Obama, I'm Bored

Weeks ago the thought of whom Obama would choose to be his running mate made my mind race over the possibilities and the possible strategies behind certain choices. My favorite, Gov. Richardson, hasn't been spoken of much at all recently, which I think may be a good thing.

But the excitement over who will be Obama's "veep" faded more than a few weeks ago. It's not really Obama's fault. It's mostly the result of the news day after day giving "hints" from "people close to the candidate" or "from people close to the campaign"... general rumormongering.

Wait. Now that I think about it, I signed up for the email notification the campaign made such a big deal about thinking, 'well if he's asking for your email info again and makes this big deal about it, then the announcement should be forthcoming in a reasonable amount of time...oh say like 3-7 days. You know, the amount of time it would take to send a letter snail mail. Also, it seems that the delay ruins the whole metaphor behind this unique, and innovative way to get an announcement out by creating this new ritual of sending text messages and emails to supporters.

The campaign could have gone the traditional route of physically getting on a podium and saying it in a speech. They could have chosen to fax press releases to the news agencies to get the word out surrounding the announcement, but they chose email and text. It's faster. It's easier. It bypasses the commercial press, kinda (since it's probably made the press more frenzied to "scoop" the general public). This new ritual screams phrases in my head like 'moving forward' and 'not afraid of change'. But what the campaign forgot is that in this day and age when you tell someone you're going to text or email them, and it takes a really long time (longer than if you'd use the old ways Obama chose not to go with) the metaphor falls flat. One's mind starts thinking, 'he might as well have snail mailed me a spiffy letter thanking because that's how long it took him to use the new technology' to deliver a very historically old announcement. I'm sure there are some strategic reasons for the timing of the announcement, or intervening events that may have caused the campaign to change the timing of the announcement. It just makes me think that when the message is actually sent, that I'll feel like one does when a fancy cake you've been baking is finally done, you take it out the oven and leave it to cool, and come back to see it fell. It's still excellent to eat and all, but it's just fallen flat. It's not like the sky is falling, but it's a bit of a drag and disappointment.

Read more!

I Needed A Laugh

But instead I kept refreshing cnn.com. Serendipity struck when the breaking news on top was a link to...try not to laugh...Bush speaking in New Orleans to talk about hurricane Katrina recovery. It's kind of hard where to begin as I listen to him talking about thanking the American taxpayer for help providing the money to help rebuild the area. He "understands people are hurting". He says "a brighter day is coming". He talks of all the infrastructure improvements and sets a goal of 2011 for all the levees to be complete. He informs us that the governor and the federal government agreed on a 30 year loan for improvements for the state. He didn't say the amount, but said he granted the governor's request to a standing ovation that seemed very staged, then Bush said, "this isn't supposed to be self-congragulatory." But what else is it? His strategy is not to repeat (his) mistakes of the past, and then talks about how people still haven't been provided what they need (how many years later?) but they're working on it. He self congragulatorily outlines how so many social services have been restored like health care, etc. He outlined in a one liner that there will be a series of community health care clinics (he needed to read that part) to provide preventative care. Funds given to the police for cars, computers, etc. crime lab, so they can do their back log of work. Crime is a problem but there are notable improvements. Education he goes on to say has improved with 'many' schools having re-opened. He's reading off his script, then he improvises Bush-isms after that with the smirk on his face. "This part of the world" he uses to describe New Orleans in terms of a place other kids are sent to go to university. Strange statements. He jokes that there are more

...oops, mother calls and there goes my Bush-ism coverage on Katrina. I still don't know how the guy has the nerve to show his face there after screwing so many people over with all the resources misappropriated to other states and all. But that's our Bush for ya.

Read more!

Maybe McCain's Problem Is

...his biggest strength. His major strengths are his "experience" and his military service. He is a product of Vietnam. He lived it. It shapes his thinking.  It also, in my opinion, handicaps his ability to lead America.  When he was a soldier, he wanted America to stay the course. As a fellow soldier put it, "He was a conservative. He was an archconservative," said Brace. "And his theory on the war at that time was 'Do it. Do it right, and get it over with.' "


Earlier in the same cnn.com piece, McCain was happy at the election of Nixon. If you remember from high school or the numerous documentaries on politics or the Vietnam war, Nixon ran on the idea of ending the war with "honor" and won, but having no strategy to do that, he ended up continuing the war until 1973.

According to Brace, when Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, McCain was "elated."

"He said, 'Nixon will get us home. Nixon won't sit there. He'll listen to the generals and get, you know, no more running this war from the basement of the White House.' "

"Well, it didn't happen," Brace recalled recently. "We thought we'd be home for Christmas of '69 and there we were. And there we were for three more Christmases -- '70, '71, and '72."

As a Soldier, McCain wanted the candidate that was more style than substance. He wanted the candidate that just said what people wanted to hear, but did whatever he pleased. He hoped for the president that defeated Humphrey back in '68 using divisive tactics (anti-hippie, appealing to voters against the civil rights movement, etc.). The candidate that won in part by going behind the back of the U.S. government to encourage the south vietnamese government to withdraw from peace talks to get a better peace deal from a Nixon presidency (which didn't occur because of a lack of a plan). He believed in a guy that discouraged an end to a conflict that was killing Americans for his own selfish political gain. He believed in a guy that used the phrase "peace with honor" to get elected, but ended up dishonoring the office by using dirty tricks resulting in his impeachment and the disillusionment of many Americans with their government.

Most telling, he truly believed such a guy would give a crap about him or any servicemen. There's McCain's judgment sitting on a platter. Anyone can see it if they want to. But not everyone does. Back in '68 McCain didn't want to look past his political ideology and he hopes the American people will make the same mistake forty years later.

The historical facts coupled with McCain's judgment and ideology at the time, show McCain's misguided lack of judgment on both the war itself and who was best equipped (or willing to) end it. What cements how misguided his thinking is can be seen in how he cannot seem to connect the dots between 1968 and 2008. Back in 1968, McCain, held captive, wanted to be brought home. I guess that means he wanted peace. Maybe that meant he wanted the U.S. to "win" in order for his release. His statements and political opinions at the time seem to be somewhat contradictory. Maybe he just didn't like the hippies and the anti-war movement because he was a soldier. Maybe how he defined himself personally was in conflict with the democratic party's values at the time and more in line with the rhetoric Nixon was spouting back then in regards to the war. I wish someone would ask him to clarify his feelings back then and how they may or may not help him formulate the policies of his possible presidency.

The ideology McCain states now in 2008 involves "winning" a conflict that is very difficult in practical terms because the enemy is ubiquitous and the objectives are difficult to define, as you may well know based on McCain's inability to articulate what the definition of victory is in his speeches.  The one speech comes to mind where he defines victory by essentially using the same word (I believe he used the word "winning" and the phrase "winning it right"). The windbag hit what drives his policy best in his statements today saying a soldier begged him to be allowed to, "Just win the war."  He apparently still believes  America lost Vietnam because of a lack of trying.  A lack of will.  It seems he believes the same about Iraq.  Sadly, he seems to ignore history and is jumping at the chance to repeat it.

This is the same strategy that lead to U.S. failures in Vietnam, Cuba, and Iran. It's the same flawed policy that lead the U.S.S.R. to fail in Afghanistan. It's also what lead to the British losing in it's struggle to keep it's colonies in north america, India, South Africa, etc. World empires or superpowers have trouble maintaining, controlling, or influencing territory far away with conventional forces when local populations resist and use guerrilla tactics. Yeah, it's way more complicated than that (religion, ethnicities, competing superpowers covertly funding each side of a conflict, etc.), but that is the gist of it.

By and by McCain woodenly talks vaguely about drilling for oil, being an I told you so about the surge implying it means we're winning, divisively appealing to special interests on hot button social issues, talking about winning without a defining plan about how we will win, and subtly questioning Obama's patriotism and background. Kind of sounds like that guy McCain was so sure would bring him home from Vietnam.

Read more!

With What Army, McCain?

John McCain couldn't pass up a chance to "talk tough" about how he wouldn't put up with Russia's invasion of Georgia. That's all well and good, but as is responded to on many a playground, poker table, and workplace when one guy talks tough and the other guy calls the bluff, "With what army?" Sometimes it shows wisdom to have the discretion to pick your battles. If McCain had been running the country we'd have had surges just like the Bush white house has done, just earlier (read that as soldiers even more tired) who would be unable to back up McCain's rhetoric.

Not even Viagra can help McCain or the impotent Bush administration address this issue. It just frustrates me that if the neocons hadn't tried to rule the world, overestimated the capabilities of the armed forces, and used force for the correct reason at the correct time, Russia wouldn't have the opportunity to even pull this mess. Not because we would pound them into the ground, but because we could. Or at least have the assets to coordinate sending U.N. troops from a horde of countries pretty quickly to at least be on the ground in a peacekeeping role.

Read more!

What Happens When Another Country's Leader is Smarter Than Ours

So Russia is now invading part of Georgia. Bush is condemning the Russian move, but he's doing nothing to stop them. He has ordered humanitarian aid dropped, so that's good. But why would Russia invade Georgia? Vlad Putin (more on my thoughts of why we are treating him like the leader later) calmly explained that like in Iraq, there was tyranny and a history of the current government systematically killing off a certain ethnic group, so force was needed to bring peace and security to the region for fear that violence could spread, hurting Russia's security on their side of the border. Wow, sounds a lot like Bush's case for invading Iraq except he didn't claim the country had stuff there that isn't.

Because of Bush's foolishness America is in a position where their military, already spread thin, is confronted with an attack on a democratic country and for all intents and purposes, is pretty impotent in stopping their "friend" from taking back countries that splintered off from Russia during the demise of the U.S.S.R. This is what you get when you treat a strong man of a big country like a friend despite warning signs that Russia was biding it's time and taking plays from the Neoconservatives like false flag wars, labeling any political opponents, groups, (or weak governments) as terrorists and the biggest warning sign of all when Putin didn't really step down, but named a successor who pretty much let's him remain the de facto president. Thanks Bush for rolling America back into the freaking cold war! /sarcasm off.

Maybe this is simpler than I'm making it out to be. Maybe, like the Iraq war, the invasion of Georgia is just a strategic land grab to control access to ever growing important resources, oil and natural gas.

Maybe it's simpler still. Putin back-stabbed Bush for power. Sad that Bush and the media still treats Putin like a legit leader while he's running a show with a puppet president who plays second fiddle as far as who Bush talks about when he's supposed to be talking to "the leader" of Russia. I thought Bush didn't engage/coddle/harbor/whatever other rhetorical big talk he's used to describe authoritarian dictators. Ever since the puppet guy's election, that is what Bush has done. Just watch the insipid interview he did with Bob Costas when asked about Russia. You'd still think Putin legitimately was the president of the country unless you listen carefully. We just have to wait and see how far up our country's ass his shoe is going to go I guess.

Worse yet, China may not talk much, but they are always paying attention. Think the Chinese may attempt to flex their muscles? How would they choose to do so? Economically since we owe them lotsa money. They could "liberate" Taiwan. Send another hit on the Tibetan monks to let them know who's boss. Probably a combination with a few suprises the Chinese have sat on.

I'm not done yet. If you're a conspiracy theory oriented person, (I know you're not, Puce), Bush could have asked or let this slide for on the down low, to scare on the fence voters to fall onto the McCain side. 'Terrorists really don't scare people like they used to. We need a new threat. I got it, resurrect the U.S.S.R. threat. We don't know all that much about them. They have nukes. g.o.p. really needs to win. Gotta do it.' The g.o.p. and this administration has been so deceitful that I really do consider some sort of arrangement not that far out there. War is the reason Bush got a second term.

Read more!

screwed up yet again

This blog is spiffily coded, but now, in experimenting and playing around with the other one while trying to fix this one I've smooshed all my sidebar items way way down :( Blogger is undergoing a scheduled outage and I can't access the Layout editor to try to fix it. I think it's code based anyways which I can get to, but wouldn't know where to begin...shoulda downloaded that code before I went about fooling with it hehe.. And here is the rest of it..not!. My next project is to re-introduce all the funky widgets where I want them. As you've probably noticed all my thingamabobs except for a links widget got smooshed down to the bottom of the page I think because the post section is wider leaving the sidebar narrower than before I renovated my code. In case you get a mac, Bizut, don't look at the dodgers blog in Safari, it looks terrible. I was horrified when I looked at it this morning. I don't think there's much of a fix for that except for coding in something to stop Safari from going to the extreme on the resizing and left-justification. Anyways, so it takes me way too long to learn that stuff, but I guess I shouldn't complain because I do have the time on my hands to research, fiddle with, and fix it to my liking :( I also would want to go weed out the code that shows the url's to the site I got the original template from. I wish the layout editor in blogger was better.

Read more!

Wow! That was a Pain

I had put off doing the "Read More" a.k.a. expandable posts because it really felt like blogger didn't like me. I copied my exact working template from my other blog where I'd implemented expandable posts but for whatever reason blogger ignored the code when I made this blog. It pissed me off and I eventually gave up. So today I wrote an absurdly long post on a time.com article that dealt with emails proclaiming Obama to be the anti-Christ. So stupid me tries to get expandable posting to work on this blog. Used the blogger help instructions but they are kinda confusing if you know nothing about your template and what kinda code it is. Read some more and went to other blogs discussing it; their instructions proved to be easier but somehow I'd angered the template-checking google whatever and it kept red flagging my code. Nothing in particular except to say bad code. I'm cutting and pasting how can I go wrong! Maybe it had to do with the outage on blogger. That's my best guess. After about 2 hours of cutting and pasting and ditching my old template for a blogger pre made one, and many many foul curses later I got the darn thing to work. And just because I know it works I'm going to leave the code hanging. So if you click the read more link, there will be nothing more except a bigScrew your sucky-fucky, blogger CSS editor, Google!

Read more!

Obama the Antichrist?

Here is the article which will lead me to the following rant.  It's from time.com.
A guy has a nice photoshopped picture of Obama on his discussion of the topic on his blog.

It make sense that some evangelicals (and many others that may not even be religious) that are overly interested in exactly when and how the world will end/second coming of Christ would over-interpret scripture and come to this possibility/conclusion. People have done many ignorant things over the 2,000+ years since the historical Jesus lived and the New Testament was written in the name of Christ (i.e. the crusades). Clinton was named the anti-christ in emails during his presidency. Conspiracy theorists have said most of the Bush family members are wrapped up in multiple conspiracies and secretly rule the world from some nebulous shadow governmental organization/old boy network/an alien reptilian shape shifters that came from inside the earth (not making that up, go check out some conspiracy sites).

It's ridiculous on it's face. It smacks of superstition. Even though this type of stuff has been attached to American Presidents going back to Ronald Reagan by people that are overly paranoid about the government, aliens, etc.; In this case it goes a little beyond. Underlying the attack is the entire he's a muslim not a christian and he's not white and therefore you shouldn't vote for him. It smacks of bigotry rationalized and underlying misinterpretation of biblical scripture. But it will affect a lot of people's decisions. It aims at the lowest common denominator deep down in people's hearts, which is what saddens me the most.

It's funny how the evangelical preachers have to constantly change how the future will unfold, which inevitably involves identifying where the anti-christ will come from and how he (or she) will act. Evangelical preachers have preached the end of the world from radio and television since the media were invented and backed it all up with the same quotes from Daniel, Luke, and Revelation and tie it in neatly to current world events. The happenings in the middle east, jewish people relocating to Israel, liberalization of social mores here in the U.S., any technological advances that remotely seemed to foreshadow big brother or a new world order, EU talks and unification were a big deal, globalization, and most natural disasters are popular fodder...it never ends, until some preacher happens to be accidently right some day.

Anyways, Jesus said, "You cannot tell by careful watching when the reign of God will come." (Luke 17:20). I think if you're Christian this quote speaks for itself without jumping around from Daniel, Revelation, Isaiah, and many other books to create a mish-mashed message tied into current events and then proclaim the end is nigh! I think quotes from the messiah's mouth suffice a lot better, if Christ is your thing.

Read more!

I Guess I Could Be Even More Annoyed

After a bit of sports reading, I go and update myself on CNN and see a new headline about our government keeping people in wooden crates with dimensions of 3x3x6. And George W. Bush has the moral high ground to talk down to the Chinese government about his "deep concerns" for China's human rights record how? Anyways I'm going to juxtapose the high value detainees-in-a-box story with his quotes to the Chinese government...

"America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists,"

But we're all for terrorists in cages and boxes--it's humane, extraordinary renditions to third party countries--we don't believe they'd be tortured there, water-boarding/enhanced interrogation techniques on high value detainees--but not torturing (that seems to me to be the new political version of 'I didn't inhale); oh and by the way, can you sell us more of those electronics and clothing made with child and prison labor? We'd also like it if you make sure our citizens can travel to your country to buy livers and kidneys from the thousands of political dissidents, human rights advocates, and religious activists you shot en masse then harvested their organs? No, we still don't wanna buy any brains so you can keep shooting them in the head. Thanks.

"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights -- not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," he said. "And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs, but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs."

And the Bush administration also feeds talking point propaganda and disinformation to that free press. The administration is even nice enough to pay old cronies that were too corrupt to not be fired and retired military to be talking heads on network and cable news programs. That's freer than free. Our government sends in agents to pose as demonstrators amongst true demonstrators and purposely start violence so that the police can beat down the protestors and end the demonstration. Labor laws and the rights to organize have been so eroded that walmart employees have to sit and watch videos on how bad and against their own interest organizing would be. If that's not enough, Walmart closes the store and fires everyone. Yep, we've realized the democratic freedoms outlined in the constitution and the bill of rights.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Let freedom Gong.

Read more!

Hillary Is Annoying Again

Dang the Clinton's suck butt. Can you imagine Hillary as a character actress? She just can't help but upstage and distract. She's like the fifth outfielder on a baseball team that constantly carps at the media that he needs to be starting on this team or traded. Sometimes you have to be a team player and do best in the role that you're given in life, not the one you wish you had.

If HIllary is so insincere in her support for Senator Obama that she instructs "her" supporters how to divide the upcoming convention by putting her name on the convention ballot, and putting out yet another statement about taking "her" delegates and lording them over Obama so that "her" delegates are respected, blah, blah, blah...and carping yet more about how Obama hasn't done enough to do more to retire "her" debt. I hope she's already eclipsed by whomever Obama chooses to be V.P. by the time Obama's second term comes to an end in 2016.

Which begs the question, what the heck does Hillary Clinton still want, and what else can Obama be expected to do so that "her" people that voted for her can feel respected to Hillary Clinton's satisfaction.

People are only physically capable of bending backwards so far. She needs to nag her husband for respect instead of Obama. She also needs to whore herself out giving speeches in foreign countries and pulling corrupt political strings instead of publicly shaking down Obama in the middle of "his" run for the president of the United States.

I can't believe this stuff is happening again. It annoys me to no end short of people still dying in Iraq needlessly and Bush being in office.

Read more!