AWHQ Oral History

Went down to the KUT studios last night with my mom and got interviewed for their "Oral History of the Armadillo World Headquarters" project. It's a StoryCorps project, so our recording is headed for the Library of Congress.

There's a really nice Myspace page for the Armadillo.

Link to a few AWHQ pix.

The President and the Wars

Read this

What I got was an unexpected look into the eyes of a man who intertwined his roles as commander in chief and consoler in chief on a solemn day filled with remembrance and respect for sacrifices made - and sacrifices yet to be made.

I'm sure the cynics will assume this wasjust another Obama photo op.

If they'd been standing in my boots looking him in the eye, they would have surely choked on their bile.

His presence in Section 60 convinced me that he now carries the heavy burden of command.

Optionally, read this.

Americans Are Paying Attention

Quick post on national politics. Conservatives are happy this week because they added two Governors and lost two congressional seats (including one the Republican party has held continuously since the 1900's). To me it's a win-win. I have no plans to move to Virginia (although it's a beautiful place) or New Jersey. Hell, I can't think of any place in Texas I'd live other than Austin. The win for my side is that it just got easier to pass a progressive national agenda with two more votes in the House.

On the topic of health care, the new Republican bill is not going to help them with independents or even their base. Some excerpts from the Washington Post

In 2019, after 10 years of the Republican plan, CBO estimates that ...17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won't have health-care insurance. The Republican alternative will have helped 3 million people secure coverage, which is barely keeping up with population growth. Compare that to the Democratic bill, which covers 36 million more people and cuts the uninsured population to 4 percent.
...
According to CBO, the GOP's alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan.

When Republicans make claims of fiscal conservatism and then do things like this, their only hope for gaining power is if people just aren't paying attention. If, as they claim, America is really a 'center-right' country, and yet they are still losing elections, maybe they ought to look at their actions in relation to their rhetoric. Putting out bills that are more expensive than those of the 'tax and spend liberals' isn't going to cut it.

I think that people on the left and the right both have reached the point where they are unwilling to have politicians say one thing and do another. On the left, that resulted in low turnout in Virginia and New Jersey. On the right, it seems to be resulting in a willingness to lose rather than put a so-called "RINO" in office (NY-23). Overall, I think it's a good sign for the country that people are demanding more accountability from politicians.

Time for a Change

OK, here's a long, rambling post. I started blogging as a way to highlight things that I found noteworthy, mostly in the areas of music and politics, my main interests at the time. As it went on, music took a back seat to the politics. This is something that I've been meaning to change. It's not just that I want to talk/think less about government and politics, I also want to change my approach to discussing both.

Back in the Clinton days, I was in my late 20's. Life in America was pretty good for a lot of people and I was pretty apolitical. When I did think about politics or government, I definitiely leaned liberal, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the subject.

During the 2000 election, I had two overriding thoughts:

1) Gore was much more qualified from an intellectual level to lead than Bush, but he (and Democrats in general) were not willing or able to fight back against the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove political attack style. The Atwater/Rove playbook is basically to throw out as many baseless attacks and distortions as possible, in hopes of bogging your opponent down with bullshit which they can either spend all teir time refuting or let stand. Gore and the Democrats had took the wrong lesson from the ridiculous Clinton impeachment. They got the idea that the only way to deal with the B.S. coming from the right was to "rise above" a.k.a. ignore it.

2) Bush was a simple minded Christianist who could be easily manipulated by the Nixon administration retreads he was surrounded with. I also knew how incompetent he was from a governing standpoint because I live in Texas. I wasn't too worried at first because the debates showed him to be barely able to speak in sentences. Thanks partly to the so called "liberal press", The 2000 election somehow came to be about who you would rather have a beer with (amazing the things that seem to be important when the economy is rocking) and the alcoholic apparently was a more "likeable" guy.

Even with all that, Bush got < 50% of the vote and needed some trickery to close the deal. I don't blame him for that. I do blame Gore and the Democrats for being unwilling and unable to fight back. If you didn't really want the job, why run?

The Bush administration radicalized me politically. They increased the wealth gap, started a completely unneccessary war and declared the Geneva conventions to be "quaint" while torturing accused enemies. I could go through the top 20 ways they did tangible damage to America and the world, but that's been covered pretty thoroughly elsewhere.

The thing that really got me concerned was how, post-9/11, they used fear (fed by ignorance) to sell every crappy idea they had. It got to the point where the Republicans were using fear the way advertisers use sex. "We need to lower the capital gains tax, or the terrorists will kill you in your sleep!" It's a lot easier to make people fearful if they don't have the knowledge to independently validate what you're telling them. This is part of the reason you started seeing what some have called the "war on science" and the close alignment between Fox News and the Bush administration.

An aside about Fox:

I recently posted a link on Facebook to a Pew survey that showed that Fox viewers have a different viewpoint than people who get their news from other sources. I'm actually OK with Fox wearing their affiliation on their sleeves. What I'm not OK with is when they "report" demonstrably false "news". A quick example follows.

My oldest daughter went to San Antonio recently to visit relatives. While there, she got a heaping does of Fox News and Fox News-informed opinion. One of the opinions (stated as fact) was that the text of the Senate health care bill hadn't been posted online. She asked a couple of reasonable questions (did you look online for it yourself? "No", did you confirm that via any other news media? "No"). When she got home and told me about this, we popped open the laptop and did a single Google search for the bills, which are here (finance committee) and here (HELP committee). Hell, it took longer to load the pdf of the finance bill into the browser than it did to find it online.

If you are going to tell people "facts" that are demonstrably false, you need to get them to either ignore or discount sources that contradict you. Fox seems to be successful in getting their viewers to do both.

Anyway, now that Obama is in the White House and Democrats "control" Congress (if they could ever actually get out of their own ways), my focus is on making sure that they do the right thing. From my point of view, the worst of the crisis has passed for now. I understand that on the conservative side, they see the crisis as just beginning (believe me, I get the emails from the RNC, Erik Erickson, the NRA, etc.), but that's not my problem. I'm not fired up all the time, and I won't engage on that level. Hell, I don't even watch Olbermann that much anymore. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions, I do. What it means is that if I express an opinion, and you respond with name calling or some other attempt to attack me (rather than addressing the merits of my opinion), don't expect me to play along. I don't have a need to, and I won't.

Sooooooo....All of that was a long-winded way of saying that I will be changing the tone of this blog and expanding the subject matter. Oh, and I'll be posting more often.