictions that were never properly explained to me forced Grandpa K. to move to the relatively low elevation of the Idaho-Washington border at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers in what was at the time the outskirts of Clarkston, WA, where he bought 10 acres of what would today be called a mini-ranch. Grandpa K. accepted this medical challange and chose to create a business/retirement hobby that consisted of a coop full of laying hens and a barn with three dairy cows (that he milked by hand every morning and every evening) and - eventually, as suburbia moved out and surrounded his little spread - a bunch of neighbors who more than happily purchased his excess milk, cream, eggs, and the occasional portion of beef or chicken that he would produce...
  
  Grandpa K. was a stickler for the protocol of cleanliness. The ancient but remarkably efficient Rube Goldberg contraption that he poured pails of fresh milk into every morning and evening to separate the milk from the cream - it was called, not surprisingly, the 'separator' - was cleaned after every use with the sort of devotion that one would only hope one's surgical team would spend on the tools being used for one's own operation. Critters that may turn into meat on the table - be they the calves that Grandpa K. occasionally allowed his dairy cows to birth or some portion of the chickens that he tended - only became cuts of meat if they didn't look "off". Sick animals were never butchered for food...never...
  
  While it would be comforting to think that he made these decisions for purely altruistic reasons, the reality is probably a bit different. Because so much of the food that Grandpa and Grandma K. put on their table came from their own efforts and could sooner rather than later directly affect their ability to keep producing the food they needed to survive - especially back in the day when they were raising a brood of laborer/children - the quality and safety of the food that appeared on the dinner table was a matter of real, personal importance. Grandpa K. was the product of an era where there was a simple understanding that you can't survive your family getting sick from the food you produce and you can't survive your neighbors electing to avoid your products because those products made them sick...
  
  There once was a time when we used to be able to be comforted by the idea that the federal government felt the same way about food safety as Grandpa K. As is the case with so many other aspects of the Dark Cloud that was the administration of George W. Bush, it turns out that we weren't nearly as safe as we might have hoped or anticipated we should be. The risk of being exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as BSE or "Mad Cow Disease" hasn't necessarily been a significant risk in the U.S., but the problem has existed and has raised the specter of people being afflicted with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The odds of actually being afflicted are down there in "winning the Lottery" territory, but that doesn't really matter to the people who actually came up with snake eyes in that particular gamble. Fortunately, today, the Obama administration took a stand on how those odds play out and issued direction that "downer" cows can't become part of the food system...
  
  Call me a totally unreconstructed, old-time wild-eyed hippie liberal if you will, but the fact remains that nobody who lives in what is supposed to be the 'Greatest Nation In The World' should ever die because of some failure to adequately protect the national food supply. It doesn't matter to me whether the "reason" is grounded in some sort of care for fellow human beings and doing the right thing or whether that "reason" is based on a fear of liability. There is a simple bottom line: things that I buy in the grocery store shouldn't ever run the risk of killing me. I pay taxes, just like Grandpa K.'s kids did, to maintain some sort of bureaucratic infrastructure that makes sure that I don't die because of unfortunate/unregulated/unsafe food choices. It's almost sad, but greatly appreciated, that we finally have an administration ensconced in the White House that understands that whole straight-up idea of taking care of the public welfare through food safety, even if it conflicts with corporate interests...
  
  Grandpa K., life-long Republican voter that he was, would probably approve...
  
• March 11, 2009
• 20:20

  OK, Tell Me Something I Don't Know

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  ...and in today's episode of "Information to be filed under "Well, Yeah!!" ", we are informed by Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.Dak.) that President Obama doesn't have the votes to get his budget plan passed by Congress "in it's current form"...
  
  Shocking news, I know, and just as vitally important to the continued survival of this great nation of ours as the equally shocking and meaningful news that Bristol and Levi are splitsville. A quivering, fearful nation, watching its 401K's reduced to the street value of the cat food that we will all soon be eating as the economy collapses around our heads (and that's only if our luck holds and all the cat food manufacturers don't go into Chapter 7 bankruptcy), clearly will be stunned to a nearly comatose state by vicious body blows such as these...
  
  Senator Conrad is to be lauded for this brave public service he has engaged in by lowering our expectations...about the budget, I mean, given that there seems to be no credible evidence that he had a hand in the Bristol-Levi breakup. A hopeful but fragile nation might otherwise not be able to handle being blindsided by the notion that the president's budget might not make it through the process unscathed, that it may somehow be "Dead On Arrival". I mean, who could imagine the very idea that any one of the 535 members of congress might have a different take on pressing budgetary priorities than the person in the White House and the shear audacity and clout to make that different take stick?
  
  This revelation by the Senator must be what tough love looks like. Either that or it has been a slow news day on the Hill...
• March 09, 2009
• 19:33

  Explaining Beaver Management And Other "Pork" To John McCain

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  ...I will confess, once again, that there once was a time back in 2000 when I was somewhat in the thrall of John McCain. Shouldn't be surprising; I've never claimed to be a stone cold wild-eyed full-blown progressive in any case, although the fact that there isn't a NASCAR race on Sunday - which means that when I get home from church I will probably clean my firearm collection rather than drive my big blue 4x4 pickup truck through a bunch of mud holes for the hell of it - has nothing to do with all that, so never mind just exactly why I don't view myself as an icon of the progressive movement. I'm not; that's it. Sorry...
  
  I did find myself falling out of thrall with the ol' Maverick over a fairly short time frame way back then, though. I didn't do so because he decided for crass political reasons to try to out-W Gee Dub; no, I lost my interest in McCain because his little 2000 foray into the world of populism turned out to mask what is little more than a small set of simply held principles that has appeared to be perched in some fantastic cliff-top redoubt that is perfectly defended against the vicious assaults by the forces of reason or reality...
  
  This is where we turn to North Carolina beavers, as they represent Big John's larger reflexive distaste about the whole subject of congressional earmarks. As it just so happens, I have a great deal more direct personal knowledge about beavers and their influence on both the human and natural condition than does Big John McCain. So does North Carolina. This is perfectly understandable, given that McCain claims as his home state a desert hellhole mostly remarkable for it's lack of beaver habitat (although I should point out, in the spirit of fairness and full disclosure, that I have been to the Beaver Creek Ranger Station near Wet Beaver Creek on the Coconino National Forest, near McCain's "cabin" in Sedona). The fact is that beavers present a conundrum for anyone who cares about the natural world and its relationship to what is called "the human environment". Beavers are part of the intricate web of an ecological community, creating through their construction ability all sorts of benefits to riparian- and aquatic-dependent species. They create and expand the wetland systems that are in many cases the original building block of ecosystem and species diversity throughout much of the once wild unmanaged lands in the United States...
  
  From the standpoint of that "human environment", they are a pain in the butt, given that mountain men who trap beavers and beaver felt top hats are no longer a meaningful part of the economy. Beavers plug culverts (resulting, in the worse case, in road failures); their dams flood property that is otherwise intended for uses other than being underwater; they damage and weaken levees with burrows and chew on trees intended for commercial purposes. "Managing" beavers is a thoroughly human concept (and one that I suspect that McCain would support), given that they were here first, but humans have made that decision in response to the need to minimize the impact of reintroduced beavers in places like North Carolina, and folks in North Carolina do understand that and it's safe to say they aren't all that pleased with Big John's Twitter shout-out...
  
  This is all symptomatic more than actually informative when you drill down to the "who" and "why". The only obvious solution - and an elegant one, I believe - is to move the sources of all these egregious earmarks to McCain country. Move the Iowa pig farms to the greater Phoenix metropolitan area (Scottsdale would be a supremely ironic and appropriate destination); live-trap every beaver in North Carolina and air-drop them all on the Oak Creek drainage immediately adjacent to McCain's "cabin" in Sedona, Arizona; live-capture every Mormon cricket in Utah and rain them down like a slick, ugly cicada storm over Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tuscon, and all of Arizona's agricultural centers. If the ol' Maverick wants to keep insisting that all of these earmarks, and so many others, are just simply "pork", then he should be all the way down with forcing himself and his constituents living with the issues that all these examples of "pork" are trying to address...
• March 06, 2009
• 20:20

  Republican Death Wishes

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  ...I have to confess that I could beat my head against the wall and never be able to convince myself to - at the very least - plan for, if not express the anticipation of, the death of philosophical opponents to those tenants tenets (h/t to joel hanes for his self-admitted pedancy in pointing out my error) that I hold dear. Events of the last couple of weeks suggest that this, if nothing else, explains why I am not now nor will I ever become a Republican...
  
  A few days ago we had Senator Jim Bunning making plans for the near-term demise of SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today we see the de facto Boss Hogg of the Republican party almost celebrating the theoretical demise of Ted Kennedy with relation to the impending fight over some sort of comprehensive health benefits plan that would benefit all Americans...
  
  These episodes are perfect demonstrations of the difference between the world all of us little people live in versus the mountaintops on which these anointed few perch. Out here in the real world, there is no particular tolerance for stupid insensitivity and a pretty good chance of ostracization - if not violence - for those who can't pick up on the obvious clues. Up on the mountaintop where punditry lives, apparently, these rules don't exist. The sorts of comments that would get your ample butt thrown off of a PTA committee or city council or county commision are merely ignored if you are an elected legislator that your party would like to see fade away or excused if you are a hero to your party's base despite accusations of behavior that the party's base would consider to be apostasy were it committed by anybody else...
  
  I lived a part of my early adult life in a few small-town cowboy/logger bars in any number of small cowboy/logger towns out here in the intermountain west, and I can guarantee that the sorts of things that these two clowns have said would have started brawls if they had been said in those places. That sort of action doesn't seem to ever happen up there on the Republican side of that mountaintop. Maybe that's why they can't figure out why they are less popular than oil company and banking executives in the eyes of the American people...
• March 04, 2009
• 20:07

  Mitch McConnell Has A Sweet Deal, But He Doesn't Want To Share With YOU

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  ...today Senator Mitch McConnell made sure to get in the day's first shot at using the word of the day - "bipartisanship" - before quickly getting down to the business of demonstrating that he doesn't really mean it when talk turns to fixing the mess that is health care in the United States.
  

  ...McConnell suggested there were areas in which Republicans won't compromise, particularly the creation of a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers.

  
  Now, you've probably heard some version of what I am about to say before, but I'm going to say it again anyway: This is, in large part, the very health insurance system that is available to Mitch McConnell, all of his Republican caucus mates, and every one of the two million Federal employees who some sort of elegible job status. McConnell, along with all those others, have the opportunity to be enrolled in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Act program (FEHBA). I say "available" because there is no particular requirement to be enrolled in FEHBA; it is an election that can be made at the time of hiring and changed every year during the so-called 'open season' that rolls around every November...
  
  In fact, FEHBA is a perfect example of what could be done for the public at large. It is a federally managed system to be sure, but individuals actually sign up to be insured by specific private or quasi-private health insurance providers, such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Instead of your health care choices being taken out of the hands of you and your doctors and being placed "in the hands of another Washington bureaucracy", under the FEHBA program your health choices are ripped out of your hands and given to nameless, faceless insurance company employees, just like out in the real world. Clearly this is all win-win...
  
  Mitch could, of course, put his money where his bipartisan proclivities are and drop his FEHBA coverage, which is overseen by a Washington bureaucracy (the Office of Personnel Management, to be exact). He could go out on the open market and buy a personal health insurance plan from some of the same companies that participate in the FEHBA program. He may well pay a great deal more for this policy, of course, and will sacrifice the fixed biweekly Federal premium contribution that helps to defray the cost of FEHBA program insurance. At least, though, he would finally be walking the walk when it comes to steering clear of any sort of health insurance plan tainted by the influence of federal bureaucracy...
  
  Mitch isn't in the mood to share this sweet deal he has, though, for reasons that he claims revolve around for concerns about competition, even though any number of commercial insurance providers complete for his own insurance dollar inside the FEHBA system. The issue isn't competition per se, but rather is the fact that there isn't any sort of bargaining power afforded to the individual over premium prices like the FEHBA program has. People who already are being hammered from all points on the compass by our flailing economy would, in Mitch's world, be forced to pay whatever the commercial market will bear without assistance or support. In Mitch's world, health care decisions for private citizens would be made by insurance bean counters...just like they are right now in Mitch's own real world of FEHBA...
• February 28, 2009
• 19:22

  Good Day, Paul Harvey; Rest In Peace

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  ...it occurs to me, on learning that Paul Harvey passed away today, that an odd - at least for me - aspect of my place in this world since about the age of 16 is the way people have reacted to my voice. Over the years, any number of people - interestingly enough, mostly women - have approached me after some meeting or presentation or training session or other circumstance where I have had to do a lot of talking to tell me how much they love my voice. Over those same years, I have been asked, brow-beaten, and pressured to join church choirs and other singing groups to contribute what has been insisted is my "wonderful" singing voice to those groups. It was, in fact, other people's interest in my voice that led me (in a complicated series of circumstances too tangled to explain here) to become a 'disc jockey' at my small hometown radio station during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school. This was where I first really came 'face to face' with Paul Harvey...
  
  There wasn't a lot of radio to listen to back in the 1960's and early '70's out there in the wilds of Central Idaho. Actually, there was only one AM station to listen to during the daylight hours - the one I eventually worked at - and it was part of a small local network that relied on ABC Radio for its national feed. That package included roughly 5 minutes of news at the top of the hour, a variety of half-hour programming that was usually played early on Sunday mornings, and three daily programs featuring Paul Harvey: the morning news report, a 15-minute noon news program (which, unlike the morning report, also ran on Saturday), and "The Rest Of The Story", which ran locally in the weekday mid-afternoons...
  
  Harvey's was a comfortable, warm. avuncular voice that could deliver all sorts of straight news in a way that made the issues clear and even provide a warning for those shocking moments - the death of Pope John Paul I comes immediately to mind - that could cushion the shock of the moment. While his later work, especially in my later post-DJ days living in small eastern Oregon communities that were once again places where radio choices were limited, began to sound like a halfhearted, ill-equipped effort to become the ABC Radio answer to Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey still had those journalist chops that would clearly distinguish him today from all the cable talking heads and radio icons who have taken over our national political discourse...
  
  It isn't politically correct to say so if one wants to maintain that progressive street cred, but the hell with all that. Paul Harvey's passing marks the departure of another of those benchmarks that have defined my own life. I will never be able to add up all the hours I spent flipping switches to make his voice stream out through the transmitter to the local population or the hours I spent recording his Saturday noon report on the ancient cranky reel-to-reel recorder in the sad, cramped little room we called the "recording studio" for play in our time zone. I can't even begin to tally the hours I spent in a tight little radio station control room listening to Paul Harvey or the number of angry phone calls I got for what we shall refer to as "technical difficulties" when the tape reel dedicated to Harvey's Saturday noon report (which came over the network feed at 9 AM) wasn't large enough to actually record all of the Saturday noon report...
  
  In some strange way, Paul Harvey taught me how to think about things. His effort wasn't successful in the normal sense, because he had natural conservative proclivities that I ended up rejecting, but he was a major voice in the conversation that represents my advent to adulthood. He was once a part of my life in a way that could never be untangled from any of the other parts; regardless of the places that he went in his later years, that memory is meaningful and precious. May he rest in peace...
• February 27, 2009
• 19:35

  When Apology Is Fail

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  ...there occasionally comes the moment in many lives when, having exposed the deep-seated putrid swill of which one's own soul is constructed, there is nothing left to do but make a desperate grab for that last remaining lifeline connected to any common understanding of social decency and offer an apology for one's actions. This apology isn't, of course being offered with any particular sincerity, given that its basis is anchored in an absurd insistence that our intellectual capacity must be suspended in order to reasonably accept the apology. Today's episode this vein is offered by the soon-to-be-former mayor of Los Alamitos, California...
  
  Inquiring minds want to know: if the mayor wasn't somehow aware that watermelons are a classic racist icon, why was the cartoon funny? Would it have been as much a knee-slapper to the mayor if the objects in the cartoon had been, say, Casaba melons or cantaloupes...or maybe Ponderosa pine cones or English walnuts? Is this some sort of big-city horticultural reference implying that the presence of a garden on the White House lawn precludes the ability to actually hide Easter eggs amongst the resulting vegetation rather than just setting them out on the grass for all the kids to see because big city kids can't deal with overlying vegetation?
  
  I like to think that I have a pretty good sense of humor, but - for the life of me - I can't imagine why a cartoon reference to watermelon plants would be a funnier Easter egg hunt reference in an otherwise racism-free world than, say, a hill of strawberry bushes. Clearly, I am not qualified to serve on the city council in Los Alamitos, California; my sense of humor just simply isn't as well developed as my sense of the history of racial innuendo...
  
• February 25, 2009
• 20:11

  But It's BALSAMIC, Dammit!

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  ...Central Oregon has a lot of things going for it that make it a nice place to live. There are many, many - no; seriously, way more than societally or environmentally responsible - golf courses nestled amongst the pine trees and bitter brush that provide the vegetative backdrop to our little corner of heaven. There are also a host of outdoor recreation opportunities afforded from skiing to fishing to wilderness exploration. The social cultural scene is another one of those things that make my little corner of the world that makes - or used to make - that nice place to live...
  
  The cultural and economic center of Central Orygun, the city of Bend, used to be but isn't anymore one of those things, for reasons that have lots to do with dramatic collapse of hyper-inflated real estate prices and an unfortunate combination of too many McMansions and too little affordable housing for the people who work in the service economy that used to make our tourism-based economy succeed. Home foreclosures are rampant, once-breathtaking housing prices are plummeting, unemployment is at nation-leading high levels, and now we make the national news-stream with this desperate but strange story...
  
  It's ironic, in a strange cruel way, that all the problems that are plaguing Central Orygun these days can be condensed at some national level into some bizarre story about a crime spree at a local specialty store involving the theft of balsamic vinegar. That's right, America; things have grown so bad in what was once one of the shining examples of The Cool Places To Live that desperate unnamed perps have been reduced to stealing bottles of balsamic vinegar for purposes that one can only imagine are so dark and twisted that they cannot be discussed at a family blog such as this one...
  
  The majority of people who live in Central Orygun these days are not native-born; lots of us weren't raised here and - in many cases - our children weren't born here. For one reason or another, many of us ended up here because this was The Place To Be that our parents told about as we were growing up. Now, however, we are fetched up against the same sorts of punishing shoals of economic reality as the rest of the nation, and our Star Turn on the national stage is the random but vexing theft of...well...bottles of balsamic vinegar...
  
• February 22, 2009
• 19:38

  A Message Behind The Crassness?

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  ...courtesy of Politico, we see not only one more reason why Senator Jim Bunning may not even make it out of his 2010 Republican primary but also what tribulations may lay ahead for President Obama if at some point he is confronted with the prospect of naming a nominee to the Supreme Court of The United States. Aside from the fact that Bunning - who the folks at Time Magazine - of all people - called one of the Five Worst Senators in 2006 - proves beyond any question that there is a measurable gulf between the talent necessary to be a Hall of Fame pitcher and that necessary to be a United States Senator, there is the underlying suggestion that Republican Senators may finally push all the buttons necessary to finally address the Senate filibuster rule on judicial nominations....
  
  It could just be Bunning being Bunning, of course. There are plenty of examples over a surprisingly short tour demonstrating that he is one of those Senators living in the "just a matter of time" category; there is also the simple fact that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly, frantically trying to find someone who doesn't exemplify the phrase "loose cannon" that can hold onto that seat to avoid slipping over the edge into long-term status as Meaningless Minority. But there is also a disturbing undercurrent to Bunning's mindless prattle:
  

  The paper reports that Bunning reiterated his support of conservative judges, saying “that’s going to be in place very shortly because Ruth Bader Ginsburg…has cancer.”

  
  The interesting undercurrent behind Bunning's typically heartless Republican crassness is that whole idea of a possible insistence that any Obama judicial nominees hew to some conservative orthodoxy or face obstruction. This, of course, would be totally in contravention to the views of Republican Senators over the last eight years when it comes to a president's right to nominate the person of his choice. Never mind that, though, because we learned long ago that the normal rules don't apply to Republicans. They already know that Democrats will blink when it comes to the "nuclear option" regarding the filibuster rule, and we already know that they will play hardball while Senate Democrats are debating just exactly which wiffleball bat to bring to the game...
  
  Jim Bunning, if the report is to be trusted, said something that generations of parents would have boxed their childrens' ears for saying in public in order to teach them proper manners. The interesting part of what he said, though - that part beyond the customary crassness of a typical Republican commentary - that certainly catches one's attention...
• February 20, 2009
• 18:41

  When No Means "Gimme"

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  ...if you were to cast a casual eye toward the votes of Senators and Representatives on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you would note that Representative Greg Walden (OR-2, R) voted against the bill because it contained far more spending and far less tax cuts than he and his Republican cohorts wanted. Of course, you would be able to save yourself the Googling time if you were sufficiently aware to recall that not one single House Repubican voted for the stimulus package, but never mind that...
  
  In either scenario, however, you just might find yourself nonplussed, perplexed, or even a bit gobsmacked to find such worthies as Congressman Walden and others diving into the stimulus fund distribution process like scrappy but under-talented small forwards trying to come out of the fight for a rebound under the basket, arms held high and elbows swinging. But there he is, insisting that he is going to do his part to grab "an unfair share" of stimulus money for land management activites that he voted against...
  
  So here we have the perfect example of the muddled, almost schizophrenic game plan that the Republican party has mapped out for its return to majority power. On the one hand, you have the new face of the Republican party, House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, announcing the establishment of a "stimulus watch" program that serves no other purpose that ferreting out every little dime of expenditure that they can trumpet as 'waste, fraud, and abuse'. On that famous other hand, you have any number of Republicans who had not one single good word to say about any sort of spending instead of a constant and on-going diet of tax-cuts stepping into the fray, as Walden is doing, to help put their odd little stamp on the spending, for no other reason than to address a deep, nagging fear that it just might do some good and expose absolutist nay-sayers as being fully on the wrong side of history and the facts. They understand, even though only in a primitive, puerile, way, that any tactic other than the classic move of playing both ends against the middle is the path down which long-term minority status lies...
  
  People like Walden can't help themselves because they have no other choice. The kind of spending that he and others are trying to now muscle into the process to have some say in would not have even happened if Walden and his party had been in the majority, and a good part of the reason that there is such a wild frenzy of competition going on right now (no, literally, at this very moment) to distribute the money that will be coming to the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management is the little-discussed fact that the failure of Republican Congressional majorities over more than a decade and the last eight years of a Republican presidency put these agencies in the position where they had so much unfufilled need to be addressed in the first place. While it would have been nice, in a larger context, if Eric Cantor and Greg Walden and all those other Congressional Republicans would have cared enough to have a 'recover watch' program to spy on the unaccounted-for billions of dollars that were shipped on pallets to Iraq (especially since I know a lot of people who would have been more than happy to spend that money for the betterment of our natural resources with far more accountability), it's amusing to see that they finally have some interest in how ARRA stimulus money is going to be spent...
  
  ...even though, in Greg Walden's perfect world, there would only have been tax cuts for businesses without customers and employees who are either unemployed or afraid of being so and aren't going to spend a single dollar that they don't have to...
• February 19, 2009
• 19:44

  Why Some Bankers Need To Be Shot Into The Sun

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  ...the AP provides a stunning story today about the absolute blood-sucking perfidy of the financial community when it comes to serving the needs of Americans on the edge...
  
  This paragraph says it all:
  

  For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there's a new twist to their financial pain: Even when they're collecting unemployment benefits, they're paying the bank just to get the money — or even to call customer service to complain about it.

  
  Just think about this for a moment: people who have lost well-paying jobs because of an economy that is making loud whistling noises as it plummets by your window are being forced to pay part of their unemployment compensation to the banks that have convinced 30 states that a debit card system is the way to go, and they have to do so for no other reason than the fact that those banks have convinced those states to have a debit card system. This is such an outrageous and profoundly stupid practice that an already overly-boggled mind struggles to decide who should be run over in the parking lot first...
  
  Once upon a time, states mailed checks to those eligible for unemployment compensation. In fact, during more recent days at the cusp of the 21st Century, many governmental entities figured out how to engage in electronic direct deposit of salaries and various other sorts of compensation into personal accounts. In all of these situations, it has never been necessary to create a framework that required a bank to engage in any sort of work requiring capture of some portion of those transactions as part of some profit stream. Now, however, at the very time that many of these financial institutions are struggling in a crisis or their own making, they are being afforded an opportunity to skim profits off the top of spreading national misery and desperation by assessing usurious charges against unemployment benefits while at the same time receiving taxpayers' money - in many cases just recently paid by these recently unemployed workers - to apparently do nothing more than fluff up their portfolios to the benefit of investors and bonus-baby employees while refusing to actually diving back into the arena of actually lending money to companies that might have been able to stay in business and keep some of those taxpayers employed...
  
  Every dollar of unemployment compensation is vital to those who find themselves in need of this particular aspect of the social safety net that wise people created back in the day before rich wingnut Republicans became a feature on the landscape. The whole idea of unemployment compensation should logically exist outside of some sort of framework based on any particular profit motive, but that clearly isn't happening in three fifths of these United States and the taxpayer-subsidized banks that are managing this system are milking it for every possible penny. This situation is the perfect example of why it's time to duct-tape a few bank executives to some powerful NASA rocket and aim it toward the sun...
• February 16, 2009
• 12:46

  It's A Big Ocean Out There

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...clearly it's time to start thinking about buying lottery tickets, because the news of the last couple weeks suggests that million to one odds just don't seem as daunting as they once did. Whether it's satellites smashing into each other several hundred miles above the earth or nuclear missile subs of two nations not currently at war (as far as we know) bumping into each other in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, long odds seem to be losing a bit of their spiky hopelessness...
  
  There's a lot of volume of water to hide a submarine in, even if one confines oneself to the northern Atlantic, so the idea that two submarines would be at exactly the same depth at exactly the same time at exactly the same place is - as the retired admiral says in the story - extraordinary. At least it appears that both the British and French have got that whole "run silent, run deep" thing down to an art; either that or they both need to do some work on their passive detection capabilities. Whichever is the case, they certainly couldn't hear each other at close range...
  
  It's a truly remarkable story, especially since it carries the suggestion that the French may not even known that they ran into another submarine (or for reasons of their own didn't want to admit the fact). I can hardly wait for the American attack submarine tapes to show up on YouTube....
• February 15, 2009
• 16:04

  Fiddling Like The Housing Market Burns - Bankers' Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...courtesy of BusinessWeek, we don't so much learn but instead have confirmed for us the fact that the carnage of the subprime mortgage fiasco stems not only from some feral desire by the financial community to shove happy new homebuyers out the door with mortgages they would struggle paying, but also from a kind of venal shortsighted greed and intransigence that virtually guaranteed nobody would escape unscathed...
  

  One reason foreclosures are so rampant is that banks and their advocates in Washington have delayed, diluted, and obstructed attempts to address the problem. Industry lobbyists are still at it today, working overtime to whittle down legislation backed by President Obama that would give bankruptcy courts the authority to shrink mortgage debt.

  
  Nero would, I presume, understand...
  
  This article tells a grim story filled with its own fair share of villains, precious few heroes, and millions of people who were victims of their own dreams, carelessness, or the silky words of fast-talking financial grifters. There's plenty of blame to be parceled out, but the financial industry and its Washington henchmen deserves top billing in the credits for taking what was already a bad situation and making it worse by refusing to address the problem under any terms that weren't as favorable as possible to the banks, regardless of the long-term consequences to the housing industry or the larger economy...
  
  I hate to start ranting like some crazed socialist, but even a quick run-through on this article starts to make the idea of nationalizing banks - if only in self-defense - sound disturbingly like a reasonable idea. It's another one of those greedy 'cut nose/spite face' stories that reveals the greasy underbelly of capitalism run amok. Oddly, it even has some eerie parallels to the Peanut Corp. of America saga - although the scale and potential exposure to criminal indictment is obviously starkly different - even down to the fact that these two tales of myopic cupidity in the face of the the greater good have played out over the same time span...
  
  The take-away points from the mortgage crisis story as told by BusinessWeek is a grim one: any attempt to save the dire situation we are in will only be done on the terms of the financial industry, if they have any say in the matter, and even though they were invested in a gamble just as much as those home buyers to whom they offered loans, they will insist on being made as close to whole as possible (with salaries and bonuses intact, thank you very much) even if our children's children need to spend their lives paying for it...
• February 11, 2009
• 20:46

  On The List Of Things I Hope To Never Have To Say In Public

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I have a list of things that I hope to never have to say in public, and specifically hope to never have to say in front of a Congressional committee. This is on that list:
  

  "Mr Chairman and members of the committee on advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer your questions based on the protections afforded me under the US Constitution."

  
  I'm just engaging in wild unsubstantiated speculation here, but it seems to me that when you have to get to this point in your public pronouncements, you are in a whole heap of trouble. This is the kind of public statement that suggests that the simple idea of going home at night to have a stiff drink and chat with your spouse about how your day sucked is the sort of charming personal lifestyle minutia that you may not for the whole rest of your life be able to enjoy...
• 20:12

  Car Wrecks In Space

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...even though I've always been kind of a space wonk, today's news that satellites are crashing into each other 400 miles up there above our heads came as a bit of a shock. In the mind of a grown-up kid like me who insisted his parents drag him out of bed to watch the Mercury Program launches back in the early 1960's, the idea that there isn't enough room out there in the vastness of space to make sure that satellites don't run into each other like a couple of economy cars at a snow-slick intersection is mind-boggling...
  
  An obvious question arises: how is it that we can apparently track objects in space down to four inches in size but can't shout out a warning to the Iridium folks that their cute little Honda Civic of a satellite is on a collision course with an H2 Hummer of a hulk at an approach speed of twenty or thirty thousand miles per hour? Sometimes it seems as though we are replaying the mistakes of the last century in the skies above us rather than in the oceans and on the lands around us. The near space surrounding our planet has replaced the ravine out behind the house or the local dump or some convenient nearby body of water as a place where the final resting place for assorted junk and garbage is perfectly acceptably and devoid of any particular ramifications...
• February 09, 2009
• 19:32

  Who Needs Puppy Cam When We Have Republicans?

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...Puppy Cam was one of those incredibly rapid and powerful viral phenomena that sucked up band width all across the intertubes like some crazed and unexpected miniature black hole suddenly ripping an ugly gash in the space-time continuum in the control room of the Large Hadron Collider and dragging the entire village of Prévessin-Moëns across the event horizon. In homes and offices and cubicles across the world, otherwise sentient beings spent hours fawning and drooling over the real-time antics of a litter of Shiba Inu puppies live-streaming onto their computer screens. Productivity plummeted around the globe; First World GDP numbers suffered a body blow; the European Union met in emergency session to draw up plans to respond to this latest assault by the Japanese puppy juggernaut with a Bernese Mountain Dog Puppy Cam site...
  
  Those first puppies grew up and were given away, though. No longer what there the release of watching cuuuttee little baby dogs fighting and growling and tumbling around and with each other. A dark emptiness settled across the developed world.....but Hope is on the horizon. No, it's not puppies; it's conservatives that we now have the opportunity to watch. As it so happens, there are various breeds of conservatives: one the one hand you have the reactionary shallow-thinking litmus-test conservatives (most commonly found sitting in front of microphones in sealed radio sound studios where they can't get their hands on any of the sophisticated equipment) while on the other hand we have a small cadre of relatively quick-witted feral conservative politicians who make the occasional grand show of common-folk populist outrage (that never translates to any actual action) that they hope will foster a sense that they are actually calm reasoned common folk their own selves, mostly in hope of continued electoral success rather than as a means of properly representing their constituents...
  
  For your consideration, today we have the cute growling tumbling faux-fight between Laura Ingraham and Arlen Specter. By way of stipulation, it must be said that any resemblance between Specter and an actual reasonable "moderate" Republican is only the result of careful political craftsmanship and not the product of any legislative or political action on his part. Specter earned his chops in his verbal assassination of Anita Hill during the "high-tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas's SCOTUS nomination hearing and has never really looked back. Over a good portion of the last eight years he has made Harry Reid look like some sort of pale imitation of righteous indignation, using his chairmanship/ranking membership positions to express various varieties of populist outrage at the actions of Bushco, but - just like Reid over the last couple of years, except with much more heartfelt outrage - he has always managed to knuckle under to his conservative masters. Today, though, you could almost feel the building pressure of another onrushing campaign that Arlen is going to have to run all across a political landscape that even he can feel beginning to shift dangerously under his feet...
  
  Specter doesn't come close to being the first person I would hate to see getting verbally beaten for his political stances and votes, regardless of the venue host. The dialogue in this particular interview is truly precious, though, and answers the needs of an internet world crying out for a new cage full of growling, tugging, and tumbling after all the past stars have gone off to new homes. Arlen has decided to position himself for his general election contest as the calm moderate Republican of great seniority, and the True Believers will be tugging and tumbling with him - like Laura Ingraham did today - to try to drag him into line or at least get him pointed in a different direction when it comes to issues like economic stimulus. This is, if anything, even better than Puppy Cam if only because the stakes seem so high. At the rate Republicans in both the House and Senate are going, however, the stakes aren't going to be all that high for them, because they aren't going to matter much more than any past version of Puppy Cam, although they will be cute to watch...
• February 08, 2009
• 21:41

  "It Sounded Like A Train"

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...sometimes it does sound like a train. Other times it sounds like a jet that is just about to land on the piece of ground on which you stand. The sounds of a wind- and convection-driven wildfire bearing down on you with terrifying speed can vary, depending on the type of fuel being consumed and your own personal aural history and sense of peril at any particular moment. That sound, whatever comparisons it may challenge you to come up with, almost doesn't matter because there is always way more drama in the surrounding sights and smells for your brain to process that let you know just how dire the circumstances are...
  
  The wildfires currently devastating southern Australia have more dimensions of tragedy than we are normally accustomed to seeing. This isn't just about lost homes and businesses; it isn't only about the sheer awesome power of Mother Nature when she has had enough and wants to deliver a serious message about where and how we choose to live. At last count, over 160 people have died while either trying to shelter in place or flee these fires. That is an almost immeasurable tragedy; it is one thing to understand the loss of property but another entirely different thing to contemplate loss of life on a scale such as this. Being in the presence of an uncontrolled running wildfire can be a scary experience even when you are there on purpose and supposedly know what you are doing. It is even more terrifying when the Beast comes roaring into town with such a raging demonic power that you have to quickly come to grips with the grim realization that you don't know what to do or where to go. There will be time enough later to discuss the extreme conditions and climate change and all that. There will need to be time made later to discuss all those traditional takes on making property fire safe and the whole flee vs. shelter in place matrix and all the other nuts and bolts of living in a fire-prone environment. All there is time to do now is pray for those who have lost and who have been lost and those they left behind...
• February 07, 2009
• 21:20

  The Reality Of A Parable

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I simply don't have the talent to do it as well as Badtux. All I can say is go read the Snarky Penguin's Parable and pray that people who should know better - despite all evidence to the contrary suggesting that they don't have the simplest clue - will somehow come together to support the need to do the things necessary to save us from ourselves...
• February 04, 2009
• 19:43

  The Ineffable Power Of Paybacks

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's simple enough to say that there aren't special prosecutors enough or time to dig into every little sordid nook and fetid cranny of the vast corrupt scheme that will be known to history as the presidential administration of George W. Bush, but there is at least - every once in a while - the sweet ineffable power of karma. Such power is demonstrated by the strange case of Leslie Hagen, a former Justice Dept. contract lawyer who got canned, apparently because Monica Goodling, best known as God's own proof to Americans that a faith-based legal education is a truly misguided idea, decided that Hagen's sexual orientation was a qualifying factor for continued employment...
  
  Goodling, of course, fired Hagen, which lead to a search for a replacement. That replacement was announced this week and it was.....Leslie Hagen. As those of us who have spent our lives working in the natural world so well understand, reality generally violates the laws of geometry. There really isn't any hope that there will not be a perfect circle formed here. Hagen will never be allowed to lead the prosecution of Monica Goodling for either this act or any of the other equally or even more serious violations of federal regulation and law to which Goodling is accused of having been in proximity over the last few years. That's a shame, really, for reasons having as much to do with the ability of the country to hold people accountable for their actions as it is for reasons of seeing the sort of stone-cold righteous dénouement to a story that history needs to hear so our heirs don't ever allow the sorts of cultural mistakes that lead to the existence of the Bush administration to ever happen again...
  
  The United States vs. Goodling, with Leslie Hagen as the lead prosecutor, would be the truest expression of the ineffable power of paybacks, but we're not going to see that. We'll just have to be satisfied that Hagen has her job back, with better terms of employment than before. Given that President Obama has tried to establish a theme of looking ahead rather than looking back, that will have to be good enough for now....
• February 02, 2009
• 20:34

  The Gift That Keeps On Giving

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...it's really hard to keep from bursting out in painful, muscle-pulling laughter at the very thought of this:
  

  Fresh off his stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, Joe the Plumber is now doing political strategy with Republicans...
  
  [snip]
  
  Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He's apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package...
  

  
  This is becoming a joke without a start or a midpoint or a punchline, except for the simple phrase "Joe the Plumber". We have a guy who isn't a plumber and may not necessarily go by the street name "Joe" who managed to stretch a bit of campaign a$$hattery into a gig that makes a pure mockery out of Warhol's whole "15 Minutes" concept. But there he is, in all his reflected glory, offering advice to the Conservative Working Group...
  
  Given the profoundly positive impact he had on the McCain campaign, it's hard to think of doing anything else other than wishing him luck and encouraging the Republicans to keep working him into the mix. It will no doubt help them explain how one of their newly-crafted icons is so much different than people like Tom Daschle or Tim Geithner when it comes to issues of paying taxes, economic stimulus, and Social Security as a value to society...
• January 30, 2009
• 21:03

  How We Know That Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive And Well

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...and so it turns out that Judicial Watch, a conservative "watchdog" group that make its bones by going all pitbull on Bill Clinton back in the day, has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State because of the Emoluments Clause. As this piece from December shows, Judicial Watch has been pushing this issue since her nomination and rejects the idea that it has been addressed by Congress in the past...
  
  It would be a great argument, and Judicial Watch could probably get away with arguing that its concern was all about respect for Article One, Section Six of the U.S. Constitution were it not for one simple fact: the lawsuit, which was filed yesterday (Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009), does not appear to also challenge the appointment of former United States Senator Ken Salazar to the position of Secretary of Interior...
  
  Salazar, like Clinton, resigned from a current term that included the period of time during which the vote was held to increase Cabinet salaries. Curiously, his confirmation and assumption of a Cabinet position that benefits from a congressionally-mandated pay raise during his current term doesn't appear from the media reports to be an issue for Judicial Watch. Good thing for him his last name isn't Clinton; otherwise he might just get swept up in the powerful tides of Judicial Watch's Clinton Derangement Syndrome...
• 19:18

  Claire McCaskill's Forgotten Idiot

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...the bigger news today was that Senator Claire McCaskill positively unloaded on Wall Street in the face of the news that a gaggle of Wall Street firms getting billions of taxpayer dollars were awarding billions of dollars in bonuses to some of their employees. The more fascinating news, somewhat buried in that lede, was that Rudy Giuliani was more than happy to step into the breech and defend the continuance of these bonuses...
  
  In Rudy's world, the awarding of bonuses is important, if not vital, to the economic well-being of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. These Bonus Babies get taxed on this money; they SPEND this money in restaurants and department stores all across the metro area, bringing jobs and economic stimulus in a way that only Wall Street bonuses can. The very economic welfare of the Big Apple, in Rudy's world, rests on the sagging weary shoulders of these big-spending Bonus Babies...
  
  I want to live in Rudy's world. I don't at the moment; in the world in which I live, the very best you can hope for is to keep the job that you have even if you are performing above and beyond the call of duty. Out here in the not-Rudy's world, people are desperately trying to cling to the crumbling basic foundations of their lives, and those who are lucky enough to still have their jobs or have rounded up one or two or three part-time positions to avoid living in the in-laws' basement or in their own cars (assuming the repo man hasn't come calling) are having federal taxes cut right off the top to pay for the bailout that will save these Wall Street firms. Out here in the non-Rudy world, taxpayers are struggling to provide food and shelter for their families; they aren't much focused in or probably even sympathetic to the sort of pain that Wall Street Bonus Babies could be suffering at the loss of their bonuses...
  
  How often do these Wall Street people eat out and go shopping, for crying out loud? Don't they own kitchen appliances? Cookbooks? Do they not have access to laundry facilities, requiring them to buy new clothes on a weekly basis? How many wall treatments are necessary to make their lives fully actualized? There's a bigger point here, though: why should we suddenly care just about them? There are food service workers and restaurant owners and mall employees and mall business owners who are losing their livelihoods all over the country because of layoffs by and failures of nearby companies that have done everything right! An untold number of companies lie in smoking ruins and their former employees are facing stark choices light-years away from any reasonable understanding of 'The American Dream', and all of that can be traced in sharply jagged lines of varying lengths straight back to a point of origin centered in the Wall Street firms now looking for a government handout and the reckless decisions they made, along with Bonus Baby employees who may well have taken part in those decisions...
  
  Out here in non-Rudy's world, bonuses come from superior performance, when they come at all. Most people out here in the non-Rudy world understand that your chance of getting a bonus is inversely proportional to the amount of bailout money your company is receiving from the Federal government. The former and soon-to-be former employees of Caterpillar and Boeing and Home Depot and Pepsico and Starbuck's won't understand how people who work for companies that were complicit in the root cause of this economic disaster should be eligible for a bonus. As Senator McCaskill said today, there is a band of idiots out there who just don't get it when it comes to the issue of bonuses in these dire economic times. The response by Rudy Giuliani seems to suggest that she missed one...
• January 28, 2009
• 19:41

  If You Believe In Peanut Butter, You Gotta Refuse To Believe In Peanut Corp

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...OK, so the title is a bastardization of a Peter Pan Peanut Butter ad jingle from 1972, and the breathtaking irony is that this brand of peanut butter got caught up in a product recall two years ago for what was called at the time the first such recall in response to a salmonella outbreak. In any case, let's cut to the chase...
  
  Turns out that the Peanut Corporation hasn't been exactly forthcoming over the last couple of years about the quality and safety of their industrial peanut butter and peanut past product. Their cavalier attitude about all those mundane health/safety requirements that exist to ensure that the American food supply can be considered safe is - if news reports are to be trusted - so outrageous as to rise to the level of rank criminality. By all appearances, they apparently decided to press on with distribution of potentially tainted products in the face of evidence that there may be a problem and it certainly shouldn't come as any surprise that there are calls for criminal investigations...
  
  The Board of Directors and senior management should consider themselves lucky that today's revelation and recall are probably perfect examples of the fortuitous circumstance that being part of the American industrial complex affords. As recent examples of jurisprudence in the face of egregious corporate behavior in the People's Republic of China have shown, these peanut people will at least escape with their lives for what PRC officials would deem to be death penalty offenses. There is, however, another group of folks that have some 'splainin' to do...
  

  FDA officials declined to say how agency investigators missed warning signs at the plant, such as mold, dripping water and other problems that indicated the plant may have been susceptible to contamination.

  
  I'm not ready to point fingers at individual FDA inspectors because - as a decades-long Fedborg insider - I know how things work. But this is a prime finger-pointing opportunity as far as the George W. Bush version of the FDA is concerned, because this looks exactly like a manifestation of every other stinking cozy business-friendly decision that has controlled the actions of the Federal government over the last eight grim, dark years. The failure of the Food and Drug Administration to properly protect the people whose tax dollars fund its operations is just another example of why the mutant love child resulting from the unholy Bushco-backed philosophical consumation between Adam Smith and Ayn Rand should simply be left to die on some dark cold street corner...
  
  Several people have died who didn't need to and hundreds of people have been rendered seriously ill who didn't need to be, and all of it is because a corporate entity didn't operate in the best interests if its customers and a federal agency tasked with the responsibility of making sure that corporations perform in the best interests of the American people failed - and I'm talkin' failed UTTERLY - to redeem its legally-mandated responsibility. Criminality may well exist here also, but the least thing that we know is that it is going to take some time to work all the kinks out of the system that Gee Dub's minions and the late and unlamented Republican Congressional majority twisted into it on purpose. In an otherwise perfect world, raw political stupidity shouldn't result in a body count, but real life informs us differently. Whether or not you believe in peanut butter, God help us if you can't get to a place where you can't eventually believe in the people who make some of that peanut butter...
• January 27, 2009
• 19:46

  Winning At A Losing Game

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this Politico report about the outcome of President Obama's meeting with the House Republican caucus regarding the stimulus package is instructive in a sort of twisted "Notes From The Underground" fashion. The vast array of transparently self-serving quotes in the article serve as a roadmap to that special secret place where Republican strategy now hides...
  
  The now-revealed strategy is simple: opposition, intransigence, and direct monkeywrenching of the legislative process. It's a derivative of the strategy Republicans employed during Bill Clinton's first term to finally capture majorities in Congress, with the primary difference being the uncomfortable reality of having to deal with a president who is garnering impressive approval ratings even among Republican voters. House Republicans have decided to finesse that grim fact by directing their ire against the Congressional Democratic leadership for having shut the Republicans out of the legislative process...
  
  Now, in the first place, I'm as compassionate as the next dimwitted faux ranch-owning brush cutter, so it is probably understandable that I should compassionately say to those offended Members of Congress, "Suck On THIS, Minority Kid!" If one even accepts the wounded mewling of these offended parties, the fact remains that they are being treated to far better treatment than they accorded Democrats between January, 2001, and January 2007, during which time they - in concert with the Bush White House - treated Democrats in a manner that, in most polite societies, would explain a sudden rash of Important People being run over in parking lots. Given the starkly dramatic voter repudiation of all things Republican over the last two election cycles, any sane group of battered survivors would be far more gracious in their understanding of the honor being paid by the mere fact of leader of the majority party actually granting them relevance by meeting with them. These are Republicans, however, and their misguided sense of entitlement is still strong...
  
  In the second place, all they have to peddle are the same tired policies that did nothing to prevent the current economic crisis and which serve only to benefit the best well-off amongst us while offering peanuts to the middle class and abandoning the least well-off amongst us. The tattered remnants of the Republican party still desperately cling to a mutant version of Ronald Reagan's insistence that government is the problem rather than a solution, which itself is a holdover of a 70-year-old objection to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As a result, Republicans insist on an economically useless array of tax cuts that are meaningless in terms of actually fixing the current economic problems because those traditional waypoints of conservative economic theology genetically imprinted. As Paul Krugman so precisely deconstructed the situation a couple of days ago, the most powerful motivation for Republicans is the urge to see government fail...
  
  That's a scary bottom line to contemplate. In essence, both the quotes offered by Republican House members in the Politico story and the larger understanding of their strategy demonstrate that the Republican Caucus feels that it is better to try to extend and expand the building misery of American citizens in order to retain the support of their base and to hope that they can convince voters in Congressional districts held by Democrats that the failure of stimulus efforts are a result of ideological failures by Democrats rather than intentional interference by Republicans. That's all part of a losing game that Republicans have been playing for over a decade and paying for over the last couple of elections; the way things are looking right now, they are setting themselves up to continue to win at that losing game...
• January 24, 2009
• 19:13

  Killing The Goose That Laid The Post-Partisanship Egg

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...on the surface, House Minority Leader John Boehner's sudden strong objection immediately after the Inauguration to President Obama's stimulus package would have seemed odd, given his previous embrace of this supposed new post-partisan era. Turns out the reason was simple: the new President's Inaugural speech pissed him off, along with a whole bunch of other Republicans...
  
  There has been a lot of chatter about the efforts to find a suitable, appropriately secure Blackberry-like smartphone for Barack Obama so he doesn't feel like he is trapped in the numbing insular blanket of the D.C. 'bubble'. Maybe John Boehner should consider the same sort of outlet so he can understand the trends and tides of American opinion outside the beltway and come to grips with all the reasons that there is NO talk whatsoever on the American street or in the American media outside the Beltway about the repudiation that laced Obama's speech...
  
  Did the new President throw his predecessor out in the street? Yup; even the most casual observer would be a fool to deny that. Did Obama make a point of drawing a starkly distinctive line between the way things were and the way they will be, taking pains to disparage the immediate past? Oh, hell yes, but the obvious question is why not, given the simple fact that this defining bright line was the whole basis of the 2008 election from the top of the ballot to the bottom all across the country. Did the speech have a bit of a hard edge that visibly annoyed former First Lady Laura Bush? Who cares? No sane person voted for Gee Dub because of her and she isn't much more than a caricature of the Kay Adams role in a twisted imperfect "Godfather" parody that left a trail of bodies the likes of which Mario Puzo couldn't even create, much less imagine...
  
  What Boehner and that short bus full of Bushco minions don't seem to understand are the raw facts: George W. Bush left office with approval ratings that, depending on the poll, hovered around or below those Richard M. Nixon enjoyed on August 9, 1974, as he fled the White House in Marine One to avoid impeachment and assured Senate conviction on those charges. Aside from that, the Republican Congressional delegation, as its reward for blindly supporting Gee Dub, lost its majorities in both houses in 2006 and became even smaller in 2008. When it came time to call bets and put the chips down, all Boehner and the rest of the Republicans had to push into the pot was Evil Brown People, tax cuts, and opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, and embryonic stem cell research at a time when real live people were losing their jobs and their homes and any sort of faint glimmering hope for a better future for themselves or their children...
  
  President Obama said what he said on that frozen artificial podium last Tuesday afternoon because it was exactly what had to be said. Whatever the hell experiment in governance the Republican party was engaging in over the last decade and a half, it has been an abysmal failure and stood to be repudiated so that people both at home and abroad could understand that we wouldn't be making those sorts of mistakes again. Boehner and the gang don't seem to understand that those embarrassingly low Congressional approval ratings are the fault of Congressional Republicans or that their brand is a worse seller than even products from the Chrysler Corporation...
  
  The time probably isn't ripe for the minority Republican leadership to come storming out of whatever caves they've been hiding in to weather their most recent brutal shelling and throw all this happy post-partisanship talk away by declaring rock-ribbed, stern opposition to Obama's stimulus proposal. That appears to be the plan, though, apparently for no better reason than the fact that he trash-talked their man Gee Dub. You just can't help but wish 'em good luck with all that and encourage them to keep it up...
• January 23, 2009
• 19:10

  How The Terrorists Won - 'Deportland', Oregon, Edition

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...I had been thinking over the last few weeks that I might be able to take a break from being grumpy, but it turns out that stupid runs swift and deep like a powerful river through the steep-walled canyons of American life, so I suspect that a reprieve from well over a decade of bone-deep grumpiness just isn't in the cards. This week's example of breath-taking bureaucratic stupidity that played out on a far corner of the tarmac at Portland (Oregon) International Airport offers distressing proof that the overwhelming desire of George W. Bush's administration to make us Be Afraid all the time didn't crawl onto that gleaming green Marine helicopter with him last Tuesday afternoon and that Bushco hasn't actually departed but has rather just joined the lurking shadowy ranks of the undead...
  
  The core facts of the story are simple. Aeromexico Flight 670 departed Mexico City on Tuesday, Jan. 20, for a direct flight to Seattle. Several hours into the flight, fog at SeaTac forced operations to cease, leading to this episode. AeroMexico's official response can be found here. There are many remarkable aspects to this story, aside from the apparent reemergence of the sort of official behavior that earned Portland its "Deportland" moniker several years ago. Amongst the questions that come immediately to mind:
  
  How is it that passengers cleared for a flight into the continental United States can't be allowed to disembark into some secure area rather than having to sit in the plane for four hours?
  
  Why is it that over the course of four full frikkin' hours it was impossible to dig up any one of the 17 available Customs officials to perform whatever magic that is necessary to allow roughly three dozen passengers to get off the plane for a few minutes? I realize that Customs inspection doesn't impose those sorts of understood personal demands that occupations like federal resource management where you are generally expected to be able to respond on short notice to things like missing hunters or lost Christmas tree cutters or newly started forest fires, but don't they even have people's home numbers just in case?
  
  How is it that local paramedics are the ones who ran over to the nearest Golden Arches to rack up over three dozen Big Mac meals on their own debit cards to feed people who were essentially being held hostage? Why the hell couldn't even the most half-witted Port of Portland personnel figure out that passengers on a commercial flight that spent six hours in the air before it touched down on PDX's runway just might need some relief during some portion of the extra four hours that the aircraft was forced to sit at a noncommercial gate? Does the Port of Portland not understand the plight of the stranded traveler, or does it just simply not care?
  
  A corollary question: How is it that airport police can board the aircraft to threaten passengers, but neither they or any other Port of Portland employees can board the aircraft to provide any assistance, food, or comforting words to the passengers?
  
  The Rose City's international airport has accrued a well-deserved reputation for being a bad place to fly into from a foreign land (Comment #18 recounts some of the more famous particulars). It has now added to all that previous baggage a reputation for being a bad place for American citizens trying to return home to end up flying into on an unscheduled flight on an unsupported carrier, because they will be treated as suspected terrorists owning to the failure of local officials to scrounge up a Customs official to say it's OK for them to get off of their aircraft, even for a moment. You have now been officially warned: there is no such thing as honoring any sort of aviation version of the Law of The Sea regarding stranded passengers as far as the airport managed by the regional Port of Portland bureaucracy is concerned. Even if you are an American citizen, if your flight has to make an unscheduled stop at PDX you will be treated as a hostage and - if you complain about your treatment - you will be treated as a potential criminal...
  
  Back in the late 60's, iconic Oregon Governor Tom McCall said, in effect, "Please come visit, but please don't stay". Apparently the Port of Portland employees responsible for running Portland International Airport only heard - or only imperfectly remember - the second half of that particular line. Or maybe they don't, and only know the twisted fake reality of Bushco's nearly decade-long fear campaign. In any case, the actions of official personnel at Orygun's largest airport start to make Amtrak look pretty attractive...
• January 21, 2009
• 19:15

  So Does This Make Obama '45'

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  ...my man Joe Biden had an opportunity that he and nobody else other than a few strict constructionist Constitutional scholars and a whole host of wingnuts could claim to understand: for a precious day or less he was - in the eyes of some - the actual real-live 44th President of the United States, all on account of the spectacle of Chief Justice John Roberts crashing and burning under the pressure of that moment in the brightest spotlight imaginable...
  
  The problem is fixed now, probably because somebody in the Obama administration thought that there was enough question about whether the Constitutionally-defined oath had to be said in proper word order that there wasn't any reason to take a chance (we are saddled, after all, with a more conservative SCOTUS than the one that decided Bush v. Gore back in 2000). But just think for a minute about all the things Biden could have done, had he realized the power sitting in his hands during those hours between yesterday afternoon and this morning. I have often pined for the opportunity to be in charge for a day, but I would settle for less than 24 hours in order to get done those things really needing getting done, and Joe Biden had that chance. Sadly he didn't realize it, just like about 99 (and some odd decimal) percent of us apparently didn't realize it and if a few "scholars" and a host of dead-ender wingers are to be believed...
  
  The pressing question, though, is whether Biden gets to claim to his grandchildren that he was the 44th President and held that post until he was usurped by some young extremely popular slick-talkin' whippersnapper. Even with the "abundance of caution" displayed by Obama's people, is Joe Biden really president number 44? Is Obama actually '45'? Has the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission been notified to carve out some space for the massive stone edifice that will be known as the Biden Memorial?
• January 20, 2009
• 20:14

  At Last

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  ...it appears that a recurring theme of the First Dance at some of the Inaugural Balls is one instrumental arrangement or another of the classic Etta James song "At Last". This is how Etta would do it (just close your eyes if you would like to ignore the "Wild at Heart" clips):
  
  
• 19:16

  What Today Means

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  ...aside from all the talk about "promise" and "change" and whether Obama's speech was suitably uplifting or whether the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of The United States should, you know, kind of have the Oath of Office down pat, today means one thing: this one guy crawled onto a highly modified Boeing VC-25 at Andrews Air Force Base to take off into the uncertain skies above the mid-Atlantic seaboard, and for the first time in eight long years the Air Traffic Control call sign for that aircraft wasn't "Air Force One". That means as much - if not more - to me than anything else that happened today...
• January 19, 2009
• 19:41

  Exploring The Strange Escherian Wrold Of John Cornyn

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  (note: I actually wrote this last night, but the realities of internet connections and wide-area network failures struck down my best intentions.)
  
  ...John Cornyn, junior United States Senator from the state of Texas, is a truly conflicted piece of art. With the unlamented departure of Ted Stevens, he has - by threating to put a 'hold' on the vote to confirm Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State - become the leading Republican example of what a piece of M. C. Escher art looks like when expressed in human political form...
  
  Cornyn has made what can presumed to be a serious threat to lock down the Hilary confirmation vote over what he chooses to express as concerns over foreign donations to Bill's William J. Clinton Foundation. The reason, of course, is concern of a potential conflict of interest in Hilary Clinton's advice to President Obama during some unspecified future international situation. No amount of insistence by Sec. of State designate Clinton herself about the kind of firewalls she plans to erect to avoid such risk of conflict of interest seems to satisfy the junior Senator of Texas...
  
  There is – as is usually the case when unreflective self-aggrandizing conservatives are concerned – a profound bit of what a casual observer would call “irony” reflected in Cornyn's stout-hearted concerns about the risks that foreign contributions might bring to this rather unusual connection between the SoS and a former POTUS. Cornyn is what would be called “mobbed up” if the Mafia were involved in the extractive oil industry. He would undoubtedly stridently object to any suggestion that his by-and-large pro-Big Oil votes over the last several years have any relationship whatsoever with the tens of thousands of dollars he has received in campaign contributions from the same Big Oil concerns that have benefitted from those votes of his. Unfortunately for “Big John”, there isn't any middle ground...
  
  What we actually have here is part of the two-pronged conservative attack plan: go after Hilary because she is the Hilary Clinton that – just by existing – serves as a rally point for the Republican base while trying to knock that disturbing Obamessiah down a notch or three by turning one of his cabinet appointments into a big ol' public fight. Eric Holder turned out to be a loser for the tattered remnants of the Republican gang looking to score coup against Obama once a host of presumably stalwart Law-And-Order Republicans came out in his support. Tim Giethner seems likely to break a relatively recently-crafted mold by surviving his tax-payment problems – not to mention the oft-mentioned but rather irrelevant house-keeper green card issues – and be confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury because of the dire nature of the times and his purported skills...
  
  Cornyn's objection looks like it is little less than one last dying hypocritical expression of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. How he failed to bring up Vince Foster is an unanswerable question, because Big John, being clever enough to make it to the United States Senate, isn't going to tip his hand that way. The inference is clear, though, coming from a guy who has never hesitated to vote against the larger interests of American citizens and for the narrow, profit-motivated interests of the specific special interest groups and industries that have worked to fill his own campaign coffers...
  
  Big John Cornyn led all comers in the 110th Congress in terms of contributions from Big Oil. His domination in that regard is astounding, if not downright embarrassing (click around to burrow into the reality) and is instructive in light of his 100% voting record in defense of oil interests. At the same time, he offers the audacious suggestion that Hilary Clinton should not be confirmed as Secretary of State until or unless her husband forswears any foreign contributions to the foundation that bears his name...
  
  There is a powerful incentive for Cornyn in these particular circumstances: the opportunity for a powerfully self aggrandizing "Three-fer" is almost too good to pass up. First, he gets to take a stab at the Hated Bill Clinton - but subtly, through Hilary's SoS nomination. Second, he gets to take a stab at the equally Hated Hilary Clinton, thereby increasing the value of his political stock amongst "the base" at a time when lonely minds are calling out for a new leader that can step up to the presidential plate in 2012. Third, this moment offers a chance to strike a debilitating blow against the sort of otherwise independent private organizations that want to combat the very personal, individual nature of international poverty (as well as ignorance of the dangers of global climate change) that otherwise nurtures - if not institutionalizes to the corporate benefit - the opportunities for profitability on the part of the corporations that donated over half a million dollars to Cornyn over just the last two years...
  
  Cornyn's arguments against confirming Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State are both on their face and after careful review nothing more that the last desperate Senate rules gambit of a party that got its butt kicked last November and isn't even close to figuring out to find its way back to actual real-world relevance. The tragic irony is that he is probably the least possible likely candidate to raise questions of conflict of interest; it's like one of those strange twisting Escher staircases that folds back upon itself...
• 9:32

  Now IS The Time

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  ...the speech was 45 and a half years ago. His birthday was last Thursday. Yesterday a raucous sort of homage was paid to that famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Today is the day we honor his birthday, his dream, and his life.
  
  
  
  King's dream hasn't yet been fully realized thoughtout American society, but tomorrow a remarkable chunk of it will come to fruition as the entire world watches Barack Obama take the oath of office for the Presidency of the United States. In a just world, Dr. Martin Luther King would be the revered 80-year-old patriarch of the Civil Rights movement watching with the rest of us as this part of his dream unfolded. The world isn't just (as if you didn't know that) and he won't be amongst us - physically, at least, so we'll watch for him and reflect on this one remarkable symbol of how the arc of the moral universe, as he said it would just days before his assassination, has bent toward justice...
• January 17, 2009
• 19:02

  Media Insanity Or Turing Test? YOU Make The Call

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there may well not be enough ones and zeros in all of cyberspace to fully document the stone-cold craziness that has seemed to infect the Main Stream Media over the last decade and a half. It's almost like trying to describe in real time the individual nature of any particular wave crashing onto an Oregon coast beach. Examples of either MSM insanity or those waves keep pounding toward us with such a rapid, numbing, and regular frequency that it isn't possible for any one human to keep track of them all. There are those instances, however, where the rancid cream does rise to the top of that spoiled milk we know as the Fourth Estate and we can get a solid look at the disgusting mess...
  
  Today's example is one of those offerings that could well be catapulted into the MSM Insanity Hall Of Infamity by the raw wrongheaded audacity of it's underlying premise. Humbly offered for your consideration, courtesy of Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek Magazine: "Congress: Say Goodbye to Oversight?"
  
  No; really. That's what they wrote.
  
  This visitation from some strange, not quite parallel universe doesn't even suggest the need for one of those "oh, my, where to I start" moments. Between what was generally Republican control of Congress for six of the last eight years and the erection of a massive wall of "Executive Privilege" against what could charitably be described as feeble Democratic efforts since 2006, it would be a hopeless errand to find anyone other than a fool, space alien, or toothless meth-addled freak who would agree with the suggestion that there has been anything other than a Looney Tunes version of oversight exerted over the Bush Administration. Nor is there any reason to hold the MSM blameless in any of this sordid little history. There may be individual examples of reporters pulling back the curtain on various aspects of a dizzying array of episodes of misfeasance, malfeasance, and outright felonies committed by members of the blessedly departing administration, but the corporate entities comprising the MSM that could have relived those glory days of the Watergate era or even reprised the sordid gossip columnist muckery that first brought Isikoff to national journalistic prominence back in the Monica Lewinsky day generally sat on their hands...
  
  There aren't a lot of options here. There are only two choices. On the one hand, the MSM has sunk to some previously unplumbed depth of irrationality that would lead to an editor even daring to loose a piece of writing on the world suggesting that we are about to wave goodbye to some rock-ribbed, Mom-and-apple-pie era of Congressional oversight of the Executive branch. Either that, or some Evul Jeanyus has figured out how to solder enough flash drives and Eee PC CPU's together to create a remarkably realistic form of artificial intelligence that can produce entire paragraphs of remarkably lifelike text that have no connection to the reality we have experienced over the last eight grim years. No clear-thinking sentient being could cook up the proposition that we are saying 'goodbye' to Congressional oversight when we haven't even said 'hello' for eight long years...
• January 15, 2009
• 20:45

  Why I Didn't Shoot The TV Tonight

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  ...no, it wasn't Gee Dub's valedictory speech tonight that made me glad that the effort of dragging a suitable firearm out of the gun case, unlocking the trigger lock, loading the weapon, and putting a few rounds through the screen. It was David Gregory...
  
  I'm sitting here late in the evening, watching the last rebroadcast of the day of the Colbert Report, and there is the newly-crowned Master of NBC's Press The Meat sitting at the desk with Stephen Colbert, generally seeming to be oblivious to the snarky arrows that Colbert is shooting at him, and former NBC White House correspondent Gregory says, in effect, that 'we will keep asking the same questions of the Obama administration that we asked Bushco; we will (and this is direct) hold his feet to the fire'...
  
  Any video evidence of the Main Stream Media holding any member of the Bush administration's feet to the fire on anything resembling a regular basis over the last eigth years would be the sort of thing that would rank right up there with Bigfoot sightings in Manhattan. David Gregory may think that he fought the good fight against various White House press secretaries, but that's not the same thing as his and other media outlets actually pursuing stories. Neither his network(s) or any of the others that comprise the MSM need ever fret the risk of standing accused of holding the Bush administration's feet to the fire...
  
  We are starting to see the first glimmerings of the reestablishment of that concept as the last few days before the inauguration of a Democratic president. It shouldn't be even in the least little bit surprising for anyone who has around and able to pay attention for the last thirty years; a Democratic president will suffer a great deal more personal inspection that will a Republican president. Gregory's comments were the sort of thing that should make me whip out any one of my several firearms and empty a clip into the TV if for no other reason than to save myself from further exposure to this sort of basic bone-deep stupidity. I didn't do it, though, because I don't need a new TV and it's a lot of work to unlock all those gun locks. As a result, my little ol' ancient 13-inch bedroom TV will live to annoy me another day...
• January 13, 2009
• 19:37

  The End Of The Days Of Lists

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...The List is long, and it risks putting the worst days of Richard Nixon or the smiley-faced "aw shucks" assaults of the Reagan years in a deep shade. It would take more time than I have the patience to devote to the effort to even create a truly comprehensive list, so think of this as basically just a starter kit in response to the recent specter of "Gee Dub - The Legacy Tour":
  
  The Florida recount, James Baker, the SCOTUS, and all the rest
  Karl Rove
  John Ashcroft
  Donald Rumsfeld
  Dick Cheney
  West Coast energy crisis
  Enron coverup
  Tax Cuts primarily for the well-off
  Ignoring that Presidential Daily Briefing, Richard Clarke, and a host of other signs
  Smoking guns and mushroom clouds
  Karl Rove
  The Office Of Special Plans
  The Downing Street Memo
  Yellowcake
  WMD
  AUMF
  Operation Iraqi Liberation...soon changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom (acronym control)
  Patriot Act
  Patriot Act II
  Karl Rove
  Illegal Wiretapping
  Camp Xray at Guantanamo
  Abu Ghraib
  Dick Cheney
  The flight suit and the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln
  Extraordinary Renditions
  Waterboarding
  Alberto Gonzalez
  Katrina
  Michael Chertoff
  Michael "heckava job" Brown
  Chief Justice John Roberts
  Associate Justice Samuel Alito
  Dick Cheney
  The Justice Department in general
  The firing of specific United States Attorneys in particular
  Bradley Schlozman
  Karl Rove
  Active attacks on long-established environment protection regulations
  Dick Cheney
  Active attacks on real live scientists and actual science
  Karl Rove
  And the list goes on and on and on...
  
  This doesn't even do anything approaching justice to the last eight years, but there is finally a light at the end of this long, brutal tunnel we've been barreling through for most of the last decade. One week from today, around noontime in the Eastern Time Zone (9 am locally), the need to think about this list as anything but a marker to where the bodies are buried will finally, mercifully be over...
  
  
  
• January 11, 2009
• 19:13

  If You Click "Reply All", The Terrorists Win

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  ...I know how these sorts of things happen. I've seen them happen. Somebody screws up with a mass emailing, somebody else decides to reply to the sender and unfortunately selects "Reply All", and then fight's on. In this case, the wide-ranging flamewar brought the State Department email system to its knees, which I must confess made me laugh out loud...
  
  I laugh because, like I said above, I've seen this before. I'm a bit surprised, in fact that these sorts of self-induced DDS attacks aren't more common. The first e-storm whacking the gang I hang out with was a couple of years ago with the pre-announcement of an opportunity to apply for a vacant position that an almost immeasurably small number of the thousands of upon thousands of employees to whom the email was sent were either interested in or qualified for. There had been a great many email pre-announcements for various jobs over the previous months, many of which were similarly of little interest to most of the recipients, but this one was an email too far for one fed-up employee. His demand that "this sort of crap" not be sent to "the whole wide world" - sent "Reply All" - was responded to by a host of coworkers from across the US - also sent "Reply All" - suggesting with greater or lesser degrees of cordiality that he was now part of the problem rather than a path to the solution. A massive volley of "Reply All" responses immediately began filling inboxes across the nation, most of which suggested in one way or another that the first group of responders should consider wearing mittens until they got smart enough to be trusted with the email system...
  
  At this point, the email traffic broke down into small, angry individual skirmishes - all sent "Reply All" - where many thousands of employees were entertained by the same sort of harsh, emotional confrontations that would look comfortably familiar - absent the expletives, of course - to any veteran of Usenet groups, BBS forums, or even the more recent blog comment threads. At first it was annoying but easy to delete all these new messages tumbling into the inbox, but names started to look familiar and it became a little bit of work-killing fun to start reading the individual dramas playing out across the official email system. Stern emails from bean counter poobahs (you just know these people think they look GOOD in those green eyeshades) shortly began to intermingle with the electronic bar fight and productivity no doubt plummeted in other offices as it did in mine as we laughed until we drooled while reading the subsequent marvelous stew of newly discovered gems to each other...
  
  The final tally of received emails ran to the far side of a couple hundred each for most of a couple tens of thousands of employees. The impact to agency servers was probably meaningful, although any concerns about the impact to the email system were apparently more important to those higher up the ladder who want to send lots of emails than it was to those of us on lower rungs who are the recipients of those emails; there are, after all, telephones on many of our desks if we really need to communicate and voice-mail if the objects of our communication desires are 'away from the phone'...
  
  These sort of eruptions seem to come around about once every 18 months or so in the system I'm connected to, so its good to see that all those hoity-toity stuffed shirts in the State Department aren't any more immune to the same impulses than the rest of us (it's also good to see that their little e-storm is the one that made the news). This probably means that the terrorists win, because everything has meant that over the last eight years, but at least this time they're winning with style...
• January 10, 2009
• 20:09

  If The IDF Invaded Portland, Oregon...Or, Why Leaflets Mean Nothing

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...this is Portland, Oregon:
  
  
  Out beyond the edges of this picture to the left and right lies the rest of the politically defined city of Portland - as opposed to the Greater Portland Metropolitan area. The vast majority of that unseen area is neighborhoods comprised of houses on tiny lots, apartment complexes crammed up against each other, and the occasional aggregation of condo's, with a nice diversity of small parks interspersed throughout the city. Excluding water (such as the Willamette River in the foreground), the area of inhabitable land within the city of Portland is 134 square miles. The population density within the boundaries of the city of Portland is around 4,200 people per square mile...
  
  This is the Gaza Strip. The area of inhabitable land is 139 square miles. The population density within the boundaries of Gaza is a little less than 11,000 people per square mile. There is no indication that there is a nice diversity of small interspersed parks...
  
  Were tanks and troops and aircraft of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to swarm across the eastern border into Portland, dropping leaflets ahead of their advance and text-messaging the residents to warn them to stay away from the targets of their invasion (angry, heavily armed home-brewers, I guess, because Grunge Rock is pretty much already dead all by itself), the desperate fearful residents would be able to flee in the opposite direction. They could flee west over the Portland Hills into Hillsboro and Beaverton and Tualatin, taking refuge in the vast comforting spread of industrial parks, scattered neighborhoods, gated communities, and malls that would provide all sorts of prime locations for refugee camps in appropriate proximity to the succor of Starbucks, Burgerville USA, and Powell's Books...
  
  When tanks and troops and aircraft of the IDF swarm across the eastern border into Gaza, dropping leaflets and sending text messages in advance of various moments of escalation of the invasion, the citizens have nowhere to go. They are trapped to the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on all other sides by people with firearms who will not let them cross into Egypt or Israel. Their only hope is to stay away from Hamas fighters as the leaflets and text messages urge, but they are also trapped by the simple fact that the determination of just exactly who is a Hamas fighter is being made on a moment by moment basis by individual pilots, enlisted-grade forward air controllers, junior-grade field commanders, and singular tank commanders of the IDF. These trapped residents live in an environment where nobody has a uniform and there is precious little difference in appearance between a "bad guy" and all those other people who don't realize that they are suddenly featured characters in some strange infrared movie that will be played later in the day as a movie clip demonstrating the great victory...
  
  The noncombatant residents of Gaza have nowhere to run or hide, regardless of whatever blizzard of warning leaflets that may rain down upon them. One only has to casually ponder the borders and population distribution of a place like Portland, Orygun, to understand the reality of the circumstances that these noncombatant citizens of Gaza are facing right now. For them, this is a "shooting fish in a barrel" game with no particular rules about picking out just exactly which fish can be shot at, and they don't have anywhere else that they can go...
• January 09, 2009
• 21:06

  Friday Night Songs

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  ...some songs from my early years have kept echoing through my head over the last eight years. Here's one:
  
  
  
  If for no other reason than January 20 will mark the end of those last eight years, here's hoping I can get my feet back on the ground...
• January 08, 2009
• 20:58

  Can This Stop Now, Please?

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  ...of all the things that have been bad about the long, brutal international reign of terror that has been the Bush administration, the occupancy of the office of the Vice President of the United States by Dick "Big Dick" Cheney has been one of those pinnacles of madness for which this administration should be most remembered. His views on both executive authority and the role of a person in his position have made the whole idea of "undisclosed location" look pretty good if we're talking about a remote uninhabited Pacific island or the trapped dead-end side of a tunnel cave-in, but really bad if there is any opportunity for communication with the outside world involved...
  
  It would be a cheap, convenient throw-off to say that Dick Cheney was this generation's Spiro Agnew, but he was so much more than that. Cheney wasn't so much another growling Republican attack dog so much as he was the embodiment of a truly dangerous imperialistic view of the Executive Branch of American government, espousing interpretations of executive power that the vast majority of constitutional scholars wouldn't be able to buy off on even if you kept them up all night and plied them with neverending bottles of cheap wine. He leaves office with what is probably the lowest approval rating of any Vice President in the last century and as the Vice President that Americans are least interesting in hearing a valedictory speech from in at least that long, if not longer...
  
  But he just won't go away quietly, even though he needs to. Big Dick is - and has for a long time been - about as popular in the mind of the average American as the idea of a huge flaming asteroid smacking the Earth dead-center and recreating that whole "Where did the dinosaurs go" scenario. And yet, he's still out there, offering unsolicited and unappreciated advice that didn't even work the first time around...
  
  It's time for him to go fishing so this nonsense can stop...
• January 07, 2009
• 19:13

  Even John Doe is P.O.'ed

   » ‎ The Grumpy Forester

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  ...there just simply isn't any excuse for this. While it is only unintentionally cruel, the fact that the letters sent to relatives of Army personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan being addressed to "John Doe" was a product of a contractor's actions in no way excuses the Army. Contractors, despite the mountains of apparent evidence provided by all those huge no-bid contracts in Iraq, do not - or at least aren't supposed to work - in a vacuum. Throughout the Federal government, including the Pentagon, there is a vast bureaucracy that exists for the sole purpose of overseeing contracts (let's just say I know about these things and leave it at that). There was a Contracting Officer and a Contracting Officer's Representative (and perhaps even Contract Inspectors working for the COR) who's job it was to oversee the contract and make sure things went smoothly...
  
  An Army spokesman says "It's our fault". Well, yes, it is their fault. It was the job of Defense Department acquisition personnel to make sure this went smoothly to the benefit of still-grieving families, and, despite the presumed focus that you would think would be directed to this letter, they managed to screw it up by the numbers for reasons that would guarantee a one-way ticket to another line of work (probably in a picturesque but disturbingly remote Alaskan village) for most non-Defense acquisition personnel. Apparently this episode answers the question of where all those Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority procurement specialists ended up working...
• January 05, 2009
• 19:36

  Wanting It Too Much

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  ...I'm starting to get a disturbing vibe from Roland Burris. Up until last week neither I or the vast majority of Americans had ever heard of him, and then Blagojevich named him as the replacement to fill Barack Obama's vacant seat. What I have learned since then is that he was the first African-American to be elected to state-wide office in Illinois and is - in a certain sense - most notable for insisting in that office of State Attorney General that the state fight for the conviction and execution of a man accused of a vicious rape and murder long after it became apparent that the target of this prosecution was innocent of the crime...
  
  Roland Burris appears to be a politically ambitious man. Aside from his tours of duty as State Attorney General and State Comptroller, he has run for mayor of Chicago once, for US Senate once, and for governor three times. All by itself, this track record would suggest that his insistence on December 14 that he would only be interested in being a "caretaker" Senator with no interest in running for reelection might not be all that sincere an observation, given his history of not taking "No" for an answer. Fortunately for the observant - or unfortunately, as the case may be - the discrepancy between his history and his 12/14 suggestion don't have to stand on the confused edge of that history; just a couple of days ago, according to a columnist/blogger/whatever from the Chicago Sun Times, he's walked all the way back from the December 14 'offer' and ruled out a role as "caretaker"...
  
  All of this is just the sort of thing that one might expect from a person who feels that he is destined for better things. I don't have all that much a problem with that; it takes a certain mindset that I don't have to be willing to lay yourself out on the line time and time again in order to try to reach a place that you think you should occupy, and all the recent to-ing and fro-ing is the normal sort of thing one might expect from an ambitious politician. The problem I have with Roland Burris regards his judgement as displayed by his aggressive behavior as Attorney General in the case of Rolando Cruz...
  
  Rolando Cruz was a young man convicted multiple times for the brutal rape/murder of a 10-year-old girl. He deserved the death penalty the crime, were it not for the fact that there wasn't actually any real evidence that he did it. Roland Burris aggressively sought to convict and sponsor the state-sanctioned murder of this young man (if you go all squougy at my use of a Politico link, I have others), even when a police investigator and Burris' own Deputy Attorney General resigned in protest over the continued effort to convict Cruz in the face of mounting evidence, including DNA tests, that demonstrated that he was nothing more than a victim of anxious overreach and misconduct by both prosecutors and police involved in the case. Roland Burris really, really wanted to win the appeal in this case, even when his own people were telling him that his desire to convict and murder this young man could not withstand the simple weight of the evidence...
  
  This is a measure of the judgement of Roland Burris. Either that or it is a plumbing of the depths of the political ambition of Roland Burris at the expense of other human beings. In either case, it demonstrates that he isn't all that acceptable a nominee to the role of junior Senator of the State of Illinois. That, combined with the increasing stridency of his personal insistence that he MUST be sworn in right now as the next Senator from Illinois - which is a fight one would think would be fought by the governor's office rather than by the nominee - raises interesting questions as to why he should be considered a worthy candidate to a Democratic seat in the United States Senate...
  
  Burris wants this Senate seat too much. That's not a good thing all by itself and it's compounded by his single-minded pursuit of the upholding on appeal of the conviction of a man who was clearly innocent of the crime for which he has been charged. His behavior during that episode clearly indicates that he wanted "it" too much even then, although what the "it" was at the time was a rather amorphous desire for higher office. As a nation, we deserve better...