BunkBlog

First it was Kyoto we backed out of, now it’s the Women’s Rights declaration of the UN. We helped to write both the Kyoto Treaty and the Women’s Rights Declaration; now we refuse to support either of them.

It’s a stupid move, and it’s an obvious grandstanding ploy, as the Declaration is a non-binding statement of principles, not a law or treaty. We can’t even say the right thing anymore?

At work today, one of my cow-orkers referred to Ellen Degenerate and the oh-so-amusing PIAPS(Pig in a pant suit) aka Senator Clinton, in the space of a few minutes. Why are the folks on the Right still feeling so marginalized that they lash out with such vitriol at the various people they believe personify the evil which is Liberalism? You know that a small cadre of pundits spends hours every day coming up with new slurs and epithets to hurl at the people of the Left, because the way that so many people suddenly come up with identical witticisms is a bit . . . hard to believe. I know the Ellen Degeneres slur came from Jerry Falwell, a man who is living in a glass house of his own. I presume the PIAPS moniker is from Rush (the drug abuser) or G Gordon Liddy (the convicted felon), but I’m not 100% certain of that.

Why does the GOP believe itself to be under siege? Why are Republicans convinced that they are the underdogs? They own a huge chunk of the American business landscape, and all three branches of the federal government. Hey, ya know what? When you run the country, you can stop pretending to be the minority. K? A’ight.

Iran’s Defense Minister says Iran can block any attack by the U.S.

bq. “We are able to say that we have strength such that no country can attack us because they do not have precise information about our military capabilities due to our ability to implement flexible strategies,” the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Shamkhani as saying.

Um, yeah. Right. Heard of satellite imagery?

The Economics Editor at the National Review says the U.S. deficit is shrinking.

He’s right. The deficit is shrinking. That does not mean the debt is shrinking. Deficit means, “how much more in the hole we’re going to be at the end of 2005 compared to the end of 2004.” So, good news! Last year the U.S. added an extra 413 billion (that’s 9 zeros) to your debt. This year, the fine stewards of your tax dollars only plan to add 355 billion (still 9 zeros) to the unfathomable burden we’re passing on to future generations. Great news. Fantastic.

Most recently finished book – L.E. Modesitt’s The Ethos Effect.

Although I usually like Modesitt’s science fiction, this one was written a bit differently. I guess I’m just noticing the Tom Swifties too much or something.

Anyway, throwing out the sometimes leaden dialog, the ideas of this Parafaith War sequel are interesting. One of the things SF excels at is showing us extremes of contemporary situations so we can see them from a different viewpoint. Things in this one that you may have heard about in recent years in real life: racial profiling, incarceration without trial or charges, religious fundamentalists driving bad government decisions, and military actions with no apparent logic behind them.

Barack Obama faces high expectations after resounding Senate victory. I’m sure he does. Why does it sadden me to find out that he’s only the fifth black U.S. Senator in the history of this country?

How many Senators have been elected to first terms in the past 140 years? What a ratio…

Realizing that the military (and veterans groups) leans about 70% Republican, you’d think I’d get used to the insane drivel that spews from them on a daily basis.

The offtopic chat room, after ten minutes of lurking, has already managed to annoy the piss out of me this morning. I don’t even know what the context is, but at least three (of eight) members of the room have comisserated about how horrible the New York Times is, that liberal media mouthpiece. I guess they forgot how the Times was used as the unofficial news outlet for every lie told by Ahmed Chalabi about the inevitability of finding WMDs in Iraq, or the various other ways that paper held up the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare as a good thing. These are the same people who use Rush Limbaugh the druguser and G. Gordon Liddy the convicted felon as news sources. How can any reasonably intelligent person (all M.I. guys here) actually believe that there is a liberal media, when Fox News is the highest-rated news channel and Air America is struggling to survive amid the Rush and Liddy radio waves?

I don’t like people who mindlessly parrot viewpoints formulated by wiser heads. I don’t like people who can hold such wildly contradictory beliefs to be self-evident as, “Bush is good for the country and he lowered my taxes.” Does anyone think that we can keep going with trillions of dollars in debt, while continuing to dig deeper? Hell, Cuba has told its citizens to stop using dollars. When our money isn’t even any good in that broke-ass country, what does that tell you about our economy?

Karl Rove and friends have done a fantastic job of snookering the American people. Many undecided voters (how can it be a week from Election Day and you be undecided?) are going to vote based on whether they think Dubya or Flippy is the more honest or agrees with their views on gay rights. Who gives a shit what your neighbor does in his bedroom? All I care about is what the impact on my bottom line is from the government. If I notice the inconveniences imposed by a shrinking set of civil liberties, that is a big deal to me. If I notice that my income is shrinking because of the government’s actions, that is a big deal to me. Social issues like abortion and gay rights are not the job of the government anyway, so how the candidate feels about each issue is completely irrelevent. Or it would be irrelevent in a sane world. We live in Bizarroworld.

Mtzlplk lives.

Bush campaign creating lists of black voters in Florida, to challenge them en masse on election day. This type of intimidation is probably not legal, say experts. This seems unlikely to stop it from happening, of course.

While chatting in the “off topic” room at work today, one of the morons participants mentioned how laws are made, not by the President, but by Congress and activist judges. I objected to the adjective before “judges” since they are judges, whether appointed or elected, and the term has become one of derision used by the neocon nutjobs.

When pressed, he averred that judges were making law, in contradiction to the wishes of the electorate and the legislature.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases is a good reference.

I mentioned that Brown v. Board of Education was just such an event, and does this mean that we should have kept segregation in schools because the electorate and the legislature wanted it?

Response: If I say yes I’m a racist biggot (sic), if no then I’m inconsistant (sic).

Yep. Don’t want to be a flipflopper, do you? Or a good speller. 🙂

Libertarian and Green presidential candidate arrested

bq. On October 8th at 9PM, two third party candidates were arrested for attempting to enter the Washington University complex holding the second presidential debate. The candidates, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party, chose civil disobedience to fight the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Over half of Americans believe third party candidates should be included, yet politicians continue to funnel public funds into the bi-partisan Commission.

The VP debate wasn’t as intense as the Presidential debate last week, but it was decent enough. Considering it preempted everything else, it was hard to miss.

I was surprised by both candidates performance last night. Cheney actually seemed sane and reasonable, a feat he doesn’t seem capable of on the campaign trail. Edwards, for his first debate ever, turned in a good performance as well. Of course, since he’s had lots of practice in court rooms, I’d expect him to be a decent orator and quick to respond to questions. But, he didn’t let Cheney rattle him, which might be difficult considering some of the personal attacks the VP slid into the debate while sounding reasonable.

Both of them made good points, and I don’t think this debate really ended up with one of them as the clear winner. Edwards spent too much time belaboring Halliburton, but then it is an enormous scandal – or would be if the media actually spent any time at all doing a decent analysis of the whole mess. Cheney, for his part, didn’t beat any one horse which may end up making Edwards’s speaking more memorable to the public. We’ll see.

Regardless, the VP debate doesn’t really make much difference, unless you have a narcoleptic admiral on the podium.

OK, maybe not fun. Easy to make fun of?

I don’t know how many times the “deer in the headlights” look appeared on the President’s face last night, but it was quite a few. I’ve never seen someone founder so badly while groping for an answer.

I like the way Bush was able to turn every question about Afghanistan into an answer about Iraq. “The enemy attacked us, so we took the fight to them in Iraq” seemed to be his attitude throughout the debate. Apparently nobody has told him the hijackers were mostly Saudi citizens who trained in Afghanistan. You’d think after three years he would know this, wouldn’t you?

The so-called Marriage Protection Amendment comes before the House on Wednesday. Please let your congresscritter know that it’s a stupid thing to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution.

Slashdot has an article about the new World Wind software from NASA. Naturally, this causes NASA’s servers to choke from the load of trying to serve up a 200+ megabyte file to every geekboy on the planet.

Solution? Several bittorrent files have been posted. Now I’m grabbing this monster file in under 30 minutes, instead of looking at a day. Good thing Orrin Hatch hasn’t gotten this Peer to Peer stuff outlawed yet. I wonder if there is some other substantial non-infringing use out there? 🙂

This analysis of CBS’s documents seems pretty thorough and convincing. The superscript and completely different signatures are interesting. Not to mention, the document used as a “proof” of forgery was done with Word’s default settings: 1.5 inch margins. Normal margins are 1 inch per side; even assuming the document was created on the old mil-standard paper, that leaves a half-inch anomaly for any clerk worth his salt in 1973. Wonder if the people who created these apparent forgeries are working for the Left or the Right. If the Left, they should not be trusted with anything ever again; if the Right, congratulations and well-played.

Now, if someone would please get the political discourse back to something that resembles current issues, please? Like I give a rat’s azz about what either of these two twits did in 1968 or 1973. Geez.

Reuters reports on the latest Congressional Budget Office findings, which show a 200 billion dollar increase in the projected long-term deficit compared to reports just six months ago. I’m sure this will be attacked and trumpeted by the two candidates in the next couple weeks.

Bush blames the 2001 recession, the costs of the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror for the growing budget shortfall.

Yeah, I’m sure the tax cut didn’t do anything at all to reduce our total budgetary inputs. Do you suppose the politicians who run our country can even balance their checkbooks?

If you saw the RNC at all, you know the podium had a less-than-subtle cross on it. Some people objected.

Karl Rove told CNN he did not think the podium’s decorative woodwork looked like a cross.
“My God, where do they come up with this stuff?” he said. “Does it look to you like it’s a cross? I don’t think so.”

Yeah, right.

Kerry now claims that Bush is Unfit to Lead, a sharp change to his earlier approach. I still wonder at the ability to focus on the Vietnam War as the most important issue of this election.

Why has Kerry not explained why he was so credulous as to quote discredited reports about military abuses 30 years ago? Why has he not brought up any details of his 20 years in the Senate? And are all of his speeches filled with vague promises, or just every one I’ve seen or heard a piece of?

On the other side of the political fence today, was the Republican Convention just a chance to bash the Dems or what? It’s an interesting contrast – the DNC stressed Democratic party people and issues; the RNC stressed Democratic party people and Republican issues. Very vitriolic this week. Looking like an ugly election.

I love Tom Tomorrow. Check out This Modern World for an entertaining glimpse at the logic of the Dubya.

About 3/4 of the way down this page, the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, makes an ass of himself on national television.

On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who’s funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,” Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: “Excuse me?” The Speaker went on: “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years – George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.” Wallace: “You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?” Hastert: “I’m saying I don’t know where groups – could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

We just don’t know. That’s the Karl Rove approach to smearing people – make it ambiguous. Maybe Ann Richards is gay; we just don’t know. Maybe John Kerry shot himself to get a purple heart; we just don’t know. Maybe George W. Bush screwed a goat on his ranch last week; we just don’t know.

There are a lot of things we don’t know. Speculating wildly about things with absolutely zero evidence is not the way we should expect our elected leaders to behave. But maybe we just don’t know.