Category: Politics

Where is the demand for No Recount?

As of this morning, despite their massive dollar advantage, voter supression drives, robo-calling schemes, and propaganda network, the Republicans have lost control of the House in a big way. As for the Senate, it appears that the Demcrats will also pick up the six seats they need for control, with the Allen-Webb race in Virginia the deciding factor on whether Dick Cheney gets to be a tiebreaker for two more years. At present, Webb is ahead in that race, but only by 8000 or so votes – close enough that there will likely be a recount demanded.

So, to the right-wingers out there who in the last couple of presidential elections have shouted down recount efforts with cries of “Just declare Bush the winner and let’s move on!”: I’m waiting for you to denounce the coming Virginia recounts and just declare Webb the winner.

Because, of course, you’re all nothing if not consistent in your Fair-and-Balanced(tm)-ness.

Slow Week

Not much of note so far this week. No new replies from agents save for one who essentially said he was too swamped to take on new clients. Spent Wednesday at an all-day meeting in lovely downtown Trenton, NJ. Bleh. On Tuesday, Bush ran the constitution through a shredder, burnt the resulting slivers, then, with a sigh of pleasure, proceeded to relieve himself on the ashes. Arrest without charges and indefinite detention without trial is now the law of the land here in the good old Land of the Free.

So, yeah. Slow week.

Word to 2008 presidential candidates: I’m voting for whoever’s platform is based on taking the following actions on day 1 in office:

Step 1: Every Politburo member who voted for the repeal of Habeus Corpus is declared an enemy combatant and, under the very law they put into place, swept up and interred without trial at a prison camp in some desert hellhole. Likewise every pundit who went on the air screaming the need to relinquish our safety for our own safety.

Step 2: Repeal the act, but not retroactively. Need to put the fear of “freedomboarding” into those folks for a bit first.

It occurs to me that under the new law I’m quite possibly putting myself at risk of “disappearance” by writing this. Good thing nobody reads it.

October Surprise Office Pool

If that sort of thing wasn’t frowned upon where I work, I would start a pool to see who can predict this election year’s October Surprise most accurately. Pay a buck, pick an event from a list of choices, and pick a day. At the end of the month, the pot is split between everyone who made a correct prediction.

Make no mistake, the October Surprise is coming. Our Republican masters are in serious danger of losing their monopoly – especially given the impact of recent scandals. The question on my mind is: what form will it take? Let’s look at a couple of possible scenarios:

Terror Alerts, Foiling of Plots, Non-Osama Kill/Capture

A boost in the terror alert level was a useful distraction from other news for a while, but it seems to have lost its potency and today would likely not produce even a blip on the ol’ approval-rating-ometer. We’ve killed or captured “Al Qaeda’s number 2 man” so many times that hardly anyone pays attention to that sort of news anymore.

The recent tactic of announcing a foiled terror plot has met with some success. A couple of guys sitting around in a bar in Florida saying, “Dude, wouldn’t it be cool if we could, like, blow somethin’ up?” becomes “Major Terrorist Ring Disrupted!” An alleged plan to mix multiple liquids into a bomb on board a plane becomes big news, never mind the fact that to turn said liquids into explosive material would require a fair amount of laboratory equipment to also be carried on and set up while the aircraft was in flight, or that British authorities more or less came out and said the US pressured them to make the arrests on a time frame that had to do with politics rather than with catching all the perpetrators and building a solid case against them. For the most part we’ve become jaded to even this method of propaganda, though, so even if they do uncover some new conspiracy, I doubt it will have much effect.

Saddam Sentencing

Saddam will be sentenced before Election Day, and the pundits will be out in force shouting cries of victory while ignoring the fact that by and large Iraqis were better off under the reign of a brutal dictator than they are under US occupation.

Might help the right-wing re-election effort, but in my opinion this in itself won’t be enough.

Osama bin Captured

The administration has a vested interest in keeping Osama alive and free. With him gone as a figurehead, a large portion of the electorate will likely lose interest in the War on Terror™ before there’s a chance to invade any more middle-eastern countries. Of course, if things look desperate enough, they may be forced to play the OBL card. If they can find him, assuming they don’t already know where he is.

And Iran, Iran So Far Awaaay

The same folks who knew where the WMD were in Iraq are convinced Iran is on the verge of blowing up half the planet. Never mind those nuclear experts who say the country is at best years away from building a viable bomb.

A bunch of surgical air strikes and some dramatic footage of exploding buildings will go a long way toward convincing many among the public that the Bushies are still actively Blowing Stuff Up For Freedom. Note that I’m not saying that dropping some ordnance on Irani nuclear sites is a bad idea in itself; I certainly don’t want that lunatic leader of theirs getting his hands on nukes. I suspect, though, that any action we might take at this stage will be motivated by politics rather than accurate intelligence, and will be ineffective and come back to bite us in the long run.

Guess what? As I write this, the Eisenhower Carrier Group is on its way to the Persian Gulf – within easy striking range of Iran.

America: It Was Nice While It Lasted

The scheduled post on writing query letters has been pre-empted by this political diatribe borne of frustration and depression:

With Congress’ confirmation today that the president has the right to torture prisoners and detain them indefinitely without filing charges against them, the United States of America has officially placed itself squarely into the same moral category as al qaeda. Kidnapping is now our national foreign policy.

We’ll likely capture or kill Osama in the next few weeks; the Republicans need an “October Surprise” to maintain their stranglehold on power in Washington – but it no longer matters. He’s already won.

There’s a statue in New York we won’t be needing anymore. Perhaps we should sell it for scrap to help pay down our war debt. Halliburton will probably be happy to accept the demolition contract.

From the Dept. of Things I Never Thought I’d Say

As uncomfortable as it is to find myself in something resembling agreement with the fundamentalist-nutjob Jack Thompson/Family Research Council types, I’ll have to give credit where it’s due: even though the “Left Behind” game I mentioned in my last entry is Christian-themed, these groups have strongly and apparently almost universally denounced it. It seems they’ve decided that violence is violence, even when it’s done in the name of that big invisible overlord of theirs. Perhaps that sort of violence is even worse than the run-of-the-mill non-denominational kind, at least when it’s confined to video games.

Just in case anyone besides the search engine bots has noticed that I haven’t posted anything lately, I’ll offer my explanation: I’m in the process of training my replacement at one client site in preparation for my move to a new one on monday. That, plus children’s birthdays, sick family members, and the desire to get outside once in a while have been absorbing my time. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks, things will settle down into a pseudo-routine.

Praise th’ Lawd and Pass th’ Ammunition!

Coming in time for this year’s holiday season is Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a new strategy wargame with a twist: you’re a Christian leading your forces against the infidels, and in the loving, charitable spirit of Christianity, your goal is to kill anyone who won’t convert. Shouting “Praise the lord!” as you smite your enemies, you march down the streets of New York City amid the rotting corpses of the impure.

Violence in video games is of course, nothing new, and games with a religious slant have been around too, though they’re seldom of the high-profile, mainstream variety. I’m not one who’s inclined to believe that video-game violence is responsible for all the ills of our society, but I am one of those who gets a bit disgusted when I see parents buying a copy of Grand Theft Auto for their 8 year old. But I’m wondering how this game will play among the “Focus on Family” type wannabe Taliban-for-Jesus groups who regularly condemn any sort of imaginary violence that might somehow, someday, have an effect on straight white male Christians. Will they defend this game? Will they condemn it for its violence in spite of its religious background? Or will they, as they’ve done so far, continue to remain silent on the subject, realizing that to open their mouths in favor of either solution might cause the public to smell the hypocracy on their breath?

Now, in defense of LB:EF, it does also allow you to play as the bad guys. In the guise of Satan, I suppose, or one of his earthly minions, you’re able to raise demons to fight against the armies of light. Demons which one would presume to be some combination of gay, jewish, liberal, or muslim – you know, to make them really seem frightening and evil to the target audience.

What ratchets up the fright level about this game for me is that it is apparently being backed and promoted by one of those mega-churches. You know, the ones where the preacher flies into town in his private jet, climbs out of his limo, enters a packed arena-sized building, and delivers a sermon to thousands (or millions, live via satellite, or send $29.95 plus shipping for a copy of the DVD!) about how Christianity is under attack in America?

The marketing plan? Send free evaluation copies to churches all over the country. Yes, to Christians nationwide, the message will be clear: Thou Shalt Not Kill, Unless the Victim’s Dogma Differs from Yours.

I described the game to a co-worker who’s big on making bible-based moral stands while he’s not busy surfing the net for porn, a guy who can’t be made to see the little ™ sign alongside the phrases “War on Christianity” or “War on Christmas”.

His reaction to the game? “Good! It’s a counter to all those other games!”

“Other games?” I asked. “You mean ones where the goal is to kill Christians?”

“Yeah, those!”

“Like which one?”

[Sound of crickets chirping]

“Well, I don’t know, but they’re coming!”

At first I wrote his response off as run-of-the-mill paranoia, but the more I though about it, the more I realized he was right. Now that the far-right lunatic fringe of the bible-thumper set has opened the floodgate of kill-the-infidel gaming, what’s to stop the violence-endorsing sects of other faiths from creating wargames of their own?

Many more details on LB:EF are available in Part 1 and Part 2 of an article by Jonathan Hutson.

And no, there’s no word yet on whether the Holy Handgrenade will be available in-game.

I Spy With My Little Database

I don’t have a fundamental problem with records of our phone calls – not the actual conversations, mind you, just the records of who called what number and when – being put into a searchable database so that in times of genuine danger (not the manufactured color-coded danger they’re trying to sell us most of the time), some court-appointed investigator can run some pre-approved query along the lines of:

select CALLER_NAME, CALLER_DATE
from PHONE_CALLS
where RECIPIENT='OSAMA BIN LADEN'

I don’t find this to be a terrible violation of my privacy and it does, in fact, have some chance of helping to track down some of the folks who may be genuinely trying to cause us harm. I have less objection to this, in fact, than to the various for-profit organizations that keep the huge databases from which this information is culled.

No, my problem is that this data has been collected and analyzed in secret, with absolutely no oversight, by an administration that shuns the rule of law, subverts constitutional rights, illegally backs out of treaties, and in general likes to think it has the power to do as it pleases, and seems to have a congress that agrees. There is absolutely no mechanism in place to prevent this data from being used criminally for political purposes.

You want free access to all that phone call data? Fine, but in exchange I’m gonna have to ask to be able to go The Light of Other Days (a favorite book of mine) on your buh-tocks. You can have my info, on one condition: make all that publicly accessible via Freedom of Information Act requests. That way, people like me can write queries like:

select count(*)
from PHONE_CALLS
where CALLER_ADDRESS='White House'
and CALL_RECIPIENT='Jack Abramoff'

Or, better yet:

select count(*)
from PHONE_CALLS
where CALLER_NAME='Rove, Karl'
and CALL_RECIPIENT='1-900-TEENSINBONDAGE'

For that privilege, I might just be willing to let ’em log my phone calls. The telemarketers get more use out of my phone than I do, anyway. I think they’re the real terrorist threat we should be sending troops after.