Category: Politics

Not that this is much of a revelation, but apparently the NRA is not too hot on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Sheesh.

They’re including a given senator’s vote on the Sotomayor confirmation in their ‘ratings’ of senators, and I guess that’s fair. I just kinda feel like that’s kinda cheap. You only decide to include it after you’ve found her to not love guns to the extent that your bloodlust is satisfied? NRA, you should have been on top of this a long time ago. It’s the supreme court, for crying out loud! That should be in your stupid little evaluation thing either way.

From my read on the situation, these ratings the NRA arbitrates seem to carry a good deal of clout in getting people elected. That stands to reason, given the funding and resources behind the gun lobby. I guess it just makes me sad. I’ll go on record saying that I don’t like guns too much, and I wish nobody had ‘em, and also:

Confession: This post was supposed to have more analysis, but I lost an hour and a half watching Eddie Izzard clips on YouTube after looking for that clip. Oops.

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Last night, Ethan and I were sitting down for a nice little LAN party to get a little StarCraft going on. Before I could start the game up though, my little e-mail alert dropped down, displaying the subject line of a single incoming e-mail: URGENT – Kucinich delivering impeachment articles NOW!.

“Huh,” I wondered aloud. “Wonder what this is.” I hopped onto the CSPAN website and pulled up their live feed, and there he was. Dennis, my hero, my champion, and my favorite candidate for the U.S. Presidency… Bravely, he stood there on the deserted floor of the United States House of Representatives, making his case. He has 35 articles of impeachment to get through. 35 separate reasons that he felt merited, each on their own strength, George W. Bush’s removal from office. DailyKos.com, the only website that was covering this story for quite some time, indicated that it took him four hours and twenty minutes to cover each article. Geez.

In that time span, Ethan and I played two games of StarCraft and ate dinner, while Dennis took on the lying, deceitful leader of the free world. The man is a hero, and he’s getting snubbed by the media and his peers. Pelosi has publicly stated her lack of support for such a move (that link also lists each article and its charge), which I suppose I can accept. Impeachment of the highest elected official in the country is sortof a deal, and it steps on a lot of toes for good and ill; there’s no way to get out of it without doing major damage to both sides.

And yet… listening to Dennis read his articles, everything he says is true. All the lies, the treachery, the lax and poor administrating… he did his homework. This is not some nut standing up and shouting “witch!” Everything in his articles was supported by documents and testimony, most of which came from the government itself. And if these things are true, why not impeach the president?! If he actually committed such crimes, he deserves to get booted.

I conveyed this much emotion to Ethan, and he responded that a fat lot of good it would do: if Bush were removed from office, Cheney would simply take over. That’s the beauty of it all though… Dennis already has that covered. Once we get Bush, Cheney is next, and then guess what? Nancy Pelosi is president of the United States until Obama can take over in January.

Talk about the left wing’s wet dream.

Anyways. I thought that train of thought was somewhat humorous, despite my outrage that major media outlets are largely ignoring this in favor of the “WILL HE OR WON’T HE?!” question of Obama making Hillary his running mate. Ooof. I don’t even care anymore.

In other news, I want to extend a challenge to everyone: Stop perpetuating the Chuck Norris meme. PLEASE. I’m speaking of a general consensus that Chuck Norris is awesome and hilarious and deserves to be immortalized on t-shirts with snarky sayings. Please help to fight this. Chuck Norris is really one of the biggest idiots in the world today. He has a column in syndication, Ethan and I found yesterday. Please read the following snippit from his most recent piece:

Bill Clinton once said, “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse emissions because we’ve got to save the planet for our grandchildren.” That is the type of mentality that got us in this trouble. I’m all for doing our best to preserve our planet, but not at the price of losing our nation in the process. Bill’s words just might come true, but not as he or Al Gore might expect. We might save the planet for our grandchildren, and lose America at the same time, unless we turn around this energy crisis now.

~Chuck Norris, Professional Ass

I’m sorry, but really. Our favorite line was, “I’m all for doing our best to preserve our planet, but-” What? WHAT?! BUT?!?!?!?!. You can’t possibly be serious?! There’s no acceptable “buts” that follow that sentence, due to a very simple axiom: No Planet = NO PEOPLE. I hope I’ll be spared having to explain the Boolean operator that connects the two. Geez. It’s not even that difficult of a concept to grasp. So Norris purports that preserving the American way of life is more important than living? I suppose I’d agree in certain contexts. IE: I’d rather die than submit to some sort of foreign-imposed authoritarian dictatorship. That’s probably true.

But this image of somehow going out in a “blaze of glory” to preserve America while you cruise around suburbia in your Ford Excursion is just absurd. How can life really be worth so little to you that you’re willing to sacrifice your descendants’ right to life for such a trivial privilege?

I don’t understand.
I think that’s, perhaps, becuase it makes ZERO SENSE.

So stop perpetuating the Chuck Norris theme. If we all work together, maybe we can even get Walker, Texas Ranger out of syndication. Just Maybe.

UPDATE:
I just received an e-mail from the Dennis People this afternoon that says someone crippled their website early this morning, following the completion of the filing of the Articles of Impeachment.

How childish, radical-right hackers of the ‘net.
How childish indeed.

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Hope everyone’s lives have been going well. Mine’s been OK.

I actually had a pretty cool Leap Day. I always wanted to make sure and do something special on Leap Day, because it only comes around every four years… I feel like I should make the most of it. This year, I was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics honor society. Since I’ll probably be a member of that for some time to come, I thought it was slick that my “induction date” was 2.29.2008. Leap Day Mission: Accomplished.

Sunday night Ian and I were up really, really late doing physics work. After he went to bed, I kept at it, and then had some Chemistry to tackle. I was up until 5 AM, which was a first even for me. Luckily, since I’ve been back home, I’m recharging on sleep, which has been terrific.

In other news, I’m getting really frustrated with my coursework. I know the semester is only halfway over, but this has just not been a very engaging one for me. Chemistry is tedious and frustrating, I’m tired of German, Math, as always, is a really brutal struggle, and both physics classes I’m in are really, really abstract. So in addition to being spent… I’m finding it really hard to even think about going back, much less trying to get work done over break.

But that is, in fact, what I’m about to go attempt to do, so wish me luck.

Heute Auf Deutsch:

“Wenn ich ‘USA’ höre, denke ich an Wolkenkratzer und Gettos, an den Grand Canyon und die Rocky mountains und natürlich an Iowa.”
[Translation: "When I hear 'USA', I think of skyscrapers and ghettos, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, and Iowa, naturally."]

And how about those primaries?
How about I’m getting really sick of them.

I’d still rather have Hillary win, but I don’t think she can pull it out at this point. I’m getting sick of dreading every single caucus because we know Obama will win them, and I’m also getting tired of holding my breath through every single primary. It’s just old at this point. I’m resigned to ol’ Barrack winning, and I just want to focus on the general election now.

There’s no real good way to differentiate between the two, which makes all this drama over which is better incredibly silly. They’re both terrific, and one of them seems to have a bit more traction, so why fight it?

I dunno. I also have no clue as to why I’ve been sucking it really badly at StarCraft lately. No idea.

My house is being replumbed. It’s loud.

On a final note, my webservice got bumped up to a WAY nicer package for free! We now have what I believe is 350 GB of space… which is 3.5 times larger than my entire harddisk. So! I no longer have any reservations about posting excessive amounts of music and video.

We also may be hosting Paula’s website soon, which will be fun as well!

I like how this went from an entry about nothing to an entry about EVERYTHING.
(Sorry for my lack of coherence, I’m typing this at like… 11 AM, and I’m normally not up that early. At least not in the past few days.)

P.S.: I heard today’s song in a TV commercial the other day. It was kinda surreal.

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Happy Super Tuesday!

I’m so excited; today is awesome! Granted, it will be better once the polls close, but I wanted to give a brief recap of the field at the present time.

I’ll begin first where it all began, in Iowa. This year, I was actually AT Iowa caucus, which was fun. Ethan and I drove up all the way to Grinnell, IA , they day of caucus. It was a long drive, during which we got through the entirety of the Smashing Pumpkins – Greatest Hits album. And the Pumpkins wrote a LOT of music.

The actual event was pretty fun, even if I only got to observe. Ethan hung out with the Obama people for most of the night, while I got the please of hanging out with the Obama people’s children… or at least that’s who I assume they all belonged to, given that Obama had twice as many supporters as anyone else there.

Surely, you saw the returns of that night, with Obama winning, and Edwards edging Clinton out for second. The experience itself was goofy, to be honest: all those crazy people yelling at eachother about one another’s “viability” and so on, but one I will probably never witness again, so it was worth it.

Almost immediately following these results, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden dropped out of the race! I thought this was a little sudden, but they really didn’t have any traction, and I guess they didn’t want to risk having happen to them what ended up happening to Edwards. Fun Fact: The district where I was that night elected Chris Dodd’s ONLY delegate, and Ethan knew him by name! I feel as if that’s as close to fame as I will ever come.

Next up came New Hampshire. For some reason, I got REALLY into this. I forced Lizz (and her family, for a while) to watch the CNN coverage of the primary returns, which was special. Hillary Clinton won that state, edging out Obama for first, with Edwards in a distant third. The highlight: CNN displaying multiple pie charts on no fewer than FOUR Television sets simultaneously. [John Stewart later jabbed that they'd set up their election coverage headquarters in a CNN] I searched in vain for a picture of this.

Bill Richardson called it quits after this and grew and AWESOME goatee just in time to watch the Super Bowl with Bill Clinton. I approve, heartily.

Next came Michigan, won by Clinton, but largely to no fanfare or attention, because of the delegate-debacle. Nevada followed, which Clinton won decisively, finally forcing my favorite candidate, Dennis J. Kucinich, out of the race. I want to stop here for a moment, and lament the fact that Dennis was regularly excluded from debates among the top trio of Clinton/Obama/Edwards.

I’m sorry kids, but that’s just not right. He may be really extreme in his views, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to exclude him. He was regularly shut out of debates, which is unacceptable. He was a real, honest-to-god REGISTERED candidate at the time, and he was not allowed to speak his peace like the rest of them were. Look to the republicans: in spite of all the McCain/Romney drama, and the Huckabee the spoiler (more on that later), they still have the decency to invite Ron Paul (who is an idiot, for the record) to the debates. AND THEY SHOULD!

Democracy doesn’t work unless everyone gets their fair shot, and Dennis did not get his. Tragically, now he’s catching a lot of heat back home, and his House seat is in jeopardy. Granted, it was kindof silly for him to run for two positions at once, but I still feel like he got the raw deal.

Onward now, to South Carolina! This proved to be the swan song for John Edwards, who could not pull his home state as he did in the 2004 cycle. Obama did very well, particularly among the large African American population, netting him more than half the popular vote, with Clinton scraping by with a little bit more than a quarter. Edwards was just under 18%, sadly for him. I don’t know what happened to Edwards, honestly. He didn’t do anything wrong. No scandal, no slip-ups, no nothing.

He just couldn’t catch on with people. It really underscores how crucial I think those first two contests are. Iowa sets up a front runner, and New Hampshire, priding itself on voting “smarter” than Iowa, frequently picks ‘the other guy’, as we saw this year. Time and time again, we’ve seen it pan out like this, and I feel sorry that Edwards took the brunt of it for the second time; it’s even harder now that he couldn’t carry his home state like he did in 2004. But yeah, he’s done now.

Florida came and went with little more than a remark from Democrats, who pledged not to campaign there in light of the aforementioned delegate-debacle (wherein they lost the rights to ALL their voting delegates for moving up their primary), but Clinton carried that state well with its population of older folks, as well as women. For the Republicans, it was a much bigger ordeal: John McCain won this decisive closed Republican primary, setting him up as the man to beat, with Romney playing catch-up (something him and his millions of dollars/supports seem prepared to do), and Huckabee just doing whatever the hell it is that Huckabee does.

Now were are here at today, Super Tuesday!

The first blood today was drawn by, surprisingly, Mike Huckabee! In West Virginia, the McCain camp quickly realized after the first round of caucus that they were not going to win the state outright (Romney was actually in the lead, and expected to win), and threw practically all of their support to Huckabee. You’re allowed to do that in a caucus setup, and now with 52% to Romney’s 47%, Huckabee is the victor, taking all 18 of their delegates.

Romney’s campaign issued a whiny press release, blah blah blah.

I don’t really care.

More to follow this evening!

[NOTE: Thanks to Rachel Kelm, who first turned me on to today's song many years ago!
Also, thanks to Rudy Giuliani, for, contrary to what the song says, failing.]

8:00 PM CST
So far Hillary is holding the Quasi-Mason-Dixon line with Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Obama snagged his home state of Illinois, as well as the peach-state, Georgia! New York was just called for Clinton (good thing she didn’t lose it; how embarrassing!), and she’s leading just barely in Massachusetts, but that one’s too close.

Ian and I think CNN’s Super Tuesday Coverage is a sham; they count down to the poll-closing-times, and the instant they close, CNN makes a projection, with literally 0% of the vote counted. Hacks. Also, John King has way, way too much fun on the write-with-your-finger screen. It’s an entirely useless device, but he’s the only one who uses it… like he had some special training, and no one else in the studio is certified to use it or something. Or maybe they all just think it’s stupid.

Who knows.

Delaware called for Obama. Fun Fact: Ron Paul has fewer delegates than “Uncommitted” people, who don’t know what they want. Sad Panda.

8:18 PM CST

Clinton is called for New Jersey on MSNBC. That channel has Tom Brokaw, which is awesome. But CNN has this one hilarious guy who I heard say something to the extent that “Republicans need to get over the whole Ronald Regan thing. I’ve read the bible. He’s not Lazarus. He’s not coming BACK. That made me laugh, and it’s also true. (11:31 PM CST, Roland Martin is his name)

John King is still drawing all sorts of stupid circles on the touch-screen. Ian and I want him to use the different colors to make some type of illustration. I doubt he will.

8:40 PM CST

Alabama is called for Obama. Huckabee is putting up a fight, which just tickles me pink (this is, not surprisingly, his color on the big ol’ Red Map). Cooper Anderson is billed as such a pretty boy… I wouldn’t do him.

9:00 PM CST

Utah goes for Romeny. Color me unsurprised. CNN instantly calls this on the hour.
Why did they even wait?
Wolf Blitzer says in many cases they must wait for the “actual numbers,” the “real ballots.” Ian feels this is what the election is “actually” about. I have to say I agree, but I still love Wolf.

9:13 PM CST

Huckabee is droning on about something… a lot of college mascot allusions that I don’t understand. He is a populist, which upsets Laura Ingram and makes me happy. However, if he became president, his wife would not make my “Top Hottest First Ladies” list. Sorry.

[Ian and I will be posting our top five soon; get excited]

Kansas has caucused in the majority for Obama. I feel that Lawrence had a large hand in that, but it’s just a thought.

9:20 PM CST

Obama picks up Connecticut, which with Kansas makes a cool 101 delegates. Nice.

9:34 PM CST

Obama also scores in Minnesota, while Romney talks on his campaign not being as sad as it appears (though it does have a ‘saddest puppy’ look about it). My fun story about Mitt Romney?

My mom said to me: “Tom, your grandma reads all this crazy stuff that says in the end days, when the antichrist comes, he’ll come as a politician. Now, I know that’s just bull… but when I see Mitt Romney… I can’t help but think… maybe it’s him, you know? I’m not saying he is… but he’s just so… slick. You know?”

Yeah. I kinda get that feeling too. He’s creepy. Not because of the mormon thing; I could care less. Christian is Christian to me. There’s just something too… calculated about him.

9:48 PM CST

Hillary Clinton is about to speak, and Bill is there too!

She’s trying to get her people with the signs to shut up. Sign people are really loud, I’ve noticed. She keeps nodding to try and get them to quiet down, and minute she says another thing, they start yelling out again.

Blah. I want them to call Missouri, but they seem reluctant to do so, despite 2/3 of the “real vote” having been counted.

10:38 PM CST

I had to take a break to do like… work. John McCain is blabbing now. Somehow I ALWAYS catch his speech. He’s really nice in complementing his competitors, which is refreshing. It actually seems sincere too, not like someone just stuck a post-it on his speech. I like that.

OH NO! Obama started speaking before John McCain! Conflict!

I’m getting tired of this though, honestly. Ian took the political candidate quiz, which was cool. I promised not to say what he got, so I won’t, but we had fun talking about that. You know, the issues.

11:11 PM CST

Clinton picks up Arizona. Special. Missouri is insanely close. 98% of MO reporting, Obama up by a percentage point. So, so dramatic. I’m tired, in need of a shower, and still have more studying to do. FINISH UP MISSOURI SO I CAN GET ON WITH MY DAY. P.S.: I hope Huckabee pulls MO. You go dude. Just ’cause.

11:16 PM CST

MSNBC just called California for Clinton, with only 15% reporting. That’s special. They’re also saying McCain has won Missouri. They seem more wonton in in just calling stuff. I don’t know if I like that or not, but CNN has followed their lead so far, so I dunno. Maybe they’re just faster/better?

11:31 PM CST

Still waiting on Missouri’ California called for Clinton and McCain on CNN. Lots of speculation on Huckabee being a possible VP. Begala says that MA, CA, and NJ were the states to watch, and Clinton won all of them. Then Larry King interrupted everyone… to go to commercial…

11:38 PM CST

“CNN, the most trusted name in news,” was read over the graphic, by James Earl Jones. Best news station ever? Maybe…

11:44 PM CST

Obama projected to win Alaska. News bar mistakenly reports Huckabee winning Missouri. Apparently the weather is really, really terrible in Tennessee. Outside here in Kirksville we’re getting some light snow that is supposedly going to turn into 8-12 inches of snow.

CALL MISSOURI!

11:48 PM CST

MSNBC has MO called for Obama, which seems likely. Unless Clinton can find 4,000 extra votes in the remaining 1%, I think he’ll get it. They’re also ballparking the number of delegates over at MSNBC, which is cool.

12:28 AM CST

CNN called MO for Obama… while I was taking a shower. *sigh*
I’m turning my chips in this evening. It was a lot of fun; it’s got me all excited for the general election, but that’s a while from now. Obviously, since things ended up so close, we’re now looking down the road to the coming contests.

Louisiana is next, this Saturday, so keep your eyes open.
This thing is, apparently, far from over.

P.S.: Remind me to never liveblog 4 hours of anything ever again.

So I’m kindof irritated with Russia, on the whole.

I’m not going to get into that whole business with Putin suspending little bits and pieces of the constitution here and there; though that is markedly uncool. No, I’m talking about more recent developments. We’ll first begin with the scary one, that being that Russia may have fired a bomb at Georgia.

The idea that Georgia would be so crass as to make this up is rather ridiculous. What the hell was Russia thinking? My biggest question is why the bomb didn’t go off. Was it a mistake, or is Russia just sending a warning? I don’t really know. It seems though that the Russian Federation woke up one day and decided that they needed more land. And if they can’t take it from Georgia, they’ll take it from the ocean, so to speak.

Russia is hell-bent on extending their claim of the continental shelf of Eurasia. At first glance, this seems silly: What in the world would they do with all that extra ocean? Answer: Drill of Oil. (It seems to be the answer to a lot of recent, silly questions)

Before the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf would approve their claim for this extra bit of ocean belonging to Russia, however, they demanded more research. So Russia set off in a sub named MIR (like the spaceship, but traveling in a James-Cameron Abyss rather than a Stanley-Kubrick one) to take a look at what the ocean floor looks like up at the north pole. While they were there, they dropped a flag.

The audacity of that!
I wasn’t alone in my principals:

“This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory’,” Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told CTV television.

Or can you?
I can’t decide whether I’m really, really irritated with Russia have the audacity to drop that flag, interpreting it as them already feeling that the land is theirs, and granting them an explorer’s right to leave their mark where they’ve gone for the first time.

[Secretly, I hope the American government stages a rogue operation to capture the un-rustable, titanium flag the Russians left, and replace it with a small castle made of caviar cans, populated by those stacking-dolls. We'll melt the flag down and cast it into a missile, and give it to the Georgians, for their trouble.]