Archive for March, 2008

5 years on…

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Passing by the protest yesterday, held in the shadow of heavy rain — which is to say, light rain that will turn heavy any minute now — I look over the gathering crowds and what little booths have been put up.  I see three political candidates — first I saw Steve Novick’s campaign, which meant to me that just around the bend, but never next to him, I would see Jeff Merkley’s.  Before I saw Jeff Merkley’s, I saw Ron Paul supporters had set up their little shin-dig — a bit of ideological diversity, I suppose.  I am a little bit annoyed — it seems a little tacky for politicians to set up shop in these things, crassly shifting about for votes.

A group of about a dozen O-PIRGers had gathered into what looked like a prayer circle.  Maybe, in a way, it was.  But they threw out a peppy slogan at the end, and I guess you can say were in good spirits.  A smattering of Women in Pink — indicating Code Pink — were here and there.

A ways away there is a memorial, on the edge of PSU, several grassy knolls of white flags representing dead Iraqis, after a handful of rows of red flags representing American dead.  If I find a photograph of it online, I will post it.

Walking around the bend, I see a man with a black handkerchief over his mouth, handing out fliers.  Pretty interesting — this is the infamous “Black Blocks” of these marches.  Or so you think.  I take a flier, look down on it, and see that he was mildly co-opting the situation — and there was a large troupe of Scientology critics waving signs aimed at the downtown Scientology Center.  A fat and well dressed man stood at the door-way of the Scientology Center, staring at the crowd, waving signs “Keep the Faith.  Lose the Corporation”; “Remember Lisa McPhearson”; “I Like Science Fiction Too — But I wouldn’t–“, et al.  It was … interesting.

Throwing It Down!

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Supposing for a moment the ponderance of how something — anything — is “threatening to threaten the Obama Campaign” — can we throw in an extra “threaten”?

CNN is hilarious sometimes, but it is maybe not their fault.  It is a scandal that was obviously going to come sometime, and I knew it would, and more than anything else would serve as the Cultural Wedge that would deflate Obama — but it amuses me more than anything else.  Basically what amuses me is the handful of seconds of b-roll that I saw on CNN last night.  Reverend Wright is speaking.  Popping into the screen for just a few seconds — two burly black men who seem to be Throwing It Down — or something.

Change the channel, or turn the channel off as the case was, and come back to it an hour later, and you’ll see that b-roll again.  And again.  And again.  Wright preaches, two burly men pop into screen-shot and gestilate wildly, then pop out of the screen-shot.

Steve Novick voted for Nader? Gasp.

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Last week, Jeff Merkley made some remarks which clarified why the better choice in the race between Merkley and Steve Novick to battle Gordon Smith for the Senate seat from Oregon is, indeed, Steve Novick.

Apparently Jeff Merkley is happy to be a Democratic Party Apparatuck, Get along to get along.  This route does have some of its advantages.  The means of legislative (and indeed executive) government needs to be some unholy mixture of working with the “Powers that Be” and calling such out.  The problem with the former is that it inspires a certain amount of timidity.  The latter model has its problems — the “Powers that Be” have a certain amount of, um, power to shuttle things, after all — but within this framework, you have to solve the pressing problem of the Democrats first.

The words went to the effect of pointing to Novick’s praise of Ralph Nader voters in 1998, an alluding to his vote for the candidate in 1996 by way of dishonestly suggesting he did so in 2000.  As well in pointing to a certain level of ambivalence in the candidacies of Clinton and Obama.  To which I have to say, Good for Novick.  Really.  It’s a Senate I used to sometimes view as being compose of Russ Feingold and 99 others, which means that if things settle in with your Harry Reid — Tom Daschle component of managing a caucus, you need someone to counteract your Ken Salazars.

Absent any compelling reason Merkley would be more electible than Novick, and I cannot find any, Novick has to be your man… Oregon, so far as I can tell, being the seventh most likely Republican Senate seat to go over to the Democratic side.  Which, if I had to guess, is about where the races settle between the donkey party winning and the Elephant party winning.

I thought he’d back in April. He’s a month early

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Appropo of next to nothing, revenire charged out with this:

Ban me… I know a teeny weeny bit about IP etc. 

Hm.  Perhaps it was a mistake to indulge him and plead for a generic sense of “etiquette”.  An Internet troll will take this as a sense as a weakness for the silly games they play.  Does revenire have anything to say about Wyoming or squares, and the relation between Wyoming and Squares?  No.  He does not seem to.  Hence my problem with him.  I may indeed “do something about that” after all.  Ideally I would reconfigure the comments section of my blog such that revenire’s comments not posted to the Larouche category would go in to the “Approve / Disapprove” channel, to be judged on a simple matter of relevancy — Larouche topics going through automatically.  (Isn’t Larouche fixated on Squares, and makes a Calculus problem with them a matter of Gnostic meaning?)  I don’t think I get that specific, though.  As it is set right now, everyone’s first comment goes through that channel, and I approve them, and their comments go through automatically from then on out.   I will look into it, I suppose.  In the meantime, I plan on posting about my desire to Square off Wyoming again shortly, so Revenire will have another crack at that.

Appropo of… nothing… revenire chimed in with:

Or, better yet, call the cops.

This came out of nowhere.  In this light, I do reserve the right to call the authorities if and when I see revenire engage in illegal activities.  But I have yet to see such a thing, so I’m just left scratching my head at this one.  Not having seen such, I do not know what he is referring to, so I will just have to ask: Is there something in your conscience that is bothering you, revenire?

And appropo of revenire’s state of being, we get… this:

For all I care you can jump off a bridge.

Go ahead, jump… because you’re a nothing and the rest of your soap opera characters are empty husks… dead souls.

Interesting.  This appears to be second nature.  Is this a greeting amongst Larouchies?

“Hey!  Have you killed yourself today?”

“No.  Not yet.  Got a deployment to the college campus.  Have one of those “Renaissances” to ignite.  Hoo Hoo!  Kill me.”

Nay.  revenire is mocking the death of Ken Kronberg, who as we all well know, jumped off a bridge to his death — on the day that the Dcaily Memo mentioned the advisibility of suicide before unleashing a broadside against his Printing Press as the reason for the problems of the organization.  Actually he also may well toss in that he is mocking Jeremiah Duggan here, who I am lax on mentioning so I suppose revenire does a service by reminding me about him.  Anyway, whatever the circumstances that lead to his death — in that remote conference in Germany — German officials did rule it a suicide.  So, he’s mocking two deaths.

Or I could count this as the knife’s edge within that which we call “ego-stripping”.  Not so much a concerted effort here, but a frame of mind, boiling down to a litany of largely incomprehensible insults.  Case in point, his willful reading incomprehension of my innocuous anecdote about confusion over Sputnik and the city of Krasnoyarsk.  I puzzled over his reaction to that, and just threw my hands up in the air and submitted the question of “What is revenire’s problem” to FACTNet.  The answer to the inability to abide by a simple personal anecdote lies in the individuality of such … to be assimilated in the Borg, those concepts of human experiences need to be scuttled.  Mind you, this isn’t a thought through process, just a state of flinging crud.

But revenire:  If your come on during your career as perennial political candidate included “I don’t care if you kill yourself” — no wonder you didn’t much crack a couple percentage points.  Then again, garnering votes is never the purpose of a Larouche themed electoral campaign.  So, if it’s a part of the pitch to join the LYM — no wonder the numbers in that organization are dwindling.

Eliot Spitzer’s expensive taste in Hookers

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

Goddamned the Goddamned Eliot Spitzer.  Client number Nine.

The question I have regarding Spitzer is in terms of quantifying levels of hypocrisy.  It is the same question I had with regard to Larry Craig.  Just as Larry Craig’s central concern never involved the Gay, Eliot Spitzer’s did not really involve the busting up of Prostitution Rings.  Spitzer’s claim to fame, and whyhis downfall is pretty disappointing — came with cleaning up financial frauds of major corporations.  Ask him to list his proudest accomplishments, Prostitution will not come up.  I suppose Craig shot himself in the foot by insisting “I am not Gay.  I never have been gay,”, effectively elevating his standard issue but bluster-less record on the on that account.

Start with the not so iron-clad law that you figure that you can either frequent service from prostitutes or you can prosecute Prostution, but not both.  Now we delve into laws of relativity from that spot.  Spitzer has made some hay out of prosecuting prostituion, but notably if you look at the AP bullet-list today, this falls under the purview of “Other Cases”, after a list of five major corporate cases where he earned his chits.  If this list were made over the weekend, you would have to wonder if they would even make the list.  But key in ascertaining levels of Hypocrisy is that the question is unresolved, with no clear “No”.  The lowest level of hypocrisy, roughly none, would be if Spitzer were actually fighting for the legalization of prostitution.  That is never  politically feasible, so you go to the next level of political hypocrisy, which would be if he were passively leaving the wheels in motion for prosecuting prostitution, but not making any deal about it.  Somewhere between there and Leading The Charge with Cleaning up the Scrouge of Prostitution as his raison d’ente is where Mr. Spitzer sits.

Oh well.  His political light had already dimmed a bit anyway.  And thus he falls all the way off into the graveyard of politics, victim of human weakness and a dash of hubris.

… After all…

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

A five-month investigation by The Associated Press found low levels of pharmaceutical drugs — including antibiotics, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — in the drinking water of at least 41 million Americans.

The AP’s investigative team found traces of drugs in 24 of the 62 major metropolitan water systems it checked.

Have a glass of water in Philadelphia, for example, and you’re drinking tiny amounts of at least 56 pharmaceuticals or their byproducts.

Lake Meade, which is about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, supplies drinking water for Nevada, Arizona and California, and testing found trace levels of birth control, steroids, narcotics and other drugs in that water supply.

Tempted to suggest that the Conspiracy Theorists are right about this one, except here it is more like the Paranoid Schizophrenics, who are — after all — more a-tuned to some things than the rest of the population on some matters… after all.

Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, recognizes that the pollution is “a growing concern and we’re taking it very seriously,” but overall there’s no reason to stop drinking water—not that you really have a choice.

That’s exactly how it works, right?  Captive audience, into the Essentials of life.  Just … like… them.

Barack Obama: Still on Path to Nomination

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

My initial thought concerning the super-delegates, as expressed on this blog back in December or January, was “The Tie goes to Clinton.”  Indeed it does. I just am not sure what counts as a tie, seeing as how we are largely set in stone — Obama will end this primary season with more delegates than Clinton, probably more than 100.

A bit of wisdom tossed at me from the Pundit class which I picked up and accepted because it made sense, and good gravy a lot of pundit class words of wisdom make no sense, is that whoever gets to a 100 delegate lead, as paltry as that sum is in terms of percentiles, will have a nearly insurmountable lead. And that seems to be the case, as Jonathan Alter’s “Math Problem” explains.  Barack Obama is still on the trajectory to the nomination, and the Super-Delegates will be hard pressed to reverse what is a significant delegate lead. Further, Barack Obama has consistently lead in polls of “head to head” match-ups over Clinton, and while I am not unsympathetic to the argument that this does not factor what an actual campaign contest will serve the polls are what they are, an additional factor Clinton will have to overturn in order to make a convincing case to the Super-delegates to over-turn the delegate count.  The only other factor Clinton has in order to win is that she will have to do somewhat better than my imagined “Best Case Scenario” in the remaining contests to serve as a momentum argument about Obama’s campaign stamina.

So, here’s how I view this campaign. Obama has been on the trajectory toward nomination since his Iowa victory.  Hillary Clinton‘s victory in New Hampshire bought her the chance to change the trajectory on Super Tuesday, but she would have to win the night decisively. The results were sufficiently muddled that while she won the night in the Media — California and Massachusetts and New Jersey — the next month’s worth of primaries and causes were so tailor-made for Obama that she still had to change the trajectory in her favor. She clearly knew her peril, as evidenced by the age-old desperation tactic of calling for a long lineof Debates — always a sure sign of a candidate who needs to change the dynamics of a campaign race. Which is why even as she did as well as she possibly could have on Tuesday’s election — a “mini-Super Tuesday”– and carried the night in the media — “Hillary Back In” blared our local newspaper front page headline — at the end of the day, when the dust settled, the cold hard reality for her was she had reduced Obama’s delegate lead by about 10 — an amount that would be wiped out by Obama’s victories in Wyoming (um… 7 to 5?) and Mississippi. Once again,she clearly knows the perils of her situation, as her pitch now includes the hinting that Obama would serve as her running mate — a gambit served as much with super-delegates in mind and one that softens her “All hands on deck” attack on Obama as Inexperienced in suggesting that he will have his chance in eight year. It strikes me as a “Hail Mary” — a necessary “Hail Mary”, Hail Marys are necessary — down a touchdown and the seconds have ticked off the clock, GO! — and also a pretty well executed Hail Mary, but a Hail Mary nonetheless. We’ll just have to see if it hits the tallest and most athletic Receiver. It is why we cannot shut the book on Hillary Clinton’s campaign just yet.

Basically, I hope Obama wins Pennsylvania in a few weeks, which I gather will effectively close Hillary Clinton‘s narrow path toward nomination, stopping her pitch that she can better win the Rust Belt. Which is actually not a bad argument toward electibility, as set against Obama’s argument that he could better win the West — a frontier tantalizingly close for the Democrats, made harsher by the presence of John McCain. A long nomination precess has probably served Obama well — forcing him to explicate “Hope” and “Change” slightly, as well building up Democratic Parties in various states. But a nomination process any longer than Pennsylvania will be detrimental.

The Republicans’ perchance for “Winner Take All”s has served to truncate their process well. If the Republicans had the Democrats’ Proportional Representation System, I think McCain just now would become the Presumptive Nominee, with Romney just now bowing out. The good news is we would still have Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee to kick around. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton would now be the nominee for the Democrats — or close to it — off of her California victory more-so than anything else.