Assorted Oddities…
Don’t forget to check some of my favorite blogs:
http://evenlittlesparrows.blogspot.com/ - Sparrow Chat
http://derenegade.blogspot.com/ - Dependable Renegade
http://www.crooksandliars.com/ - Crooks and Liars
http://www.thinkprogress.org/ - Think Progess
http://priceofliberty.net - The Price of Liberty is Vigilance
http://www.nocapital.blogspot.com/ - No Capital
http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/ - NewsHog
http://www.cursor.org - Cursor
http://www.mockpaperscissors.com/ - Mock, Paper, Scissors
http://tumblingvice.blogspot.com/ - Tumbling Vice
http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/ - BobGeiger (formerly Yellow Dog)
http://left-over.blogspot.com/ - Left-Over
Glossary for newcomers:
Chief of the Counterfeit Compassionate Conservative And Oh Yeah By The Way Conspicuously Caucasian Caucus = George W. Bush
Dither of Dolts = The Bush Administration and heads of agencies
Lint Twins = The Bush twins, who, like lint, are neither useful nor decorative
Shithead = Karl Rove. To save typographer’s labor and print space, this combines the two soubriquets frequently applied to Mr. Rove: Bush’s Brain + Turd Blossom = Shithead
XianXrazies = Any group professing to be Christian which believes the faith excludes any of humanity from the hope it presumably offers since Christ’s sacrifice or which believes it has successfully learned to read God’s mind or which believes God wants followers who are drafted or gathered by impressment or which believes God hates or wants anyone else to hate those who do not believe in Him.
Ambulatory Emetic = Condi Rice, Secretary of State, aka the cacophagous, fawning bitch cur that slithers and crawls behind her master. A gourmand of whatever shit he deposits, she mixes it with her venomous digestive juices, then vomits it forth before the leaders of the world.
—o0o—
Assorted oddities…
Sometimes lately my life is a little like the marvelously anticlimactic line in Shelley’s “Indian Serenade”: I die, I faint, I fail.
That is to say, immediately after a chemo session, I have a spell of fatigue which suggests the bright light at the end of a long tunnel will be appearing momentarily and would be welcome. That’s followed by a period in which my bed and I become bosom buddies, hurling back into each other’s embrace after short intervals of separation. The last stage is this one…in which I note that I have failed to blog myself, instead treating myself to long excursions (and frequently long comments) in the blogs of others. (Some of those I visit most frequently are listed above.) Usually those blogs have already noted most of what I consider noteworthy, so anything of mine would be a redundancy at best.
But there are always a few things which get through my mental mists eventually. Here are a couple of them:
1. SAT Scores Take Sharp Drop - Class Of 2006 Registers Largest Decrease In Three Decades , which certainly suggests that if no one child is being left behind, then all children must have fallen far behind their seniors. I’m not sure unanimity in lowered expectation was the goal of “No Child Left Behind”, but it appears increasingly that’s what it has achieved. Perhaps children look at Mr. Bush and think, “Okay, even if I’m not smart enough or well-educated enough to get a job pumping gas or flipping burgers, I can always be elected President.”
Various possible explanations are offered for the decline in scores — a change in the test itself, fatigue occasioned by the length of the test, and the rising cost of the test, which has reduced the number of students taking it twice. Another explanation is that the schools are a mess, that teachers are inadequately compensated and frequently inadequately trained, that parents are losing the battle to peer pressures on students, etc., etc., etc. No matter how hard I try, it’s hard for me to believe a chronic academic under-achiever like Mr. Bush will ever provide — or appoint anyone who can provide — reasonable steps to halt the backward drift.
Take a trip to Sparrow Chat’s Now, Some Things for an interesting and (I think) amusing look at Mr. Bush’s usefulness as an incentive to education. As I said in my comment there, if
Princeton had the nerve, it would probably be advertising widely that Mr. Bush is a product of Yale and Harvard.
2. Abu Ghraib Prison Totally Empty Official Says No Detainees Left At Notorious Iraqi Prison, which contains the interesting information
U.S. military officials had said they have always had the intention to move detainees from Abu Ghraib because it is in a region susceptible to attacks and was difficult to support logistically.
More than 13,000 detainees are being held at coalition facilities, in Camps Cropper, Bucca, and Fort Suse. Many detainees are awaiting trial, others formal charges.
A committee consisting of U.S. and Iraqi officials from the ministries of human rights, justice and interior has reviewed the cases of more than 30,000 detainees and recommended more than 15,400 for release.
The arithmetic of that final paragraph is unsettling. More than half the detainees, in other words, apparently should never have been there.
I wonder if the Bush budget has allocated funds to hire temps to do the letters of apology to those 15,400?
3. Richer for poorer - Though their numbers remain steady, the lot of America’s poor may be improving in ways not reflected by the official figures, which takes a look at the recently released Census Bureau report and makes some interesting points. However, after its “things aren’t really so bad” tone, the article concludes:
Some critics of the government’s poverty figures argue that the impression they give is too gloomy. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think-tank, points out that official poverty calculations exclude taxes paid and government benefits received as well as non-cash income such as fringe benefits or the rent saved through homeownership. This leads to a growing mismatch between the official poverty rate and spending by those at the bottom, which has risen though the poverty rate has held steady.
Mr Eberstadt points out that while nutrition, adequate shelter and health care were big problems for the poor when America’s poverty measure was devised, the picture is different today. Obesity is now the chief nutritional woe facing America’s poor. And those under the poverty line now have nearly as much house space and amenities as the average family in 1980. This does not mean that the poor are leading lives of plenty but it does indicate that their lot is getting steadily better, an improvement not reflected in official figures.
It may get even harder to assess the true state of America’s poor. The census report notes that its Survey of Income and Programme Participation is being “re-engineered” in a way that will provide less data than the current version. Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, attributes this to a “blind the beast” strategy by those Republicans who are determined to prevent the government from collecting any data on issues that it might then have to tackle. Though the poor may still be with them, in the future Americans will be less aware of it.
Once again, it’s the final paragraph that causes some rising of the short hair at the back of my neck. The GOPer talent for re-defining reality and then marketing the sham to carefully selected members of the human herd is well-known. I’ve always maintained the GOP consists of piss-poor policy-makers but wonderful marketers — packaging and market targeting may not be noble skills, but in politics, they are obviously very useful.
4. And as though to prove that final point for me, we have this:
Rumsfeld: World Faces New ‘Fascism’ - Defense Secretary Likens Iraq War Opponents To Those Who Appeased Hitler . Here’s a snippet:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces “a new type of fascism” and likened critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis in the 1930s.
In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion” about what threatens the nation’s security. His remarks amounted to one of his most pointed defenses of President Bush’ war policies and was among his toughest attacks on Bush’s critics.
Speaking to several thousand veterans at the American Legion’s national convention [xm note: in Salt Lake City, Utah], Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failure to confront Hitler. He quoted Winston Churchill as observing that trying to accommodate Hitler was “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.”
As I said, targeted marketing is a big part of any GOP success story. Such a speech before the American Legion in Salt Lake City probably drew applause. I hope there are still cities in this misguided, foundering nation where it would have drawn cat-calls, cabbages, and over-ripe fruit.
I suggest Mr. Rumsfeld withdraw his head from his anal cavity long enough to take a look at Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: - Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
Or, of course, he could just look in a mirror.
Update: Keith Olbermann has delivered a response to Mr. Rumsfeld’s outrageous comments. Read the transcript AND watch the video!
Update: Mayor Rocky Anderson’s speech in Salt Lake City is another impressive retort to Mr. Rumsfeld’s offensive speech. Check it out.
