Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Warning signs

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Danger, danger, danger! Our country is in trouble, so let’s give George W Bush a big blank check — no strings, no accountability — so that he can make everything right again.

Blank check? America gave Bush a blank check after 9/11. So we ended up with government-sponsored torture and invasion of privacy on a massive scale. What we didn’t end up with was catching Osama Bin Laden.

Blank check? Congress gave Bush a blank check to go into Iraq if all else failed. Wow that was fast. How many of his cronies are multi-billionaires now on the fat profits they are making there on his watch? What we didn’t end up with was finding weapon of mass destruction.

Somebody is going to have to help clean up the mess that the unregulated excesses of Wall Street have made. But if we give Bush a blank check on that, who is to say that he’ll spend the money wisely? Who’s to say the next president won’t have to ask for another huge amount of money to get things fixed up?

Even Bush should agree, based on the old Texas saying, “Fool me, can’t get fooled again.” Any big bailout needs to have big strings attached.

Obama and Clinton: CNN Texas Debate Mashup

Originally uploaded by stevegarfield

Joe Biden said it. Hillary Clinton said it. And (I confess) Betsy Devine also thought it, back when the primaries were getting started. Who was this young guy with his groupy supporters, his visions of Red-and-Blue harmony? Wasn’t he just a naive dreamer who would quickly be crushed by Karl Rove and his cynical minions?

A supporter of John Edwards, I later trended toward Clinton, deeply annoyed by the Hillary-haters who found welcome instead of rebuke among Obama’s groupies.

But the big-eared guy with the funny name won me over. Making a long story short, he won me over completely, on March 18, with his “speech on race,” giving respect to divisive resentments, both black and white, even as he asserted his own call to unity.

What would it be like, I finally asked myself, to have a President who was thoughtful and empathetic and deeply intelligent. Somebody who stayed loyal to his big-mouthed pastor long after it would be expedient to have denounced him, but somebody who stuck up for what he himself believed in, even when what he believed was a complex reality, not poll-tested bullet points.

Predictably, McCain supporters will use people’s long-ago words to claim that Obama now is not ready to lead. I disagree, and so (I bet) do most of the people they’ll be deceptively quoting.

Poisoner eyes her victim

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

You already know to watch out for poisoned teacups, but what you should have been worrying about instead …

An internet-based team of “three people from the United States, three from the Ukraine, two from China, one from Estonia and one from Belarus” (says Reuters) stole credit card numbers by millions from US retailers, and sold them “… to people in the U.S. and Europe for thousands of dollars. The buyers then withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automated teller machines, officials said.” Even so, the chief conspirator’s lawyer sounds very confident that his client will never enter a jail cell.

After all…. the guy who made possible the NH 2002 election phone-jamming got his conviction overturned because the interstate denial-of-service attack on Democrats’ phones was not covered by Federal laws against phone “harassment.”

It’s hard for the laws against doing bad stuff to keep up with human innovation in stuff we can do. Maybe that’s how it should be.

But let’s hope the US Attorney’s office works smarter on identity theft cases than they chose to do in the matter of NH phone jamming.

John McCain Seattle

Originally uploaded by soggydan

A few months ago, the GOP gurus were upset, but now they are happy. How can they be happy? All their most Rovian candidates were shot down in the primaries by John McCain, who’s never been in their pockets.

The GOP gurus are happy because they feel confident that McCain can be pushed into a graceful exit before the convention. Having taken the (minimal) heat and (even less) scrutiny from press for a year of primary season, he will step aside for a candidate who will look clean, exciting, and new, swapping loser for winner.

Republicans have been thinking about how they could profit from the Torricelli model since 2004.

Who is the secret candidate we will be handed? Condoleezza Rice? Maybe, but more likely General Petraeus.

Dethroned St. Michael in Castel Sant’Angelo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

In 590 AD, the archangel Michael decided to sheath his sword and stop killing Romans with plague.

The expression on this statue by Raffaello da Montelupo (1504–1566) says so much. Immortal Michael can’t really understand why puny humans care so much about whether their lives end with plague or with some other horror.

I would like to see a new kind of Peace Corps created, even a short one, for politicians whose decisions shape people’s lives. Just for a week or two, I’d like these powerful guys to be assigned randomly to some not-prosperous neighborhood and given not quite enough money to meet all their needs.

Let them cope with public transportation and busted-up second-hand cars instead of a limousine, chauffeur, and police escort. Let them argue with tired emergency room personnel on behalf of a sick kid whose parents don’t have good insurance. Heck, let them stand in line to buy macaroni with food stamps.

I wish Democrats would move a little bit faster to shore up the American infrastructure of schools, streets, bridges, buses, and decent jobs that pay a decent wage to people who work hard–all things our parents took for granted but that the rich “archangels” of Team Bush have heartlessly plundered because none of these things mattered to their own lives and families.

It won’t be in bookstores for another week but that didn’t stop two “reviewers” last week from posting low-ball reviews on Amazon. The book is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, a colorful, profane, and surprisingly frank memoir of sleazy politics.

Media mentions of Allen Raymond’s book have mostly talked up his phone-jamming, for which his RNC pals threw him under the bus. The book details many stunts more colorful. Deceptive robocalls to Democrats from “scary black men” or “actors putting on thick Spanish accents” worked wonders at keeping them home on Election Day. Swapping soft money for hard–funneling GOP dollars to leftwing splinter candidates–engineering repeat contributions from donors who had already given their legal limit–Raymond names names and shows how each trick works.

Adam Cohen in the NYT says that this book may finally force Senate action on the long-delayed Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act. I hope it will.

I got an advance copy just a few days ago in response to my longtime phone-jamming blogging, and just posted my own review on Amazon too. It would be quite a job to track GOP lowballers around the two-way web but you may find it an interesting hobby. (On Barnes and Noble: “Pitiful and poorly written,” some prescient reviewer claimed on Christmas Day.)

Probably the biggest reason that GOP insiders want you not to read this book is not the rude first-person memories of Bush, Rove, Feather, Synhorst, et al. but the way showcases in-crowd contempt for their freeper supporters — “the Jesus-loves-guns crowd” — “the knuckle-draggers, the gunnies, and the committed ideologue nuts.” “The mouth-breathers who who decide GOP primaries might allow people to steal their money and send their children to impossible wars but they’ll cut no such slack for baby-killers.”

The book’s quite a read, and it could just make politics better.

According to the Washington Post, George W Bush did something different this year when he “met” with Nobel Prize winners.

He actually met with them, or at least with one of them. And that one he met with was the President-elect of the year 2000 (at least by popular vote), Peace Prize winner Al Gore.

It’s easy to let eyes get hazy over this photo–just imagining how the whole world would be different if Al Gore had become US President back in 2000 instead of George W. Bush–starting, maybe, with a President who paid attention to memos with titles like “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” Or at least a President

• more focused on Bin Laden than on Saddam Hussein
• with nobler priorities than cutting rich people’s taxes and killing Social Security
• whose patriotism cares more about our Bill of Rights and less about flag pins

But that’s not how it turned out, and doesn’t George Bush look delighted!

Take one former Republican rising star, whose years spent “pushing the envelope” on campaign tactics have left him cynical–and very ready to talk. Allen Raymond spent three months in prison for phone-jamming crimes, telling the Boston Globe later that Republicans were now so “ultra-aggressive” and “ruthless” that he feared saying no to RNC-bigwig James Tobin could shut his consulting firm out of future business.

Add one former Page-Six gossip-bigwig, Ian Spiegelman. Gawker printed (I won’t even quote it) the blistering letter that got him fired from the New York Post. He’s said to describe himself as a “revenge fetishist.”

Put them together and what you get might be a real page-turner–How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Coming out soon from Simon and Schuster.

More on this in Blue Hampshire. It’s quite a story

Mt. San Miguel continues to burn. San Diego wildfires.

Originally uploaded by slworking2

Good news for exhausted firefighters and refugee California residents–a change in the weather has now slowed the spread of the flames.

The LA Times says that back in 2004, a “Blue Ribbon Panel” said California firefighters needed some 150 new firetrucks, but as of 2007 only 19 new trucks had ever been ordered…and zero delivered. Risking their lives in Vietnam-era helicopters, because recommended replacements for those had also never been purchased, California firefighters deserve enormous gratitude…

…which should be expressed by giving them tools that they need to do the hard dangerous job that they are doing on our behalf. Are you listening, all you tax-cutting Republicans whose SUVs are spackled with bumper stickers saying how much you respect soldiers, firemen, and policemen?

In funnier news, there’s a spoof piece at Daily Kos with photos of FEMA marshmallow distribution and a Bush “fireside” photo-op.

“New leak shock,” says today’s Irish Independent.

Yesterday’s shock was a civil servant (male), who passed on private government data that got used for attempts at blackmail. Today’s story is a civil servant (female) who repeatedly accessed the files of prominent people–often just days before their “confidential” data showed up in newspaper reports about them.

According to the Independent, nine different newspaper stories revealed private details that this civil servant leaked to them from government files. She also “improperly accessed” the private files of many others.

Only by chance was this ongoing abuse discovered, while officials were investigating a separate matter. And the woman remained in her job for almost a year before offering her resignation and taking her departure.

If only the private data of Irish citizens were half as secure as the job of a civil servant “protecting” that data!