faux palin 4

I guess we should have seen it coming. Sore loosers throwing mud to see what sticks. I think she just got sick of providing voluntary donations to John Stewart, and decided to make them involuntary. I am nevertheless surprised at the gall the woman and her campaign's strategists have. Sadly the boss of her campaign was subjected to exactly the same kind of smear tactics in the primaries of 2000, and rightfully if bitterly complained about it. Are our and John McCain's memories really this short? Does the end truly justify all means? Are there really 10k Californians that will cheer these comments forgetting that their Hero's patriotism, exemplified by his horrifying incarceration at the Hannoi Hilton, was dragged through the mud by his own party only 8 years ago? This is not a Faux Palin, its a Faux John McCain, and while I respected him before, this respect is going down the utubes rather quickly.

faux palin 2

Never again laugh about beauty queens who state that they want to go out and change the world to make it a better place should they win the contest. By for example shooting moose from helicoptors, smacking Pootin (how else to spell that ugly redneck UUU? Reminds me of nucular) in the head whenever he rears it out of soviet airspace and bringing her five nannies for her five kids to Number One Observatory Circle (sry, JFGI). You never know, it might all come true.

response from senator feinstein

As promised I wrote to a couple of Senators. Senator Feinstein had her bot write back to me. She does offer for me to call her at her office in DC should I have any further questions. Well, lets have some further questions. Send them to me and I shall ask. But you can't make me ask her to kick John McCain in the shin when she sees him in the hallowed hollow halls of government.

Dear Mr. I.:

Thank you for your letter expressing concern about Congress' consideration of a plan to meet our Nation's credit crisis with financial help from the Federal Government. This is a difficult situation for which there are no perfect solutions, and I would like to share my thoughts and concerns about this issue with you.

On September 19, 2008, Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr. announced a legislative proposal to use $700 billion to purchase illiquid mortgage-related assets from ailing financial institutions. Secretary Paulson's three-page proposal was a non-starter, and without critical changes it has no chance of approval from Congress.

This proposal would have given a blank check to an economic czar who would have been empowered to spend it without administrative oversight, legal requirements, or legislative review. Decisions made by the Treasury Secretary would be non-reviewable by any court, agency, or Congress. The proposal also lacked a requirement for regular reports to Congress on the status of the program. This was simply untenable.

Since this announcement, my offices have received thousands of comments from Californians like you concerned about how this action will affect them. Yet, I believe prudent action must be taken. The bill should include the following principles: a phase-in of funding; oversight, accountability and transparency; a mechanism allowing the Secretary of the Treasury to modify mortgages to prevent additional foreclosures; and a precise cap on executive compensation.

The current credit crisis affects all Americans. If action is not taken to stem the crisis, Americans risk losing their homes, jobs, personal savings, life insurance and more. Banks will cease to lend to businesses and homeowners, and credit will be increasingly difficult to come by for average Americans. I strongly believe that the consequences of failing to act now would be greater than not acting at all.

Attached please find a statement I recently made on the floor of the Senate expressing my feelings on this issue. Please know that I will keep your thoughts in mind as this situation unfolds.

Once again, thank you for writing. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein
Floor Statement on the Economic
Rescue Proposal
September 26, 2008

"Mr. President, to date I have received from Californians more than 50,000 calls and letters, the great bulk of them in opposition to any form of meeting this crisis with financial help from the Federal Government. I wanted to come to the floor to very simply state how I see this and some of the principles that I hope will be forthcoming in this draft. Before I do so, I wish to pay particular commendation to Senator Dodd, Senator Schumer, Senator Bennett, and others who have been working so hard on this issue. I have tried to keep in touch -- I am not a negotiator; I am not on the committee -- but California is the biggest State, the largest economic engine, and people are really concerned...

This goes on quite a bit, I will spare you that though. If you want it, let me know and I will forward. Did anyone else write? I assume everyone else would have gotten the same response?

faux palin

Dunno if you all have seen this, since we have been busy running to WaMu trying to get cents on the dollar, but its funny. In a sort of nightmarish foreign policy equivalent to "I dont know much about the economy" McCain.

bad news is good news

I posted a blog in reply to CMCs blog on Democratic wimps recently. It was the continuation of an interesting conversation, quickly degenerated into name calling and wasn’t very useful after that. That post, as badly timed, as useless and aggravating as it was, is the post on my blog that has been most commented on. More people have checked it out, and thought it interesting enough to comment on than any other post that I wrote before. And I write some pretty funny shit.

Just goes to prove again, how unenlightened we are. I hate it when my elitist lefty friends go on about the stupid masses. Not that you all are stupid, you are after all reading my blog. Only if you wouldn’t be reading it, would you be stupid, but then you wouldn’t know. This only proves that reading my blog makes you smarter. But I want to hold people responsible for their actions. So when I hear from the lefties that 90 % of the world doesn’t care about what goes on around them, and only listen to the person that screams the loudest, I naturally want to disagree. I want to say that lots of people are interested in substance over volume. I try to hold myself to the same standard, which is why I apologized for my badly timed post. I can not influence if others act the same.

I concede that I am wrong. A serene exchange between left and right just isn’t interesting to media consumers. You wonder why the talking heads have turned into screaming heads? They scream because you want them to scream. Fox and Hardball are your modern day Circus Maximus. Those TV stations have the same viewer matrices that I get from Google. The matrices tell them when two guys call each other names and appear close to scratching each other’s eyes out viewer numbers go up. Throw in a half naked woman, and you are good to go in the ratings game. Sad, but nevertheless true that nobody gives a rats ass about peace, intelligence and kindness. The funniest thing is to be called on the carpet for not retaliating in kind to an insult to me or my point of view, “Hey, you are cheating me out of my conflict high”. But that's all good, just something to think about.

I draw two conclusions from this:

1. Nobody will ever read my blog. I do not like to spew hate. It makes me feel bad, and I will not partake in it. Also, my Mama would wash out my mouth with soap. You may get your dopamine high somewhere else. At least now I have a good justification why all you ignoramuses do not flock to my genius writing.
2. Bring back the real Circus Maximus. The Mall would be a grand place for it; there is already a nice and tall Obelisk there. Can you imagine it? Gladiators hollering “Morituri te salutant” in front of the White House, Bush VIII pointing his thumb toward the ground, lions eating christians, re-enactments of the battle at Guadalcanal. I shiver in pleasure when I think of it. The bloodier it is the more the people’s lust for games will be satisfied, and the more we can chat in peace about how to provide bread to the entertained masses. You ken? If you feed their bloodlust, they will not care to see your blood on the floor when you talk about their bread. Also, I imagine (in vain probably) that my reader numbers would go up.
   

trying on that wide angle lense

In respecting the sentiments of CMC, a patriot and warrior on Memorial Day, I was going to post the below at a later date. But I realized this debate is what Memorial Day is all about. I hope to hear similar debates, if hopefully better informed than I am, between the contenders for the highest office in this country. Too long we have been forced to listen to canned prepared 60 second speeches.



You think war is hell because soldiers die, soldiers come back with bad wounds, and some of them go crazy. You think that running around in a strange land shooting people is the ultimate sacrifice for your country. As horrible it is to point your gun at another man, as horrible it is to see life snuffed out all around you, as horrible as it is to see your brothers die around you, you do not know the hell of war until it reaches your mother’s doorstep. You do not know the hell of war, until you have to worry about a gang of soldiers coming into your house and raping and killing your family in front of your eyes. You may have seen all of these things, but that horror is not yours. You do not know the consequences until your home has been reduced to rubble and you go through the remnants to find your grannies dentures, because that’s all that survived the napalm. This explains why Europe is somewhat fearful of the trigger happiness the USA displays. They have in living memory destroyed everything around them. They did it themselves, have nobody to blame but themselves, but it does engender a sense of restraint. When this country invaded Iraq for the second time my mother called me to tell me that the man in black leather boots is walking again. She has the same visceral reaction to these kinds of events as you have on the Fourth of July. War is hell, and the sanctified version (where are the body bags?) that the American public is served with their daily dose of “we are the saviors of the world” should make you, a Vet, cringe. Or do you accept this little white lie as a small price to pay, truth as the collateral damage so to speak, in order to keep the home front in line?

Small countries around the world are constantly engaged in unspeakable atrocities, and the way the USA justifies going to war against her enemies is somewhat of a role model for them. How many times have you recently heard some little petty dictator call his political opposition terrorists and proceed to drop American made ammunition on them? He has as much right to do that as we had a right to go into Iraq. And how do you think that opposition feels when they pick up a dud that says “Made in the USA” in loud and proud letters? You think the USA goes into every conflict freeing some innocent peoples of their dictator. But if the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic, the most land of the free and home of the brave lends legitimacy to might over right you can be sure that all the little bad guys will follow our lead. Especially when they see how well the propaganda works in the USA. Of course it is not our fault that these little dictators follow our lead, but who else are they going to follow, especially since we do it so well?

You equate an error in judgment of whether we should go to war to an error of aiming the parachutists in WWII. Aren’t those two completely different shoes? Isn’t that comparing me buying orange juice instead of apple juice, as my mother asked me to, to her asking herself whether she should have a baby in the first place? I do believe that a decision to go to war or not is a little grander than reading a map incorrectly, although it would seem that the US Military in recent history can be accused of that as well. One could allow that the civilian leadership in this country is not very good at reading maps either, since they thought that Bin Laden was in Iraq – but we know that’s not what Iraq was about. If you are not mad at the Republicans for taking you into an unjustified war, at least you should be mad at the incompetence of the leadership of this war. I don’t know what the reason for their inability to consider historical campaigns are, and I don’t understand why their learning curve is so low that it took them 5 years to figure out that they are in a guerilla war, let alone how to deal with it, but I know that if I would put my life on the line for this shit, I would expect a little more skill from my leaders. When Kara Mustafa did not manage to take Vienna in 1683 the Sultan sent him a silken cord. Nobody is asking Rumsfeld to do anything but disappear into ignominy, and the least our current leadership could do is follow him and let some fresh minds work the problem.

So the USA has been messing with the Middle East for the last fifty years. I don’t understand how you think that gives us the right to go in there and bomb the place to smithereens. You know all the history of the former Secretary of Offense shaking hands with our current enemies, using the Afghanis against the Sowjets, installing the Shah in Iran, then turning around and setting Saddam Hussein on Iraq when they revolted against our puppets. The list is endless, and can be continued at leisure in South America without either justifying the current action, or actually being laudable. What would you say if Russia invaded Afghanistan tomorrow, and justified it by saying “Tovarisch, my grand daddy was fighting the mullahs and their American made MPs. We have been in that dusty, godforsaken joint for so long that in the beginning we had to use Camels to get around.” How about Cuba? What if China invades Taiwan, they certainly have been there a minute (if you measure it in millennia)? So does it give them the right?

And how did we go from justifying this invasion with “Them boys got WMD and Nerve Gas that will make your skin come off in bubbles” to “Saddam has been a threat to the governments around him for years” to “He killed the Kurds” to “Man, we been there for 50 years”. I hope you have a larger context in mind than just a temporal one. Because when I look at the justifications above, I see them all as fairly applicable to the USA. You know more about weapons in all shapes and sizes than I do. Tell me do we have stockpiles of nerve-gases? Do we have suitcase-sized nukes in violation of none-proliferation treaties? How many times have we invaded a country in the last 50 years, compared to Saddam Hussein and Iran? Are we going to fight wars in all places when they disagree with us just because we have built a base and hung around after the last ass-kicking?

If you have been involved with a region for fifty years, wouldn’t you hope that this, the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic [here insert more tiresome, patriotism inducing rhetoric used in each and every country around the world; Austria is the best country in the world because of our music and our mountains] country in the history of the world would do better than what we see now? If morality, right over might and most importantly history are on the side of the USA, on top of us being just absolute hot stuff, shouldn’t you demand better results than what has been delivered by a huge majority of Republican Presidents over the last 40 years? It can’t have been the Democrats’ weak FP since they fumbled themselves to only three victories in that time period. Somehow we always are told that these things take time. That just around the corner you can see the final solution to the problem. Ask me when this final solution will become real. And I will tell you that it will remain the mirage that it is until the day the oil runs out and the day Christian Fundamentalists get it on with Muslim Fundamentalists in some mythical battle to ring in the Apocalypse. Hopefully this will coincide, so that my Middle Eastern friends will only have to bury their families once. Of course by that time we will have found ample reason to be camped out in some other country that we just bombed back into the Stone Age. Did I tell you that you do not know the horrors of war until your sister is raped with the business end of a gun, so that she may never bear children to her rapists’ enemies?

Considering the results of voting a Republican into the White House all but three times these past 40 years, I will concede that I do not understand this country, in as much as the definition of crazy is expecting different results from repeating the same actions. I admit I do not understand crazy. You wonder why your friends, your sons and daughters die in distant places, you wonder why your treasure is spent on annihilation instead of edification, you wonder why the crazy people get thrown out of their asylums and the poor turned out of the hospitals (How The Gipper became so revered is beyond me, your blue collars are gluttons for punishment by the rich; at the most he played better poker than Gorbachev), you wonder why the rest of the world looks on in astonishment as you greet the end of the Cold War by building suitcase-sized nukes. I do not think that a Republican victory will happen again in 2008 because I have more faith in the mob-thinking of the masses, as I just do not see them being able to think as independently as you and those unidentified Republican pollsters. But if it were to happen it would send a great message to the rest of the world. That finally that horrible baby boomer daydream/nightmare, which has managed to vote a literal dynasty of Democratic Presidents into office, kept the poor Republican minority not only out of power but also forced to follow a weak FP and listen to lefty elitist mass-media propaganda is over. Oh, you say that only three Democratic Presidents were elected into office over the last 40 years? Well, then those Democrats surely must have been successful at running the joint behind the backs of the guys with the Veto Pen. A Republican electoral win would also send a message that this young nation is no longer naïve, altruistic and optimistic. That she has left behind that early childhood stage of blind trust in the goodness of others. That she has entered full blown puberty and must thus be given the freedom to act out for a couple of years. Unfortunately, she is not a harmless little teenager, whose worst action could be to mess up her own life because she didn’t know about condoms since her mum was busy either in the Women’s Power Association, or in her church. Instead and unfortunately, she is the 800 pound gorilla and liable to break some China and there is a lot of China to mess with. In due time she will come to sit at the family table, slightly remorseful over all the shit she put her poor parents through.

In the meantime how often will she bring the true horrors of war to the shores of foreign lands? Your claim to nobility, that you are not using your mincemeat-making arsenal (even though you say you are not superman - which one is it?) is so beyond me that I can’t even come up with an appropriate simile. How many Philippinos, Vietnamese and Iraqis need to die conventionally before you admit to yourself that merely not dropping your nukes does not make you civilized? You label Europe sophisticated, and somehow that is an insult, when you yourself are victim to the most fascinatingly sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of the world. You could throw a dart at a world map, you are welcome to use that terrorism map on your wall, and as long as you aim south of the equator you will most likely hit a resource rich country in which the USA installed and/or supported a regime of horrific proportions. In fact, we both know that some of the worst terrorists come out of those places. Yet you insist that we are doing it out of the goodness of our bleeding hearts. Wouldn’t it be intellectually and morally more honest to stand up and say “Yes, we run this joint as we see fit, and for the maximum profits of our people”? Because that’s what we do, and our outstanding standard of living is based on it. And that is the reason in a nutshell that this country keeps voting Republican. Deep down inside we are all selfish, and we want that cheap oil, the cheap gadgets from china and the lovely diamonds from the Congo. If only in a very small measure we reaped what we sowed on 9/11 I am mildly perturbed to think of the future reaping we will be going through. Of course we can always ratchet it up, fight a harsher war, build bigger bunker busters, chase them more, but will that create anything else but a spiral of violence? How did that work out for Israel so far? Do you want to put your child on a bus and worry if that bus will implode in some idiot’s righteous anger?

And yet you still believe that you are the savior of the world, because your government somehow manages to pull the freedom wool over your eyes when you should have been seeing the money trail all the way from your pocket to the war in the Middle East and back to record profits in the coffers of Exxon Mobile (the funniest thing is how surprised all the business analysts are now, at the news that those companies are not making billions of dollars anymore when a Democrat is about to be elected). Personally, I am going to throw up if I get another tax refund check because I was taxed incorrectly for the Spanish American War.

You like the guy like a wise man should like a fool. You can learn from him, but he will never learn from you. This is fine, as long as I want him to dance with some tribal leaders in Africa. But when I want him to consider the consequences of his actions in a place fraught with historical fault lines such as the Middle East, I would prefer a guy whose librarian wife forced a couple (of thousand) history books down his arrogantly uneducated throat. Yes, I think that a man who can’t form a straight sentence should not be running the world. In fact, I would be completely fine with having a guy at the helm that I can absolutely not stand. As long as I think he is smart and moral enough to do right by the world he can be the prick from hell. You think to be smart and eloquent is bad. As if stupidity guaranteed honesty and intelligence implied duplicity. I would prefer to think of the political class as duplicitous by nature, and if they all are that, let’s have one who has read a couple of books along the way. Since the Republicans over the last 40 years have not been able to supply that, let’s give the Democrats a chance to either proof me right, or you wrong for the next 40 or so years.

in response to “The please like us Party”

Once again I must congratulate the Crack Emcee. I love how he puts it all together. Short and sweet sentences, pictures that say more than a thousand words, easily digestible and easier to follow. It’s just hard to read at work, people wonder why I am checking out “Give ‘em Hell, Harry” Truman and Easy Rider pictures while I am supposed to be diligently cogging away in my cube.

The analysis of Clinton and Gore as war mongers who wanted to increase the Offense Budget, while not inhaling, and of Mini Bush (this is an age categorization, when you measure the Bushes by their fuck-ups, he outshines daddy like a stadium flood light would a candle) as the humble Foreign Policy guy, who never really wanted to fly that damn plane anyway, let alone in Vietnam really surprised me. I must have been dreaming when I saw all that “weak on FP liberal” dirt thrown at them. And I must have been dreaming when it was assumed that George Bush would be strong on National Security and proceeded to fumble his way through every international situation like only a Bush can (head in soup in China, planes shot down in front of China, non-signatory of small arms treaty).

However entertaining the above reversal of roles is, the salient point seems to be that once a President is in office, he can not afford to cater to either his hard right or hard left anymore. Real Politik sets in, and the world has to be taken seriously and with as little ideological baggage as possible. The USA is not in an easy situation, the most powerful nation on the planet, everybody wants a pie(ea)ce of her – you know this if you ever played Civilization. Mostly we seem to be running around like a schizoid teenager, who wants nothing more than to be loved for her loyalty and friendship (export of democratic freedoms), yet is painfully aware that if make-up (oil) is not secured in the short run she will loose power, and that for that reason her grand station in this high school (world) relies on dominating commerce and the procurement of certain lipsticks (metals) and mascara (resources). Morals and walking over dead bodies to get the resources you need in order to impose your will is difficult to pull off at the same time, at least not without smallish PR fallouts. Especially while remaining the good guys the USA used to be after WWII - for which I personally am hugely grateful, as I would have grown up either a Nazi Youth, or behind the Iron Curtain.

I suspect that the same situation vexed Truman and grand old Roosevelt, the difference being that not every Joe Blow was blogging their ass off about it, JFGIing every bloody comment while digging up divorce statistic and old campaign buttons. The lies don’t fly as easy anymore. And lies are part of the game. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, you need to play an international game of chess with people who are absolutely ruthless and with their backs to the wall. That’s like putting me in the ring with a rabid, wounded Doberman. I know you gave me a gun to defend myself, but most likely that bitch will be way faster than I can ever hope to be.

I think we should leave the ideology behind, leave the campaigning behind, leave all the rhetoric behind, and judge both Republicans and Democrats by their results. This gets hard when you consider that a lot of these wars stretch out over opposing administrations. But lets try: It would seem that WWII was rather well done. Korean War, was a write-off, probably quite useful though. Vietnam, a big clusterfuck. And the Gulf Wars could only be described as silly, if they wouldn’t be so expensive. What is the thin red line through all these wars? I believe it to be that the USA does better the more right she is. I am all for kicking some ass around the world, and nothing annoys me more than my Euro Friends who just yadda after their media and hate everything the USA does, BUT it seems that when the dust settles and we actually consider if we had a right to enter into a war, we can directly correlate that to our success with it. This makes me hopeful. In fact I rejoice that the USA always looses when she looses her moral compass. It makes watching all those tedious Hollywood happy endings bearable, as it seems as if really only the good guys can win in the end. And whenever even our glorious behind is wrong we fall on it, just like the Ruskies did and hopefully the Chinese will soon.

We did not have the right to invade Iraq. If you base that argument on human rights, you need to ask your congressman (the ones with the actual power to declare war) to invade China right now. And you should have done the same when every single democratically elected government in South America was overthrown with our help. If you base it on WMD, let’s go to N. Korea, and Pakistan right now. Both of which are a lot more unstable and actually HAVE some, compared to Iran for example. If you think that our current success (I measure success by not seeing white boys dying on the beaches of the Korean Peninsular) in N. Korea is based on hardass Foreign Policy you are plain wrong. It is based on what you would call lily-livered democratic “please like us” party principles, which was only initiated because we saw that kicking ass didn’t work in the Middle East, and because we ran out of money. I am not sure which reasoning I prefer.

You, the citizen, were conned into going to war in Iraq; remember Colin Powell and his little sample of whatever-the-bloody-hell scared us just so in front of the UN? Although I do believe that every citizen bears responsibility, and that in this regard you failed only a little less than Colin Powell, I will halfheartedly grant that you were conned into sending your boys to die for nothing. For this reason we need to present a bill for the huge error of judgment and arrogant group-think that was the result of a bunch of neo-cons getting together and trying to reorder the world in their image.

This is not a somehow diffuse case, with lots of competing variables to consider. Just look for the people who planned and implemented the war. They are gone. Their own party, their own President has forsaken them. This is not a liberal conspiracy. If they would have been right, they would still be dancing victory laps on The Mall. And don't tell us we didn't tell you so. We did, Obama for example. The people of the USA were tired of being conned back then, and they are pissed at being conned now, and they will present a bill to the Republican Party who is, as I write this, running for the hills (yup, an undisclosed location). The upcoming bill will be the second part of a lay-away bill, the first part of which was presented during the last mid-terms.

I think McCain’s story is absolutely fascinating. Nobody can even come close to imagining what it is like to spend 5 years at the Hanoi Hilton except for Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. I have tried, but I gave up. I admire his politics of the past years even if most died-in-the-wool Republicans wanted to vomit in their mouths when he was driving campaign finance reform. And he was nominated exactly for these reasons. He won the Republican nomination because he is the most Democratic of all Republican candidates. So please spare me all that talk of why Republicans are better on FP. They are not; they conceded that by nominating McCain. Campaign Finance Reform? Bring it on! Marrying one hot woman who looks just like the last one he dumped? Bring it on! (I am Austrian; I have no problem with how he lives his private life. You do though, you hated Clinton's BJ, so be honest.)

But supporting the President unconditionally in regards to the failed policies of the Middle East? That is unacceptable. The Republican Party and John McCain have to learn that lying to the people will cost them dearly. It might even usher in a new Democratic Age, how ironic that would be, and so sweetly and justly making Carl Rove rotate in his little southern (yup, undisclosed as well) plantation grave.

the population bomb

My boy Yukes in his blog against the human right of vampiring our sweet little planet points out that there are just too many people on it. I agree, although it makes me uncomfortably fatalistic to do so. I mean, once you agree that there are too many people what is the next logical step that either we or nature will need to take?

For this reason I want to give a shout-out to The Population Bomb. Hip Hip Hurrah! The Bomb has finally exploded in our none-believing (or willfully stupid) faces. The Bomb reminds me of a war relic from WWII. It dropped, never exploded, in a weirdly Freudian manner proceeded to bury itself in our fertile moist earth, was subsequently forgotten, later stumbled upon by farmers, and finally, while being ridiculed for its outdated mechanism, decided to ram its message so far up our asses that to call it an enema of epic proportions would be a, well, epic misunderstatement (this last malapropism is for you W). The Bomb will flush our shitty humanity down the toilet of the universe.

As recently as 2003 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (all three of these words are individually and taken together oxymoronic in regards to this hive-mind) rated it the twelfth worst and harmful book EVER published. Without wanting to digress too much, this list makes nice bed time reading for your normal (IQ higher than 72) mind. What should be on it instead of their choices are books such as Mein Kampf and the Bible.

I want to ask a couple of questions: Members of the ISI, when you go to your local Wall Mart, do you throw a hard cover edition of the Population Bomb at each other while fighting over the last packet of, as you think, over-priced rice? Do you stand at your local gas station and take the name of your stupid lord in vain when cussing out your silly little hive-mind because you voted for your republican soulmate W, who after all, made oil four times as expensive as it was when a lily-livered, bleeding heart, blowjob-enjoying liberal was in the White House? Will you wonder why you can’t afford your god-damn cooling bill for your stupid, none-insulated, redneck shack anymore, now that the masses of colored people on this globe use up your precious energy before you can steal it out from underneath them? Are you outraged that the multitudes blame you for this and say “I told you, when you took our condoms away, that your bloody abstinence crap DOES NOT WORK! Now we got AIDS, can’t afford food for our 15 children anymore, and to add insult to injury you made Kyoto a joke“? When you cry over another one of your stupid proselytizing sisters getting raped and murdered in Africa or Afghanistan do you remember that you are the only country in the world that voted AGAINST the Small Arms Treaty of 2007? Abstaining wasn’t good enough for you. Do I need to list the horrific regimes that did not take this step alongside you? Did you really need to make it official that you finally realized that nature wasn’t killing off the condom-less multitudes fast enough, so you wanted to lend it a gracious, christian, helping hand?

Do not be outraged that I am lay all of this at your doorstep. Do consider that your right-wing, fanatic religionist, irreparably fascist ass voted EN BLOC for the current lame-duck administration, which is driving all of these policies with your whole hearted prayerful approval. TWICE!

Where was I? Oh yeah, conservatives, republicans, believers, whatever you want to call yourself: You are always wrong! History makes a joke out of you. The other country in which books like the ones on your list are forbidden is Iran. Look at the past 200 years in the USA. You liked slavery, you liked segregation, you like the A-Bomb, you like guns, you like greed. All of which have been proven wrong and are also mentioned in passing, so to speak, in your curse-them-to-god seven deadly sins and dumb commandments. And even though you put a guilt trip the size of a super kancho on the rest of humanity you keep acting against your own morals, against your spurious, so-called christian values (What?! Do you make a living using oxymoronic names?) that you expound on in your vacuous publications, with which you seek to cover the real truth of your sad existence: That you are the bane of humanity. That you hate knowledge. That you hate sharing this planet with all peoples. The only bomb you ever disliked was The Population Bomb. And thankfully that one has been airmailed back to you, compound interest included. I only wish that my liberal behind could just this once be as wrong as you are on a daily basis. Then we could all survive this mess you have unloaded on us.

blogging for hope

our human right

lucky coincidence of birth
uneven in distribution
fused to our geography
instead of our humanity

luck is in short supply
three billion short

my cobalt overrides
your water
my nickel rules
over your bread

I care not for your hunger
nor your sickness
your suffering leaves me cold

you call it luck
I call it destiny
that yoke is yours
that silver mine

my human right

forget roulette

spousal matchup

Today I enjoyed watching speeches by the democratic presidential spouses. To make a long story short, I think Mrs. Obama is a skilled orator. She is self possessed, she has good cadence and she knows English much better than the current Prez, even though he is married to the first librarian. But putting her up against old Billy is like putting me in sumo ring with the current Yokozuna.

For that reason I think it would be fair to establish a handicap for presidential spouses. Similar to golf, where a player’s handicap allows all players with different skill levels to play against each other competitively this would level the playing field in the spousal matchup of 2008.

With that in mind I propose Bill Clinton, who after all is used to addressing the nation and the United Nations, to be categorized as a handicap -2. Which on the Illetschko-Volo Electoral Spousal Scale means that he may not use the letter L. This should put him on equal footing with Michelle Obama, who may use all vowels and consonants indiscriminately. So when she rhetorically asks the crowd “Why am I leaving my kids at home running around with my husband, running for president?” Billy Goat may only respond by saying “Goba cimate change is neary as bad as No Chid eft Behind”. With the successful adoption of this scale you can look forward to Mr. Clinton introducing his wife with “I woud ike to introduce my wife, Hiary…uhm. My wife Senator Cint… this is just not fair! My wife, the junior senator from New York.” It should add much needed levity to this year's presidental contest.

In other news, Bi Cinton compained heaviy about the imiatations of the ietschko-Voo Eectora Spousa Scae as impemented in this very bog. He obviously thinks it is a “Repubican Conspiracy”.

Why I don’t want the First Lady in the White House

Nothing and I mean nothing would be better than having a Woman President. Except maybe a black man. First of all let me state, that I belong to the majority that thinks the Republicans should just save their money and not bother running in 2008. I am convinced that every sane person who is eligible to vote in 2008, and those two are not mutually assured, knows what is good for them at this point.

The choice of Democratic candidates is large (I wrote this a while ago). I realize that most people and pundits are thinking how silly it is to start campaigning so early. What they, and Al Gore, do not seem to understand is that the Presidential Election 2008 are like the NBA Playoffs last year. They will be decided in the early rounds. The final will be a formality. Which only shows that it’s OK not to vote for an Oscar winner (I wrote this a long while before the Nobel thingy happened, maybe that would cancel out the Oscar).

I write this article with the above premises in mind. A Democrat will win, and the choice is between a black man and a woman. I guess it would be too easy to just give us the choice between a black man and white man of comparable status, or a woman and a man of comparable stature. But instead it has to be a relatively inexperienced black man, and the nearly former wife of a former President. Anyone want to take bets that Mrs. Clinton was playing a long game when she stuck with her husband? We could discuss the merits of each candidate, for example various policy choices, their foreign affairs mettle, their stance on universal health insurance and global warming. But I don’t think that their differences in policy statements are huge. I think that they are equal in their skills at being politicians, although with strengths in different areas.

The choice comes down to an issue different from politics and policies. It comes down to adherence to the Constitution of the United States of America. That original founding statement of the country was conceptualized with one specific purpose. A later President succinctly said “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. I take the most important meaning from the Constitutions and Mr. Lincoln’s speech to be that the self governance of the people in this country is inviolable. This was extraordinary at a time when the common mode of governance was the absolute monarchy, a hereditary system based on the belief that rulers of monarchies were chosen by a god, or at least proxies of that deity. This modus operandi became unacceptable in this young nation. Both the issue of hereditary and god-given right to rule were made obsolete with the first confident John Hancock on that parchment.

This to me is the crux of the choice between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. Today seven years ago, Mr. Clinton was the President. I know I am stating the obvious, who could forget those good old days? But I do find it surprising that all those Democrats who were taking issue with the son of a former President being elected into the White House after only eight years of interlude, think nothing of accepting the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton without blinking an eye. What happened to the “sanctity of our democratic values”? What happened to the “raison d’etat” of this land? Suddenly lefties think nothing of putting together another political dynasty, when only recently they were so against it. What are we going to do next, elect the daughter? I hear she is quite smart. I find this dishonest and inconsistent. I also think it dangerous. Instead of nipping the acceptance for this form of hereditary rule in our political system in the bud, we would encourage it. We would extend our blessing from the left to the last example from the right. It would become common place for politicians with family ties to strive for the highest offices in the country. Are we not close enough to being led by a political and elitist caste as it is? With politicians groomed from an early age, going to the right schools, joining the right fraternities to making the correct career choices we are on our best way back to the bad old days. John Hancock would rotate in his well earned resting place.

I know that in these insecure times we long for something known, something that we think safe that carries minimal risk. Maybe that is the reason why absolute monarchies evolved in the first place and were successful for such a long time. But being afraid of the unknown may not enter this equation. This country has managed to peacefully transfer power from one reasonably independent individual to another for over three centuries and that process should remain intact. Then there is also the fact that most people who would vote for Mrs. Clinton would at least as much be voting her husband back into the White House. In fact, to most people this seems to be the good idea here. I wholeheartedly disagree. Not only is it unconstitutional for the spouse of the President to have undue influence, it also shows that we should not be voting for that candidate in the first place. If she was qualified on her own, we would not feel the need to bring her husband into the equation. It is sad to have to apply this logic to the first female candidate with a serious chance of success. But integrity and the law of this land, given to us by one of the nicer documents in the history of humankind, demand it.

Because of this I choose the greater of two goods. Not only would we preserve our democratic institution but we would also send a clear signal to every citizen of the United States of America and to the rest of the world. That this country elects colorblind and without prejudice in regards to sex and origin of the candidate. There is no higher proof that this country is truly governed of the people, by the people and for the people, and that this bastion of universal equality shall never perish. What better way to claim leadership of the free nations of the world in these globally insecure days could there be?

(I must have just watched some patriotic movie when I wrote this, or something)

fast ohne worte

too much fun

May the supreme being bless nerds who combine the perfect trifecta of nerdism, humor and politics. I give you Mortal Combat '08.

Denis Kucinich

The only guy that says, “I will cut 15% of the Pentagon budget and stick it into free public schools up to tertiary level”. We all know he will not make it out of the Primaries for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with Americans knowing deep down inside that they benefit from an American Hegemony. My lefty friends, it may be convenient to bash the warmongers and the Bushit that’s been happening, but we all know that we reap the fruit of dominating the globe on a daily basis. Pointlessly, yet as an alternative, may I meekly suggest to consider all the cool shit we could do if we would cut our Offense Budget to the levels of China, which is a laughable 45 Billion USD. That would mean a windfall of 580 Billion USD (not counting war debt, which is not included in the Offense Budget) for the US Taxpayer. I leave it to you to pick your favorite pork-barrel because there is room for all of us.

moral relativism’s ugly stepchild , or how to catch a flip-flopper

You may believe that the sun rotates around the earth. You may believe in a phallic symbol of your ultimate release from the human body’s shackles. You may howl at the moon and drink its shine. You may believe that the earth is four thousand odd years old and that Aliens built the pyramids ten thousand years ago. You may believe that god put all those little critter bones into the ground to test our free will. You may believe that it is wrong to eat Pig, Cow and/or bananas on Wednesdays. If you want to stick voodoo needles in The Brain’s Puppet, be our guest.

Here is what you may not do – never, ever, never: You may not ever change your mind. You may not believe in one thing one day and something else the next. Changing your opinion is passé. It is gauche. It is so Enlightenment – and we don’t do that anymore. We choose one side out of our multitudinous options and we nail ourselves to it. Imagine life like a wheel of fortune. That wheel can keep turning, as long as we are nailed to one spot we don’t care whether we end up at the bottom or at the top. We are not afraid of being at the bottom because at least we remain consistent. But we are scared to death of getting flung of that wheel while changing positions.

Anything less than righteous inflexibility will make us ridiculous, make us loose face and let other people accuse us of the dreaded double standard. If you think today that it would be a good idea to give starving people a fish to eat, but tomorrow you want to give them a fishing net because you changed your mind and you think teaching them to feed themselves is better than feeding them ad infinitum, then you have committed the last remaining real faux pas in public life. You will have to wait for another chance in your next life, except that you will be reborn as a mollusk. You have proven beyond a doubt that you are not trustworthy. Really, who can trust a person who says one thing one day and another the next? Telling the truth may demand such mind acrobatics, but that is too complicated. Let us rather banish the truth and instead welcome the last remaining universal human sin onto our stage – Hypocrisy. There is hoping that it is the last act in this farce.

Taking a stand, any stand, gets you ahead. Inflexibility wins the day. Nothing else matters because everything is acceptable and nothing may be criticized. If you think drinking your own blood on summer solstice brings you closer to your own personal hippy god you may do so. Just don’t confuse your neighbor by giving her a bible next Easter. For hypocrisy is the one supreme sin left in our world. No, it is not the sin of being wrong or misguided or fallible or just plain old dumb that bothers us anymore. That stuff is all good. But if you want to bring your opponent down, if you want to win that election, get that multinational CEO post or run that religious outfit there is only one way to leave the other gal in the dust. You must catch him in a spider web of conflicting statements. You must dig through her background and find that deliciously salacious piece of contradiction. It’s ok that he snorted coke or drove his kids to school drunk as a skunk. That’s not what you are after. It is fine that she keeps switching jobs back and forth between government armament buyers and offense contractors, all the while taking bribes from both. That’s just the way things are. But when you find that statement, when you find that nugget of flipfloperism you have hit pay dirt, yes Siree. Joe Blow will explode in self-righteous fury, betrayed and hurt by the duplicity of another elitist: “What? First she voted for it, and now she is against it? How dare she?!?! That freaking whore. I will never vote for her again. I don’t care what she says, just keep it straight!” I guess we are just too stupid to hold two competing concepts in our minds at the same time. We can not fathom that a situation will change, that new facts will come to light. Since every opinion is justified by little more but its existence it is impossible to criticize it. Since everything is permissible it has become acceptable that political debates are nothing more than litanies of 30 second statements about a candidate’s position. It’s like watching a campaign add marathon. Nothing gets debated or argued over. Nobody is wrong anymore; everybody just has a different way of looking at things.

But if you are not allowed to change your mind on an issue how would you ever stay married, raise kids or hold a job? Some things are wrong and some things are right. The sun doesn’t come up in the east for example (gotcha). But we are not fed the truth by the spoonful at birth, and most of the time we need to find out by trial and error what is right and wrong. Usually that means we have to change our minds in the process at least somewhat. One of the great balancing acts of human history is how religions of the world constantly change their positions, usually only after years of burning heretics at the stake, while at the same time preaching a stark conservatism for their followers that does not allow for flexibility of thought. I still don’t get how they pull it of, but I guess that’s why they have shrines built in their honor, and I don’t.

I know the following cliché has been overtaxed, as opposed to the filthy rich, but remember how we used to have to eat our mammoth raw? Back before that fortuitous lighting set a Bush on fire (God, if you have any mercy, do it again) and the first steak was cooked up by accident. Well, that lightening sure would have looked dangerous as all the furies of hell to me. And that bush that it set on fire sure would have seemed like it was about to consume my mammoth fur tent in which the next 50 generations of my descendants were supposed to be born. So why should I get anywhere near the fire, just so that I can cook piece of meat that I and my forbearers have been eating raw all our lives? I guess something would have changed my mind – probably the better taste. It sure would have been funny though to see the two rival shamans of the tribe accuse each other of hypocrisy because they started liking the cooked meat better then the raw meat.

Since hypocrisy is the last remaining weapon in our public discourse it has become impossible to change one’s mind. So let me put down my vote for some contention in our public lives. Not just bipartisanship. Let’s call each other idiots a little bit more and let’s accept each other’s fallacies a little less. Let us be ok with someone changing their minds, we can still call them stupid if what they say is actually dumb. Let us light a torch for flexibility.

In the end, if everything becomes acceptable, nothing remains unacceptable. This in essence means that nothing is wrong. The sun rises in the west – somebody please challenge me! We need to fight over some real issues instead of over who said what when, and how they are now saying something else. That way what we say will be meaningful again.

you get the leaders you deserve

Winston Churchill, he of the immortal blood and tears speeches, left behind a legacy of wonderful quotes, one of them about Democracy being the least of all evils. I humbly usurp, and by no means without pleasure that ”In democracy you get the leaders you deserve”. Since I currently reside in the USA this is for at least one more year a juicy subject. One might say it is the reason for writing this piece. Mostly because I am sick and tired of everyone and their dog jumping on the Bush-hating bandwagon. In reality you are not getting on the wagon, you fell off a different one. You loved the little gunslinger and his paroles of letting those evil-doers hear from us very soon. You loved him so much so that even when you had the choice of correcting your error a couple of years later you abstained. You wanted more and no, you did not suffer from Stockholm Syndrom. For that to happen you would have to be taken hostage first and I do not subscribe to that arrogant left paradigm of the people being hoodwinked by the spectacles of propaganda. There was no hostage-taking of public opinion; there was no hoodwinking of the unsuspecting masses. Not even a little bit. You ask how I know this? In 2004 only 55.3 % of all eligible voters participated in their Oh, so cherished democratic duty. That’s a hot 4 % more than in 2000, when supposedly you just didn’t care and no pressing international agenda was on your mind. Of that grand half of all voters 51 % threw in their lot with Mr. “Put food on your family”. The supposed leader of the free world, a man who can’t form a sentence that makes sense for the life of him, was elected by 25 % of the eligible voters, or 62 Million Voters.

Instead of this apathy in the face of what is becoming a crisis of extinction level event proportions you should have either resoundingly kicked is ungainly behind in the gutter to be swept onto the trash heap of history, or at least provided him with a real mandate. Something like 80 % of the population for example. Of course The Brain did not care that 25 % is not a real mandate and sent his heralds out into the land to proclaim the advent of a new age of republican dominion.

Possibly the first time around - you like to blame voter fraught in Miami Dade (or Vice) county - you can be excused to pick a scion of an emerging dynasty, who very obviously was not fit for the job, over a hapless and prideful inheritor of a supposed political genius. But the second time around? You said to this cretin and to the rest of the world that you liked the state of affairs. That you were happy with setting fire to the Middle Eastern fuse and in the process providing a windfall of profits for all of his financiers. Now, when it becomes all too obvious that he and his laughably arrogant neo cons fell flat on their faces, and he remains the last one standing (wobbling may be a better choice of words here). Now, that the baby hawks all left the nest. Now, you think nothing of getting the hell out of Dodge as well. Excuse me, but I am not going to let you get away with it.

In awe, you were of the genius of The Brain. The dudes in the little fast boats you ate up with patriotic gusto. And the other guy was married to a really rich woman – goodness, she might turn the tax code to her advantage. Possibly, he even spoke French! He should have just said that he speaks Freedom, than he would have been more in line with your dumb patriotism and the 50 % of congress without a valid passport. Yes, you vote for people who are not allowed to travel to Canada! Those poor schmucks can’t even go up there on one of their investigative junkets to smoke a joint, which would quite possibly increase the average IQ of our national leaders – yes, they would have to inhale.

You think medical care for everyone is un-American. You think that putting 500 Billion Dollar into the Offense Budget is just fine and dandy. You are stupidly surprised when you get a letter from your cell phone company that refunds 50 Bucks to you because they overtaxed you for the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR!!! Just in case you suffer from the illusion that we freed the Philippines from the centuries-old yoke of the Spanish Crown, keep in mind that we killed 200,000 of them when they did not want to be folded into our own burgeoning empire after we kicked the Spaniards to the curb. You are as fine with that as you are with today’s adventures in oil. Forgive me if I sound a little ticked off now that you are all wearing the mantle of innocence. That you think you can just wait for the next gal, and tell the world and yourself that you didn’t know because you were deceived. You were not deceived, not even a little bit.

So instead of riding into the sunset with the baby hawks please stick around and help this bumbling fool out. Help him not to save any face. Help him be even more incompetent now that he is making feeble attempts at reconciliation with the world and its climate. Help him not to fix his syntax errors so that we may at least be entertained a little longer. Anything else would make you dishonest in addition to being stupid. And who wants to be dishonest, right? That would make you a politician and I would have to take your passport and pot away.

Instead live in disgrace for a while. Enjoy the rotten fruit of your labor. You deserve it. You can not blame the merciless despot at the top, because there is none. You may not blame the media, because in the paraphrased words of a certain comedian “you don’t turn around to look over your shoulder to look for the media when you take money out from the ATM late at night”. I will not even let you excuse yourself by saying that you are too busy making that monthly payment on your second car. Take the bus, and while you are at it vote for a politician who will make that bus drive on alternative fuels. You don’t know what alternative fuel means? Let me give you a hint, it’s not the flex fuel sticker on the back of your Hemi-powered Dodge truck that lets you drive in the car pool lane while filling up on 92 octane. Oh right, you say that flex fuel thing will not work either because the evil oil lobby with their billions of dollars bought all the evil passport-less politicos and now you and your poor little children will have to suffer from the nasty West-Nile Virus because it is getting hot. You, my dears, deserve it all because you voted for it all.

Maybe, just maybe if you would have picked the guy who got you seatbelts forty years ago you could now drive in a clean car, take your child to a dentist without paying a cent, not worry about the Chinese polluting the globe because we just plain gave them our cleanest coal power-generating technologies, still call French Fries that, get the oil that you need for your penicillin cheaper, install solar panels on every house in the Southwest and power the entire USA, make peace break out in the Middle East because nobody buys their oil anymore, and earn the love of the world because you are finally the good guys that you think you are. And when all of that happens, I will grant you your pride in your accomplishments. I will applaud you as the enlightened savior of humanity. I may even joyously intone “God Bless America”. Because you will finally and for the first time in a while deserve it.

Presidential Frankenstein

I watched an interesting forum Friday night on TV. The economic advisors (possible future Treas Secs, please keep that I mind) of five of the major candidates expounded on their and their candidates' economic views. To say that they are smart is stating the obvious. It is however interesting to see their boss’s character reflected in them. Hillary Clinton’s guy is this pouty looking Wall Street guru, wearing an impeccable suit and a chip on his shoulder. Our free economics gunslinger, representing Giulliani doesn’t give a damn what he looks like, he is at least as ugly as his boss, and like him not afraid to go against the grain. John Edward’s proxy was a gentle professor, who is not affected by either rising oil prices or healthcare costs. John McCain’s man kept to himself a lot. And Obama’s passionate, but reading from notes, young’un was the only one who came remotely close to saying that we should stop spending 500 Billion of your money on kicking ass around the world. The other candidates don’t have economic advisors.

Looking at the session from a holistic point of view I want to take all of the candidates, rip them into little pieces and build myself a presidential Frankenstein consisting of all the good things that I want from your next president. I want him to do a Broadband Initiative (John Edwards) because without that, not only will a lot of menial jobs be sent to China, we will also not create any more new economy jobs. I want to stop wasting money on weapons of mass destruction (Presumably Obama, although he can’t say it for fear of being a dove). I want to keep the USA on a firm free market standing (Giulliani) because I am from Austria, and I witnessed the policies of economic stagnation in the old world. I want John McCains guy to keep to himself a little less, because then I could maybe talk myself into taking a piece of his boss for my presidential Frankenstein as well. And I like the idea of universal health coverage (Hillary Clinton’s guy seemed most passionate about that).

The one thing that stood out is that not one of them has a short term solution for foreign oil dependency and global warming. Not one of them wants to have a hydrogen car by the end of the decade. If this is depressing, at least it is honest.