Talking Points Memo reported new figures from the American Research Group indicating George Bush’s Job Approval rating had nosed down to a new record low: 27%! (Newsweek, lefty bastards, had him at 26%, so props to ARG for their fair and balanced stats.)
This is alarming. It wasn’t long into the second term before the sheer weight of Bush Administration corruption and imperial pretensions started taking their toll on the American psyche, so we all pretty much knew that these approval ratings were going to head south, but they are now falling at an increasing rate, like trapped in some sort of Gravity Well of Despond. The following chart uses the ARG stats for the past 13 months and fits it to a polynomial trend for the next 12:
This is VERY BAD. We do not currently have polling mathematics in place to account for the inevitable pull to negative numbers. We’ve gone from steady decline to freefall and I personally find myself constantly mouthing the words “Pull up Maverick! You’re comin’ in too hot!”
As the downward slope increases, one can’t but notice the similarities to the funnel-like design of Dante’s Inferno and should expect to see evidence of all classes of governmental sin come rocketing past our eyes as it all comes crashing down: Lust, Gluttony, Prodigality, Avarice … it’s going to get nasty. (Well … nastier).
And I don’t even want to guess what happens when it all goes into the Negative Zone. Impeachment may be merciful. In other historical scenarios it turns into Guillotines and Angry Mobs, or Heads on Pikes outside the Tower of London.
Rather than actually write anything today, I thought I should lift some wonderful stuff from the ABC News website. Who knew that a spark of delight still lingered in a TV news network?
I went to a page where the lead story was how the Pentagon spends money to do research on developing armor that renders soldiers invisible (We already had that when I was in the army; it was called AWOL) and arming sharks with implants and cameras to work as spies.
The headline is “Fringe Science Yields ‘Gay Bombs’ and Psychic Teleportation.”
But what clinched my decision to steal rather than write anything is the series of headlines listed under “Related Stories.”
1. Robo-Lobsters and Mind-Controlled Sharks
2. Panel: Case Not Yet Made for New Nuke
3. Non-Lethal Weapon Makes Targets Feel Like They’re on Fire
4. Pentagon Hires New Spokesman
It’s really hard to kill email. Before we erupt with righteous outrage over the White House’s devious attempts to hide and then destroy legally protected information (and very probably evidence of criminal activity) let’s ask the question:
Is it really gone?
There have been some attempts to pass off this White House/RNC rush to destroy the evidence with a shrug and a “How unfortunate, but these emails are systematically deleted as a matter of common practice.”
But that’s not true, because if it were, it would be true for ALL of the RNC email accounts. But the distribution of reported deletions is clearly biased to those accounts that would be more likely to be investigated.
I simply can not believe that there aren’t multiple backups of ALL of this stuff. It is such a basic IT practice.
Every large organization, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) is certainly one of these, backs up its email. This is a common practice for the simple reason that servers fail. The hardware can fail for lots of reasons, email databases can be “corrupted” (index information is destroyed so although the email is there, your map to where it is stored is lost), and viruses can infect the email database.
So organizations back up email databases, usually daily. The most recent backup is kept on another server. If the email system crashes, you copy over yesterday’s backup to a clean machine and restart.
You don’t discard these backups for a long time. Years. After a few days, backup files are moved to more permanent media, like digital tape or CDs or DVDs, and put in a safe place. Companies that do not do this for themselves hire IT firms to manage it for them.
I have no problem believing that most of the RNC office staff may think that if they print an email and run it through a shredder, then it’s gone. But anyone with ANY exposure to this stuff knows that old files never die, they just get archived, both in the sender’s environment and in the recipient’s. If the NSA weren’t currently serving as Bush & Co’s personal Band of Dementors, they could probably gather this stuff up in about 20 minutes.
The RNC email servers and all of these file backups represent the highest grade of information available for the decisions that comprise the Attorney General’s scandal, the Abu Ghraib human rights violations, and who knows what other criminal acts spewing from this administration. These materials need to be seized and handed over to an unbiased/unbought group for forensic investigation.
It’s a crime that they tried to destroy this evidence. But I don’t believe that this content is really gone, because it is really hard to kill it all. And I want to know what’s in those emails. That’s where the impeachment gold is.
Insanity and dementia are very serious issues. You should never make light of them – unless, of course, you’ve gone through the looking glass and found yourself living in a country where some crazy son of a bitch has somehow become president.
And if the people around the president have also lost their grip on reality, and if the country’s mainstream channels of information have been playing out infantile fantasies, believing everything they’re told and dutifully reciting their fairy tales, grateful for the ensuing lollipops – well, then you might want to count your marbles.
New Jersey’s state constitution prohibits any “idiot or insane person” from voting in an election – but not from running in one.
Nor can they control who votes in Congress or who gets to veto the laws Congress passes. Those awesome personages could ALL be crazy, because there are five votes on the Supreme Court – Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, and Doc — ready to declare that whatever a psychotic (Republican) president may do shall henceforth be deemed sane and considered to be the law of the land.
In New Jersey three years ago, a nursing home employee won a seat on her county Democratic committee when absentee ballots cast by residents of the nursing home provided the margin of victory. When that fact came out, she stepped down. But why?
Is that any crazier than the way George Bush was installed in the White House after losing the 2000 election?
Eighteen states prohibit voting by people who are non compos mentis, which is Latin for voting to re-elect George Bush even after you saw what he did in his first term. A like number bar voting by people who have been officially determined to lack competence, which is what Alberto Gonzales was pressuring all the fired U.S. attorneys to do in the case of registered voters deemed likely to vote Democratic..
Insanity is defined as a psychiatric disorder entailing a chronic lack of reason or foresight; and while George Bush ponders his legacy, his lack of reason and foresight has led a number of historians to declare his presidency the worst ever. His best hope now is that the judgment of history will be, “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
When John Ashcroft covered the bare breasts of the statuary framing his press conferences, that left nothing to look at but John Ashcroft, so he was soon gone.
But the effort to turn American discourse into a tent revival meeting was just beginning. The Thursday Times has a long, depressing article about how the Justice Department has reframed the entire civil rights agenda to ignore racist and sexist discrimination and hate crimes and to concentrate on blurring the lines between church and state.
One example tells the story. The DOJ has come out, guns blazing, to help proselytizers who want to send home religious advertising with schoolchildren. In Massachusetts, they cleared the way for a sect distributing candy canes as part of a biblical message in which the red stripes represent the blood of Christ.
And what do the white stripes represent?
You can almost hear the rusty little wheels turning. Oh, yes – purity! White stripes are for purity! And we all know what kind of purity the Bush Justice Department cherishes most.
They didn’t mention it, but the cellophane wrappings on the candy canes symbolize the evanescent transcendence of ape-free creation. Then there’s that grand, ubiquitous icon of human imperfection, the bar code on the package. The black bars stand for original sin. The spaces between them are the white horsemen who overslept and missed the apocalypse.
And you thought our Constitution provided for separation of superstition and corruption?
Pumping faith-based initiatives into every corner of American institutions, ultimately the DOJ will be suing to require passing a collection plate at the whorehouse. Be sure to vote for the congressman who attends faithfully and gives generously.
As a source of smoke, fumes, and carbon dioxide, the tiny engine on a lawnmower or weed-whacker is trivial. But there are so many of them, and they are so loosely regulated for emissions or efficiency, that they add up to significant pollution.
California has started to regulate small engines, and now the EPA is beginning to move in the same direction.
What has not yet been addressed is the fact that the same principle applies to brains. Small brains are much less efficient than larger ones, and their emissions range from annoying to downright toxic.
They inflict far more damage on the environment and on society than large, powerful brains doing thousands of times more useful work.
The evidence for these conclusions consists of six and a half years during which the Bush administration and the religious right have teamed up to install a horde of puny intellects in positions once occupied by people with perfectly normal brains. The result is the worst fouling on record of the American political and cultural atmosphere.
A spokesperson for Focus on the Family is rumored to operate a brain of only four neurons that requires six pulls on the starting rope to generate even a silly mistake. Yet somehow this cortical pipsqueak manages to spew out even more noxious fumes than the whole Arkansas legislature, though somewhat less than those of Texas, Kansas, or Kentucky.
Our only hope is that such underdeveloped mechanisms, like those on lawnmowers, will someday be guided around the landscaping by illegal aliens.
Nancy Pelosi told me Hillary Clinton will be the next president.
Theoretically, she told everyone that (she was being interviewed by Chris Matthews), but she was looking directly at me. At stake was her credibility and my credulity, and I’m not sure she did all that well; but I did brilliantly – I believed every word.
The question arose when Matthews recalled that in pre-election polls in 1960, even southern and midwestern Protestants tended to say they could vote for John Kennedy, a Catholic. But when they finally got into the voting booth, many democrats in Kentucky and Kansas and other (what are now called) red states couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
So can voters who now say they would willingly vote for a woman actually be counted on to do so?
Pelosi thinks being a woman today is less of a barrier than being a Catholic in Kennedy’s day. She’s a woman and a Catholic and I’m neither, so I have to believe her.
She recalled what Kennedy told a group of Protestant ministers: “What matters is not what kind of religion I believe in but what kind of America I believe in.”
In civilized countries, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher got elected and did well in the job. In the U.S. today, the blue states could manage that, but the red states?
Who knows? But a filly just won the Belmont. Anything’s possible.
It was surreal.
Friday night the whole country was watching Paris Hilton being dragged screaming out of court and back to jail after the L.A. sheriff had sent her home. Why was everyone watching that? Well, what was the alternative?
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace was fired that day, and the Defense Secretary said that he had to let him go to avoid having him appear before Congress to answer questions about the Iraq war, which is none of their goddam business or ours, either.
Meantime, the military judges at Guantanamo had ruled that the trials there are illegal, so the Pentagon (as Keith Olbermann put it) told them to go back and change their minds.
It bore some resemblance to reality but not much, a version of reality twisted beyond intelligibility. Like quantum theory, which describes fundamental weirdness. Eureka! We’ve evolved beyond Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to a quantum government where nothing makes sense – by design.
It’s surprising, really, because quantum phenomena answer to the uncertainty principle, and the Bush Leaguers are never uncertain about anything. They’re just wrong. Smug, always certain, and dependably wrong.
Still, in quantum mechanics you can discover the position of something or its momentum but not both. So as long as the Bushies kept wriggling and squirming, their real positions were hard to pin down. Now they’ve lost all momentum, and we can see just where they stand. Up to their eye-stalks in muck.
The way Erwin Schrodinger explained quantum uncertainty was by imagining that you put your cat in a box with a vial of poison gas – John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales would love this – and with a radioactive sample of something that has a 50% chance of emitting a particle that will trigger a detector and break the vial, killing the poor cat, even if it’s an American citizen.
At least your cat has half a chance, but here’s the thing. Until you open the box to see if he’s okay, he’s NEITHER dead nor alive. He’s in a state of quantum uncertainty, like a Guantanamo prisoner, so he has no legal status of any kind and, theoretically, he’ll be there forever, dead or alive or neither or both.
Who cares? It’s your cat.
The quality of mercy is neither strained nor not strained. It’s just on a temporary-insanity leave of absence until we can impeach Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales and consign them to a Schrodinger box in Guantanamo.
