Sen. Al Franken Draws a Map of the Entire U.S.

I have been sort of skirting political posts lately, because I tend to get red in the face when I do, so I only post when it's something non-partisan (even though posting something about Al Franken may be conflated with partisan hackery, meh).

So what we have here is newly minted MN senator Al Franken drawing a map of every state in the union. It's a pretty impressive feat that Franken can draw such a detailed version of the map, and live during a public address, no less, during the Minnesota State Fair. I know, right. How quaint is that? State fairs. Sounds so 1950s. Ah, MN's so dreamy.

Does That Race Bait Ever Catch Any Fish?

What we are seeing right now is a very sly move on the part of conservative pundits and talking heads - from the incomprehensible and increasingly opaque Mr. Limbaugh to the relatively insubstantial Glen Beck - in their criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor. They call her a "racist" and a "bigot". Limbaugh goes so far as to call her a "hack" and a "reverse racist". I will not say that members of Congress have leveled such a claim upon her, because they have allowed right-wing hatchet men to do that for them. Suddenly, the Republicans have become the spineless Democrats, since their only claims on Sotomayor so far is that her views are "troubling". This sort of nonexistent critique of a potential candidate is "troubling" to me and bad for the country. When all you have is a Party of No in the Republicans and a Party of Whatever in the Democrats, then it does not speak very well of our country's direction.

But I digress.

What makes the right-wing punditry's criticisms of Sotomayor so sly is that the intention is to draw out race-baiting from the side of the Dems to curry favor for the candidate. If the Dems come out in public and say, "Mrs. Sotomayor, who is a Hispanic woman, is being attacked because..." then the other side has the advantage. It turns into an issue of whether or not she is being hoisted up for the Supreme Court for her ethnicity rather than her policies, and that does not bode well for an administration promising change as its main slogan.

The Democrats have begun to take the bait, though probably not with as much vigor as the right would like, and it will be interesting to see just how far the argument about race will go.

What is troubling is that it is the same defense that Limbaugh did give in defending Alberto Gonzales when he was to be confirmed as Attorney General and what, I'm sure, Glen Beck would have said, were he able to say anything. Limbaugh carried Gonzales's ethnicity like a banner when defending him, and it worked, to a certain extent. Democratic members of Congress had to backpedal and insist that their criticisms, which, I admit, were valid, had to do with his policies and not his race, which only muddled the waters and allowed any true criticisms of Mr. Gonzales to be lost in the shuffle.

And the opposite is true. What people like Limbaugh have done is take the race card and play it successfully against those who have historically played it, getting the other side to take the bait and make the debate over matters revolve around race and not the issue. That is an inherent weakness of Democrats. They do not, by the way, take the high road; that is not my implication. They are simply too afraid of offending anyone to not be sucked into the race debate, and that is how they often lose these ostensible PR campaigns.

If the race card can be played to muddy the waters on a person's lack of credentials for an office, it can also be done to muddy the waters when a person is clearly qualified, as Mrs. Sotomayor seems to be. That is what members of the right have discovered, and, though the tactic doesn't always work - I imagine that Sonia Sotomayor will be selected for the Supreme Court - it is a tactic that can almost always be used in the absence of a political smoking gun.

The Result is Irrelevant

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.
~Hannah Arendt

It seems to me to be a non-subject as to whether prosecuting CIA officials who called for the torture of any human being, no matter how despicable, is the right thing to do. When you cannot distinguish your methods from your enemies, then you yourself become indistinguishable from your enemy. And, while I am appalled at the conflation of CIA officials with Nazis defending themselves using the now-titled "Nuremberg Defense", I can certainly see no reason why "just following orders" is acceptable.

President Obama deserves harsh criticism on this point, I think. He cannot forgive and forget these indiscretions, especially since the proponents of torture attempted to - nearly successfully - cover them up. Releasing the memos without doing anything substantive about them is both politically and pragmatically dubious. Not only is it helping the fundamentalist recruitment effort - though to prosecute only on that basis would be morally shady - it is also inherently wrong, I think.

And, going a step farther, if it is, in fact, in violation of some international accord to not prosecute, then it is decidedly a stupid move on the part of our president to release the memos and then claim that all past offenses should be forgotten. Now, I am not so shallow as to believe that there is not some political edge to be had from making these documents public. Surely, political democrats wrung their hands at the idea of letting these hot little documents see the light of day. Of that, I am almost positive. It's just I am not so sure that it will not backfire in the long run, which is, in its own right, a very cynical point.

The Kite Runner & Afghanistan

Sometimes I feel like I use my "five paragraph essay" voice when I talk about quote-endquote important issues, so forgive me.

Anyway, I'm about ninety percent done with Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and have an overarching feeling of dismay about the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful novel, and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

But the line between fiction that so often gives me comfort in and escape from the REAL WORLD has been shattered by this book, which details the life of a child who grows up in Afghanistan in the Seventies, moves to America, and then returns [for an important plot thread] after the country has been taken over by the Taliban.

So, anyway, that's the novel in a nutshell, and since I have painted the story with such a broad brush, please don't disregard the book based on such a silly little paragraph. There is too much to be explored plot-wise in the story, but the literal, surface meaning is not what I mean to talk about. The political undercurrent is, and it is that which interests me. It is so alive with the modern state of the country and pessimism about its future that I couldn't help but be fundamentally shaken by its implications.

When war is waged on a country, it is difficult for people to understand the daily struggles of those people and whether or not the beliefs of the everyman align with those who have (ostensibly) caused the war. In Afghanistan, the fundamental - again, no pun intended - question is: do most people in the country align themselves with the Taliban?

The answer, I would say, is a resounding NO. I can't extrapolate all of Afghanistan out by the comments of one book, of course, but I do think it is important to note that perspective can be derived from sympathetic texts. And, while I criticized escalation of forces in Iraq, I have to say that I agree with Mr. Obama in sending more troops to Afghanistan to help the country get under control.

Khaled Hosseini himself has something to say about the presence of the US:

But this much we do know: Without a genuine and sustained, long-term commitment on the part of the U.S. and its allies, Afghanistan is doomed. Though Afghans are an independent people and take pride in their sovereignty, polls have repeatedly shown that, despite growing skepticism and disillusionment, the majority of Afghans still view the foreign presence in their country favorably. They know that a weakened western resolve will mean that positive gains that have been made so painstakingly will vanish swiftly and the country will slide back.

So, if I haven't depressed you too much, I encourage you to give The Kite Runner a chance. It's a damn fine book, and one that may help you get something that almost never hurts: a perspective other than your own.

Sad But True

Too Big to Fail

In a statement that was so mind-blowingly simple I hadn't even considered it, Matt Taibbi said (at about 2:00 in the video below) on the Rachel Maddow show last nigh:

"If these companies are too big to fail, they're too big to exist. In a capitalist society, we can't have a situation where all you have to do to stay in business forever is get so big that, whenever you screw up, the government comes and bails you out."

Brilliant. He went on to say that it's the reason we had trade-busting way back in the day, so that these companies can a manageable size, and when they become incompetent, we can just let them fail.

Now, to deter any potential attacks, let me, too, say that, like Rachel, I'm obviously not an expert. But the logic in that statement seems pretty tight to me.

You can read Taibbi's newest article by clicking here.

'Evil' Political Cartoon

I want anybody who patronizes this site to go and visit the web comic I saw today over at This Historic Times. It's totally worth it, and if you don't get the reference...[shrugs]

Something to Think About Before Bailing Out "American" Plants

The not-so-big three are certainly are no less global than, say, Honda. General Motors gets 44% of its revenue from other countries and Ford gets 53%, according to Forbes (April 21). A German company, Daimler-Benz, still owns a fifth of Chrysler, and a group of affluent private investors owns the rest.

An “American” brand tells you little about where all the parts in a car are made. I was once at a dinner with Lee Iaccoca where I teased him about my Dodge Stealth, made in Japan by Mitsubishi. Similarly, today’s Chevy Aveo is imported from Daewoo in South Korea. Yet Hyundai has a plant in Alabama.

Cars.com found only four cars and six light trucks with a domestic content (meaning US or Canadian) above 75%. That list includes the Toyota Tundra and Sienna and the Honda Odyssey. Other Honda’s have a 60-70% domestic content, barely missing the cut.

The “Detroit” metaphor for primarily domestic vehicles is also inappropriate. Among the remaining seven vehicles with a very high domestic content, three are made outside Michigan —the Chevy Malibu from Kansas and Cobalt from Ohio, and the Ford Explorer from Kentucky. Ford’s F-150 truck might be made in Michigan or Missouri, the Chevy Silverado in Michigan or Indiana.

Source: The Cato Institute

White People

I had to shrink the pic down to get it to fit in the blog, so you might want to click on it to get a better looking version. What's funny is that, in its original size, only the first two panels showed! Unintentional racism!

Sarah Palin's Use of Prayer

"And pray about that also. I think God's Will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."



It came out today that Sarah Palin didn't demand books to be removed from libraries, but that she asked what the local libraries would think of having certain books removed, a fact that's made every warm body in the union breathe a sigh of relief.

I think it makes her worse, honestly. What if, on her first day, she'd asked, "Hey, what would you God-fearing people think if I started using the word nigger around here? I'm just trying to get to know you and everything and wanted to gage your sensibilities."

(Hopefully) they would have kicked her ass. The worst thing is, nobody's called her on it. She's got the religious nuts drooling all over their fucking hymnals, the gun-nuts cornholing their modified assault rifles, and the media hasn't said one word about any of it. Goddamnit.

Politics: A Meta-Blog

Hey out there in BloggerLand, how are things?

I tried to not let the blog get into too much political talk - there's so much out there already - but I couldn't help myself.

SO, in the grand spirit of forgiveness, give me a little, please? It just comes out sometimes, without warning, and I am just a conduit for what spews forth. I'm sorry. That's just me.

I at least try to find things that are interesting and haven't been plastered everywhere already, but I'm going to put a little effort into blogging about something else for a change in the future, unless I feel like talking Politics, that is.

Because I do like things other than the big P word. Movies, books, my two puppy dawgs, etc.

So, I guess this blog isn't about anything really but my own self-indulgence, a meta-blog, if you will. I'll be blogging some mo' later. I have something to say about Welfare Reform. Surprisingly enough, I'm for Welfare Reform.