Sunday, April 20, 2008

More Weekend - April 20th



  • It's doom and gloom Sunday. Bob Herbert says: The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election. This is a skill that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss year for the Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose. Thanks Bob.

  • Bush gushes about how "romantic" it must be to be a soldier. But those of us who have been there know "war is hell." And now the soldiers on the "war on terror" are beginning to speak out.

  • Here's a report published by the National Defense University's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center. This Pentagon Institute calls the Iraq War "a debacle." Well gee, I guess that's a little more sophisticated than "a fucking mess." Is anyone listening?

  • Here's an article that's painful to read. One reason the U.S. dollar and U.S. economy is imploding is that vital cash meant to buttress banks' reserve requirements and to support bail-out agencies like the FDIC and other stop gap measures is being drained away by parasites in suits who read "Alpha" magazine. The Revolution is coming, my friends.

  • Holy Crap! The stogestic Eugene Register-Guard comes out for Barak Obama.

  • The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy endorses Hillary Clinton. Okay, that's probably unfair to Hillary, but could someone explain to me what this is all about? I know Rush Limbaugh reeealy wants her to win the nomination, but this is getting scary.

  • By the way, is that a Confederate flag behind Bush in the photo above? Someone help me out here....
  • And just for fun: When Bananas Ruled the World.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Weekend Update - April 19th


Tomorrow, April 20th, is my son Jonathan's ninth birthday. The day he was born, our friend Barbara mentioned something about "four-twenty" which went completely over my head at the time, but since then I've been educated about this curious date. It seems 4/20 is some kind of police code for a drug bust. Whoo-hoo. Also, April 20th is Adolf Hitler's birthday. Also, the day Jonathan was born a couple of asshole kids were killing their peers at Columbine High School. Fourtwenty. My son's birthday.

It's a good thing my son is a tremendous kid. He's one of those kids who surprise you every day. He's always a bit smarter than I thought. Sometimes that scares me, but I suppose that's a natural thing for a father to feel.

When he was two years old, I wrote the following essay about him that I'd like to share with you once again. It's called "Morning Son."



He comes padding into the bedroom, his little, perfect feet making a slight slapping sound on the hardwood floor.

It's dark still. The clock beside the bed says 5:53 a.m., and no one is up but him. He gets up early a lot like this, just to come into our room and climb into bed with us. Sometimes, I think I wake up early just so I can wait for him. I love the sound of his feet.

He comes around to my side of the bed and puts one foot on the bottom of the bedside table and hoists himself into the bed next to me. He makes no sound after that. He just lies quietly beside me to see if he got away with this intrusion. I take his little hand in mine and hold on to it for a second. He snuggles up close to me to get warm.

My son Jonathan is 2-1/2 years old. On September 11th, he sat in my lap as I watched the horrible events of the day unfold on TV. As I watched the towers collapse and realized the loss of innocent life, I held him close to me like some sort of human security blanket, and every now and then he would look at my face as though he realized something was terribly wrong.

I suddenly had a tear leaking out of one of my eyes and he touched my face with one of his hands and quietly said, "Dadda?" I looked down at him and smiled and told him everything would be OK.

My only son came into my life late. I was 54 years old when he was born, and I figure God had some sort of reason for making me wait this long. I had practically given up on the idea of having children. I rationalized it all by declaring that I didn't want to bring a child into a world like this - full of hate, full of sorrow, full of pain. But God - and my wife, Linda - gave me this boy. This boy so perfect. This boy so full of life. This intense little boy who lies beside me at 5:53 a.m., in the morning, quietly. I'm lying on my back and he rolls over on top of me, his little feet just reaching my hips, and he puts his arms around my neck. Several days before, he and I had gone down to the Amtrak station to watch the trains come in.

JonJon loves trains. He always has me carry him around the trains because the noise and their size scare him a little, so I carried him for about a half-hour and he got to be so heavy. But he's lying on me now, and he's as light as a feather.

He puts his head down on my shoulder and we just breathe together for a while. Too early to make any sound. I put my arms around him, worried that the slightest breeze will blow him away from me. I think of all the awful things happening in the world, the people dying, the children crying.

I hug him gently.

He turns his head slightly and softly kisses my cheek. "Dadda," he sighs, not a question, just a statement. Everything will be OK.

My son. My son.

Happy Birthday Jonathan. Happy 4/20 to everyone. Party on. Regular Update tomorrow.

JP

Friday, April 18, 2008

A Key Pennsylvania Endorsement

I know PA very well.

I did my Senior year of High School there in the center of the State, the area that James Carville dismisses as "Alabama". Beautiful and interesting, cold in the winter, humid in the summer. Not my idea of fun, but where my dad grew up, relatives lived, where in fact my family had lived long enough ago that two of them served in the Continental Army under Washington. And lived to tell the story. Pennsylvania in some respects has not changed much in the last two hundred and twenty years, in other ways it has changed markedly. Are poor people bitter there? I am guessing they probably are. Frustrated, concerned, upset over rising prices of food, gasoline and undoubtedly ammunition.

Not so different from a lot of rural parts of Oregon. A lot of Oregonians learned to hunt because it was a good way to keep from going hungry. It may be again some day. The same with Pennsylvania, where I believe the concept of "out of season" is taken fairly loosely, particularly if the meat source is on your property. Or close enough to make it easy to carry them. I saw a gas pump offering premium for $4.07 a gallon the other day. Gosh, I wonder why someone earning minimum wage would be bitter in this land of endless promise?

Arthur

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Weekend Update - April 12th



  • Okay, it's time for a check of what's new in America. Here's something from Mark Morford that I guarantee will make your skin crawl. "The Great Pubic Hair Conundrum."

  • Is it because John Yoo, the former Justice Department's hired hand, is such an easy target? Is it because of the cheeky, in-your-face way in which Yoo argues that the president has the authority to have your eyes poked out and your sons' testicles crushed, because we are "at war" and he is commander in chief? Nah.

  • p.m. carpenter discusses "Hillary bashing."

  • Gov. Bill Richarson endorsed Barak Obama and not Hillary Clinton. Here's why.

  • The Bush Administration: Taking the Justice out of the Justice Department. Click here.

  • Gotta love this: Stolen and sensitive US military equipment, including fighter jet parts wanted by Iran and nuclear biological protective gear, has been available to the highest bidder on popular internet sales sites, according to congressional investigators. Once again, someone is asleep at the switch.

  • A Chicago priest hopes that Obama wins, and hopes he doesn't get shot. America, 2008.

  • Condi Rice for Vice-President? What a wonderful idea. I'm all for it.
  • Here's something we should all be aware of. We taxpayers are paying for the big military brass to go golfing all over the world. Don't forget, tax day is April 15th!

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Any Rabbits Left In This Hat?


(Just got this from Arthur before shutting down for the the night, and weekend. By the way, just starting my vacation this week, attempting to learn how to use my new birthday iPod. This gadget will hold 8G of songs, movies, podcasts, and dirty pictures downloaded from the Internet. Thanks Uncle Bob. If you need me, I'll be in my room. Love to all, JP.)

Something about Mark Penn taking a meeting and a large retainer to lobby on behalf of the right-wing Columbian government just looked sort of bad. Being a decisive leader, Hillary Clinton decided what many of her staff have been saying for about a year, the guy was not an asset to her campaign. It will be interesting to see how her campaign changes in the weeks ahead. That's about all the time she has left to pull about fifteen pink fuzzy rabbits out of a hat in order to save her flagging campaign. I doubt that there are enough days in the week, and enough weeks in the month, and enough months in the year, for her to pull it off.
And since I am strongly anti-dynastic, I think that is all to the good. I do feel like trying something entirely different. Something good and different, as contrasted to the John McCain different in a bad way change. (See note below)

(Click Here)

At the very least, perhaps this will permit Clinton to end her campaign on a high note, rather than an extended wallow in the mud.

Arthur
(Editor's note: The Bad Hat staff is divided over what Arthur is saying here. But we love this guy so much, we can only offer up one explanation for his sentence structure in this instance. His 7th grade French teacher. There's more to this story than he's willing to tell, we wager.) More on Mark Penn.

Weekend Update - April 5th



  • Okay, so Barack Obama is THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT AND HE COULD REALLY CHANGE THE WORLD and stuff, but what is the very best thing about him? Mark Morford tells us.

  • We do admire Hillary Clinton, really. If she manages to become the Democratic nominee for President, we'll vote for her. But here's The Top Ten Myths Keeping Hillary In the Race.

  • And on a lighter note, we regress to the era of Frank Sinatra. I think this might be funny, but I'm not sure. You be the judge.

  • The Iraq War is costing each American household about $100 a month. That seriously cuts into my liquor bill. This has got to stop.

  • I was going to go lightly on Hillary this Update, but she was in Eugene yesterday giving a speech in my old high school gym. And alas, she screwed up again....

  • Well, at least Democrats aren't the only ones telling whoppers. Poor old John McCain can't keep his poop straight either.

  • Dammit George, we warned you from the beginning. Yer gonna be the Worse President Ever. Click here to find out why.

  • Just when you thought it was safe... McCain says he'll seek education help from Jeb Bush. No, really. I'm serious.

  • The Internet. "Beware the New New Thing."
  • This week's picture is a drawing of Spring by my son Jonathan when he was 4 years old. He's going to be a dentist when he grows up. He says.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

This Is Beneath Us. Do Not Watch It.

Or else, be prepared for a somewhat guilty pleasure at best. I cannot emphasize enough the role that I think YouTube is going to play in the 2008 Presidential election. This video mashup appears to have been made by a slightly deranged miscreant who dislikes Hillary Clinton. It is weird, occasionally surprising, interesting in a sort of sick way and probably will not get a lot of views compared to the thousands of other campaign clips out there on the Internets this year. I think it gives a fair idea what one or two determined amateurs with an inexpensive video editing tool can do over one crazed weekend.

There is a venerable history of what we could call "viral campaigning". By definition, most citizen campaign forays are negative ones. They are easy to do and generally a lot punchier. There will also be faux citizen video clips that surface during this campaign, almost all from the GOP side, Those will have fake errors and camera shake, but they will at heart be so stupid and cheesy that I predict they will have little or no impact.

The long history of viral campaigning? Oddly enough, in Tibet there turns out to be a venerable tradition of street songs. Catchy, punning, sarcastic street songs that some miscreant starts to sing and that just catch on and spread around the capital city like wildfire. A friend of mine's father was the target of one such street ditty. He said some parts of it were unprintably obscene and suggestive, other parts were merely insulting and insinuating. And his father survived and went to on to eventually be portrayed as the evil protagonist in a 24 hour Chinese mini-series that was then translated and edited into a 20 hour Tibetan language version. And that version went on to become one of the most watched films in Tibetan all over the world, where the fire-breathing anti-Chinese speeches my friend's father is show delivering have turned him into an unlikely folk hero, since in life he was a fairly low-key guy. So clearly, a street ditty does not always destroy one's career.

But a viral video? I think images have far more power to move opinions. Watch this one and see what you think. I do not dislike Clinton, she just weirds me out because she is capable of sounding just like my 7th grade French teacher, the one that scared the hell out of me. And then she'd be all happy, then she'd go back to scaring me and speaking at a high volume right in my face. Mademoiselle Grey. I still shiver when I think about her.


Arthur