Reading teh stoopid of the Arizona Republic so you don't have to...
Shorter Robert Robb: Let's pretend the last eight years haven't happened, and that Bush's economic policies will work better when they're John McCain's economic policies.
Bonus Shorter Robert Robb: I'm opposed to illegal wiretaps of reporters, except when questioning such wiretaps might threaten the reelection chances of a fellow Republican douchebag.
Laptop (aka, my one and only machine) gets shipped off for repairs tomorrow. It's been giving me fits for a while with overheating problems, and the inept rat bastards who pass for technical support can't get their heads out of their collective asses.
Don't know when I will be back precisely, though I can assure you it will be sooner than 8 months.
Let me finish by saying, because it really needs to be said...
ALIENWARE'S TECHNICAL SUPPORT STAFF BLOWS GOATS!
There. I feel better already.
One of my obsessions, really since the beginning of Season 3, has been Ronald D Moore's reimagined series Battlestar Galactica. It is, quite simply, the best Science Fiction series ever shown on television. The 4th (and Final) Season just started, and looks like it will be a fitting conclusion to the series.
Why do I come to this conclusion? I heartily suggest you watch this from about 2 minutes in for what is probably the single best space battle ever created for TV or film.
Then consider that the writing on this show is of such long form that no loose ends are left. Things that seem like throwaway bits in Season 1 were part of the main plot line in Season 3. Subplots become multiple episode arcs. Beloved characters die, often, in ways that will leave you feeling like you've been sucker punched. The writing is so far ahead of anything out there in television, SciFi or not.
If you haven't turned on to this series yet, go buy or rent the Season 1 boxed set. If you aren't hooked by the time Kobol's Last Gleaming Part 2 (the season finale) is done, you're undoubtedly dead. Then check out Seasons 2.0, 2.5, 3, and the made for TV movie, Razor. Then catch Season 4 on SciFi. You'll see what I mean. BSG is the gold standard that all other television or movie Science Fiction will measure up to, and be found wanting, for years (decades?) to come.
The Rat says check it out.
Mystic, in happier times.
I would have been back a few months ago, until a pair of health scares intervened. One involved Mrs. Rat, who is doing just fine now, and is the sexiest 40-something alive.
The other, unfortunately, ended badly. We lost Mystic, my beloved tuxedo cat, probably the best furred companion I've ever had on March 25, 2008. She was just 26 days shy of six years old.
She was my inseparable companion for 5 years and 7 months. When I came home, she was right next to me, within 30 seconds of sitting down. Didn't matter when it was. When I was home, she was never more than 10 feet away from me. Usually, right next to me, day or night.
Thanks, Mystic, for the time we were friends. I'll never forget you.
Did you miss me?
I figured it's about time I dial up the snark again, especially now that the Wreck of the Old 97 Straight Talk Express has been pulled out of the wrecker yard and put on the tracks again. Going to spend today updating the blogroll, and will shortly be back with more snark, more geek, and less dour.
Courtesy of Abu Aardvark, we learn of the death knell for the Iraq coalition* "government."
Lost in the reporting of the unbelievable horrific terrorist attack in northern Iraq is a bit of a political bombshell. Al-Arabiya is reporting that the emergency political summit of Iraq's leaders has failed to produce even nominal political reconciliation. This is a devastating outcome for the Maliki government and for those Americans who hoped to have some political progress to show in the upcoming Crocker/Petraeus report. There's no other way to spin this: this summit was billed as the last chance, and it has failed.
The background is that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had called an emergency political summit to deal with the political crisis sparked by the withdrawal of the Sunni al-Tawafuq Bloc and the suspension of participation by the members of Iyad Allawi's Iraq Bloc from Maliki's government. Much of the Iraqi and Arab press portrayed this as a last-chance effort to salvage the Maliki government, certainly before the Petraeus-Crocker report but probably for good. Talabani summoned Maliki (Dawa, in his capacity as Prime Minister), Massoud Barzani (in his capacity as head of the Kurdish region), Adel Abd a-Mahdi (SIIC, in his capacity as Vice President), and Tareq al-Hashemi (Iraqi Islamic Party/Tawafuq Bloc, in his capacity as Vice President). Hashemi, after much back and forth about the invitation, agreed to attend. Iyad Allawi's bloc was pointedly not invited, despite his public indications that he was quite available. Nor were the Sadrists.
don't bother trying to spot the Sunni. (picture courtesy of al-Arabiya)
I thought there was at least a chance that they would cobble something together out of desperation and find ways to lure the Sunni parties back in - if for no other reason than that, by the accounts I've seen, American officials on the sidelines were heavily pressuring them to come back with something. It probably wouldn't have resolved the underlying problems (government spokesman Ali Dabbagh made it clear in advance that no substantive issues would be discussed), but I thought they might well emerge with a face-saving compromise. They did not. Instead, Talabani announced the formation of a new four party coalition in support of the current government without any Sunni representation. What's left is a government stripped to its sectarian base - the two Kurdish parties and the two major Shia parties - and a world of political hurt.
There are only so many last chances that this government is going to get, and the Maliki government is on strike two and has fouled about the last four pitches away. Personally, the actions of the last couple of months of the Maliki government remind me a lot of the last days of the Czar, or if you prefer an American example, the last days of the Diem regime.
In light of the fact that we are arming the Sunnis, both deliberately (read further in the Abu Aardvark entry above at the link), and inadvertently, it seems like only a matter of time before things get unwrapped completely there.* - Sunnis need not apply.
It's no exaggeration to say Roxy Music's Avalon was the soundtrack of my dating with Mrs. Rat all those years ago.
Seth Oldmixon at MyDD asks a salient question:
Rick Renzi, the Republican incumbent in AZ-01 managed to keep his seat in 2006 following a vicious campaign against his Democratic challenger, Ellen Simon. Renzi, as you know, was a key player in the U.S. Attorney firings stemming from DOJ investigations into shady land deals orchestrated by the Congressman.
Desperate to keep his seat, Renzi ran slanderous ads against Simon calling her a "NAMBLA lawyer" (which she is not) and at one point calling her "the devil." Ellen Simon bowed out of the 2008 race, leaving the field open to a new Democratic challenger. But nobody's really stepped up.
Today, Arizona Congress Watch points us to the money numbers for AZ-01 and it looks like nobody is running - not even Renzi. Renzi, the incumbent, has barely $20,000 cash on hand. And according to the Arizona Republic, the NRCC won't even confirm that he's running. So, why does Renzi lead the money field by almost $16,000? The Dem with the most money right now is Mike Caccioppoli, and he's reporting under $5,000 cash on hand.
This isn't even a case of the Democrats not fielding a candidate against a strong incumbent. This appears to be a case of the Democrats not even bother to field a candidate in an open race. That's just crazy. AZ-01 is not only a winnable seat. Ellen Simon won 44 percent of the vote - just 7 percent behind Renzi. A year later, Renzi is all but out of the race, and the field is fertile for a Democrat to come in and lay roots for a winning campaign. But, instead, the Democrats appear to be taking a pass.
NRCC spokeswoman Julie Shutley said the Republicans "are confident that this seat will remain in the red column." And I can see why. The Democrats are handing it to them on a platter.
Ellen Simon gave Renzi a pretty strong run last year, forcing the NRCC to spend money there they really didn't want to, and Renzi is so tainted at this point it's a serious question mark that he'll even run again. I'm shocked, with all the mad scrambling to find opponents for Republicans in much safer districts (cough, cough, Shadegg's district), that we can't find somebody to run in an election which is likely to be for an open seat, or at least against an incumbent facing a criminal investigation, in a district that is much closer to 50/50.
Courtesy of Raw Story, we learn of a rather useless and silly research project:
Scientists have explained mathematically why the famous "silly walks" of Monty Python's John Cleese have never caught on in the long history of Homo sapiens.
The giant, leg-twirling strides of silly walks may enable an individual to leap around swiftly but are simply too expensive in metabolic energy compared to conventional locomotion, according to a paper published on Wednesday by Britain's Royal Society.
Manoj Srinavasan and Andy Ruina, researchers in applied mechanics at New York's Cornell University, drew up a geometrical model of human walking and running.
They found that, in essence, each leg is a "telescoping actuator" that can change its length.
In walking, the body vaults forwards in circular arcs, driven forward by the pendular swing of the legs, with the toe and heel providing the push-off and landing point for each movement. In running, though, the body travels from one parabolic arc to the next, with a bounce in between.
Srinavasan and Ruina then factored in the metabolic cost of three drains on energy on both movements.
I'd quote further from an article describing what is undoubtedly the biggest scientific development since the invention of fake vomit, but my irony meter was redlining.
I'm afraid we'll have to mark your grade as incomplete for the semester, however.
\
Reporter: Is this the end for Spinal Tap?
David St. Hubbins: Well, I don't really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It's like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.
-This is Spinal Tap, 1984
About a year and a half ago, in a conversation with my good friend Zelph and some other people at Drinking Liberally, a conversation that was clearly counting our chickens before the eggs were even a glint in the rooster's eye, we discussed various possible 2008 Presidential candidates, Democratic and GOoPer. By that point, based on his Curtis Lemay-esque rhetoric about the need to expand the war in Iraq, I had come to the conclusion even then, that John McCain's rhetoric, while then critical of the President (now he's critical, oh, not so much), would be out of step with a public in 2008 who would have seen 5 years of this ill-advised, stupid war. I predicted then that John McCain's day as a national politician and Presidential candidate was just about done. I'd like to say it was due to any particularly brilliant insight, but it was just a hunch that as the election grew closer and the war dragged on, that he would seem as out of touch as Bush on what even then smelled like a lost war to me.
Still, the media continued to prop him up as a darling, and he was anointed by the Wise Men of Washington* as the presumptive heir apparent to George W Bush.
My how things have changed, and as they have, how enjoyable has it been to see John McCain laid out for the threadbare, politically spun, farce he has pretty much always been.
Remember two years ago about how he was going to opt out of Federal campaign funds because he was going to raise so much money he wouldn't need them? Yeah, that was a real knee slapper.
Then there was the time he was going to tap into all of Dubya's big donor network and raise like a bazillion dollars? I'm still rolling in the aisles over that one.
Then there was the time a couple of months ago when he said he'd rather win the war in Iraq than win the Presidency (and somebody suggested again that he'd do neither...wonder who that was).
Now, as it turns out, he's raised less money than can be found in between the seat cushions of Bill Gates couch, has been spending it like a drunken sailor in a Singapore brothel, and now has less cash in hand than the snowball's chance in hell candidate. (Cue angry comments from rabid Ron Paul supporters, all three of them).
Now, as the good ship John McCain begins to take on water faster than the Empress of Ireland, John McCain's staffers are scurrying for the lifeboats.
All in all, as a connoisseur of the finest schadenfreude, it's been one hell of a year. Thanks for the memories, John.
Next time, John, perhaps you should just send a card or shake his hand, ya think?
*-Wise men of Washington is registered trademark of Atrios. Or at least, it should be, dammit.
Yeah, yeah, so Richard Lugar, future ex-con John Doolittle, and Pete "Wanders the Halls of Congress in PJs" Domenici have "publicly broken with Bush over Iraq"
At this point, I could care less about what Republicans are saying. It's what they (as well as Democrats) do. Until they actually vote to deny funding, and establish withdrawal deadlines, its just so much worse than useless talk.
I expect when it comes time to do not only the right thing, but the smart thing, and work to end this stupid war, they'll fall into line just like the other useless Republican puppies who've criticized the conduct of the war, and happily vote for some useless compromise bill whose net effect will be to kick the can until 2009 when Bush's successor can end it (or escalate it, see Dick Nixon's secret plan).
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Rolex.
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