Democrats and Republicans, when they’re the only ones in the room, can rarely agree on anything. But as soon as a third party comes sniffing around, the Big Two are suddenly the best of friends. There are plenty of examples of this outrageous behavior; Radley Balko documented the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow Libertarians on the ballot in Louisiana. Here in West Virginia, we have the home-grown Mountain Party’s Jesse Johnson, who sued to be allowed into the state’s gubernatorial debate.
The gutless judge, Jennifer Bailey Walker, refused Johnson. It is absolutely pathetic how anti-democratic the major two parties truly are. Third party candidates should always be allowed on the podium. The more views we have, the better elections we’ll have. Anybody claiming otherwise is a shameful liar.
(Incidentally, I vote for all Mountain Party candidates, whenever they’re on the ballot. I have no idea what they believe in, or what they’d do if elected, and I don’t care. Better that we get to hear these people than hear the same old nonsense.)
So, Phil Gramm is doing a bang-up job speaking for McCain, especially after declaring America a nation of whiners stuck only in a mental recessions. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Even if I was pulling for McCain, and I certainly am not, this would have forced me to facepalm myself. How else can you explain somebody, in the midst of bad economic times for a lot of people, although not necessarily the economy itself, saying something so stupid? Economists never understand this sort of thing, but a person’s outlook on the economy as a whole is directly affected by their personal economic standing. If that standing is bad, then the economy is in bad shape. I guess people get bent out of shape about this sort of thinking.
What the Phil Gramms of the world need to say is something like, “We know times are tough for some of you, but we’ve got a strong nation and a purring economy and we want to connect you with it.” You don’t have to lecture your audience at all times.
Boggling the mind, Hillary Clinton is out of the election officially, only months after losing the primary campaign. Good for her. It’s about time she started acting like an adult.
To her supporters: the right candidate won. You’re going to get farther with a Presidential candidate that can actually win an election. Trust me. If you play the percentages, you’ll find that actually having your candidate win is worth more than having a candidate lose. Democrats are slowly, slowly, slowly learning this.
This has to mean that Barack Obama’s in awfully good shape to compete this summer, this fall, and actually on election day. Republicans can keep trying to smear the bejesus out of him and his family, but it won’t ultimately work. A good smear can keep people home, but they’ll never turn them into supporters of John McCain who is, unfairly or otherwise, stuck campaigning under the banner of “Four More Years…of War, Torture, High Prices, and Some More War!” He cannot avoid the quagmire that Bush left him to campaign in.
Things, right now, fingers crossed, nerves frayed, constantly glancing over my shoulder, seem good.
Look, I’ll start believing news like this when it actually happens, and not before. In every other situation involving this particular candidate, she has done the opposite of what she should have. As recently as last night, when she should have been bowing out, she was claiming that she wasn’t sure what she going to do.
Even though she’d already lost.
Still, this has to be taken cautiously as good news. Barack Obama can win, and with Hillary Clinton both out of the way and being supportive, surely he is in relatively good shape.
More soon, if this actually happens, but again, I’ll only believe this when I actually see it.
To believe Mike Garrison’s side of things, the following facts do not tell a story:
-Garrison got his job from Joe Manchin, West Virginia’s governor.
-Garrison was friends with Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin’s daughter.
-Garrison represented Mylan, a pharmaceutical company that currently employs Heather Bresch. (The company is owned by one of West Virginia University’s largest donors, Milan “Mike” Puskar.)
-Upon realizing that Heather Bresch had never actually earned an Executive Masters of Business Administration, Garrison’s chief of staff convened a meeting with several other higher ups from the University’s administration in which it was decided to pretend as if she had in fact earned it. This was promptly discovered, because predictably, the kinds of people who make it into WVU’s administration are complete morons.
Essentially, Mike Garrison wants you to believe that even though he can thank her father for his position, that even though he counts Bresch as a friend, that even though she is employed by one of the University’s most financially flush patrons, he had nothing to do with her receiving a degree that she hadn’t earned.
Let’s suppose I came to you and told you that story: would you believe it was at least potentially possible that Garrison had some influence over the outcome? Of course you would, because you’re not an idiot.
My parents aren’t idiots. They visualized the pieces, put the puzzle together, and can see the image: WVU is lead by an unqualified lunkhead who gives degrees away not caring a tinker’s cuss for the damage it does to the University’s reputation.
Unfortunately, West Virginia’s political aristocracy couldn’t give a good goddamn what people like my parents think. They have never cared what people like my parents think, or, for that matter, what anybody in West Virginia thinks. They always do exactly as they please, and play the, “But we’re West Virginians!” card whenever they get themselves into trouble.
For instance, sure, we could have had a qualified state treasurer to manage our money, but A. James Manchin was also available, and dammit, he was from the state! So we elected him and ended up losing $231 million dollars. (Or, you could have fun with Arch Moore, a former idiot governor who settled a $100 million lawsuit for $1 million instead, after the Buffalo Creek Flood. Actual West Virginians referred to the dam’s collapse as an “Act of God.” Instead of blaming the idiots who tried to dam hundreds of thousands of gallons of water with mud.)
Look, I love West Virginia, but would anybody seriously object if the city of Charleston burned to the ground with every single member of this state’s ruling elite inside? Yes, we’d be bad off for a time, waiting for special elections to replace the yahoos who currently pillage our state blind behind their constant song, “But we’re West Virginians!” But then, a week later, we’d have all new people, who for at least a time would be so uncoordinated that they couldn’t possibly be worse than the idiocracy we currently have running things.
As I said, I love my parents, but they’ve got to much faith in things if they think WVU’s president is going anywhere just because he’s a completely corrupt moron who does the will of his political patrons over the good sense that just anybody else might possess. Facts are facts. Truths are truths. West Virginia’s a painfully fucked up place, and this certainly isn’t going to be the scandal that fixes things.
Pictured above are ramps, part of West Virginia I like, one of the things I have to constantly think about whenever Garrison pops into my head.
Raided by officials after a call from a girl confirmed what everybody already knew - polygamist Mormon are all types of dangerous crazy, particularly when children are involved - men at the compound have struck back, claiming their rights were violated. If this is true, shame on the state of Texas for botching what should have been an easy set of prosecutions, and sadly, these men should go free.
However, I’m guessing that nobody’s going to walk here, because I really can’t see where any specific rights were violated. The claims being made by the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (that, amongst other things, police couldn’t have had warrants for every single home within the compound) are thin gruel and not likely to stand up in a court of law that will probably rule that the compound represents a single property and as such, everything within it was authorized to be searched. But I’m not going to law school, so maybe I’m wrong.
Still, it’s funny to see that these polygamists are claiming that their rights have been violated, as if they enjoyed a right to polygamy, underage sex, etc. It’s a funny thing when that Constitutional Freedom of Religion comes into conflict with other laws, and of course, it’s shameful when idiots hide behind that Freedom, claiming that whatever they’ve done was religious in nature and thus protected.
I’ve followed other, similar cases, although none with consequences this dire. One case, in the Northwest, involved a man who wanted to have his 12-year-old circumcised (the father had converted to Judaism), and his mother opposing it. The father claimed dominion on his son’s penis because he was religious. He was actually taken seriously.
It’s strange the lengths we’ll go to protect the religious in their expressions of faith. When I was in college in Massachusetts, the local legal establishment wore kids gloves, and did literally anything they could, to avoid offending the Catholic Church while pursuing the dangerous child molesters who happened to also be priests. Because really, the real victims were the priests.
This claim of violated rights is the first of this nonsense from the FLDS. It’s the only out that they’ve got. By claiming that they’re free to do whatever they want to children because God instructed them to do so, they’re hoping that America will take the same approach as always: generally hands off. “Well, it’s awful, but they’re religious…”
If only everybody enjoyed this sort of legal protection: a drug user saying he was told by God to get high, a recidivist drunk driver claiming God told him to get behind the wheel, a murdered claiming that he was instructed by God to kill. These sorts of things are generally laughed out of the courtroom if they’re allowed in the first place. But the FLDS claim will have credence, because if the problems were really so bad, wouldn’t Texas have intervened long before this situation came to light?
Sadly, the answer is no, because again, America takes a very hands off approach when it comes to the religious. That’s how these hundreds of girls ended up being left at the hands of the monsters in charge of the FLDS.
I’m not suggesting that people don’t enjoy a freedom of their faith, in case anybody was wondering, but rather, that the freedom ends where another person’s begins. Forcing 13-year-old girls, by virtue of the fact that they’ve gotten their periods, to get married and start having children isn’t an expression of free religion, but something more akin to slavery. These girls didn’t willingly choose this life, and those people claiming that the FLDS acted within their boundaries would be wise to remember that.
-I should have known the criticism would come. Haku’s been in touch, wondering why I so rarely update. Because I’ve been busy, that’s why.
-A long time ago, I was a social worker. Part of my responsibilities included doing restraints. Eventually, after a bad restraint initiated by me, I realized that I could no longer handle the responsibility of tackling kids. It just wasn’t something I could do. So I quit.
Unlike these pharmacists, who are claiming a special right not to fill prescriptions that conflict with their own religious beliefs. Of course, the prescriptions are for the morning after pill, which these pharmacists believe to be tantamount to abortion. If these people believe this so deeply, the answer is clear: quit your job. Walk away from the things that you find morally objectionable, instead of asking for special legal protection to screw over people who disagree with you. Imagine the other pharmaceutical implications of this. A Muslim pharmacist who refuses prescriptions for Jews. A Christian Scientist who refuses prescriptions for anybody.
The world is not constructed in such a way as to protect people from things they do not like. If these pharmacists find the morning after pill so morally objectionable, don’t participate in a profession where you might be forced to prescribe it. Find another job within the field, or better yet, don’t and shut up. If everybody gets a pass on doing work for religious reasons, I’ll be religious before you can snap your fingers, and I won’t be working another day in my life.
-The response to Obama’s speech from the media has been enough to make me want to drive nails into my brain. He asks us to move away from race: all the news networks ask is, “Race? Race? Race?!?!?!?!?” It’s like they’re incapable of seeing the world in anything other than the dichotomies that they create to make their life easier. The rest of us suffer for it. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that’s likely to hurt Obama. The media really needs to step back from itself and take a long, hard look at how it doe…oh, who am I kidding? They’ll keep fucking things until they die. And then the next generation will.
-Off to Hilton Head on Friday, for some beach, food, and golf with the family. I’ll be taking photographs. I’ll be in the sun. I’ll be posting occasionally. Poor Haku’s going to go back to tearing out his hair, waiting for reasons to be mad at me. Such is life though.
People keep asking me, “Well, why do you support Obama? You don’t like Hillary, I get it, but why then Obama?” And the answer is above. He recognizes bullshit when he sees it, and then he calls it out. Observing that Hillary Clinton has won less popular votes, less delegates, and less states indicates exactly the sort of chutzpah his opponent is showing in suggesting that he’d be good vice-president material.
Then, Obama eviscerates the ludicrous notion coming out of the Clinton campaign that he isn’t ready to be president. He wonders how it is that he would be an excellent vice-president, even after they’ve claimed that the most important qualification for the vice-presidency is readiness, something which he lacks and is a reason to disqualify him from presidential consideration.
What does the Clinton campaign have in response? Predictably, nothing. Because in reality, all they’ve got is the smear, and the best way to counter a smear isn’t to run from it (as John Kerry and Al Gore did continually, for no good reason) but confront the thing head on, as Obama has done. He looks Clinton supporters in the eye and says, “This is what she’s saying, and this is why it doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.” And he’s right.
So why support Obama? Because there’s something about him that seems to be different, some sort of evolutionary step forward for politicians, wherein he says what he means, cops to his mistake, and has a willingness to walk across the aisle if it’ll get something done. The forces at work may ultimately slow him down, or stymie his ability to accomplish his goals - it was, after all, the ultimate lesson in The Wire (Sorry Haku) - but he seems to be something very, very different. And at this point in American politics, something different is good enough for me.
-Meanwhile, the less said about Eliot Spitzer and his prostitutes, the better, except that he represent the worst of politics: the man who makes his life seem to be one thing, when it reality it is something else altogether. You can’t campaign against prostitution if you love the prostitutes. The rules apply to you the same way they do to everybody else, jackass. It’s no different than Larry Craig being so against gay marriage - hell, gay anything - while at the same time soliciting blowjobs in airport bathrooms. And of course, there are countless political examples of politicians saying one thing while doing another.
The fear, I suppose, is that Obama will be like this, but so far, nobody can stick anything to him other than the Tony Rezko nonsense which is, at best, incredibly thin gruel. And Obama’s already come forward and described his purchase as “bone-headed” which is more than can be said for most lying politicians. Until somebody sticks something on Obama that makes him seem like Spitzer, I assume that he’s different.
And again, that’s enough of a reason for me to support him.
-Good lord. Tomorrow’s a big day, isn’t it? Or is it? I can’t tell. We do know that important primaries are happening in Texas and Ohio, and that as things stand, Obama and Clinton may split these two. They may also split Vermont and Rhode Island. Here’s crossing fingers for Obama, but I’m losing my confidence. I’d like to see Obama surge through, but rampant talk of Republicans crossing party lines to support Hillary, whom they know they can easily defeat, has me nervous, as does Clinton’s Rasputinian ability to apparently dodge bullets. Why won’t her campaign fold?
-Meanwhile, we’re down to a single episode left for The Wire. This week’s? Absolutely unbelievable: it was arguably the greatest single episode of the show, which is ridiculous high praise. Consider…
1. Michael realizing he was being set up, and shooting Snoop at point blank range. He has ice water running in his veins and intelligence to an incredible degree. Also, did Snoop’s speech to him before getting done sound familiar? It should - it was every speech everybody ever gave McNulty. “You’re not enough like us and we cannot tolerate that difference.”
2. Bubbles’ (Reginald’s) speech at Narcotics Anonymous was heart-breaking and uplifting, simultaneously. We know he’s been through hell. No less than Jay Landsman said so when deciding to put Bubbles back out on the street after Sherrod’s accidental overdose. We’ve watched him experience every bit of indignity possible, and we’ve seen him come out on the other side. The message was clear: only you can do this. Don’t rely on anybody else. Bubbles triumphed, ultimately, when he realized that there was nobody for him to reach out to and he still decided not to get high.
3. Meanwhile, Dukie’s descent in Bubbles world is concerning, if not entirely unexpected. Clearly he was comfortable with the Araber Junkman. Michael warned him, but Dukie knew that it was a life he could survive.
4. Kima crying while admitting to Daniels what McNulty had been up to? Geez. If Jimmy had let her in on things earlier, would she have stayed quiet?
5. And Landsman ripping Jimmy while praising “the Buuuuunk.” Priceless.
6. The bust was perfect. Everybody going down was perfect. And the fact that Jimmy’s arrogance has ultimately led to that takedown getting completely fucked up? Essential.
7. There is Marlo’s howl in jail, that his name is his name. That’s ultimately all he cares about. Money? Strength? Authority? Nothing drives him more than his name being recognized on the streets as the man. How does anything combat that mentality?
8. The veteran? The newspaper foul-up? The Walter Reed? “How are you doing Marino?” The veteran asks. The man hobbling by on two prosthesis? “Outstanding!”
9. Finally, the appearance of the drunk cop from season one, Augie? It’s little things like that the make the show worth watching, and worth missing. “Beats working,” he says, about his job on evidence storage.
One episode left. Does Jimmy go down? Is Rhonda Pearlman the inside source? Does Michael shoot Marlo? Six days left, and they cannot pass quickly enough.
-Obama wins again, taking Wisconsin handily. All of Clinton’s strengths evaporated, and now she really does seem to be on shaky ground. Before voting ended, I spoke with Angelic Clare, who warned that Clinton might win Wisconsin and play the role of the comeback kid. But it wasn’t to be. Surely she’s getting damaged beyond a point of return, isn’t she? Every desperate thing her and her supporters are trying isn’t sticking, and meanwhile, they look all the worse for it. Again: this can’t continue forever.
Meanwhile, McCain’s doing everything in his power to make himself unappealing. Courtesy Ambinder:
“I will fight every day in this campaign to make sure that Americans are not deceived by an eloquent and empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed philosophy that trusts in government more than the people.”
That’s McCain, campaigning against Obama. His message is clear: don’t have hope. Don’t believe in bigger and better things. There are numerous reasons to ignore McCain’s pontificating, specifically the absurdity of a man who used the federal government to “fix” elections warning against using the government, instead of people, to fix problems. But deeper, does McCain really think this is going to work?
Negativity, not about his opponent so much, but about the idea of hope, of change, of improvement? He can’t possibly believe that people are anxious for his own, apparent, nihilistic worldview. It’s absurdity to suggest any chance that it actually ends working.
Or, as others said, he sounds “old.” That’s not good.
-Meanwhile, graduate school grinds on. I hate it. There’s no point masking it anymore. I don’t fit in, my questions are generally worthless, and my willingness to even remotely fake a belief in what I’m being taught is vanishing by the day. Numbers don’t explain people, or at least, the numbers we have right now. We’re so much more complex than attempts to reduce our existence to 1s and 0s. Every theory reads like Swiss cheese - full of holes and not particularly tasty. I’m 27, and completely without any sort of direction in my life. The direction that I thought I’d like to take seems like a far off idea, beyond my ability to achieve. So now what? I don’t take pictures. I don’t write stories. I don’t do political science. I don’t do anything.
-Spoiler Warning - RIP: Omar. The show couldn’t have done a better job with the character.
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