Some Words

So, I was working on the big project, and realized that I’ve been so focused on it, I haven’t really gotten a lot done on the short stories that I had planned to finish up. Well, that’s no good. I’m rapidly running out of time. I went back and didn’t like much of what I had planned, which probably means that several of those ideas weren’t very good to begin with. Ah well. So where does one find inspiration? Perhaps this absurd list of people who Barack Obama has supposedly had killed, much of which reads like synopses of D grade political thrillers?

No. But it was tempting… Change a few names, give it a little plot… It was tempting…

I would love to hear one day that the right had farmed out one of these bullshit conspiracies to a ghost writing John Grisham. At least then we’d get a couple of really creative deaths.

I have a strict “do not so much as enter” policy with Walmart. Finding reasons for this is not hard. For a long time I have been of the opinion that the place basically manufactures poverty. Of course that isn’t what they claim. Why would they? They act like they’re Robin Hood.

Jeffrey Goldberg has this article in The New Yorker. It covers some of Walmart’s campaign to improve their image. A beautiful moment occurs when an employee brags about eating at Subway, but clams up when it is pointed out that he makes millions of dollars. There is also a great bit where a former Democratic campaign aide trails off halfway through admitting he sold out his principals for cash.

As I was reading an article on Bush’s response to the subpoenaed aides and funding for the war, something struck me. It was the usual article, nothing special, but it ended with the idea that Bush taking a hardline stance might strengthen his base. What?

First off, his base can’t ever get elected again. Sure, higher approval means a stronger stance at the legislative table, but he’s taking hardline stances against things that are unpopular. Maybe there is a portion of the population that doesn’t care what a president endorses, as long as he makes a big macho show of being “presidential” about it, and here I mean presidential to read imperial.

That’s not what struck me though. Here is a president who is on what seems to be a historic run to the bottom of the well. He’s gone from seeming like an incomprehensible behemoth that the left could never seem to best, to one of the least popular presidents of the past 50 years. He’s got two years left, and as far as my, admittedly untrained, eyes can tell, he’s got a dinner fork in his back the size of his “home state.”

Yet every damn article I read about him seems compelled to latch on to some point, even if it’s just, “Mr. Bush seemed decisive about choosing ranch dressing over caesar” to claim his amazing power could come roaring back. Why all these silver linings? Is that balance? Bush is in a shitty shitty position right now. If I were on the right, I wouldn’t be looking for some silly palliative like, “He seemed strong today.”

Is this a continuation of the “Rove is unbeatable, so anything that looks like defeat must really be strategy” meme?

Why do people let Bush try to portray himself as standing up for the troops to get them more money? It’s more like, “I’m going to send your son to die in a pointless war, that I started out of an inflated sense of personal pride. You can send him to die with fancy equipment or cheap equipment. Do you support your son?” But instead of dealing with the underlying message, all I read the reporter surmising is that the tactic might work?

Not that I should really be surprised.

Edit: Quoting from this article:

Cheney called it a myth that “one can support the troops without giving them the tools and reinforcements they need to carry out their mission.”

Bullshit. The answer is clearly “don’t make them undertake a stupid mission in the first place.” They won’t need those funds if we take them out of Iraq. It’s been over six years and I still sometimes have trouble believing that such fatuous logic is allowed to take place in our governance.

In Turkey, where Orhan Pamuk (2006 Nobel for Lit) is from, Hrant Dink has been killed. Dink was seemingly killed for his stance on the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Both he and Pamuk were tried and convicted of slandering Turkish Identity because they spoke out about it. There is of course outcry about this. And it doesn’t look good for Turkey, trying to get into the EU.

Congrats to Kirk Johnson he just wrote the first New York Times article I can remember, which talks about Minnesota, but doesn’t seem on the verge of calling Midwesterners plebeians. Still, while Wellstone was clearly the most liberal of the three, it might have made more sense to mention Dayton, or his successor Klobuchar. Mr. Wellstone, while magnificent, has been dead since 2002. I wish he were still on the stage of Minnesota politics, but he’s not the best example of Minnesota post 9/11. I also might have mentioned that Pawlenty didn’t so much win reelection, as Hatch lost election, but that’s quibbling.

I try to stay away from politics on this blog, but I couldn’t pass this one up.

I love this. The Republican spin is hilarious. I’m used to seeing good spin from them, spin that makes me gnash my teeth. The whole, “making us work is bad for family values” is amazing. Seriously, who thought of that? Did it go through any sort of review process before it was wheeled out?

Sure, it’s hard on some families, just over 200 of them. If these reps didn’t think their marriages could handle the results of their actually being elected, clearly they shouldn’t have run. Maybe, if it’s hard on their family, they should term limit themselves? That would be a healthy trend in America, people actually retiring to spend more time with their family, instead of using it as an excuse.

All anyone has to do is stand up, say, “Why not work to legislate to help the American family? Many of them are working longer hours than you will be, just to make ends meet.”

Over at Girls Are Pretty, they have officially broken the record for the most convoluted anal sex joke ever made. I am speechless.

This narrowly edged out everything Martin Peretz has ever said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the title.

Every time I’m about to stop reading kos entirely, he does something like this which, while a little cornball, gets the point across. I could almost hear De Niro jumping onto the slackline as he says, “We’re all in this together.”

Absent a Republican controlled congress, Democrats and progressives in general are arguing about who won it for the Dems. As my friend Mark pointed out to me the other day, this would be the time for all the Democratic factions to entrench the sense that they’re important. Sadly, this argument has the three hallmarks of all fights on the internet, a lack of retaliatory scale, occasional flights of intellectual laziness, and badly done photoshop jobs.

The mildest thing going on is people saying that blogs are very important to the current situation. I’ve got no problems with that, blogs played an important part in this past election. Still, I’m going to stop to take a swipe at Roger L. Simon, just because I can.

Roger, you think those people are luddites? Because they don’t know what blogs are? Please. I talk to people every day who can’t tell me if they use a PC or a Mac. Knowing what the hell a blog is goes so far beyond that. Also, have you noticed that bloggers still often refer to the MSM to get their stories. They take what the MSM has reported, and then examine it. Until I see a blogger with the resources and desire to go out and do reporting of his own, in a real, substantive, and sustained way, I don’t think we’re ready to call the MSM a dying beast just yet. Blogs are great for commentary, not so great for digging, say, into the finances of a major company. The MSM hasn’t been doing enough of that kind of stuff recently, but blogs have a better chance of forcing the MSM to reform than doing it themselves.

Now, moving on, we have The Plank giving a short civics lesson regarding the DCCC and DSCC. And then there’s DownWithTyranny… now, I don’t really care about the Rahm vs Netroots thing that’s going on right now. It’s deadening the buzz that comes from Dems having won resoundingly for the first time since I was allowed to vote. Still, there are two paragraphs that I cannot let pass by.

Yesterday I found an e-mail from New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein asking me to call him about a story he was doing on Rahm Emanuel. I hadn’t checked that e-mail account in 2 days so I knew I was late. I called Gerstein at around 9 PM, ascertained that he wasn’t related to the Lieberman stooge of the same name, and said I was ready for my 10 minutes of New York Sun fame. He told me it was too late but that he had lifted a quote from my story on Rahm on DWT (if one uses the “search this blog” function above one will find 165 stories mentioning “Rahm,” even more than mention “Foley”). He also told me I wouldn’t be happy with the result because it was mostly Rahm’s friends giving his side of the story. And it was too late for him to re-open the story; it was after midnight in New York. Draw your own conclusions about journalistic integrity, etc. And about Mr. Gerstein’s story, which I haven’t bothered to read. How is it?

Is it a puff piece about how Rahm recruited brilliantly? Strategized brilliantly? Executed brilliantly? Deserves a huge role in the leadership? Does it talk about how he defeated the Syrians on the Golan Heights, does a mean ballet dance and eats lox and pastrami with his mouth open… while talking about taking over the world? Was it all about what a tough guy he is– our Tom DeLay, our Karl Rove, a modern day version of Chicago’s horrendous political boss, Richard Daley, the remnants of whose still insidious machine– rather than any actual people– he represents in Washington? I’ve read it all before.

So wait, you didn’t get the email, you waited two days, got back to the guy, and his publishing deadline had passed. You then question his journalistic integrity? What is he supposed to do? “Stop the presses! Stop the presses! There is a man with a website who wants to be heard!” Please. Read your fucking email regularly. That’s my solution.

That would be bad enough, but then you say you haven’t read the article, and set up a fiction bunch of talking points, which you suppose the article might contain, as a straw man to set aflame. Do you realize how fucking stupid that is? How long would it take to read? Seriously. Do you hear yourself there? I’m amazed. I don’t care if Rahm wins the spin war. Maybe he’d read the damned article.

Looking at the way things are shaping up now, the Dems might actually do better than I expected in the Senate. Webb/Allen has gone into a recount. McCaskill seems to be shaping up as a Dem pickup.

Recently I started seeing maps of the house that use little squares for each state. The size of the state on the map is based on the number of house seats. This map is especially great for this election cycle. I stare at it, and it’s like the big red swath in the center of the nation has corroded away.

Oh, and Martini Republic alerts me to the fact that the FBI is looking into robocalls.

I was feeling a little down about the election, worried that I’d gotten my hopes up for nothing. Then one of the colocation customers of the ISP I work for came in. He was taking his servers out, and sounded a little bitter. I asked him what he had been doing with those servers. It was then that he told me if was for a GOP GOTV effort.

It seems that the money going into MN’s GOTV was cut a while ago. He didn’t get the funds he was expecting, so he had never even started his operation. That pretty much made my day.

And tomorrow, I vote. If anyone I know reads this and does not vote, know that I will hunt you down.

Edit: I am not the only one who is seeing a botched attempt.

It seems that the NRCC has been making calls claiming to be Dems. I’d like to see a list of all the places they’ve done this. My girlfriend got a robo call that was supposed to be from a Dem candidate here in MN, then she got it again 15 minutes later. Sounds a little fishy. Also, if the Dems do take back the house, I’d love it if one of them would throw down a law about needing to identify the funding political group at the start, and not the end, of the call. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it might help. Using faked robocalls like that that is just disgusting.