Archives for July 2009

Victoria Jackson, who made a career out of acting stupid on SNL, serves up something that is rather hard to characterize.

Obama legally kills babies and now he can legally kill Grandmas!

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

Believe it or not, the piece gets better (or worse, depending of course on your point of view and mood) from there, as Jackson goes on to harass an innocent Burbank gift shop owner with wingnut ramblings, then wonders why she is met with silence.

I wonder if Jackson and Dennis Miller hang around Burbank together, worrying about nationalized cars? The burdens these folks carry, I tell you. My heart aches for Jackson, who is certainly old enough to be a grandma and is clearly rather frightened by it all. She should get out of her comfort zone and drive over to Malibu or something.

(I saw it here.)

Join us tonight at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

Yeah…I’m late with the post tonight but, hey, I’m busy already!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGK5tXNItV0[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 332 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to get lost at.

There are a lot of things I just don’t get. And this is one of them.

Didja know that Ted Van Dyk worked in the Johnson administration? Ted reminds us.

It’s pretty damn wonky, and it’s not overtly political in the normal sense, but there’s an interesting piece in AppleInsider on a brewing HTML 5.0 standards battle, that I think might surprise some locals as to Microsoft’s history of anticompetitive practices, and how its relentless opposition to open standards has adversely impacted both web developers and consumers alike.

I don’t ever remember reading coverage like this in the local press, but perhaps I just missed it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNrUo6snlx4[/youtube]

It’s not like any real news was made at yesterday’s big press conference at Sound Transit’s Link Operations and Maintenance facility, though you’d think a public gathering featuring our Mayor, Governor, US Senator and US Secretary of Transportation might be news enough to make it into our city’s only remaining daily.

Apparently not.  Not even a mention in a measly blog post. Not even an ironic jab at say, Gov. Gregoire, for talking almost entirely about highway spending while standing before a backdrop of spanking new trains. Huh.

Obviously, the purpose of media events like this—and I’m assuming Sec. Ray LaHood is holding them around the nation—is to show the public that stimulus dollars are actually being put to work building infrastructure and creating good paying jobs. You know, like the 75,000 jobs here in WA state that Gov. Gregoire claims these federal dollars have already helped create or save.

And that’s an important message to get out, especially as some of are nation’s leading economists are beginning to make the argument for another round of stimulus spending… an argument that will fall on deaf ears if the public doesn’t believe that the first round of spending has actually accomplished something. And if papers like the Seattle Times fail/refuse to pass on this message… well… if a tree falls in the forest, and all that.

Wow:

But as for whether another pursuit of national office, as she did less than a year ago when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House, would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

“I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

[via Atrios]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiNUkME9D9k[/youtube]

US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held a press conference in Seattle today at Sound Transit’s Link Operations and Maintenance facility on Airport Way, to highlight how the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (i.e., the stimulus package) is funding sustainable transportation projects and putting people back to work here in Washington state. Joining Sec. LaHood at the podium were Gov. Chris Gregoire, US Senator Patty Murray and Mayor Greg Nickels, a pretty high-power group, but I thought the best explanation of the impact of stimulus dollars on our local economy came from Lee Newgent of the Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, so that’s the video clip I’m posting first.

More clips coming as I slog through the editing process.

I can empathize with nearby residents inconvenienced by light rail, and I sure hope Sound Transit does its best to prevent or abate those unexpected screeching noises on the run through Tukwila. But… I have trouble feeling sympathy for homeowners complaining about noisy trains “knocking down their property values” when the homeowners knew full well that they were buying next door to busy train tracks:

David and Laurie Shumate, who moved into their remodeled 1920s home two years ago, take issue with Sound Transit’s November noise readings… “We don’t want to move, but … ” David Shumate said, sighing deeply before finishing, “I don’t know.”

The woman who’s lived in her house for 60 years… she’s got a reason to complain. But the Shumates, not so much. It’s like folks who buy houses near airports, because they’re such a good value, complaining about noise from airplanes flying low overhead.

Sound Transit is in the midst of conducting further tests, and if they determine there is a problem they will try various noise abatement methods, including soundproofing affected homes. But…

“That doesn’t help when we’re outside,” Laurie Shumate said. The Shumates spend their spare time converting what they disparagingly call the previous owner’s “English garden” into a lush yard full of plants native to the Duwamish River area.

Again… they bought a house across the street from elevated train tracks, and they expect to enjoy their lush garden in piece and quiet? That’s just bad planning.

Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, is dead at 93.

At Hullaballo, dday has an interesting post up called “The Lessons of Robert McNamara,” discussing the 11 causes and lessons from Vietnam that McNamara laid forth in his later years.

We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don’t believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Not only did we ignore them in 2003, we somehow managed to make most of the same mistakes in Iraq. It may seem a long time ago, but in the summer of 2003 people who thought we were making a colossal blunder were being called traitors. I suppose the trolls are still calling us traitors, but these days jingoism isn’t much of a selling point politically.

And while things may be less bad in Iraq, that crucial fact is that we are still there, and are likely to remain there indefinitely, despite what any politicians promise.

My daughter and I are back from Brownsville, Oregon, after our annual orgy of small town Americana—a 4th of July weekend filled with horseback riding, softball, fireworks, swimmin’ holes, community pancake breakfasts… and of course, about five and a half hours straight of tossing pizza by a backyard, wood fired oven.

And let’s not forget the beer, a keg of some hoppy, ever-so-slightly fruity elixir from Ninkasi Brewing in Eugene.

Yum.

Now some might argue that the way we Americans tend to celebrate our nation’s birth—with fun and food and lots and lots of beverages—somehow trivializes our founders’ daring and dangerous struggle for independence, and the many hardships they endured, but I’d argue exactly the opposite. For what freedom is greater, and more worth celebrating, than a freedom we are free to take for granted? And what better way to honor this freedom than to do exactly that?

We live in the wealthiest, most powerful and most secure nation in the history of the world. I hope you enjoyed America this weekend as much as I did.

A remorseful blogger apologizes for making Sarah Palin resign. I can’t even guess what’s going to happen next in this train wreck. Will some major ethics violation be revealed? Will she change her mind about resigning and just pretend on the 24th that she never actually quit? With someone this nuts, anything is possible.

Last week’s contest was won by ‘Truth Teller’ in only 12 minutes. It was the National Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario.

This week’s is a little more rural, good luck!

– Iran’s religious establishment is dissenting from Khamenei.

– Soldiers in Colombia are killing innocent civilians and dressing them up as members of FARC in order to collect reward money (which comes out of our aid packages to their government).

– Norm Stamper excoriates Democrats for not using their power to roll back the drug war:

And the cause of this “drug war dementia”? I’m guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

“Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?”

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they’ll be handed their heads come election time.

I’d argue that another aspect of this are the special interests within law enforcement and the pharmaceutical lobby who don’t want Americans to have greater freedom of choice when it comes to the substances they put in their bodies. But having politicians recognize that the public would be overwhelmingly on their side should they choose to move forward with drug law reform is a necessary first step.

I have a quick message for everyone still on the “Sarah Palin in 2012” bandwagon.

If you want to live in a country run by a woman who tries to silence the media, uses public resources for her own personal projects, believes in her own lies as if they are true, and pretends to be God, there’s already a country like that.

It’s called North Korea.