I think it is worthwhile to look at the names of the members of the Senate Democratic caucus who voted to condemn a political advertisement.  This might make some sort of sense if this were a Republican Congress.  But, then again, A new Gallup poll came out.  Congress’s approval rating has shot up to 24 percent.  Parcing it by party, the Republicans give a 37 percent approval for Congress; the Democrats have a 23 percent approval rating.  Which makes some sort of sense, since  — for example — you see the Congress today throwing red meat to the Republican base by condemning a liberal organization that donates money to the Democratic Party.

And, of course, the list goes on to all 49 Republicans.

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)

Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)

Conrad (D-ND)

Dorgan (D-ND)

Feinstein (D-CA)

Johnson (D-SD)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Kohl (D-WI)

Landrieu (D-LA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)

Mikulski (D-MD)

Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)

Salazar (D-CO)

Tester (D-MT)

Webb (D-VA)

The Republicans are sort of privately publically conceding a loss of four Senate seats in the next election. The state of play of the two parties and the seats up suggest that a Democratic majority of 60 seats is not out of the question — and, generally speaking if 2008 is as good a year as 2006 was for the Democrats (with a much slimmer Senate map up… going into 2008, the Republicans have 22 Senate seats up to defend and the Democrats have 12) they probably would. Theoretically this would mean that magical “Filibuster-proof” seat, as right now the Republicans tact is to filibuster anything worth anything, but the reality is that the number is arbitrary — Nebraska would be sending us unrepetent Iraq War supporting Democrat Bob Kerrey, for instance. Knowing the Democrats, electing Kerrey will probably be Job #1, (or 2?) which exposes the politics as a sort of Good Old Boy Network.

Bush has an approval rating somewhere in the twenties. Congress has an approval rating in the teens. The Democrats were elected out of disgust with the War in Iraq, but are impotent in doing anything about it.  Rhetorically I saw how people viewerd this non-binding resolution of several months back to the effect that they were “cutting money off to the troops” — which is the effect of how money rolls in and out of the pot handed to President Bush.  A political coup for the Republican Party, such as it is.

They are gridlocked. This past week, the Republicans filibustered a measure that from one of my favorite Seantors, Jim Webb of Virginia, that would have given the members of the military as much time at home as in action. As an “anti-war” measure, it’s a toothless joke– but our political discourse has deemed it as such nonetheless methinks partially because it’s a sort of safe way for the Democratic Party honchos to oppose something or other with regard to “The Reason they were put into the majority”. It was a worthwhile measure nonetheless. Former supporter of the measure John Warner ceased supporting this measure, perhaps taking the margin of supporters with him, and proposed a different measure — which was a non-binding version of the same exact thing. A pointless gesture — into the ether– pleasant enough, easily ignored by President Bush because it doesn’t require him to do a thing.

What the Congress did pass was a resolution condemning a newspaper ad from moveon.org that called General Petraeus a name. This is sort of a sick joke, a pointless measure which I can’t imagine anyone outside the orbit of Fox News and Republican talk radio paying attention to. It is difficult for me to see what is the point of Congress passing resolutions that do not do anything at all, passing into the ether, but that seems to be what our closely divided Congress is doing these days, out of inertia.

Hillary will come into office, with a Congress that includes somewhere between 55 and 60 Democratic Senators. And it will be the equivalent of Lyndon Johnson handing the Vietnam War over to Richard Nixon.

This caught my eye, from the This Modern World weblog (which apparently became a group blog since I stopped regularly reading it a few years’ ago.)

Well then.  This should be easy to find.  Here is Alan Greenspan’s letter to the New York Times, in its entirety, regarding Atlas Shrugged:

To The Editor:

“Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of life and happiness.  Justice is unrelenting.  Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment.  Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.  Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders “about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,100 pages and some fourteen years of work.”  This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.

— Alan Greenspan

A case study in the quotation I’ve settled into regarding Ayn Rand — “(Ayn Rand) requires the fervent elitism of late adolescence to truly be taken in. One either needs to acquire a taste for Ayn Rand then, or not at all.”

But you can also draw a direct line between that letter, and its parasites, and his Fed Chairman era quotation about how “maintain a level of worker anxiety” was his main purpose in tending to the economy.   Libertarianism, and “Objectivism”, ceases to make sense — as a practical service, Greenspan was never drawing down the government, but pulling levers in the government, and its relations with business.  But I hear that Ayn Rand devotees of a certain stripe compare Greenspan to some character or other in one of those books (Atlas Shrugged?  That other one whose name escapes me at this moment?) — a sell-out, you cannot function into the government system like that.  And thus, a cult apparatus springs up: get away from that evil, please.

Never. Ask. John Kerry. About. Skull. And. Bones.

If you do so, you will get tasered. Right?

My interest level would perk up a tad if John Kerry answered the load of dangling and rambling questions. Skull and Bones, for instance. But I’ve already been through that one. (Or Kerry’s supposed response to Greg Palast regarding Ohio.)

So I have suggested the darker answer to Paul Craig Roberts’s question already. The other response is the sort of — what, should he have leapt off the stage and gone to hand-to-hand combat? For what it is worth, Kerry has issued a statement. Those are always great.
But I think he managed to dodge the questions. Unless someone can point to a transcript where, with the 21 year old carted away, he answered the questions. I don’t know — the cameras were all aimed at the police situation at that point. The three questions, which pushed him over the one minute limit, apparently along with a certain attitude grounds for the police rushing in — and on to his reactions which were apparently grounds for a tasering. Oh dear John Kerry, could you issue another statement and answer the three questions?

In the mind of Joe Average, the Meyers man is not a terribly likable figure, and the response is sort of a rolling of the eyes and figuring that he’s broken a breach of Polite Society, a product full to the brim with immature wailing.  (Tightly wound and an Attention-seeker. The words I have come across are “I know the type”, with a sly smile that “he had it coming”).  His cries are over-heated. But nobody’s perfect in a disorderly society.

So.  Why Should God Bless America?

In other news of God and Religion:

State Sen. Ernie Chambers sued God last week. Angered by another lawsuit he considers frivolous, Chambers says he’s trying to make the point that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

The Omaha senator, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, also says God has caused “fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes.”

He’s seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty.

Sigh.  Perhaps as a sign that the state senator from Nebraska is juggling items that are not necessarily, it reminds me of something.

God.  Pause.  For allowing good things to happen to bad people.  Pause.  And Bad things to happen to good people.  Pause.  All in the name of “Working in Mysterious Ways”.  Pause.  Pause.  I would be a one billion to one underdog in this, but HEY!  Everybody loves the Underdog!

… Never mind.

A headline I just saw, propped up at Yahoo’s main page.  When I glanced up I thought, “Really?  Has he fallen that low in the decade since his failed presidential bid that he’s reminiscing about old salad mixes from his youth?”

Somebody other than I might have a wider swarth and more expansive point to make with the Alexis Debat story — he, um, is another one of those “journalists” who was caught making stuff up, in this case interviews which raises the question of how much attention various public officials pay to their press clippings.

Barack Obama.  Debat defends himself, saying he made the mistake of trusting “a third person” to ask his questions. But the spokesperson for the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was also “interviewed” by Debat in Politique Internationale, told us his was also a fake. As were the ones Debat “got” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former president Bill Clinton, and many more.

Leaving the Great Questions and riddles to others, my question is centered on this:

How did Alexis Debat, a self-proclaimed expert on terrorism, manage to build such a career for himself –as a regular contributor to the foreign affairs reviews Politique Internationale and National Interest, as a consultant for ABC News and an analyst of the prestigious Nixon Center attending conferences with the cream of the crop of American foreign policy circles?

Nixon Center?  Does that answer any question, or is it too much of a snark?

From the Oregonian:

Let’s see a list of lies

Over and over again The Oregonian prints opinions from people who claim President Bush has continually lied to the public over the last few years. I’ve asked several of my very far left friends to name a few proven lies the president has made. Other than the overworked weapons of mass destruction question, none of them can come up with more examples.

Would The Oregonian please print a list of proven lies this president has made? With all those letters that have been printed, there must be a long list.

STEVE TENNENT Northwest Portland

I believe this is something of a meme, I believe I heard it on either a commercial or actual program for a conservative talk radio program.   Meaning the “Conservative Movement”, whatever that is, or perhaps better to say the 20-something percent of Bush supporters in this day and age– has gotten together and decided to say “What lies?  What lies?”  Politically charged conversations can be annoying at times — I have cringed in overhearing someone ostensibly on my side argue with someone ostensibly on the other side,  neither side coming out terribly well.  Sometimes a person’s mental filing cabinet is a little too disshelved at any particular moment.  (Worse is when somebody wants to make a political point in a completely apolitical situation or with people who would just as soon let that lie for a while — beware that trap.  Get a blog to rid yourself of your political wrenches.)

I will say about the matter of the “overworked weapons of mass destruction question”.  There is a degree to which I have moved forward, but if anyone finds themselves stuck back there, my one piece of advice is what you need there is a handful of precise and specific items.  Intellectually you will win the argument with that — intellectually you won’t if you are stuck in the vague line of “he said there are WMDs!!” — even if it does not particularly wash over to the “Hawk”.  Understand, our Oregonian letter writer probably has on his computer a file in his email box of Bill Clinton (the… um… 17th greatest president in American history) in 1999 running his gum about Hussein’s WMDs program.  Bully for him.

I am fairly positive that a quick search around the blogs will point me to something shouting and yelling about how the Liberal bloggers (or the “far left bloggers”) are not paying any attention to the Hsu fund-raising scandal with Hillary Clinton.  (Here for instance.  That’s the first item I find with a google search of “liberal blogger” and “Hsu”.)  I suppose it escapes my notice slightly, in part because it is what I expect from my not preferred Democratic presidential candidate, and I believe this is a recurring template of a scandal that you will see during a Hillary Clinton presidency.  I do not represent such a thing as “the liberal blogosphere” — sooner or later I am convinced I will end up on the conservative side of the American political line, in part by staying right where I am — but just for the sake of bemusement: there.  I just mentioned Hsu.  But I do have a There was a political cartoon I saw in a newspaper of a whole mass of reporters prying into Larry Craig’s bathroom stall, while a badly drawn Hillary Clinton smiles and walks away with a money bag marked “Hsu Campaign Contribution”, whistling all the way.  I find the message amusing, in its insinuation that … why in the world would we find an anti-gay gay Republican bathroom stall sex scandal more interesting than a campaign contribution scandal?

Then again, I think this is the same cartoonist who drew a cartoon of a sick South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson, with a bunch of donkeys huddled around his bed with flowers of “Get well soon”.  I knew the insinuation was supposed to be that the Democrats wanted him to get well again so they could keep their Senate majority, but the message falls flat in that there was nothing in the cartoon to suggest insincerity in Johnson’s colleagues in their desire for their colleague to… you know… GET WELL SOON.

The city’s sports’ fans are down in the dumps right now, muttering the cursed name of “Sam Bowie” under their breath as Greg Oden undergoes surgery that will take him out of his rookie season.  Of course, the Sam Bowie comparison will only pan out if Greg Oden resurfaces as a bust, and Kevin Durant wins multiple titles in a Hall of Fame career for the Oklahoma City Sonics — a team that is currently located in Seattle.  Then that “Bowie — Jordan” dichotomy will be in effect — though, for the full effect the Chicago Bulls would have had to have moved to … I don’t know… Pittsburgh? back in 1988 or thereabouts.

On the other hand, this could all be a blip in the radar.  Oden comes back for his second season.  The team wins their promised dozen championship series through these next two decades.  And everything works out well.

But, for the moment, it is all doom and gloom.  I do have one bright spot for the sports fans of Portland.  Which is that the city never got one of those major league baseball franchises.

A taxing day for both teams ended in frustrating fashion for the
 Nationals, who played under unusual conditions. It's never easy for any team
 to get motivated to play a late-season getaway contest in front of a
 crowd that would have been disappointing for a JV high school football
 game. 

Attendance at Dolphin Stadium was officially announced as 10,121, but
 only a fraction of that number actually showed up. A couple of reporters
 in the press box did a head count as the afternoon's first pitch was
 being delivered and came up with 375 fans. 

"It looked like an extended spring game," Acta said. 

The crowd was so sparse, every word uttered could be heard throughout
 the stadium. One fan seated behind the plate got on umpire Paul
 Schrieber's case and wound up getting ejected from the facility. 

"He was chirping to everybody," Schneider said. "There's just no need
 for it. No matter what people were saying, you could hear everything.
 that was going on."

The significance for the city of Portland is that the two franchises involved in this little debacle — a real revenue generator — were the two teams that entertained offers from or toward Portland to come on over.  The Montreal Expos, treated nicely by mayor Vera Katz — feigning toward Portland to leverage a better deal from Washington.  The Florida Marlins, told to shove it by Mayor Tom Potter, feigning toward Portland trying to find their way — and never quite getting there — to Las Vegas.  So, you know, THIS TOO COULD BE ALL YOURS!  Catch the Excitement!  And it’s certainly going to revitalize the economy of Portland, Oregon — right?

The history of the Florida Marlins has always fascinated me.  They have won two championships.  These championships came so suddenly, particularly the second one which rolled from a great late season spurt, so as to catch Miami off-guard.  After both of their championship, particularly the first one — but the second one had a good one season lag — the team sold off all of their major Championship players and returned to the bottom of the heap.  Which all means that the market had a very short window of opportunity to purchase what they want — winning baseball team, and a long window of opportunity to purchase what they do not want — losing baseball team.

Passed by Voodoo Donuts.  It appears that there was a drunk man in front of that business, unsatisfied with a couple of donuts he had just bought, trying to unload them for reduced price.  At least I think that was what was happening.  I did not take, nor did I buy anything in proper fashion, what with the end result being me standing around with one fewer green bill in my wallet and some sugary pastry with bacon or cereal on it.

Tom Potter has a beard.  It was a signal that he was going to announce no run at a second term, I suppose.  The consensus common wisdom appears to have built itself around the idea that when the history of Portland is written, it will move from Mayor Katz to Mayor Adams, not quite able to squeeze in that Tom Potter interlude.  There seems to be this idea that Katz overloaded the city with mulititude major projects with the insinuation that Mayor Sam Adams will do the same, as is the natural course of things, and as explains the inability to say anything about Tom Potter and the manner in which everything anyone is saying about him comes across as a backhanded compliment.   What the city needs is a few more new trams?  (Maybe a major league baseball stadium?  Sam Adams, of course, being the presumptive next mayor for Portland.  Probably for about the same sort of reasons that Jim Francesconi was, and we all know about his tenure as mayor.