"On your knees, Senator!"

Interesting bit on the base-closings recommendations:

Although much of the Defense Department's plan for closing or shrinking hundreds of bases nationwide emerged from the review intact, the commission overturned several of the plan's largest pieces, preventing the Pentagon from moving dozens of submarines, hundreds of aircraft and thousands of military personnel to new locations around the country in coming years.

Even so, unless the plan is voted down by Congress, which does not appear likely, the Pentagon will be able to proceed with its most-far-reaching retrenchment in decades and consolidate many previously far-flung military units at a smaller number of bases. But the commission's revisions appear likely to shrink the nearly $50 billion in savings the Defense Department hoped to achieve from the plan and spare thousands of jobs in communities with bases that the Pentagon hoped to close.

In the most dramatic example on Friday, the nine-member commission voted 8-1 to overturn the proposed closure of Ellsworth, the second-largest employer in South Dakota, after concerted lobbying by the state's congressional delegation and governor, who camped out in the hotel ballroom a mile from the Pentagon, where the commission was conducting its deliberations.

I wonder how long it'll be until a congressman delivers the line that prompted O-Dog from Menace 2 Society to kill that crackhead...

Base: How low can we go?

Notice that most of the barking from congressmen that are having military bases close in their states has nothing to do with whether the base is necessary? Instead, they speak about it as if their purpose is to prop up the local economy.

I recall passing by the TV earlier while CNN was on, and they mentioned John Thune griping about a base in South Dakota being closed. What caught my attention tho' was that he had made keeping the base open a campaign issue when he was running against Daschle, pretty much saying "elect me and it will remain open".


3 thoughts from this:

1) The way they treat those bases you'd think it were just another piece of pork to have a military base. When political pandering comes into play on this issue during a freakin war, it really makes you question how seriously anyone takes this...

2) in effect, the location of those bases functions as a subsidy. As such, I suspect it'd be easy to tell how poorly a state's economy is doing by taking note of who barks the loudest when you want to close some -- you know something is wrong when people want a chunk of their land to be controlled by DC.

3) this is what politics amounts to: no need, just want. There was a report awhile back about the Pentagon wanting to stop production on some fighter jet that happens to be made in Georgia; the local media covered it w/ more of a serious tone than they do when someone gets murdered, and every GA congressman they could reach for comment spewed about how it was "devestating". By assuming that everything we have and/or could get is a necessity, such talk becomes meaningless, akin to calling a paper cut "life threatening".

The Mask slips...

I'm going to give you guys a treat here: a rather informative encounter I had mere moments ago on another site. The following is a quoted reply from a vehemently pro-Bush so-called "conservative", in regards to a remark I made opposing his arguement that it would be justified to intervene in Venezuela over resources. Note the parts in bold:

look, we've been down this road before, many times. I say that we exist as the unitary superpower, and as such should devote our national strategy to maintaining that status and do what it is we have to do. Our economy runs on oil, and there's a long precedent of the US intervening in Latin America to advance our intrests.

You counter that argument by saying that everyone should just keep to themselves and leave everything well enough alone.

I reply that we are a superpower, and a superpower's first goal is to ensure that it remains a superpower and blah blah blah we have to have an interventionist foreign policy.

Your retort is that you just don't understand how everyone could be so stupid, and unable to see the elegant logic of your fantasy dream-world of bullshit free-market jerk-offery in all aspects of public life, totally ignoring that in the free-est market in the world, the US, the completely free-market economy is a total myth.

The Libertoid theory of gov't doesn't freaking work, it is divorced from reality, I argue for three or four posts until one or both of us just give up and move on with our lives.

you're welcome for saving the thousands of keystrokes and possible CTS that just may have resulted.

This is a "conservative" Republican, calling the belief that we are not entitled to other people's property "bullshit" & "jerk-offery".

And people wonder why I feel the Republican Party needs to collapse first...

Grow your own?

Science is threatening to make the whole moral hoo-hah over embryonic stem-cells irrelevant:

Scientists have turned an ordinary skin cell into what appears to be an embryonic stem cell. The process may eventually eliminate the controversial step of destroying human embryos for stem cell research.

The new technique involves fusing a skin cell with an existing, laboratory-grown embryonic stem cell. The fused, or hybrid, cell is "reprogrammed" to its embryonic state, Harvard University scientists report in the journal Science.

Cool...

Recognizing signals...

A rooster crowing at sunrise is to "morning on a farm" as Pat Robertson saying something stupid is to "the sky has not caved in":

Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club” that it was the United States’ duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”....“You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

Yup, just another day...

Coincidence?

Me, a month ago:

....the problem is the concept of politics itself is wrong. Allow me to explain...


When you consider the extent to which american government has shot past any discernable restraint, any lover of individual liberty who is honest enough with themselves to take inventory of what they seek to revoke will notice the list is quite long: There is virtually nothing that the reigning authority of this country does that is justified. Small wonder that people who confront us claim that we're anarchists, as in the current environment we might as well be. So, when election day rolls around we have a contradiction on our hands, in that we are attempting to round up for political purposes a truly apolitical constituency. (emphasis added)

Karl Hess, former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, in 1969:

There is no operating movement in the world today that is based upon a libertarian philosophy. If there were, it would be in the anomalous position of using political power to abolish political power. (emphasis mine)

Me in the middle of a rant against the Kelo ruling and its implications:

Notice that these days big businesses don't operate like you'd think they would? They don't simply buy land and build, or buy property directly, and then open up shop, oh no. State and city governments have to give them all types of incentives and loopholes to lure them in, they practically have to PAY these people to expand their business there now! And these aren't just fly-by-night operations we're talking about, some are rather large and wealthy corporations with plenty of money to shop around like the rest of us. What changed?

GOVERNMENT did, that's what. (emphasis added)

Hess, again in 1969:

Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. Big business supports a form of state capitalism in which government and big business act as partners....

The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. (emphasis added)

I know what you're thinking: "yeah, so you agree with some of his conclusions, so?"

This is so: I had no idea who this guy was until now. Never heard of him, never read any of his work, dude just now came to my attention as having ever existed.

I guess this is a case of what you might call "trickle-down philosophy"...

Our royal pain

Some bits on Frank Porretto's Sunday Rumination got me to thinking:

Let's be candid about our electoral motivations. We don't go to the polls every four years to elect a president. Not any more, at least. We go to the polls to anoint a king.

"How can he say that?" I hear you cry. Simple: it's true. It's not that the president has the unlimited authority of an absolute monarch. Nor, if we were questioned on the matter, would most Americans advocate giving it to him. We elevate him to his office in the hopes that he'll prove to be a Solomon or an Aragorn: a paragon of justice, courage, and virtue, worthy of more than obedience out of fear...worthy of something approaching veneration.

We haven't had many presidents of that stature. In today's world, such men are quite rare; the assumptions and attitudes of our era are hostile to the conditions required to produce them. But were a modern Marcus Aurelius to present himself to us, many would be the voices raised to urge him to close down the rest of Washington and rule by personal decree....

So this is where we have come to. Our expectations of government are so vast we want more than the humble soul merely doing a temporary public service, to soon return to his plow as if nothing had changed. We expect a king, despite our political system being originally designed to assume that no one is worthy of being one. We ignore policy in favor of character, despite having no way whatsoever to tell whether or not the character we are actively shown is who the person really is, as well as very little possibility of encountering that character even if it were there...

Combine that with not realizing that there is a difference between the interests of "the country" & the individual interests of the ones within it, and we're asking for what can never be done. Inevitably such a ruler would have to do something that would steamroll another person, and frequently.

I don't know about anyone else, but this gradually moves me to feel that we're asking the wrong question. Perhaps we should shift our focus to explaining to the rest of the public why expecting so much in the first place is ridiculous. It's no wonder we don't accomplish much electorally: they want someone who convinces them they can be trusted with endless power, we come right out the gate saying we don't even want power. Here in the US, modern democratic (the sentiment, not the party) impulses are the legs overbearing authority stands on, time to get chopping.