HACKERS
________
Ok Alaska Joe. I'm back :-) [It was nice to know you missed me!]
My absence had nothing to do with politicians suddenly starting to behave. It was a personal issue. Just about the time of my last post I was rather viciously attacked by a hacker. He had pulled my email out of the ether (or more likely out of his own membership list ... he has several sites on the 'Net and I was, no: I AM, a member. I'll have to drop by one of these days. But by luck of the draw as far as I know, he pulled my email address, hacked the machine and stole the most recent couple months of email. That was critical professional correspondence (that was mixed in with the jokes and the anecdotes people used to send me before I stopped emailing them back). Then a message popped up on my computer telling me I should go here. (Only that time it was a live link to where I'm fairly sure was one of his sites and I think I know which one. He had to grab something there apparently because when we left it was like an antelope on speed. We shot and boomeranged around the 'Net so fast it would ... well, in fact it did, make my head spin! And then we ended back up on his site anyway (I don't think he realized that I realized that I knew where we were even with the dizzying trip to disorient me). We went from the site to what "felt" like an empty field with a very minimal Paypal station at one end and the company that the Hacker used to sell me "verbal books"! Just try to convince someone you didn't receive the product when the Paypal receipt ways "oral ebooks" or whatever! :-D He said he'd sell it to me for $70 and I could go home.
It was worth vastly more than that in many ways, so I said ok. But then instead of getting the product (I didn't really figure this guy was going to read me a book :-) ... I got another bill for $70. We continued this game, he raised it to bigger chunks than $70. When we got to $1,350 I quit. I couldn't possibly afford that ... but there was irreplaceable professional communications in there that I simply HAD to protect. But through a process of scribbling in margins I connected with the "night watchman" who was handling the process for the hacker ... as soon as he realized he asked me if this was one of those ["insert name of hacker here if he ever touches this blog"] deals. I said yes and he made an unremembered comment in disgust. They seemed like an ok outfit if one good person can be extrapolated that far, and he assured me they'd retain all the materials, etc. The next day I found little cracks in Paypal's armor ... it used to be a lot harder to get them to step into the middle of any such disagreement. But I finally got through and they opened an investigation and I got back my money and my emails! And I'd like to think I helped make the Paypal system a little easier to be willing to investigate in a case like that.
Unfortunately. The hacker was furious. And he attacked with major firepower. He is an excellent programmer and if I understand correctly, a "big name" in the hacker world as well. Plus in the little entreprenurial corner of the 'Net he is quite well known ... right on the periphery of the big time players. A guru wannabee. Claims to be an Internet millionaire. And he had some very effective "inventions" that truly may be game changers. Right when I.D. theft and the less enticing parts of Internet shopping are starting to overtake that initial enthusiasm is not when we need a reputation of being full of crooks and hackers. It is the frontier ... that little section of the 'Net ... and I'm a believer in humanity's need for a frontier. Scammers and spammers and Soapy Smith flim-flammers I can handle fine. But this man is a flat out crook. He claims to be a sociopath and accepts "sadistic sociopath" without any suggestion otherwise.
The kind of guy who would build a fire on the back of a turtle and get a huge rush out of watching the turtle bake in his own shell.
He is still here. A year and a half later and he was here virtually any time that I was. And I live on them. He killed off several ... I think we decided 5, but some of them required multiple trips to the shop. I have three hard drives that we had to pull out along the way in case the F.B.I. would like to take them into the clean room and see what all the hacker deleted and destroyed.
He has (despite every possible thing that anyone can think of to do to mine to prevent remote access ... he has it working. My desktop is his desktop. I just sat back last night and watched him move the cursor around and open and close files (and I think delete another batch but I'm not yet certain). Then I found out that he had a group of hackers wandering through all my computers where all of the family's dirty laundry is stored. Then I figured out that they were using my machine(s) for some sort of file sharing ... probably music. Probably the feds will finally show up ... and they'll arrest me for having an illegal music sharing station! :-) But I'm guessing 20 people had access to the depths of my soul (I keep it hidden in my hard drive). And I couldn't service clients with him there. Plus destroyed my time and billing programs. We had and office LAN which he destroyed and replaced with their own which they had the gall to call "Jailbirds R Us". There have been lots of much worse ramifications ... he's gotten his revenge for me messing up his (well -oiled process, I wasn't a unique case! I just have enough mouth to do something about it). Of course that turned out poorly as I lost not 2 months of emails, but 5 YEARS of "can't lose" emails. When he first showed up I tried to back up the system quickly before I had any idea he was "always on" (they have alarms of some sort that alerts them when a victim logs on ... or so I have hypothesized ... and I think I got agreement on that from him). So he wiped out my backup too. Then he destroyed access to the entire company data base (small company, but cranks lots of critical paper) and has probably averaged four of us over that time (not counting staffs). No only were the archive files critical, but all of our current "live" files were destroyed as well (actually I think they are still "there" somewhere. The hacker just destroyed any way to access them.)
So I dropped my blog, I dropped other stuff I was doing on the 'Net. I'm going to have to mend fences with all those friends I used to have but figured they'd never be friends again if the hacker got them ... I was highly contagious!
He ran my out of business. 22 years of a successful professional business and he destroyed it. He cost me nearly TWO (2) YEARS of income. Long story with lots of side paths, but essentially, he wouldn't let me get any work done and would make everything I did do take forever. I can work 4 hours on writing a report ... that he can destroy in 4 seconds. And he did that a lot. I did a lot of my work in the libraries. But he made everything take so long I couldn't charge for it ... I was just hoping that when I finally did get a project finished and to a client that I hadn't ruined a wonderful 20 year relationship because my stuff didn't get to him until three weeks after he absolutely had to have it. It was tough. But I have a small packet that proves much of the stuff I say, and I have lots more (screen shots, etc.) whenever they want it. I had to close it down. I couldn't afford to run it (and it was harder work than ever before because of the hacker).
I've been in touch with the "local" F.B.I. (~120 miles away) and the national folks (the hacker and I are on opposite sides of the country ... local law enforcement won't, probably can't, do anything.) But I hadn't seen much sign of him for awhile (although stuff was done that I was just sure I didn't do!) until last night when he decided to put on a show. My but I hope the federal men were watching! :-)
I do think it is safe now. Or I wouldn't be back here. Besides, I'd be Blogger would be about as good a co-plaintiff as one could have if he really did infect them.
So ... that's why I haven't been on for a year and a half or so. But now, I'm unemployed and broke ... so I can go back to blogging!
PRODIGALS AND SONS AND THINGS
_______________________________
Which brings me to the "other" part of this post. Here we've got two brothers; a good brother who stayed at home to help his mother and father run the modest little farm and never got a chance to "go out and see the world".
But the BAD brother ... the one who took his half of the inheritance and squandered it while traveling and adventuring. He got to see the world! He had the opportunity to do a lot of things that kids that age seem to need to do to get it out of their system. Things that it will be too late to do when one is older. The older brother was ticked off and I was always on his side. Every bit of "fairness" in me screams that the wrong kid got the feast and the calf.
But I got to thinking about it one day. I remember that was Jesus himself who spun that parable. And he was trying pretty hard to convince people that "fair" didn't mean "an eye for an eye". He was trying to bring humanity an entirely new paradigm. In the driest description I can think of ... Jesus was attempting to replace justice with love. It took me a lot of years before I understood why Jesus would sound like an idiot who rewarded bad behavior. It was a dangerous thing to say considering that he was someone who has been looked up to more and used as an example than any other person before or since.
People followed his actions, he set the example that countless people have tried to follow; to "be like Jesus" and to make all decisions the way Jesus would make them. But he probably knew it wasn't really dangerous ... because people wouldn't understand and those few that did wouldn't do anything about it. And those very few that understood and tried to do something about it, would fail miserably.
Upon contemplation, I can see how devoted Christians would have a hard time imagining Jesus being furious with the return of someone very important to him, but that he had expected never to see again. So there must be some other message he is trying to convey.
As I kept getting older (it keeps happening too! :-) I had my own kids and thought about how I would react if my son, the younger of my two kids ...
[All who guessed without even being asked .... you are correct ... the prodigal son that Jesus made famous was the younger son!]
... took his "college savings" out of the bank and disappeared and years had passed and I had no idea whether he was even alive or dead ... and then, as I was knocking on old age's door I see him walking down the road towards home ...
I get it. I understand what Jesus was trying to do. Justice. Equality. Even fairness. Those we think of as the goals. The things to strive toward. The things to do to be a "good person' and even a "good Christian".
And they are wrong.
At least if they purport or wish to "follow Jesus". Nor are they inherently wrong. They might coincidentally be right. But stopped clocks are a couple times a day also. He was much more radical than trying to bring about a fair, just world.
Justice, equality, fairness ... that is what he was trying to get us to understand was not the goal. All those preachers who stand up and talk about how we have to strive for equality, and fairness ... and ultimately this will create "justice" ... which is the "god" of this "missed the boat" Christianity. Plato took Aristotle's hierarchy of good and evil and all the schools in the neighborhood where the Christians were hiding in those days were Platonic schools ... and we ended up with Plato's philosophical world view of simply moving "the Good" to the top of the pyramid and we suddenly have a hierarchical model of good and evil. The Socratic and pre-Platonic Greeks fought this "binding of god into a hierachy (because in Plato's system the hierarchy is what is really God). It was a giant philosophical debate and it set the path of Western history. But the "God is Everywhere" philosophy lost to one where God is a structure that "the Good" is the highest point on the structure. We went from a philosophy that said that a chair that you can sit in is far more perfect than one that exists only in some heaven of ideas. Plato (and picked up by the Christians) thought people were originally defective ... Original Sin. The early Greeks that that was nuts. A new-born infant is absolutely without sin! (Just a good thing they can't throw rocks :-) But Plato won and the Christian kids were taught Platonic philosophy and Christianity caught a couple of great historical breaks and became the dominant Western religion and that is why we are a Platonically based society today still guided primarily by Mosaic law.
Today's Christians pushing democracy and fairness and equality and, ultimately, Justice ... are teaching Mosaic law. The law of symmetry. Of the need for the karmic balance of Yin and Yang. Justice. An eye for an eye.
Jesus came to bring a sword. He was so radical he made the '60s protesters look like Sunday School teachers. He wanted to turn society upside down and shake it like it was a money changers' table in a temple.
We can't dispense justice. Our court systems have proven that even when they really try. Only a perfect, "sinless", person can stone a prostitute ... which was another example of Jesus saying "You will never know all the details and won't even come close to knowing enough of them to know which decision is just ... whatever the decision. If we had only "sinless" people ... we wouldn't have the problem. But we don't and we won't so we do.
"Only your father in heaven can judge people." Come on folks, get this through your heads! I would guess Jesus was often very frustrated :-)
Fairness. Such a positive goal. And it might be. It might be that if you took everything that happened to all the players in a situation starting at least with their birth and understood everything that had happened to each of them since ... then in a dispute between them one might possibly come close on getting "fair" right. Of course the punishment has to exactly match the net wrong that the badder guy did ...
I see why Jesus said that really ... if it needed to be done, only a god could do it.
No. I think what the Barefoot Prophet was trying to tell us was that we have to think beyond the concepts of fairness and justice. They may be important ... or at least nice ... but they may just be totally irrelevant. I'm not advanced enough to understand all he was trying to tell us by any means. In the Stygian darkness with my white tipped cane the best I can do was to think I see that he came to throw out the law of Moses. The Law of Moses was an earth changing event of its own and in its own time. Essentially, the Law of Moses replaced the Law of Might Makes Right. It was a giant evolutionary step from the Law of Power. A step that had guided us for Millenia and had served its purpose wonderfully .... for the incremental step it needed to be.
But my white tipped cane says that Jesus was just trying to get it through our "symmetry rules all" heads that Love trumps Justice. And if he isn't coming back until we are able to understand that ... he's not coming back for awhile.
It trumps fairness too. After thinking a lot about it recently (I have an 18 year old youngest son :-) ... I know!
And this is what I know: my son had done so many bad things and wasted so much of my money and left his brother to do the work of two ... and that I'm getting older and my days are even more precious ...
I know that when I see my son walking down the road to the house after not having even heard of him for years and believing that I would die without ever seeing him again ...
I will run out to greet him joyfully, yelling at anyone handy to kill the fatted calf as I go.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
17.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 3
December 15, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 3
-AKA-
Being Exxon Means You Never Have To Say You're Sorry
Oil ... $$$$$$$ ... Black Gold!
The centerpiece of international politics, wars and economics. A sizable portion of the world's population believes we are at war in Iraq because of it. A song that I quite enjoyed when there was a small handful of us loudly proclaiming that we would be nuts to go to war with Iraq; one that I copied and passed out freely before George W's "shock and awe", was entitled "How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?".
We have it (oil ... we're a little light on the sand). Indeed, we have so much of it we can apparently afford to dump it in the ocean.
In the minds of most people when they think of oil, they envision the stuff they pour into their car engines. And, of course they are correct. That is refined motor oil. But crude oil, the unrefined hydrocarbon gunk that is pumped out of the ground and, at one time was attributed to decayed dinosaurs, is not something you'd want in your car. Nor in your boat. Nor in your fishing pots or nets. And most certainly not in the seafood meal at the fancy restaurant.
Nor is all oil the same; not even all crude oil. The oil that Captain Hazelwood and Exxon decided to return to nature had made a remarkable journey even before it so abruptly ended.
The oil had arrived in the port of Valdez after being pumped from deep, deep wells nearly a thousand miles to the north in Alaska's North Slope Prudhoe Bay fields and travelling completely across the state (which is the most difficult, by far, of all states to travel across) via one of the world's engineering and construction marvels: the Alaska pipeline. The Port of Valdez is a deep water port, ice free (by Alaskan terms) year round, and able to handle the giant oil tankers that transported the Black Gold to the energy starved world.
Alaskan oil [somehow appropriately] is heavy, tarry stuff that requires [like many Alaskans :-)] a lot more "refining" than most. It is not the clean "sweet" oil found in backyard wells in Texas. Nor is it the stuff that Jed Clampett could find bubbling up in his backyard woodlot. Our oil is thousands of feet below the surface and for whatever reason, largely decided to locate itself in some of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Alaska's North Slope holds vast reserves of oil. As anyone who has followed the news at any time in the last few decades knows, there is a terrific and ongoing battle regarding extraction from the ANWR portion of the North Slope between the Luddites who hide behind the much cooler sounding title "environmentalists" on one side and Sarah's "drill, baby, drill" contingent on the other. This topic deserves vastly more in-depth treatment than I can give it here, but may well be a follow-on column since oil is such a "hot" topic these days in any event.
I personally am in no hurry. Even if alternative energy forms were found and oil was essentially replaced as a fuel, it has sufficient other uses that it will always remain of high value. I'd just as soon leave it in the ground as a bank account for my grandchildren. My objections however have nothing to do with environmental concerns. There are none remaining of note. That is simply a phony excuse by the Luddites. The existing oil operations in the North Slope have had no negative environmental impact. The caribou and other wildlife seems quite attracted to the spectacle (face it ... they are bored with thousands of miles of featureless tundra as their lifetime view) and it has not had any negative effects on the environment whatsoever.
No ... the only time our Alaskan crude oil has harmed the environment was when a drunk sea captain decided to see if his boat was tougher than the rocks of Bligh Reef [it wasn't].
And that harm to the environment was real. It wasn't the "pretend harm" that the greenies use to scare people into opposing drilling. This was real harm. And it not only harmed the environment dramatically (twenty years later and it still hasn't recovered ... biological processes operate much more slowly in this cold climate), but it harmed, even more dramatically, the people who made their living off that environment. And those who made their living off the people who made their living off of the environment.
For those of you just joining us, the brief synopsis is that a drunken Captain (who Exxon had put through alcoholic rehab previously and absolutely knew that he had relapsed badly; indeed he couldn't legally drive even a car - his license was suspended for his third DUI since the rehab only a few years before the accident) was given command of a massive oil tanker and, without bothering to tell anyone, apparently tried to slip through a channel where no oil tanker belonged. And then, he and his bottle went down to his stateroom to do "paperwork" while leaving control of the vessel in the hands of a third mate who was not certified to run the tanker in Prince William Sound (PWS), although he was in the open ocean. For reasons that will never be known, it didn't make it. It appears that when they first scraped the reef a drunken Hazelwood staggered into the wheelhouse and screamed "hard right". Unfortunately he was drunk (and perhaps dyslexic?). If he'd yelled "hard left" we may never have heard of the Exxon Valdez.
As it was, it (in the Captain's inimitable slurred radio report) "fetched up" on the reef and was apparently leaking some ... cargo. That "hard right" caused unfathomable destruction of wildlife and pristine habitat. The spill killed an estimated 350,000 to 390,000 seabirds, in addition to 3,500 to 5,500 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs (along with countless other flora and fauna).
It also caused unfathomable loss and damage to those who lived there and were "married" to the land, the sea, and its abundant resources.
This happened in 1989.
No, I didn't mistype. My fingers didn't slip. I didn't get confused. It truly has taken nearly 20 years to pry any money out of them.
Let me give you a move visceral feeling for how long ago Exxon oiled us and then postponed the day of reckoning. In 1989, we had the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. On June 3 of that year, we also had the Tiananmen Square Massacure. Seems we've had several Chinese governments and entire major philosophy changes since then! :-)
The world moves right along unless you are Exxon with your foot on the brake.
Indeed, Alaska has only been a State for 50 years! For 20 of those we've been living with the never-ending saga of the Exxon Valdez.
In 1989, on November 9 ... the Berlin Wall fell. "No", you say, "that couldn't be! That was more like half a century ago." Well, the Exxon spill was 1/5 of a century ago. But yes ... before such major changes in the world ... the Exxon Valdez had already attempted to cut a new channel through Bligh reef.
In 1989, gasoline was $1.29 a gallon. The mimimum wage was $3.35. A dozen eggs were 96 cents; a loaf of bread, 69 cents! Oh and before serious competion with the internet which should have lowered it's price (!), the cost of a first class stamp was $.25!
It seems like it was a different age, a different era. And it was! Exxon managed to delay through the passing of years, decades, a century and a millenium. It is difficult to believe that the Supreme Court of 1989 (or 1994) would have sliced and diced the exemplary damages award so viciously. [Truefully, even though I understand that this Court is the most conservative in a very long time ... I still find it difficult to believe that even they would do ... what they did!]
Exxon is so big and so powerful and so unbelievably arrogant that they were able to "leverage" that power to keep the money out of the hands of the fishermen for all this time ... and Exxon has now succeeded in keeping most of the money out of the hands of the fishermen forever.
"The check's in the mail."
Exxon claimants [as all the prevailing plaintiffs in the Exxon-Valdez lawsuit are called] have been waiting nearly 20 years to hear those words; nearly 15 years since the jury verdict awarding us, in addition to modest compensatory damages, a $5 billion punitive damage award.
But, the checks aren't for anything close to that. Actually, ignoring interest [as Exxon still hopes to be able to do] and many other variables, we are roughly a decimal point off. In other words, if your share, according to the only people legally qualified to know and therefore to decide; the jurors, was say $100,000, then your "check" would be for ~$10,000. If the jury [and convoluted formulas that were subsequently applied] said your claim was worth $10,000, then your check is for ~$1,000.
And for this we waited 20 years?
Actually, the checks aren't in the mail yet. Presumably they will be soon.
The folks that will be receiving money in this first "round" are those claimants who had no issues of any sorts attached to their claims [eg: judgments against them, IRS liens, child support liens, probate issues (since so many of our original claimants have died), assignments (so many people were so broke they were forced to sell part or all of their Exxon claim to speculators for a small percentage of its worth. Of course, they may look like geniuses now ... , or other]; and had gone through all the stacks of paperwork properly and along the way filled out the proper forms to have the Claims Administrator [the law firm of Keller Rohrback] directly deposit the funds to their bank accounts.
But given the history of this situation, that's really close to "the check's are in the mail".
In 1994 a major trial was held in federal court with approximately 32,000 plaintiffs and a jury, who by all accounts took their job very seriously. After four weeks of testimony and argument and four days of significant deliberation and balancing Exxon's claim that they didn't deserve to be punished any further, primarily because of all the money they had already spent cleaning up their mess, against the reality of what happened, the jury concluded that Exxon needed to both finish reimbursing the actual "out of pocket or never in pocket" type losses (compensatory damages) which was never much at issue. It also made the finding of primary importance that Hazelwood AND Exxon were reckless (ie: "grossly negligent"). Although this point seemed unassailable and crystal clear to everyone but Exxon, it was so dear and the attorneys had fought so long and so hard to get to that point that the lead plaintiff attorney actually had tears when the announcement was made. He had done it.
The finding meant that Exxon was liable for punitive damages and, given the size of the company it was expected that they would be "significant" [the relevant standard being focused on company size and income since the purpose is "punishment" and an award of $10,000 might punish a small mom and pop, but wouldn't be noticeable to Exxon]. Generic formulations yielded nearly absurd results because Exxon was SO huge and profitable that in order for it to "feel" the punitive damages award, the number would have to be staggering.
If one wishes to swat a two year old child for doing something he shouldn't have, it doesn't take much to accomplish that goal. If you swat an elephant with the same force and power ... it would notice you no more than it would a mosquito. In fact, it would probably be more bothered by a mosquito.
Exxon was, and Exxon-Mobil is, an elephant compared even to other elephants.
Instead of shooting for an absurd number that would actually be fitting under the circumstances, plaintiff counsel determined to ask for something that, given Exxon's size, was clearly reasonable and, therefore, presumably appeal-proof. They asked for fifteen billion. The jury gave them five. This was far less than the purpose of punitive damages would dictate as it was but a small percentage of Exxon's annual profits and a pittance compared to Exxon's overall value. It may not have been something that Exxon could pay out of the petty cash annual party fund, but neither would it have a substantive negative effect on the company. This discrepancy (between the value of the award and the value and profits of Exxon) has only increased with time.
As Brian O'Neill, the plaintiff lead attorney said shortly after the initial verdict::
"With a company as large as Exxon that thinks it is above the law, you need to take a substantial bite out of their butt before they will change their behavior. We want to change Exxon. We want to make the Exxons of the world aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. It is really a great day. It took five years to bring it about, but we got there."
Indeed, all that was true and for the first time in five years in some of the economically devastated towns and villages, it was the first day of sunshine in half a decade. Despite all the suffering, the loss of culture, the loss of livelihood, the psychic pain that could never be healed ... it was a large enough verdict that there was sunshine and some smiles again. Even though the award was fairly small in terms of the size of award compared to size of company that would be required for "punishment", Exxon was so huge that, in absolute terms, this was a tremendous award; it would arguably be the second highest sustained jury award on record.
There was only one little problem. The award was not sustained.
In a display of corporate arrogance unmatched in modern times (well, perhaps, other than Enron giving top management huge bonuses just before closing their doors), Exxon vowed that as a matter of principle, and because it thought that people should be grateful to it (for all the work it did cleaning up the spill) instead of suing it, it would make sure the fishermen and other plaintiffs never received anything anywhere close to an award of that magnitude.
Exxon succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and beyond the wildest nightmares of the plaintiffs and their attorneys. They made certain that the lesson for all to see was NOT that "the Exxons of the world were made aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible". Instead, Exxon set out to prove, and ultimately did so with resounding success that the Exxons of the world are NOT responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. They boldly and "in your face" demonstrated that O'Neill was absolutely correct in saying that Exxon believed that were above the law ... and they successfully proved that, indeed, they were.
There is an old African proverb that says: "When elephants play, the grass gets trampled." You have to give O'Neill and his firm credit though. They stuck with us the whole time and fought tooth and nail every inch of the way. It is a tragically sad commentary on our system that even with powerful law firms on our side, that we didn't manage to rise much above the level of the grass. The elephants in the world have gotten so big that there is almost nothing able to control them. They've been paying lobbyists for so long (and as we have been discovering in Alaska, the Big Oil boys have been cutting out the middle man when convenient and paying the legislators directly) that they managed, by the back door, to pack the courts as well.
At most ... we got up off the ground by sheer brute force and transformed ourselves from grass to mosquitoes.
We buzzed around them. We even bit them. But ultimately we had about as much effect as one would expect a mosquito to have in dealings with an elephant. We were naive. All of us, including the Federal District Court Judge Holland who maintained his honor by telling the 9th circuit to shove it when they ordered him to knock the punitives down. Our hot-shot lawyers were naive. The fishermen were naive. "Oh, come on ... the United States Supreme Court is not goin
g to take a drunk driving case!" Unless, that is, you have a Court that has been picked as they rose through the system by litmus test on such things as "tort reform", which is phony lingo for "taking away rights guaranteed by the U.S. Consitution but not admitting to it". 20 years of naivete. Even more than the money (and that is saying a fair bit), I think all of us on the side of right, truth and justice are more upset by a 20 year spanking than anything else. We are embarrassed that we actually believed our "judicial system" was in the business of dispensing justice. Even I fell for it and I had a Superior Court judge tell me once to always remember that the courts are in the business of judgments; not justice.
And that there was a huge difference between the two.
Which is something we have all now (even the most stubborn of us) finally learned.
Harken back to Brian O'Neills' statement following the verdict, above. This is what he said after the Supremes gutted it:
"I feel bad for all the claimants, that they're not going to get enough money to put together their lives again. I feel bad for all the claimants because they're not going to get the satisfaction knowing that there was a just punishment administered to Exxon. And I feel bad for all of the claimants because the judicial system has let them down. It just isn't fair."
Part 4 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 3
-AKA-
Being Exxon Means You Never Have To Say You're Sorry
Oil ... $$$$$$$ ... Black Gold!
The centerpiece of international politics, wars and economics. A sizable portion of the world's population believes we are at war in Iraq because of it. A song that I quite enjoyed when there was a small handful of us loudly proclaiming that we would be nuts to go to war with Iraq; one that I copied and passed out freely before George W's "shock and awe", was entitled "How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?".
We have it (oil ... we're a little light on the sand). Indeed, we have so much of it we can apparently afford to dump it in the ocean.
In the minds of most people when they think of oil, they envision the stuff they pour into their car engines. And, of course they are correct. That is refined motor oil. But crude oil, the unrefined hydrocarbon gunk that is pumped out of the ground and, at one time was attributed to decayed dinosaurs, is not something you'd want in your car. Nor in your boat. Nor in your fishing pots or nets. And most certainly not in the seafood meal at the fancy restaurant.
Nor is all oil the same; not even all crude oil. The oil that Captain Hazelwood and Exxon decided to return to nature had made a remarkable journey even before it so abruptly ended.
The oil had arrived in the port of Valdez after being pumped from deep, deep wells nearly a thousand miles to the north in Alaska's North Slope Prudhoe Bay fields and travelling completely across the state (which is the most difficult, by far, of all states to travel across) via one of the world's engineering and construction marvels: the Alaska pipeline. The Port of Valdez is a deep water port, ice free (by Alaskan terms) year round, and able to handle the giant oil tankers that transported the Black Gold to the energy starved world.
Alaskan oil [somehow appropriately] is heavy, tarry stuff that requires [like many Alaskans :-)] a lot more "refining" than most. It is not the clean "sweet" oil found in backyard wells in Texas. Nor is it the stuff that Jed Clampett could find bubbling up in his backyard woodlot. Our oil is thousands of feet below the surface and for whatever reason, largely decided to locate itself in some of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Alaska's North Slope holds vast reserves of oil. As anyone who has followed the news at any time in the last few decades knows, there is a terrific and ongoing battle regarding extraction from the ANWR portion of the North Slope between the Luddites who hide behind the much cooler sounding title "environmentalists" on one side and Sarah's "drill, baby, drill" contingent on the other. This topic deserves vastly more in-depth treatment than I can give it here, but may well be a follow-on column since oil is such a "hot" topic these days in any event.
I personally am in no hurry. Even if alternative energy forms were found and oil was essentially replaced as a fuel, it has sufficient other uses that it will always remain of high value. I'd just as soon leave it in the ground as a bank account for my grandchildren. My objections however have nothing to do with environmental concerns. There are none remaining of note. That is simply a phony excuse by the Luddites. The existing oil operations in the North Slope have had no negative environmental impact. The caribou and other wildlife seems quite attracted to the spectacle (face it ... they are bored with thousands of miles of featureless tundra as their lifetime view) and it has not had any negative effects on the environment whatsoever.
No ... the only time our Alaskan crude oil has harmed the environment was when a drunk sea captain decided to see if his boat was tougher than the rocks of Bligh Reef [it wasn't].
And that harm to the environment was real. It wasn't the "pretend harm" that the greenies use to scare people into opposing drilling. This was real harm. And it not only harmed the environment dramatically (twenty years later and it still hasn't recovered ... biological processes operate much more slowly in this cold climate), but it harmed, even more dramatically, the people who made their living off that environment. And those who made their living off the people who made their living off of the environment.
For those of you just joining us, the brief synopsis is that a drunken Captain (who Exxon had put through alcoholic rehab previously and absolutely knew that he had relapsed badly; indeed he couldn't legally drive even a car - his license was suspended for his third DUI since the rehab only a few years before the accident) was given command of a massive oil tanker and, without bothering to tell anyone, apparently tried to slip through a channel where no oil tanker belonged. And then, he and his bottle went down to his stateroom to do "paperwork" while leaving control of the vessel in the hands of a third mate who was not certified to run the tanker in Prince William Sound (PWS), although he was in the open ocean. For reasons that will never be known, it didn't make it. It appears that when they first scraped the reef a drunken Hazelwood staggered into the wheelhouse and screamed "hard right". Unfortunately he was drunk (and perhaps dyslexic?). If he'd yelled "hard left" we may never have heard of the Exxon Valdez.
As it was, it (in the Captain's inimitable slurred radio report) "fetched up" on the reef and was apparently leaking some ... cargo. That "hard right" caused unfathomable destruction of wildlife and pristine habitat. The spill killed an estimated 350,000 to 390,000 seabirds, in addition to 3,500 to 5,500 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs (along with countless other flora and fauna).
It also caused unfathomable loss and damage to those who lived there and were "married" to the land, the sea, and its abundant resources.
This happened in 1989.
No, I didn't mistype. My fingers didn't slip. I didn't get confused. It truly has taken nearly 20 years to pry any money out of them.
Let me give you a move visceral feeling for how long ago Exxon oiled us and then postponed the day of reckoning. In 1989, we had the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. On June 3 of that year, we also had the Tiananmen Square Massacure. Seems we've had several Chinese governments and entire major philosophy changes since then! :-)
The world moves right along unless you are Exxon with your foot on the brake.
Indeed, Alaska has only been a State for 50 years! For 20 of those we've been living with the never-ending saga of the Exxon Valdez.
In 1989, on November 9 ... the Berlin Wall fell. "No", you say, "that couldn't be! That was more like half a century ago." Well, the Exxon spill was 1/5 of a century ago. But yes ... before such major changes in the world ... the Exxon Valdez had already attempted to cut a new channel through Bligh reef.
In 1989, gasoline was $1.29 a gallon. The mimimum wage was $3.35. A dozen eggs were 96 cents; a loaf of bread, 69 cents! Oh and before serious competion with the internet which should have lowered it's price (!), the cost of a first class stamp was $.25!
It seems like it was a different age, a different era. And it was! Exxon managed to delay through the passing of years, decades, a century and a millenium. It is difficult to believe that the Supreme Court of 1989 (or 1994) would have sliced and diced the exemplary damages award so viciously. [Truefully, even though I understand that this Court is the most conservative in a very long time ... I still find it difficult to believe that even they would do ... what they did!]
Exxon is so big and so powerful and so unbelievably arrogant that they were able to "leverage" that power to keep the money out of the hands of the fishermen for all this time ... and Exxon has now succeeded in keeping most of the money out of the hands of the fishermen forever.
"The check's in the mail."
Exxon claimants [as all the prevailing plaintiffs in the Exxon-Valdez lawsuit are called] have been waiting nearly 20 years to hear those words; nearly 15 years since the jury verdict awarding us, in addition to modest compensatory damages, a $5 billion punitive damage award.
But, the checks aren't for anything close to that. Actually, ignoring interest [as Exxon still hopes to be able to do] and many other variables, we are roughly a decimal point off. In other words, if your share, according to the only people legally qualified to know and therefore to decide; the jurors, was say $100,000, then your "check" would be for ~$10,000. If the jury [and convoluted formulas that were subsequently applied] said your claim was worth $10,000, then your check is for ~$1,000.
And for this we waited 20 years?
Actually, the checks aren't in the mail yet. Presumably they will be soon.
The folks that will be receiving money in this first "round" are those claimants who had no issues of any sorts attached to their claims [eg: judgments against them, IRS liens, child support liens, probate issues (since so many of our original claimants have died), assignments (so many people were so broke they were forced to sell part or all of their Exxon claim to speculators for a small percentage of its worth. Of course, they may look like geniuses now ... , or other]; and had gone through all the stacks of paperwork properly and along the way filled out the proper forms to have the Claims Administrator [the law firm of Keller Rohrback] directly deposit the funds to their bank accounts.
But given the history of this situation, that's really close to "the check's are in the mail".
In 1994 a major trial was held in federal court with approximately 32,000 plaintiffs and a jury, who by all accounts took their job very seriously. After four weeks of testimony and argument and four days of significant deliberation and balancing Exxon's claim that they didn't deserve to be punished any further, primarily because of all the money they had already spent cleaning up their mess, against the reality of what happened, the jury concluded that Exxon needed to both finish reimbursing the actual "out of pocket or never in pocket" type losses (compensatory damages) which was never much at issue. It also made the finding of primary importance that Hazelwood AND Exxon were reckless (ie: "grossly negligent"). Although this point seemed unassailable and crystal clear to everyone but Exxon, it was so dear and the attorneys had fought so long and so hard to get to that point that the lead plaintiff attorney actually had tears when the announcement was made. He had done it.
The finding meant that Exxon was liable for punitive damages and, given the size of the company it was expected that they would be "significant" [the relevant standard being focused on company size and income since the purpose is "punishment" and an award of $10,000 might punish a small mom and pop, but wouldn't be noticeable to Exxon]. Generic formulations yielded nearly absurd results because Exxon was SO huge and profitable that in order for it to "feel" the punitive damages award, the number would have to be staggering.
If one wishes to swat a two year old child for doing something he shouldn't have, it doesn't take much to accomplish that goal. If you swat an elephant with the same force and power ... it would notice you no more than it would a mosquito. In fact, it would probably be more bothered by a mosquito.
Exxon was, and Exxon-Mobil is, an elephant compared even to other elephants.
Instead of shooting for an absurd number that would actually be fitting under the circumstances, plaintiff counsel determined to ask for something that, given Exxon's size, was clearly reasonable and, therefore, presumably appeal-proof. They asked for fifteen billion. The jury gave them five. This was far less than the purpose of punitive damages would dictate as it was but a small percentage of Exxon's annual profits and a pittance compared to Exxon's overall value. It may not have been something that Exxon could pay out of the petty cash annual party fund, but neither would it have a substantive negative effect on the company. This discrepancy (between the value of the award and the value and profits of Exxon) has only increased with time.
As Brian O'Neill, the plaintiff lead attorney said shortly after the initial verdict::
"With a company as large as Exxon that thinks it is above the law, you need to take a substantial bite out of their butt before they will change their behavior. We want to change Exxon. We want to make the Exxons of the world aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. It is really a great day. It took five years to bring it about, but we got there."
Indeed, all that was true and for the first time in five years in some of the economically devastated towns and villages, it was the first day of sunshine in half a decade. Despite all the suffering, the loss of culture, the loss of livelihood, the psychic pain that could never be healed ... it was a large enough verdict that there was sunshine and some smiles again. Even though the award was fairly small in terms of the size of award compared to size of company that would be required for "punishment", Exxon was so huge that, in absolute terms, this was a tremendous award; it would arguably be the second highest sustained jury award on record.
There was only one little problem. The award was not sustained.
In a display of corporate arrogance unmatched in modern times (well, perhaps, other than Enron giving top management huge bonuses just before closing their doors), Exxon vowed that as a matter of principle, and because it thought that people should be grateful to it (for all the work it did cleaning up the spill) instead of suing it, it would make sure the fishermen and other plaintiffs never received anything anywhere close to an award of that magnitude.
Exxon succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and beyond the wildest nightmares of the plaintiffs and their attorneys. They made certain that the lesson for all to see was NOT that "the Exxons of the world were made aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible". Instead, Exxon set out to prove, and ultimately did so with resounding success that the Exxons of the world are NOT responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. They boldly and "in your face" demonstrated that O'Neill was absolutely correct in saying that Exxon believed that were above the law ... and they successfully proved that, indeed, they were.
There is an old African proverb that says: "When elephants play, the grass gets trampled." You have to give O'Neill and his firm credit though. They stuck with us the whole time and fought tooth and nail every inch of the way. It is a tragically sad commentary on our system that even with powerful law firms on our side, that we didn't manage to rise much above the level of the grass. The elephants in the world have gotten so big that there is almost nothing able to control them. They've been paying lobbyists for so long (and as we have been discovering in Alaska, the Big Oil boys have been cutting out the middle man when convenient and paying the legislators directly) that they managed, by the back door, to pack the courts as well.
At most ... we got up off the ground by sheer brute force and transformed ourselves from grass to mosquitoes.
We buzzed around them. We even bit them. But ultimately we had about as much effect as one would expect a mosquito to have in dealings with an elephant. We were naive. All of us, including the Federal District Court Judge Holland who maintained his honor by telling the 9th circuit to shove it when they ordered him to knock the punitives down. Our hot-shot lawyers were naive. The fishermen were naive. "Oh, come on ... the United States Supreme Court is not goin
g to take a drunk driving case!" Unless, that is, you have a Court that has been picked as they rose through the system by litmus test on such things as "tort reform", which is phony lingo for "taking away rights guaranteed by the U.S. Consitution but not admitting to it". 20 years of naivete. Even more than the money (and that is saying a fair bit), I think all of us on the side of right, truth and justice are more upset by a 20 year spanking than anything else. We are embarrassed that we actually believed our "judicial system" was in the business of dispensing justice. Even I fell for it and I had a Superior Court judge tell me once to always remember that the courts are in the business of judgments; not justice. And that there was a huge difference between the two.
Which is something we have all now (even the most stubborn of us) finally learned.
Harken back to Brian O'Neills' statement following the verdict, above. This is what he said after the Supremes gutted it:
"I feel bad for all the claimants, that they're not going to get enough money to put together their lives again. I feel bad for all the claimants because they're not going to get the satisfaction knowing that there was a just punishment administered to Exxon. And I feel bad for all of the claimants because the judicial system has let them down. It just isn't fair."
Part 4 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
16.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 2
December 13, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 2
-AKA-
"The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez"
By: Captain Heavyfoot
[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot :-)]
The legend lives on from the fishers on down,
Of the Big Sound 'twas made in Prince William.
The ocean, it's said, was their butter and bread,
But oil tar on the sandwich just killed 'em.
Tanks topped with black crude, and with vodka home-brewed,
The famed Exxon-Valdez was quite loaded.
The Captain was too, yet silent his crew,
When they poured both the Captain and cargo aboard her.
Captain Hazelwood had been drinking at two separate bars or more prior to their scheduled departure. There
was sworn testimony that he had consumed at least five double-vodkas (enough to knock out anyone who wasn't an alcoholic). He didn't get even a breathalzyer test until 11 hours after the accident, but working backwards from the booze in his blood at that time they calculated that at the time of the accident he was three times the legal limit for driving a car.
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 2
-AKA-
"The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez"
By: Captain Heavyfoot
[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot :-)]
The legend lives on from the fishers on down,
Of the Big Sound 'twas made in Prince William.
The ocean, it's said, was their butter and bread,
But oil tar on the sandwich just killed 'em.
Tanks topped with black crude, and with vodka home-brewed,
The famed Exxon-Valdez was quite loaded.
The Captain was too, yet silent his crew,
When they poured both the Captain and cargo aboard her.
Captain Hazelwood had been drinking at two separate bars or more prior to their scheduled departure. There
was sworn testimony that he had consumed at least five double-vodkas (enough to knock out anyone who wasn't an alcoholic). He didn't get even a breathalzyer test until 11 hours after the accident, but working backwards from the booze in his blood at that time they calculated that at the time of the accident he was three times the legal limit for driving a car.Indeed, he wasn't licensed to drive a car ... his license had been suspended for (yet another) DUI. He had completed a rehab program three or four years before the accident and had wracked up three or four DUIs in that period of time! Not only were his superiors aware that he had badly relapsed, but they had actually been drinking with him not long before the accident!
In any event, shortly after the Exxon Valdez pulled away from the dock at 9:12 p.m. and having successfully passed through the Valdez Narrows, the master pilot who was specially hired for such tasks, left the ship. It was a beautiful evening on the water. The seas were calm, visibility was good and the ship had all the latest and most sophisticated of navigation equipment. The official story was that there were icebergs in the normal shipping lanes, so Captain Hazelwood instructed the man at the wheel to take the ship slightly outside the shipping lanes and around the ice. Experts agreed however that such story simply didn't hold together -- they were too far off course with too many ways, both through equipment and visual observation, to not be able to tell.
In fact, it was apparent that they weren't just skirting an iceberg or two, but indeed, whether to avoid icebergs or to make up lost time, or just to shorten the voyage, they almost certainly attempted to follow the old steamship passage and "shoot the gap" between Bligh Reef and Reef Island. This is an incredibly dangerous maneuver for a ship the size of an oil tanker. Authorities at the time likened it to flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, it can be done. Yes, it has been done before. But it is dangerous and absolutely not recommended nor approved. (There were rumors that for years tankers had snuck through there on occasion but no one had ever actually caught them at it. It was universally agreed, however, that such would be a stupid and dangerous maneuver.) Even so, at that point, Hazelwood then left the bridge in the control of a third mate and was down in his cabin "doing paperwork" through this trickiest part of the passage.
Neither Exxon nor Hazelwood ever admitted that was what they were attempting. The normal shipping lanes out there are extremely wide, deep and forgiving. Anyone could drive a tanker through that part of the journey. But they were over a mile and a half outside the shipping lanes and just barely missed the shortcut gap. Either they were horrendously screwed up (to be a mile and a half off course) which makes no sense, or that is exactly what they were trying.
The poor crewman left at the wheel didn't know what to do. Indeed Third Mate Gregory Cousins was not even certified to operate a ship in PWS and, indeed, it was flatly illegal for him to be at the wheel. (Of course it was also illegal for Hazelwood to be drunk!) It was widely reported at the time although such reports dropped out of sight quickly, that Hazelwood had put the ship on autopilot and instructed Cousins to contact him when they reached a certain point. Despite the fact that this was known as a treacherous area for large vessels; and that they were operating outside the normal shipping lanes, there were no guide boats or tugs and purportedly no one but a rudimentary computer was directing the massive ship. No one who wasn't there knows for sure what actually happened that night. There were also reports that a drunk Hazelwood had made his way back to the bridge and ordered a "hard right" when he should have ordered a "hard left". That isn't the official story either, but the micro-computer in the auto pilot was at least sober and probably would have been the preferred option to the drunk captain. Even so, "computer" is too fancy of a concept for it. The computer you are using to read this article is hundreds of times more intelligent.
If true, one of the largest a 211,500 ton, 988 foot long, fully loaded oil tanker was being controlled by a machine with the approximate I.Q. of a fancy toaster.
And it went crunch.
It shuddered to a halt, engines still running full bore driving it further into the "sandbar" as Exxon likes to call the rocks of the well-charted Bligh Reef that ripped the thin single hull like a sardine can. In the version of the story where he hadn't already made it to the bridge yelling "hard right", Hazelwood stumbled to the bridge, uttered a few choice words, and then tried "rocking" the huge vessel off the rocks by jamming it full throttle forward, full throttle reverse, as you might try to drive you car out of a mudhole. Unlike your car and the mudhole, however, these manuevers acted to rip the holes in the hull much wider and allow much more oil to escape than would have otherwise. Finally, after failing to dislodge it and after the crew inspected things, he slurred into the radio that they had "fetched up" on a reef and were "evidently leaking" some of their cargo.
Truer understatements were seldom more understated.
The "little bit" of "cargo" that leaked was nearly 11 million gallons of tarry black Alaskan crude oil. It fouled 1300 miles of mostly pristine Alaska shoreline and covered 11,000 square feet of ocean.
Although there is a minor error or two, this is an excellent dynamic one-page pictoral "overview" of PWS and the spill.
Part 3 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
23.11.08
Turkeys
November 21, 2008
Turkeys
I thought I had done enough about Sarah Palin for awhile. There are other important things to discuss! How the world, especially the Islamic world, is reacting to Obama's election. Another glance at the ridda (apostasy) issue. What Obama's proposed appointments tell about how he will actually govern. What his choice for Secretary of State will mean ...
Instead I'm doing yet another column on our famous/infamous Governor and the media. In fact, I'm afraid this isn't going to end the "theme" either. She is still top-level international news.
It is uncanny. Biden has been around and involved in critical national and international matters for over 36 years. Palin probably made the front page of a newspaper not published in Alaska for the first time less than four months ago. If you Google "Biden" you get 25,000,000 hits. Quite respectable! That's a lot of people talking about you! Google "Palin", however, and you get 95,000,000 hits! Let that number sink in. 95 MILLION hits! The latest estimate of the population of the United States according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 305,726,193. Of course this is comparing apples and oranges ... but there are nearly 1/3 as many "Google available and located" documents mentioning Palin as there are people in this country. For some reason that seems mind-boggling to me.
Nor is it because "Palin" is a more common name. Put the name in quotes and run "Sarah Palin" and you get 48,500,000 hits. "Joe Biden" only gets you 12,000,000. Even "Hillary Clinton" only gets 28,700,000 and she's "been around" in the public consciousness a bit longer than Sarah Palin has also.
Stories about her remain at the top of the national interest meter. Articles about her are cited at the top of nearly every "most popular story" list put out by the major news agencies.
Oh, the media still has a nasty streak that they can't seem to break when they get the opportunity to make fun of her. Like, for instance, the topic of this column: the nonsensical big "top news story" about Palin pardoning a turkey; a minor Thanksgiving ritual done by essentially all governors and presidents. Then she gave a short interview, apparently without realizing what else was in the camera viewfinder. During the video filming of the interview, workers in the background continued with the job at hand at a turkey farm shortly before Thanksgiving [duh]: butchering turkeys.
That is not a huge hook to build a story on ... and yet, it is currently (and has been for several days!) the number one story accessed through Huffington Post (and presumably near the top in interest of current news stories period!) At Huffington the story and video has 673,582 views and 5,416 comments. This blows all the "competition" out of the water. Not only the "real" and "serious" news stories ... but it even makes the silly "Obamas Expected to Have Sex In White House" story seem to be boring [91,912 views, 222 comments]! (The Obama article is actually hilarious ... especially the comments from people who don't understand that it is satire! But it is only 1/7th as popular as a boring interview of Palin at a turkey farm!)
I am beginning to understand that people (and cameras and media types) are addicted to all things Palin. But the video of a turkey pardon? Arianna [Huffington] even mentions it in her little front page editorial squib telling people to make sure not to miss it! And the comments are (largely) insanely obnoxious. Many of them call for Palin to please just go away and shut up. Ya know, if they wouldn't keep a' clicking on any news story about her and adding comments ... presumably she would! There were 49 other state Governors and a sitting U.S. President that (probably) all did the same traditional "turkey pardon". Yet not one, other than Sarah's, made the YouTube best-seller list. If people don't want to hear Sarah Palin then they should [get your crayons out so you can take notes] "stop listening"! Clearly, the turkeys weren't all behind Sarah.
"Help! Save me from myself! Stop showing news stories about Palin because I can't keep myself from watching them!" Even atrociously stupid ones like this.
Headline news: the turkey you eat for Thanksgiving was killed before you cooked it. I know this is a shock! [Well, unless it is a PETA tofu turkey :-) Are there such things? Actually, I'm sure there are given the rampant
idiocy that a rich free society engenders. Don't they have any sympathy for the poor tofus they keep killing? Heartless I tell you. We should start a "SAVE THE TOFU" campaign! We could run some video clips of masked ninja types sneaking up on baby tofus and smashing them with clubs until they die a slow and painful death!]
I just checked. It isn't just a bad joke (the tofu turkeys, not the baby tofu killers - that is a bad joke :-). But they really do make tofu "turkey". [Sigh.] It's called Tofurkey and PETA even has a website full of "oh so yummy" Thanksgiving recipes! Saints preserve us!
Doesn't anyone know that tofu is curdled, coagulated soy beans??? It is a perfectly reasonable thing to eat ... if you are starving and lost in the desert and there is nothing potentially edible for hundreds of miles ... and you've already eaten your belt. Under any other conditions it is pathetic. But I digress :-)
I think it is all ... Reagan's (?) fault. I can't remember if he was Governor of California when they decided to close down all the "establishments for the sanity deprived" [this is California we're talking about after all :-)] and send the crazy people out into the streets. This caused such things as sidewalk congestion on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and PETA.
Granted, Palin isn't as "ewwee" squeamish as this patriarchal society likes its women to be. [Grow up America!] Sorry, I, and probably most Alaskans, have difficulties with such elitist machismo - on the frontier a woman has value, she isn't just considered to be decoration.] Sarah kills and butchers moose and other animals. She commercially fishes and tromps around in boats full of dead and dying salmon.
[By strange coincidence one of the big positives for me about Hillary, (personally, not politically) was that she wasn't the squeamish type either. She worked a "slime line" in Alaska when she was younger ... w
hich consists of butchering salmon, some of which aren't quite dead, as they come past you at the salmon cannery on a conveyor belt.] Hillary noted that, armed with a rain coat, hip boots and a knife, the slime line job "was the best preparation ever for working in Washington"! But that's only because she has never field dressed a moose! :-)
So, sure, maybe some more "girlie" governor would have been grossed out. I suppose Sarah could take pointers and learn. Given that she learned to tear down, clean and reassemble a rifle in only a few minutes I'm sure she could manage this. But if you've butchered a moose, the idea that seeing a turkey "prepared" for the Thanksgiving table is objectionable is just silly. As is the reaction by all those who are grossed out by it (but can't keep themselves from watching it while ranting about it!)
Turkeys
I thought I had done enough about Sarah Palin for awhile. There are other important things to discuss! How the world, especially the Islamic world, is reacting to Obama's election. Another glance at the ridda (apostasy) issue. What Obama's proposed appointments tell about how he will actually govern. What his choice for Secretary of State will mean ...
Instead I'm doing yet another column on our famous/infamous Governor and the media. In fact, I'm afraid this isn't going to end the "theme" either. She is still top-level international news.
It is uncanny. Biden has been around and involved in critical national and international matters for over 36 years. Palin probably made the front page of a newspaper not published in Alaska for the first time less than four months ago. If you Google "Biden" you get 25,000,000 hits. Quite respectable! That's a lot of people talking about you! Google "Palin", however, and you get 95,000,000 hits! Let that number sink in. 95 MILLION hits! The latest estimate of the population of the United States according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 305,726,193. Of course this is comparing apples and oranges ... but there are nearly 1/3 as many "Google available and located" documents mentioning Palin as there are people in this country. For some reason that seems mind-boggling to me.
Nor is it because "Palin" is a more common name. Put the name in quotes and run "Sarah Palin" and you get 48,500,000 hits. "Joe Biden" only gets you 12,000,000. Even "Hillary Clinton" only gets 28,700,000 and she's "been around" in the public consciousness a bit longer than Sarah Palin has also.
Stories about her remain at the top of the national interest meter. Articles about her are cited at the top of nearly every "most popular story" list put out by the major news agencies.
Oh, the media still has a nasty streak that they can't seem to break when they get the opportunity to make fun of her. Like, for instance, the topic of this column: the nonsensical big "top news story" about Palin pardoning a turkey; a minor Thanksgiving ritual done by essentially all governors and presidents. Then she gave a short interview, apparently without realizing what else was in the camera viewfinder. During the video filming of the interview, workers in the background continued with the job at hand at a turkey farm shortly before Thanksgiving [duh]: butchering turkeys.
That is not a huge hook to build a story on ... and yet, it is currently (and has been for several days!) the number one story accessed through Huffington Post (and presumably near the top in interest of current news stories period!) At Huffington the story and video has 673,582 views and 5,416 comments. This blows all the "competition" out of the water. Not only the "real" and "serious" news stories ... but it even makes the silly "Obamas Expected to Have Sex In White House" story seem to be boring [91,912 views, 222 comments]! (The Obama article is actually hilarious ... especially the comments from people who don't understand that it is satire! But it is only 1/7th as popular as a boring interview of Palin at a turkey farm!)
I am beginning to understand that people (and cameras and media types) are addicted to all things Palin. But the video of a turkey pardon? Arianna [Huffington] even mentions it in her little front page editorial squib telling people to make sure not to miss it! And the comments are (largely) insanely obnoxious. Many of them call for Palin to please just go away and shut up. Ya know, if they wouldn't keep a' clicking on any news story about her and adding comments ... presumably she would! There were 49 other state Governors and a sitting U.S. President that (probably) all did the same traditional "turkey pardon". Yet not one, other than Sarah's, made the YouTube best-seller list. If people don't want to hear Sarah Palin then they should [get your crayons out so you can take notes] "stop listening"! Clearly, the turkeys weren't all behind Sarah.
"Help! Save me from myself! Stop showing news stories about Palin because I can't keep myself from watching them!" Even atrociously stupid ones like this.
Headline news: the turkey you eat for Thanksgiving was killed before you cooked it. I know this is a shock! [Well, unless it is a PETA tofu turkey :-) Are there such things? Actually, I'm sure there are given the rampantidiocy that a rich free society engenders. Don't they have any sympathy for the poor tofus they keep killing? Heartless I tell you. We should start a "SAVE THE TOFU" campaign! We could run some video clips of masked ninja types sneaking up on baby tofus and smashing them with clubs until they die a slow and painful death!]
I just checked. It isn't just a bad joke (the tofu turkeys, not the baby tofu killers - that is a bad joke :-). But they really do make tofu "turkey". [Sigh.] It's called Tofurkey and PETA even has a website full of "oh so yummy" Thanksgiving recipes! Saints preserve us!
Doesn't anyone know that tofu is curdled, coagulated soy beans??? It is a perfectly reasonable thing to eat ... if you are starving and lost in the desert and there is nothing potentially edible for hundreds of miles ... and you've already eaten your belt. Under any other conditions it is pathetic. But I digress :-)
I think it is all ... Reagan's (?) fault. I can't remember if he was Governor of California when they decided to close down all the "establishments for the sanity deprived" [this is California we're talking about after all :-)] and send the crazy people out into the streets. This caused such things as sidewalk congestion on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and PETA.
Granted, Palin isn't as "ewwee" squeamish as this patriarchal society likes its women to be. [Grow up America!] Sorry, I, and probably most Alaskans, have difficulties with such elitist machismo - on the frontier a woman has value, she isn't just considered to be decoration.] Sarah kills and butchers moose and other animals. She commercially fishes and tromps around in boats full of dead and dying salmon.
[By strange coincidence one of the big positives for me about Hillary, (personally, not politically) was that she wasn't the squeamish type either. She worked a "slime line" in Alaska when she was younger ... w
hich consists of butchering salmon, some of which aren't quite dead, as they come past you at the salmon cannery on a conveyor belt.] Hillary noted that, armed with a rain coat, hip boots and a knife, the slime line job "was the best preparation ever for working in Washington"! But that's only because she has never field dressed a moose! :-) So, sure, maybe some more "girlie" governor would have been grossed out. I suppose Sarah could take pointers and learn. Given that she learned to tear down, clean and reassemble a rifle in only a few minutes I'm sure she could manage this. But if you've butchered a moose, the idea that seeing a turkey "prepared" for the Thanksgiving table is objectionable is just silly. As is the reaction by all those who are grossed out by it (but can't keep themselves from watching it while ranting about it!)
I realize that there are turkeys involved here all right. I just can't decide who all they are.
But ~675,000 views just through Huffington of a turkey pardon? I'd say we probably could find at least a half a million of them in that viewer group.
All that attention. And it was probably the least important thing Sarah did that day! Pu-leese people! Get a life!
21.11.08
Time to Take Campaign Posters Down
November 19, 2008
Time to Take the Campaign Posters Down
Well, the last state finally reported results. Missouri went to McCain. Just barely, but that’s all it takes. McCain came out 3,632 votes ahead of Obama – out of more than 2.9 million cast! Too little, too late to do McCain much good but it was the first time since 1956 that Missouri didn’t "pick" the winner of the presidential race. It has been a strange election from every perspective!
And ... "Uncle Ted", the U.S. Senator that has represented this State for so long he had gained the title "Senator for life" ... lost. He was ahead in the vote count after the regular ballots were counted even after being found guilty for not noting some oil company "gifts" on his federal disclosure forms the week before the election. But we had a huge number of absentee and "other" ballots that were finally counted over the past few days and a "kid" [a 46 year old kid :-)] by the name of Mark Begich prevailed and today Senator Stevens conceded. Uncle Ted was so well known and so appreciated for all the loot he had brought home from the federal treasury that no one ever believed he would lose an election. But he did ... on his 85th birthday. He was likely the most important politician in Alaska’s history and much of what he did as a Senator (besides bringing home all the pork) shaped the State in many ways. Granted, I disagreed with much of what he did, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of it :-)
[I will, btw, be doing a future column on why the feds actually owe us vastly more than we’ve ever gotten from them. They flatly stole most of our (oil) wealth that they agreed by contract in the Statehood Compact was ours. But that will be a future column.]
So ... the elections are over. And I hate it when I still see campaign signs in people’s yards long after the election has passed, so I’ve taken mine down as well.
Besides, as thrilling as it was to have our Governor as a candidate for such a high office ... and the fact that her mistreatment by the press infuriated me ... she and I do disagree on much ideologically. [Which, however, despite the furor caused by the "stop her at any costs" national media ... she didn’t govern (that is past tense but I really don’t expect it to change) as a member of the flat earth society.] Indeed, her actual governance was not nearly as conservative as the campaign painted her. Frankly, she is a lot more tough minded and practical than she ever got credit for.
Although there are plenty of folks who disagree with me, I do believe ideology is important even if one appears to "transcend" it for practicality when necessary. And Sarah and I have some very basic, very different ideologies. I have spent a lot of time in this blog defending her against the phony attacks and simple lies about her told by the pressography during the election. To the extent that such continues, so shall I. But in areas where we disagree ... you’ll be hearing a lot more about those from me now that the election is over also!
I have not yet heard that Sarah has repudiated the claims that her beliefs include such things as the fact that evolution was divinely guided. I’ve also heard it claimed that she believes the world to be only 6,000 years old but that hardly fits with evolution, guided or not. Besides. Her father was a science teacher. Surely she knows better!
I do think highly of her, however, and this campaign has increased that admiration. I don’t know how anyone can take what she was put through. And her star is still in ascension! She continues to receive non-stop requests from the media, agents, producers ... she delivered a well-received (and well-covered) speech at the Republican Governors Association. She is more in-demand and the national ... indeed international ... spotlight is on her more strongly than it ever was when she was a mere vice presidential candidate! She has become a legitimate "star" in her own right.
The William Morris agency has called multiple times (and they only call stars :-). Barbara Walters wanted to make Palin one of her "10 most fascinating people" (and apparently she is still in contention for Walters' #1 Most Fascinating Person)! Interestingly, they have already announced that Tina Fey made the
list ... but poor Tina! After all the great stuff she's done (she is my second favorite female comedienne), she is now known as "Sarah Palin impersonator Tina Fey"! :-) Also see (one of her) fan sites: "Currently, Tina Fey is best known for her portrayal of the Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin".
Sarah has had offers to host talk shows, write books, and do countless interviews. She is finally free to do so ... and so she has been. She has done a tremendous job of turning her reputation as an intellectual lightweight into a solidly respected intelligent and resourceful person.
She is, (in the words of the McClatchy press no less!):
"A national political figure and one of the world’s most famous people."
Despite the desperate hope of many Democrats that she would run back to Alaska with her tail between her legs and disappear into an ice cave ... she is doing no such thing. And the Democrats who hoped so (and the Republicans to whom she is a potential competitor for national office someday) just don’t know this woman (as they clearly demonstrated during the campaign). She doesn’t put her tail between her legs. She is fearless. She took the best (worst) punches the national punditocracy could throw ... and she emerged stronger and vastly more respected than ever before.
They won’t succeed at pigeon-holing her with their caricatures of her in her next national venture. People will know her too well by then. They only got away with the phony portrait they painted because no one knew anything else, so they accepted the pablum the media fed them.
And she still emerged a star! One with a very bright political future. Is she the next Ronald Reagan? It could be. The resemblances are remarkable. The press tried to paint Reagan as a mental midget his first couple runs for national office as well. But it didn’t stick. He was known as the Teflon President because the people simply decided to ignore all the nastiness from the media about him ... even when they were right. They had cried "wolf" too often. They no longer had any credibility.
The same thing appears to be happening with Sarah Palin. As people discover who this woman really is ... they are learning to ignore what the press says about her. In their desperate attempt to ensure Obama's election, the press pulled out all stops in screaming "wolf" ... or, in her case "wolf killer" :-) But ultimately it is (and soon will be even more so) the press that lost credibility, not Sarah Palin.
She and Ronald Reagan both shared that ephemeral unlearnable "something" that people call charisma but which simply excites people and makes folks want to like them and want to please them. Obama has it. And Sarah Palin has it. Presidents Reagan and Kennedy had it. [Unfortunately, probably so did Hitler ... it doesn't inherently translate to "good" ... but it does tend to translate to "powerful".]
But it is a rare and potent gift. [I remember being in a room when Ronald Reagan walked in ... before he was President. The room was instantly and remarkably electrified. It was an amazing sensation and an fascinating thing to watch.] Sarah Palin is something special. And I’m not going to be bashful about recognizing and acknowledging that.
So ... the election signs are down. But we will, among many other topics, continue to follow the exploits of our Governor. And when I disagree with her (and I will!:-) I won’t be bashful about that either!
Time to Take the Campaign Posters Down
Well, the last state finally reported results. Missouri went to McCain. Just barely, but that’s all it takes. McCain came out 3,632 votes ahead of Obama – out of more than 2.9 million cast! Too little, too late to do McCain much good but it was the first time since 1956 that Missouri didn’t "pick" the winner of the presidential race. It has been a strange election from every perspective!
And ... "Uncle Ted", the U.S. Senator that has represented this State for so long he had gained the title "Senator for life" ... lost. He was ahead in the vote count after the regular ballots were counted even after being found guilty for not noting some oil company "gifts" on his federal disclosure forms the week before the election. But we had a huge number of absentee and "other" ballots that were finally counted over the past few days and a "kid" [a 46 year old kid :-)] by the name of Mark Begich prevailed and today Senator Stevens conceded. Uncle Ted was so well known and so appreciated for all the loot he had brought home from the federal treasury that no one ever believed he would lose an election. But he did ... on his 85th birthday. He was likely the most important politician in Alaska’s history and much of what he did as a Senator (besides bringing home all the pork) shaped the State in many ways. Granted, I disagreed with much of what he did, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of it :-)
[I will, btw, be doing a future column on why the feds actually owe us vastly more than we’ve ever gotten from them. They flatly stole most of our (oil) wealth that they agreed by contract in the Statehood Compact was ours. But that will be a future column.]
So ... the elections are over. And I hate it when I still see campaign signs in people’s yards long after the election has passed, so I’ve taken mine down as well.
Besides, as thrilling as it was to have our Governor as a candidate for such a high office ... and the fact that her mistreatment by the press infuriated me ... she and I do disagree on much ideologically. [Which, however, despite the furor caused by the "stop her at any costs" national media ... she didn’t govern (that is past tense but I really don’t expect it to change) as a member of the flat earth society.] Indeed, her actual governance was not nearly as conservative as the campaign painted her. Frankly, she is a lot more tough minded and practical than she ever got credit for.
Although there are plenty of folks who disagree with me, I do believe ideology is important even if one appears to "transcend" it for practicality when necessary. And Sarah and I have some very basic, very different ideologies. I have spent a lot of time in this blog defending her against the phony attacks and simple lies about her told by the pressography during the election. To the extent that such continues, so shall I. But in areas where we disagree ... you’ll be hearing a lot more about those from me now that the election is over also!
I have not yet heard that Sarah has repudiated the claims that her beliefs include such things as the fact that evolution was divinely guided. I’ve also heard it claimed that she believes the world to be only 6,000 years old but that hardly fits with evolution, guided or not. Besides. Her father was a science teacher. Surely she knows better!
I do think highly of her, however, and this campaign has increased that admiration. I don’t know how anyone can take what she was put through. And her star is still in ascension! She continues to receive non-stop requests from the media, agents, producers ... she delivered a well-received (and well-covered) speech at the Republican Governors Association. She is more in-demand and the national ... indeed international ... spotlight is on her more strongly than it ever was when she was a mere vice presidential candidate! She has become a legitimate "star" in her own right.
The William Morris agency has called multiple times (and they only call stars :-). Barbara Walters wanted to make Palin one of her "10 most fascinating people" (and apparently she is still in contention for Walters' #1 Most Fascinating Person)! Interestingly, they have already announced that Tina Fey made the
list ... but poor Tina! After all the great stuff she's done (she is my second favorite female comedienne), she is now known as "Sarah Palin impersonator Tina Fey"! :-) Also see (one of her) fan sites: "Currently, Tina Fey is best known for her portrayal of the Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin".
Sarah has had offers to host talk shows, write books, and do countless interviews. She is finally free to do so ... and so she has been. She has done a tremendous job of turning her reputation as an intellectual lightweight into a solidly respected intelligent and resourceful person.
She is, (in the words of the McClatchy press no less!):
"A national political figure and one of the world’s most famous people."
Despite the desperate hope of many Democrats that she would run back to Alaska with her tail between her legs and disappear into an ice cave ... she is doing no such thing. And the Democrats who hoped so (and the Republicans to whom she is a potential competitor for national office someday) just don’t know this woman (as they clearly demonstrated during the campaign). She doesn’t put her tail between her legs. She is fearless. She took the best (worst) punches the national punditocracy could throw ... and she emerged stronger and vastly more respected than ever before.
They won’t succeed at pigeon-holing her with their caricatures of her in her next national venture. People will know her too well by then. They only got away with the phony portrait they painted because no one knew anything else, so they accepted the pablum the media fed them.
And she still emerged a star! One with a very bright political future. Is she the next Ronald Reagan? It could be. The resemblances are remarkable. The press tried to paint Reagan as a mental midget his first couple runs for national office as well. But it didn’t stick. He was known as the Teflon President because the people simply decided to ignore all the nastiness from the media about him ... even when they were right. They had cried "wolf" too often. They no longer had any credibility.
The same thing appears to be happening with Sarah Palin. As people discover who this woman really is ... they are learning to ignore what the press says about her. In their desperate attempt to ensure Obama's election, the press pulled out all stops in screaming "wolf" ... or, in her case "wolf killer" :-) But ultimately it is (and soon will be even more so) the press that lost credibility, not Sarah Palin.
She and Ronald Reagan both shared that ephemeral unlearnable "something" that people call charisma but which simply excites people and makes folks want to like them and want to please them. Obama has it. And Sarah Palin has it. Presidents Reagan and Kennedy had it. [Unfortunately, probably so did Hitler ... it doesn't inherently translate to "good" ... but it does tend to translate to "powerful".]
But it is a rare and potent gift. [I remember being in a room when Ronald Reagan walked in ... before he was President. The room was instantly and remarkably electrified. It was an amazing sensation and an fascinating thing to watch.] Sarah Palin is something special. And I’m not going to be bashful about recognizing and acknowledging that.
So ... the election signs are down. But we will, among many other topics, continue to follow the exploits of our Governor. And when I disagree with her (and I will!:-) I won’t be bashful about that either!
18.11.08
A "Con"stitutional Question
November 16, 2008
A "Con" stitutional Question
Ok. We've had our election. The national media gave Obama his Rolls Royce ride to the white house. The people" (represented by a much larger percentage of street people bussed to the polls in the weeks before and during election day than had ever been seen in the past :-) have made him the "President-elect". (Republicans have little ability to counter this new form of electioneering except to work to stop all the early voting and make absentee voting much more difficult. It wouldn't stop the election day busing, but it would put an end to the huge numbers that get dragged to the polls in the weeks preceding an election. This is the Republicans only real solution since there are probably very few street people who would vote Republican unless for a specific quid pro quo and Republicans tend to get squeamish about outright vote buying.)
Being president-elect, however, is not a long term position. It is supposed to come to an end, according to the Constitution, on January 20 of the year following the election. But we have over two months left before the scheduled occasion.
So what happens if Obama is disqualified from holding the office before that date arrives? And, even more interestingly, what if the courts were to so determine after he is sworn in as President? I doubt that it will happen but this election has been so strange that nothing would surprise me. I think most people believe it is too late. All those lawsuits challenging his standing to be the U.S. President are generally thought to have gone "poof" with his election. But they didn't.
Interestingly the lawsuits have not been dismissed as frivolous either, which is the common response to the wing-nut lawsuits that pop up virtually unnoticed at other elections. In fact, despite the best attempts by the media to ignore them, the lawsuits have a pesky way of showing up and are not proving susceptible to being swept under the rug. I don't know if it is true or not since it is just an unverified comment, but at least someone apparently counted and says there are 17 cases in the Federal courts on this issue, two of which are currently before the Supreme Court. I assume there are "a bunch" in state courts as well seeking to stop certifications or whatever in the individual states.
Nor are these all nut-case lawsuits. Everyone has heard of the Phillip Berg lawsuit. It has been fairly well scoffed off the table by the mainstream media suggesting just that ... that it is just another nut-case action. Part of the problem with that argument is that Phillip Berg isn't your typical nut-case. Indeed he is the former Deputy Attorney General for Pennsylvania.
Although that is probably the most famous of the cases, perhaps the most fascinating and compelling case is the case brought in California by, among others, Ambassador Dr. Alan Keyes. Dr. Keyes (a PhD from Harvard is not one to be brushed off easily. He also overcomes the big problem that Phillip Berg has with his case is that the court is questioning his "standing" to bring the action. I think the court is hopelessly wrong on that. Any citizen of the United States has standing to bring a lawsuit alleging that a presidential candidate (or president-elect) does not qualify for the office.
However that is ultimately decided, Dr. Keyes does not face that problem. Perhaps fortuitously, he was on the ballot in California as a candidate for President running as the nominee of the American Independent Party. It would be difficult to imagine who would have standing if a citizen of the country who was competing with Obama for the election as President, does not.
You would think that Obama would stop trying to win all these law suits on procedural grounds and just wipe them out on the merits ... if indeed he is right on the merits. All he has to do is wipe out the "vault birth certificate" (the real one ... the kind you probably have to show to get a driver's license! Not that phony certificate of live birth that the experts are split on but that appears there is a good chance it is a forgery).
I have a hunch that Obama may not even have known where he was born until questions came up about it! It isn't like he remembers it. And things were such a whirlwind he probably didn't even take it all seriously when it started. But the wheels of justice grind slowly ... but they do grind away. But even though it isn't the kind of thing one is likely to remember, ignorance absolutely is no excuse.
I can see it, though. His Mom (who was a bit of a wild card anyway) wanted him to have U.S. citizenship as a "born in the U.S.A. type, not as a "naturalized by moving here so young" type, so claimed he was born in Hawaii and told him that. His Grandmother said he was born in Kenya. She certainly had nothing to gain by saying that. Only the vaulted certificate knows for sure. And by now, probably Obama. Or he would have produced it. He was recently in Hawaii for his Grandmother's funeral [no, I'm not enough of a wing-nut to go there :-)]. But I bet he checked the certificate while there. And instead of producing it as he has been court ordered to do and which would make all the lawsuits go "poof" ... he fights them on procedural grounds and keeps the birth certificate in the vault.
A "Con" stitutional Question
Ok. We've had our election. The national media gave Obama his Rolls Royce ride to the white house. The people" (represented by a much larger percentage of street people bussed to the polls in the weeks before and during election day than had ever been seen in the past :-) have made him the "President-elect". (Republicans have little ability to counter this new form of electioneering except to work to stop all the early voting and make absentee voting much more difficult. It wouldn't stop the election day busing, but it would put an end to the huge numbers that get dragged to the polls in the weeks preceding an election. This is the Republicans only real solution since there are probably very few street people who would vote Republican unless for a specific quid pro quo and Republicans tend to get squeamish about outright vote buying.)Being president-elect, however, is not a long term position. It is supposed to come to an end, according to the Constitution, on January 20 of the year following the election. But we have over two months left before the scheduled occasion.
So what happens if Obama is disqualified from holding the office before that date arrives? And, even more interestingly, what if the courts were to so determine after he is sworn in as President? I doubt that it will happen but this election has been so strange that nothing would surprise me. I think most people believe it is too late. All those lawsuits challenging his standing to be the U.S. President are generally thought to have gone "poof" with his election. But they didn't.
Interestingly the lawsuits have not been dismissed as frivolous either, which is the common response to the wing-nut lawsuits that pop up virtually unnoticed at other elections. In fact, despite the best attempts by the media to ignore them, the lawsuits have a pesky way of showing up and are not proving susceptible to being swept under the rug. I don't know if it is true or not since it is just an unverified comment, but at least someone apparently counted and says there are 17 cases in the Federal courts on this issue, two of which are currently before the Supreme Court. I assume there are "a bunch" in state courts as well seeking to stop certifications or whatever in the individual states.
Nor are these all nut-case lawsuits. Everyone has heard of the Phillip Berg lawsuit. It has been fairly well scoffed off the table by the mainstream media suggesting just that ... that it is just another nut-case action. Part of the problem with that argument is that Phillip Berg isn't your typical nut-case. Indeed he is the former Deputy Attorney General for Pennsylvania.
Although that is probably the most famous of the cases, perhaps the most fascinating and compelling case is the case brought in California by, among others, Ambassador Dr. Alan Keyes. Dr. Keyes (a PhD from Harvard is not one to be brushed off easily. He also overcomes the big problem that Phillip Berg has with his case is that the court is questioning his "standing" to bring the action. I think the court is hopelessly wrong on that. Any citizen of the United States has standing to bring a lawsuit alleging that a presidential candidate (or president-elect) does not qualify for the office.
However that is ultimately decided, Dr. Keyes does not face that problem. Perhaps fortuitously, he was on the ballot in California as a candidate for President running as the nominee of the American Independent Party. It would be difficult to imagine who would have standing if a citizen of the country who was competing with Obama for the election as President, does not.
You would think that Obama would stop trying to win all these law suits on procedural grounds and just wipe them out on the merits ... if indeed he is right on the merits. All he has to do is wipe out the "vault birth certificate" (the real one ... the kind you probably have to show to get a driver's license! Not that phony certificate of live birth that the experts are split on but that appears there is a good chance it is a forgery).
I have a hunch that Obama may not even have known where he was born until questions came up about it! It isn't like he remembers it. And things were such a whirlwind he probably didn't even take it all seriously when it started. But the wheels of justice grind slowly ... but they do grind away. But even though it isn't the kind of thing one is likely to remember, ignorance absolutely is no excuse.
I can see it, though. His Mom (who was a bit of a wild card anyway) wanted him to have U.S. citizenship as a "born in the U.S.A. type, not as a "naturalized by moving here so young" type, so claimed he was born in Hawaii and told him that. His Grandmother said he was born in Kenya. She certainly had nothing to gain by saying that. Only the vaulted certificate knows for sure. And by now, probably Obama. Or he would have produced it. He was recently in Hawaii for his Grandmother's funeral [no, I'm not enough of a wing-nut to go there :-)]. But I bet he checked the certificate while there. And instead of producing it as he has been court ordered to do and which would make all the lawsuits go "poof" ... he fights them on procedural grounds and keeps the birth certificate in the vault.
But the "no standing" argument presumably won't work against Dr. Keyes. Nor will the 
screams of racism by his proxies. The fact that Dr. Keyes is a nationally syndicated columnist and a black man who stands about 6' 7" adds a bit to the drama. He has also held substantive governmental positions, particularly in the Reagan administration. And he was on the ballot for President in California.
The interesting question really is whether the issue gets decided before or after January 20. He can't very well pardon himself if he is not the real president (which he wouldn't be if he was not constitutionally qualified to hold the office). He would be, in the words of the Keyes' suit ... a usurper to the office. I don't know what the punishments are. Is it treason? Would the U.S. be after him just as all the Islamic world will be because he is an apostate?
He is forming an army to answer solely to him ... do you suppose he'll put up resistance if the courts order him to get the *%&#$)% out of the President's chair? :-)
But here's the thing. I don't know if Keyes or Berg has thought through. Clearly, if he is found to be ineligible before being sworn in, he gets booted. The Constitution is clear on that. But what if it doesn't happen until after he is seated? Would Pelosi become VP?! :-) Nah. Even the Forefathers would have thought far enough ahead to save us from that! Presumably it would be the same result.
However ... I'm still not certain that Keyes and Berg and the others have thought this through sufficiently! Obama could take his platform and run comfortably in the Socialist party of most countries of Europe. But behind the rhetoric he has shown some surprisingly conservative thoughts. And there is nothing like "real life" to make one more conservative!
He is an unknown. Usually that is bad. Except this time we know who his replacement would be: Joe "no longer Biden his time". And we do know his record. I'm not so sure but what I'd rather take my chances with the unknown!
17.11.08
Fates Having Fun
November 13, 2008
The Fates are Having too much Fun!
Barack Hussein Obama. President-elect of the United States of America; a country that is fighting two wars each of which was primarily designed to "take out" an individual. In Afghanistan it was Osama, whose name is a tiny typo away from being the same as that of the president-elect. In Iraq, it was Hussein.
Is there a Barack running an Islamic country anywhere? If so, I'd be real nervous were I him :-)
Could the Fates have played a stranger trick? Not only is the name tie-in to our two wars beyond coincidental comprehension ... but in both wars we are fighting (radical) Muslims ... and the Islamic and Christian nations and religions have not been so close to falling back into the Crusades mentality since ... the Crusades?
It has, in any event, been a long time. Most Americans never thought of Islam in a negative fashion before Osama sent the planes into the buildings. Most Americans never thought of Islam at all. Or if they did, it was along the lines of "Isn't that the religion that the Cat Stevens dude adopted?" [It is. On Muharram, in 1398 by the Islamic calendar. Indeed his name now is Yusuf Islam. What most folks don't know is that he never was "Cat Stevens"; that was just a stage name. He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou.]
In any event, we are at war for all practical purposes, in two different countries and in a third sort of generic "War on Terror", with the radical arm of Islam. And we elect, for the first time in the history of the nation, a presidential candidate who has an extensive Muslim background.
Indeed, his Muslim background is another of those "hazy" areas surrounding the man. He acknowledges being born to a Muslim father and that his stepfather was also Muslim. It appears likely that he was enrolled as a Muslim at a child in the Muslim school he attended in Indonesia. I wrote one column on apostasy and will soon do a follow-up to that now that he is president-elect. But in any event, his "Muslim background" is the greatest of any U.S. President to date ... and likely greater than any serious presidential candidate in the past. And we elect someone with that background ... now?
This is beyond mind-boggling. The Fates have got to be rolling in the aisles ... of wherever it is the Fates hang out.
And yet this man not only stridently proclaims that he is Christian ... but he stained his reputation badly by being a member of such a radical Christian church (and it would have been much worse had not the press been giving him, in Bill Clinton's words, that Rolls Royce ride to the White House as noted in my last post). If the press had tackled Obama the way it did Palin ... you'd know every sermon that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever preached that could be taken negatively in any way.
But my point here is not to complain about the disparate press treatment. I've spent plenty of time in this blog doing that.
My point is that he joined the radical arm of his religion. He isn't just someone who grew up in a church and continued on in the religion he was raised in. He actively sought a place for his spiritual side and specifically selected this Church, which was more to him than just a "show up at Sunday, visit with the congregants, hear a bland sermon on doing good and believing, and maybe attend the annual potluck". This Church filled a deep hunger and he took it much more seriously spiritually than socially. "Obama was searching for an identity and a community, and he found both at Trinity. And he found a spiritual guide in Wright."
And Wright was radical! [He still is, but he has now retired.] Obama's continued association with (and pronounced affections for) him long after he reasonably should have rejected Wright and all that he stood for (assuming it was even defensible to have joined the Church in the first place) was faulted by even the most liberal of columnists. This man who Obama claimed was his "spiritual advisor" vehemently preached (to, ultimately, a huge audience) about how 9/11 was America's fault and how the U.S. was intentionally spreading the Aids virus. This man who married Obama and his wife said in one famous speech "God Damn America" at least three times. Yet Obama says it was this man's words that were the inspiration for his book "The Audacity of Hope"!
My point here is not to regurgitate that oft-repeated point that Obama's various "associations" have shown a remarkable lack of judgment. While that is clearly a true statement, my point was really to show that Obama, more than any prior president, is a member of the "radical fringe" of Christianity ... while we are fighting wars against the "radical fringe" of Islam.
It strains credulity that all these are coincidences. And yet, this is all acknowledged mainstream information. Those tending closer to the wing-nut position will tell you many more things too strange to be coincidence (including many apparently strange numerical synchronicities). I'll refrain from giving those print space here at the moment. But it all does make one wonder.
Is there something going on that none of us truly understand?
I am not a mystical nor religious person. But even I am tempted to research what the Bible says about the Anti-Christ! :-)
No. I very much doubt that Barack is the Anti-Christ. And I presume that the Fates are just having fun at our expense. But the more one ponders the impossibilities surrounding this election (imagine if, before you had heard of Barack Hussein Obama that such a person could be elected president at this time in our history). If you look at it in that context ... you will have to concede that the chances of it ever happening would be too silly to even consider.
It makes me more curious than anything. Is this truly God playing a joke on us? Could it be that these coincidences are just coincidences? Perhaps someday I'll manage to satisfy my curiosity about this most curious of elections. But somehow, I doubt it.
The Fates are Having too much Fun!
Barack Hussein Obama. President-elect of the United States of America; a country that is fighting two wars each of which was primarily designed to "take out" an individual. In Afghanistan it was Osama, whose name is a tiny typo away from being the same as that of the president-elect. In Iraq, it was Hussein.
Is there a Barack running an Islamic country anywhere? If so, I'd be real nervous were I him :-)
Could the Fates have played a stranger trick? Not only is the name tie-in to our two wars beyond coincidental comprehension ... but in both wars we are fighting (radical) Muslims ... and the Islamic and Christian nations and religions have not been so close to falling back into the Crusades mentality since ... the Crusades?
It has, in any event, been a long time. Most Americans never thought of Islam in a negative fashion before Osama sent the planes into the buildings. Most Americans never thought of Islam at all. Or if they did, it was along the lines of "Isn't that the religion that the Cat Stevens dude adopted?" [It is. On Muharram, in 1398 by the Islamic calendar. Indeed his name now is Yusuf Islam. What most folks don't know is that he never was "Cat Stevens"; that was just a stage name. He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou.]
In any event, we are at war for all practical purposes, in two different countries and in a third sort of generic "War on Terror", with the radical arm of Islam. And we elect, for the first time in the history of the nation, a presidential candidate who has an extensive Muslim background.
Indeed, his Muslim background is another of those "hazy" areas surrounding the man. He acknowledges being born to a Muslim father and that his stepfather was also Muslim. It appears likely that he was enrolled as a Muslim at a child in the Muslim school he attended in Indonesia. I wrote one column on apostasy and will soon do a follow-up to that now that he is president-elect. But in any event, his "Muslim background" is the greatest of any U.S. President to date ... and likely greater than any serious presidential candidate in the past. And we elect someone with that background ... now?
This is beyond mind-boggling. The Fates have got to be rolling in the aisles ... of wherever it is the Fates hang out.
And yet this man not only stridently proclaims that he is Christian ... but he stained his reputation badly by being a member of such a radical Christian church (and it would have been much worse had not the press been giving him, in Bill Clinton's words, that Rolls Royce ride to the White House as noted in my last post). If the press had tackled Obama the way it did Palin ... you'd know every sermon that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever preached that could be taken negatively in any way.
But my point here is not to complain about the disparate press treatment. I've spent plenty of time in this blog doing that.
My point is that he joined the radical arm of his religion. He isn't just someone who grew up in a church and continued on in the religion he was raised in. He actively sought a place for his spiritual side and specifically selected this Church, which was more to him than just a "show up at Sunday, visit with the congregants, hear a bland sermon on doing good and believing, and maybe attend the annual potluck". This Church filled a deep hunger and he took it much more seriously spiritually than socially. "Obama was searching for an identity and a community, and he found both at Trinity. And he found a spiritual guide in Wright."
And Wright was radical! [He still is, but he has now retired.] Obama's continued association with (and pronounced affections for) him long after he reasonably should have rejected Wright and all that he stood for (assuming it was even defensible to have joined the Church in the first place) was faulted by even the most liberal of columnists. This man who Obama claimed was his "spiritual advisor" vehemently preached (to, ultimately, a huge audience) about how 9/11 was America's fault and how the U.S. was intentionally spreading the Aids virus. This man who married Obama and his wife said in one famous speech "God Damn America" at least three times. Yet Obama says it was this man's words that were the inspiration for his book "The Audacity of Hope"!
My point here is not to regurgitate that oft-repeated point that Obama's various "associations" have shown a remarkable lack of judgment. While that is clearly a true statement, my point was really to show that Obama, more than any prior president, is a member of the "radical fringe" of Christianity ... while we are fighting wars against the "radical fringe" of Islam.
It strains credulity that all these are coincidences. And yet, this is all acknowledged mainstream information. Those tending closer to the wing-nut position will tell you many more things too strange to be coincidence (including many apparently strange numerical synchronicities). I'll refrain from giving those print space here at the moment. But it all does make one wonder.
Is there something going on that none of us truly understand?
I am not a mystical nor religious person. But even I am tempted to research what the Bible says about the Anti-Christ! :-)
No. I very much doubt that Barack is the Anti-Christ. And I presume that the Fates are just having fun at our expense. But the more one ponders the impossibilities surrounding this election (imagine if, before you had heard of Barack Hussein Obama that such a person could be elected president at this time in our history). If you look at it in that context ... you will have to concede that the chances of it ever happening would be too silly to even consider.
It makes me more curious than anything. Is this truly God playing a joke on us? Could it be that these coincidences are just coincidences? Perhaps someday I'll manage to satisfy my curiosity about this most curious of elections. But somehow, I doubt it.
10.11.08
Sarah Palin - A Star is ... Created
November 9, 2008
Sarah Palin - A Star is ... Created
Well, she has legs! No, no ... I'm referring to the continuing stories about Sarah Palin, not the beauty queen herself!
It isn't enough that the press, in Bill Clinton's own words [bottom of 9th paragraph], acted as Obama's "personal chauffeur" on the election trail, but they now seem determined to utterly destroy Sarah Palin and any potential political future she might have on the national stage.
The attacks continue in the pressosphere unabated. I think today Obama finally got more national press coverage than Governor Palin did ... but not by a whole lot.
I have been "consciously aware" of presidential elections since the Goldwater debacle of 1964 [well, semi-conscious for the first couple ... and for some really boring ones since]. But I remember the election of '64 very clearly. Even though age-wise, I was only a short distance into double figures, I was flabbergasted that the media could destroy someone so completely. I knew things about Goldwater that the media didn't know (nor do most people even today!) ... indeed, I knew things about the John Birch Society (which was the primary limb from which the media hung him), that the media didn't know! How could that be?
Obviously now that I'm old and cynical I realize that the media knew everything I did all along and simply lied on the theory that most people really didn't know and even if they did, perhaps they could be made to question their own knowledge. Those were different times and the media and "the people" had a different relationship. There were very few sources of news. Essentially there were three television stations and "local" newspapers. Oh, there were a few national newspapers out, but few "regular people" read them and they tended to be specialized and their readership similarly specialized. For example, although it has been published since 1889, to the best of my recollection I had never seen anyone reading the Wall Street Journal.
The press had inordinate power. As mentioned, there were very few options for obtaining national news back then and, perhaps vastly more critical, "the people" as a whole had not yet realized that the newspapers regularly and intentionally lied to us. We were taught in school that the news in newspapers was just that: news. Boring facts unadulterated by the personal opinions of the reporters or the political positions of the owners. All opinions were on the Editorial Page and were clearly marked as such. Oh, there were small muckraking newspapers whose single editor/owner/typesetter often broke such rules and let his opinions run rampant. But those were not considered "real newspapers" by "real journalists". Indeed, newspapers were held to such a high standard that they hired proofreaders to make absolutely certain that no error or typo or misspelling made it into print. And, indeed, few did.
But after the press had done their job and destroyed Goldwater's reputation and successfully elected Lyndon Johnson by a landslide ... they talked about ... Lyndon Johnson. They didn't talk much about Goldwater and they certainly didn't talk much about [you don't have a clue do you? :-)] his VP candidate, William Miller. I remember Johnson won that election by using the "old" Cold War and the "new" television to scare the public in the first example of true dirty"negative" advertising on national TV (such as the "daisy ad"that convinced people that Goldwater was a militaristic loose cannon and if he were elected we would be annihilated by Atom Bombs)!
Johnson ran as the peace candidate (and of course, immediately upon winning the election cranked up the Vietnam "situation" where we had "peacekeepers" and "advisers" into a full-blown war).
I do remember one somewhat famous mention of Goldwater in regards to the election that included an early "shot" at the media sometime afterwards: "They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd be in war in 6 months. Well, I did, and we are."
But I have never seen anything like the Palin phenomena. It suggests that either the left is remarkably scared of her and desperately want to destroy and bury her or that the right is fascinated and delighted and wants her to play on the national stage without being "held down" by a hopeless candidate (who, perhaps wisely, particularly after the national economic meltdown seemed to be working to lose the election). Or, most likely ... both factors are at work.
It is clear, however, despite the idiocies of the pundits in trying to "kill two birds with one stone", (and McCain's people trying to shift blame as effectively as possible) that McCain's loss was not due to Sarah Palin ... nor was his potentially psychologically throwing the election due to his remorse about putting someone "so unqualified" a heartbeat away from the presidency. (Although it certainly is possible that he didn't want to give any unhinged Palin backers ... and every candidate has them ... a reason to get rid of that heartbeat that was keeping her from the main office.) More plausible is that he realized that because of her, he might actually win! And that scared him more than being shot down by enemy aircraft!
Yet two things are happening that the "Hate(fear) Palin" crowd did not anticipate. First, the simple fact that they are continuing to berate and lampoon her keeps her in the national news and in the public's mind. They would be well served to remember the old saying: "I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right." There is a sense that if the liberal elites are still this concerned about her ... perhaps there are reasons why they should be.
So there is that sort of "obvious" backlash. If there had been any working brain cells left, the punditocracy would have instantly and immediately ignored Palin as though she had never existed. With no national press coverage she would have quickly "sunk back" into that distant Alaska pond from where she emerged. The pressography did Palin a huge favor ... one that they would not have had they been paying attention in class in Journalism 101 or remedial Psychology.
Yet, there is something else going on as well. Palin has been so viciously castigated by out-and-out lockstep lies ... lies that are patently obvious to those of us who knew a lot about Sarah Palin before most of the nation had ever heard of her. The witch-hunt has been so unrelenting and so intense, that it has spawned an entirely different sort of backlash: the good kind. People are obviously still fascinated with her. Many would like to believe better of her than the media does. And so we now have people who are going to tell the world the truth!
It is much more likely that Obama was born in Kenya than it is that Palin is a pawn of Big Oil, for instance. Yet because the press pooh-poohed the stories about Obama and, indeed, ripped anyone (including Sarah) who suggested that there was anything amiss that perhaps the press should look into, such stories never got traction.
Yet "everyone" seems to "know" that Sarah is a pawn of Big Oil who sold out her own state. This is ludicrous of course for any who know the facts ... but we are few and far between. However, the public's fascination and the media's refusal to let go of a bone that, had it any sense it would have spit out on election night, have led to what I believe may only be the beginning of a Palin resurgence. Presidency in 2012? It is not as crazy an idea as the elitists would have you think. Especially if people start learning the truth (and therefore start learning how badly they've been lied to)!
I haven't read this book yet. But it looks as if this is an example ... a first salvo as it were ... in the beginnings of the public redemption of Sarah Palin ... which will doubtlessly be helped along by the realization of how badly the punditocracy lied about her.
If so ... and considering the issues he faces, the unbelievable lack of experience, and the most socialistic agenda of any candidate in the nation's history ... President Obama may find himself badly beaten by a woman with lipstick and a great wink in 2012.
Sarah Palin - A Star is ... Created
Well, she has legs! No, no ... I'm referring to the continuing stories about Sarah Palin, not the beauty queen herself!
It isn't enough that the press, in Bill Clinton's own words [bottom of 9th paragraph], acted as Obama's "personal chauffeur" on the election trail, but they now seem determined to utterly destroy Sarah Palin and any potential political future she might have on the national stage.
The attacks continue in the pressosphere unabated. I think today Obama finally got more national press coverage than Governor Palin did ... but not by a whole lot.
I have been "consciously aware" of presidential elections since the Goldwater debacle of 1964 [well, semi-conscious for the first couple ... and for some really boring ones since]. But I remember the election of '64 very clearly. Even though age-wise, I was only a short distance into double figures, I was flabbergasted that the media could destroy someone so completely. I knew things about Goldwater that the media didn't know (nor do most people even today!) ... indeed, I knew things about the John Birch Society (which was the primary limb from which the media hung him), that the media didn't know! How could that be?
Obviously now that I'm old and cynical I realize that the media knew everything I did all along and simply lied on the theory that most people really didn't know and even if they did, perhaps they could be made to question their own knowledge. Those were different times and the media and "the people" had a different relationship. There were very few sources of news. Essentially there were three television stations and "local" newspapers. Oh, there were a few national newspapers out, but few "regular people" read them and they tended to be specialized and their readership similarly specialized. For example, although it has been published since 1889, to the best of my recollection I had never seen anyone reading the Wall Street Journal.
The press had inordinate power. As mentioned, there were very few options for obtaining national news back then and, perhaps vastly more critical, "the people" as a whole had not yet realized that the newspapers regularly and intentionally lied to us. We were taught in school that the news in newspapers was just that: news. Boring facts unadulterated by the personal opinions of the reporters or the political positions of the owners. All opinions were on the Editorial Page and were clearly marked as such. Oh, there were small muckraking newspapers whose single editor/owner/typesetter often broke such rules and let his opinions run rampant. But those were not considered "real newspapers" by "real journalists". Indeed, newspapers were held to such a high standard that they hired proofreaders to make absolutely certain that no error or typo or misspelling made it into print. And, indeed, few did.
But after the press had done their job and destroyed Goldwater's reputation and successfully elected Lyndon Johnson by a landslide ... they talked about ... Lyndon Johnson. They didn't talk much about Goldwater and they certainly didn't talk much about [you don't have a clue do you? :-)] his VP candidate, William Miller. I remember Johnson won that election by using the "old" Cold War and the "new" television to scare the public in the first example of true dirty"negative" advertising on national TV (such as the "daisy ad"that convinced people that Goldwater was a militaristic loose cannon and if he were elected we would be annihilated by Atom Bombs)!
Johnson ran as the peace candidate (and of course, immediately upon winning the election cranked up the Vietnam "situation" where we had "peacekeepers" and "advisers" into a full-blown war).
I do remember one somewhat famous mention of Goldwater in regards to the election that included an early "shot" at the media sometime afterwards: "They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd be in war in 6 months. Well, I did, and we are."
But I have never seen anything like the Palin phenomena. It suggests that either the left is remarkably scared of her and desperately want to destroy and bury her or that the right is fascinated and delighted and wants her to play on the national stage without being "held down" by a hopeless candidate (who, perhaps wisely, particularly after the national economic meltdown seemed to be working to lose the election). Or, most likely ... both factors are at work.
It is clear, however, despite the idiocies of the pundits in trying to "kill two birds with one stone", (and McCain's people trying to shift blame as effectively as possible) that McCain's loss was not due to Sarah Palin ... nor was his potentially psychologically throwing the election due to his remorse about putting someone "so unqualified" a heartbeat away from the presidency. (Although it certainly is possible that he didn't want to give any unhinged Palin backers ... and every candidate has them ... a reason to get rid of that heartbeat that was keeping her from the main office.) More plausible is that he realized that because of her, he might actually win! And that scared him more than being shot down by enemy aircraft!
Yet two things are happening that the "Hate(fear) Palin" crowd did not anticipate. First, the simple fact that they are continuing to berate and lampoon her keeps her in the national news and in the public's mind. They would be well served to remember the old saying: "I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right." There is a sense that if the liberal elites are still this concerned about her ... perhaps there are reasons why they should be.
So there is that sort of "obvious" backlash. If there had been any working brain cells left, the punditocracy would have instantly and immediately ignored Palin as though she had never existed. With no national press coverage she would have quickly "sunk back" into that distant Alaska pond from where she emerged. The pressography did Palin a huge favor ... one that they would not have had they been paying attention in class in Journalism 101 or remedial Psychology.
Yet, there is something else going on as well. Palin has been so viciously castigated by out-and-out lockstep lies ... lies that are patently obvious to those of us who knew a lot about Sarah Palin before most of the nation had ever heard of her. The witch-hunt has been so unrelenting and so intense, that it has spawned an entirely different sort of backlash: the good kind. People are obviously still fascinated with her. Many would like to believe better of her than the media does. And so we now have people who are going to tell the world the truth!
It is much more likely that Obama was born in Kenya than it is that Palin is a pawn of Big Oil, for instance. Yet because the press pooh-poohed the stories about Obama and, indeed, ripped anyone (including Sarah) who suggested that there was anything amiss that perhaps the press should look into, such stories never got traction.
Yet "everyone" seems to "know" that Sarah is a pawn of Big Oil who sold out her own state. This is ludicrous of course for any who know the facts ... but we are few and far between. However, the public's fascination and the media's refusal to let go of a bone that, had it any sense it would have spit out on election night, have led to what I believe may only be the beginning of a Palin resurgence. Presidency in 2012? It is not as crazy an idea as the elitists would have you think. Especially if people start learning the truth (and therefore start learning how badly they've been lied to)!
I haven't read this book yet. But it looks as if this is an example ... a first salvo as it were ... in the beginnings of the public redemption of Sarah Palin ... which will doubtlessly be helped along by the realization of how badly the punditocracy lied about her.
If so ... and considering the issues he faces, the unbelievable lack of experience, and the most socialistic agenda of any candidate in the nation's history ... President Obama may find himself badly beaten by a woman with lipstick and a great wink in 2012.
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