Category: politics

You've Nursed Your Hangover, America! Now Get Back to Work.

The election's over and I'm glad that there will be no third term for George W. Bush. I'll be happy when he's served his eviction papers by the local sheriff's office, vacating the premises for Barack Obama and family. I hope W. doesn't get his security deposit back. It won't even put a dent in paying for the damage left behind.

Let's just hope all the celebrating doesn't let us forget that there's a bit of a mess to clean up with all the entrails of the Constitution lying around on the floor. We got to pick up those guts and shove them back in there, and let's not miss any. No matter who won the elections, they're still a bunch of politicians with fatter wallets than me and you. Remember these folks are still “public servants”, and are supposed to be working in the best interests of those who elected them, and not just those that bankrolled them through the election process. I'm actually gushingly happy, but my cynicism remains intact. Make sure those you've chose are still listening.

Don't go completely autopilot, if you want your country back, roll up your sleeves, because on Tuesday all you did was volunteer to be on the committee. This bake sale ain't happening if no one shows up with any pies.

LOL PUTINZ

In the future, Sarah Palin will create Internet memes on the daily. oh wait…it's already happening. Surely her foreign policy experience won't be the last. You don't get that kind of experience by osmosis or proximity. I live next door to a doctor, if anyone would like me to perform open heart surgery on their loved ones, feel free to twitter me. And I've seen a lot of Speedy Gonzales cartoons as well, so that should probably qualify me to be our next ambassador to Mexico.

Nerve Endings Firing Away took the “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America” quote quite literally, so naturally I took their graphic to the logical next level, the lolcat treatment.

Who cares about the bailout when we've got this giant disembodied Putin head floating toward Anchorage. It's making me wonder about those weather balloons they used to mistake for UFOs.

Apology Not Expected.

I was in the middle of, actually, hopefully, the tail end of posting a comment over at Frameshop, (you see, I've been typing this for awhile, although it looks to you, humble reader, as if I'd just started), when the wonders of trackbacks just occurred to me. I can have my content and Jeffrey Feldman can, too. And how often can you have and eat the same cake? Plus I'm not sure if my links would display in the Frameshop comments.

So, the following is my commentary on PBS Should Fire Brooks, Apologize, and David Brooks' appearance on The Lehrer Report, where he equated lefty bloggers with terrorists. He wouldn't be the first to commit such a smear, but maybe the first on PBS.

…

It's unlikely that there will be an apology. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting board has a Republican majority of 5 out of 9 members, selected by the President and approved by the Senate. The current remaining board consists of two Democrats and one independent. There is one open seat, which surprises no one, as obviously President Bush will not select a Democrat to fill that final post, and the Public Broadcasting Act prohibits him from tapping another Republican, by limiting the number of board members from one political party to 5. (Interestingly, enough Bush nominated Democrat David Pryor for the board. I'm as shocked as you.)

This party of five is headed by Cheryl Halpern, who was mentioned in her Wikipedia entry as “outstanding in her field as a propagandist”. I noted this in a previous entry, but it has since been removed from Wikipedia , but it is still listed in a Search.com entry about her.

The following quote from the current Wikipedia entry looks to be a translucent spin on the earlier passage.

“She has extensive experience with overseeing pro-American media campaigns abroad.”

According to SourceWatch, Halpern contributed to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns. And in 2004 was also ranked among the Top 100 “hard money” donors by Mother Jones with donations to numerous Republicans, including Trent Lott, Sam Brownback, and Conrad Burns. Lott and Brownback also happened to sit on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. The same committee which approves all Corporation for Public Broadcasting nominations.

Oh, and by the way, Patricia Harrison, the President of the CPB, is the former Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee.

What was that whole thing about an apology again? That said, there is still every reason to ask for an apology, but given the background of who's running the CPB, the odds of hearing one are quite low.

Due Diligence

I went to a couple sites to find some perspective into average home size in the United States to possibly shed some light on the concerns regarding Al Gore's electrical bill.

Google Answers responded to a question about average home size in 2002. The average U.S. home size in 2001 was 2,300 square feet. I realize this is five years ago, but it takes some time for the majority of the country to upgrade the size of their homes, so I would suspect the 2006 number to still be below 3,000. Google Answers also listed their sources for determining the answer.

Green vs. Machine

I actually escaped chatter about Bald Britney and Deceased Anna Nicole for a whole five minutes, and heard about something that may have some relevance to something else. It was difficult, but it actually happened.

Some no-name right wing group attacked Al Gore over his electricity bills, saying they are 50% higher than the national average.

Yet they don't say how Al Gore lives in a 10,000 square foot house. I could count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of people I know personally (do mySpace friends count? cus' I haven't been to too many of their homes) that live in such homes.

I think this blog is too small for the smear machine to try to extract from my brain all the people I know personally to cross-reference their names in some super computer that will match this info up with their property tax bills and compute the square footages (footages? feetages? overall square footage was better, but this sentence was on a roll like I haven't had in awhile, so let's get back to it, shall we?) of their homes just to get to the number six and call me a liar. I doubt they would do their due diligence to be certain I don't have six fingers on my hand, because a bell curve would probably show that the likelihood of me having five fingers on the other hand would fall within two standard deviations.

I am not going to do my due diligence, cause I'm sensing the inherit truthiness in claiming that Al Gore's home is at least 70% larger than the national average. Elementary school students could make the clear determination, that indeed, even while making steps to ceonserve energy, Mr. Gore would still have a bill much higher than the national average.

Can he not be an advocate for green energy because of this? Rush Limbaugh apparently believes environmentalists want to downsize the American lifestyle. If Rush makes a claim that Gore should live in a smaller home, he would contradict himself? Walking contradiction occasionally do such things, by the way. I'm just sayin' is all.

I'm pretty sure Rush doesn't live in a glass house.

And, I'm just wondering, are our electric bills public knowledge?

Blogs I've read reporting on this include:

The Anonymous Liberal

Seeing the Forest

Crooks & Liars

Kissinger of Death

The president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger as an adviser. They do this in person, I would suppose so they can all compare hands and see whose hands have the most blood on them. Then they talk about the merits of certain brands of soap for removal of said blood. Unless of course they like to leave the dried blood on sometimes to remind their underlings of their unchecked power. This from CBS News:

Woodward also reports that the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, as an adviser. Says Woodward, “Now what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'” Woodward adds. “This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”

Quite disturbing.

And I'm ashamed that both New Jersey Democrats, Lautenberg and Menendez both supported the Torture Bill. Thanks guys. When's Ned Lamont moving to New Jersey?

The Truth Spoken.

I've been doing a million different things and nothing at all lately. But I'm glad I popped over to see what Warren Ellis has been talking about lately. And his words were not needed. Keith Olbermann said it all.

If I have any duty as an American, it is to link to Olberman's commentary.

And here's a link to the Bill Clinton interview on Fox News.

Like most of America of been distracted and sometimes unconsciously sought distraction, so here's something back to anyone who still wanders my way.

Bush and Blair Have a Little Chat

The comedian-in-chief clearly did not ask, “Is this thing on?” with a tap of the microphone. So the world gets a private moment between a couple leaders of the free world. There's a lot of talk about this around the blogosphere, and I'm sure there will be a piece on The Daily Show, followed by its posting YouTube. That's just the nature of these things.

Links:

Guardian Unlimited: NewsBlog

Transcript by Adam Boulton

Crooks & Liars

Ezra Klein

Oh and a little bit of Guess who's coming to dinner. Will the White House open the door to thug/oil baron? The answer may be inidicative of upcoming US policy in the Middle East since Kazakhstan opened airfields to us previous in the US conflict/bombing with/of Afghanistan. (Sorry I get a little slash crazy here and there, and that time it came while I was actually trying to make a point.) But it could also be that there's lots of oil in Kazakhstan. And people do crazy things for that black stuff.