Category Archive

About a week ago, I revisited an old friend of sorts. I re-read Antigone on a lazy Saturday afternoon, something I haven’t done in years. It was Paul Roche’s translation of Sophocles’ version of the tale, a battered copy, older than I am, picked up in some used book store years ago, with someone else’s notes in the margins and single words underlined here and there throughout, seemingly at random and not by me.

It’s a play I really wish someone would update and turn into a movie. I’ll spare you the plot synopsis, beyond noting that Antigone is both the daughter and half-sister of the Oedipus of Freudian fame, so her family dynamics could probably make the annual Thanksgiving dinner of the most dysfunctional family you’ve ever known seem Norman Rockwellian in comparison.

The central conflict in the play is the debate about whether it is better to obey the tyrant, who has the power to punish one in very unpleasant ways in the here and now, or to remain true to a higher law or moral principles. It’s about the choice between doing what is right and following orders.

When faced with someone in a position of authority giving orders, most people almost reflexively choose what is easy over what is right. It’s rather depressing really.

Certainly, this is the lesson history has taught us. German soldiers were only following orders when they killed millions of innocent people for the simple crime of being Jewish, or communist, or gay, or a member of some other group that a madman had designated a threat to the state. Yes, some of those orders had seemed, well, wrong, but orders were orders, so what else were they to do?

What else, indeed?

Starting around the time of the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, a Yale social psychologist named Stanley Milgram performed a now-legendary series of experiments to assess the general willingness of members of the public to obey authority figures. The results were disturbing, to say the least.

Each volunteer who participated in the study was directed, by a man in a white lab coat with glasses and a clipboard (the scientist), to administer a series of increasingly strong shocks to another “volunteer” (the victim) every time the other person got a wrong answer on a memory task. Both the scientist and the victim were actually actors playing carefully scripted roles. The scientist remained in the room with the volunteer, while the victim went into a different room, where he could be heard but not seen by the volunteer. As the shocks increased in voltage, the volunteer heard sounds of distress from the victim, who also mentioned some sort of “heart condition.” If the volunteer continued to administer the shocks (increasing from a low of 15 volts to a high of 450 volts) long enough, the victim in the next room would eventually fall silent, not responding audibly to either questions or shocks. If the volunteer objected or tried to stop the experiment, he was told the following things, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

(Prompts courtesy of Wikipedia, which also has a more detailed description of the experiments.) The volunteer was only given permission to stop if he continued to object after the fourth prompt was given.

The idea was to identify the point at which people would say, “No, I won’t do this.”

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram surveyed both his students and his professional colleagues, asking them to predict the percentage of people who would continue all the way to the 450 volt level. Everyone thought that few if any would proceed all the way through the experiment as it was to be staged, with the average being 1.2 percent. (Again, details courtesy of the Wikipedia entry.)

As I noted before, the experiment was being conducted in 1961, near the time of Eichmann’s trial. The trial certainly would have received a fair amount of press coverage at the time, so theoretically, participants should have been somewhat sensitized to the problems that can arise from just following orders. One would think, or hope, that the colleagues and students were accurate in their predictions, that most of the participants would have at some point refused to continue to administer the shocks.

In the first run of experiments, sixty-five percent of the participants went all the way up to 450 volts.

Sixty-five percent. For the sake of an experiment.

The participants weren’t happy about doing it. They made their concern about the learner’s well-being clear, for the most part. But when prompted by the serious looking man with the clipboard, they kept right on going.

When the initial study was released, it got quite a lot of attention, as you might expect. And there were some at the time who thought students should be taught to question authority, and not just blindly follow orders that were clearly wrong.

Not much came of it, of course. Because the people who are running the country don’t want a bunch of citizens or soldiers or employees questioning their orders all the time. They want obedience from the masses. They want most people to do what they’re told, when they’re told to do it. And so you don’t hear a whole lot about questioning authority or thinking critically in your average high school classroom. Maybe in college. If you’re one of those liberal arts majors, or in political science, or psychology, or some other field that focuses on how people interact with each other. And even then, the focus is usually on skepticism and critical thinking, rather than outright defiance of authority.

I’ve been on a bit of a defying authority kick lately.

Actually, my mother would tell you that’s been a constant theme in my life since I was about five. Not always defying authority, but at least questioning it. The poor woman was mystified by my tendency to disagree with teachers, often rather loudly and at great length, with examples and the odd footnote thrown in. And that was just grade school. But I digress.

In addition to re-reading Antigone, I’ve also been making my way through Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler, which chronicles the author’s experiences in Germany as the Nazis rose to power there. And last week I also pulled out my copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, another used book store find, and have been going through that, as well.

Truth be told, my bookshelves are rather full of that sort of reading material, in one form or another. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Lysistrata. Calvin & Hobbes. Dr. Seuss (that Cat in the Hat was a rebel, I tell you). Heck, even those books on Linux are related in a way, as they are part of my ongoing attempt to escape from the tyranny that is Microsoft and Apple.

But I always come back to Antigone.

She’s been my favorite ever since I read Jean Anouilh’s version of the play back in high school. His version was produced in Paris, in February of 1944, while Germany was occupying France and artists and playwrights there were forced to work under the suspicious eyes of Nazi censors. Anouilh’s version of the play was necessarily more nuanced, the ethical lines less clear than earlier versions of the story. The play never would have opened had it been otherwise, at least not before the Nazis were driven out of France. But it was clear enough to the audience what the story was about.

Antigone was the Resistance, Creon the Vichy government.

She’s a difficult character to warm up to. She’s a bit overbearing in her righteousness. And she’s also a bit defiant merely for the sake of being defiant: in the play, the second time she covers her brother’s body with dirt was unnecessary as far as the religious rites were concerned. His spirit would have already moved on. No, the second time, she buries him to make a point: that tyrants should not be obeyed when their edicts are unjust. And she is willing, even proud to sacrifice her life in order to make that point. You kind of have to think, is it really worth your life just to make a political point, when other lives aren’t hanging in the balance at that moment?

But when it comes down to standing up for one’s ideals, very few can hold a candle to her.

It’s just that I can’t help thinking how different the past few years might have been if various people in the upper echelons of our government had been a bit more in touch with their inner Antigone.

Like when Bush and Cheney were trying to start a “preemptive” war with Iraq based upon manipulated intelligence findings.

Or when someone suggested that torture should be made a part of official US policy.

Or when someone decided to run our Constitution through the shredder.

Or…well, you know, this could end up being an awful long list, now that I think about it.

On the other hand, would any one person have been able to make much of a difference at the time? It’s hard to say. Consider how more moderate voices in the executive branch were gradually forced out of their positions by the hard-liners. Or how the whole “Plame-gate” scandal got started because former Ambassador Joe Wilson spoke out publicly about his findings regarding administration claims that the Iraqis were attempting to acquire “yellowcake” uranium from sources in Africa. Or how U.S. Attorneys who refused to institute prosecutions against Democratic officials on flimsy pretenses were replaced by ones willing to take the case. Or…well, I guess this one could be a pretty long list, too.

So maybe there were plenty of people who were in touch with their inner Antigone, but they weren’t able to get the word out widely enough, or weren’t taken seriously by the media.

Our wonderful, consolidated, corporate-controlled, authoritarian-enabling mainstream media.

Where am I going with all this? I’m not really sure, to be honest.

Over the past few months or maybe years, my own inner Antigone has been reawakening. Stretching and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes after a long slumber. And I think that very soon, she’s going to be ready to take her act back out on the road.

I’m going to be making a few big changes in my life over the next few weeks, so my posting here will be a bit erratic for a while. I’ve decided to take fall semester off from my graduate studies, get out of Redstatesville for a while, and see what kind of trouble I can get myself into in the last few months before the November election.

It should be fun. Or at least interesting, which is often nearly as good as fun, and sometimes even better.

I’ll keep you posted, my dear non-existent readers (and also the one or two of you who have been leaving comments lately), when my plans are a bit clearer. For now, however, I have a six-year-old’s birthday party to attend one state over, so I need to be hitting the road.

And lest there be any doubt in the matter, I still think Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

* I used the masculine pronoun throughout my description of Milgram’s experiment instead of making it gender-neutral because back in the days when the study was being conducted, nearly all human psychological research used only white males as study participants.

For many years, the field of psychology, like the field of medicine, treated white males as the norm for the entire population, and everybody else who was not a white male was considered merely a deviation from the norm. The fact that most of the early psychological and medical research was also being conducted almost exclusively by white males is probably just a coincidence.

This lead to a lot of situations where the psychologists and doctors trying to apply the results of research to their patients found that the treatment or intervention (whether psychological or medical) did not work as advertised when dealing with patients who were not white males. This was particularly problematic on the medical side of things, as there were patients who actually died or suffered serious complications because their bodies did not respond the way a white male’s body would to the medications or dosages their doctors prescribed.

Often the most dangerous assumptions are the ones we don’t even realize we’re making.

What does this have to do with the rest of the post? Nothing, really. I just thought I’d mention it.

On July 5th, I posted one plausible reason why the Democratic leadership in Washington has been so reluctant to institute impeachment proceedings against a clearly corrupt White House. Basically, I suggested that they were waiting until Bush was out of office to begin any prosecutory action in order to avoid any attempts by the alleged president to pardon his minions for their criminal wrongdoing.

I’d like to retract that post, along with anything nice I may ever have said about the Democratic congressional leadership.

The always excellent Glenn Greenwald certainly shot my theory down yesterday. (Not that he was actually taking aim at it or anything. I’m sure he has far better things to do with his time than read my humble little blog.)

In his column at Salon.com (which I strongly encourage reading in full), Greenwald very neatly summarizes the evidence that in fact the principal reason for the Democrats’ inaction is that key members of the Democratic leadership (including Nancy Pelosi) were briefed early on about two of the biggest scandals to come out of this administration: the torturing of detainees in Gitmo and elsewhere, and the illegal wiretapping program that our Democratic-controlled Congress so graciously granted Bush and the telecoms immunity for last week.

Suddenly, the reason for their willingness to roll over on these issues becomes clear: because any investigation in conjunction with impeachment proceedings (or any other prosecution) will inevitably reveal that these key Democrats knew what was going on, and yet said and did nothing to stop it.

Can we just impeach all of them? Now, please? Do we really have to wait until November to throw these people out of office?

-jane doe

Ever since the Senate vote on the FISA POS yesterday, I’ve been trying to puzzle it out, and I still don’t get it.

Why did Barack Obama vote for the bill?

What could possibly have motivated him to vote the way he did?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m plenty ticked off at all the other Democrats who caved to pressure from either the White House or (more likely) campaign contributors associated with the telecoms. They’re all on my shit list at the moment, and the Day of Retribution shall come, when they shall be Mocked Most Thoroughly for their total lack of backbone, intestinal fortitude, and/or principles.

I write a mean poison pen letter.*

But Obama’s decision to vote in favor of the bill completely mystifies me. I really cannot come up with a single rational explanation for his decision to support this bill.

It was a foregone conclusion that, no matter how he voted on the matter, McCain (who managed not to vote on the bill) will criticize his vote during the campaign. If he voted against it, he was soft on terrorism. If he voted for it, he was flip-flopping. (And by the way, McCain: Hello? Pot? Kettle? Glass houses?) So I’m not seeing much gain there.

Some have theorized that this is part of his effort to move a bit toward the center, since he is currently being portrayed by some on the right as being the senator who is furthest to the left on the political spectrum. But aside from those of us on the left who are active in these matters, my sense is that this issue hasn’t drawn a huge amount attention from the middle-of-the-road crowd. So the way I see it, he alienated his base on the left for very little potential gain in the middle.

And boy, has he ever alienated his base. From today’s Wall Street Journal, we have this little tidbit:

Obama’s own campaign Web site has become a hotbed of debate over his support for the compromise bill, spawning four groups in which opponents of Obama’s position vastly outnumber supporters—22,957 to 38. The “Get FISA Right” group blog on MyBarackObama.com was flooded with disappointed supporters after Wednesday’s vote, with more than 60 writing in within 90 minutes of the vote.

“Christopher from Cleveland” wrote, “All those people saying that we should relax, and take it easy, since it’s only one issue, are wrong because Barack is breaking his promise to us!”

“Dan in Holland,” said he was a Michigan voter who would no longer vote for Obama, adding “I just lost an enormous amount of respect for Mr. Obama and his vote on the FISA bill and the amendment to strip telecom immunity.”

Certainly, the blogosphere is up in arms about how he voted. Promises of no further campaign contributions and refusal to vote in November abound. (But really, are these people likely not to vote? Hell, no. When it comes down to it, I think we can all agree that what we do not need is for the next four years to look like the last eight years.)

Perhaps he fears a terrorist attack will take place on US soil between now and November. If there is one, a “no” vote on this measure really could hurt him in the polls. (See my previous posts on terror management theory for why.) So that might explain it.

There’s another possibility, and it’s a disturbing one. Maybe he actually wanted the measure to pass. Maybe he wanted to have that warrantless wiretapping ability should he win the election in November.

For the record, I think that the last option is pretty unlikely. I don’t believe we’ve all misread him that badly. I don’t want to believe that.

Still, with his vote on this issue, I think he’s changed the dynamic in the race a bit. It was nice having a candidate we could get excited about, instead of feeling like we were voting for the lesser of two evils. And now, I think a lot of us are going to be asking the question, “What else is he going to change his position on?”

Hopefully, by this November, he’ll have reassured us all a bit in that regard. There’s plenty of time between now and then to convince us that he’s still the leader we saw in the primaries.

But we’re not going to forget about this. He voted to betray the constitution, just like everyone else who voted yes on that goddamn bill. He sold us out like the rest of them.

-jane doe

* Hey, I’m a graduate student of limited means, living in Redstatesville, which is a drive of approximately thirteen and two-thirds cassette tapes** from Washington, D.C. (if you allow for traffic). My response options are somewhat limited. Sometimes a Strongly Worded Letter is the best I can manage.

** Some people measure travel distance in miles. I measure it in music. Though that’s becoming more difficult, because lately, on long drives, I listen to my iPod instead of cassette tapes, and that’s just not very convenient as a measure of distance, because you have to count actual songs which is kind of a pain. On the other hand, with gas prices going up the way they have, long roadtrips will soon become a thing of the past, so the methodology for calculating distances becomes kind of moot.

Surprising no one, the Democrats in the Senate caved on the FISA warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity measure today. They pretty much gave Bush everything he had been asking for.

All the usual suspects have been writing about it, but I can’t right now. You see, I have to go pound my head against this brick wall, here. Maybe if I do it hard enough, I’ll effectively lobotomize myself. That way, when we finally cross the line completely to become a totalitarian fascist regime, I will neither understand nor care anymore.

-jane doe

Glenn Greenwald, over at Salon.com, has been following the whole FISA fiasco carefully with a lawyer’s eye. He has a great post from yesterday that rather neatly lays out exactly what the Democrats are caving in to, and I strongly encourage anyone who is concerned with privacy and the rule of law to check it out. You’ll have to watch a brief ad before you can read the column, but it is worth it, as he explains the problem far better than I have or likely could.

-jd

This evening, I had originally planned to post a nice review of War, Inc., which I finally got to see when I was in Chicago last weekend. It really is wickedly funny, and all the more topical given yesterday’s announcement about certain American and British oil companies going back to work in Iraq on no-bid contracts (read about that here). I’ll have to write that review tomorrow, though. Sorry.

The simple fact of the matter is, I’m too angry at the moment to write a good review.

The House Democrats sold us out today, folks. There’s no other way to describe it. And in doing so, they’ve pushed us a bit closer to that blurry, indistinct line that separates our democracy from fascism.

That’s assuming we haven’t crossed that line already. I’m really not completely sure, since it’s never been precisely clear to me what the defining characteristics of fascism are. There certainly seems to be a lot of debate about that on the internet. And it’s not like any modern government or political party will announce that it is hoping to institute a fascist form of government anymore, not since World War II. Still, we’ve seen the Bush White House use a lot of tactics that seem to come out of the Hitler playbook. Yes, I know that remark is likely to bring comments about Godwin’s Law — or it would if any of you, my dear non-existent readers, ever left comments, anyway. I don’t care. Sometimes, the Hitler analogy is appropriate from a historical perspective, and it has been increasingly so as this administration’s tenure has progressed.

But I digress.

The Democrats have a controlling majority in the House of Representatives. It’s not like the Senate, where they can only claim to have a majority because Joe Lieberman is still caucusing with them (even if he doesn’t vote with them on anything). So they didn’t have to cave.

They didn’t have to give in on the so-called compromise FISA measure. which grants the president expansive powers to spy on us without warrants — our phone calls, our e-mails, our internet surfing habits.

They certainly didn’t have to give the telecoms immunity. How the fuck does that make us any more secure, I ask you?

Yet this is precisely what they have done today. In doing this, they are giving us government not of the people, by the people, and for the people, but of, by, and for the major corporations. And for Big Brother.

In doing this, they betrayed us. The American people.

And it’s leaving me wondering what to do now?

See, here’s the thing. I used to be this corporate attorney. Big law firm, big business deals, big money. Well, big money for the number of years I was out of law school, anyway — lots of people were making a lot more money than me. I wore designer suits, I ate in nice restaurants, and I had a lovely office in…well, you don’t need to know which city, and I don’t want to make it too easy to identify me, for reasons I’ve already discussed elsewhere in this blog.

At first, the work was real easy to rationalize. Most of the clients I did work for were non-profit corporations performing essential services. So there I was, on the side of the angels, right? But the reality was, they were in competition with for-profit corporations, and in order to continue their operations, they had to engage in some of the same practices that the for-profits did just to remain financially viable.

This was very disturbing to me.

I tried going in-house at an organization that I believed then and still believe now to be very ethically run, but the business aspects were still getting to me. And when I have trouble believing in what I’m doing, I do not perform at my best.

Seven years out of law school, I was completely burnt-out.

I decided to go back to grad school to re-tool for a new career. I figured I would get my PhD, and then I could start working with certain organizations to educate legislators at the state and federal level about what scientific research was telling us about the field, and what the implications of that were for making policy applicable to that field.

Seems like a good fit, right? See, I already speak lawyerspeak, and politicianspeak and bureaucratspeak are both really just dialects of that language. So I thought I could help translate the scientific research (another language of its own) for the people making the policy, so that we don’t end up with policy that is so at odds with what all the research is telling us about certain things. (And yes, I’m dancing around the field I’m studying in, as well as the field I concentrated on in law. I’m trying to remain anonymous, remember.)

But then I watch things like what happened today, with the Democrats caving in to the President and the telecoms, instead of upholding the constitution. And I think about how the Democratic leadership has made it clear that impeachment is off the table. And I look at all the ways that the Democrats could have stood up for us since the 2006 election — on the Iraq war, on the economy, on our civil rights, on health issues, on torture and habeas corpus and corruption and no-bid contracts and the use of the Department of Justice for political ends and… the list just goes on and on and on.

And I wonder, am I fighting the wrong fight?

Should I be working within the system to bring about change?

Or should I be trying to change the fucking system?

I just don’t know anymore.

Any suggestions?

-jane doe

Last night in her speech, Hillary encouraged voters to go to her website and leave messages with their thoughts on what she should do next. Here is what I wrote to her:

Dear Senator Clinton –

I’m not entirely sure what to say to you today. You fought a good campaign, but in the end it was your opponent who crossed the finish line first.

It’s been very frustrating these last few weeks watching you and your campaign team spin the results and crunch the numbers. Last night you spoke of winning the popular vote — trying to steal Barack Obama’s thunder on the night when he secured the delegates needed to clinch the nomination — but your tally left out millions of voters like me who live in caucus states where Obama won. Apparently, in your mind, we don’t matter.

Your speech last night did a disservice to the Democratic Party, and I believe it will later be viewed as tarnishing your legacy. Instead of gracefully congratulating Obama on his moment of triumph, you spoke only of a campaign well-fought, as if you were the candidate with the necessary delegates for nomination later this summer, not him.

You spoke of unifying the party, but I’m not sure how you hope to accomplish that given the overall tone of your speech. There were undertones to the speech that were distinctly threatening, as if you plan to take your 18 million voters and go home if you’re not given the Vice President spot. While I agree that a ticket with both you and Obama would likely be unstoppable come November, was last night’s speech really the best way of securing a spot on that ticket?

Your speech last night was something of a political masterpiece, I must admit, in terms of communicating a number of things without saying them outright. I’m sure the pundits are having a field day parsing it right now. But the very fact that it was a political masterpiece highlighted the difference between you and Barack Obama as presidential candidates:

You spoke like a politician. Barack Obama spoke like a leader.

Please, Hillary, stop playing the political games and congratulate Barack Obama on his successful campaign for the nomination. There will undoubtedly be a very prominent role for you in his administration should he win in November — perhaps as Vice President, perhaps in some cabinet-level post. Please, don’t make it look like you blackmailed Obama into giving it to you.

Give Obama your support and your endorsement, and encourage your supporters to do the same.

Best wishes,

-jane doe

It was an interesting night for candidate speeches, tonight. And probably a bad night to be John McCain.

McCain went first tonight, and I can only infer that he felt obligated to say something because tonight marked the last of the primaries. What he was thinking giving a speech on Obama’s big night, I will never know, but it was an ill-advised decision. Speaking from New Orleans for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, he came across like a hopelessly out-of-touch high school principal trying to inspire school spirit at an attendance-mandatory pep rally for a football team facing the last game of a losing season.

McCain tried to paint himself as the candidate of change — a laughable notion at best, given his talk of continuing our current president’s failed policies. He talked up his experience and minimized Obama’s. And he tried to paint himself as an ordinary Joe in touch with the working man and Obama as some sort of privileged elitist, apparently forgetting which candidate married a woman with a fortune estimated in excess of $100 million.

In short, the speech was the standard political fare of a traditionalist, uninspired and uninspiring.

Then came Hillary’s speech in New York.

Her choice of venue was also curious: it was in a basement-level auditorium of a college in New York, a place with no monitors for the crowd to watch news coverage and no reception for people to get updates from their cell phones and Blackberries. Perhaps so they could maintain their denial just a bit longer?

Hillary’s speech was interesting, and was clearly written by a lawyer used to finely parsing words and phrases to allow one to appear to say something meaningful without really doing so. She did not concede the nomination to Barack Obama, though she complimented him on a campaign well fought. Indeed, the opening minutes of her speech sounded more like the words of a candidate who had just secured the nomination, instead of one who could no longer deny that her opponent had secured enough delegates to make him the real winner. She left her path forward ambiguous — as if she is still considering taking the fight all the way to the convention in Denver. To her credit, she did speak of unifying the party, but for the most part, this speech was all about Hillary and her supporters.

Obama wisely saved the best for last.

He was speaking in St. Paul, Minnesota, tonight, at the site where the Republican Party will hold its convention later this summer. Again, a very interesting choice of venue. Because tonight he showed that he could fill that venue to capacity with people who were just there to hear him give a thirty minute speech. Indeed, not only did he fill it to capacity, but at least one report I heard said there were apparently about 15,000 more people outside, just there to celebrate and cheer for Obama.

All this, in the space where the Republicans will be holding their convention in a few months. Don’t think that the pundits won’t have a field day with that during the convention — especially since it seems more likely that the venue will be surrounded by 15,000 protesters, not well-wishers.

Tonight Obama demonstrated once again what an exciting and inspirational speaker he can be. He acknowledged McCain’s service to our country, and he spoke kindly of Hillary. But then he spoke of the hopes and dreams of the American people, and about our ability to achieve the amazing when we all work together. He spoke of being humbled by the people he had met over the last many months as he traveled across the country campaigning. And he spoke of his hopes of helping to unite us all — not Democrats, but Americans — to restore our country to greatness in the eyes of the world.

I was a bit misty-eyed by the end of it.

So there you have it. Three speeches.

McCain spoke about…well, I’m not really sure what McCain spoke about, because frankly it was a snoozefest.

Hillary spoke about Hillary and her supporters.

And Obama spoke about us. All of us. America.

-jane doe

NB: One edit in the third paragraph. Sorry about the multiple posts, RSS readers.

Update: JedReport at Daily Kos has put together a video mash-up of the McCain and Obama speeches, which gives a nice idea of the differences between the two. Worth checking out! He’s also got the full video of Obama’s speech in the same post.

No, wait. They’re all connected. I promise.

See, I was checking out the blogs this morning, and I came across a couple stories in rapid succession that seemed to me closely related.

The first was this story in the Denver Post about someone who claims to have video of a space alien peering into the windows of his home. The story includes a copy of the video — dark and somewhat grainy, but seeming to show a face with enormous eyes peering into a window, which the story helpfully tells us is eight feet off the ground. The story also informs us that the homeowner had set up a security camera because he suspected peeping Toms of looking in the windows at his teenage daughters, and instead caught footage of a space alien.

The second was this story on Politico.com (h/t to HuffPo) about Bill Clinton’s “enemies list”:

With Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on the verge of defeat, Bill Clinton has been placing blame on enemies including a brazenly biased media that tried to suppress blue-collar votes, a powerful anti-war group that endorsed rival Barack Obama and weak-willed party leaders unable to stand up to either of these nefarious forces.

Now, I know what you’re saying, my dear, non-existent readers. “How can these two stories possibly be related?” But trust me — there is a connection in my warped little brain.

Let’s start with the space alien story, shall we? As you read the story, you find out that the guy who got the video was trying to see if there were peeping Toms looking into his house (thus explaining the videocamera pointed at a window). And you might think, “Okay, this seems unlikely, but the video isn’t obviously faked, so I’ll reserve judgment for the moment.”

But then, if you read a bit further into the article, you find out that the homeowner who captured the video images also “claims to have had more than 100 encounters with aliens” and asserts that he was abducted by extraterrestrials.

Suddenly you find yourself thinking, “Maybe this guy didn’t see any aliens. Maybe he’s just a complete nut[1].”

Because one chance unexplained occurrence from someone with no history of such claims might be legitimate, or at least worth exploring. But when you see someone who claims repeated encounters with aliens — when no one else of your acquaintance can make similar claims — you have to think that it’s a bit improbable, and that there is likely some other explanation, probably involving psychotropic meds.

It’s like the stranger you meet in a bar, who is ranting and raving about his ex-wife who (according to him) was a psychotic bitch-monster from hell.

Now, if you talk to this stranger for a while longer, he may provide evidence to support his claim. Maybe she really was a psychotic bitch-monster from hell. It happens.

On the other hand, a longer conversation may reveal that not only was his ex-wife a psychotic bitch-monster from hell, but so was the girl he was dating before he met his wife. And the girlfriend before her. And his mom. And his sister. And his secretary. And his boss. And his third, fourth, seventh, and tenth grade teachers. And…well, you get the idea.

You kind of have to start thinking, “It’s not the women who are the problem. It’s you, buddy.”

Which brings me back to the Clintons.

Throughout the race, they seem to have done nothing but blame and complain. It’s the media. It’s MoveOn.org. It’s black voters. It’s white males. It’s young voters. It’s sexism. It’s the caucus states. It’s the right-wingers. It’s the talking heads. And did I mention the media?

And I can’t help thinking, “Bill, Hillary, maybe it’s not the media. It’s not MoveOn.org. It’s not the Obama supporters. It’s not even the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Hillary started out as the media-anointed candidate, considered all but a sure thing to win the Democratic nomination. For a long time, all the other candidates, Obama included, were being covered by the press as “also-rans”. Because who could possibly conquer the Mighty Clinton Fundraising Machine(tm)?

But at the end of the day, there were just more people backing Obama where they were needed, netting him more votes, more delegates, and more donations. And those people had a lot of different (and legitimate) reasons for backing Obama. Reasons that may have had little or nothing to do with the media, or MoveOn.org, or whatever.

Game over for Bill and Hillary.

If Bill and Hillary are smart and willing to be honest with themselves (if not anyone else), maybe, just maybe, they’ll take a long look in the mirror, and think, “What could we have done differently, that would have turned the nomination our way?”

But I doubt it. It’s much easier, after all, to blame everyone else than to admit that maybe you could have done something differently to win more voters.

On an only marginally related note, I still think Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

[1]“Complete nut” being the technical, psychological term, of course.

This is an open letter to any friends of Hillary Clinton out there.

It may be time to stage an intervention.

Clearly, the woman needs help to overcome her denial and see that her obsession with winning the presidency has become a problem not only for her, but also for her friends and family. And by “friends and family” I mostly mean the Democratic party – though I would imagine that Chelsea, at least, is getting rather tired of the whole dog and pony show by now, as well.

Yes, okay, fine, she had a strong showing in West Virginia last night. So what? West Virginia has, what, 28 delegates at the national convention later this summer? That’s not enough to change the race.

And she didn’t even win all of those delegates. Obama got 8. At this point, she would need to win, like, 90 percent of all remaining pledged delegates just to pull even with Obama. And that’s not even counting all the superdelegates who are now jumping onto the Obama bandwagon because they want to be seen as backing the winner while their vote still matters. Or the Edwards pledged delegates, who are likely to switch to the Obama column given the Edwards endorsement today.

At this point, all Hillary can hope to accomplish is to weaken the Democratic Party at a time when the party can least afford it.

And that’s why Hillary’s friends need to come together and gently, lovingly tell her to knock it the fuck off before she causes even more harm to her friends and family.

-jane doe

10:51 pm: Well, we are ten minutes away from the polls closing in California. At this point, Clinton and Obama are pretty much in a dead heat as far as the state count goes — how that will translate into convention delegates remains to be seen. On the Republican side, Romney appears to be picking up a few more states (Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, and North Dakota), though those states haven’t been decisively called yet and I don’t know what kind of margins we are looking at in the states. At any rate, it means Romney is still in the game, as are both Huckabee and McCain on the Republican side. And hey, did you know that Ron Paul is still in the race? You sure can’t tell from MSNBC’s coverage, but CNN at least includes him in the results reporting at the bottom of the screen.

Meanwhile, Hillary is currently on TV giving a speech, which I have muted. I may agree with her on a lot of issues, and if she’s the Democratic Party nominee at the end of the day I’ll vote for her, but I still don’t like listening to her give speeches.

11:00 pm: Polls in California and a few other states are now closed. But Hillary is still speaking. On and on.

11:01 pm: The Republican race in California is currently too close to call. Minnesota and Idaho have gone to Obama, and according to Keith Olbermann, I was too quick to assume that Clinton and Obama are currently tied in state counts: apparently, some of the states I was putting in Hillary’s column haven’t actually been called in her favor yet.

11:04 pm: Chris Matthews, whom I find annoying, is interviewing Mike Huckabee, whom I find worrying. But I didn’t unmute the TV soon enough after Hillary’s speech, so I missed whether there is a clear leader in California for the Democratic Party. Therefore, I am suffering through the interview so I don’t miss anything important.

11:10 pm: Unsurprisingly, California is too close to call at this point (addendum: and probably will continue to be too close to call for several hours). I see no reason to subject myself to more of this coverage for now. And according to my blog stats, no one is reading this tonight anyway (not that I have any readers on this blog), so I might as well stop talking to myself and crash for the night.

- jane doe

P.S. And since I haven’t mentioned it in this post, let me just remind my non-existent readers that I really think Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

Well, the snow is bad enough here in Redstateville that my evening classes were canceled, leaving me free to camp out in front of my TV to watch the results of the various primaries across the country. I won’t be live blogging, precisely, but I will be posting occasionally here as the evening progresses. I am watching MSNBC primarily, though I may duck over to CNN at times. Or maybe even Faux News, if I’m in need of a good laugh.

Let the good times roll, my dear non-existent readers!

- jane doe

NB: All times given below are EST.

6:18 pm: Chris Matthews just welcomed southern Africa to the MSNBC audience, which raises an interesting point: the outcome of our presidential election is of interest not just here, but throughout the world. Remember: it’s not just us liberals who are counting down the days until Bush leaves office!

6:25 pm: Why is it that the pundits insist on talking about Clinton in terms of female voters and Obama in terms of African-American voters? Last time I checked, there are still a few white males in the Democratic Party: Clinton and Obama can’t possibly be getting by just on votes by people who are demographically similar to them.

Random thought: Do you think the Bush administration is loving the primaries, since all the news coverage is focusing on the election instead of to the latest misdeeds of the White House?

6:40 pm: Several of the talking heads seem to take it as a foregone conclusion that McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. I’m not entirely certain whether that’s appropriate at this hour — so far the only state that’s announced its results is West Virginia, which went to Huckabee.

6:42 pm: On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan’s sister, Bay, who is apparently with the Romney camp, is raging about abortion, illegal immigrants, and whether McCain is really a true conservative. What prompted them to put her on? She’s practically frothing at the mouth. I really hope they’re not going to keep going back to her all night!

6:51 pm: They just reported on a poll of Republican voters which found that 71% of Republicans still support Bush’s handling of the Iraq war. What I missed (if you saw this, please reply in the comments) was whether this was among actual primary voters (which would suggest that these are the hard-core Republican supporters) or among the larger group of people who are registered as Republicans. Is it possible that the Republican voters are that far out of alignment with the rest of the country? Or are these just the die-hard Republicans who won’t admit that Bush has royally screwed things up in the Middle East?

7:00 pm: The polls just closed in Georgia, and within seconds MSNBC called it for Obama. No word on what the margin of victory was — one of the pundits (sorry, can’t remember which one) said if he doesn’t beat Hillary by at least 10%, Obama is toast. Seems a bit excessive, but I suppose the pundits feel like they have to make pronouncements like this…

7:03 pm: Sorry, I really should also be mentioning the Republican results in Georgia…except that they are apparently still too close to call, with Huckabee a strong candidate along with Romney and McCain.

7:15 pm: Okay, apparently they are going to spend this entire hour riffing on Georgia because it’s the only state where the polls have closed. I’m tuning out for a while, and will tune back in when the next batch of polls close.

8:00 pm: More results:

• Obama takes Illinois, and Clinton takes Oklahoma among the Dems
• McCain takes Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut for the Repubs; Romney is forecast to win Massachusetts

None of these are real surprises. The big surprise seems to be Huckabee bringing in far more votes than anyone expected, due to those infamous conservative “values voters” (a total misnomer: liberals vote their values, too — we just have different values).

8:06 pm: Currently, Huckabee is actually in the lead in Georgia (that’s in terms of actual votes, not poll projections). The Republican candidates are still running very close in Georgia, though, so the leader may change several times over the evening as more results come in.

8:09 pm: Apparently, Romney and Huckabee are having a big old catfight. Romney is pissed because they think Huckabee is taking away more votes from Romney than from McCain.

8:15 pm: MSNBC just called Tennessee for Clinton, by a narrow margin…narrow enough that I would have thought they would hold off forecasting a winner. But what do I know?

Okay, time to check out what the other major news channels are saying:

8:19 pm: Holy crap! Faux News has Karl Rove commenting on the primaries. I don’t know what he’s saying, though, because as soon as I switched to that station, they cut to a commercial break. But it’s Karl Rove, and it’s Faux News, so it’s probably safe to assume that whatever he was saying would annoy me.

8:22 pm: CNN is actually giving results for Ron Paul, unlike MSNBC, which hasn’t mentioned him so far. His results are laughable, but they are actually getting coverage, so I guess that will make his fanatics happy.

8:26 pm: Apparently, Arkansas — unlike every single other state — closes polls on the half hour instead of the hour. Results to be reported shortly.

8:31 pm: Surprising absolutely no one, Clinton and Huckabee are the projected winners for the two parties in Arkansas.

8:36 pm: Interesting polling numbers on Evangelical voters: they are apparently dividing almost evenly among the three major Republican candidates. The other interesting thing: I don’t think anyone is asking the Democratic voters about their religious affiliation. No one is reporting on the religious affiliation of Democratic voters, at least that I’ve seen so far. It seems like they should at least be asking, instead of just assuming that the Democrats don’t get any Evangelical voters. Yeah, I’m sure most of them go to the Republicans, but I can’t help thinking there are at least a few Evangelical Democrats.

8:56 pm: NBC has apparently called Massachusetts for Hillary, by a fairly healthy margin. I was switching between stations, so I don’t know what the Republican result was for that state. Wait, are there any Republicans in Massachusetts?

9:00 pm: New York was just projected for Hillary within seconds of the polls closing. A bunch of other states just had their polls close, too, but Keith is going back over the states they’ve already called again, instead.

9:02 pm: Okay, Keith just rattled off a bunch of Republican results, but he was going too fast for me to keep track. Plus, it’s the Republicans, so I have no emotional investment in any of the candidates. Obama is apparently winning Delaware, though.

9:20 pm: Hillary wins New Jersey, apparently. And apparently McCain is winning everywhere. Except where he’s not.

9:33 pm: How the Tucker has fallen. Didn’t he have his own show on MSNBC for a while there? Does he still? I can’t stand the guy, so I’ve never really paid much attention. But they’ve got him stuck at one of the Republican candidate’s headquarters like a regular reporter/guest pundit type. He’s not looking real happy, either.

9:37 pm: Romney cannot be happy right now. He won Massachusetts, but everywhere else so far is going to either McCain or Huckabee. The Romney people are talking about Colorado, and I would imagine he’ll do pretty well in Utah as well, but he was probably not figuring on falling behind Huckabee in so many states.

10:00 pm: As predicted, Romney won Utah. Yawn.

10:12 pm: Huckabee is on TV at the moment, giving a speech to his minions supporters, but I am done for now. I may check in again after the polls close in California, but I’m sick of listening to pundits and politicians. G’night everyone!

That’s right, my dear non-existent readers, it’s Sooper Dooper Tuesday.

Oh, yeah, and it’s also Mardi Gras…because nothing says “presidential politics” quite like massive numbers of people getting drunk on hurricanes and showing their private parts to anyone willing to throw a few beads in their direction.

And it’s not just New Orleans that is throwing a killer party today. (NB: New Orleans can throw the biggest, rowdiest party ever and it won’t make a lick of difference as far as presidential politics are concerned. Louisiana isn’t having primaries today, so it doesn’t matter if all the voters are drunk enough to seriously consider voting for Ron Paul.) No, New York – which actually is having primaries for both parties today – is apparently having a parade/drunken blowout/riot in honor of some football-related event. So, if any of my non-existent readers live in New York, keep this handy tip in mind: alcohol and defective voting machines don’t mix. Vote first, then party.

I will not be live blogging the election coverage tonight, unless enough snow falls today for evening classes to be canceled (which is a distinct possibility). Or unless class is really dull (also a distinct possibility). Still, I’m very excited about today’s primaries, because by the time they’re over – or by Thursday at the latest – we won’t have to listen to the talking heads natter on about what the impact of Super Tuesday is going to be anymore.

And lest there be any doubt about the matter, I still believe that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

P.S. Once upon a time, it was illegal to sell alcohol on election day before the polls closed. Apparently they were worried about political party hacks influencing voters with alcohol. Does anyone know if this is still the case anywhere (other than Utah, where they’ll seize on any excuse to restrict the sale of alcohol)? I assume it’s now legal in most places, because there is simply no other rational explanation for Bush’s victory in 2004.

Yes, the Democratic presidential candidates are debating again tonight. I’ve lost count as to how many times they’ve done this. Keith Olbermann pointed out this evening that it really kind of depends on how you define “debate” — which is probably all you really need to know about how many of these things there have been, now that I think about it.

I will not be liveblogging. I started to, but I got sick of listening to Hillary. Not that I blame her. In their first responses to questions, Edwards and Obama went after her, and she defended herself. The third question was directly to her, and by then her voice had become sharp enough that I had to hit the mute button to hear myself think. She’s making good points (though so were Edwards and Obama), but her tone of voice was bugging me.

I am recording the debate, however, so I can fast forward through it later and pretend I am doing my civic duty. If anything particularly noteworthy strikes me, I will post about it.

Until then, allow me to reiterate that I really think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

I’m watching the debate right now, and am not going to attempt to liveblog, but I did have one thought that I wanted to get out there:

I know Gravel doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting elected, and I don’t think I would want him in the White House, but damn, I love having him up on stage in these debates because he is willing to take the other candidates to task for their votes on some of the big issues. I really enjoyed seeing him go after Hillary for voting in favor of the Lieberman bill on the Iran situation.

And yes, I still think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

At long last, the Senate Judiciary Committee has finally gotten around to issuing a subpoena on the whole alleged legal basis of the White House’s warrantless wiretapping program! It’s about time, guys!

While you’re at it, Dems, I really think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

Something in a comment I got last night made me fear that one of my major concerns/points in my previous posts on the subject of terror management theory was not coming across clearly, so I thought I’d take another stab at it.

My hope, in writing about terror management theory and its implications, is that by educating others about it I can help reduce its effectiveness as a tool of manipulation. I do not mean to imply that the threat of terrorist attack is not a legitimate one, nor am I deluded enough to believe that awareness of the theory will insulate people against its effects if, heaven forbid, another event of the magnitude of 9/11 were to occur at some time in the future. Rather, I seek to ameliorate its effects as a tool of political manipulation by our own leaders and voices in the media and blogosphere.

I fear some may also misinterpret my intent in making certain named and unnamed Republicans the villains of the piece. I do not believe that all, or even many, Republicans are evil. I know and respect many people who have been lifelong Republicans, even though I frequently disagree with them.

I have two main reasons for making Republicans the villains of the piece when I ventured into Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Land in yesterday’s posts. The first is that, as I already indicated, I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their ilk are already using the principles of terror management theory consciously and deliberately to manipulate the public, and that it would therefore be a much shorter trip for them to make the jump from merely hammering on 9/11 and the terrorist threat in speeches to manufacturing a situation that looked like a real terrorist threat of far more serious magnitude than pizza delivery guys attacking Fort Dix or a plot by intermitently homeless immigrants to blow up JFK airport by igniting jet fuel storage tanks miles away from the airport – particularly when something as serious as the next major national elections were at stake.

The second reason I chose to make the Republicans the villains of the piece is because, given the current political situation, I believe that they are the party most likely to benefit from such an attempt. The general public is very annoyed with our beloved president at that moment, and that annoyance has been transformed into much stronger support for Democratic Party candidates – we already saw some of this last November. By the time the next federal election rolls around, we will in all likelihood be another two years into the catastrofuck that Iraq has become, and may be at war on other fronts if Bush follows through on his saber rattling. (And by the way, has anyone else wondered how exactly he plans to back up those threats, given the current, over-extended state of our military? I can think of only two options: reinstituting the draft about six months ago, or using at least “tactical” nukes (if not the really big ones) to bomb Tehran into the stone age – a move that would probably be the kiss of death for our country on an international scale, completely alienating our few remaining allies and uniting everyone in the Middle East against us. But I digress.) The point being, the Republicans are the ones who would most need some sort of major attack on U.S. soil to turn public opinion their way in time to change the outcome of the election.

I also want to point out that even when I ventured into Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Land, I did not go so far as to think that Rove and Cheney, or any other members of my hypothetical evil back room cabal would actually plot a real attack against U.S. civilians. I frankly do not believe that they would do that – I cannot believe that, because if it were true, the implications for our democracy would be unthinkable. In my second scenario (the one where a nuclear weapon was actually detonated in downtown Los Angeles), they just made the mistake of seeking help in carrying out their attempt to scare voters from individuals with a hidden agenda who did want to kill a lot of innocents. Big difference.

Although there have been studies showing that mortality salience tends to make people in the aggregate (though not in all individual cases) more likely to support more charismatic and/or authoritarian candidates and policies, such politicians could theoretically arise in either party – though I tend to believe authoritarianism is more compatible with a Republican worldview than a Democratic one, at least as the two parties seem to be expressing their views through policies of late. [Addendum: I will acknowledge that this belief could be a side effect of my own biases, which are decidedly on the liberal end of the political spectrum. Except that I really don't think that's the case.]

And here is a big news flash for those who think that I am so blinded by my own political views that I would continue to follow a Democratic candidate using fear tactics to sway voters: if such a candidate did exist, and I became aware of him or her using such tactics the way certain Republican politicians and commentators are at present, I would call him or her to task for it, as well. It is the emotional manipulation and scaring of voters for political gain that I am objecting to here. I have targeted Republican politicians because they have been the ones blatantly engaging in this sort of behavior in recent years.

As I said in response to a comment last night, it is my hope that if members of the public are educated about terror management theory, they will become more conscious of deliberate attempts by politicians of either party attempting to use emotional manipulation to obtain votes, and thus better able to resist such attempts. Politicians of both parties really ought to be focusing on the issues facing our country at the moment in the course of their campaigning – and to their credit, many of the current crop of presidential candidates in both parties seem to be attempting to do just that. (Well, except for Giuliani, who can’t shut up about 9/11 – though that is perhaps understandable since it is public perception of his performance in the aftermath of that catastrophe that is keeping him viable against the other Republican frontrunners among likely Republican primary voters.)

Notwithstanding the foregoing, I really think that Bush and Cheney ought to be impeached.

-jane doe

“I acknowledge that mistakes were made.”
–Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales

Isn’t the passive voice a wonderful thing? It’s a way to appear responsible, without actually taking any responsibility. A handy rhetorical tool for those in politics, and one which we got to see in use just today, as our Chief Rationalizer for the Undermining of the Constitution, also known as the Attorney General, tried to justify the political firing of eight U.S. Attorneys while at the same time pretending he had nothing to do with it.

“Mistakes were made,” certainly, but when phrased that way, it leaves open the very important question, who by? Please, tell us, exactly who made these mistakes? You? Karl Rove? The alleged president? The American people, by voting these weasels into power? I submit to you, my nonexistent readers, that there is a world of difference between saying “mistakes were made,” and admitting that “I made a mistake.”

In fairness to Gonzales, he is hardly the first political-type to try to weasel out of a tight spot using the passive voice, and he certainly won’t be the last. Examples abound of this sort of creative use of the passive voice in politics. I seem to recall someone in the Reagan administration saying it in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, and others have used similar words in similarly awkward or appalling political situations.

And there are good reasons why we see so much of this from the mouths of politicians. A rather startling percentage of politicians are lawyers, after all, and while law students are generally urged by their writing instructors to use the active voice, those same instructors will be the first to tell you that the passive voice can be your friend when you want to accurately describe the facts in a brief without making your client look guilty of whatever he or she (or it, in the case of corporate clients) has been accused of. Consider the following example:

Imagine you are representing a defendant in a civil lawsuit in which one party is being sued for, hypothetically speaking, shooting the plaintiff in the face while the plaintiff and the defendant were out hunting after having a few beers. Which of the following sentences would you rather include in your legal brief?

“Plaintiff was shot in the face while hunting.”

–OR–

“Defendant Cheney then accidentally shot the plaintiff in the face.”

The first option acknowledges that the plaintiff was shot in the face, but provides no information about who pulled the trigger. Conversely, even putting in the word “accidentally” in the second statement doesn’t help our poor defendant out very much there, does it?

In fairness to the Republicans (and make a note that I am trying to be fair to the slimy bastards), Democrats are probably just as guilty of abuse of the passive voice. In the face of reporters trying to get Hillary Clinton to admit that she was wrong to vote in favor of the Iraq war, the most I have heard anyone get from her is an acknowledgment that “it was a mistake” — not that she made a mistake. (Shame on you, Hillary. You’re not fooling anyone with half a brain and that will work against you, since you’re not running for the Republican Party’s nomination.)

Some reporters push the issue, but it seems like many more dutifully repeat what is said to them without further inquiry. And of course, on Faux News, they just stick to whatever talking points they’ve been handed by their Republican Party overlords. We need to start forcing the issue when we are confronted with politicians trying to passive-voice their way out of a sticky situation. Otherwise, mistakes will continue to be made, and responsibility will continue to be ducked.

–jane doe

So many truly appalling things have happened over the past few weeks, I hardly know where to begin. Shall I rail about the hypocrisy of Republican politicians who proclaim that the only way to support the troops is to support the war but ignore the appalling conditions in housing for wounded members of the military who are being treated at stateside facilities until the condition of said housing becomes a segment on the prime time news?

Should I mock political candidates (even ones I like) who have begun campaigning fully a year before the first primary will actually be held?

Shall I snort in derision about remarks by the First Lady that refer to “the one bombing a day” in Baghdad, implying that (a) there is only one bombing a day (which would be an improvement), and (b) a mere one bombing a day is not a big deal (imagine if it were a bomb a day in NYC, Laura, and see if you would still feel like things were going pretty well)?

Or perhaps I should lampoon the allegedly neutral think tank (apparently a spin-off of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute) that made much of the Gores’ high utility bill but ignored the fact that part of the reason it was so high was that the Gores were paying a higher rate in order to obtain their energy from renewable sources?

Decisions, decisions…

-jane doe

Webb mentions New Orleans, which makes me wonder — I can’t remember whether the shrub mentioned rebuilding New Orleans or not.

He’s making some great comments about the economy and the erosion of the middle class. Nice contrast of CEO incomes with incomes of average workers. Nice comment about the shipping of jobs overseas — that is something that really needs to be addressed soon. I had a huge argument recently with a friend who is doing some consulting to help American businesses ship jobs off to India. My friend feels that it’s not really his problem that jobs are going away, he says he’s helping corporations operate more efficiently…I think it’s everyone’s problem. Ultimately, although corporations are considered legal persons, they completely lack many of the characteristics of people you would actually want to know, like a conscience or a concept of duty to the society. Sure, there are corporations that do good things for their community, but ultimately the goal of a corporation is to make money, both in the short term and the long term. If that is their primary raison d’etre, many of their decisions are not going to be in the best interests of the societies in which they operate.

Ah, now we get to the part where he rips Duhbya a new one over the mess in Iraq. Go Jim!

In calling upon the president to move in a new direction to address the problems facing us, he got in a great line: “If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.”

IMNSHO, a pretty good rebuttal — though he expressly stated that it was not intended to be a rebuttal.

-jane doe

Pelosi, Reid, and a few other highly-ranked Democratic members of the House and Senate just spoke to the press after meeting with the alleged president about his plans for Iraq. They looked grim. They are justifiably frustrated that Bush has waited until today (when the plans have already been made and this evening’s speech is probably already in final draft form) to “consult” with them. I use the scare quotes quite deliberately there, because true consultation involves actually listening to what others are saying and incorporating their suggestions into the final plans, not going into a meeting with one’s mind made up and attempting to persuade others to one’s view.

Interestingly, even the Republican congressional leaders who spoke with the press looked grim after hearing from Dubya. This does not bode well for the rest of us, and most particularly does not bode well for the men and women in our armed forces. This is going to be an interesting speech tonight.

-jane doe