Paul Joy's Blog

Great Questions

2011-05-09T19:09:00.002-04:00

I came across this a few days ago on Eric Alterman's Blog. It is good, really good.

Telegraphing the Pitch
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee unveiled a new primary debate plan that would give the RNC substantially more power to schedule candidate forums and choose conservative moderators from outside the realm of traditional media to host those events. Conservative talker Hugh Hewitt, in a grandly pretentious Washington Examiner op-ed from this past Sunday that really has to be read to be believed, portentously hailed the plan’s “promise of serious discussion of issues of deep importance to the conservative electorate tired to death of the agenda journalism of the Obama-loving MSM.” Predicting that such a plan “could yield a renaissance in campaign coverage,” Hewitt went so far as to draw up what amounts to a right-winger’s dream team of alternative panel members and potential debate topics:
“Imagine one or two debates on foreign affairs, moderated by a senior statesman and featuring questions from public intellectuals like Charles Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson and Liz Cheney."
"A debate moderated by the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot and featuring economic historian Amity Shlaes and other writers and reporters knowledgeable about the history of markets and regulatory policy would be valuable."
"Or perhaps a forum on the Constitution, courts and judges moderated by Robert Bork and featuring former federal appellate judges Michael McConnell and Michael Luttig? The possibilities for great and informative debates are many and long overdue.”
Let’s be really honest here, what kind of serious, fact-based policy discussions can the American public expect from the Republican primary candidates if each debate is dominated by a collection of demagogues, intellectual poseurs (courtesy of our old friend LTC Bob Bateman) and duplicitous, power-hungry officials the likes of which are listed above. Indeed, for each debate, the RNC might as well go ahead and follow the lead of a certain New York baseball team and let the moderators use hand signals to telegraph to the candidates just which canned talking points to use next. In fact, I finally let my curiosity get the better of me and decided that I would try to humbly come up with a potential list of “serious” questions that might match the tenor of Hewitt’s “smart questioners” at just such a GOP presidential primary debate. Feel free to submit your own as well...
Round Robin section:
– Just how awesome was Ronald Reagan? (For brevity’s sake, please avoid using the terms “amnesty,” “Beirut” or “signed a tax increase” in your answer.)
– Gitmo: What can we do to make it less humane for those terrorists lucky enough to be coddled there indefinitely?
– (Special for Newt Gingrich) What does the Obamas’ successful marriage say about how secular progressives are flagrantly undermining the vital role that mistresses, infidelity and divorce play in shaping American exceptionalism?
– Critics say the fact that millionaires and multinational corporations often pay nothing at all in incomes taxes here in our country is a travesty. Detail how your administration would go about lowering this unfair tax burden even further.
– What is your stance regarding teaching evolution in our schools? (Trick question: If somebody really cared about their child, they would already be home schooling them!)
– After having repealed Obamacare as your first legislative act as president, what would you charge Congress with doing next to solve our nation’s daunting health care problems: Repeal Medicare or repeal Medicaid?
– Hypothetical situation: You, a Federal Reserve Governor, a unionized public school teacher, and a pregnant illegal immigrant starting to go into labor are all stranded inside an oddly unfurnished Detroit mosque during a climate-change-refuting blizzard and you only have a single bullet left in your legal, concealed-carry handgun, who do you pray will get “called” to heaven first?–How would your administration go about discerning the voting preferences of unborn fetuses every Election Day and isn’t it safe to assume that their choice would cancel out that of the mother, especially if she wasn’t married and/or wore pants?
–Please address a fellow candidate at the forum and, in discussing his or her inability to stay true to conservative principles, explain how their failings pale in comparison to the lingering questions about Obama’s true birthplace.
–Describe in one-minute the process by which all Americans will be able to shop nationwide for cheap, J.D. Power-ranked organ transplants thanks to the completely privatized health care marketplace your administration would set up. Thirty-second follow-up: Quickly summarize your campaign’s innovative pilot project whereby the chosen dollar amount of one’s annual health insurance deductible would directly correlate to one’s standard income tax deduction.
Lightning Round:
– Bomb Iran: Yes or Now?
– On a scale of one to ten with ten being the absolute highest, how much weaker and more feckless is Obama’s leadership style than Neville Chamberlain’s?
– Show of hands, which of you supports a 9-month waiting period before any abortion could be performed?
– On a scale of one to ten with ten being the absolute highest, how much more domineering and tyrannical is Obama’s leadership style than Genghis Khan’s?
– OK, who here supports a five-year waiting period before a child would be eligible for Head Start?
– If you could repeal just nine amendments from the Bill of Rights, which one would you leave intact—the 2nd or the 10th?
– Who would support eliminating Head Start and replacing it with a dollar-for-dollar tax credit off of the first $50,000 each citizen earns in capital gains each year?
– Name an influential or perspective-changing book you’ve made it a point to never read.
– More important: making Social Security less social or less secure?
– Bigger threat to our democracy: high voter turnout or collective bargaining?
Final Question:
–Some on the left (wait for boos to die down) say that the Tea Party merely represents a clever repackaging of the same-old, politically aggrieved social conservatives that have always existed at the right-most fringe of the Republican Party and that by increasingly kowtowing to this rump minority of the American public the GOP is endangering both the party’s future as well as that our of nation. So, I ask you, just how awesome was Reagan again?

A Life Lived

2011-05-08T19:18:00.001-04:00

Reflections on a Life

I would imagine it might be a good time to look back on my 65 years on this planet and try and explain, confront, understand what has transpired and how it all has shaped me as a person. I really don’t have a very clear view of what I was like as a toddler, unlike my younger sister (by two years) who seems to be able to recall with ease everything that happened in our large family as soon or soon after she exited the womb. For instance, I do not remember getting my right hand caught in the motorized belt that drove the ringer washer. It did quite a bit of damage to the first two fingers and thumb of my right hand. All I know is that I was crawling and not yet walking. I’m sure I screamed though; including when our family doctor, Dr. Aitkins, stitched me up on the kitchen table with blood flying everywhere; so my mother told me.
Alas, that’s about it for childhood trauma. What followed is a pretty normal, active, although not necessarily eventful youth. My older sister (by two years) had to walk six blocks to catch the streetcar that took her to the elementary school a mile and a half from our home. She was six. I had to be fitted with a harness and tied to the front steps because I tried to follow her to school. I too started school at six (there was no kindergarten then) at the brand new elementary school a mere four blocks distant.
I really enjoyed school, despite the fact my grandparents, on my mother’s side, decided to buy me a brown outfit for my first day. It included a jacket and shorts, yes shorts. I was so embarrassed that I spent my recesses sitting on the north side steps of the school rather than play with the other kids. Teachers thought I was an English kid who was used to wearing a ‘uniform.’ Thankfully my parents realized that I hated my little brown outfit and allowed me to wear regular clothes to school. I quickly and easily left the steps and joined in the play that was so much a part of my education and personal development.
I had a nun in grade one; she was young and we all liked her, but I don’t remember her name. In grade 2 and 3 I had Miss Stewart; we did not get along, but I still liked school anyway. It wasn’t until grade 6 that I had my first male teacher, Mr. Morrison. By this time I was becoming a bit of a pain in the classroom; I think I saw myself as a wise guy, I suppose. Anyway it may also may have been because I had discovered girls, sigh. It amazing what an influence these lovely young ladies have on an eleven-year old kid who was wearing braces. Yes, braces! I was the only kid to have braces in my elementary school. That would appear very strange today where so many kids are wearing the ‘railroad tracks,’ as they were called back in the day.
By high school the braces were gone, but a rather cocky, skinny kid entered PACI, a venerable old building a mile and a half from home. Surprisingly I was really shy, especially around girls, but what I found was my passion – sports! I tried out for all teams in grade nine, except for football – I weighed maybe 130 pounds. Soon enough football would be my downfall as my three shoulder operations and innumerable separations and dislocations were to prove. But that didn’t start until grade 10 when I was probably a robust 140 pounds.
Those 140 pounds spent the next two years either being hurt, in the hospital (I visited every emergency room in the three city hospitals), recovering on the bench from said injuries, or simply trying to contribute to the team effort. I found that my body was much better suited to basketball, a game that I had a lot of success at, even though my shoulder injuries did not go away. At least I didn’t spend too much time away from the game because of these injuries.

Leaflets, Big and Small

2011-04-30T10:50:00.001-04:00

What Do the Leaflets Do in April/May/June?

Whenever I’m bored and have nothing to do, and my belly button is clean, I allow my mind to wander and wonder what on God’s green earth do the billions and billions of Leaf fans do when all the talented and dedicated hockey teams in the NHL are still playing in the second season. I’m almost certain that, given the fact that the Toronto Maple Leafs have now missed the playoffs for seven consecutive seasons, the leaflets have many other options to pursue. For example, there is gardening, bird watching, soul searching and, of course, golfing.
What does the Leaf Nation talk about during these quiet times in their lives? Do they talk about how awesome the Leaf management will do during the draft in June? No, that can’t be considering how absolutely pathetic Toronto is in picking top talent for their talent-short team. Actually it is quite difficult to gauge how bad the Leafs are at picking hockey talent. Their team is so bad; their head coach is not particularly liked by anyone, especially young players, that even if these kids had some major upside they would have to demonstrate it with another team after they prove to be a bust in Toronto.
I wonder, if perhaps, the Leaf Nation actually watches the Stanley Cup playoffs and fantasizes about what ifs and if onlies about their decidedly inept club? The many leaflets I’m acquainted with are split as to who does and doesn’t watch the second season. Those who do invariably whine about how the Leafs are a much better team than the ones they are presently watching. I know, it is sad, indeed. To be honest, however, there are a few, but only a few of my close friends who actually are acutely aware of how bad their team is. They alone make no bones about how far, far away the Leafs from being contenders of any stripe for Lord Stanley’s Cup.
It’s funny that I can pinpoint when all the leaflets began to see their beloved buds as perennial Stanley Cup contenders: it was the years that Doug Gilmour played for Toronto. Up until then, you couldn’t find a Leaf fan that was suitably droll about the Leaf chances. You know, they were actually enjoyable to be around because you could kid them and rag them and they were cool with that. Alas since that time in the early to mid nineties of Gilmour’s reign, Leaf Nation now believes somehow, someway that their Leafs are just that close to being viable contenders. Alas, again, no non-Leaf fan believes a word of it. Why?
Look at the record; look at their incredible incompetence in drafting quality young prospects; look at their horrendous trades, whereby they bring in aging stars who immediately succumb to Leaf disease and forget totally how to play defensive hockey; look at their anemic record of hiring the right coach and general manager to guide their sorry collection of hockey players. Need I go on? The Toronto Maple Leafs have been and continue to today to be a franchise that is long on fan support and exceedingly short on talent. General Manager Brian Burke has done nothing to change that despite his many and vociferous comments to the contrary. Seriously do you really think the Leafs will have what it takes next year to make the playoffs?
Once they begin to improve, if it actually happens, other teams will begin to take them more seriously, thus they will play much harder than they do now against the Leafs. For many years now the Leafs have had to rely on the overconfidence of their opponents to sneak in a few extra wins.
Speaking of wins, Leaf Nation is alone among all sports fans in their misguided belief that a three- or four-game winning streak in November is somehow indicative of the Leafs wonderful chances to win the Cup. It has happened yet; it hasn’t even come close to happening, but, alas, the leaflets fall for this dodge every single season without fail. It’s amazing really that a team this mediocre with virtually very limited future prospects continues to delude itself in an annual fashion to the extent of their wonderfulness. Amazing, indeed.

April 23, 2011

2011-04-30T10:49:00.001-04:00

Blog for April 23, 2011

This past weekend I helped a friend do some demolition work on his old sauna at camp. We left Thunder Bay at 5:30 Friday night with his company truck, his new 12-foot trailer, and his son-in-law in tow. We arrived at his Open Bay camp on beautiful Lac des Mille Lacs about two hours later. It was surprisingly cold, very cold for the middle of April. The wind was strong and out of the north. We quickly unloaded the truck and Shane, the son-in-law, began deep-frying chicken wings in the old sauna (it was too cold to cook outside), and Bob and I unloaded the trailer.
By 8 o’clock the wings were ready, the rum was chilling in the large, ice-laden glasses and the hockey game was on the big screen TV. So much for the socializing; we had a big day ahead of us, especially considering the next day was supposed to bring a heavy snowfall.
When I got up shortly after seven, it was snowing steadily with very little wind. By the time Bob and Shane got up and we had finished breakfast, the snow had to be at least two to three inches thick. We immediately cleaned out the sauna, turned off the power and began to gut the interior of the 12x20 structure. I cut all the electrical wires, and Bob and Shane began tearing down the interior walls. The previous owner certainly liked to use a lot of nails. The entire interior comprised 1x6 cedar tongue and groove. The boards were nailed not with one but two small nails in each stud. I’ve never seen two nails before, ever.
Once we had pulled all the nails and ripped out the insulation and vapour barrier, we had to knock down the brick wall that surrounded the woodstove, the huge woodstove. This demolition actually went very quickly and we loaded all the brick and the stones from the sauna stove into Bob’s trailer. Having cleaned all this up, we then tried to figure out a way to move the large woodstove. Its sheer size was compounded by the fact it was buried in the cement floor. However, we were able to dislodge the stove and move it slowly but surely out the door.
Once we had the stove out the door we had to maneuver it onto the trailer; this was more problematic than we had anticipated, but we were able to finally, with the help of Shane’s winch on his side-by-side quad, slide it onto the trailer. That was one heavy stove. We then filled the trailer to a height of about 7 feet with insulation, vapour barrier and the odd piece of wood. Thus began our second trip to the dump to unload all the detritus of a 20x12 building. It is now completely clear of all materials, as the old sauna will be converted to a shiny new bunkhouse for the family. Next week Bob will be replacing the existing windows as well as adding a few more.
Alas, I will not be on that job; I have home duties to perform this weekend. I have always enjoyed putting on my tool belt and hammering and sawing and all sorts of other productive and manual projects. It gives me immense satisfaction to build something, even as we did this past week to tear things down. I’ve been like this my entire life; the only caveat to all of this is that I much prefer to work with someone or others who know what they are doing. I don’t have enough confidence in myself to tackle big jobs by myself.
Sometimes I think my daughter and son-in-law think I can do all sorts of things by myself. Alas, I cannot. I just don’t give myself enough credit I suppose, but back to my main theme. There is a satisfaction I get at the end of day when we’ve actually accomplished a lot. You can see it physically and concretely. I built those walls or I tore those walls down, etc. There is also very much a camaraderie that I enjoy too. Most projects require some help usually 3-5 other people; there is also, of course, the cold beers that follow a long day on the jobsite.

April 16, 2011

2011-04-22T19:54:00.000-04:00

Blog for April 16, 2011

Well, the long 82-game schedule has mercifully come to a close and my not-so-beloved Red Wings are in the playoffs for the 20th straight year. Alas, I really don’t see them advancing too far this year. I can count on one hand the games where they actually dominated a team, like they used to regularly. The Wings will not be winning any games on their reputation these Stanley Cup playoffs. Surprisingly they play the Phoenix Coyotes again this year in the first round. It will probably be our only real chance at a first round triumph. I hate to be so negative, but I’ve watched them all year, and I’ve done more swearing rather than cheering.
But the swearing will have to turn to cheering if I’m to have a pleasant post season run. This mean my team has to change their sloppy, inconsistent play that was so evident all year long. The Wings have to be especially good at home; something that haven’t done since early in the season. The Wing fans are used to excellence; the team will have to provide it on a nightly basis for the full 60 minutes. If they do that, there should be no need for overtime.
Ah, overtime… It really is something special. The intense pressure on the players, especially the goalies, must be seen to be believed. I would love to see an overtime game live. The electricity in the building would be incredible I’m sure. Perhaps I might one day get the opportunity to see my Wings at home in an overtime game in the playoffs. I would really like to be in the stand for one of those, especially if we win, naturally.
Enough of this piffle; let’s get to the playoffs and what the Wings have to do to have me cheering and not cursing. First Johann Franzen will have to play up to his potential on every shift; second, Todd Bertuzzi will have to play much smarter than he has all year: that means no more stupid passes which gives the other team the puck and now his line has to play in our zone. That happened way to often this year.
Well, I’m glad to report that the Wings won the first game against Phoenix 4-2 last night. I saw only the third period, at least most of it anyway. I will miss all of the Saturday game, as I’ll be helping a friend demolish an old sauna and turn it into a bunkhouse. I expect my team to play even better on Saturday. Apparently they were lucky to escape the first period down 1-0. Some things don’t appear to change: the Wings do not start on time and then spend the rest of the game playing catch up.
It was good to see Johann Franzen finally do something. He had a goal and an assist. He will have to play well in all games for us to be successful. Phoenix had four power plays in the first period alone; this was after scoring the first goal less than three minutes in. One of the power plays was a two-man advantage for 90 seconds. Amazingly the Coyotes did not score. Detroit scored three times in the second and that was about it.
I don’t know how good or bad Bertuzzi was, but he did get into a fight, of sorts. Datsyuk, as usual, was his amazing self, at least from the little bit of the game I saw. Cleary was his always hard-working, intelligent and dangerous self. He too is amazing in his own workman-like way. Apparently Filppula had an excellent game – it’s about time! He, too, has to get going and play up to his potential if we are to be successful. I was surprised though at Darren Helm’s play; I thought he would be much more visible and dangerous. He wasn’t very noticeable out there, which is very unusual for him. He raises him game considerably in the playoffs, but we shall see.
I really don’t see how Babcock can put Mike Modano, a healthy scratch in game one, in for game two. Kris Draper is just too important for face offs, and Modano, let’s face it, really hasn’t fit in with the Wings. He is a defensive liability, and he never really got it going offensively this year.

Republican Children

2011-04-10T15:48:00.000-04:00

Blog for April 9, 2011

I’ve been thinking of talking about what happens in the homes of Republican politicians with their spouses, children and, perhaps, grandchildren. How do these ultra phony people explain to their spouses and their offspring what it is they do and why they make the ridiculous comments they make on a daily, if not hourly basis? I would also like to interview the parents of Republican politicians to try to ascertain the incredible depths their offspring will go to support the richest people on earth while they completely ignore the rest of their constituents.
I would love to meet the parents of these buffoons and ask them point blank: was Bubba always this obtuse, this idiotic, and this hateful when he was younger? When did he begin to show the telltale signs of being a complete and utter asshole? Did you encourage this in your child? Are you proud of what he/she has accomplished? What goes through your mind as you watch your beloved country going hell bound for the dumpster with your child leading the way?
What do the children and grandchildren of Republicans read? What books do they read, what children’s programs do they watch? How do the elder Republicans keep their offspring away from science? What schools can they enroll their children in and still make sure the teachers are drinking the Republican Kool-Aid? You really have to hand it to them: since Reagan was president, the right wing has spent an entire generation plus in denying virtually every scientifically-generated report on everything from the climate to pollution to the actual age of the earth, and the wing nuts deny it all. My question remains: how do they convince their children that all of this scientific evidence is bogus? What, indeed, do mater and pater do to make their kids toe the party line?
What goes on at the supper table in a Repub’s home when the kids come home from school? Are the kids allowed to defend their teachers’ views about science, history, religion, anything really, and not make their parents look like fools? How, indeed, do the ‘adults’ in a Republican home explain in a rational way that their kids’ teachers are wrong?
I guess what I’m really talking about here is what will become of these poor, thoroughly misinformed children, as they move through life? I think I know though: they will replace their parents and grandparents and see that being utterly obtuse about what is happening in the world around them and just wait to earn their money the Republican way – they’ll inherit it! But I digress.
What happens in Republican households when the children question the budget proposed by Paul Ryan? What happens when the kids quote Paul Krugman and many others about the sheer insanity of the proposal: the ridiculous miscalculations, the ludicrous slant it gives to serious problems that confront America? What do mom and dad say? If their children have a modicum of intelligence and honesty, how do the parents counteract the many questions the kids will have? What if grandma will most definitely be affected by this outrageous excuse to give more tax breaks to the rich?
Interesting questions, indeed. Do Republicans force their children to follow slavishly the party line? How in God’s green earth do they make their children in any way follow their increasingly bogus values?
I was watching “The Dinosaur Train” with my 15-month-old grandson this morning; actually I watch it every day with him. I think it’s a wonderful show. It’s lively, interesting, and educational. I wonder if the children and grandchildren of Republicans are allowed to watch it? I would think not. There would be far too much explaining to do to their offspring, especially when Dr. Scott explains how old these remarkable creatures are. That’s one thing Republicans have a lot of trouble with – facts! Alas, they are forced to bring their children up as incredibly ignorant and fact-denying young people in order to maintain the Republican aura of the stupid.
Because stupid is the only thing that can possibly make these people continue to carry on as they do and keep raising the ante on the stupid.

April 3, 2011

2011-04-03T21:42:00.000-04:00

Blog for April 2, 2011

Wisconsin – is it the beginning of the end for America? Is it representative of what America has become? Is it the final slide toward naked banana republicanism? Will anyone in the mainstream media make any effort to confront the right and their naked assault on the American worker? Why has such a thing come to pass in America?
What will the children and grandchildren of today’s adults ruining running America have to say about their parents and grandparents who allowed this to happen on their watch? How will it be at all possible for the offspring of Republicans to in any sensible, sane manner accost their elders and demand to know why they led the fight to destroy their own country in every way imaginable? What will the future leaders of this once great nation be able to do to stem the tide of such benighted ignorance and rancour?
I have no earthly idea. The Republican Party and all right wing zealots have decided that no matter what happens they will do everything legal and otherwise to defeat the Democrats and ensure that the great divide between the rich and the poor widen as quickly and painfully as possible. What this will eventually do to America as a civilization and super power one can only speculate, but what is certain is that America is profoundly changing before our eyes; it truly is becoming a gigantic, powerful banana republic. All the Hollywood movies ever made about the end of earth kind of features is being played out dramatically and in reality as these words are being typed.
America is going to hell in a hand basket and no one, with the small exception of bloggers, is bothering to notice or care. I find it absolutely amazing that a country that has done so much for the world as well as, alas, to the world is rapidly, inexorably heading for certain disaster and doom. I think of John Steinbeck’s magnificent The Grapes of Wrath as the forerunner of what may happen to all of America, not just California, in my limited lifetime. Given its penchant for violence, and its love of guns, the Republic will no doubt implode within the next 20 years, if not sooner. The banksters will all be taken out and shot in some public square, their estates and that of all their rich cronies will be razed and burnt to the ground. Chaos and violence will reign for decades. It will not be pretty.
I can see the very rich already contracting Blackwater (or whatever they are called now) to protect their billions. I can see your regular cop on the beat having to contend with the massive firepower Blackwater will bring to the confrontation. It will be vicious and ugly. America’s naked greed and grasping for power will be on display for the whole world to see. However, I’m sure the media will remain securely in the pocket of the rich. After all, the people who sign the cheques for the ‘journalists’ and newscasters are a part of the super rich. They will not allow their minions to ever cast aspersions upon them. It will be a nasty, drawn out war that will leave many bloodied and damaged beyond repair. I have no idea how it will turn out, but I know what side I’ll be cheering for.
I read an interesting blog post this week discussing what would America look like if the Republicans get their way on everything. It was not pretty. But I would like to return to what Republicans tell their children and grandchildren about what America will be like for them. The reason I say this is that since we were blessed, truly blessed with our first grandchild on January 4, 2010, I’ve completely altered the way I think about everything. I now wonder daily what my grandson’s world will look like. What will his aspirations be? What will his economic prospects be? What direction should his parents try to guide him educationally? Will he have as much a chance as my daughter and I had as we grew up? Will he be able to enjoy the relatively safe and pristine wilderness environment I have come to relish and cherish?

Blog for March 3, 2011

2011-03-03T21:40:00.001-05:00

Blogging for February 27, 2011

This is my second week of writing on a daily basis, almost. I don’t expect this segment to be much better than the first one, but it is a start after all. Sundays are my days for coming up with a topic for this week’s blog comment. I may come back to this after I’ve read a few of my blogs to jog my writer’s block.
The introductory paragraph, above, was all I came up with yesterday (Sunday). I’ll have to do much better tonight. My Red Wings game starts in about 35 minutes. We are on the west coast playing Los Angeles. Today was the last day to make a trade in the NHL. There appeared to be no particular blockbuster moves made, but I may be wrong. Poor Toronto had been courting Brad Richards, but he informed everyone this morning that he would agree to a trade only to the New York Rangers; yet another slap in the face for the Leaf Nation. Is there no indignity that they don’t or won’t suffer? You can talk until you are blue in the face and the leaflets just don’t get that quality hockey players in their prime have absolutely no desire to play for such a disastrous organization. With the possible exception of Ken Holland in Detroit, I don’t think there is a human being on this earth who can turn this ridiculous franchise around. They seem to be absolutely snake bit. It doesn’t matter what they do, but they find a way to look god-awful at the most inopportune times. See last night’s game against the struggling Atlanta Thrashers.
This is really the best part of the regular hockey season now. There will be no more trades; each team will have to make it on its own. No excuses. The Red Wings game last night was really strange. We were outplayed by a large margin in the first period and yet were ahead 3-1. Poor goaltending and finally some luck around the net paid off. We usually get this many chances in a game, but the shots rarely go in; I’m not sure why, but we often have trouble converting regularly on our many golden opportunities. Perhaps we have turned a corner; we’ll see: we have the Ducks tomorrow night, the Sharks on Thursday night, and the surging Coyotes on Saturday night.
The political scene in America continues to deteriorate. I’m beginning to sense that in my lifetime there will be cataclysmic shift in America’s ability to govern itself. I’m beginning to think seriously that President Barack Obama is not up to the job of reining in the Republicans and sending them and their tea party and all the nutjobs that follow them to political oblivion. The president could start by indicting all the Wall Street crooks, all the lawyers and politicians and the Bush regime cronies, including Bush and Cheney, and have them all brought before courts of law and have them tried and put away for good. Then and just maybe then will America begin to recover its soul and its direction. If this does not happen, then America is doomed. Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, and all the hundreds and thousands of right wing radio and TV dipshits be also brought up on charges of sedition and God knows what else. Also the print journalists who have allowed all this to happen while they nodded approvingly from the sidelines.
So what is to come of all of this? I think, unfortunately, this is going to end very badly for all, except the rich, of course. The American middle class will all but disappear; there will be virtually no manufacturing at all, and there will be a vast lower class with catastrophic unemployment. Crime will be rampant and, given America’s love of the gun, there will be much violence; however, the rich will be protected by their own police force behind secure walls in gated communities. And it will happen sooner than later. Obama has been a major disappointment; the democrats, as usual, have been spineless do-nothings who wring their hands and wait to see what their rich benefactors tell them to do next.
Money has absolutely and thoroughly corrupted a once beautiful country. Every where you look, America is in decline.

2011-02-27T15:24:00.000-05:00

Blog for February 21, 2011

It is about time I got back in the saddle and started blogging heavy hard. It’s been about a year since I last deposited a blog-worthy note in my moribund blog. This will mean, once again, that I have to follow my writing regimen of Sunday to Thursday writing, Saturday to revise, edit, polish, and proofread. Stir and repeat again beginning the following Sunday. All it requires from me is the willingness to sit down and get to work. Every night at 6:30, except Fridays.
It’s not like I don’t have a lot to talk about. I just to read my blogs for ten minutes and I have enough material to respond with a lengthy post, but for reasons I do not understand, I do not seem able or willing to get my thoughts down in writing. As they say though: the only way to begin writing is to begin writing. Thus I begin once again to wade into the murky but oh-so-satisfying world of writing, blog writing.
I just took a dip in the old American politics pool for a not quite refreshing dip. I don’t think I have enough intelligence; actually no one does, to make heads or tails out of what the American right thinks about anything. They could be the dumbest people on earth. If they are not, whom would you select as dumber, seriously?
I’m getting ready to watch a little bit of the Washington/Pittsburgh game that starts in a few minutes. I really wonder if the Capitals really have it in them to make a concerted effort to come together as a hockey team. As it turns out, the Capitals won the game 1-0; however, I never watched the rest of the game.
At the moment I’m watching Detroit and San Jose. It is 3-2 at the end of two for San Jose. We are quite well actually, but we are really having trouble controlling Joe Thornton’s line. We are, however, playing quite well; I’m optimistic for the third period. Perhaps the rest of this blog I will live blog the game. Hell, why not?
Datysuk just hit the goalpost at the beginning of the third. Eaves is gone for the night. He hurt his leg in the second period. Datysuk just had another marvelous opportunity - in front of the San Jose net. The last few minutes the puck has been in the Detroit zone; Jimmy Howard has been excellent all game actually. Detroit ended up losing the game 4-3. However, I think the team deserved a better fate. Better goaltending did us in along with a few goal posts.
Tonight I planned my last really heavy class load for tomorrow. Thankfully the year is just about up. I must be getting old; I look forward to the end of a school year. Mind you I still have to do five weeks of observing student teachers as my role as faculty advisor, and I have to finish my online course that goes until the end of March. This will be followed by the Junior Basic course in the spring, and then I’ll be done.
I really do wonder how much longer I will continue to do this. This will be the end of my 39th year in teaching. I wonder if we didn’t need the money how long I would continue to go. I’m probably good till 70, but all bets are off after that. Mind you if we win the $50 million lottery, I’ll be out the door in an instant.
Well, having won the $50 million, I guess I can give more time to my blogging. What would I talk about? Let’s see: American politics, the Leaf Nation, the Detroit Red Wings, education, fishing, that’s a start for sure. Now, I just have to win the big prize. In the meantime I’ll have to toil and toil and curse the bread, etc.
I’m quickly approaching the end of my self-imposed 700 words. I’m really not sure how I’m going to revise this mess into a coherent whole, but that will be Saturday’s chore. Right now I’m trying to hit the magic number before the Wings/Stars game.

Blowhards 2

2010-03-31T16:20:00.002-04:00

I think this is must reading for all thinking people. It seems to really put the right wingers in their proper place. Enjoy.

Blowhards. Part Two.
This is more of an aside than a follow-up to last week’s post on the Right’s addiction to violent rhetoric.
My point in Blowhards. Part One is that Right Wingers tend to use words for how they make them feel rather than for what those words mean and that because power and domination define the way the world works in their minds and most of them don’t have power or dominate over anyone, at least not to the degree they feel they should, they’re always reaching for words that make them feel as if they have that power and are fighting to hold onto it. They need to feel tough, strong, brave, and scary in order to feel they are powerful and dominant, and in that context only fightin’ words will do the trick.
Their language is combative, belligerent, violent because their feelings are violent.
I don’t mean that they feel the need to commit violence, necessarily. I mean that the surge of feeling within them is violent. Frustration, anger, fear, and hatred are not feelings that just sit there inside you.
Using words for how they feel instead of for what they mean is not just a habit of the Right. For most people, words are the sounds their feelings make. Ideally, we would all use the words that both sound right and mean right, that express the feeling and identify it and give it the shape of thought. That’s the job of poets. Most of us aren’t poets. We grab at whatever words we can and hope that people listening will understand what we would have said if we were poets.
I’m repeating myself.
But people don’t use words only for how they feel. We use them to make us feel. We can talk ourselves into feeling most anything. Usually, what we talk ourselves into feeling is right.
It’s astounding, and sometimes amusing, to hear someone tell an obvious lie using the most trite, cliched, and inappropriate words and realize that while everyone in the room clearly knows it for a lie and is not even bothering to hide their derision, the liar himself seems to believe himself absolutely, even to the point of tearing up at his totally fabricated emotions.
But we aren’t the audience. He is. He is talking to make himself feel right.
He is using words that make him feel that he is not what he is, that he didn’t do the bad, stupid, mean, or otherwise wrong thing he did.
Even when no real wrong has been done, at least not by them personally, people will talk to make themselves feel better.
This is the attraction of gossip. Talking about other people’s failures and mistakes makes us feel better, better than the people failing and making those mistakes. All gossip has a single them: “I am better than that.”
The need to feel better, to feel good, to feel right is human, and liberals and progressives have a rhetoric of self-righteous congratulation too. Forget politics. Listen to us talk about books, about the movies we like, about music. Especially music.
But over the last couple of generations the American Right has perfected a Politics of Feeling Virtuous.
The Right believes in power and domination as the measures of all things. But wanting power and domination and fearing that you don’t have it or are losing it are not pleasant ways to feel.
For one thing, it’s the way villains and cowards feel.
The right thing to do would be to resist those feelings, to recognize them as belonging to villains and cowards and look instead for, as Lincoln said, the better angels of our nature. But the human, as opposed to the angelic, thing to do is to indulge those feelings while pretending they’re something else, to dress them up with words that mean the exact opposite of those feelings but carry powerful feelings of their own, feelings belonging to heroes and saints.
It also helps if you can use words that make you feel that those other, less noble feelings are justified. It’s ok to want power and domination if you deserve to have them, if God or Nature has intended you to have them and that your having them is a sign of your moral superiority.
But it’s also human nature to find our goodness in comparison. Maybe I can’t be sure I’m right, but I can be damn sure you are wrong.
Which is why demonization is such a key trope in Right Wing rhetoric. They can’t be sure they’re right, but they can make damn sure they feel that we are wrong.
Of course, the less right they feel---and since they measure everything in terms of power and domination including rightness and righteousness, and they feel themselves losing power, they feel themselves losing rightness and righteousness, not to mention legitimacy---the more wrong they have to feel we are.
Losing is both a sign of weakness and a punishment for it. It is also a sign of the withdrawal of God’s favor. But God wouldn’t do that to us! (Would He?) And we aren’t weak or deserving of punishment! (Are we?) Of course not! Then, the only way this could happen, the only way we could lose the power we’ve been granted by God is if it’s being stolen from us by a side that is not of God. The side taking it must be of the Devil. The other side must be supernaturally wicked.
And words get chosen that make that wish feel like the truth.
And it goes on. If I am good, and you are bad, there is no way that I can do or say anything bad or you can do or say anything good. Consequently, if there are still racists in the country, then they must be on your side. If violence is being threatened and committed in the name of politics, then it must be coming from your side. If anything I do or say can be construed as violent and threatening then I must be doing it in self-defense. I must be doing it because you pushed me to the wall. I must be justified in retaliating.
The publishing industry has long known how profitable is to sell people the notion that they are right. Gossip and self-help advice are the two most obvious niche products marketed directly to our vanity. Politics is a fast-growing market though. There are books written to shamelessly flatter liberal vanities but the fact is they are mostly unnecessary and not worth the money to print them. You can make a liberal feel good about himself just by giving him the facts.
Now, it is a fact that the facts have a liberal bias, but what liberal vanity loves about the facts is that having them makes the possessor feel smart. Liberals live to be able to say, “Did I tell you what I read last week?” and to then tell you. We don’t need what we read to justify what we feel because we feel justified by having read, period. Besides which, we assume that whatever the facts are they somehow justify our liberal feelings, so we’re open to anything as long as it is substantiated, that is given the intellectual seal of approval by accredited experts. Trusting to experts is a feature of liberal vanity. There’s no need to sell us a liberal view of history or a liberal view of science.
But whether or not the facts are as strongly on our side as we like to believe, they are decidedly not on the side of the Right.
What the Right needs are alternative facts. It’s hard to feel you are right, and in the right, if the facts are against you. The easiest and most natural way to deal with this is to deny the facts are in fact facts. Believing that college professors and scientists are spreading lies is helpful, to a point. Another helpful dodge is to convince yourself that it’s liberals who don’t know the facts, not just because they’ve been taught lies, but because they believe things that are obviously crazy. And from Dave Noon at Edge of the American West I’ve just learned that there are conservative historians and college professors who are willing to sign their names to the notion that liberals believe and teach lunacy instead of the truth, as in a book called 48 Liberal Lies About America.
Here are three examples of those lies:
• “John F. Kennedy was Killed by LBJ and a Secret Team to Prevent Him from Getting Us Out of Vietnam”
• “Ronald Reagan Knew ‘Star Wars’ Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with the USSR.”
• “September 11 Was Not the Work of Terrorists. It Was a Government Conspiracy.”
I can’t wait to read the other 45.
The author claims that these notions are endorsed by history textbooks, thanks to the efforts of liberals. I didn’t know Oliver Stone wrote textbooks.

2010-01-21T20:17:00.001-05:00

Blog for January 23, 2010

I finally see that my beloved, but often reviled and justly so, Red Wings have now played two stellar games in a row, both losses mind you. It is the first time this year that they have done so. Is it too much to ask them to perform at such a lofty level for three games in a row? We’ll know tomorrow night (January 21) when they travel to St. Paul for a game against the Minnesota Wild.
It has been a most unusual year to watch my team play so badly at times, many times actually. I never tire of telling my many friends who, for reasons known only to themselves, cheer wildly, recklessly even, for the inept Toronto Maple Leafs, that I now know what it’s been like for them for the past 43 years to watch a team play with such utter futility and only occasionally reach the upper levels of mediocrity. Enough anyway to give them the eternal hope they treasure for each and every one of those 43 years.
I’ve witnessed the Red Wings over the first three plus months of the season like I’ve never seen them play in almost 20 years. That’s how good they’ve been; that’s how spoiled I’ve become in those wonderful years of Stanley Cups, never missing the playoffs in any year since 1990; I could go on and on, but enough. Now they play like the Toronto Maple Leafs: some times they are good, very good even, and then they can be God-awful. I’m not sure why. I wonder at times if Mike Babcock, the head coach, is losing the room. But I seriously doubt that.
If we can keep up our recent play, a big if, then we will make the playoffs, but everyone, and I mean everyone has to play his hardest on every shift. They must compete for the puck like they used to do every season; they do that and some of them will be rewarded with a demotion to the minors when Holmstrom, Williams, Franzen, and Kronwall return from injuries. If they continue to improve and we avoid any more serious injuries, then we will have to worry only about the goaltending.
Ah, yes, the goaltending the perennial problem that plagues the mighty Wings. We have never been blessed with a goalie so good that he can win games on his own. You would have to go back to the days of Terry Sawchuk to find a goalie of such skill and artistry to complement the might the Wings have shown on defense and the forward lines. Alas, Jimmy Howard, who, even when he wins makes me nervous, very nervous. He often is awkward in moving from side to side and he has this sickening flopping motion as he lunges out toward pucks. He looks no better than a junior B goalie at times. Chris Osgood is too inconsistent to be counted on to take us to another Stanley Cup.
In fact, Osgood was rather petulant at the end of last night’s loss to the Washington Capitols, complaining that he hadn’t played in a month and what can you expect when you are so rusty. He went on to say that he needed more work if he was to be a contributing part of the Wings’ future success.
I’m about to settle in to watch the Wings/Wild game in St. Paul in about 4 minutes. Both teams are fighting for a playoff position from the outside looking in. It should be a good game. Minnesota has won 4 in a row at home; I like when we’re up against it; it brings out the best in us or, as has happened way too often this year, the not so good. In a few hours we’ll know what Detroit team shows up.
Perhaps I’ll live blog the game to make up my final fifty words or so. So far not much has happened in the first few minutes. Neither team has had a stellar scoring chance. Larry Murphy is doing the colour with Ken Daniels; I guess Mickey Redmond is not available. Detroit just got their first penalty. I’ve said enough.

2010-01-20T16:39:00.000-05:00

Blogging for January 16, 2010

I really have to get out more. I was at my nephew Scott’s Winter Classic hockey party on New Year’s Day and there was quite a range of ages there: from me the oldest to another nephew who is 24. The average would have been around 40. Everyone had cell phones and throughout the game and long after they were either talking or texting almost continuously, at least for the 24-year-old. What does this mean about where our society is going when we feel compelled for some reason to be communicating nonstop with other people who could not possible be interested in what we are doing at a ‘sausage’ party where ten guys, three of whom did not have cell phones were watching an NHL hockey game being played outdoors.
If I was on the other end of a text or a phone call I think I know what my reaction would be. Do I really have to know how many beer you’ve had, or who is at the party and who isn’t? I would imagine this is only going to get worse. The day is coming, I suppose, when everyone from nine to thirty-nine will be constantly in touch electronically with someone or other. Is this the beginning of the end of conversations; you know, face-to-face conversations where you actually look someone in the eye when you are talking to him?
If I was a little nosier, I would have asked anyone of the many people there if he minded sharing with me what he had texted. I’m just guessing now mind you, but I will assume that spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization do not exist when you text or twitter. Can you twitter from your cell phone? I wouldn’t be surprised. Heard a great commercial the other day about a cell phone that was also a weed wacker. Loved it. But I digress.
As with any of these sea changes in technology and how it has such an immediate and profound, often, impact on our lives, especially if you are young, it makes me wonder what is just around the corner that will make it even more difficult, more stressful to teachers and parents to get their children to work on their writing skills and their people skills. How far away are we from a society that increasingly becomes more distant, more inclined to be indifferent to what happens to our fellow human beings? How far away are we from ignoring, at our own peril, the tell tale signs of a society that has become more and more robotic and less and less human?
It would seem we are becoming more tethered to our toys, our electronic toys that give us an added layer of indifference or distance from our fellow man. We use these devices to help us keep our distance from relationships and family contact too. We often use these intermediary devices to keep us in contact with our parents, our siblings, and our friends in a world that is increasingly becoming more and more remote. Will the time come when we are in a face-to-face conversation or confrontation and we will be at a loss for words? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the intimates in this conversation/confrontation resorted to texting each other as they faced one another, less than a meter apart.
Have I seen the future for my two-week old grandson? Is this what his life will be like, only much worse? Will people in twenty years even be talking to each other in what we consider today to be normal? Will the electronic age be so much a fundamental part of our lives that we will be unwilling, or perhaps, unable to carry on a conversation with anyone unless there is some form of electronic device to act as an intermediary between us? Will Kaeden grow up doing more texting than talking? How will the grandparents ever be able to be a part of his world, a world that increasingly has become more remote and less human?
I’m not sure I want to tarry too long pondering the answers to these vexing questions. I think I would rather just talk with my grandson about what he is up to, etc.

Kaeden Shannon Paul Foster

2010-01-07T20:02:00.001-05:00

Blog for January 8, 2010

On Monday, January 4, our grandson was born. He was 8 pounds exactly stretched beautifully on a 21-inch frame. Our wonderful daughter Laurie-Ann had but two hours of hard labour – not bad for a first child. Not bad at all. Shannon, our son-in-law, was a tower of strength throughout the birth. He came running to tell us, his smile a mile wide as he stated that our grandson was born at 7:06a.m. His name will be Kaeden Shannon Paul Foster.
Dianne and I first saw him in Laurie’s hospital room: Dianne sometime that morning; I didn’t see my grandson until after 5p.m. When I held him I thought of what Diana, the lovely lady who works the Aramark food business at the Faculty of Education. She said when you hold him for the first time; you will never forget the feeling. She was right. Kaeden was like holding a burning log he produced so many BTUs. He rarely opened his eyes, but Shannon says they are blue. Blue is good.
Laurie said she didn’t feel so good; although I thought she looked just fine, if a little tired and haggard looking. She is attempting to breast feed, but between her and the baby, they were still trying to work out the details, both of them being rookies so to speak. Dianne and I left shortly after 6p.m. We were both pretty tired but elated too. We were, finally, grandparents. Laurie and Shannon are both 37 years old. They have been married for five years; we were beginning to think we would never see a grandchild.
It’s been quite a while actually since anyone in either of our families has had a child. Cameron, the son of Jimmy (Dianne’s brother) and Ann was born almost 20 years ago. That’s an awful long time between babies. Apparently my nephew Jeff (son of my sister Derryl and her husband Mike) and his new bride (newly married in October of this past year) want to start a family right away. Good for them.
The next morning Laurie and Shannon brought Kaeden home. Laurie basically kept him in her arms all day, even when he was sleeping. Thus she got no sleep. The next day she put Kaeden in his rocker/bassinette and he slept like a real trooper. Last night, however, was not a good one. He was fussy and Laurie attended to his needs perhaps a little too quickly. Again she had a rough night. I saw her this morning; she did not look good at all. Fortunately, Kaeden had a wonderful afternoon of sleep (12-4) and therefore Laurie did too. She has to make sure she begins to recover from the after affects of birth. She has to be strong and alert for baby Kaeden.
Listen to me; I’m sounding just like an interfering grandparent. By the way, I want to be called grampa; I’m not sure what Dianne wants to be called (granny?). But I digress. I am most looking forward to watching my grandson grow up. I fully expect to be involved in everything he does. We will be very active grandparents, especially when Laurie goes back to school in September. Dianne and I will be babysitting our beloved little fellow. Well, actually, Dianne will be babysitting most days; I’ll still be at Lakehead University, God willing to start my tenth year at the old Bora Laskin Building. However, I fully expect to be involved on my days off and when I’m home from my classes.
I’m also really looking forward to having Kaeden at camp this summer. I know he won’t understand where he is yet, but I want to begin acclimatizing him to what I hope to be his camp some day. I know his parents really aren’t interested, but who knows, maybe our grandson will take to fishing and camping like Dianne and I have. I realize we are many years away from that decision yet, but it still is nice to think and dream about it.
It will be interesting to see what kind of sports my grandson will be involved in. Now that it’s a boy, the male sports immediately come to mind: hockey, baseball, etc. I know Laurie is quite adamant about not allowing her son to get involved in contact sports, but we’ll see. Golf is certainly a game that he might well excel at.
To be continued.

It's been awhile

2010-01-03T20:19:00.001-05:00

Sunday, January 3, 2010

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything to put on my blog, but I suppose it’s a New Year’s resolution come a few days early. I see already that Microsoft Word is annoying me. They are trying to tell me that ‘it’s’ is used incorrectly. It’s NOT! Alas, some things never change. However, I do not want to waste my time talking about the many problems with Word. I want to get back into the writing game, and the only way I know how to do that is WRITE! Already I’m beginning to annoy myself – using CAPS and exclamation marks. Give it a rest, Ed.
I’m still a big reader of blogs that comment at length on the completely dysfunctional American political system; I’ve been doing this for years now, and the unfortunate thing is that no matter how much sense these bloggers make, it has virtually no influence whatsoever on how America conducts its daily political business. I have a few theories about why this is so. Who knows? Someone might actually agree with me.
The Republican Party, despite being out of power, still wields tremendous influence, far outstripping their supposed inability to win office in any significant numbers. Why? They dominate all aspects of the American media. How do they do this? Mainly by working an egregiously compliant press to join them in positioning the Democratic Party as weak and ineffectual. And it works.
Despite the impressive and persuasive writing on the part of many in the blogosphere, the American public generally and hopelessly stupidly takes their political cues from serial liars and ass kissers of the first rank on the TV and the major newspapers and magazines. The term IOIYAR is so thoroughly appropriate, and the bloggers cannot make a dent of any size or shape to reach the vast majority of the American people who seem to be very much at ease with their incredible lack of awareness about anything that affects them deeply – things like health care and joblessness.
The fact that virtual everyone is predicting that Republicans will gain seats in the elections of 2010 pretty well tells you all you have to know about their thinking and lack of awareness. Which brings me to a significant, I think, point: what the hell is wrong with Americans? I do not know of another country that has a citizenry that is so ignorant about the goings on in their government. When you have so many people who are utterly unaware of what is being done in their name by their government, and they don’t seem to care. The American people yawned and snoozed through eight years of the worst administration ever in the history of the republic, and only the bloggers and a few, very few other journalists who have made any attempt at all to bring to light the many nefarious law-breaking that went on unimpeded during the Bush administration and continues, sadly to say, during the first year of the Obama administration.
If I were a blogger who has spent as much time as the liberal bloggers have in trying to bring attention to the perilous plight of America, I would be frustrated to the extreme. No matter how cogent their arguments, no matter how persuasive their writing, the Republicans simply ignore all the facts thrown in their face and scream inanities like ‘socialism,’ ‘Nazism,’ and all sorts of other ridiculous commentary, and the mainstream media gives these fools a national platform to spout their invective and venom with little or no consequences for their hatred and gross stupidity. The thing is that the Republicans don’t care. They have hides as thick as Naugahyde and they have absolutely no shame. They lie and cheat with impunity, and the mainstream media gives them a free pass every time. Nice work if you can get it that’s for sure.
I’m coming to the end of my first blog in a long, long time. I know it blows big time, but I have to start somewhere and it might well be here. Yes, I’m going to publish this drivel on my blog to show myself and the world how bad things can be and yet believe I am capable of much more.

Driftglass gets it!

2009-05-27T19:16:00.001-04:00

Virtual Particles.

From the collapsing probability cloud of the Mouse Circus, there congealed this prototypically absurd exchange between Senator Dick Durbin (D-driftglass’ state) and Newt Gingrich on the damage the existence of Guantanamo Bay has done and continues to do to our international reputation that sailed right on by the host of "Meet the Press"

this Sunday.

Durbin: I just gave it to you: Major Matthew Alexander, who interrogated the al-Qaeda suspects in Iraq. And it was his conclusion that half of them had been recruited and were fighting, trying to kill Americans because of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
...

Gingrich: Let me say, first of all, there were over 550,000 troops who served in Iraq. I'm sure you can find one to agree with you. The fact is the 3,100 Americans who were killed on 9/11 were killed before there was a Guantanamo. The recruits who were going into Iraq were going into Iraq long before Guantanamo was, was a serious factor. The people fighting today in Pakistan are fighting Pakistanis. The people--the Taliban who's fighting in Afghanistan, they're not running around using Guantanamo. They're running around using the existence of America. One of the terrorists in Guantanamo recently threw his television down and broke it because he had a picture of a woman with bare arms. I think we are kidding ourselves about who these terrorists are and we're kidding ourselves about the power of this. Guantanamo matters because in America and Europe the left has decided the matter.
...

You could spend a couple of hours closely fact-checking and parsing every way in which this single, oozy slab of trademark Gingrich treachery can be subdivided into individual blocks of mendacity.

From the dismissal of a genuine subject matter expert who directly contradicts Ginrich’s obscene assertions as somehow statistically irrelevant because a bunch of other troops have been to Iraq...

...to the idea that throwing a teevee down makes a person a hardened killer...

(Which, of course, means Elvis Presley was a terrorist:

All the way to 1974, when Elvis finally got some mental satisfaction by nailing Goulet on TV. It occurred while Elvis was working at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. He was in his top-floor suite when he saw Goulet on TV. Elvis took out his gun, shot the TV, and (according to Allexperts.com) said, “Get that s**t outta my house!”

(SCTV and Chicago’s own “Image Union”

were terrorist training organizations.

(And Frank Zappa was some kind of Talibanish

hatespeechifying inciter of anti-teevee violence.)

...you could spin endless yards of comedy gold from all of the idiotic implications of Gingrich’s idiotic words without ever touching on the key point that whatever “facts” Gingrich didn’t just pull straight out of his ass, he got 180 degrees backwards wrong.

From Washington Monthly:

I had heard that as well, after writing my last post on the subject, and was waiting for confirmation before publishing it. Note not just that neither an objection to bare arms nor any other sort of Islamic fundamentalist anything had anything to do with it, but also that the detainee in question is presently living peaceably in Albania.

That means that even if you don't think, as I do, that it is perfectly understandable that someone who had been imprisoned unjustly for seven and a half years might throw a TV to the ground in frustration, and even if you overlook the many US citizens who have tossed the odd appliance around during (say) a bar fight without thereby showing themselves to be terrorists, there is no need to worry about any TV-throwing Uighurs being released into the US. The only Uighurs still in Guantanamo have never thrown any TVs at all.

Of course Gingrich isn't talking to you or me. He is dog-whistling to the Republican Base; telling them that something as trivial as bashing the idiot box is actually an Ominous Harbinger of the Apocalypse, when brown people and furriners with weird names do it.

Tirelessly preaching is the same tired sermon of xenophobia and racism he has been bleating out for 20 years.

Because Gingrich never intends his “arguments” to be taken seriously. It is not merely that Newt Gingrich is a degenerate liar; rather, as he showed with implacable ferocity back in his wingnut backbench bomb-thrower days, Newt doesn’t give a shit about the truth or falsity of anything at all.

To Gingrich, words are nothing more than the linguistic equivalents of virtual particles:

Virtual particles are subatomic particles that form out of "nothing" (vacuum fields conceptually analogous to lines of force between magnetic poles) for extremely short periods of time and then disappear again. …Virtual particles are real and have measurable effects, but the same uncertainty principle that allows them to come into existence dictates that they cannot be directly observed.

From ordering Republicans to call Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity as a means to create tactical political advantage (and then weeping over how terribly partisan politics has become), to pontificating as a Family Values leader while cheating on his second wife with his third mistress, to ordering a brand new wife and his brand new religion calibrated for optimal electoral value straight out of the GOP “Bride, Faith and Beyond” 2012 campaign catalog…words are nothing to Newt but abstract phonemes to be strung together to make the Pig People dance or shout or vote.

Which, over in the Better Universe, would lead me to be much more optimistically inclined in the direction the incomparable Digby points out here:

One of Newt's biggest problems as a politician is all the stupid things he's said in his career. He makes Biden look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That's why I hope he runs for president.

However we don’t live in the Better Universe. Over here, in the reality we have, Newt is a card-carrying MSM Village insider with a blank check to inexhaustibly churn his hateful, fact-free bullshit out the Mouse Circus C-130 like a thousand cubic yards of radar-reflecting chaff. One week he is peddling his venom as a George Stephanopoulos “panelist” on one network, and the next week his has slithered across the hall to appear a “guest” of NBC’s resident “Meet the Press” Jughead

whose silk-gloved handjobbing of pustules like Gingrich makes the eyebrow-arching “Hmmm”-a-thons of the late Tim Russert look positively impaling.

Which winds me back to what Chris Matthews had to say during Matthews’ wide-ranging deep-muscle ego massage at the big, tender hands of Chuckles Rose on his eponymous show Monday (h/t Blue Gal)
Matthews: Some of the bloggers jumped on me an this is what I think explains what some people think of me. When we first went into Iraq...

Rose: What do you think they think about you?

Matthews: The don’t quite get me. First of all, I’m a grown up and they resent that. And secondly, also, I have a job – they don’t like that either. Hehehe. That’s really gonna fester them in anger.

And later…
Matthews: I’m not a Lefty because I’d rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for my country. I wanted to be wrong [about Iraq]. That’s why I’m different than these bloggers and these people that are so cocksure about themselves. I’d rather have my country succeed than be right.

Looking back over the last four-plus years, I find that I have now done between 150 and 170 (depending on how you keep score) of these Sunday Morning after-action, bomb damage assessments. And from the very start, SCMD was never going to be a transcriptional analysis because the Mouse Circus is kabuki theater, and merely transcribing that which has already come right out of the can thoroughly pre-scripted seemed a waste of time and pixels.

No, the Mouse Circus deserves to be treated as what it is: is a weekly Member’s Only puppet show where trail balloons are launched, Approved Talking Point rations are doled out, and impotent millionaires feign passion for one side of fake controversy or another and rub their wizened political genitalia all over each other in stilted orgies of mock public discourse.

From Taibbi:

The entire news business is dominated by financial considerations. In fact it’s probably more accurate to say that the business is dominated by financial desperation. TV networks routinely run blatant advertorials about new “miracle cures” or product launches (new movie releases are a classic example). Moreover they routinely ignore important news stories if they don’t offer an angle that sells. The whole industry, I mean the entire news industry, missed the financial crisis, and do you know why? I know why. Because there wasn’t a single news organization in the country that could afford to put boring mortgages on the front page.

The game was well and truly lost when Fox proved it could carve out the first new network in 40 years and steal market share from the Big Three by vertically integrating soft core porn, raunchy cartoons and Archie Bunker News. It was lost when the Big Three –- panicked by the hemorrhaging loss of Low Information/High Bigotry viewers and their billions of dollars in buying power -– began openly pandering to the opinions of demagogues and degenerates under the fig leaf of “objective” journalism.

You know Chris, of all the tawdry, narcissistic little lies you and your craven brethren tell each other about why you botched your professional responsibilities so catastrophically during the Age of Bush, the most disgraceful is that you somehow failed because of an excessive love of country. That your massive, throbbing patriotism compensates for your massive, throbbing fuck-ups and your superiority to the childlike, jobless Lefties of your shallow imagination somehow exists in direct proportion to the immense scale of your dereliction “because [you’d] rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for [you’re] country.”

Chris, I don’t know a single angry Lefty blogger who wouldn’t dearly love to have been wrong about the last eight years, precisely because we saw what a disaster was waiting for us at the bottom of the abyss into which Bush was hurtling us all. We saw the car being driven off a cliff by a drunk and tried every way we knew how to warn everyone who would listen.

Mostly we got called traitors and were told to shut up.

You, on the other hand, sold your professional soul to a smirking chimp because he looked like a flight suit.

From Media Matters:
Chief among the cheerleaders was MSNBC's Chris Matthews. On the May 1, 2003, edition of Hardball, Matthews was joined in his effusive praise of Bush by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and "Democrat" Pat Caddell. Former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-CA) also appeared on the program.:
MATTHEWS: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you're the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan -- what do you think?

COULTER: It's stunning. It's amazing. I think it's huge. I mean, he's landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It's tremendous. It's hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn't matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It's stunning, and it speaks for itself.

MATTHEWS: Pat Caddell, the president's performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?

CADDELL: Well, first of all, Chris, the -- I think that -- you know, I was -- when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull. But and then I saw it. And you know, there's a real -- there's a real affection between him and the troops.

[...]

MATTHEWS: The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown --

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

CADDELL: Yes. It's a -- I don't know. You know, it's an internal thing. I don't know if you can put it into words. [...] You can see it with him and the troops, the ease with which he talks to them. I was amazed by that, frankly, because as I said, I was originally appalled, particularly when I heard he was going in an F-18. But -- on there -- but the -- but you know, that was --

MATTHEWS: Look at this guy!

CADDELL: -- was hard not to be moved by their reaction to him and his reaction to them and --

MATTHEWS: You know, Ann --

CADDELL: -- you know, they -- it's a quality. It's an innate quality. It's a real quality.

MATTHEWS: I know. I think you're right.

Later that day, on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Matthews said:
MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.

No, Chris, you failed because you were a chump. You and your colleagues failed because you refused to commit the considerable resources at your disposal to do the very job for which you are so massively overcompensate: the job of digging and digging and digging. Of asking really hard questions of powerful people when it is unpopular to do so.

What I don’t have -- what no bloggers have, Chris -- is NBC or ABC paying me a small fortune every week to put on a fucking puppet show. I don’t have staff. Research assistants. Interns. Any of that. What I have are several jobs which, when splinted together, keep me from falling into the maw of unemployment and poverty slightly more slowly than would otherwise be the case.

What I do have is a constant and rising sense of rage and tragedy at how deeply and brutally our media has failed us. How, time and again, the men and women in the shiny hair, $1,000 suits and seven-figure salaries have abandoned us. Have taken their 30 pieces of silver to sell our democracy into the hands of its loudest and most malignant internal enemies.

What I don’t have is access to Newt Gingrich...or David Gregory…or Chris Matthews. Or anyone who knows them. Or anyone who knows anyone who knows them. So what I cannot do is get a straight answer to the very simple question: Why in the fuck are depraved ambulatory snafus and serial liars like Newt Gingrich given a major media platform week after week after week? And why doesn’t anyone anywhere have the balls to actually ask the sonofabitch anything remotely resembling a real question?

The bloggers I know, Chris, are all grownups. They are moms and mechanics. Teachers and tradesmen. Students and singers. Writers and waiters. Comedians. Techies. Cube rats and counselors. Lawyers and secretaries. Anything and everything you can think of.

The bloggers I know are the kind of good, hard-working Americans who live every day one cracked axle or broken arm away from penury, and what they have in abundance is stress, shrinking wages and mounting bills.

What they do not have are lavishly-funded front organizations like Gingrich’s “American Solutions for Winning the Future” into which wealthy patrons can dump tens of millions of dollars to underwrite their political agendas such as (Source: IRS Political Organization Filing and Disclosure site. All amounts represent aggregate year-to-date contributions for the third and fourth quarters of 2008)...
A tiny sampling from year-to-date September 2008 reporting:
International Speedway Corp (In a flurry of $4,600 and $8,200 third quarter contributions) -- $ 57,200

Bernie Marcus -- The Marcus Foundation
$ 250,000

Mr. Frank Hanna -- World Wide Assets, Inc.
$ 80,000

Sheldon Adelson -- Las Vegas Sands Corp.
$ 2,933,660
...

A tiny sampling from year-to-date December 2008 reporting:
Charles Schwab -- Charles Schwab & Company
$ 50,000

Mr. John M. Templeton Jr. -- John Templeton Foundation
$ 11,200

Seeme Hasan
$ 10,000

...

The bloggers I know have nothing remotely like that financial artillery at their command.

They also do not have the most important thing that money can buy: Time.

And yet what they do, Chris, virtually every fucking day of their lives is the one thing that your peers in the Villager somehow cannot bestir themselves to bother with; steal a few minutes out of each day -- maybe in the morning before the kids are up and absorbing every erg they’ve got, or at the end of another long day laboring in the deepening shadow of bankruptcy -- to perform that most basic and sacred rite of citizenship.

Staying informed.

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

They take what little time and energy they have left from their depleted reserves and try to make sense of the world around them.

Try to rapidly read and listen and to mine a little bit of truth from a media that traffics in deception and distraction. Usually exhausted and often deeply frightened by a world we see falling to rags and rubble around us, we learned the hard lesson of the last 16 years of progressively more pathetic and shamelessly corporate media.

That we are on our own.

That if we want to glean some facts and context from the feculent tsunami of spin and bullshit and “America Idol” and runaway cancer kids that is the Big Dollar media, the self-important, process-addicted, status-quo defending, penis-obsessed-but-torture-ignoring, wildly overpaid children of the Village are the very last people on Earth we can trust.

So instead of giving up we push back. We set out alone or in little groups -- usually with few resources beyond the money in our pockets and the shirts on our backs -- across a vast and hostile cultural landscape where we are constantly harassed and belittled by an entire menagerie of malefactors of great wealth whose power depends entirely on creating and maintaining toxic levels of public ignorance and fear.

We make this lonely, exhausted pilgrimage because we are desperate to figure out what to make of the world in which we live, and to share what we learn as best we can with our friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

Because -- as we learned from our mothers and fathers and elementary school teachers long ago -- that is what good Americans do.

It is just about as pure and Capraeqsue an act of citizenship as I can think of, Chris.

Which is probably why it seems so angry and alien to you.

John Cole's Take on Conservatism

2009-03-22T14:31:00.001-04:00

22
Mar
Conservatism as Urine
by John Cole

It isn’t just DougJ. I simply can not take any more of this narcissistic self-referential babble about the nature of conservatism:

Conservatism is “formless” like water: it takes the shape of its conditions, but always remains the same. This is why Russell Kirk calls conservatism the “negation of ideology” in The Politics of Prudence. It is precisely the formlessness of conservatism which gives it its vitality. Left alone, the spirit of conservatism is essentially what T.S. Eliot calls the “stillness between two waves of the sea” in “Little Gidding” of his Four Quartets. Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves—the waves are not the water acting, but being acted upon; stillness is the default state of conservatism:
I am so sick and tired of these “esoteric” discussions about the flawless, formless, and timeless beauty of conservatism. It is utter nonsense. We got unchecked “conservatism” the past eight years, and instead of water, it felt more like urine, as they pissed all over us. Conservatism brought us an expanded surveillance state, intervention into a man’s marriage, unchecked budgets, war of aggression, torture, a rejection and mockery of both science and the rule of law, the unchecked executive branch, and on and on and on. The conservative standard bearers are now Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor and Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber.

After getting hammered in two national elections, the rehabilitation of conservatism takes the form of these flowery paeans about the timeless wisdom of an ideology that is the “negation of ideology.” What a load of gibberish. At what point will these clowns realize that they sound like the Soviet apologists in the late 80’s and 90’s who wanted to tell us that communism didn’t fail, it just wasn’t properly implemented?

And for extra comedy, this bit of dribble comes by way of Sullivan, who found it from Rod Dreher. Rod Dreher. You remember him, right:

For all my excitement over Sarah Palin, there is a part of me that can’t commit to voting McCain-Palin yet. Last week at this time I was almost certainly not going to vote for McCain. Now I’m likely to do it. But what holds me back is what Clark Stooksbury speaks to in this post:
Dreher is free to vote for McCain to spite the Kos Kretins; but he will also be voting for war with Iran and pointless brinksmanship with Russia, funded by another mountain range of debt. A McCain vote also gives a ringing endorsement to the last eight years of unnecessary war, torture and incompetence. In other words, it is a vote to cut off his nose in order to spite his face.

That’s very succinctly and accurately put. If I vote McCain in the end, it will have to be in clear sight of these things, and with the faith that the risks that Clark rightly points out I’ll be taking are worth the rewards of a Palin ascendancy. In truth, as much as I like Palin, especially for the enemies she’s made, I don’t know that I can affirm the reward justifies the risk of a McCain presidency.

Anyone who gets excited by the idea of rule by Palin isn’t fit to drive a motor vehicle, let alone be at the forefront of a political movement. Don’t be fooled by the reformation efforts by Frum and Dreher and Douthat and the rest of the crowd of snake oil salesmen, because when the chips were down in November 2008, they still all saddled up and went to battle for a know-nothing ignoramus from Alaska and her geriatric side-kick. The country was in a tailspin, brought on by their party and their ideology (and formerly mine), both of which had been proven by that point to be bereft of ideas and solutions, and yet they still went to the voting booth and chose more of the same.

They chose to go down with the ship. Can’t they stay drowned?

*** Update ***

From the comments:

The “conservatism” that Sullivan is always going on about is a philosophical construct, not necessarily a political one. A philosophical construct that he has carefully crafted after many years of introspection and study*, and one that has little to offer in purely political terms; at least, not nowadays. If anything, Sullivan’s now more of a “libertarian” in his specific policy recommendations, after having disavowed his deranged love affair with militaristic big-government imperialism**.
The philosophical ideal of “Burkean conservatism” [Reliance on monotheism and other traditional institutions for social stability while very, very gradually modifying the existing system is preferable to any “radical” popular change based on ideology, due to a prudent fear of societal collapse and the blood of innocent people running in the streets] is not the same thing as the political ideal of American “conservatism” [which seems to me to be a bizarre amalgamation of anti-tax sentiment, frontier individualism, nationalism, corporate interest, anachronistic cultural sentiments (e.g., racism, sexism), and biblical fundamentalism].

Note well that there may be policies that one would support based on one’s philosophical conservatism that align with one’s political “conservatism” (e.g., voting against “redistributive” progressive income taxation, maybe), but the two are uneasy partners at best. In fact, the past eight years have shown the more honest philosophical conservatives that the Republican party under W. Bush was tremendously radical (in the philosophical sense) and sacrificed most notions of Burkean prudence for the sake of their political ideology.

That would be great if they (Sullivan excluded) didn’t keep trying to find excuses to marry philosophical conservatism with movement conservatism and modern brain-dead Republicanism.

Posted in Burkean bells at 11:19 am | 80 Comments

The Incomparable Driftglass

2009-03-21T14:49:00.002-04:00

Posted by driftglass
Friday, March 20, 2009

NBC boss: Jon Stewart's criticism absurd, unfair
By Paul Thomasch

NEW YORK (Reuters) – NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker fired back at comedian Jon Stewart on Wednesday, saying it was "unfair" and "absurd" for the funnyman to criticize CNBC and question its coverage of financial news.

"Everybody wants to find a scapegoat. That's human nature," Zucker said during a keynote address at a media industry conference. "But to suggest that the business media or CNBC was responsible for what is going on now is absurd."

"Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn't make it so," Zucker said, describing the comedian's comments as "completely out of line."

Zucker's comments are the latest salvo in a war of words with Stewart, who hosts the mock news program "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on the Comedy Central cable television network owned by Viacom Inc.

Stewart has blasted CNBC's reporting of the financial market meltdown, saying the channel was too cozy with corporate chiefs and key government officials.

The comedian has lobbed particularly harsh criticism at CNBC commentator Jim Cramer, and last week invited him for an appearance on the comedy show, where he hammered the guest for his coverage of Wall Street.
…

Because everyone knows nothing shuts down a whip-smart, knives-out comic faster and puts him in his place more terminally than a rich, corporate douchebag wagging a jewel-encrusted finger in his face and bleating about how unfaaaaair he’s being.

OK, Mr. Zucker, since you appear to be almost preternaturally unable to grasp what is happening right in front of you, let me explain.

When people like you, Mr. Zucker, chose to put on a freak show of CEO-handjobbing puffery and WWF rants instead genuine financial news because people like loud, shiny things...when you chose to slingshot Broderism-hind-teat-hustlebuck-runtlings like David Gregory into positions of extraordinary media prominence and influence instead of real reporters...you helped create a massive, suffocating vacuum where “journalism” used to be.

And the thinking public will not abide such a vacuum.

You, teevee giant Jeff Zucker, are the one who helped created a media so overtly bent, profit-obsessed and nakedly corrupt that, in the end, millions and millions of us no longer trust anything it tells us. It has been too horribly wrong too often. It has compromised with monsters and appeased destroyers too often. It has excused its own gluttony and cowardice and mind-numbing incompetence with self-serving, self-pitying twaddle about “balance” and “objectivity” too often. It has willingly sold us out to the rich and powerful far, far too often.

You, Mr. Zucker, are the one who abdicated his responsibilities and helped make a world where just about the only one we even halfway believe won't bullshit us along until he can knife us in the back is a joke writer from New Jersey.

You dropped the scepter, Mr. Zucker: all Stewart did was pick it up and use it to smack around a few of your more obnoxious, over-paid dancing bears.

So stand up and take a fucking bow.

Final Thoughts

2009-03-11T12:54:00.001-04:00

Well, maybe they are not my final thoughts.

Another year comes to an end.

Yesterday was my last class with this year’s batch of students in the professional year. I am truly blessed, I think, to have the great good fortune to have such wonderful young people in my classes. They are an inspiration to me; so much so in fact that I am going to make a concerted effort to attend grad for the first time ever. They certainly are worthy of my humble attendance; besides, I would very much like to meet the parents of such amazing children. I want to congratulate these parents on how superb they must be in raising such offspring.
You know the students have had an impact on you when you don’t want the year to end. I wish I could be their faculty adviser so I have an excuse to talk to them via e-mail and WebCT. I must be getting maudlin in my old age. In my final tribute to them in the last class I mentioned how much they had taught me that they would never know. This little missive is a feeble attempt to share some of the things they taught me.
You (I’ve switched to the second person because it is more personal than the third person) have taught me that you will be exemplary teachers because you are willing to teach who you are, not just the curriculum. Your presentations proved to be exemplary because you showed through your confidence, your modulated tone and expressive language that you belong in front of a class. It gave me great pleasure to watch you strut your stuff upon that sterile stage known as ATAC 1006.
Your helping of each other especially impressed me. Teaching is very much a collegial thing, and when one of you was stuck for a unit plan on Hamlet, three of you sent him detailed unit plans on the play. That, my friends, is collegiality. Make sure this continues on your placement, please. You all have WebCT into the foreseeable future, perhaps to the end of placement. Use it to help each other and contact me for help, questions, or you want to share some success you have had. Don’t be shy. Keep me in the loop, although I will not step on the toes of your faculty adviser.

Driftglass is Amazing I

2009-02-24T15:29:00.001-05:00

None So Blind
3 Comments
Labels: Understanding The Right
Posted by driftglass
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

As those who get paid not to see.

Breaking: Andrew Sullivan discovers the Right is stinky with Crazy Bad People!

Again!

From his site:

“I've posted about [Alan] Keyes's remarks before but the full text of what he's saying is truly disturbing. He calls Obama an "abomination." He says that "we have to stop him" or the US will cease to exist. He says that the military should think about not obeying their commander-in-chief because he is not rightly the president of the United States. It seems important to me that responsible, leading members of the Republican party, if there are any left, need to disown these remarks. The consequences of letting them stand are quite disturbing."

Really?

Well while Alan Keyes is undoubtedly about one CD short of a David Lynch retrospective, he in also without office, platform or power. In fact as far as I can see, about all that's keeping "Alan Keyes: Conservative spokesman" from becoming "Alan Keyes: All-day-subway-rider-who-screams-at-strangers-about-fluoridation" are several nice suits and a stipend from whatever fascist "think tank" pays his room and board.

On the other hand, Tom DeLay spent years using very real power to inflict very real damage on the United States while Conservatives cheered him on, so how exactly are Keyes' ravings any worse than any of the million, sociopathic rants delivered by "The Hammer" over the last quarter century?

Or Newt Gingrich counseling Republicans everywhere to incant "Democrats are traitors" every time they got near a microphone?

Or endless headlines about Vince Foster's “murder”?

The drug-smuggling Clintons?

The mass-murdering Clintons?

Bill Clinton the depraved rapist?

The Right hunting a President like wild boar for seven years because he was "in the way"?

...
Richard Mellon Scaife is a billionaire contributor to the Republican Party and right-wing think tanks, one of the most influential men behind the right wing today. Scaife has helped establish their biggest institutions and supported some of their most radical ideas.

Scaife was a primary source of money used to fund attacks against Bill Clinton during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky eras of his presidency. He has also been known to purchase mass quantities of conservative books (especially those published by Regnery Press) to push them up the bestseller lists.

Among the right-wing organizations substantially funded by Scaife are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, Cato Institute and a working group within his American Spectator publication called the "Arkansas Project," whose specific aim was to locate and create dirt on the Clintons in order to smear them, in hopes of removing Clinton from office.

People for the American Way estimates that the Scaife Foundations have channeled in excess of $340 million to right-wing groups over the last thirty years, more than any other individual.
...

How is Keyes’ bloody rag-waving any different than a Conservative media that cheerfully fed its deranged base a steady diet of secret Liberal government plots and black helicopters ?

Any different than the leaders of the Conservative Movement who had no fucking qualms about playing footsie with neo-Nazis and militias scum right up until one of their Aryan heroes took literally the "irredeemably evil Liberal government" venom that was spewing out of the mouths of Hate Radio and House Republicans every single day...and decided to blow up a Federal building?

Conservatism in America was not somehow captured, cruelly tortured and then killed by that vile George Bush in 2003; Conservatism was born fucked up and in sin and has been an unholy alliance between plutocrats, fascists and fundies since it toddled out of the cradle and decided that George Wallace was a cultural hero to be emulated instead of a cultural cancer to be excised. And your so-called “responsible, leading members of the Republican party” have been dining lavishly out on scurrilous, Wallace-and-Keyes-style lynch-mob-goading language since I was in high school.

It is no longer productive to pretend a cavalry of responsible grownups from the Right is going to arrive and scold and shame people like Alan Keyes into shutting the fuck up. Keyes isn’t capable of shame and Keyes isn’t the problem: he is merely the latest high-profile ugly symptom of a disease that the Right -- your Right -- has always nurtured and cultivated.

On the other hand, responsible grownups on the Left have already wasted decades of time and energy and money and adjectives trying to warn people like you about people like Keyes and the calamitous arc your movement was following by embracing people like Keyes. Because, Mr. Sullivan, your movement has always been built around pandering to lunatics like Keyes.

So we warned you.

And warned you.

Holy Fucking Venus on a Vespa, did we ever warn you.

And now we’re all rather hoarse and worn out from trying to shout past Limbaugh and Falwell and Reed and Robertson and Weyrich and Bauer and Schlafly for the last two decades to get through to you.

I know we’re not your audience, but you should know that while I personally think its great that you’re finally mastering political A-B-C’s and fractions and all, we on the Left got tired of waiting for people you to stop circle-jerking with bigots and monsters wearing dime-store Maggie Thatcher masks a long time ago.

A very, very long time ago.

Long enough that we now find your eager and evergreen astonishment each time you re-discover that the Right is being run by madmen to be tantamount to a 45-year-old man bragging that he’s aaaaalmost figured out how to use the Big Boy potty without making boom-boom on the walls.

So quit waiting for whatever crusading watchdogs in the press or in positions of power on the Right to come thundering over the horizon in the final reel: any such creatures are either long since hollowed out, sold out, dead, or never existed in the first place.

Instead, if you really want to do a public service, stop yelping about why Keyes is still allowed to flap him gums, and start answering the really interesting question.

To wit:
“What exactly is so deeply broken in people like Andrew Sullivan that they can delude themselves so long, so passionately, so disastrously and so self-destructively about the real nature a movement which, in the end, was never more than a cult of angry, paranoid rubes, well-funded demagogues and rapacious plutocrats?

Driftglass is Amazing II

2009-02-24T15:22:00.001-05:00

In which Andrew Sullivan is shocked to find that Republicans used their years running the country to wreck the country.

Sigh.

From his site (with emphasis added by me):

...
It is good to see the GOP pretending to be fiscally conservative again, but could any of them - just one or two apart from Ron Paul - concede that Bush and Cheney are the ones responsible for our current fiscal nightmare? They drove us so deep into the ditch that we have almost no fiscal lee-way to counter the kind of crisis they stumbled into at the end of their term. If we had retaied the fiscal health of the Clinton-Gingrich years into the new millennium, our range of possible actions right now would be far less dire.

Except since the beginning of time, the essence of politics has always been about deliberately depriving the opposition of as much choice and range of motion as possible. About deliberately forcing them down the path of your choosing by eliminating every other alternative.

How do you not know that?

For example, for the longest time Neoconservatives wanted to extend the American Empire into the heart of Middle East. So they used the crisis of 9/11 to gin up a pack of lies, roll 150,000 troops into Iraq, blow that country to atoms, fuel anti-American rage and terrorism where in never existed before, and then argued with a straight face that we could never leave Iraq….because of how fucked up everything was.

Or do you dirty terrorist-lovers want America to lose?!?

The whole object of the war was to strand us there; to arrange events so that no one could ever even whisper that maybe we should extricate ourselves from the Bush Clusterfuck without paying a fearful price. By mercilessly playing on the public's deepest fears and the Right's love of killing scary brown people, the Bush Administration would pitilessly cauterize every option except the never-ending occupation of Iraq and -- Bingo! -- the Neocons would have their Empire.

For decades, Conservative have also been equally open and clear about wanting to smash the federal government and replace it with an unfettered, unregulated corporate feudal state. Because Gummint is Evil, Evil, Evil! So Conservatives rolled the Bush Administration into D.C. with all its ruthless, calculated bumpkinism like a political IED and detonated it. And Conservatives cheered as their Decider smashed and bankrupted every bit of government he could lay his hands on…applauded as he hog-slaughtered the “fiscal health” of its predecessor without a backwards glance…and now fanatically oppose any action to address out economic crisis that does not begin and end with more tax cuts.

Because Conservatives HATE the government. Or don’t you remember?

Jesus, man, it was in all the papers. For years and years and years. C’mon and work with me here.

Unbridled loathing? “Booga-Booga; the Liberal Gummint is out to get you”? Hulk Smash? Starve the beast? Drown it in the tub?

On every radio and every teevee?

Ring any bells?

The text or subtext of a billion tons of Conservative direct mail campaigns?

The first paragraph of every Conservative phone-banking effort?

Ten seconds of every thirty-second Republican campaign ad?

The thesis statement of every wingnut begging letter and fundraiser?

The fucking Guanine and Adenine in your fucking political DNA?

And since hating government (in its Evil Liberal puppet masters) is THE central organizing principle of the Conservative Movement, how can it possibly surprise you that, as Iraq follows 9/11, Conservative policies and politicians have brought us to this moment.

That however many lies it may require and however much pain it may inflict on the public, Conservatives see economic collapse in America as a good thing. A righteous cleansing and path back to power. As their golden opportunity to finally, once-and-for-all curb-stomp the Evil Socialist Gummint into oblivion.

What comes after is a little unclear, but depending on which RSS feed you subscribe to, I believe we either get a 1,000 Year Randite Reich, or The Rapture.

The Villagers

2009-02-21T15:55:00.002-05:00

Here is a clear example of what Democrats have to put up with in Washington. George Will just happens to be one of the sleaziest and slimiest of the villagers.

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Fri, Feb 20, 2009 6:50pm ETSend to a friend Print Version
Media Matters: In support of shunning
by Jamison Foser

The blogger Digby popularized the use of the phrase "The Village" to describe Washington media elites. The mocking nickname was inspired by a 1998 Washington Post article by Sally Quinn about Washington's reaction to the Lewinsky scandal. Quinn quoted David Broder saying of Clinton's effect on Washington: "He came in here and he trashed the place ... and it's not his place." And: "The judgment is harsher in Washington. We don't like being lied to." Others -- journalists like David Gergen and Chris Matthews alongside politicians like Joe Lieberman -- echoed the sentiment that The Village just couldn't tolerate Clinton's lies.

It was all bunk, of course. The Village hated -- and, it must be noted, lied about -- the Clintons long before anyone, Bill Clinton included, had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky. And needless to say, other politicians have both had extramarital sex and told lies without drawing The Village's scorn.

So it's laugh-out-loud funny to suggest that Washington -- specifically, the newsrooms of Washington -- is filled with journalists of such reverence for the truth and honesty that they simply could not accept someone who told a lie. It certainly never manifested itself during the Bush administration -- Broder, for one, famously suggested that Clinton should have resigned because "he may well have lied" but repeatedly refused invitations to say the same about Bush.

But wouldn't it be nice if The Village really was as opposed to lying as Broder claimed? More specifically, if the media elite who serve as Village elders had the good sense to shun their colleagues who habitually misinform, that could go a long way toward reversing the decades-long erosion of public confidence in the news media.

Take, for example, George Will. Will recently used his syndicated Washington Post column to make several false claims about global warming -- something he has done frequently in the past. Will's column sparked widespread condemnation, but the Post refused to run a correction and insisted that it has a "multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible."

That has led to suggestions that the Post might want to consider adding another layer or two, or redefine what they consider "possible." Certainly, the Post could do a better job of keeping falsehoods out of your morning newspaper. But the basic problem here wasn't that the Post had an insufficient number of layers in its editing process; it's that the Post publishes George Will at all.

See, Will may have a reputation as an honest, intellectual conservative, but he has a long history of dishonest hackery, conflicts of interest, and double standards.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, for example, Will secretly helped coach Ronald Reagan for a debate, using a briefing book stolen from Jimmy Carter's campaign. After the debate, Will appeared on ABC's Nightline, where he praised Reagan's performance without disclosing his role in prepping the candidate. In 1996, Will defended a speech by GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole without noting that his wife, a top Dole aide, had helped write it.

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Will treated Jesse Jackson quite differently, ambushing him with an arcane question about "the G-7 measures of the Louvre Accords" -- a question interpreted by many as an effort to do little more than embarrass Jackson and compared by some to the literacy tests used to disenfranchise African-American voters until they were banned in the 1960s.

Whatever the reason for Will's treatment of Jackson, he behaved far differently toward George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign, when he penned a Washington Post column about Bush titled "He's No Intellectual -- And So What?" During that campaign, Will met privately with Bush shortly before the candidate appeared on ABC's This Week. Why? To go over a question in advance so he didn't "ambush" Bush with "unfamiliar material." Will even went so far as to give Bush an index card containing a portion of the question he would ask.

You might think a journalist -- particularly one who had previously been busted praising the debate performance of a candidate he had secretly helped coach -- would be embarrassed to admit that he had given a presidential candidate a question ahead of time. Not George Will: he bragged about it in his Post column.

Of course, Will is hardly the first columnist to take sides in elections. Nor is he the first to lend a bit of assistance to his favored candidate, though few have been as audacious as Will in doing so. Still, Will's efforts on behalf of Republican candidates -- though sometimes ethically questionable -- aren't the primary reason he doesn't deserve his place on the Post's op-ed pages. His greater sin, as a columnist, is the frequency with which he makes false claims.

Will's pattern of global warming falsehoods has been well-documented in recent days. It's a pattern that goes back at least 16 years:

Will confronted Gore on the issue of global warming: "Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain."

It was Will, however, who should have read the poll more carefully "before pontificating." Gallup actually reported that 66 percent of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with only 10 percent disagreeing and the rest undecided. Gallup took the unusual step of issuing a written correction to Will's column (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/27/92): "Most scientists involved in research in this area believe that human-induced global warming is occurring now." Will never noted the error in his column.

That aversion to corrections -- if not to making false claims -- seems to be another pattern with Will. Jonathan Schwarz dug up the following story from Noam Chomsky's book Understanding Power:

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," ... he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter ...in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" ... So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

In more recent years, Will has made false claims about the Voting Rights Act and the New Deal. He made a claim about China drilling off the coast of Florida that was so wrong, even then-Vice President Cheney -- who cited Will in repeating the claim -- acknowledged it wasn't true. When even Dick Cheney thinks you've gone too far in spouting pro-drilling falsehoods, you have a problem. But neither Will nor the Post corrected the error.

Last year, Will claimed in his Newsweek column and on ABC that Social Security taxes are levied based on household income. Not true. He claimed that McCain won more votes from independents during the primaries than Obama did. Wrong. He claimed most minimum-wage earners are students or part-time employees. False. Will has even lied about Hillary Clinton's Yankees fandom.

Basically, George Will routinely makes false claims large and small, holds politicians to disparate standards, and engages in ethically dubious conduct on behalf of his preferred candidates. The Washington Post can hide behind multi-layer processes all it wants, but as long as it publishes Will, it will continue to misinform its readers. The Post doesn't need to give Will a better fact-checker; it -- along with the rest of the media elite -- should instead give him a good, thorough shunning.

Instead, he remains a respected citizen of The Village -- the same Village where, David Broder insists, people just don't like being lied to.

Blogging at its Best

2009-02-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

This is from Tom Watson's Blog:

Lights Out Tonight, Trouble in the Heartland...
When Blue Girl's step father died on Inauguration Day, her mother gave back the plaque she'd given the old man three decades earlier, and in her moving elegy this week (a post her blogging friends have been sadly expecting), Blue Girl gave us the rallying cry for the long, cold middle section of this endless winter:

It reads: Patience my ass. I'm going out to kill something.

Nothing could have been more appropriate. And it made me smile. And I was grateful. He and I were more alike than I ever knew. All of the anger that had washed over me and through me for so many months, in that moment, simply washed away through laughter and tears.
No such transcendence among some of the stronger, angrier voices in the new era, no loving memories of wisdom and the eternal verities among the bloggers I've turned to as an antidote to the hope and change placebo - just an angry slogan that fits this grim Super Bowl Sunday like a linebacker's shoulder pads. No particular knock at President Obama from this quarter: I thrilled at some of the imagery like everyone else with an American pulse, and I'm generally pleased with the early days. It matters who sits in the Oval Office.

But there are three-hundred million of the same species roaming these badlands, and damned if the anger's not building out there. To many of us, the most important utterance in public life undoubtedly came from Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill in reaction to the news that Wall Street bankers took a record $18 billion in bonuses at the end of 2008, even as the Federal treasury pumped billions of our sorry dollars onto their book to prop up their sorry, unpatriotic, anti-American, traitorous asses: “They don’t get it,” McCaskill said on the Senate floor. “These people are idiots.”

Yes, they are - and what heart among us doesn't embrace the hope of a parade of orange jumpsuits? That's change we can believe in. An angry voice among the angry, Digby raps the Republican suggestion that McCaskill's proposal to limit the pay of top executives of TARP-subsidized companies to $400,000 or less will send too much talent overseas:

I say if there's an overseas market for these greedy, incompetent bastards then the best thing we could do for the country is to exile them. Unfortunately, they've managed to take down pretty much the entire world with us, so I don't think there are a lot of jobs for failed wall street executives out there right now. But hey, let them put their resumes up on Craigslist like everyone else and see what the market for such superstar talent will yield these days.

Lance Mannion taps into the lighting of the torches and the slow heat of the melting tar, as he rips Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus's opposition to pro-union legislation, which Marcus decried as the "demise of a civilization":

...a civilized nation by his lights is one in which a chosen few get to live like kings and queens, comporting themselves as they see fit, following highly flexible rules they set for themselves and can ignore at their convenience, paying no price for their crimes and depredations, while getting to tell the rest of us how to behave and how to work and how to accept our lots without complaint or expectation of any other rewards besides the ones they deign to toss our way like scraps to the dogs, a nation in which they rake up piles and piles of money and cart it home in wheelbarrows while the rest of us are so desperate for work we'll take whatever we can get at whatever insulting wage they decide, begrudgingly, to pay, in which we're so terrified of losing our job that we'll cringe and fawn and work ourselves to exhaustion to please our unpleasable betters and then grovel and apologize and accept our punishments meekly when we we fail to be sufficiently slavish.

Meanwhile, our back-to-the-country pal Neddie Jingo sees denial and poison in a visit to Tysons Corner Mall:

....the density of the crowd made it impossible to escape the thought: For a country that has, this week alone, shed 100,000 jobs with no end in sight, there sure were a whole lot of people out spending money on fripperies. Second, what the fuck are these people here for? Where's the appeal? Thousands upon thousands of people of every age, income group and ethnic identity, aimlessly wandering among exactly the same PacSuns, Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombies, Williams & Sonomas they'd find in any other mall...for what? They'd actually packed into their XTerras and Priuses with the thought in mind that the best kind of Saturday night consists of grabbing a plate of Heat-Lamp Italian and a large Sprite, wandering the halls of America's Fourth-Largest Mall, and seeing and being seen in this plastic zocalo, this carefully-policed polis?

This is a theme that has been owned of late by the original angry man of exurbs, mall culture, foreign oil and SUV-clogged traffic jams - the rural future loving gadfly/novelist Jim Kunstler, who takes his upstate reaper's scythe to the bailouts and stimuli:

All the possible actions tried so far have have seemed absurd. Why even try to prop up inflated house values when the single most crucial need in this sector is for house prices to return to parity with incomes so the shrinking pool of ordinary people still employed can begin to think about buying one? Well, the obvious explanation is that politicians can't bear the pain of watching mass foreclosures and the ruination of families. This is pretty understandable, and it is tragic indeed. Frankly, I don't know of any political narcotic that can mitigate the pain that results from having made poor choices in life -- even if those choices were promoted and reinforced by the mighty ideology of "American Dreaming." Anyway, the foreclosures are well underway now, and perhaps the salient question is how long will the public's fury remain constrained while they hear about Wall Street executives buying $80,000 area rugs? Surely there is a tipping point of collective distress that is not too far from where we're at now.

But none of them can touch the anger of our old blogging compadre Dennis Perrin, one of the lone red dots in a sea of feel-good blue in these early Obama Era days - and the red ain't for Republicanism, my friends. Dennis has taken another path, and damnit if he isn't churning out some of the best, most vicious prose on the Internet these days (his Updike piece was simply the finest bit of writing to hit an RSS feed after the author's death). Sure, you may still feel pretty rosy and hopeful (I do, some days) but like the bottle of Xanax calling your name on the worst of down Dow afternoons, Perrin's rants have become ground zero for that restless ire that seems to afflict everyone I know over 40. You can love Obama, and still spoon up Dennis's choler like Recessional tapioca:

It seems that in order to be a "good" progressive, if not a Decent American, one must remain starry-eyed about Obama, regardless of reality. How long this condition will linger is up in the air, though I doubt it will ever fade away. Too many liberals are too attached to the myth of benevolent power. They want someone to worship, to obey, confusing their conformity for "inspiration," or worse, "patriotism." Feedle fiddo foo. What you gonna do?

Tonight, we j

Pax Moronica

2009-01-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

From Whiskey Fire:

Pax Mornonica

I just read a piece in the online Wall Nut Journal onion pages by someone affiliated with the Hoover Asylum. And you're right, that's my own damn fault. But I'm not looking for sympathy, though it did hurt quite badly. I'm not even asking you to "read the whole thing," insofar as it is a lament for Obama's apparent abandonment of Bush's wildly successful Mideast diplomacy. (No, really, it is.)

I was just interested in this paragraph as a point of history:

In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.
Indeed. Whenever British ships hove into view, natives all over the planet had the exact same response: "hooray, here comes the liberty." Just like now the universal response to the roar of American planes is, "oh look, they are dropping even more freedom, in the form of powerful explosives."

More on W

2009-01-22T20:46:00.002-05:00

Cliff Schecter
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 January 2009 13.00 GMT
Article history
With only days left until his term expires, it appears that the Bush legacy project, an attempt by the usual corps of serial sycophants to rehabilitate the lame-duck generalissimo's image, is falling upon the deaf ears and self-gouged eyes of an American public sickened by the last eight years.

Yes, the Bush cabal just couldn't clear out of town without trying to complete one last propaganda project for the Gipper, or the Decider, if you will. Karl Rove, the genius who predicted a permanent Republican majority right before destroying a temporary one, and Karen Hughes, who likes to create mutual understanding in the Middle East by explaining that God appears in the US constitution, have been unleashing a wave of their finest shock and awe talking points. To listen to them is to hear how black is white, up is down and Bush has been more Churchill than Ceausescu.

Condi Rice, the very Siren Song of Security who thought a 2001 presidential daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" meant the al-Qaida leader was thinking of investing in beachfront property in the greater Fort Lauderdale metro area, has also added her prescient voice to the chorus.

Our fearless chief diplomat's latest missive, reminding us that "the war on terror has failed to eliminate al-Qaida and its leader Osama bin Laden, but the US-led coalition and Iraq are close to defeating the group's Iraq branch", would be pretty cool if it weren't for the tiny hiccup that there was no "Iraq branch" of al-Qaida until she and her superiors chose to idiotically invade that country, and then do everything just short of providing al-Qaida in Iraq with an infusion of venture capital.

But the biggest problem for defenders of Bush's vast array of "accomplishments" is not even the cast of nincompoops trying to portray him as the "misunderestimated" heir to President Harry Truman. Their biggest obstacle appears to be reality itself. The American people have a way of getting it right, if not always immediately, and Bush's handlers haven't quite been able to force us all into the Matrix. Yet.

Right on time, CNN has come out with a poll that proves we know more than Mr Permanent Majority after all.

When asked whether Bush was "tough enough for the job", 49% of Americans responded yes, and 51% said no (even though he cleared brush in a very forceful manner! And wore a really tight flight suit! And said "Bring 'em on!"). That, by the way, is the best he performed on any question.

Is the president a person you admire? Seventeen percent yes, 72% no, but perhaps Bush legacy project peddlers can win over that 1% still thinking about it. Does Bush inspire confidence? Twenty percent said yes, and 80% said no. Did he manage the government effectively? Only 25% think he did, while 75% said not so much. Finally, did Bush bring the kind of change the country needed? A whopping 13% answered in the affirmative.

This is the way the rest of the poll goes. Whether it is about "getting things done" or "uniting the country" – two of Bush's campaign pledges – he is lucky to approach a 33% positive score. Saying these numbers ain't pretty is in the same range of euphemistic happy-talk as claiming the economy has hit a rough patch or the Cubs haven't won a World Series recently.

So when their two-page document of talking points comes your way reminding you that "Bush kept us safe after 9/11" (except for the anthrax attack, the shoe-bomber plot foiled by alert airline passengers and the more than 4,000 American kids unnecessarily killed in Iraq) and "Bush lifted the economy with tax cuts after 2001" (try Googling in succession: "sub-prime mortgages", "Bernie Madoff" and "Enron" for Bushenomics in action), much like CNN poll respondents, you can take the antidote by just refusing to close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and scream "nah, nah, nah, nah nah" until no longer cognisant.

As for history exonerating Bush 43 (as Laura Bush claims will soon occur), Herbert Hoover somehow doesn't elicit evocations of ecstasy 80 years later, and LBJ is still remembered more for a very bad war than his landmark legislative accomplishments. Now try combining starting a stupid war with overseeing an economic meltdown.

See where this is going, Laura?

Just two months ago, I met with Julie Blust, communications director for the National Bush Legacy Bus Tour sponsored by Americans United for Change. Upon it's arrival in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, she took me aboard this 45-foot long, 28-ton monument to Dubya's impact on the country and planet, from Katrina to corrupt no-bid contractors, economic destruction to "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Upon seeing the real record, as it appeared in video, picture and chart form on the walls of the Bush bus, it would be impossible to draw any other conclusion than that this man was a one-man wrecking crew (well, two and a half if you include Cheney). And that he'll saunter up alongside James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding as the very definition of Oval Office calamity.

There is really only one arguable legacy of Bush's White House tenure that is a step forward for the US and all mankind. It's called President Obama.

Lance Mannion on George W. Bush

2009-01-22T20:43:00.001-05:00

George Bush's last second chance and the American refutation of the Book of Ecclesiastes

Unless the aliens landed before noon Tuesday and he donned his old flight suit, jumped into the cockpit of an F-14 conveniently parked on the White House lawn, kept fueled up and with rockets armed for eight years for just such an emergency, and flew off into the skies to shoot down all the flying saucers by himself and I missed it, former President George W. Bush is going to be remembered mainly for four things.

Starting and failing to win a war of aggression against a nation that was no threat to us.

Playing air guitar while a great American city drowned, then leaving it to rot in the mud for three years.

Getting caught flat-footed by the greatest financial meltdown in the country's history since 1929, a meltdown in great part caused by his administration and Party's policies, practices, and neglect.

Reading a children's storybook while terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center.

History books will note that Bush lied us and bullied us and frightened us into the War, that the only victims of Katrina he appeared to muster any compassion for were a rich Southern Senator and his own incompetent head of FEMA---"Heckuva job, Brownie."---that his "solution" to the economic collapse was to give away the Treasury to the crooks and fools who'd made the mess, that he'd been warned a month ahead of time that terrorists planned to hijack airplanes and use them to kill people. Historians will add other details, about torture, about alienating allies, about politicizing all aspects of government and turning the Justice Department into the legal arm of the Republican Party, about the attempt to hand over all our Social Security money to the same crooks and fools who wrecked our banking system. But in the popular imagination, George W. Bush will be the President who turned everything he touched to shit.

In the month or so before he left office, left town, and, let's hope, left us alone at last, squads of Bush League apologists took to the airwaves and the op-ed pages to try to persuade History to look kindly on their old boss and hero. It was irritating to listen to and read, but also amusing, because the only way most of them could find to go about making the case that Bush had been a successful President was by arguing that he hadn't actually been that bad.

The rest just made up a character named George Bush and told folk tales about a fictional Presidency.

But to the degree any of them were serious, they were forced to rely on one idea. History would prove that George W. Bush was right.

No, it won't. Like I said, History's already being written and it's not good news for Bush.

Even if the pages were still blank, though, think about what's being argued. That sometime, in the future, George W. Bush will turn out to have been a completely different person and President for the one we took him for.

In the future, George Bush is going to get yet another shot at getting it right.

He's going to be given one more second chance after a lifetime of second chances.

For a variety of reasons many Washington Media Insiders were heavily invested in the idea of Bush as a successful President and they never tired of assuring us that any day now he'd start acting like one.

David Broder was particularly fond of this pretty story.

This claque of journalists and pundits rooted overtly for Bush's transfiguration which they seemed convinced was inevitable, if it wasn't already happening right before their eyes. The day was coming soon when he would lead them up the mountain to blind them with his glory and there they would build tents for him and for Ronald Reagan on his right and Winston Churchill on his left.

They covered George Bush as a phoenix, reborn and brand new as President after every self-immolating screw-up and act of destruction. This is it, this time he'll turn it around. Every defeat was a victory in disguise, the re-defining moment.

All their hopes and expectations were based on the notion that people change.

Starting over is one of our national myths, an item of faith in the religion of America. Pack up and move. Go west, young man. Hit the gym. Change jobs. Get out of that awful marriage. Go back to school. Win the lottery. Quit smoking. Stop drinking. Give up gambling and running around. Find Jesus, and be born again.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

This was the basis of George Bush's whole political career. At age 40 or so, after a lifetime of failure, screw-ups, and disgrace, he'd put down the bottle, turned his life over to Jesus, and practically overnight become a new man. That as a new man he was hardly indistinguishable from the old one except that instead of trying to do anything for himself and making a hash of it he let smarter, more diligent, more determined and focused men use him as their tool. Nevermind that last part. The important part of the story is that he changed.

And having changed he was now ready and able to be the success he was born to be.

This idea, that people change, especially when God and Jesus take them by the hand, and that that change always leads to success and happiness, is so dear to so many Americans that they were willing to reward Bush for the great things he had not yet done on the grounds that of course now that he had changed he would do them. They made him Governor of Texas and then President of the United States, even though there was nothing in his past that suggested he'd be any good at either job and much that showed he would in fact be as bad as he turned out to be.

The past didn't matter. He'd changed. That which had been crooked had been made straight. That which was wanting had been numbered. All was not vanity and vexation and seeking after wind.

If he can do it, we can do it.

We elected George Bush President of the United States to reward ourselves for the changes we were going to make that would make us better, happier, richer, wiser, thinner, sexier, younger, stronger, cleaner, sober, worthier of love and therefore loved.

People change. Bush changed. We can change.

This is the central tenent of one of the great American religions. There's Football, there's Money, and then there's the Church of the Second Chance, which has many denominations and hundreds of forms of worship, rites, rituals, and practices. It is the religion of the self-help movement and the psycho-therapeutic industry. It has replaced Christianity in many of the mega-churches. Used to be you rose from the Mourner's Bench to testify. Now you attend workshops and form support groups. The point used to be saving one's soul for a better life to come. Now the point is saving one's sense of self-worth in the here and now, and considering how miserable, lonely, and self-loathing so many of us are, it's hard to argue that this isn't a good point for a religion to make.

People change. Bush changed. I can change.

Well, people do change. They kick bad habits and develop new, good ones. They change jobs and discover talents they never knew they had. They find satisfaction in tasks they'd never had reason to suspect they'd be any good at. They go back to school and learn new skills and new ideas and new methods. They move across country and make new friends, discover joys in scenery they'd never imagined was out there to enjoy, find the change in the weather has improved their health and mental well-being. They go to a doctor and come out with a prescription and within weeks their moods have evened out, their sadness has lifted, their anxiety is gone. They fall in love and discover that it's true, the whole world loves a lover, and they love the whole world in return.

They fall asleep misers and misanthropes on Christmas eve, secret, solitary, and self-contained as oysters, and wake up on Christmas morning as good a friend, as good a master or mistress, as good a man or woman as the good old City knows.

People change. But they transform. They don't transmutate.

The new persons they become are made out of the same stuff as the old persons they were.

And more often than not it's not the case that they have changed but that their circumstances have. They've been given an opportunity.

The apparently mediocre and deservedly obscure math teacher miserably going through the motions in a suburban high school where the principal's a blockhead, the students are without ambition, and the parents think schools exist to justify the hiring of a football coach takes a job in the inner city and a few years later is winning awards and receiving Christmas cards from former students beginning their graduate work at MIT and Cal Tech.

The drop-out from that teacher's old school enlists because there's nothing else to do and a few years later is commanding a company of Marines.

The washed-up quarterback working as a clerk in a grocery store gets a second look and a tryout and fifteen years later is leading his team to the Super Bowl.

But there's nothing magical about the apparent changes in these "new" people. If you look back, the teacher always knew his subject and had a talent for explaining it, just no one was listening to him. The Marine captain was always brave and a quick thinker and she had a way of getting people to follow her lead. Kurt Warner always had a good arm and a good eye.

The "changed" person who showed no signs before her transformation that she would become this "new" person is a rare, rare bird. And it's more likely in such a case that it's not that she didn't show any signs but that there was no one around her perceptive enough to spot them or that her circumstances before the change were so horrific that she wasn't able to be any kind of person at all, she was merely a reaction to or a reflection of the horror.

And a person can only change with a change of circumstances to the degree she has the talent or the skill or the wisdom or the discipline to take advantage of the change. A bad accountant can change accounting jobs as many times as he wants but if the problem is that he's innumerate he's not going to change himself in the process.

Change requires the person who wants to change to make smart choices about what to change into.

A man who does not take advice well, who is incurious, short-tempered, and impatient, who can't be bothered with minutia, nuance, and ambiguities, who needs to surround himself with flatterers and toadies and lackeys, who loses focus easily, who refuses to admit mistakes which means he can't correct them, who thinks that he is owed the job instead of having to earn it, is not going to change into a good President no matter how much he has "changed" by sobering up and turning to Jesus and no matter how many second chances he's given.

When people talked about Barack Obama's lack of experience as a disqualification for the Presidency, they were not looking at his biography. When other people talked about how Sarah Palin's lack of experience should not be a disqualification, because look at Barack Obama, they weren't looking at her biography.

The record of President Obama's life is the record of someone who has always been changing himself for the better, of someone who has worked exceptionally hard at whatever he's done, learned from every job he's undertaken how to do the next job, who has improved himself by leaps and bounds all his life. All Presidents have had to learn on the job. President Obama has a history of doing that extremely well.

The record of Sarah Palin's life, though, is the record of someone who has always managed to improve her situation while not doing very much to improve herself. It's the record of a vain and overly self-confident person who has just assumed she's deserving of and up to whatever job she's decided she wants. Look at her now and you see someone who didn't learn anything from the fall campaign except that people don't love her as much as she deserves to be loved. She has said she may run for President, she's probably going to run for the United States Senate, but she's not doing anything to prepare herself for either job. Instead she's busy teaching herself how to become a better celebrity and making headlines by whining and pitying herself in public.

The record of George Bush's life wasn't simply the record of a chronic fuck-up. It was the record of someone who learned nothing from his mistakes, of someone who did nothing different every time he was given a second chance. The myth of George W. Bush is the myth of a man who changed. But I'm not sure Bush himself ever thought for a moment he needed to change. It looks to me as though he thought of his drinking as an obstacle not a symptom of deep-rooted unhappiness or a sign of a bad or a weak character. I think made the mistake of thinking the only problem he had was drinking and he thought of his drinking as if it was a form of temperamental asthma, a health problem that kept him from running that four-minute mile he knew he was capable of running if he could only find a cure and get up his wind. Once he quit, he thought, he was done. It never occurred to him that even if his lungs were up to it, his legs might not be, and he needed to go into training. Didn't help that he was surrounded by people who found it to their advantage to spot him a hundred yards in every race and move the finish line closer and bribe the judges and knobble the competition.

George Bush's record after he quit drinking is not the record of a man who stopped fucking up but of a man who stopped trying. As I said, Bush's successes after he got clean and sober were due to his putting himself in the hands of other people who succeeded for him without taking any of the credit.

George Bush did not change, but the story of his life could be told in a way that made it sound as if he did, and the American faith in change and our belief in a second chance is so strong that Bush's handlers and enablers hardly had to work to exploit it.

It was often said by his admirers that George Bush was authentic, that he was exactly what he appeared to be. But this was a vice not a virtue. He didn't have the character or the temperament for the job and he never tried to change that, and given that once in office he pursued policies that had proven countless times in the past to be worse than useless, there was never a real chance he would turn out to be a successful President. History will not give him another second chance.

Unless...

Maybe he learned something from all the time he spent working with President Obama in the last couple months. Maybe when he's out of office and away from Dick Cheney he'll be able to listen to his father, follow his example. Maybe he'll make friends with Bill Clinton too. He was never a good President, but maybe like Jimmy Carter he can become a good ex-President...

Sorry. Can't help myself. I'm an American. I believe in second chances. The religion of Change is my religion too.

__________________________________

I don't think History will be kind to Bush, but Will Bunch is worried that the attempts to rewrite it in Bush's favor will continue for a long time yet to come. Good reason to worry. Long after 60 per cent of the people had figured him out, plenty Media bobbleheads were still at it.

This time, they kept insisting, he'll be different.

Some of them stayed at it till the end.

He can still turn it all around. History will come to rescue his reputation. It's happened before. Look at Harry Truman.

A real understanding of history has never been required mental equipment for a job in the Washington Press Corps.

There are historical reasons for Truman's unpopularity when he left office, reasons that have no parallel in assessments of Bush's Presidency. And the reasons for Truman's late in life ascension to beloved elder statesmen are more biographical than historical. The case for Harry Truman was made by Harry Truman in Merle Miller's Plain Speaking . Truman turned out to be his own best advocate. Historians had already begun to revise their estimation of Truman, but Truman himself is the one who changed the popular conception of his Presidency.

He told his own story in a direct, simple but eloquent, and above all truthful fashion, and he changed people's minds.

Perhaps Laura will be able to speak up for George the way Harry was able to speak up for himself, but no one should be expecting any literary surprises from George W. Bush. Grant's Memoirs were only a surprise to people who hadn't read his letters and war dispatches or met with him for extended conversations.

_

Blogging Hockey

2009-01-03T22:43:00.003-05:00

Hockey Blogging - Saturday, January 3, 2009

I’ll be watching the Canada-Russia junior hockey game and the Detroit Red Wing-Minnesota Wild NHL game as well. I’m going to try blogging both games and see how it works out. If it isn’t too bad, I’ll post it on my blog. As I wait the real hockey games, I’ll kill some time and watch the Leaf-Senator game. Jason Spezza and Dominic Moore are both going off for some early game stupidity. Naturally this got the faithful for Toronto in the stands and in the booth, of course, all twisted up in their knickers. Toronto just got another stupid penalty to go down two men. It is now 1-0 Ottawa.
After watching the first 10 minutes of the Ottawa-Toronto game, it is a distinct pleasure to watch the kids play. Canada is already up 1-0. I love the energy of these young players. The teams really go all out on each shift. The Russians just scored to tie the game. It is now 2-2. I knew that the Russians wouldn’t be as bad as everyone said they would be. We Canadians too often get a little ahead of ourselves when it comes to our game. Whenever Pierre Maguire opens his silly yap, I have to change the channel. He is that annoying! Gord Miller, as always, is a pleasure to listen to.
I’ve just switched to the Red Wing – Wild game. It is always so much better to have Ken Daniels and Mickey Redmond calling the game. As Mickey just said, Detroit has to watch for a let down after the New Year’s Day game in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. It was one of Detroit’s best games this year (they certainly haven’t had many, for sure). Hudler almost scored early in the game on a beautiful set up from Brian Rafalski. Detroit has had at least three more superb scoring chances. Datsyuk is, as usual, amazing. Chris Osgood has been steady and solid in the Detroit net. He hasn’t played since December 15th. It really surprising that Minnesota has the best defensive record, along with Boston, in the league, and yet the Wings have been all over them. It’s been a combination of good goaltending by Josh Harding and some really bad luck for the Detroit forwards.
On a truly gritty play, Henrik Zetterberg just missed a crushing check by a Wild defenseman and made a beautiful pass to Mikael Samuelsson who immediately deposited said pass into the net behind Harding. The first period is now over with Detroit outshooting Minnesota 11-8. I thought the shot differential would have been a lot bigger than that. Detroit really did dominate the period. It was quite a treat to watch Zetterberg and Marian Hossa play together; I wouldn’t be surprised if they both have multiple point nights. They have been particularly effective tonight.
It is still 2-2 in the junior game. The second period has started and we have our first penalty. Brad Stuart got the gate. The Wild have the man advantage. We killed it off; Ozzie looked impressive. The Wings just got their first shot on net in the second period. We haven’t exactly cranked it up like we can. I expect them to kick up a notch or two very soon. Dan Cleary just got a slashing penalty, only the second penalty in the game. This was followed by a delay of game penalty to Andreas Liyla. Now we are down 2. Luckily the intermission breaks up the 5 on 3. The Wild will have a two-man advantage for 31 seconds in the third period.
Minnesota scored on the 5 on 3 and then they scored again when Niklas Kronvall coughed up the puck in his own end. Wings scored late in the third to tie it on their second consecutive power play. The overtime has been pretty well dominated by the Wings, but there have been no goals, alas. We go to a shootout.
Pavel Datsyuk made a typically Datsyukian move that will be on all the highlight film reels at 11:00pm. Ozzie stopped all three Minnesota shootout attempts.

2008-12-12T18:17:00.001-05:00

Journaling5 - Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Besides my usual and extensive reading of online newspapers and blogs especially, I really have to begin to read more extensively; this doesn’t just mean the novels I am currently reading: Anna Karenina, Middlesex, and Ten Days in the Hills from the upstairs bathroom, the living room, and the bedroom respectively. This does not include Up in the Old Hotel that furnishes me with reading pleasure in the basement bathroom. Also not included is my “New Yorker” magazine that I faithful read every week, except I no longer read it at the kitchen table at my wife’s insistence.
I have all these books on the go, but I don’t spend enough time on them, especially my bedtime reading. I haven’t looked at Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills in at least two months. This means I have to spend more time, at least 10-15 minutes reading before I go to sleep. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, yes, it is an Oprah selection, is quite interesting reading about a very unique topic that I have recently spent much more time attending to as I try and spend a little more time with my wife in the living room while she watches all her many favourite TV shows and less time by myself in the computer room. Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel deals with true stories about the many characters Mitchell interviewed in 1940s New York in a wonderfully written, but awfully dated book.
There is an interesting story about Mitchell and his long relationship with “The New Yorker” magazine. Apparently he had a desk, or an office, I’m not quite sure which, at the magazine for decades, and yet he never published a thing. Apparently he would show up to his office every day and would be summarily greeted by one and all, yet he never submitted anything for “The New Yorker” for publication. No one asked him what he was doing; no one knows whether he wrote a word or not in the time spent at his desk/office. He did this until his death. I think that says a lot about “The New Yorker” as a magazine and as an institution (it is just one more reason why I have such an affection and respect for the magazine).
Meanwhile back at Up in the Old Hotel, I read the first two stories: one about an old Irish pub that went through remarkably few owners and about a lady named Maizie who worked at the ticket kiosk for an old movie theatre in the Bowery. I realized at this point I really was not all that interested in what happened in New York before I was born. Thus I began to pick and choose stories to read; now I’m reading about the Mohawk Indians from just south of Montreal and their remarkable story concerning their complete lack of fear of heights. These natives are responsible in large part for most of the skyscrapers in Manhattan and the various huge bridges that dot the landscapes of North America. I’m not sure what else I might read from this book, if anything else.

Obama's Cabinet To Date

2008-12-09T16:55:00.001-05:00

Journaling 3 (December 7, 2008)

There’s been an awful lot of talk about Barack Obama’s selections to his various cabinet posts. I really don’t know a great deal about the people he has chosen with the notable exception of Hilary Clinton. What is it with the Clintons (Bill and Hilary) that is so fascinating to the press? I’ve never seen two people who attract so much negative press for being highly skilled and intelligent. It is almost as if they are so clearly superior to most everyone around them that the press is beside itself with jealousy and God only knows what other types of paranoia.

I’m almost certain that President-elect Obama and his seemingly very bright cabinet will also come under attack from the mainstream media (MSM) as well. Perhaps the MSM became very comfortable (too comfortable) covering that great white dope – George W. Bush. A reporter, I’m sure, could never feel inferior to a man of Bush’s limited abilities in just about anything. I may be wrong, but somehow I doubt it. Bush has lowered the bar so dramatically that it would be nigh impossible for anyone, especially himself, to clear it with relative ease. Obama, on the other hand, has already begun to raise the bar of accountability higher than Bush ever had it in his eight years as president.

The 800-pound gorilla in all of this transition talk from the hapless, incompetent Bush to the energizing and inspiring Obama is the Republican Party, a party of such unbelievably stupid, shallow, hate-mongering fools, that any sentient human being would be repulsed by its juvenile behaviour and ridiculuously asinine approach to governance. And yet, for reasons known only to millions of benighted Americans and an equally dull and compliant press corp, the Republican Party still to this day wields untoward power and influence on the American political scene. For a clear example of this see Sarah Palin, easily the most visible and outspoken remnant of a party that once upon a time had some real sense of purpose and a real goal to help America go forward. This definitely no longer is the case. Palin and others of her ilk have helped to transform the party into a mere shadow of its former self and will leave it floundering in the wilderness for generations to come (one can only wish).

Where have I been?

2008-11-17T17:08:00.003-05:00

Well, it certainly has been awhile since last I graced these pages. We have a new president-elect in America and we have our usual lengthy list of republicans being republicans much to the diminishment of their country. Is there nothing these pompous fools won't do to advertise their immense stupidity?

That's all for now. I just wanted to touch base with my faithful reader. Me.

iGoogle

2008-03-13T11:03:00.000-04:00

iGoogle

Lance Mannion: Remember good old President Mondale?

2008-02-02T14:33:00.000-05:00

Lance Mannion: Remember good old President Mondale?

Letters-to-the-Editor

2008-01-14T18:26:00.000-05:00

Here are four letters that I have submitted to various newspapers in North America. Two of them were published. Which two?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

To Whom It May Concern:

I see Mr. Nagy is at it again. High atop his perch on the stool in the corner he adjusts his cap and turns his dyspeptic gaze once more on the SIJHL and proceeds to rain down opprobrium on this vibrant and growing local junior hockey league.

I’m not sure what Mr. Nagy’s problem is. He apparently does not read the wonderful dispatches from the fine cohort of sports reporters sent to cover the leagues many games. Perhaps the enthusiasm and all round excellent work his sports reporters bring to their coverage of this improving league for young men in Thunder Bay and district is beyond his limited and myopic view. Perhaps he is one of those unfortunate, misguided individuals who find it distasteful to say anything positive or encouraging about a home grown product.

That the SIJHL is thriving despite Mr. Nagy’s unrelenting negativity is a testament to the resilience of the league and/or a telling commentary on the feckless influence Nagy has in the local sports community.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Dear Editor:

Today’s column by David Brooks “Ending the Farce” is beyond the pale, especially when this exemplar in partisan bull twaddle is compared to the far more judicious, reality-based editorial “Soft on Crime.”

You just know that Brooks has been imbibing the Republican Kool-Aid too long when he can type a sentence of exquisite irony “President Bush entered the stage like a character from another world, a world in which things make sense.”

Brooks, at least, got half that sentence right: Bush is from another world – a world no sentient human being is aware of or has ever visited.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Dear Editor:

I just finished watching the Detroit/Ottawa game and I wonder if anyone else in this city is thinking what I’m thinking? Why, oh, why must we endure the lousy play of a decidedly mediocre (I’m being awfully generous here) team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, every single Saturday night during the regular NHL season? What happened to giving us the hapless Leafs every second weekend, and now that we have the excellent Ottawa Senators, why don’t we watch the Leaf train wreck every third week? Montreal fans would really appreciate seeing their team and listening to an English version of their games and Toronto fans will only have to hyperventilate and do whatever it is they do while the Leafs lose another one every three weeks.

It would seem to be a no brainer to me. Hockey fans, like me, would not have to put up with the constant soap opera-like atmosphere that permeates every Leaf game. To wit: they’re fragile (what are they, the ice capades?); they have to trade Sundin and anyone else of value (that would be Kaberle; that’s about it).

Tonight’s game, supposedly the marquee game of this NHL season was a case in point. After the first period we had to endure the relentless stupidity of Don Cherry and his pet monkey say nothing about what had transpired in the first period, but Cherry assured the Leaf nation that Curtis Joseph was on his way back to Toronto and ‘he would be our saviour.’ The second intermission had the hot stove league brainiacs talking exclusively about the Leafs’ myriad problems and how Scotty Bowman is just the saviour that the Leaf front office needs. Two saviours in two intermissions. Thank God almighty I can reserve my patch of pavement on Yonge Street for, you know, THE PARADE.

So there you have it, hockey fans. Apparently there was a hockey game tonight between the two best teams in the league, and all the babbling bobble heads could talk about was… you guessed it, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Dear Editor:

Oh, the richness of the ironies that abound in today’s column by Dr. Krauthammer (“In Baker’s Blunder, A Chance For Bush”). That Krauthammer believes that some how, some way President Bush will recommend ‘something new and bold’ is astounding on its face.

While the doctor is not incorrect in his assessment of the feckless impact of the Iraq Study Group, he is still inhaling the same vapours from the president’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of fantasy gas. He accuses the commission of not attempting to come up with a plan for success in Iraq – and the president has? But the ironies keep getting better. In the next paragraph the good doctor opines that the report has an ‘air of detachment from reality.’ Really? Where has he been for the last six years?

I would humbly suggest that Charles Krauthammer has been on the Kool Aid drip far too long as evidenced by his tenacious, albeit misguided, support for a president whose predilection for screwing everything up remains fundamentally unchanged and, for this columnist, unchallenged.

Fleece Sheets

2007-12-29T19:20:00.000-05:00

Fleece sheets are hands down the best invention ever! My wife just bought another pair that included, get this, fleece pillow cases too! Man, I’m totally ready for bed every night now. You have not slept until you’ve curled your toes around fleece. Trust me, I know what of I speak (is that grammatically correct?). We now have at least 5 complete sets of fleece sheets. Mind you we also use them at camp. You see we have air conditioning at camp and at home, and my wife likes it cold in the house. Thus we use our fleece sheets all year round and were not ashamed to admit it.

Worth a Read - (this is not mine)

2007-12-23T19:49:00.000-05:00

Thursday, May 27, 2004

The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101 Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?" No honestly, they have. I'd love to show you the emails I've received, there were dozens of them, honest. Honest. Anyway, I note that "errors of prewar planning" is now pretty much a mainstream stylised fact, so I suspect that it might make some small contribution to the commonweal if I were to explain how it was that I was able to spot so early that this dog wasn't going to hunt. I will struggle manfully with the savage burden of boasting, self-aggrandisement and ego-stroking that this will necessarily involve. It's been done before, although admittedly by a madman in the process of dying of syphilis of the brain. Sorry, where was I? Anyway, the secret to every analysis I've ever done of contemporary politics has been, more or less, my expensive business school education (I would write a book entitled "Everything I Know I Learned At A Very Expensive University", but I doubt it would sell). About half of what they say about business schools and their graduates is probably true, and they do often feel like the most collossal waste of time and money, but they occasionally teach you the odd thing which is very useful indeed. Here's a few of the ones I learned which I considered relevant to judging the advisability of the Second Iraq War. Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology companies. There was a live debate on this subject at the time. One side (mainly technology companies and their lobbyists) held that stock option grants should not be treated as an expense on public policy grounds; treating them as an expense would discourage companies from granting them, and stock options were a vital compensation tool that incentivised performance, rewarded dynamism and innovation and created vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly people like Warren Buffet) held that stock options looked awfully like a massive blag carried out my management at the expense of shareholders, and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L account. Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were. Since the tech companies' point of view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren't, really, all that fantastic. Application to Iraq. The general principle that good ideas are not usually associated with lying like a rug1 about their true nature seems to have been pretty well confirmed. In particular, however, this principle sheds light on the now quite popular claim that "WMDs were only part of the story; the real priority was to liberate the Iraqis, which is something that every decent person would support". Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a "starting point". By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford's Law. Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than "some" or "some but not enough to justify a war" or even "some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs". My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised. The Vital Importance of Audit. Emphasised over and over again. Brealey and Myers has a section on this, in which they remind callow students that like backing-up one's computer files, this is a lesson that everyone seems to have to learn the hard way. Basically, it's been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve. I hope I don't have to spell out the implications of this one for Iraq. Krugman has gone on and on about this, seemingly with some small effect these days. The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important. And so the lesson ends. Next week, perhaps, a few reflections on why it is that people don't support the neoconservative project to bring democracy to the Middle East (a trailer for those who can't wait; the title is going to be something like "If You Tell Lies A Lot, You Tend To Get A Reputation As A Liar"). Mind how you go.
1 We also learned in accounting class that the difference between "making a definite single false claim with provable intent to deceive" and "creating a very false impression and allowing it to remain without correcting it" is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of jail. Even if your motives are noble.posted by the management 5/27/2004 11:57:00 PM

Late December Musings

2007-12-23T19:39:00.000-05:00

I’m going to try to write in my blog every day (with a few minor exceptions – like tomorrow evening – Christmas Eve; and the next day – Christmas Day). Let’s see how long I can keep this up. To begin with I’m going to try to write in Word and then paste into my blog. I really hope my students, all of them in all of my classes, past and present and future will visit my blog to read, to cogitate, to socialize, to drop little notes, or even bomb mots!
I want my blog to be successful, but not too successful; I don’t want it taking over my life. I have plenty to do now with my classes and all the reading I like to do each day. Factor in the snow shovelling and you can see that Ed is a busy boy, indeed. I am continually amazed by, and appreciative of, the tremendous amount of time and effort that some bloggers put into their blogs. Many of them are lawyers who have simply given up their practices, or most of them anyway, to blog and keep the public aware of what is happening to their rights as unscrupulous politicians are making every effort to subvert the democratic process.
I must confess that most of my reading of blogs (it’s over 50 and counting) is from the American side of our mutual border. You will find that I will often refer to them or share some of their insights with you. I also will make many references to the NHL, specifically, the Detroit Red Wings. They are mine team and I’m proud of it. I will also, in a very much more negative tone discuss the Toronto Maple Leafs and their legions of pompom waving chuckleheads who people the airwaves at TSN and Rogers’ SportsNet.
It is a given, I am sure, that the ONLY condition of employment at these two supposedly NATIONAL SPORTS CHANNELS would include undying love and admiration for everything blue & white. It is the only way that I know to explain the 24/7 love fest that occurs whenever ‘the Buds’ happen to win a game or two. It can only be surmised that all of these so-called sportscasters are also in the employ of the teachers’ retirement fund, which has a majority interest in the Leafs. In fact, there is only one sportscaster who is not a not-so-secret member of the blue & white cult, and that would be the estimable Gord Miller. We have shared a few e-mails in the past, and he assures me that is absolutely nuts around TSN when the Leafs make the playoffs or run off a modest win streak.
This brings me to my premise: that all Leaf fans, no matter what their chronological age is actually no older, or smarter, than a nine-year-old kid. Only this would explain the remarkably resilient ability of the Leaf Nation to support a team that clearly is not going to make the playoffs this year, again. But I digress.

The Toronto Make me Laughs

2007-12-04T19:08:00.000-05:00

I'm anxiously awaiting the beginning of the Detroit/Montreal game this evening and decided to watch TSN and SportsNet on the dish. You know what the headline and the incessant talk on both Leaf networks screamed out in overly large caps? "GOING FOR THREE!" Jesus H. Christ! Can you imagine what these two fawning, asslickers would be like if the Leafs were actually going for something important or significant?

I hope Nashville kicks their sorry asses and shuts up the chattering, nattering dimbulbs that so annoyingly and cloyingly choke up the airwaves with their moronic adulations of a shitty, mediocre team.

Jon Swift: Journalism 101

2007-11-28T16:51:00.001-05:00

Jon Swift: Journalism 101

New Blog Name

2007-07-09T18:11:00.000-04:00

If I'm going to get involved in politics, or anything else for that matter then I had better not hide behind a pseudonym. Thus the change in my blog yet again.

It's been awhile

2007-06-28T09:47:00.000-04:00

It's been a few months since I last blogged. I changed the name of my blog from 'Contract Lecturer' (it sounds to0 pompous and pedantic) to EdtheWedge. I'm much more comfortable with this moniker.

Saturday/Sunday Blogging

2007-03-04T16:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday Night/Sunday Afternoon Blogging

The Leafs are on TV tonight (go, Sabres!); the Wings are on tomorrow afternoon; I might as well blog tonight to keep myself sane and away from that demon rum. Tomorrow I’ll begin marking my 3251 stuff and have that done by early in the week. Then I’ll do everyone’s marks, submit them to the powers that be who will then, if they are happy, send them to the registrar to be sent to you soon, I suppose.
Those who presented this week will receive their marks and comments (I’ll simply type up what I wrote down during your presentations and send them just to the group). I just did this now; I think you would rather have your marks than listen to me ramble on.
Back to the rambling: one thing you will notice in your career is that some classes are much, much better than others. You will find that if a certain student is away that the entire atmosphere in the class is different. I now call this the ‘Terry’ phenomena. Students in YA will know whom I am speaking about (note the correct use of whom). But I digress.
It is now 4:00p.m. The Wings have lost in overtime to Colorado. Our goaltending continues to suck. I just finished marking 3251 reflection papers (10 of them). I’ll do 15 tomorrow, 15 on Tuesday and complete their marks. I’ll then do all of your marks and submit them by the end of the week (March 9). While I’m blogging, I’m watching ‘Nigella Feasts’ (it used to be called ‘Nigella Bites’). She certainly enjoys her food and she talks with her mouth full, which I like because it shows her love of food over proper etiquette. It is a British show, I think. Which is kind of strange when you think about it; the British would have a show on food? Hmm…
Tonight we have our monthly cards. I really don’t like poker; I’m not good at it, and I really am not a gambling person. I do like the camaraderie though: the food and the beer. We play $15 poverty poker (that was my idea); I don’t mind losing 15 bucks for an evening of manly entertainment where the BS and the fish get bigger, if not better. I’ll post this now, not because it’s good but because I can’t think of anything else to say. I must await the muse to motivate and move me.

Monday Night Blogging

2007-02-12T23:02:00.000-05:00

“Monday Night Blogging”
I’ve finished my 4113YE lesson plans (you guys are good). I just watched my Red Wings get their collective asses kicked by the worst team in the NHL, the Philadelphia Flyers. I’ve still got a wicked head cold and I have only one more day of antibiotics to take. What to do? I poured myself a Lamb’s Palm Breeze (ah, nectar of the gods) and maybe see if that doesn’t give this damned cold a lethal, albeit illegal, body blow. But I digress (If you do not know it yet, that is my signature phrase).
As I sit here at my laptop nursing my rum and diet coke, I’m watching, sort of, “Batman Begins” with Christian Bale (an impressive actor, I think). I highly recommend you read James Wolcott’s latest offering at his blog (interestingly enough called James Wolcott). Google it and you will see what an acerbic, trenchant fellow he is. His adult job is with “Vanity Fair,” an American monthly, I believe. He is given to commenting intermittently (alas) on all things great and small. He is particularly adept at skewering (what a great word!) politicians, other writers, and TV shows.
I’m going to share with you something he said about George Bush this past July. It was prompted by another crisis facing the American government (there are so many) and, of course, Bush was out riding his mountain bike). It is truly priceless and so devastatingly accurate. Here it is:
No doubt exercise helps clear his brain, but if it were any clearer, it'd be a patch of blue sky. He needs to unclear his brain, and let a little reality intrude, and wipe that barbecue grin off his face.
07.15.06 1:11PM ·

I warn you, however, once you’ve tried Wolcott you will be hooked. Having said that, I hope you are not fans of “24,” the hit TV show. My daughter and my son-in-law love it; I’ve only watched part of one episode. James absolutely annihilates it in a Wolcottian tour de force. See Google above. Good night and happy reading and working on all those lovely assignments that professors so assiduously assign.

Paul

Friday Night Blogging

2007-02-09T19:38:00.000-05:00

I'm going to try writing something each weekend to share with you. You may have noticed that there is a place to comment on what I have written at the end of each post. Until I find out how to get you online yourself, please feel free to say and post what you will, not just about my post, but about anything that is important to you.

It does not have to be school-related. Share with us what is of interest to you. Please use a pseudonym. You can send your real name with the moniker to me later via MAIL in WebCT. Remember you can do this while you wait for the pizza guy, your new best friend in Thunder Bay, to deliver the goods to your basement hovel. But I digress.

The weather is too cold and nasty to support any meaningful outdoor activities, for which T. Bay is justifiably famous, thus we are relegated to staying indoors and creating mini works of genius on our laptops while we wonder how much longer this lousy weather is going to continue. If it wasn't for my head cold, I would have gone to Lac des Mille Lacs this weekend for ice fishing with a few of my fishing buddies.

I don't really like ice fishing; it's too hard to troll and search for the ever elusive walleye (pickerel to Canadians), but I do like the company of my friends and a Breeze or two into the bargain. Did I mention how damn cold it gets out there on the lake? Luckily my friends have ice shacks right on the ice. This is good for me because basically I'm a wimp, and I don't like the really cold weather.

This weekend I will mark lesson plans, read student responses to work they were to read for class, check my WebCT for student comments and finish reading "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley. It is a wonderful novel about farming in the American heartland. In fact, it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1991.

The Iraq/Iran? War

2007-02-09T19:33:00.000-05:00

“The Iraq War”
I’m presently watching “Meet the Press” with Tim Russert and presidential hopeful and ex-Senator, John Edwards. I like Edwards; I’m not sure I trust or like Russert. I find him to be an equivocator and a tool, and I mean a ‘tool’ of the Republic Party as well. They are discussing Edwards’ position on the Iraq war at the lead up and the early years of the war. Edwards has been forthright about his mistake about his early support for President Bush and the war. He continuously and fervently and honestly, I think, apologized for being dead wrong about his support for these abysmally prosecuted and pathetically weak excuses for starting the war in the first place.
As I’ve said before I am intrigued by American politics; I’m also thoroughly alarmed by them too. It would appear that our friend (yours and mine), President Bush, will be taking his Iraq war on the road to Iran. It is just not Bush, of course, who is pursuing this disquieting route to hegemony in the Middle East. He has lots of company, led by, the de facto, president of the United States, Dick Cheney and his disturbing band of neocon nutjobs. Bush, as usual, allows himself to be propelled along these disastrous courses but makes sure he does not miss one of his workout times; priorities, you know.
I really believe as these scary events unfold that we, the international community, are witnessing the demise of the American empire. George Bush has almost single-handedly brought American power and prestige to its knees. Pretty impressive, you must admit, for something he has been able to accomplish in less than six years. This incurious, indolent man has supervised (I’m not sure if that is the right word) his country’s remarkable destruction right before his too-close-set eyes. For all intents and purposes, Japan, and especially, China own America. The Americans owe hundreds of billions of dollars to each of these creditor nations. Because Bush refuses to tax the rich and the super rich in America, he must pay for his Iraq war by borrowing from these two nations. The children and certainly the grandchildren of present day Americans will be left with this huge bill to pay. But Bush does not care, by that time he will be dead and universally acknowledged as the worst American president ever!
An interesting, and even more disturbing aside to all of this is the posture of the Republic party. They have circled the wagons on this war and are steadfast in their support of Bush, their leader. The Republicans, who have shown an interest in running for president in 2008, have to a man continued to mouth the GOP talking points; it’s as if the disaster that is Bush/Cheney never happened. It is clear, at least to me, that the Republic party will continue to bow to the most extreme and wingnuttery flanks within their party. They will attack mercilessly and without any sense of decency anyone and everyone who dare disagree with their policies and their divisive and purely partisan planks in their platform.
In this they will be ably supported by a compliant and lazy national press and FOX News, as well as certain high profile newspapers throughout America. Until these Americans realize how disastrous this cozy and inherently evil partnership continues to cripple American government at home and abroad. The key word here that explains too thoroughly, I’m afraid, is the greed that is the basis for the Republic party and too many people who share in this short-sighted and wrongheaded policy.
In other words, it will be the same old, same old. It is too clear that the Republic party has no intention of changing, nor has it shown any sense of learning from all their mistakes in government the past six years. That they will elect no one to office in two years is a clear and present possibility. Just remember what Brian Mulroney did to the Progressive Conservative party of Canada in the 1980s. Did they not have but two members for the entire country? They could have, and perhaps did, caucus in a phone booth.

Blogging

2007-02-05T16:06:00.000-05:00

(begun on Sunday, January 14, 2007)

Blogging

I’m very much into blogging. I read approximately 40 blogs a day. I rarely, if ever respond, however. Perhaps I should, to hone my weak and moribund writing skills. I really need to get back into the writing game. There is no excuse for me not to give a minimum of 30 minutes a day to writing – 30 minutes a day, every day. This can easily be added to my less than robust schedule. It is what I like to do; it is what I am good at, but it is also something I have to do regularly. I have to find a way (like I did with my Monday Memo work at St. Pat’s lo those many years ago) to find a niche for my particular kind of humour and my particular bent of mind, twisted as it might be.
I really cannot explain why all my blogs are American and that they all deal with American politics, particularly national politics and, even more particularly, deal with the presidency of one George W. Bush. It is not unlike how I used to devour the Canadian newspapers when Mike Harris was Premier of Ontario. His bullying, ham-fisted ways made him an easy target for my vituperativeness and my venting of spleen. Thus with Dubya as well. His sheer incompetence, his indifference, his indolence, his stupidity are without parallel. He truly is not only the worst president ever; he may also be the worst politician ever! He is that egregiously dreadful.
Perhaps it is because I am drawn to train wrecks that I follow so closely the workings, the machinations of incompetent blowhards. It is the distinct pleasure I get from knocking their silk top hats a kilter with a well aimed snowball (verbal projectile). There is something deep inside me that wants to expose and punish those who would use their power and wealth to punish those who are less fortunate and less favoured than they. It makes me feel good, not superior, to bring down the high and mighty as they try to use their influence and position of power to look after their rich and powerful friends. I cannot countenance that kind of naked abuse of power and privilege; it makes me see red and attack these types verbally and in print. It gives me a feeling of doing something worthwhile and edifying.
Which leads me to the distinct possibility of beginning my own blog, alas; I would be forced to dabble in American politics from a Canadian perspective. I’m sure Americans will be less than thrilled to have a Canuck, a left-leaning Canuck at that, lecturing, opining on American politics. The right and its extreme wing, where all the most outrageous and vile nutbars and neocons reside, would be in a righteous uproar. I would learn two things for sure straight away: blog honestly and competently and develop an extra layer of Naugahyde skin for that toughness so necessary for political battles in America.
A considerable problem with having my own blog would be the tremendous amount of time needed to attend to its growth and maintenance of a solid, albeit Canadian viewpoint. The more I think about this the more I like it. One problem for sure will be the fishing season; I would need to have Internet access at Pine Point or I would have to impose upon Bill and Kris to use their Internet in the office. This may be dicey because they might be Republicans; ooohh… I shudder at the thought of using their good graces and offices to impugn and rail against their party. Although I am quite sure I will find some very easy Democratic targets to zero in on as well. One thing about politicians in Canada and the United States: they will never cease to not provide fodder for my particular grist mill.
It’s interesting that I began this column talking about blogging and how much I enjoy reading them, but that I do not respond very often, and now I’m talking about starting my own blog where I would be writing reams and reams of verbiage – all of it brilliant, of course. Of course.

Detroit Red Wings

2007-02-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

“This Year’s Wings”
Monday, January 29, 2007

We have passed the halfway point by a bit now and my Wings continue to struggle in rather strange ways. Our defensive play is without a doubt superb. Mind you it has to be superb because our goaltending is satisfactory at best. I just do not trust the abilities of Dominic Hasek or Chris Osgood to carry the load. We are still the best team in the league to support the puck and make crisp, accurate passes all over the ice. What surprises and vexes me is our inability to finish off splendid passing plays with goals. We lead the league most shots on goal and least shots allowed on goal.
I think that is pretty significant and speaks well of much of what we do well, but these fancy plays and dipsy doodle passes and moves do NOT result in goals. We have to be able to put teams away for good. Yesterday’s game against Colorado was a clear example of our problem. We absolutely dominated that game from start to finish, but with six minutes left in the game we were leading 1-0; we outshot them 38-10. We had multiple chances to score throughout the game, yet we did not, and it wasn’t because Jose Theodore, their goalie, was playing so well. Too many of our shots get blocked or we miss the net altogether.
Both Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg should have at least 30 goals each, given the many, many chances they get. They have less than half that amount. Why? When they are on the ice with Thomas Holmstrom, usually, they absolutely dominate any other line (with the exception of the San Jose Sharks) a team the Wings really have been dominated by. I’ve never seen a team in the last 15 years that have clearly outplayed us in every way as have the San Jose Sharks. They have two goaltenders that are clearly superior to anything we have, and when the playoffs begin this becomes crucial, absolutely crucial.
So what are we going to do? We don’t have the wherewithal that I know of to pick up a first rate goaltender. We don’t have one down on the farm and we have never drafted goalies well. We are also rather small and light. The Sharks really do push us around; not only are they big but they are also fast too.
Presently I’m watching our game against the New York Islanders. I’ve been impressed by the Islanders quickness. DePietro, their goalie, has been solid. We are down 0-1 on a goal 22 seconds in. We just got overwhelmed in our end. Hasek was not at fault. We had 4 power play chances; we had a lot of excellent chances, but blocked shots and poor shooting, as usual, kept us off the scoreboard. We have a lot of jump; that explains the many penalties against the Islanders, but we have not scored. I expect the team to continue to force the play and find a way to put one past DePietro.
The Islanders are clearly trying to run us and take the measure of our resolve; I think they will find us more than willing to put up with whatever the Islanders send our way. We are about to begin the second period; both teams will be playing five-on-five. I want my team to find the net more, especially Dan Cleary and Jason Williams. They have really been struggling lately. Williams has struggled all year. It is obvious from the first period that we really miss Mathieu Schneider on the power play; his cannonading drive from the point is sadly missed. Even Niklas Lidstrom seems to miss his power play partner.
I really don’t think we will do particularly well this year in the playoffs. I think we will have trouble getting past the first round again. If we do advance, then I’ll have to wait and see who we play and how well we played in the first round. I’m still waiting for our team to begin to jell offensively, especially on the power play, where we have been dreadful at times. I will revisit my team later in the season to see if their offence has come to life.

2007-02-04T16:42:00.000-05:00

I want to begin using this blog as a stepping stone to my Process Writing course at the Faculty of Education. It is a nine-week course that has just passed its halfway mark. I want to use my students as willing (I hope) guinea pigs in order to use it full time in all of my classes next year.