Bringing teh stupid does make us exceptional, indeed. No other political culture reveres ignorance detests intellect and respects anger like we do.

Did you watch the Pats play tonight? Edelmen is the new Wes Welker and Wes Welker will be back in a few weeks, BooYaa. Brady had an excellent first half, 2 TDs, 1 INT. Edelmen had a 75 yard TD punt return. Talking about football, time to go watch the second half. Looks like EW is too.

Who? You? he he.

Defense needs work. They put more pressure on the ball – passing and running – last year in the 3-4 than they did tonight in the 4-3 but I think they’ll get it figured out. One less backer to fill the whole, squeeze the cutback lane, and cover. I curious about what drove the change.

Parallel to the point you’re making here, I think the Town Hall meetings imbroglio going on across the country now have ripped open a scab in the body politic: It may be that most of the country has moved on, and is willing to accept a Black President, and gay marriage, but there is a Resistant Core that is terrified because their world is getting turned upside down.

During the Bush years, the Republicans stoked the fires of fear about National Security, teaching us to fear each other and Watch Out for “terrorists,” most of whom were expected to have brown skin and speak Middle Eastern languages.

Now that Bush is no longer in office, and we have a non-White President who campaigned on a platform of change, Republicans are stoking the fires of fear because circumstances have forced President Obama to tackle ten problems at once, each one knee-capped by the Bush administration. But the cumulative effect is to raise the prospect of wholesale change, upsetting the Status Quo and threatening the Domestic Security of the people who identified with the previous ruling class.

So the 25 percenters who still support Bush and Cheney are whipped into a paroxysm of fear for their National and Domestic Security, and the Town Hall meetings give them a platform to express all their fears.

Meanwhile, I heard the other day that the Secret Service is underfunded and is strained to the max providing security for the President. For example, IIRC, when Obama went to the baseball stadium to throw out the first pitch, there were no scanners at the entrance gates to make sure that no one was packing heat.

It will be a miracle if President Obama makes it through his presidential term(s) alive.

Bob in HI

Group W bench for Staton!

“Kid, I want
you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W …. NOW kid!!”

“What were you arrested for, kid?”
And I said, “Littering.” And they all moved away from me on the bench
there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I
said, “And creating a nuisance.” And they all came back, shook my hand,
and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the
bench.

–Arlo Guthrie

I’ll share this story here since it is sort of on-topic.

I hired a competent, well-equipped (all of his machinery looks brand-new and is perfectly maintained) tree service to remove a big tree from my front yard a few days ago. The owner-operator of this tree company is black.

My next-door neighbor, who also has a large fresh stump in his front yard, made a point of passing on a warning he had received from a friend of his, that this above-mentioned tree guy had been known to refill stump holes with rocky soil, so I should be on the lookout. Friendly neighborly advice you know.

So here’s the lesson: anybody who denies that racism is a (stong) factor is lying. Yes if it makes one feel better, it is often subconscious; that is, there are two conflicting emotions, a private one and a politically correct one, which I believe are mixed internally, allowing the individual to assure him/herself that he is doing the right thing while still keeping proper vigilance against danger. Or discomfort.

That stuff is buried deep inside and it is very difficult to flush out, so one covers it up.

Bob, this is what I tell people who I catch fantasizing about (or people who are fellow travelers of those who fantasize about) doing grievous bodily harm to Obama or any other non-Republican political figure:

Remember how we got the Great Society? Aka New Deal II?

That was when JFK got martyred in a city known to be a hotbed of right-wing racist extremism. The guy who took over for JFK turned out to be much more progressive than JFK ever was, much to the dismay of the right-wing nutjobs who’d put up all those “WANTED for TREASON” posters all over Dallas in the first weeks of November, 1963.

Remember how Bill Clinton got re-elected in 1996, two years after the Republicans — backed by a media that they or their arch-conservative financiers had increasingly bought up, bought off or scared off from honest reporting?

That happened when some of your buddies in a right-wing Michigan militia thought it would be a neat idea to murder 168 government employees and their children by blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Do you all really want to go for the trifecta here?

Why did the police not charge him with I don’t know conspiracy or something related to helping a crime immigration is still a crime right?
Why did they stretch the protecting wildlife laws and make this political prosecution look like an attempt to grab whatever straw they could?
I mean leaving water in the desert if plastic is so bad give him a warning and insist he use glass next time.
This prosecution just smells of desperate.

I don’t object to the water, but the plastic jugs are a problem

this is one of those “sticky wickets”

I don’t want people to die

but I don’t want a bunch of trash in the wilderness

our immigration policy has to be reformed for more than just humanitarian reasons

and now the government wants to “secure” the northern border too

one clusterfuck, coming up …

Earlier today, I posted this at a military vets website. Enjoy.

My ‘normative’ Friday Vent

In an op-ed piece [titled, “Progress Over Perfection”] in the Washington Post of today, Paul Begala, a political operative in the Clinton administration had this to say, by way of an analogy to today’s health care debate and relative to the history of the progressive legislation for Social Security, and thusly, I make mention of this ‘context’ since I feel it’s required for an accurate understanding.

“No self-respective liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers—a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of non-profits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.”
Obviously, the ‘point’ of all this is his Argumentation for the progressive view for moving change forward in smaller increments. And if not, it will be the 1990’s all over again.

However, Begala fails to note that for historical purposes, Social Security has no purpose in this debate. If it did, he would not have started the above paragraph ‘preaching’ to America’s diversity. Thus, he’s conveniently tossing in the Democrats’ version of the ‘race card’ and that shuts down my open-mindedness to what he has to say. But then, he wasn’t writing to me, but to a much larger audience with his overall and historical tendency and which is to influence the “influencers” located in our nation’s capitol. As such, those of us residing in the hinterlands of America need not concern ourselves.

And Begala goes on to add this:

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps, all those things. But it was also a start.”

Perhaps, he is talking to me? If so, I am listening, but he is not “listening” to me or “hearing” me when I suggest and advocate that Universal Health Care should be delivered via the Indian Health Services or the Veterans Administration. And in my context, Begala has mindlessly forgotten that the ‘public option’ for which he is attempting to argue in favor of, and yet, which has no Honor or Equality embedded in the legislation. In this modern age, carefully crafted legislation must empower the individual, and if not, we must accept our responsibility for having ‘dis-empowered’ our progeny. Consequently, legislation that continues to perpetuate the inevitable surcease of either the insurance industry or the employer, should have no place in a society that has a well-recognized history for government successes in such programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and inclusive of SCHIPs and which is a program that defines and delivers medical care to children residing in low-income households. Therefore, a job loss simply means more than the loss of medical care for the employee and the affected family, but leading to an eventual bankruptcy.

And that is why Paul Begala is indeed wrong and his propensity for being shortsighted when he articulates his “progressive” idea is not nice to see, as seen by my rudimentary lights. I, on the other hand, argue for both the long term and to include true ‘equality’, especially when the recipient has to stand in line at the admitting desk at any facility operated and managed by Native Americans. And perhaps this too will lead to even more change when we come to acknowledge that the Rez is a simplified Third World Economy inside a First World Nation. And you too can see, Paul Begala can’t or won’t go down this road, but I will. And that’s the ‘difference’ between the aggressive-moderate–myself, and the progressive–Begala. Or is that neo-liberal now?

In this similar vein, Begala is content with revisiting the past glories while I am wanting to create tomorrow’s history today. He will settle for the lesser while I will reach higher for the ‘newer’ and the ‘better’. And since we are both members of the same political coalition, I know that I will be continuing my advocacy, and he may, ultimately, win—for today.

Jaango