R.I.P. Dad (May 25: A Joyful Remembrance)
You’re furious. I never taught you to sing. You carry rocks in your head and pitch them. Without warning. Happy drunk. You’re furious. I beg you for sin. I beg your skin. You buy a whore. Don’t give her water. You’re furious.
There was a moment, at some point, when I made use of the platform and audience I had with my previous site to ask an important cultural question.
Since I either no longer recall the response, or conceivably failed to follow-up on what response there was, I must ask again.
Does anyone out there have Especially for You, Dearling Darling, and/or Jammers by the late, lamented Portland band The Feelings?
Because I don’t, and that’s an entirely unacceptable, untenable, and unfortunate situation.
This week, much is being made (rightfully so) about some oddities in the filings of two candidates under the City’s new publicly-financed campaigns law.
First reported in Theo yesterday, a followup today includes a rather odd accusation from one of the candidates.
In a faxed statement Thursday, Boyles accused the newspaper of religious discrimination against Christian conservatives and Slavic Christians in particular. She did not return two phone calls but said in her statement that she and Golovan “followed the regulations to the best of my knowledge.”
Take a look at the original Theo article to which Boyles refers. I’m hard pressed to find evidence of religious discrimination, unless Boyles believes the term to include mere mention of the religious or conservative characteristics of herself or her supporters.
Whatever her rationale for making such a charge, in terms of how such a bullshit accusation plays out here it reeks of desperation.
Were we dealing with a political professional — be they candidate, elected official, or campaign manager — we’d all be chattering about how it looks for all the world like a smokescreen meant to divert attention.
Either that, or Boyles is of the overly-sensitive type who leaps to the presumption that any mention of someone’s religious conservatism must inherently be meant as an attack.
I, for one, don’t find either possibility particularly comforting.
Much of the support being thrown to Dave Lister’s campaign for City Council relies upon the assertion that he has the “common sense” that Portland needs in its elected officials. That notion just came up again today, elsewhere, and so I need to revisit something.
In my “anti-endorsements” post (to use the Willy Week’s term for it), I criticized a Dave Lister piece for being both derogatory and false.
That said, there’s a curious degree of venom in this piece, where he generalizes an entire room full of people into some sort of degenerate “poor by choice” crowd.
At the end, he huffs that “Portland’s job creators [who] have participated in the political process by funding the campaigns of the candidates” will not, with the advent of publicly-financed campaigns, have a voice anymore because the only other option for them would be the absolutely degenerate horror of having “to go downtown and mix it up with the poor by choice.”
(And I’m setting aside the fact that this word of warning doesn’t actually make sense, since Portland’s publicly-financed campaign program is not mandatory. Lister’s vaunted job creators, who he seems to find somehow more intrinsically worthy than the “poor by choice,” continue to be able to dump as much money as they want behind any candidate not participating in the program. Whether this indicates that Lister doesn’t understand the program, hasn’t read it, or is lying about it remains unclear here.)
Before I go any further with this, it’s probably fair and sensible to pull the relevant section of Lister’s piece verbatim here.
In the past, Portland’s job creators have participated in the political process by funding the campaigns of the candidates who share their views on what’s needed for the city’s economic health. When the council adopts “clean money” campaign financing that participation will end. The only way they will be heard then is to go downtown and mix it up with the poor by choice.
The question is, will they? Somehow I don’t think so. I think they will vote with their feet and walk away.
Left unstudied by my previous mention of this are some other clear implications of Lister’s argument. Leaving aside, for the moment, both its derogatory nature and its falsehoods, it’s worth noting the logical conclusion of what he argues.
Lister’s complaint is that if local business-owners were unable to toss their hard-earned cash at candidates for local office, their only route to participation would be to directly engage elected officials at Council sessions and the like — something Lister argues they’d be loathe to do.
In other words, it’s only through cash, in Lister’s argument, that business-owners exert their influence over elected officials.
Notice what that means. To follow the argument to its clear implication, it means that the money businesses throw at candidates in fact does have an impact upon the governance of the City. Oddly, as you might recall, the argument Lister and other opponents of publicly-financed campaigns make is that the current system in fact is not tainted in this way.
Presumably, you can see the contradiction.
Now, I don’t posit that Lister actually believes the current system is corrupt in such a way. But the notion that it is corrupt in such a way is contained within what he wrote.
To tally this up, then: Lister’s piece is derogatory towards Portland residents, false in its insinuation that business-owners somehow are barred form contributing to candidates not participating in publicly-financed campaigns, and when extended to its clear implications admits that money is how business-owners influence candidates and elected officials.
I don’t think this qualifies as “sense” in any legitimate way. But, lamentably, this sort of unthinking babble certainly is all too common.
It seems the world of political PR flackery has found me here. Over the electronic transom of the email address for this domain just now came an immigration-related press release from the gubernatorial of Ron Saxton.
Although I will admit that it amuses me to know that at least one communications director has had to place this particular domain in their distribution list.
Update: So uninterested in this email was I, that I didn’t bother to read it until just now. Once read, it’s clearly a hoax — especially when you notice it says it’s embargoed until (yes) April 1, 2006. I imagine a number of bloggers are going to get this. No idea of the actual source, but it’s clearly not the Saxton campaign. If it were, they’d be employing a very bizarre campaign strategy to say the least.
President Bush has given Commander-in-Chief Bush unlimited wartime authority. But the “war on terror” is more a metaphor than a fact. Terrorism is a method, not an ideology; terrorists are criminals, not warriors. No peace treaty can possibly bring an end to the fight against far-flung terrorists. The emergency powers of the president during this “war” can now extend indefinitely, at the pleasure of the president and at great threat to the liberties and rights guaranteed us under the Constitution.
- Gary Hart, History News Network
If Congress doesn’t have the power to define the contours of the President’s Article II powers through legislation, then I have no idea why people are scrambling to draft legislation to authorize what they think the President is doing. If the President’s legal theory, which is shared by some of our witnesses today, is correct, then FISA is a dead letter, all of the supposed protections for civil liberties contained in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act that we just passed are a cruel hoax, and any future legislation we might pass regarding surveillance or national security is a waste of time and a charade. Under this theory, we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government, we have a monarchy.
- Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), at the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing On the Call to Censure the President
Once upon a time, when word of a certain movie was not yet everywhere, and to an extent it wasn’t even clear that it wasn’t just all a hoax, it was amusing.
Now, it’s everywhere, and being repeated endlessly and breathlessly, from all quarters and directions.
The movie isn’t even out yet and already it’s become like one of those annoying SNL sketches that everyone in the world constantly quotes and repeats for three weeks after it airs, each one thinking they are being original and clever for doing so.
From new limits on sex education classes to penalties for living in sin, the proposed laws would remake Missouri’s public life in myriad ways. They would sanction prayer in public schools, subsidize religious schools and allow the Bible to be taught in school.
One bill purports to help women make “the transition from work to home.” Another wants the legislature to recognize “a Christian God” as the deity for most Missourians.
If the state starts paying for contraceptives we will have more babies than if we just teach people to not expect free prostitution from poor people.
- Representative Cynthia Davis, via Feministing
I harbor no illusions about the impact of this study, since it simply will be argued that God imposed these lackluster results precisely in order to test people’s faith.
A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact, researchers said on Thursday.
…
Among the first group — who were prayed for but only told they might be — 52 percent had post-surgical complications compared to 51 percent in the second group, the ones who were not prayed for though told they might be. In the third group, who knew they were being prayed for, 59 percent had complications.
So, really, it’s not so much that the study “failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact” but that its numbers indicate that if you’re being prayed for, you’re going to do worse than people who aren’t.
Alternatively, perhaps the study simply shows that it is prayers engaged in specifically by Catholics and Protestants that result in bad results, and so some people should start looking around for whatever religion is the right one.