Kind of unfocused this week with all that’s going on, so I’m going to resort once again to brief rants on various topics. Bear with me, friends – I promise to keep the lid of my head on.
The Commission. I understand Congress’s reluctance to deal with difficult issues like 
raising taxes, cutting popular programs, etc. That is, however, the main reason why they have been sent to Washington D.C. – to decide where the money for the federal government comes from and where it goes. If they are unable to grapple with these issues, they might consider applying for jobs at the corporations that paid for their campaigns. What irks me about the deficit reduction commission, aside from the participation of paleocons like Alan Simpson, is that they are not directly accountable to the electorate. Even more than that, commissions are usually mustered to do particularly dirty work, like cutting or privatizing Social Security to save a few bucks.
Let’s look at this for what it is. The last administration recklessly cut taxes on rich people, not once but twice, and invaded no less than two countries. We can argue about whether or not Afghanistan should have happened (I think not), but Iraq was and remains a total, utter waste of lives and resources. The hole in our national finances is largely due to these elements, and if someone recommends we pay for criminal negligence such as this by cutting benefits to elderly people of limited means, that’s a non-starter.
Death and Texas. Jesus christmas. No one likes paying taxes, or going to the dentist, or taking exams, or eating their Maypo (well…. almost nobody), but this software executive in Texas who flew his plane into an IRS building should have taken an anger management seminar or something stronger.
Number Two. Our partners in war, the Pakistani intelligence services and military, have captured the Taliban’s second in command. I imagine someone will take his place, right? Whatever intelligence value he may offer, he certainly can’t tell us what we most urgently need to know – namely, what the hell are we trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and when the hell, with 8 years of war and counting, are we going to get out? Seems as though we’ve made the Afghans pay quite enough for 9/11, an attack planned by non-state actors whose initial funding in the 1980s came from us. And with all the civilian casualties we’re causing on both sides of the border, I imagine they’ll have no trouble filling that number 2 spot.
luv u,
jp
Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We’re just getting a preliminary read here, but I’d say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the “oit”). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind… as in robot hand… as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look.
technician – Marvin’s creator, Mitch Macaphee – and asked him to program into Marvin the willingness to volunteer for such a dangerous task, which Mitch did in a trice. No problem for an experience mad scientist. There were a few glitches, of course – in essence, Marvin’s mouth was saying “I volunteer” but his legs were pedaling in the other direction. (Those magnetic-drive casters produce some torque, let me tell you.) That aside, we managed to get a rope around him, strap a flashlight to his forehead, put a cell phone in his claw, and lower him down into the abyss. Fortunately, Marvin’s eyes double as web cams, so we were able to see the underground landscape unfold before him – fascinating journey, as that Australian interior designer might say in a totally different context. Care for a Foster’s? (Product placement – hey, got to keep the lights on somehow, right?)
seventy-five, or even one hundred miles below us. But as far as I’m concerned, anything down there belongs to US. That’s right… a pie-slice shaped vector of earth stretching from the perimeter of the hammer mill down to the core of this planet – a colossal spike of mineral wealth – belongs to us, at least as far as our new legal advisor Anti-Lincoln can tell. Yes, I know what you’re going to say… why, WHY would we consult someone as untrustworthy and disreputable as anti-Lincoln, the literal antithesis of our most revered president? A man with no scruples, no ethics… what kind of a lawyer could he possibly be? OUR kind.
mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter’s experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There’s also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person’s efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there’s “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the namesake of which – former Texas representative Charlie Wilson – just passed away this week.
Whatever his role may have been in providing fuel to the Afghan war effort during the 1980s, this was not the work of one man, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of one speech. This ongoing crisis was many, many years in the making, beginning in earnest with the Carter administration and the decision to begin backing the fundamentalist factions within Afghanistan because it was felt that they would prove a longer-term, more pernicious problem for the Soviets than any secularist elements. Money began flowing on a larger scale in the Reagan years as the CIA embarked on what was up to that time the largest operation in their history, conducted in cooperation with the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis. Fanatical fighters were recruited all over the Muslim world, including most notably Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. So we all had a piece of this one, and now it’s got a piece of us.