{ Monthly Archives }
And we’ll all soon be visited by the thought police…
Bush job rating falls to all-time low: poll
President George W. Bush’s job rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, amid strong opposition to the Dubai Ports World deal and increasing pessimism over the war in Iraq, according to a CBS News poll released on Monday.
Gee. Blithely and blindly handing over control of critical US ports to a foreign-state-owned company is a bad thing? Who knew?
So, the great and fabulous MoveOn.org took a poll and found that 84% of their members would like them to focus on unseating “right-wing democrats” as well as working to regain democratic control of the congress. And so, they’re going to do it. Well, I’m here to say that I think it’s a bad fucking idea. Internal strife and disunity have cost the democratic party elections in the past (anyone remember Carter and Kennedy not holding hands in 1980? Yes, that 1980) and there’s no reason to assume that those same issues won’t wind up damaging the push to retake even a portion of the congress this time around.
Worse still is that their first foray into pushing more progressive candidates is happening here in Texas. Yeah, Texas. What a great place to spin your wheels and waste your money on trying to get a progresssive elected. That’s effort and funding lost that could be spent on unseating a republican in a place where they’re actually vulnerable. And, my friends, trying to replace a democrat who voted “1 out of 3 times with the republicans” (horrors!) is precisely the kind of maneuver that the right wing likes to see. It allows them to paint us as divided and, worse, so bound to an ideology that we’ll turn on ourselves.* Right about now we don’t need to be helping our opponents.
So I’m done with MoveOn. They’ve lost me with this. Here’s the text of my “unsubscribe” message:
So, you’re going to go ahead and fire up the internal strife machine, eh? Disunity within the Democratic party is going to get us nowhere right now. And on top of that you’re going to waste your time and money on doing this in Texas? I live in Texas, people, and the odds of a progressive getting elected here right now are slim. So why not keep working on unseating right-wing republicans where there’s a real chance rather than challenging democrats who aren’t “progressive enough?” Count me out, MoveOn. I don’t want email from y’all anymore.
If you think that MoveOn is acting more like MoveWrong right now, take a minute to let them know. And no, I ain’t linking to them, so you’ll have to type it into your browser yourself.
*kinda like they did with the whole “Harriet Myers isn’t conservative enough” thing. That sure made you want to support Alito, didn’t it? Yeah, I thought so. Wise up.
And is it bad but not worth killing over? Or is the old man just a bad shot?
Safernatin’ the country is seeryus binnis. An’ nuthin’ says seerys binnis like knowifyin’ whut yer talkin’ of. No, what you’re talking of. That why we’s a’spyin’.
If the media were honest, that would be the headline for this story. See, after six years of failed policy (be it eduction, healthcare, economic, or foreign) foisted on a foolishly accepting American populace, the neoconmen, with shrub as their figurehead, have pissed away a budget surplus and now expect the children, elderly and working poor of America to suffer for the sins of their elected.
No great country ever went broke tending to the health and educational needs of its citizens, because a healthy and educated citizenry ensures prosperity for everyone. On the other hand, pandering to the rich and leaving the rest out in the cold, though, does nothing but harm society as a whole.
Worse still, an open-ended and ill-defined state of war tends to bankrupt countries faster than anything (not to mention destroying civil liberties). Especially when that war is being carried out at the whim of a largely unchecked leader. Oh sure, some people in the military-industrial complex make a killing, but sometimes even some of them realize the situation is untenable.
You know, the above could apply to the cold-war era Soviet Union. Unchecked leader? Check. Ill-defined and open-ended state of war? Check. Destruction of civil liberties? Check and check.
I’d better stop before this post qualify as samizdat? Maybe if I wrote in a more satirical style I could get away with it.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a seminar presented by Edward Tufte. If you’re not familiar with his work then you might well find it interesting to visit his site and poke around some. Well, if you care anything about representing data in a visual medium, that is.
Anyway, among the various topics that were part of the lecture was a little thing called sparklines. This concept really captured my imagination and, fortunately, it seems to have grabbed the attention of quite a few others, too. Thankfully, many of those folks are more technically inclined than I, and that means that though a wonderful plugin for WordPress (Simple Sparklines) I can now include sparklines in my posts here, when appropriate.
Thanks great, yongi, but what about people who aren’t using WordPress? Well, another fine individual has put together the Sparklines Web Service for easy web-based creation of sparklines. There are other options, too, like plugins for Microsoft Office. So, really, anyone who wants to use sparklines is bound to be able to find a way.
Oh, and to show off the awesome power of sparklines…
So there. I’m a data geek. Such is life.
Much has been made of how our little fascists have based their foriegn policy (such as it is) on oil. Invade Iraq for the oil. Spar with Hugo Chavez over the oil. Let the oil companies price gouge the ever-lovin’ bejesus out of the American consumer. And so on. And all of this because many of them are actually oilmen and stand to reap substantial financial gains from all this. Well, I’m here to give you a new piece of news. Shrub et. al. must’ve done some serious investing in wire production, or at least in copper. Why? Because they appear to be basing the rest of their policies (domestic and human rights, at least) on wire. Illegal, unconstitutional wire-tapping. Repealing Rove v. Wade. And, of course, nothing says “torture” like piano wire.
So, I propose that, starting now, we the people start doing our best Joan Crawford (the last name is ironic, if coincidental) and tell these bastards “No more wire! Hangers, taps or piano!” And how do we do that? Well, we start by reclaiming congress in 2006. So when Novemeber comes around, get off your ass and vote. Or you might just wind up working for these greedy pricks next money-making scheme… down in the mines.