So it seems McCain staffers think Sarah Palin has gone rogue. if the rumors coming from places like CNN are true, Palin's straying embarrassingly far off message; she's certainly enabled any number of obnoxious racists and religious zealots (personal to F.B.I. in Quantico: you really need to keep a close eye on these people in case of an Obama win -- they're angry, stupid, and heavily armed), and the Republican party seems to be on the verge of tearing itself apart. (For whatever it's worth, I predicted -- well, call it an edjucated guess, "predict" is such a pretentious term -- a number of years ago that when the shit hit the fan, the neocons, the palaeocons, and the religious Right would claw each other's eyes out and tear the GOP to shreds, probably around 2010. They certainly seem on track to make that time frame.)
In a reasonably rational world, the fact that the entire structure of conservative free market economics has come crashing down and that US social policy threatens to make us look like savages in the eyes of the rest of the Westernized world would be putting an end to current Republican policies. The fact that the US has just been quite abruptly switched over to a duct-tape-and-chewing-gum version of a socialist economy tells us that we've got an awful lot of rebuilding and remodeling to do, and an Obama presidency with a Democratic congress might just put us on that route. I can only say we can hope, but we shouldn't hold our breath; after all, November 4th is still a week and a half away.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Say it
A few years ago, the nostalgia site RetroCRUSH published a list of the 50 Coolest Song Parts. I'd like to add one.
I've found myself weirdly fascinated with the Ben Folds/Regina Spektor song "You Don't Know Me". In some ways it seems to go back over and mine the territory Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand marked out thirty years ago with "You Don't Bring Me Flowers"; it is, as any Folds production is, impeccably produced, with a bouncy tune juxtaposed with harsh dump-song lyrics. It doesn't live up to its potential though -- while "Flowers" almost seamlessly converted from a solo to a duet, with really only a few rough spots that Diamond should have rewritten, Folds uses Spektor mostly as a backup singer, which, though I'm not too familiar with Spektor's work, seems to be a huge waste. It's a big whack of points off of what should be an awesome song.
Anyway, Spektor steps into character as the jilted lover precisely once in the song, for two lines at the end. Having sat through an unrelenting tirade from her soon-to-be-ex, the woman finally steps up, first with an impatient "What?", then with a cracking, devastated, but utterly defiant "Say it!"
Bam. Kick to the fucking nuts.
There is no place left to go. The man ends with a noncommittal justification for refusing to proceed further, and the song fades. Good stuff.
I've found myself weirdly fascinated with the Ben Folds/Regina Spektor song "You Don't Know Me". In some ways it seems to go back over and mine the territory Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand marked out thirty years ago with "You Don't Bring Me Flowers"; it is, as any Folds production is, impeccably produced, with a bouncy tune juxtaposed with harsh dump-song lyrics. It doesn't live up to its potential though -- while "Flowers" almost seamlessly converted from a solo to a duet, with really only a few rough spots that Diamond should have rewritten, Folds uses Spektor mostly as a backup singer, which, though I'm not too familiar with Spektor's work, seems to be a huge waste. It's a big whack of points off of what should be an awesome song.
Anyway, Spektor steps into character as the jilted lover precisely once in the song, for two lines at the end. Having sat through an unrelenting tirade from her soon-to-be-ex, the woman finally steps up, first with an impatient "What?", then with a cracking, devastated, but utterly defiant "Say it!"
Bam. Kick to the fucking nuts.
There is no place left to go. The man ends with a noncommittal justification for refusing to proceed further, and the song fades. Good stuff.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thoughts I wish I wasn't having
-Obama does not yet have this one in the bag. The ACORN thing will be beaten to death over the next two and a half weeks, and I'd bet money that despite what I've read to the contrary about ACORN being a pretty good watchdog when it comes to vote fraud, absolutely no one to the right of Obama himself will believe it.
-Given the sheer white-hot hatred coming from The Base (TM), the Democratic Congress better do way better in the next session than it did in this one or there will be a frivolous impeachment in President Obama's future.
-McCain likely has absolutely no political capital left. After that debate performance, only The Base (TM) can possibly take him seriously. That doesn't mean, however, that a massive, completely spurious, devastatingly effective propaganda blitz can't still happen. It really depends on whether McCain finds a white knight in the former "VRWC" crowd. One can only hope that whoever's coming up in Richard Mellon Scaife's disgraced shoes has as little faith in McCain as the broader fundraising base seems to.
-I don't care if Joe the Plumber is an actual plumber, or if he's really related to Charles Keating, or what. He's a dimwit who can't think past the end of his own paycheck, and is likely up for a massive IRS audit this year after what's come out about his tax bill. And if I had to guess, he's probably a Paultard.
-I hope at least a few of President Clinton's personal Secret Service detail are still on the job. Obama's going to need them. I swear, Slick Willie must have handpicked his detail from the special forces considering someone actually tried to drop a plane on him.
-I have heard people saying that they hope the government means it that they'll eventually cash out of the banks they're buying into. Fuck that. Socialism = Sweden as far as I'm concerned, and I want the Fed to be able to whack financial misconduct right where it hurts the most -- in the boardroom.
-Given the sheer white-hot hatred coming from The Base (TM), the Democratic Congress better do way better in the next session than it did in this one or there will be a frivolous impeachment in President Obama's future.
-McCain likely has absolutely no political capital left. After that debate performance, only The Base (TM) can possibly take him seriously. That doesn't mean, however, that a massive, completely spurious, devastatingly effective propaganda blitz can't still happen. It really depends on whether McCain finds a white knight in the former "VRWC" crowd. One can only hope that whoever's coming up in Richard Mellon Scaife's disgraced shoes has as little faith in McCain as the broader fundraising base seems to.
-I don't care if Joe the Plumber is an actual plumber, or if he's really related to Charles Keating, or what. He's a dimwit who can't think past the end of his own paycheck, and is likely up for a massive IRS audit this year after what's come out about his tax bill. And if I had to guess, he's probably a Paultard.
-I hope at least a few of President Clinton's personal Secret Service detail are still on the job. Obama's going to need them. I swear, Slick Willie must have handpicked his detail from the special forces considering someone actually tried to drop a plane on him.
-I have heard people saying that they hope the government means it that they'll eventually cash out of the banks they're buying into. Fuck that. Socialism = Sweden as far as I'm concerned, and I want the Fed to be able to whack financial misconduct right where it hurts the most -- in the boardroom.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Down the stretch or down in flames?
Well, we'll see. I have to be brutally honest -- I'm not completely on the Obama train (I originally wanted Edwards), but when I look at the alternatives -- irrelvance or John McCain... well, he can't be any worse, right? After all, McCain at least came off as coherent, but to those who watched the debate on TV, he seemed dismissive and disrespectful, and evidently at times about ready to jump podiums and rip Obama's throat out. In addition, his responses on abortion rights (what "extreme" wing of the "pro-abortion" movement? Most pro-choicers actually like kids...) and public schooling (vouchers, aka the Great Private School Money Siphon; HeadStart is a great program, but we need to reform it (?!)) either ran against the grain of American life or just plain made no sense at all.
Truthfully, I like the way Obama came off in the debate tonight -- deliberative, a bit of a policy wonk in the Clinton mode, even-handed and unwilling to allow himself to be baited; compare to McCain, who was polished but stuck too close to his talking points. If this is the sort of president Obama might be, this might work out pretty well. And I would love to see racist assholes lose their shit when "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..." goes out over the airwaves. But there's still two weeks left. No chicken counting just yet.
What's clear is that McCain has self-destructed -- picking the ridiculous and pathetic Sarah Palin as a running mate, pushing conservative policies at a time when many Americans are starting to become suspicious of Bush's holes in the church-state wall, grandstanding on economic issues in the midst of a meltdown that's utterly devastated the intellectual case for conservative/libertarian fiscal policy. He's surrounded himself with the Republican base and discovered he doesn't really like them, especially since a large contingent of them are hoping he'll kick the bucket and leave Palin in charge. (Bad news, holy rollers: barring a melanoma recurrence, McCain has longevity in his genes.) He could come back. But someone could also find the Skinner constant in Kip Thorne's FTL travel equations when the Large Hadron Collider starts up and we could have a manned mission to Gliese 581 by 2020. (Okay, that's slightly less likely. But you get the idea.)
What's clear: there is a damn good chance the US will have its first president of African-American descent. (BTW, anyone find his recent commercial showing his family on his mother's side a little overcompensatory? Admittedly it's probably necessary in all the states where people think he's a Muslim, but it just looks strange in Massachusetts, which is pretty much a safe Obama state either way.) If it doesn't... well, I'll put this diplomatically. No one outside the US wants McCain to win, because they associate him with Bush 43. Despite McCain's protestations tonight in the debate that he isn't Bush 43, he's done a piss poor job of distinguishing himself.
Truthfully, I like the way Obama came off in the debate tonight -- deliberative, a bit of a policy wonk in the Clinton mode, even-handed and unwilling to allow himself to be baited; compare to McCain, who was polished but stuck too close to his talking points. If this is the sort of president Obama might be, this might work out pretty well. And I would love to see racist assholes lose their shit when "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..." goes out over the airwaves. But there's still two weeks left. No chicken counting just yet.
What's clear is that McCain has self-destructed -- picking the ridiculous and pathetic Sarah Palin as a running mate, pushing conservative policies at a time when many Americans are starting to become suspicious of Bush's holes in the church-state wall, grandstanding on economic issues in the midst of a meltdown that's utterly devastated the intellectual case for conservative/libertarian fiscal policy. He's surrounded himself with the Republican base and discovered he doesn't really like them, especially since a large contingent of them are hoping he'll kick the bucket and leave Palin in charge. (Bad news, holy rollers: barring a melanoma recurrence, McCain has longevity in his genes.) He could come back. But someone could also find the Skinner constant in Kip Thorne's FTL travel equations when the Large Hadron Collider starts up and we could have a manned mission to Gliese 581 by 2020. (Okay, that's slightly less likely. But you get the idea.)
What's clear: there is a damn good chance the US will have its first president of African-American descent. (BTW, anyone find his recent commercial showing his family on his mother's side a little overcompensatory? Admittedly it's probably necessary in all the states where people think he's a Muslim, but it just looks strange in Massachusetts, which is pretty much a safe Obama state either way.) If it doesn't... well, I'll put this diplomatically. No one outside the US wants McCain to win, because they associate him with Bush 43. Despite McCain's protestations tonight in the debate that he isn't Bush 43, he's done a piss poor job of distinguishing himself.
Friday, October 3, 2008
America gonef
Okay, so Biden didn't shred Palin the way everyone was expecting, and she somehow managed to avoid sounding like the gibbering idiot she came across as with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. But has George W. Bush really lowered the bar for GOP candidates so low that this debate could possibly be called a draw?
I'll start by saying both candidates had a problem with evasiveness. But there was one key difference between the two of them -- Biden was cogent and quick on the draw with information that could be easily verified with a quick Google search. Palin, on the other hand, fought like mad to stay on message whether it was relevant or not and showed little obvious ability to think on her feet, resorting to trite sloganeering so often that it was unclear whether she had any original thought at all. Biden actually came across as somewhat flummoxed, like someone who'd just realized that the person he'd been attempting to have a discussion about basic particle physics was actually a cat. I'll give the punditocracy the idea that Palin in some sense "held her own" -- that is, she didn't make herself look like a bigger ditz than she has already. But she didn't exactly raise the bar either -- her responses were bordering on content-free, and she seems to have no feel at all for appropriate speech registers. I mean, that was all George W. Bush had to do in his debates, and look where we are now.
Only the most dishonest or desperate of party hacks could consider this a win for Palin. But what amazes me is that this could be considered even a draw -- I mean, how does that work? This isn't bowling or horse racing where you can spot a less experienced opponent some handicap points. Somewhere on the Senate floor, Hillary Clinton is glad she endorsed Obama.
I'll start by saying both candidates had a problem with evasiveness. But there was one key difference between the two of them -- Biden was cogent and quick on the draw with information that could be easily verified with a quick Google search. Palin, on the other hand, fought like mad to stay on message whether it was relevant or not and showed little obvious ability to think on her feet, resorting to trite sloganeering so often that it was unclear whether she had any original thought at all. Biden actually came across as somewhat flummoxed, like someone who'd just realized that the person he'd been attempting to have a discussion about basic particle physics was actually a cat. I'll give the punditocracy the idea that Palin in some sense "held her own" -- that is, she didn't make herself look like a bigger ditz than she has already. But she didn't exactly raise the bar either -- her responses were bordering on content-free, and she seems to have no feel at all for appropriate speech registers. I mean, that was all George W. Bush had to do in his debates, and look where we are now.
Only the most dishonest or desperate of party hacks could consider this a win for Palin. But what amazes me is that this could be considered even a draw -- I mean, how does that work? This isn't bowling or horse racing where you can spot a less experienced opponent some handicap points. Somewhere on the Senate floor, Hillary Clinton is glad she endorsed Obama.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
McCain is a coward
So McCain, being revealed at long last as a coward, has attempted to back out of this week's presidential debate, and he's getting hammered in the opinion polls for it. An evident attempt to take the moral high ground on the current financial meltdown has instead made McCain look like a coward, and he's even threatening to pull Palin out of the VP debate. On top of all that, he blew off David Letterman, pissing him off mightily; considering that ever since the 1992 elections, pissing off the late night talk show hosts has been a very bad idea, it certainly makes McCain look like a coward.
I think I want to googlebomb this. McCain is a coward.
I think I want to googlebomb this. McCain is a coward.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Palin's true colors
Well, Sarah Palin's true nature has become quite clear with almost embarrassing speed. Despite coming off as window dressing from the beginning, she's proven one thing -- she's a skilled propagandist, and a rather obnoxiously autocratic one at that. Trying to get the Wasilla head librarian fired for not bending on a censorship issue? Trying to get someone fired because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband? This is a woman who has little concept of separation of powers. In that regard, she actually reminds me a lot of ex-gov Mitt Romney, who also had a nasty habit of trying to do things that he wasn't constitutionally allowed to do. So I already don't like her. (The fact that I happen to personally know someone who is a Wasilla resident who outright hates her doesn't really have much bearing on that.) You don't have to be a sexist pig to find things to criticize her for.
And now, the "community organizer" smear. Mike the Mad Biologist over at scienceblogs.com points out that her sneering use of the term "community organizers" is really a pitch-perfect example of dogwhistle politics -- to a liberal, a part of the political spectrum where community activism is integral to the process of policymaking, this is a somewhat incomprehensible sneer -- after all, community activists are the people on the ground in poor neighborhoods, making sure people can show up to vote, can afford the high costs of energy and housing, have a venue to tell their stories, and even just put food on the table. Community activists are like the neighborhood equivalent of trade unions, providing bargaining power to the disenfranchised at city hall and the state capitol the same way that unions are supposed to with corporate management.
But that's not the image Palin is trying to invoke in the minds of prospective GOP voters. The Right has long been enamored of the narrative of rugged individualism, and has cultivated the model of a class society where if you're not on top, you probably don't deserve to be; after all, we can all achieve any station in life we want, right? In addition -- a point that underlies Mike's post -- the ugly fact is that the GOP was known early on to be trying to find ways to sneak veiled racism past voters in case of an Obama primary victory. They've already done it at least once by accusing Obama of racism by making a preemptive strike a few weeks ago against that very tactic ("You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.") and Mike makes a pretty good case that this, likewise, is a racist swipe at a class of people that the Right generally associates with such exemplars of self-parody as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Now it may not be inherently racist (though I doubt it), but it is definitely classist. This speaks straight to American Right's mantra of self-reliance and, racist or not, plays off the image of lower-class communities as crime-ridden cesspools of stupidity and laziness and of community activists as willing enablers of such squalor. Palin's "community organizers" aren't building houses, negotiating cheaper oil, or subsidizing rent checks; they're enabling freeloaders and retards to get something for nothing. To the very richest Republicans, this message goes even deeper: it says that rather than trying to bring the downtrodden up out of need, they're trying to tear down the successful out of jealousy.
I have to be honest. I'm not too optimistic about Obama's chances this fall; though Andy Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com currently has Obama leading in the tracking polls with just over 300 electoral votes, we live in a time where, thanks to the shamelessness and propaganda expertise of people such as Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, our national political conversation has combined the fear-mongering of early 20th century politics with Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style to create a situation where, for the time being, progressive politics can make only minor gains and has to fight on a daily basis to keep what it has gained in the last 40 years. But I'm still voting Obama, because I have no other viable choice. With any luck, the swipe against "community organizers" will backfire the way Bob Dole's attacks on teachers' unions in 1996 did. Maybe it will too.
And now, the "community organizer" smear. Mike the Mad Biologist over at scienceblogs.com points out that her sneering use of the term "community organizers" is really a pitch-perfect example of dogwhistle politics -- to a liberal, a part of the political spectrum where community activism is integral to the process of policymaking, this is a somewhat incomprehensible sneer -- after all, community activists are the people on the ground in poor neighborhoods, making sure people can show up to vote, can afford the high costs of energy and housing, have a venue to tell their stories, and even just put food on the table. Community activists are like the neighborhood equivalent of trade unions, providing bargaining power to the disenfranchised at city hall and the state capitol the same way that unions are supposed to with corporate management.
But that's not the image Palin is trying to invoke in the minds of prospective GOP voters. The Right has long been enamored of the narrative of rugged individualism, and has cultivated the model of a class society where if you're not on top, you probably don't deserve to be; after all, we can all achieve any station in life we want, right? In addition -- a point that underlies Mike's post -- the ugly fact is that the GOP was known early on to be trying to find ways to sneak veiled racism past voters in case of an Obama primary victory. They've already done it at least once by accusing Obama of racism by making a preemptive strike a few weeks ago against that very tactic ("You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.") and Mike makes a pretty good case that this, likewise, is a racist swipe at a class of people that the Right generally associates with such exemplars of self-parody as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Now it may not be inherently racist (though I doubt it), but it is definitely classist. This speaks straight to American Right's mantra of self-reliance and, racist or not, plays off the image of lower-class communities as crime-ridden cesspools of stupidity and laziness and of community activists as willing enablers of such squalor. Palin's "community organizers" aren't building houses, negotiating cheaper oil, or subsidizing rent checks; they're enabling freeloaders and retards to get something for nothing. To the very richest Republicans, this message goes even deeper: it says that rather than trying to bring the downtrodden up out of need, they're trying to tear down the successful out of jealousy.
I have to be honest. I'm not too optimistic about Obama's chances this fall; though Andy Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com currently has Obama leading in the tracking polls with just over 300 electoral votes, we live in a time where, thanks to the shamelessness and propaganda expertise of people such as Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, our national political conversation has combined the fear-mongering of early 20th century politics with Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style to create a situation where, for the time being, progressive politics can make only minor gains and has to fight on a daily basis to keep what it has gained in the last 40 years. But I'm still voting Obama, because I have no other viable choice. With any luck, the swipe against "community organizers" will backfire the way Bob Dole's attacks on teachers' unions in 1996 did. Maybe it will too.
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