A Rare Victory for the Citizenry

Some may call it a victory for gun owners, but that would be imprecise. Gun owners may or may not benefit from a proper interpretation of the Second Amendment, depending upon their own intentions (and legality) in owning guns. That subgroup aside, it is clearly beneficial to all citizens that to keep and bear arms is recognized as an individual right, which can be abridged only when individuals, through their own actions, lose that right through due process of law.

What's really cool is that this ruling came down from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a body that has done its part at times to give liberalism a bad name. Perhaps this liberal ruling augurs a rational turning of the tide.

Aren't We Done With These Kinds Of People Yet?

What I don't get is why anyone would vote for this asshole and yet his candidacy announcement is big news.

He may be a smart guy. He may have done some good things. I don't know. I don't care. Success in politics is about managing impressions and my impression of Gavin Newsom is of a cheating rabble-rouser with scary teeth and car-salesman hair and about all the sincerity of a plastic fart.

The Times Can Suck My Ass

I almost stopped blogging, didn't I? But then the New York Times leads the pirate story with

The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military as it faces a booming pirate economy in a treacherous patch of international waters.

What the FUCK are they trying to say here? Only a hugely idiotic fucking idiot would try to draw some sort of ironic line between the high cost and power of an American destroyer and the fragile thread of human contact by which a single American life is hanging. As if to say, Oh, we have all these nukes, but were powerless against four guys with a knife to a man's throat, oh, we suck, oh, oh! God. Words fail me. I can't believe people still read that swill. Death to all newspapers.

Intermission

Suddenly it occurred to me that though Natasha Richardson got injured in a country with universal health care and therefore insufficient funds to keep a med-evac helicopter anywhere near the ski resort, her wealthy if left-leaning family wasted no time getting her out of the Canadian hospital she was late to and over to New York. Seems to be rare indeed for people with money to waste time leaving their sick or injured loved ones in countries that claim to take care of everybody. I'm not sure how proponents of universal health care address that fact. Sorta reminds me of those folks who think gun control is a reasonable response to crime, yet are unable to claim that Republicans and the NRA and others who fight for gun rights are actually soft on crime.

Not that I'm opposed to everyone having coverage. But to serve everyone, a society really has to build up the wealth first. Not there yet. Keep the pressure on, by all means. But the problems of war and economic disparity precede. Freedom comes before justice.

Shocked, I Tell You

Shocked that I learned by random backchannels that Obama gave a speech on education today -- shocked not by that, but shocked that I agree with everything he said about it. Shocked that I completely agree with the president!

So I read a presumably liberal slant from the AP and for balance looked it up on Fox. The AP told it straight. Fox prefaced their story with a bunch of whining about the imploding economy.

As if an imploding economy is a bad time to talk about spending money on education. Christ, guys, an imploding economy is a pretty strong sign that we are way late on the spending!

Yay for holding teachers more accountable, paying on merit, supporting charter schools where they work, increasing funding at the early stages, and especially yay for saying,

"The bottom line is that no government policies will make any difference unless we also hold ourselves more accountable as parents."

Apropros of naught

My favorite lesbertarian sez:

The continuing crash of the markets is not only due to the uncertainty created by the current administration's seeming inability to develop a coherent policy to deal with the banks — but a well justified fear that Barack Obama intends to put a stake into the meager libertarian-lite legacy of Ronald Reagan, and create his vision of a socialized and federalized America.

Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, sounding like one of Rand's villains, admitted as much:

"This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Today the president himself announced that the crisis is our great opportunity to remake America.

Yes, I was a skeptic and a downer and suspicious that somehow I had missed a toke on the same good shit that had everyone else in raptures over Mr. Obama's candidacy, election, and fresh new Presidency. And, no surprise, he has done some good things, such as reverse the ban on stem cell research. But my overall doubts were founded on an impression made by the man himself, and it seems that those of us who watch now not with rancor but simply with open eyes and who increasingly find our '08 concerns coming to fruition are growing in number. Interesting times aborning, as always.

Wingnut

I just realized that since

• There's no problem with gay marriage
  
• CCW (Concealed-Carry Weapons) permits should be issued to anyone who applies and meets the requirements
  
• Marijuana needs decriminalizing
  
• As does independent prostitution (i.e. non-pimp non-brothel)
  
• Illegal immigrants should be deported
  
• Illegal immigrants' medical bills should be reimbursed by their home countries
  
• Public school funding should be tripled
  
• Public school employees should be hired/fired/compensated on professional criteria rather than as though represented by some labor union
  
• Private school vouchers should be encouraged, based on models where they help the poor
  
• Rent control should be eliminated
  
• Capital gains taxes should be eliminated for anyone worth less than say $5M
  
• Any community can and should define areas where nudity is legal
  

(and I could go on) I must be some sort of nut. Am I a wacko liberal or a crypto-conservative? Do I care? Do you? Why am I still up?

Obama At Risk

Just my quick unqualified thought. I never supported the bailouts or the big economic stimulus package but I'm nobody and don't know much. (I gotcher stimulus package right here, baby!) I just have a bad feeling about government taking the reins to save people from themselves. Plus the rhetoric has been dishonest. They keep blaming Bush, who actually tried to regulate the FMs some more and was stymied by Congress, and Greenspan, who was Clinton's darling if I recall, and of course the set-up so people could buy houses they couldn't afford, which was absolutely not a Republican deal, never has been. In other words, I deeply distrust the public discussion on this, and am not convinced that the current power has any better a combination of competence and good intention than the last.

So. These bold moves have Mr. Obama's imprimatur, these vast trades of money for control, these tax-funded infusions to try and jump-start an ailing economy in the mold of FDR's programs to end the Great Depression. Everyone's a Keynesian all of a sudden. But the markets so far have responded poorly. They keep sinking. And it isn't that markets are all Republicans who would rather lose money than see Obama get a win. Markets are self-interested and thus can be trusted as an indicator set of the wisdom of the crowd. If the market, which is forward-looking, doesn't like something, maybe that something ain't so great.

So we have a situation where mere weeks into his presidency, Obama has hitched his wagon to an unproven and expensive program about which the non-political self-interested crowds outside the Beltway are gathering doubts. It's not hard to predict what may happen next. Mrs. Clinton and her husband were dogged for years by the failure of her bold program to reform healthcare. Mr. Schwarzenegger was rendered relatively ineffective once his early and bold proposals to correct California's more intractable problems failed at the ballot (thanks in my opinion to the pernicious influence of self-protecting power centers called "unions" but that's fairly moot now). Obama is at risk of losing his momentum, initiative, popularity, whatever it is that enables a politician getting things done, and winding up kind of a meh president and risking a GOP comeback in '12.

That's all. Half a long unedited essay is better than none, if I'm just bleating to the net before cranking up on yet another day here in corporate America where we are living the dream.

(Bonus round: "Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse ...")

Obamanauguration

It was a fine day to watch the big screens in the company cafeteria and listen to the normally very restrained employee base erupt into occasional applause.

It was inspiring to see that if you strip away the network hype and the camera positioning and the bands and parades, the inauguration of a new president is really a very brief and simple affair. A few words earnestly spoken, and done.

People I was with thought that

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

was a great line. So did I. I'm sure further analysis will show most of the speech came from a combination of prior speeches -- they always do. But that doesn't matter. A presidential inauguration is a time when we remind ourselves and the world what we are about.

* * *

What are we about? The countless examples of Bush Derangement Syndrome don't tell us, and I look forward to them fading away. In some quarters they will be replaced with a naive disappointment over Obama's inevitable grappling with reality. Those of us who were not deranged will offer respect, if early indications are to be believed. Further afield will be some people who simply can't be pleased.

Out of all this our diversity is forged; and from diversity, strength and, eventually, prosperity. Forget about peace. Peace follows when enough people do enough of the right things right. But until every one of humanity's countless diverse communities embrace the values of tolerance, understanding, and negotiation, peace will remain an elusive dream. What we have to do is remain (in this order) strong, free, and prosperous.

* * *

Who said this? Guess, don't Google.

"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."

Never Repent

I supported Iraq (you know what I mean) and never backed down. Now Bush is retreating into history, where the verdicts remain open. Meanwhile, we have a quagmire of another sort looming. Should Obama try to apply the lessons of the Great Depression? He seems to want to. But he must be cautious. Bush (as I saw it) tried to apply the lessons of World War II. But look how well that went. He pretty well proved that big decisions are difficult and risky, even while deferring those decisions is riskier. Neo-neocon sums up the situation nicely (as usual) in "Making predictions about the economy —- or much of anything else".

A pox on 'em

I like how even the VOA's brief mention of the Gaza fighting quotes a Gazan journalist --

"I moved out of my house out of fear. They were bombarding near my house."

-- without bothering to mention Hamas was bombarding Israeli houses for weeks beforehand, daring Israel to do something about it. The obvious intention is to provoke another little war that Israel will call off once Hamas has thrown enough Arabs under the tank treads, thus enabling Hamas' declaring victory as the surviving underdog and further advance the global creep of anti-Semitism. And it will probably work.

End the War on Drugs

I guess I'll never be a liberal as defined by the American media (and, in my experience, most commenters, bloggers, etc). When moved to comment on the issues of the day, I trend towards the conservative side. Not to follow an agenda, however; that's simply the way I usually roll when inspired to react.

So anyway, here's a reminder to folks that us bad guys -- conservatives, Republicans, and the Wall Street Journal -- can actually be on the right side of things now and then, with this hair-raising lead:

Of all the casualties claimed by the U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America, perhaps none so fully captures its senselessness and injustice as the 2001 CIA-directed killing of Christian missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in Peru. -- WSJ, 12/14/08

More from us Kool-Aid^® guzzling haters on the subject here: Let's End Drug Prohibition.

Secretariat

I love this woman. And we're trading her in for ... Hillary Clinton? Granted, Mr. Hope und Change, given his political debts, doesn't have a lot to work with ...

One thing about consciously becoming nonreligious after many years of giving it a go is I have grown comfortable not believing in the myths that hold the larger population in thrall. For example, that the Bush team leaves us weaker and the world in a worse state ... That's right up there with the Three Wise Men following the Star of Bethlehem. Wait and see.

Drive Em Out

So on the way home last night I was listening to NPR as I usually do and some gasbag was saying that if we let the Big Three automakers go under, that will also hurt the entire supply chain, which is huge, and that in turn will drag down the foreign makers who build cars here.

And this utter idiocy was left unchallenged by the journalist. Where the fuck do they get journalists these days?

One of the things that has steamed me up the most since I became a grownup and got a job in a real industry is that the major forces driving this world -- the making of policy and the analysis and reporting of same -- is left to lawyers and journalists and the occasional retired college professor. People in other words with no real understanding of how A leads to B leads to C. And so we are getting fuckeder and fuckeder every passing year.

Don't get me wrong. If GM and Chrysler go into bankruptcy, that will be very bad. The ripples will tsunami across the landscape and tear vast holes in the banks and houses and factories and everything else in the way. But the pain will be relatively short-lived -- a few years maybe -- as what's left of industry downsizes and retools and reconfigures and starts hiring again (here's an example of the sort of brilliance GM's failure will make room for). In contrast how the fuck long will the country be burdened with the unintended consequences of an unimaginably huge bailout? We'll essentially be rewarding an old-line 20th Century industry for fucking around in their old-line 20th Century way. They'll forget the scare and go back and do things the same way. Well, except for the oversight provided by, ahem, Congress. If you think that will help, omigod, go rent a brain, will you? Try it out, see if you like it.

I also recall hearing of a contention by the Ford guy, who doesn't really NEED the money, that if the other two go down, then he will need some money too. Well, a) no fucking duh, as CEO he owes it to his stockholders and employees to see to it that a gift given to their competitors comes to them as well, and yet otherwise b) that's bullshit, because it will not only mean he suddenly has a less competitive market to play in but a shitload of experienced and desperate auto workers and cut-rate factories available to go play in it with. Sounds like good times to me.

Did I mention auto workers? Oh, those poor fuckers. It took me two degrees and ten years of experience to make a salary comparable to your average union quarter panel installer and U-joint adjuster. Maybe twenty, I don't know. Fuck em. A major reason we're in this mess -- not the short term mess created by those creative wizards on Wall St but the longer term mess of steadily decreasing American industrial output and the massive strategic and economic Damocletian sword it represents -- is that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch the gravy train we leapt aboard after WWII, and our workers just aren't worth as much more than the rest of the world's as they used to be.

Oo, what a sentence. What meant: As the competing ladders of economic growth lurch upwards, lower costs elsewhere make our workers' entitlements unaffordable. That goes double for the non-workers' entitlements, but I'm not getting into the welfare state today. Seems a bad time of year for that particular rant.

But it is a good time of year for redemption. I offer a case in point, the lovely and talented Carly Fiorina, who lost her job after flying H-P a little too close to the ground but today has some good things to say about the auto company bailout: CEOs seeking bailouts should be willing to resign.

Victory in Iraq Day 22 Nov

A number of people shook off the infection of pessimism and the sand the media has been pouring on them long enough to notice something:

We won the war in Iraq.

Don't expect the President to mention it. Especially don't expect the President-elect. He was hired on the theory that he was right to oppose the war and to oppose fighting it properly (i.e. masterfully opposing the "surge" while congratulating the troops who effected it). He's not going to change his tune now, especially since it isn't necessary. He gets the incalculable benefits of the U.S. having removed a dictator and placed something like the rule of law and democracy in one of the world's political and economic centers of gravity, while keeping his anti-war reputation, and at a pretty low cost as wars go. I don't begrudge him this. Just sayin'.

Just to check my sanity (which some would argue I checked years ago and never bothered to reclaim) I did a quick Google News search on "Iraq". I saw headlines about:

Iraq to vote on security pact
Iraq warns of consequences of early US pullout
In Baghdad, debating post-US outlook

This and the usual tension of civil (i.e. largely unarmed) debate. Conspicuously absent: Relentless terror attacks, Iranian troops interfering, a never-ending civil war, mass unrest. Indeed, war correspondents are returning to find the place relatively peaceful.

"There's nothing going on. I'm with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months. And the place we're at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there's nothing going on. I've been walking my feet off and haven't seen anything." -- Michael Yon

There is one dire warning from many quarters if the US pulls out to soon: Pirates. Yep, that's the worst we have to worry about now: That the Gulf will follow the example of the Horn of Africa. And we know it won't. Except when using them against each other, I'm sure even the Iranians and the Saudis would cooperate against piracy.

I had a reader in times past who continuously called me an idiot for refusing to see that the Bush / Cheney plan was really to drop Iraq into perpetual war so that Western oil companies would always have leverage in the Gulf. I'm glad to say he was wrong all along, and that I suspected it all along. Not that I would necessarily put it past Royal Dutch Shell to be pulling strings with blood-soaked fingers. But sometimes you have to look at the world as the executives do and not the writers of paperback thrillers.

In recent months I've also been glad to see emerging validation of my instinct not to be political fashionable, but to follow my own vision. I've never backed off my support for the Iraq War. I've learned of the lies and the subterfuge and the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, and I have no interest in defending them and I certainly wouldn't push for a pass on prosecution or, in the end, for amnesty. Fuck that. Crime is crime, and as we saw recently with Prop 8, clever use and abuse of the law can do real evil.

But looking at the big picture -- turning away for a moment from Bush's crimes just as we turn away from Lincoln's, from Wilson's, from Roosevelt's -- Saddam's regime was an octopus of caustic influence and direct interference, and something like what we did had to be done. 9/11 provided political capital that Bush had to spend, and overspend, quickly, and overspend it he did. "Squandered the good will," he did, and the world is a better place for it.

Now the once long shot candidate whose campaign was built in part on a strongly opposing view will take the reigns. In the see-saw world of a functional democracy this is no surprise. What's emerging as kind of a surprise is the centrist, indeed hawkish, aspect of his first cut at a cabinet. But only kind of a surprise: I've said all along Obama is damn smart.

Business As Usual

It's pretty clear by now I was never caught up in the Obama thrill. I never really saw what was new about him other than being the child of a man born in another country (a plus, if anything). All the fine talk rang hollow, and I'm suspicious of popularity anyway. That's all by the way: I'm perfectly fine with him being President -- he's an amazing person and so long as he doesn't end up under the thumb of those legendary Washington interests, he'll make his mark.

So long as he doesn't. If he's serious about appointing Hillary as SecState, I think we can all agree that dream is officially over: The consummate power player, and wife of an ex-President whose fingers are in every lucrative pie in the world, being named Secretary of State. It was a fun little revolution, wasn't it? I hope you enjoyed it.

It's a little early but I'm thinking Daniels/Rice 2012. I don't like Jindal -- he's a creationist nutjob -- or ANY of those clowns who ran against McCain. I admire Dr. Rice completely, and Daniels, recently re-elected governor of Indiana, has a get-it-done tight-budget reputation. That's all I know. It's enough for now.

Obamanic Relations

According to genealogical research summarized here, our President-elect is distantly related to the following people. It all goes to show if we all had professional genealogists tracing connections, we’d realize we are all FAMILY.

LBJ	Mariel Hemingway	Charles Addams
John Steinbeck	Christopher Reeve	Brad Pitt
Howard Dean	Sarah Palin	Jimmy Carter
Katharine Hepburn	Ken Kesey	Harry Truman
Dick Cheney	Robert Duvall	Senator Byrd
J.P. Morgan	John Hinckley	George W. Bush
Gordon Hinckley	General Longstreet	Woodrow Wilson
Birch Bayh	JonBenet Ramsey	Georgia O’Keeffe
Gerry Ford	Justin Timberlake	John Glenn
Lon Chaney	Winston Churchill	James Madison
Robert E. Lee

And all this just from his mother's side.

I only put names of people I’ve heard of, and I put them as I know them.

Yeah, I know, finding all these links was a terrible waste of precious NaNo time. Sue me.

Emotional Mixtures

Honestly. Though I voted McCain, and regard Obama as a politician first, a leader second, and a man of conscience somewhere out beyond third, he's brilliant, he's young, he's historic, and by the time I was home watching returns I was hoping he'd win.

“Marvin ... What do we do now?” -- Bill McKay

Enjoy the honeymoon -- interesting times ahead, as always, especially when he returns to the values he strayed from to win this thing. Congratulations President Obama!

Spirits

Election Eve

Tonight is the crest
From now through tomorrow the roller coaster will be in freefall
Our breath will be taken as gravity recedes
And finally late in the night when the results are called
We’ll come to rest


In the new dawn’s early light, expect nothing. Whatever the results, they don’t change what you can do. Rely on yourself and on the community you build. As a favorite philosopher sings:

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

I'm Missing All The Fun

This is like three miles from my house. Mild in-country suburbanites are rioting over same-sex marriage. Agh. I guess the good news is, since it takes two to tangle, this means plenty of people even out here are against Prop 8. But the pro peeps are highly motivated too: they think they are rescuing civilization from itself. However the vote goes, this will not be the end of it.