Category Archives: News and Politics

Where’s George?

Anybody remember that President Bush guy? What’s he been up to?

Apparently not a lot.

You want to know the pathetic thing? The press hasn’t been up to much, either:

>To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren.

>[…]

>Four minutes after the scheduled start time for yesterday’s White House briefing, only 14 of the 49 seats were occupied… many of the nation’s leading news outlets left their chairs empty, among them National Public Radio, the Washington Times, the New York Daily News, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune and the Politico.

>[…]

>Reporters busied themselves with personal tasks: rubbing eyes, cleaning eyeglasses, reading the newspaper, fiddling with BlackBerrys or studying the blank pages of their notebooks. One of the deputy press secretaries, Gordon Johndroe, rested his chin in his hand. There was nothing left to be said — which was the cue for [radio host Lester] Kinsolving, who demanded to know Bush’s view on the disparity in pro-football eligibility for players from the military academies.

You’re doing a heck of a job, Washington Press Corps!

(Link via Hullabaloo.)

Micromanaging the Troops

Of all the things our representatives in Congress could be focusing on right now…

>[Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.] [at]

>”Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.

>His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of “sexually explicit material” on military bases.

(Via [Hullabaloo] [h1].)

I would have assumed it was more dishonorable to send our troops to live in [shoddy slum housing] [fo] (also via [Hullabaloo] [h2]), or to [oppose the expanded GI Bill] [abc].

Of course, as a member of Congress, Rep. Broun has a different perspective on things. Legislators enjoy any chance to introduce a bill that stimulates moral outrage yet accomplishes nothing significant. It gives them something to brag about, and stirs up the kind of fuzzy indignation that generates votes on the very far right, but doesn’t really rock the boat. Nothing unusual there. What’s appalling about this bill is the justification:

>Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations.

>But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved — “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.

Translation: these guys think that, because military pay come from taxes, they have the right to tell the troops how to spend it.

Now I’m wondering how soon it will be before everyday employers try the same thing–whether the big box stores and meatpacking plants of the world will claim the right to stick a finger in their employee’s personal finances, since, after all, that money is coming from corporate profits…

[h1]:
[h2]:
[at]:
[fo]:
[abc]: “"Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college."”

The Rich are Different From Other Suckers

I guess the guys sending out all those fake PayPal and eBay emails aren’t satisfied with the take they’re getting from the general public. According to the New York Times phishers are trolling for a bigger class of seafood. Some operation is specifically targeting the wealthy and powerful. What’s interesting is the tack they’re taking:

>Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

I guess these guys know their audience.

Truth in Editorial Interjections

Yesterday Tim Goeglein, a [special assistant to President Bush] [wp] who has essentially functioned as a political operative keeping right-wing activists in touch with the president, was caught [plagiarizing columns for his home-town newspaper] [nn].

This embarrassed everybody, and it wasn’t long before the President [“accepted his resignation”][wh].

Not long before his exposure Goeglein contributed a piece to [the National Review Online’s tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr] [nro]. What’s great about this is the byline:

>— Tim Goeglein is deputy director of the White House office of public liaison. [This has been corrected since posting. —Ed.]

It sure has, National Review Online!

[nn]:
[wp]:
[wh]:
[nro]:

George W. Bush: Art Lover

So apparently President Bush has a favorite painting. It’s buy an early 20th century illustrator named W. H. D. Koerner, titled _A Charge to Keep_. He says it shows one of the Methodist missionaries who travelled the American west during the 19th century.

According to Slate (and a book by Jacob Weisberg, apparently), he doesn’t *quite* have that correct:

>The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

(Seen via Pharyngula and Jeff VanderMeer.)

Bleak Friday

Thanksgiving takes a back seat to Black Friday these days. I’m not sure when this happened. Wikipedia cites a couple of articles that trace the term back to the seventies, but the only people using it were bus drivers and police in Philadelphia.

I don’t remember encountering the phrase “Black Friday” until sometime in the last decade… but one year–I no longer recall when–I started hearing it all over, and at the same time the shopping sprees seemed to get bigger and crazier. I wonder which way the cause and effect runs. Did the media discover a growing phenomenon, or did the audience see their stories and rush to join the herd?

In the last two days I’ve seen all the usual news stories. It’s the photos that disturb me… like the one attached to this story. Those expressions… the body language of these people, rushing into a mall as they would to a lover they hadn’t seen in years… that transcendent *joy*. For a midnight visit to a mall, a night of 20% discounts. Why? What are their lives like, that this is their great holiday experience?

This sad little detail crawled into my head and hasn’t let go:

At Best Buy on South Duff Avenue, shoppers draped around the building waiting for the store’s special 5 a.m. opening. Standing proudly at the front of the line was Iowa State University student Aaron Kulow and a couple of his friends who had been waiting outside the store for nearly 17 hours. Their goal was to get their hands on a few deeply discounted laptop computer packages and half-off GPS devices.

Kulow had only one thing to say as he bounced up and down to stay warm in the frigid temperature: “Yeah, it’s definitely worth it.”

Seventeen hours. If the store opened at five in the morning, that means he’d been standing outside since noon Thanksgiving day.

Unless his family has a grand old tradition of Thanksgiving breakfast–turkey sausage, scrambled egg casserole, cranberries on their cereal–this guy has no life.

Shouting for Privilege

(I posted about this earlier. Then I tried to write something a little longer. Then I forgot about it for a while. Here it is anyway.)

A couple of weeks ago (yes, this is a little late. I got distracted) the Senate invited a Hindu cleric to give their morning invocation. Apparently this was a big historic first-time thing, so of course somebody had to screw it up.

You can see the video here. The poor guy hasn’t even started when this droning half-zombie voice breaks in with a prayer to Jesus so mechanical that it must have erupted from some automatic place without passing through the speaker’s brain. And the sergeant at arms restores order in the Senate, and the chaplain starts his spiel, and another voice breaks in ranting, this time in the exact tone small children use for “Mom! I’m booooooorrrrrrred!


It’s amazing that they thought they could do this
; that standing up and shouting down a speaker in the Senate was in their clouded minds somehow the right and natural thing to do. This is the bald obliviousness to normal standards of behavior you’d expect from a severe Asperger’s sufferer. How did they get to this place in their heads?

Continue reading Shouting for Privilege