Web Log Archive, October 29th through November 11th, 2006

Saturday, November 11th, 2006                The 88th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I

I do not share the righteous rage of my neighbors concerning 'illegal aliens' and I do not point this out to be self-congratulatory. To the contrary, I wonder if, perhaps, something has been lost on me and I should feel threatened by this well-documented glut of un-documented non-English-speaking "freeloaders"!
I have received more than a few chain-letter type e-mailings urging me to be indignant if I'm asked to press '1' for "instructions in English".
I am regularly exhorted to feel impatient and resentful if I even suspect that a non-citizen is benefiting from food stamps...or (gasp, even) Social Security. While "the possible 'illegal' alien in front of her at the grocery store buys the name brands, my Mom goes for the generic brands, and day-old breads" rants the author of a note I received just yesterday morning. What inspires this xenophobic mindset? Would I share it if I lived closer to the border?

Friday, November 10th, 2006

"Republicans should feel relieved: Considering that in November 1942, 11 months after war was thrust upon America, President Franklin Roosevelt's party lost 45 House and nine Senate seats (there were then just 96 senators), Tuesday's losses were not excessive punishment for the party that has presided over what is arguably the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history." George Will

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

This is the NYT's 'Times Select Free Week' and so you get to read columns by some of our country's best writers without having to part with $50 a year. Today's offering by Maureen Dowd is worth a click. Here's an excerpt:

'In a scene that might be called “Murder on the Oval Express,” Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it’s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington’s most skilled infighter. (Poppy? Scowcroft? Baker? Laura? Condi? The Silver Fox? Retired generals? Serving generals? Future generals? Troops returning to Iraq for the umpteenth time without a decent strategy? Democrats? Republicans? Joe Lieberman?)'

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Q: With all due respect, Nancy Pelosi has called you incompetent, a liar, the emperor with no clothes, and as recently as yesterday, dangerous. How will you work with someone who has such little respect for your leadership and who is third in line to the presidency?
A: This isn't my first rodeo. This is not the first time I've been in a campaign where people have expressed themselves...in different kinds of ways.

Q: Are you worried that you won't be able to work with the Democrats, or do you feel like you have to prevail upon them your viewpoint?
A: Look, people that's (sic) going to be looking at this election, the enemy's going to say, 'Well, it must mean America's going to leave'. And the answer is no, that doesn't (sic) what it means. From Presidential News Conference

Outing: Did you know that Ken Mehlman is gay? Wow!

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006             Election Day

New initialism: 'RINO'='Republican In Name Only'.

Monday, November 6th, 2006             Happy Birthday, Lin!

OK, so, tomorrow's Election Day and my long-awaited advice is that if you're planning to vote for any Republicans, then you should stay home. I know Angelides is funny-looking but so am I and I'm gonna vote for him even though I know that California Republicans bankrolled his successful Primary campaign. We pinkos must neither forget nor forgive that Schwarzenegger once stumped for Bush in Ohio (although I recognize that the fact of his governorship has an up side: Maria ain't been doin' no newscasts).

As for the 'Measures'...the 'Initiatives'...the 'Propositions': vote NO on each one! They're a ham-fisted way to make laws! Now...if (and only if) a Proposition also happens to be a 'Bond Measure' (meaning that it will empower the government to borrow money targeted to a defined project), then it it should be considered. This year, for example, there are five Bond Measures: 1B through 1E and Proposition 84. I plan to vote YES on each of these. I particularly like 1B, because it seeks to raise money for, among other highway projects, a fourth Caldecott Tunnel bore through which even more poor slobs can get to beep and creep between their domiciles and their places of employment.

For a succulent example of success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan, the current content of VanityFair.com is not to be missed.

Sunday, November 5th, 2006              Happy Birthday, Mom!

"...the President’s listeners seem to revel in the distortions, celebrating with shouts of “USA! USA!” and responding on cue when Bush has them mock the Democrats. Some appearances have a Lord of the Flies quality, as excited Republicans rally around their strong man hailing his pronouncements even when they make little or no sense, or when they celebrate the misjudgments that led to the disaster in Iraq." Robert Parry

"The only way we can win is if we leave before the job is done...I mean, the only way we can lose is if we leave before the job is done!"
  POTUS, 11/3/06, at a Victory Rally in Greeley, Colorado

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

Courtesy of my Big Brother, here are a few lines from In One Era & Out the Other, by Sam Levenson (1911-1980):

"Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll find it."
"If you want to know how your fiancé will treat you after marriage, just listen to her talking to her little brother."
"I'll admit that my wife is outspoken...but by whom?"
"Our toaster works on either AC or DC, but not on bread. It has two settings: too soon or too late."

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Here's a human interest story fresh from our local fish wrap...and I'm not making this up!

Naked man arrested after pulling awl from rectum 

Seems they were trying to reason with him and were about to let him go, when he went for it! "Put your hands where we can see them!"
Yup, he was arrested for having a concealed weapon.

"Great Minds Think Alike", as my daughter used to say, and so I knew that my reaction to Kerry's 'botched joke' (even as I slide into dementia) could not be unique. ;-) Over the last few days there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of commentaries written on this subject; a fair fraction of these makes the point that, looking past Kerry's manifold and manifest ineptitudes as a politician/comedian...and taking his comments for how they read and sound (not for how they were meant to read and sound), he (quite unintentionally, I'm sure) spoke the truth.
From a well-constructed op-ed piece by Rosa Brooks in today's Los Angeles Times, some excerpts:

"If those grunts were half as smart as members of Congress, they'd be on Capitol Hill getting sucked up to by lobbyists instead of sucking up dust in Baghdad's bloody alleys — right? Most of our current political leaders didn't waste any time serving in the military. Like Vice President Dick Cheney, they had "other priorities." As recently as 1994, 44% of members of Congress were veterans. Today, it's only 26%. And despite the mandatory "I adore our heroic troops" rhetoric, most on Capitol Hill aren't steering their own children toward military service. Only about 1% of U.S. representatives and senators have a son or daughter in uniform. For many in Congress, serving in the military is a fine thing to do — for all those poor schmoes who don't have any better options, that is.
And though the average member of the military is neither poor nor uneducated, social and economic elites are dramatically underrepresented in the military. Military recruiters don't even bother to recruit in affluent neighborhoods: They know no one's going to sign up. At elite universities — Harvard, Stanford and Yale, for instance — the percentage of graduates who enter the military is minuscule. [But] a democracy needs a military that's not radically out of step with the values and hopes of civilians; and those who volunteer to risk their lives in our name deserve civilian leaders who understand something about the realities of service and combat."

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

A fascinating statistic, assuming it can be trusted, is the rise in human life expectancy over the last few hundred years but especially over the last century. In 1915, the average lifespan in the United States was only 54 years and, going back a bit farther, to the 1840's, "the longest-living people in the world were women in Sweden, and they lived an average of 45 years. Today, the average lifespan...in the U.S. is [about] 78."

The source for these numbers is Daniel Perry of the Alliance For Aging Research in Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

OK, so it was probably stupid and clumsy of Kerry to say "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." He later called these comments a 'botched joke' but, by any measure, it was not a politic thing to say...because it happens to be uncomfortably true! Now, one can nibble around the edges and insist that more than a few scholarly types do choose a career in the military. There's West Point and there's Annapolis and there's the Air Force Academy. Fair enough. But with our volunteer Army, this much can't be argued: most join up because they are either unwilling or unable to enter college after high school. It's also true that most kids who signed up in the last, say, six years, did not anticipate being sent off to fight a war to which there does not appear to be an end. So yes, many kids who declined (or deferred) their post-secondary education, are now 'stuck in Iraq'. 

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006               Halloween: the 80th Anniversary of the Death of Harry Houdini

"Never in modern history has the solution to one problem resulted in the creation of so many larger problems, especially since the initial "problem", Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, turned out to be non-existent.
The pressures on Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are now immense. The sheer scale of the bloodshed and chaos their invasion unleashed - coupled with the dissembling that preceded it - has undermined their credibility and destroyed their popularity.
Both leaders know (though they cannot admit) that, short of their committing every available soldier and turning Iraq into an occupied state like post-war Germany, events are largely beyond their control. Both want nothing more than to extricate themselves from the crisis. Their goal must be, somehow, to declare "victory" and bring the troops home - a retreat camouflaged by some fig-leaf of achievement."
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, U.K.

"The test must now be studied on many more people to make sure it's as accurate as it appears. But the test raises the question of whether people really want to know if they are likely to develop a devastating disease for which there is no cure."

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Monday, March 5th, 1990: "He was telling the group how the campaign picture of Michael Dukakis in a tank had made the candidate look like Rocky the Flying Squirrel when his left foot began to shake uncontrollably. Lee stared at his leg as everyone in the room looked at him in silence. The twitch moved up the left side of his body. Lee clutched the right side of the lectern, shook his head violently, and an involuntary scream came out of him, Yaaahhhhh! Blake and John (RNC 'advance men') looked at each other, thinking for a moment that it might be a cowboy yell for effect. By the time [everyone] realized it was pain, Lee had collapsed. '"Help me! Somebody help me!' "

From Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater (1951-1991), by John Bradley, 1997

Sunday, October 29th, 2006               Happy Birthday, Joe!

The night before last I learned that 'non-plussed' means 'puzzled'. Having been an English speaker for most of my life, I did then assume that 'plussed' must mean 'not-puzzled'. But silly me! There's no such word as 'plussed'! And, yes, that's puzzling! Turns out that 'non-plussed' is derived from a Latin phrase meaning 'no more'. 

Current Blog