Tag: Politics

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How it works

These are good, upstanding, patriotic American citizens who are standing against what they see as decades of freedom-crushing excess, who are only fueled by their patriotic fervor and their keen knowledge of history and policy, whose every gathering — no matter how sparsely attended — warrants huge and fawning and reverent news coverage, whose formation is the most important development in American politics since the Revolution itself (no matter how much their basic arguments sound like Republican-as-usual-but-this-time-with-a-tricorn-hat), and whose motives cannot be questioned or mocked in any way.

These, on the other hand, are dirty, smelly, anti-American hippies who don’t know shit about anything and who really ought to just shut up and go get a job and work hard because, as we all know, one’s standing in life is always and invariably a reflection of how hard one works, and who really gives a crap if thousands of them gather to protest anything at all, am I right?!

Thanks for setting this straight, news media of America! I look forward to continued extensive coverage of the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor and whether or not the latest Republican Desperate Flavor of the Month is going to run for President or not and whatever it is that Sarah Palin had to say on this particular day.

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The deck chairs are in order, Captain Smith.

Did you know that, even as NASA has ended the space shuttle program with no replacement and no real direction for future space policy, we’ve made it illegal for NASA to enter into cooperative space projects with China? I didn’t, either.

It’s one thing to mistakenly pursue bad policy on the belief that it’s good policy, but I’m really starting to think that our country is deliberately opting for bad policy whenever possible. These are truly amazing times to be alive, and I don’t entirely mean that in a good way.

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Da doo Ron Ron….

Politics, below the fold.

Via PZ Myers, we have Ron Paul’s answer to the shocking question, “Do you believe in evolution?” (We’ll just set aside the notion that one can “believe in” evolution, kinda like how one “believes in” Santa Claus.)

I’m not surprised at all to hear Paul say “I don’t accept it, it’s just a theory”. No surprise there whatsoever. But what did catch my ear is his opening, where he says that it’s inappropriate to even ask the question in the first place.

Well, Mr. Paul, I like my Presidents to not be nitwits who disrespect science. Which is yet another reason why no Republican has ever won my vote for President. (Or for anything, really.)

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Dispatch from the Shore

Hey all,

We’re having a great time here on the Jersey Shore. It’s funny — I’m aware of the existence of a teevee show called The Jersey Shore, and that’s that, but when I was telling people that my family and I were going to the Jersey Shore, lots of folks grinned and said, “What happens at The Shore stays at The Shore”. And that sounds great and all, but it doesn’t make for good blogging. So, a couple of notes thus far:

:: It turns out that the tastiness of rum varies in direct proportion to one’s proximity to salt water. Rum’s great in Buffalo. But drinking rum when you’re so close to the ocean that even through closed doors you can hear waves breaking? Awesome.

:: I’m planning to sample some tequila later. I’ll just have it on the rocks, maybe with a lime twist. None of that licking-salt stuff; that’s just gross.

:: Yeah, it’s really hot. But late in the afternoon when the wind is coming off the shore, it’s very pleasant and can get downright chilly.

:: Kite surfing looks like more fun than anyone should be allowed to have during one activity.

:: I dislike tourist-trap pricing.

Reactions to world events:

:: The Pirates aren’t just toying with having a season over .500, but they’ve been flirting with first place. In fact, as of this writing, they hold a one-half game lead in the NL Central. This amazes me.

:: The NFL lockout sure has been “on the verge of ending” for quite a while now.

:: Thinking it over, it becomes clear to me that the Republicans have been getting a little crazier each year for something like thirty years. Every time election season starts to roll around, they’re just a little bit more insane. It terrifies me to think that as batshit crazy as Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry are, in 2015 (assuming an Obama reelection next year) there will a whole bunch of Republicans coming to the fore who are crazier than that.

:: Rupert Murdoch apparently got a pie thrown at him today. This disappoints me. I can think of few people less deserving of a pie in the face than Rupert Murdoch. But then, I’m odd.

:: And finally, it continues to amaze me that you don’t have to venture far from Western New York to see how much nicer folks have it just about anyplace else. Cities and towns with waterfronts, that let folks build things as long as they comply with certain zoning requirements, cities and towns that…oh well.

More upon my return to society. Having great time, wishing you were!

-Me

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Hee hee….

I’ve interacted with a good many libertarians in the time I’ve been online, and I can probably lose a few fingers on one hand and still use that same hand to count the number of ’em who don’t fall into one of these categories.

(via)

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Let us have no more!

Kinda-sorta meta-political rant below the fold. And concealed, so highlight the text if you really want to read it. (I do not recommend this.)

About a month ago I decided to stop reading political blogs almost entirely. I removed all of the links to political blogs from my blogroll, and I deleted all political blog RSS feeds from my Google Reader set-up. I only kept two other blogs that maintain political comment, because both are by local guys I like a lot and have met on occasion; but I dumped those, too, from Google Reader when their outfit decided to switch their RSS feeds to providing summaries only. (I hate being forced to click through to read something. It’s annoying and an obvious ploy to get actual page loads, not unlike publications online that break articles into multiple pages when they obviously don’t really need to, and obviously only do it so their ads reload each time you click to the next page.)

I wandered into the comments thread of one of those the other day, and this particular blog’s comments are always predictable, in that within four or five comments, the resident libertarian will chime in to indicate that the entire issue discussed in the post, no matter what issue it is, would go away if we just let the market fix it. And sure enough, this guy chimed in to say — and this is not an unfair paraphrasing, either — that we wouldn’t need political parties in the US at all if we could all just agree to be libertarians!

I just can’t do political discourse anymore, folks. I simply do not have the wherewithal to process the stupid things that people believe anymore, and I have zero interest anymore in contributing to “the discussion”. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen; I’m just going to keep living my life, reading and writing about what interests me, and I’m going to try to stop living in the increasingly fruitless hope that one day I’ll be able to honestly say that the most liberal President of my life, in terms of policy, actually wasn’t Richard F***ing Milhous Nixon.

(And don’t get me started on the 9-11-01 conspiracy shit that is filling up my Facebook feed.)

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The hell with all of it.

Political rant below the fold.

This whole idiotic business about President Obama’s birth certificate perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with political discourse in this country. This week, Obama finally got sick of the whole damned thing and released the long form certificate, which says exactly what the short one he’s released all along said it would say. Well, duh. What a stupid nontroversy this has been.

I thought of it a couple of weeks ago when I went to the DMV here to apply for my Enhanced Driver’s License (a souped-up license with embedded electronica which is accepted as proof of citizenship and identity at Canadian border crossings). One of the required documents for that license is a birth certificate, and I’d never really looked at mine before. Turns out it’s a short-form certificate that refers to a long-form document that is filed with some governmental office in Pennsylvania (I was born in Pittsburgh — or so my parents tell me). I didn’t have to provide the long-form certificate; this one was fine. Nobody questioned it. I wonder why that is? Probably because I was a white guy applying for a driver’s license, not a black guy running as a Democrat for President of the United States. (Of course, nobody in any governmental capacity who works with such documents for a living ever questioned Obama’s short-form certificate either, because they’re not Teabagger idiots.)

But now we’ve had Donald Trump for weeks blathering on about this, saying things like “I’ve had people in Hawaii investigating this for weeks and they can’t believe what they’re finding!” And of course, no reporter challenges Trump on this: “What are they finding, Mr. Trump?” Of course, Trump is one of those people who just steamrolls his way through interviews, ignoring questions entirely, but reporters let it pass because it’s either let him do that, or don’t get the interview, and well, that‘s just not an option. Our media sucks. It really does. The whole “He said, she said” approach has been disastrous for the country. When one entire side of the political discourse is allowed to lie with impunity, we’re all screwed.

A perfect example of how debased the media is happened this week on the TODAY Show. At Obama’s press conference in which he scolded the media for focusing on the birth certificate idiocy instead of actual issues, he called out reported Chuck Todd by name. Next morning, there’s Todd on TODAY, doing a two-minute story on the birth certificate story, complete with “Here’s what Obama said, and now here’s Donald Trump’s reaction!”, because in this country we decide who gets to share the stage with the President of the United States by virtue of who’s loudest. At the end of Todd’s story, he finished up by saying: “Later today, the President will go to ____ to dicuss issue ____. Back to you, Meredith.” Chuck Todd’s response to being scolded by the President for focusing on stupid non-issues was to keep reporting on the non-issue of the day. It’s just embarrassing.

And it continues. Now the Teabaggers want to see Obama’s school transcripts. Why they should be demanding those is beyond me, since there’s no way they’d be voting for him anyway, whether he posted straight A’s or skirted through college with just a high enough GPA to not get kicked out.

But then, this is how the Right works in this country. Fifteen years ago, the fate of the nation hinged upon obscure land deals in Arkansas and an occasion or two of fellatio. I do think that racism is a big factor in all this crap, but the other large factor is simply that the Right will gear itself up to destroy any Democratic President. (Or any almost Democratic President — remember the Swift Boat Liars?)

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