Score one for pro-small (but effective) government conservatives!
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
DADT Repealed At Last! Credits Where They Are Due...
It's been a long time coming, but that disgrace of a law known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell that has served as a cover for unfair discrimination against gays serving in the US military is finally repealed today. Looking back on it I am intrigued... The USA started out blazing the way toward valuation of fair play for all against the then prevalence of religious dictatorships (along with dictatorships that were using religions as cover for their oppression). Nowadays we are lagging behind other developed countries who are too busy fixing real pressing problems to indulge in nosing into and passing judgment on what some of their soldiers (and citizens in general) do in their private romantic lives.
There remain some who still endorse this anti-gay policy, indeed, claiming that allowing gay soldiers to not have to hide who they are (and giving free pass for anti-gays snitching to uproot career of good gay soldiers who aren't that interested in showing off their gayhood to begin with) will "destroy unit cohesion". To which I say, 'O ye of little faith. Just because you lots can't handle your own sexual bias doesn't mean that the rest of us can't! I have a lot more faith in the sensibility of the average American soldiers than you do. They have slept beside their gay brothers in arm under the pings of enemy bullets for years. I bet most of them even know which brothers and sisters are gay and which aren't and don't need additional drama some misguided overly religious folks insist on throwing their way'.
So here a little celebratory number for the now much more wholesome US armed force... Did you know this thing is taken from an opera?
"Well, now, my bumblebee, go on a spree,
catch up with the ship on the sea,
go down secretly,
get deep into a crack.
Good luck, Gvidon, fly,
only do not stay long!"
- from Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov's Legend of Tsar Saltan.
Translation taken from wikipedia.
Prince Gvidon was sent into exile by a trick, but thanks to the Swan Bird (who sings this tune), he is temporarily transformed into a bumblebee so that he could go back home and visit his father, the Tsar Saltan, albeit incognito.
And giving credits where they are due... I must admit that like many others, I've thought Barack Obama a lot less principled and a lot more political than he apparently is. What can I say? The man is smarter than I am and even more patient. And I have undoubtedly suffered a bit from the prevalent American disease of 'I want this and this, and I want them NOW because I don't want to wait for them to be done properly syndrome'. It is a really nasty mental condition since it serves up unrealistic expectations while tending to gloss over the difficulties involved in the process of getting all those stuff done. With the feverishly partisan news reporting of recent years, it is easy to lose perspectives and forget to check for real status on things.
When Obama took office in January 2009 folks left, right, and middle agreed that our economy was heading for a catastrophic collapse on the scale of the 1929 - 1939 Great Depression. Republicans and Democrats alike predicted that the economy wouldn't even begin to recover for many years, and there wasn't much of an end in sight for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... and anyone who actually thought that healthcare reform could actually happen was likely way overly optimistic near the point of being delusional. Nearly two years later, much of those were done, and the much maligned stimulus (started under George W Bush and continued under Obama) has actually saved the economy (it didn't collapse. We still have a banking system, the auto-manufacturing industry, and the economy is actually on the upward slope again. Not as steep a slope as we'd wish for, but it is pointing up instead of down the way EVERYONE predicted it to still be doing by the end of 2010) and TARP, the 'bank bailout' is even projected to turn profit for the taxpayers!
Sure, things could be better, but they could also be a lot worse. And the truth of the matter is, they are verifiably a lot better than they were projected to be two years ago. Sometimes it pays to make sure that one's expectation doesn't keep upgrading itself to the point where no good deed can go unpunished...
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Price of Commercialized Journalism?
Real life is not a zero sum game... no matter how some people like to make it out to be for the sake of getting TV rating (and the ads-selling money that comes with it). The problem of course... is that a whole lot of people here keep buying the scam just because the scammers are labeling themselves as 'conservatives'.
If Fox News fooled you once, shame on them. Any repetition of the same sort of being fooled by the same so-called news organization, however, is an indictment on... you.
Rachel Maddow is to the left of me politically, but I'll buy her a drink anytime. You may disagree with her politics, but you can't deny that the lass is an honest journalist.
If Fox News fooled you once, shame on them. Any repetition of the same sort of being fooled by the same so-called news organization, however, is an indictment on... you.
Rachel Maddow is to the left of me politically, but I'll buy her a drink anytime. You may disagree with her politics, but you can't deny that the lass is an honest journalist.
For good measure...
Added 2 Aug 2010:
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Voluntarily Bloody Thailand?
Yet another round of political protest in Bangkok, Thailand. This one by the 'Red Shirts' supporters of deposed ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra (a billionaire telecommunication tycoon with good - if corrupted - economic record but lousy international relation and much to blame for pushing the minority Southern Muslims into uprisings that led to a slew of bombings a few years back) who want the current moderate Democrats (that's the name of the party there, but in policy it is more conservative and comparable to what the American Republican Party used to be... before it was usurped by the neo-cons into today's religious-fanaticism-ish party) ruling party to dissolve itself and hold another (sure to be) dysfunctional election.
If you haven't been following the political unrest in what used to be peaceful Thailand, BBC News has a good set of fact sheets to help you catch up.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Those who actually live there can analyze the political situation better than I could even try. Watching what's being done in this protest, though, with the voluntary shedding of blood in order to splash it around the government building's gate and such... I have to wonder just how much of a public health problem it is for the biohazard material (human blood... after all, according to WHO statistic of 2005, 1.14% of all Thais age 15 or older are HIV positive) to be spread around in public places like that. Check out Avert.org's educational stats page if you wonder about what the statistics mean.If you haven't been following the political unrest in what used to be peaceful Thailand, BBC News has a good set of fact sheets to help you catch up.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
One (Any)Man, One Vote...Still The Best Of Lousy Options
To be honest, being mindful of the troubling implications of what Leo Szilard meant when he wrote;
I'd think it might still be a viable idea if the 'test' is standardized and only tests the most basic concepts of government (rather than being so specialized that only a law professor would have a prayer at passing it)... And that it is applied to everyone.
But then again... there are sick and old people and working people who haven't the time to keep up to date on their civvies (hardly the sort of knowledge used in everyday life for most people). They would be at a disadvantage at passing this hardly necessary test. The potential for abuse is so great that it is another one of Pandora's boxes (akin to the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited political campaign spending by corporation) not worth opening, in my opinion.
"Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?" (The Voice of the Dolphins)I did like the idea of making people pass a civic test before being able to vote... That was until I saw this.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I'd think it might still be a viable idea if the 'test' is standardized and only tests the most basic concepts of government (rather than being so specialized that only a law professor would have a prayer at passing it)... And that it is applied to everyone.
But then again... there are sick and old people and working people who haven't the time to keep up to date on their civvies (hardly the sort of knowledge used in everyday life for most people). They would be at a disadvantage at passing this hardly necessary test. The potential for abuse is so great that it is another one of Pandora's boxes (akin to the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited political campaign spending by corporation) not worth opening, in my opinion.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Factual Fiction?
About the only thing Dick Cheney did really well by me when he was Vice President was his endorsement of Factcheck.org as a premiere non-partisan fact-checker of what nonsense politicians try to blow by us. I still think the best thing for everyone is for each of us to read up on all the bills and other topics we want to pipe up about for ourselves, but then many just haven't got the time. Factcheck.org and Snopes.com are my favorite places to run rumors and other smelly propaganda emails by to screen out BS from facts.
If only people like Congressman Wilson and his fact-deficient disciples would do the same, then perhaps they wouldn't spend so much of their time making fools of themselves on national television...
But then... are these folks really interested in actually knowing what they are talking about before talking about it? If they are, then perhaps I (and many of my friends) wouldn't keep getting fact-free propaganda emails that claim that Obama is an illegal alien who's trying to turn the country into pre-WWII Germany while plotting to euthanize all geriatrics and brainwash all grade school kids, would I? And these loonies are even trying to pack loaded guns into his town hall meetings now. Just how crazy must their leaders sound before the flock realize the blatant senselessness of it all?
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
But then... are these folks really interested in actually knowing what they are talking about before talking about it? If they are, then perhaps I (and many of my friends) wouldn't keep getting fact-free propaganda emails that claim that Obama is an illegal alien who's trying to turn the country into pre-WWII Germany while plotting to euthanize all geriatrics and brainwash all grade school kids, would I? And these loonies are even trying to pack loaded guns into his town hall meetings now. Just how crazy must their leaders sound before the flock realize the blatant senselessness of it all?
Saturday, June 20, 2009
The 3rd Week of June 2009
An eventful week this was... elsewhere. Here, we've been having a sleepy little week with a bunch of indecisive clouds that hover around wanting to drop us some rain, but somehow can't seem to find a suitable landing place for their watery cargo.
The dominant news of the week is, of course, the presidential election in Iran... What do you know? Most of the news anchors are actually pronouncing the country's name right (short E-raan rather than Ai-raan). The weird thing, though, is that many of these same anchors are still going on mis-pronouncing Iraq (they say Ai-raak rather than the correct short E-raak)... And we've been stuck there since 2003... What's with that, ay?
Anyhow... There doesn't seem to be a large community of Iranians here in downtown. No demonstration so far (I think a group did show up to demonstrate a little by the Schwarz Federal Courthouse earlier in the week, but there hasn't been anything since). I'm quite impressed with the coolheadedness of Barack Obama... And I'm utterly exasperated by the republican talking heads and politicians who came out calling for a hard-line response to the Iranian government since the day after the election. These big-mouthed neo-con republicans didn't even have the decency (and brain) to wait a few days to allow time to process information properly before drawing their typically invalid conclusions.
This is most ridiculous considering all the lessons they should have learned just by reading the foreign news in the last year. Remember how Thailand had 2 major demonstrations that stemmed from discontent over their election results just last year and how that turned out to be an internal political war between their own intelligentsia class in the cities and the poorer folks in the countryside? Remember just how exactly we got duped into invading Iraq even though it didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and didn't have any stockpile of WMD? It doesn't pay to jump into other people's business before you've found out what the deal really is. If a riot had broken out in New York City after an election here, would we Americans have been happy to hear the Iranian leader mouthing off about it or offering to 'help'? or even a Brit PM? Of course not! We'd all likely just tell them to, you know, go be fruitful and multiply themselves (joke shamelessly stolen from Michael Shermer)! This battle is for the Iranians to win or lose. Not us.
So... a kudos to you, Mr. Obama... You suck when it comes to protecting basic rights for gay Americans, but on this foreign relation front, you're the man!
And just where the heck are the leaders of the Green Party and the Libertarians? We need a third party here! I'm too disgusted with the fanatic right-winger republicans and I don't want the democrats to have a monopoly. If you slow slugs don't step up to offer a valid and reasoned check to keep the democrats honest now, when the heck will another chance like this come up for you?
Anyway.... people are getting hurt in Tehran at the moment. Hang tough, Iranians. If any folks have the resilience necessary to deal with the current tumult, though, I'll bet on you Persians... You've been around for ages.
(The replica plaque of Cyrus' proclamation above is located in front of the House of Iran in Balboa Park, San Diego, CA, USA)
The dominant news of the week is, of course, the presidential election in Iran... What do you know? Most of the news anchors are actually pronouncing the country's name right (short E-raan rather than Ai-raan). The weird thing, though, is that many of these same anchors are still going on mis-pronouncing Iraq (they say Ai-raak rather than the correct short E-raak)... And we've been stuck there since 2003... What's with that, ay?
Anyhow... There doesn't seem to be a large community of Iranians here in downtown. No demonstration so far (I think a group did show up to demonstrate a little by the Schwarz Federal Courthouse earlier in the week, but there hasn't been anything since). I'm quite impressed with the coolheadedness of Barack Obama... And I'm utterly exasperated by the republican talking heads and politicians who came out calling for a hard-line response to the Iranian government since the day after the election. These big-mouthed neo-con republicans didn't even have the decency (and brain) to wait a few days to allow time to process information properly before drawing their typically invalid conclusions.This is most ridiculous considering all the lessons they should have learned just by reading the foreign news in the last year. Remember how Thailand had 2 major demonstrations that stemmed from discontent over their election results just last year and how that turned out to be an internal political war between their own intelligentsia class in the cities and the poorer folks in the countryside? Remember just how exactly we got duped into invading Iraq even though it didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and didn't have any stockpile of WMD? It doesn't pay to jump into other people's business before you've found out what the deal really is. If a riot had broken out in New York City after an election here, would we Americans have been happy to hear the Iranian leader mouthing off about it or offering to 'help'? or even a Brit PM? Of course not! We'd all likely just tell them to, you know, go be fruitful and multiply themselves (joke shamelessly stolen from Michael Shermer)! This battle is for the Iranians to win or lose. Not us.
So... a kudos to you, Mr. Obama... You suck when it comes to protecting basic rights for gay Americans, but on this foreign relation front, you're the man!
And just where the heck are the leaders of the Green Party and the Libertarians? We need a third party here! I'm too disgusted with the fanatic right-winger republicans and I don't want the democrats to have a monopoly. If you slow slugs don't step up to offer a valid and reasoned check to keep the democrats honest now, when the heck will another chance like this come up for you?
Anyway.... people are getting hurt in Tehran at the moment. Hang tough, Iranians. If any folks have the resilience necessary to deal with the current tumult, though, I'll bet on you Persians... You've been around for ages.
(The replica plaque of Cyrus' proclamation above is located in front of the House of Iran in Balboa Park, San Diego, CA, USA)
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day 2009
A few shots from Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery in Point Loma, the southward jutting peninsula that separates the San Diego Bay from the Pacific Ocean.
The news at the end of last week, of course, was full of the competing speeches of President Obama and Dick Cheney, who still insists on advocating waterboarding terrorism suspects (not convicts, mind you, suspects!) and that that is not torture. That egoistical sadist ought to put his money where his mouth is and have himself waterboarded to get the taste of what he is wishing on others (who have not been proven guilty of anything). Especially, seeing how a bit of real experience can really make some talkative naysayers do a 180 turn in a flash when it comes to whether waterboarding is torture or not (the libertarian Christopher Hitchen had done it, the conservative radio head Erich Mancow Muller had done it, isn't it about time Cheney does it?).
How many of the vets entombed at cemeteries like Ft. Rosecrans had had to endure torture in the line of duty because the people they were fighting against can hide behind the excuse of retaliation against our own use of it? How many of them died in combat believing that the US has the moral high ground when it comes to torture? And that we do know the difference between justice and vengeance (and care more about getting the right perpetrators of crime rather than just getting a neck to hang the charge on regardless of whether it is the right neck or not)?
And for Cheney, who has never served a day in the military, to go around doubting the honor and loyalty of someone like General Colin Powell, the non-diva-like guy who served 3 distinguished tours in Vietnam and, with one big spot when he worked for Bush 43 and Cheney, has always done his best for the men and women in uniform, is a travesty. And that there are people who would take Cheney's utterly unreliable words (how many lies has he told while looking straight into the camera already?) over Powell's is sheer madness. Beware of people who loudly demand loyalty at street corners like a bunch of scribes and pharisees... They are the ones who don't get it that it isn't enough to ask someone 'are you loyal?' without clarifying 'loyal to WHAT? Country or You? I have no doubt about where General Powell's loyalty lies. I have plenty about Dick Cheney's... Too often have he and his stooges prioritized their own political agendas over the best interest of the country and the troops!
The news at the end of last week, of course, was full of the competing speeches of President Obama and Dick Cheney, who still insists on advocating waterboarding terrorism suspects (not convicts, mind you, suspects!) and that that is not torture. That egoistical sadist ought to put his money where his mouth is and have himself waterboarded to get the taste of what he is wishing on others (who have not been proven guilty of anything). Especially, seeing how a bit of real experience can really make some talkative naysayers do a 180 turn in a flash when it comes to whether waterboarding is torture or not (the libertarian Christopher Hitchen had done it, the conservative radio head Erich Mancow Muller had done it, isn't it about time Cheney does it?).
How many of the vets entombed at cemeteries like Ft. Rosecrans had had to endure torture in the line of duty because the people they were fighting against can hide behind the excuse of retaliation against our own use of it? How many of them died in combat believing that the US has the moral high ground when it comes to torture? And that we do know the difference between justice and vengeance (and care more about getting the right perpetrators of crime rather than just getting a neck to hang the charge on regardless of whether it is the right neck or not)?
And for Cheney, who has never served a day in the military, to go around doubting the honor and loyalty of someone like General Colin Powell, the non-diva-like guy who served 3 distinguished tours in Vietnam and, with one big spot when he worked for Bush 43 and Cheney, has always done his best for the men and women in uniform, is a travesty. And that there are people who would take Cheney's utterly unreliable words (how many lies has he told while looking straight into the camera already?) over Powell's is sheer madness. Beware of people who loudly demand loyalty at street corners like a bunch of scribes and pharisees... They are the ones who don't get it that it isn't enough to ask someone 'are you loyal?' without clarifying 'loyal to WHAT? Country or You? I have no doubt about where General Powell's loyalty lies. I have plenty about Dick Cheney's... Too often have he and his stooges prioritized their own political agendas over the best interest of the country and the troops!
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tea At Low Noon
By the way, on this Tax Day 2009 a bunch of folks went about tea-bagging in protest of just about all things Barack Obama. I hope all these protesters are rich whiners who are making $250,000 per year or more since if you make less than that you are actually getting a tax cut from this administration (though apparently when your only source of ‘news’ is that disgusting cable tv channel by the name of FOX, then you can be fooled into believing in any wacky things like ‘Obama is a Marxist’ or ‘Obama is a non-American Kenyan’ or ‘Obama is imposing more tax on you’ or ‘Obama is a communist’, etc, etc, etc... Even when it is demonstrably NOT true).
To tell the truth, had I been presented with the choice between Obama and Hillary Clinton on Election Day last November I would have chosen the latter... And that would have been the wrong choice. Like him or not, the dude has proven impressively cool-headed and sure-handed... even when the economy was crumbling all around him while the sore-losers GOP were (and are still) stuck in the ‘you can listen to us all you want but we’ll pretend that you haven’t even tried to hear us anyway’ vote-no-on-everything mode.
If I have to classify myself into a political party it’ll still be libertarian - though I’ll never go for anarchy. Not wanting the government to interfere with personal freedom is one thing. Getting rid of it altogether is quite another. And if you’re gonna keep a government around to provide the infrastructure and stability, then you’ve gotta pay for its service via tax!
And just what the hell is this idiotic cry for a spending freeze right in the middle of a big recession anyhow? If the rich folks stop spending their money on their boats, what will happen to the marine carpenters and mechanics? To the ship builders and people who work in the marinas where the yachts are kept and maintained? To the restaurants and other businesses that draw their business from the boaters? If people stop going to concerts and to see performance arts, then what will happen to the skilled artists? Theater staff? Recording companies? Artist agents? Businesses and restaurants around the concert halls and museums?
No spending means no customers to the small businesses. No customer means no money and that only leads to laying off jobs and no hiring... which, of course, leads to more unemployed people on the street and fewer people who can afford to spend the money that'll keep businesses going! People who have money to spare need to keep spending it NOW and not the other way around. Else, we’ll never get out of this vicious cycle that turned the 1929 recession into the Great Depression that lasted a whole decade! Did you right wing fundamentalists not pay attention in that Econ 101 class in college or what!?!
There used to be a time when I had more respect for the republican party than I did the democrat. Now they suck like a stuck vacuum!
To tell the truth, had I been presented with the choice between Obama and Hillary Clinton on Election Day last November I would have chosen the latter... And that would have been the wrong choice. Like him or not, the dude has proven impressively cool-headed and sure-handed... even when the economy was crumbling all around him while the sore-losers GOP were (and are still) stuck in the ‘you can listen to us all you want but we’ll pretend that you haven’t even tried to hear us anyway’ vote-no-on-everything mode.If I have to classify myself into a political party it’ll still be libertarian - though I’ll never go for anarchy. Not wanting the government to interfere with personal freedom is one thing. Getting rid of it altogether is quite another. And if you’re gonna keep a government around to provide the infrastructure and stability, then you’ve gotta pay for its service via tax!
And just what the hell is this idiotic cry for a spending freeze right in the middle of a big recession anyhow? If the rich folks stop spending their money on their boats, what will happen to the marine carpenters and mechanics? To the ship builders and people who work in the marinas where the yachts are kept and maintained? To the restaurants and other businesses that draw their business from the boaters? If people stop going to concerts and to see performance arts, then what will happen to the skilled artists? Theater staff? Recording companies? Artist agents? Businesses and restaurants around the concert halls and museums?
No spending means no customers to the small businesses. No customer means no money and that only leads to laying off jobs and no hiring... which, of course, leads to more unemployed people on the street and fewer people who can afford to spend the money that'll keep businesses going! People who have money to spare need to keep spending it NOW and not the other way around. Else, we’ll never get out of this vicious cycle that turned the 1929 recession into the Great Depression that lasted a whole decade! Did you right wing fundamentalists not pay attention in that Econ 101 class in college or what!?!There used to be a time when I had more respect for the republican party than I did the democrat. Now they suck like a stuck vacuum!
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