just act like you know what you are doing
Funny, poigniant, comic; oddly relevant story arc starts here:
http://minimumsecurity.net/blog/2007/10/10/excuse-me-senator/
Sarah Palin is going to be in Philly tomorrow, go make your point heard:
http://steph99.livejournal.com/66597.html
Filed under: Friday, Politics, webcomicI have discussed Get Your War On here before, but these new GWYO animations are side splitting!
All I’ve gotta do is stay focused (and stop wearing pants)!
If you are unfamiliar with this series, it might be better to start with this one.
Warning: All the GYWO stuff uses language that is not safe for sensitive ears.
Filed under: Funny, Politics, webcomicAden Nak is one of those bloggers that frustrate me.
He makes this kind of excellent point:
Well said, sir. This kind of thought provoking observation that I’d like to get all of my Republican neighbors and relatives to consider. But your impact is going to be drastically reduced because you’ve camped out so far on your own end of the debate that nobody on the other side of the aisle will even be able to hear your shrill but clever voice.
Why would you say, as if it were the damning evidence, your opinion of Sarah Palin that “She’s fucking dumb, okay?“ I mean, sure that’s probably the case but anyone who doesn’t already agree with you is going to write you off right there, click their back button, and never think about you again. You’ve gotten their attention and web traffic by creating a zeitgeisty flow chart
(why is this not already posted to graphjam, anyway?), and so you’re getting tons of hits. You’ve put together some excellent logic with your bullet point list of what we’ve learned from the Palin-Couric interview but it won’t reach the attention of those people who have yet to make up their minds. You’ve provoked one of the following in people that would be your target audience: anger, dread, frustration. Notably absent from that list is thought.
Now, this is all assuming you’re trying to make a difference. If you’re just ranting to rant well … Sorry, my mistake. Go on with your bad self. That’s one of the reasons to have a blog at all, I suppose.
But you haven’t made your message something I can send to my Granny or my mom. Or people like them in battleground states. I can’t send them a link to your post which says “Sarah Palin is a stupid, self important, ignorant bitch” in the second sentence. They won’t even get through the first paragraph! Maybe if you inverted the flow of your rant and lead the audience up to that idea you’d be more effective. But please, please make yourself relevant. Entertaining those people “a-carryin’ signs mostly say hoo-ray for our side” isn’t what is needed at this moment. We need some collateral for everybody who is putting their effort into making the great schlep … especially those of us who can only schlep virtually.
I hope that you have not squandered your genius in the moment of relevance, your fifteen seconds of fame. You obviously know what you’re doing or you wouldn’t have put your URL in the image that is going viral at this very moment. Emotions are certainly running high right now and keeping them in check is going to be important if this unusually important election is going to mark an improvement in the world or … well, or worse.
Filed under: Politics, The InternetSo, let’s start with this:Â I’m not inclined to base my politics or purchasing decisions on what a famous actor might say just because they are a famous actor.
But Matt Damon, in this case, has it right. The situation is absurd. Sara Palin might have the requisite skill set to be a hockey mom or a small town mayor or possibly even to be governor of the 47th largest state (or maybe not). So far in her campaign he has not demonstrated, well, anything except fashion sense, nice legs, and the capacity to follow the orders of the Republican puppet-masters.  And the McCain campaign has proven nothing but recklessness in selecting her to be the vice presidential candidate.
And the dinosaur thing, well … I’ve concluded that this is just Matt Damon being witty. I can’t find anything that indicates Sara Palin made any kind of statement about believing that dinosaurs lived 4,000 years ago.  But if she did, I too need to know about it.
Thanks for pointing this out, Jess.
Filed under: PoliticsI’m not much of a “sportsman.” I don’t hunt. I respect the rights of people who do (responsibly), and I think that responsible management of natural resources includes some measure of culling.
However, I’m not at all cool with irresponsible use of natural resources. I expect that for some people, hunting wolves and bears could be really fun. Presumably those are people who really enjoy a bear-meat sandwich or wolf steak. And I support the right of those people to do so. This country is big enough to set aside large areas of land where that can take place.
Somewhere in the realm of responsible management of natural resources, it becomes necessary to kill a few top predators to keep an ecosystem in balance. With that in mind, and in consideration of the fact that there are relatively few people to manage some very large swaths of land, aerial hunting might be useful. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Federal law allows.
But this is not, in my mind, hunting by any sporting definition. A hunter is already at a substantial advantage because they are using a gun. Chasing from the air also makes a hunter faster and from that angle the animals have no ability to hide. And without firing a shot you could chase an animal around for a little while (scaring the bejeesus out of it with a roaring motor) wait until he gets tired, then land. Walk right up to him an *pop* … bearskin rug.
But in Alaska, the issue keeps showing up on the ballot.
What makes this a controversial issue worthy of repeated public referendums? Because there are people who want to leave home bound for adventure in an exotic and far away country, send some postcards, and then return home with a bearskin rug and a story about the bear they shot. And some of those people would pay good money to do so in a way that assures them of making a kill. Sporting-ness be damned, they want to have the appearance of being a big game hunter. So there’s that. There’s also the fact that people will pay good money to hunt other big game, but top predators like wolves and bears keep the number of moose and caribou in an ecosystem down. Subtract some wolves and you can get more rich hunters to pour money into your state’s tourisim economy. That might not be okay if it didn’t require throwing the ecosystem out of balance to do it. It might also be okay if the people trying to do this sort of thing did not also keep trying to take away the ability of the public to control it.  Certainly that is a different issue, but it is related and creepy.
So, all of this might only be of passing interest if the governor of the state where all this is taking place were not nominated to be vice president.
To restate:Â I’ll support your right to have ridiculous firearms, I’ll support your right to hunt sportingly, but I will not support efforts to circumvent the political process or disrupt it with big money so you can exploit our shared natural resources and disturb a carefully managed environmental balance.
No matter how pretty you are.
Filed under: enviro, PoliticsI realized the other day that as I’ve been mentioning all these great webcomics, I haven’t yet mentioned the one that is the quintessential political webcomic of the (last few) day(s). It is called Get Your War On. It is simple and direct both in art and text.
To echo what one reviewer said, this stuff reminds you how toothless political comics (and commentary) has become.
This strip has been running since the beginning of the “war on terror” [sic] and it really presents a fascinating history of the occurrences therein. I recommend you read it all, but it may take you all day so I’m posting this early.
Filed under: Politics, webcomic
If that’s not self-explanatory enough, think of this: On a scale of 1 to 121 with 1 being most peaceful, Canada ranks 8th and USA comes in at a scalding 96th. Go figure. Oh yeah, Iraq is 121st.
Filed under: Politics, Real LifeHow can you absolutely know that your vote didn’t get counted in last week’s election? You vote for yourself and look for your name in the outcome. That’s what Randy Wooten did. In a display of Arkansan ingenuity that makes me proud, he voted for himself to be mayor and, sure enough, the official tally showed him with zero votes. And with only 32 votes reported in his county, being off by one is a margin of about 3%.
You can read the Associated Press story on the abcnews site here.
And yes, the county he lives in used those electronic voting machines you’ve heard so much about.
Filed under: Politics, Real LifeThis text by the Virginia State Board of Elections was in a pamphlet which I picked up at my polling place this morning. You can download the entire .pdf file from the Board of Elections site and read it yourself, if you want to.
It says:
The Constitution does not define marriage. Under current statutory law in Virginia, persons who marry must have a license and be married by a … person authorized by law to perform marriages. Present law prohibits marriages between certain individuals. For example, …between couples of the same sex.
The document goes on to explain in detail that the existing laws (yes, plural) which explicitly and unambiguiously makes marriage between persons of the same sex illegal in Virginia. It is just crazy to me that such an addition to the state constitution would be considered necessary, even if it were well worded enough not to raise questions about the rights of all relationships between consenting adults.
Of course, polls taken last month and reported in the Washington Post show that the measure stands a very good chance of passing and our commonwealth constitution being amended to specifically (well, not specifically enough) deny rights to residents.
Filed under: Politics, Real Life
