Having to move your political baggage.

It looks like I'll be moving from Philly to the Big Apple sometime this Fall. Personally I'm excited to go. Politically, I'm less excited. On top of NY not being a swing state, I'm not interested in voting for either of the Senate candidates. (I used to admire Clinton before she cosponsored a flag-burning ammendment. In my view the Constitution exists to protect rights, not to take them away.) On top of that, I was really looking forward to casting my vote on the Santorum/Casey race. Oh well.

Bitter gift idea

Know a Bush-hater who has a birthday coming up?

The new Dixie Chicks album might be a good gift idea. This one's a little bitter. You might recall Dixie Chicks made a comment to the effect that they were ashamed of George Bush. You might also recall that this prompted some people to gather together to burn them in effigy. That kinda leaves a mark. Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much?

I’m not ready to make nice

I’m not ready to back down

I’m still mad as hell andI don’t have time to go round and round and round

It’s too late to make it right

I probably wouldn’t if I could

‘Cause I’m mad as hell

Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

................................

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby

With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’

It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her

Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger

And how in the world can the words that I said

Send somebody so over the edge

That they’d write me a letter

Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing

Or my life will be over

Rhetorical Smackdown or Rare Moment of Truth?

I haven't been keeping up lately and I missed this one.

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

Evidently Bush relies heavily on a rhetorical fallacy called The Strawman. (Rhetoric links in sidebar)

Who knew?

Wow, though. That's a call-out. Somebody better teach Jennifer how to mince words.

link credit to Carpetbagger.

Romantic Movie Philistine

I keep getting pressure from the girlfriend to go see Brokeback Mountain, and I keep reminding her that I have no interest in seeing it. She thinks it's fun to tease me for being homophobic, hoping to bait me into seeing it. Honestly though, the gay kissing scene isn’t going to scar me. Sitting through a romantic drama is. Andrew Sullivan continually promotes the movie as a love story, and points to its box office success relative to other romantic dramas. According to that site, Brokeback has climbed to the eighth best romantic drama of the past 20 years. As inspiring as that is, it’s made me even less interested in seeing it. Why? Look at its company. On the above link of 99 movies listed as “romantic dramas”, I’ve only seen 4 in their entirety.

Those four:
Ghost I liked it. Creative with a good plot.
Dirty Dancing This one was also good. (What happened to Swayze?)
Some Kind of Wonderful. Breakfast club with a romantic backdrop, good in that 80’s way.
Romeo and Juliet Saw it in high school and thought it was horrible. I can barely tolerate it on the stage, as a movie it just sucks.

I’ve also seen portions of some of the other movies:
The English Patient – really really bad, stopped watching early on.
An Officer and a Gentleman – one of my mom’s favorites, painfully dull to me
Far and Away – only caught the end of this and don’t have anything good or bad to say about it.
The Blue Lagoon – Flipping channels, a mostly naked Brooke Shields did catch my attention, but not for all that long.

Anyway, the vast majority of movies on that list are uninteresting to me. Maybe someday I'll have a change of heart and watch it, but until then Brokeback is just one more sappy tearjerker. I can handle missing it, and hopefully I’ll get less crap than I did when I skipped Titanic. (Just a guess, the boat sank, right?)

One year of blogging

So yesterday marked one year of blogging. It's been a lot of fun and has resulted in a lot of thought. Other than that the only new perspective is that I probably can't ever run for public office (oh well, not losing a ton of sleep over that). Freedom to say what you want is a precious thing.

Ukrainian Rhapsody

So 24 hours ago I found myself at a Queen concert with a bunch of wild Ukrainians. That's not exactly something I'd have predicited when I woke up, but sometimes life is most interesting at its most surreal.

Caveat Imperator

The military cracks down on the dress code. Now, I'm not about to second guess what it takes to command troops, because frankly it's not my area of expertise.

I will say however, that this reminds me of an executive I used to work for at a large company (boss's boss's boss's boss kind of executive). He issued a dress code that called for business-like apparel: button up shirts, dress shoes, and (most disappointing to this then 23 yr-old) skirts of modest length (below the knees only). Some months after the memo came about we were audited by the government. The company's performance on this audit was bad enough to have business ramifications. And those were severe enough to call for the head of a big boy. The executive was relieved of his position and escorted off site (they do that at big companies to make sure you don't steal anything on the way out). The general consensus was if he had focused on more important issues he might still have a job. Said consensus wasn't terribly sorry to see him go.

Again, it's not my place to opine on what the military brass decides to do. Just pointing out that a lot of soldiers are losing faith that command knows what's important.

Quick update...

No time to blog, but it turns out the Senate Intel Committee did in fact bury the investigation. They came out of a private session and said "no investigation".

Here endeth my misbegotten love affair with Olympia Snowe.

Truth hiders

Bill Frist threatens to change the structure of the Senate to avoid a NSA inquiry?

It should be obvious that the executive cannot place wiretaps on Americans without any oversight. You're welcome to disagree, but I see that as a short path corruption and Dictatorsville. So the question is...will the Senate Intelligence Committee (whose job is to provide Sentate oversight to intelligence) actually oversee anything about the NSA spying?

Not if Frist has a say in it obviously.

But there are a few people willing to defend the principles of this country. Among them:
Rockefeller (D)
Levin (D)
Feinstein (D)
Wyden (D)
Bayh (D)
Mikulski (D)
Fiengold (D)
DeWine (R)
Snowe (R)
Hagel (R)

Since this has the potential to become a Democrat witch-hunt, I won't necessarily ascribe any positive virtues to the Dems. But the 3 Republicans are taking a risk here, by upholding their oaths and doing their jobs. DeWine is one of the most vulnerable senators in congress and might be motivated by fear, but Snowe and Hagel are "voting their consciences" or "exercising thought". If you use your brain for half a second you'll realize that unaccountable, untraceable, wiretaps by the executive are inherently corruptive. This should be non-partisan. Republicans, do you trust Hillary not to listen in on Rove's phone calls in a few years? Cause if there's no oversight, there's no accountability. Anyway more props to Snowe, who has officially been my favorite Republican for a long while now.

Finally, let's give credit to those who enable unlimited government espionage:

Roberts (R) (chair, no less)
Hatch (R)
Bond (R)
Lott (R)
Chambliss (R)

You 5 get the "myopic party blinders" award. It's really special that you'd rather not do your job than risk finding out that the president did something illegal. If you suceed in screwing this up, I hope you're the first people to get tapped. (Besides Frist, who probably figures with his legal troubles that his phone is tapped anyway...)

Political capital deficit spending

Via Carpetbagger: when Bush won the 2004 election by a few percent, he boldly claimed he had political capital and he was going to spend it. Well, we all know Bush is a good spender… Unfortunately, this administration is bad at cost projection. Anyway, he didn’t budget enough capital to pull off social security reform. In the interim his support has dwindled some. But he’s still spending away.

BUSH: I've got ample capital and I'm using it to spread freedom and to protect the American people, plus we've got a strong agenda to keep this economy growing.

To strain the analogy further, Bush is now in political capital deficit spending mode. And how does one deficit spend? You borrow of course! In this case, Bush is borrowing from the power of the Republican monopoly. They're loaning him the credibility he needs to pursue his policies.

Here’s where my political economics gets a little shaky…does bad decision making “trickle down” all the way to the electorate or does the accumulated negative interest fold the Republican majority like a junk bond come elections?

So what's in your blog?

Thanks to Shrine of the Holy Whapping for directing me to this site! The site creates a "word cloud" of your blog. While I'm happy that think and good feature prominently, it's also clear that I'm obsessed with republican bastards. Or somesuch.

If only Karl Rove had a blog we could check whether he's really obsessed with Hillary Clinton

Just for shits and giggles, I've tossed in a few clouds from some other blogs.

Mission Accomplished

Happy March 1st. It's been 3 years since we won the war in Iraq and prevented Saddam from attacking us with weapons of mass destruction. A lot has changed since then, but sometimes reflecting on the past allows us to better understand our current state of existence. So give it a shot.

UPDATE: ummm. Whoops. This was supposed to wait until May (May/March what's the difference) first. Evidently I need to do better fact-checking, or get an editor, or not blog at 3AM. Thanks to K for the notification.

Communication Errors

The other day I was all excited because I got the chance to use a fancy new transfection method on my cells. The downside was that it would require I run an assay after midnight for two nights running. Oh well, I'm a bit of a night owl, and that's a small price to pay. So I grew up the cells, did my procedures, and waited. Yesterday's assay went fine, although the equipment I use to assay now has a fancy log-in system linked to the university accounting program, but I had instrtuctions and logged in with no problems. Today however, after I waited until midnight, and spent an hour giving my cells their terminal preparation, I found that there was a connection problem that prevented me from using the machine. So there I am. 2AM. At the culmination of an expensive multi-day experiment. Standing in front of a fully functional flow cytometer attached to a fully functional computer, that can't quite seem to connect to the accounting program that should be telling it I have permission to use it. Communication error. Cells dying unassayed. 2AM. Are you reading me? 'Cause I really need to communicate how I feel to the responsible parties and I don't want there to be any errors.