http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/terminatrix.html

Thanks, dbay!

Patriotic pretzels

This product got me thinking — is it even possible to come up with 5-10 food products less likely to be patriotized than pretzels?

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This has got to be harder than hitting a 90 MPH fastball: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/forward-flip-basketball-s_n_218799.html

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On more serious Minnesota political notes,

1) When does Al Franken get to be Senator already?

2) Why doesn’t anyone seem to care that Minnesota’s Governor is behaving like a King?

3) At least one piece of good news for Minnesota baseball fans — no increase in garbage burning coming from right field…http://www.startribune.com/local/west/48815442.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUX

At one line, though, I just cheered:

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”

Let me begin to enumerate the verbal jiujitsu of this line.  I love in particular the metaphor of the ground shifting beneath people.   This image is not at a distance and cannot, in fact, be distanced from the hearer, the way an image appealing to the senses of sight or hearing could be distanced.  People can imagine a visual image at any distance they choose, up to miles away from them, a tiny speck on the horizon.  People can be deaf, willfully or through a deficiency in their senses, to a sound image.  They can be deaf to bells of freedom ringing or imagine the promised land as seen from a mountaintop, far, far away.

The ground shifting beneath somebody, however, is immediate and palpable.  The ground beneath your feet is touching you.  To understand what the speaker is saying here, you have to imagine feeling it in your body.

Obama could have ssaid it so many different ways.  He doesn’t say, “The landscape [around us] has changed.”  He doesn’t say, “Change is coming.”  Either of those are visual and imaginable from a huge distance away.

Not only are you touching the ground, but you also depend on it for support, of your body and by extension any political argument you make.  People say metaphorically, “He [his argument] doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” but those legs are supported by the ground.

If the ground itself has shifted — well, the bases of our arguments and reasoning have changed.

In fact, they invited us.

They have raised the bar for decent human behavior in our family, demonstrating what I would call Christian virtues, except that they were Jewish virtues long before they were popularized by that nice Jewish boy from Nazareth, and except that Kirsten and Mark are atheists. But you get my drift.

It started when I was being maligned this summer by email by a Jesus-Nazi after I publicly disagreed with the group email about Obama being the Antichrist.  Kirsten jumped in and defended me to the group.

Kirsten offered to us that, while she wasn’t voting for Obama, any of her relatives who wanted to campaign for him in Ohio were welcome to stay with her while they did.

I doubt I’d've offered that, but now I have to, because she raised the bar.

She offered to pick up Kam at the airport Halloween evening, and stocked up on cottage cheese and frozen blueberries and coffee for us to eat while we were there.

The night before Election Day, they cooked steaks ordered from Omaha for us and waited dinner until very late when we got home that night.  Mark ended up grilling them in the backyard in the dark.

On Election day, Mark offered Kamilla the use of his ancient Toyota, which was great.  Kam was able, on her breaks from poll-watching, to get stuff from the local 7-11, while I flushed out voters in a heavily Democratic neighborhood across town.  Priceless.

They both got up at four a.m. with us ["It's exciting!" they said] and ran around finding Kam a thermos for her coffee. Mark ended up having to walk a mile to his polling place to vote.  And he did vote, but it wasn’t enough to put McCain over the top in Ohio.

When we got back about eleven on election night, they had gone to bed, but got up to watch McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech.   When we came in the front foor, we found a hand-drawn picture with the caption “Congratulations, Kam and Karah!”  It featured a picture of an elephant crying big hand-drawn tears.

Thanks to the 12apostophes contingent, Minnesotabama.

Thanks to Kam and me, Ohiobama. We’ll tell you how we did it when we recover from pounding the pavement.  We’re going to recover by some intensive interval-type shopping.
Looks like there might also be a North Carolinabama and Indianabama.

I’ve decided to rename a red state, too.  In honor of its achievements in the preservation of openly expressed racism against blacks — here’s the results of a survey of Kentuckians conducted by my local newspaper:

http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/568306.html

Excerpt: A survey of 600 likely Kentucky voters, which was taken Oct. 19 to 21 and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, . . .  asked respondents to react to two statements about race in general.

More than three out of every five respondents also agreed with a statement that said “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” One fifth of people polled said they disagreed with the statement while 19 percent said they weren’t sure.

The 61 percent of Kentucky respondents who said they agreed with that statement is well above the 35 percent who agreed when asked the same question in a national Associated Press-Yahoo poll taken in September.

– and because I live there, I’ve decided to rename Kentucky.  From now on, it will be referred to as “Hussein.” Former Kentuckians, now known as Husseinites, need to just get the hell over it.

Minneapolis readers: Wonder which “Soil and water supervisor Seat 3″ you should give your vote to this year?

Check out the StarTribune’s “My Vote” site: entering your address will give you your polling location and a sample ballot — so you can research all the ins and outs of the less-contested seats. Check it out here.

You may have encountered this from the other side of the door; somebody rings your bell on a Sunday while you’re trying to enjoy the ballgame, a guy standing there with three political buttons and a stack of papers, and asks you to vote his way. Today, that was me.

I got a lot of unanswered knocks, which is usual for this sort of thing. I got a lot of dismissive waves and “not interested”s, which is not unusual, although I didn’t think I was selling anything in the strictest sense. I just sort of look like a salesman.

There were, too, some staunch Obama supporters and encouraging words. One made my case for me, and said that he had already told all his friends: if you want things to get worse, vote McCain, if you want a change from Bush, vote Obama. Who’s in favor of worse? Nobody.

I asked one prospective voter, an Obama fan, what time he would head down to the polls (if you get people to think about when they’ll vote, they’re more likely to actually get out there and do it). “I’ll probably head down their early,” he said, “I just got laid off so I don’t have much more to do that day.” I felt pretty secure that he’d make it on Tuesday.

The day was a bright, blue, gorgeous 65 degrees, which, in Minneapolis on November 2, is proof enough that global warming will soon kill us all, and helped make our case for Obama.

I got nipped by a dog, but her owners were Obama supporters, so I skipped the shots. I met a Libertarian who’s house smelled like dope, and I also encountered that most elusive of wildlife — the undecided voter.

“I mean, I just think they’re both just out for power, and they’ll lie just the same,” he said.

I told him my shameful secret; that in the 2000 election, I thought Bush and Gore were pretty much the same and supported Nader. It was a mistake, I said, I couldn’t have been more wrong. After all, Gore went on to win the Nobel Prize while Bush ruined the entire world.

“Well, I did like Clinton,” Mr. Undecided said. “He lied, but he sounded good. Obama’s like that. I’d rather listen to Obama’s voice for the next four year’s than that other guy.”

Excellent! Well, I hope you consider Obama then on Tuesday, I said. I’ll take anything. And, even though the man was obviously insane and had lived in his basement for the last two years, he couldn’t remember McCain’s name, which I took as a very positive sign.

Two people I talked to wanted to vote for Obama, but didn’t know where their polling place was. That’s what I’m here for! I wrote down their polling place on some literature, asked them when they’d vote, told them there’d be long lines, so go early.

Will those two people really go on Tuesday? Will we get the “like-the-sound-of-his-voice” vote? Was it worth it?

Dear God, I hope so.

As I was blowing the aforementioned leaves and watching them fly up into the air only to fall back onto some previously cleared patch of grass, I had an epiphany. I noticed that my next-door neighbor’s lawns had also managed to accumulate a fair amount of leaves since they had last been raked, so, rather than establishing a clear boundary between the three properties (a kind of leafless DMZ, as it were—oh snap! You love the subjunctive voice), I opted to clear their lawns as well (ok, just the halves that were contiguous to my parent’s property.) This ostensible random act of kindness was not, mind you, because I am in possession of any kind of highly evolved sense of community, nor was it due to my recognition that my neighbors and I were engaged in a collective struggle to thwart these autumnal invaders; rather, it was because I knew that those same frackin’ leaves would eventually blow back onto the areas I had just cleared. In other words, if I blew the leaves on my neighbors lawn as well as those on my own, it would mean that I would not need to worry about raking up any maverick detritus that might flout the sovereignty of suburban property lines and launch cross-border incursions later on this week.

So what’s the point, you ask. The recent rhetoric being bandied about by the McCain/Palin campaign—the use of epithets like Socialist, Communist and Marxist as part of an attempt to discredit the Obama/Biden campaign—has afforded liberals an opportunity to test new strategies for parrying such attacks and winning over misinformed voters. Unfortunately, the Democrats have largely fallen back on the failed strategy of appealing to the perceived “better angels of our nature,” a strategy which invariably leads to their invoking some manifestation of the quixotic motto “E pluribus unum.” However, the 2000 and 2004 elections (even if they were stolen) reveal the powerful role that an ignorant (dare I say self-centered) electorate can still play in deciding who will lead our country. The trouble, as I see it, is that young voters (let’s say for the sake of argument 18-38) are still highly susceptible to bankrupt political philosophies like Libertarianism (Aw, you’re a Libertarian? That’s adorable! But it’s grown-up time now, so pay your freakin’ taxes and think about how much it would suck if we had to drive on dirt roads all the time. Ingrates!!!) or the hyper-masculine tenets espoused by modern-day Republicans (Wars, whether cultural or military, and tax cuts are always sexy when you aren’t personally suffering their effects.). Thus, when liberals claim that government programs are important to ensure that there is some degree of parity regarding access to affordable education, health care, housing, etc., they are often confronted by a series of unrelated right-wing talking points and political bogeymen that alleged conservatives conjure up as political straw men (we’ve all seen the perverse delight with which Republicans talk about welfare mothers, garbage-pail kids, late-term abortions, etc.).

So, how can we countervail against such ignorant tripe? I’ve found that the only way to talk to rabid ideologues is in terms that they can understand, i.e., failing to take care of those who are struggling will inevitably come back to bite them in the proverbial ass—Don’t want to provide adequate funds for failing school districts? Then don’t complain when people working minimum wage jobs screw up your order at the drive-thru. Don’t want to pay higher taxes to provide health care to everyone? Then don’t cry when your premiums and medical bills rise to offset the costs of clinics and hospitals treating the uninsured. Don’t want to raise the minimum wage? Then stop whining about the fact that no one can afford to pay the costs for your plumbing services and that your business is suffering as a result. Don’t want to live in a country that is ethnically and linguistically diverse? Then move somewhere else, a–hole. You can even pepper your stump-speech with folksy wisdom like, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or shit flows downhill, or you’re a d—bag. To be sure, Obama has attempted to raise some of these issues when speaking with constituents (watch the video of his chat with Joe the Plumber), but until members of the mainstream media start calling out Republicans for their disingenuous claims about the important role government plays in our daily lives, we all need to take on the responsibility of talking to our misinformed friends and family. The bottom line is that the meme of an evil (read: European) government that redistributes wealth and/or opportunity from hard-working Americans to lazy Americans is total BS, and people need to be called out on it. Our economy is only ever as strong as the men and women who form its base. Now go out and rake your neighbors’ leaves!

Ron Paul ’08!!!

The meat of it is this:

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Well, the entire economic meltdown hasn’t shocked me. When you believe everyone will just act nicely for no good reason, it shouldn’t be shocking when everything isn’t rosy in the end. What is shocking to me is that the architect of all this modern deregulation (along with Milton Friedman) came out and admitted that it was wrong. I guess he should get a small degree of credit for not gnashing his teeth and blaming poor people and the media, but given his responsibility in this that credit doesn’t go too far in my book. It is fair to say that Greenspan’s realization should (it won’t, but it should) put any pure free market argument to bed for the rest of my life.

In the end, what a weird year. I thought I would see an African American elected President before I saw the ideologue of ideologues, who basically turned this country into a deregulated mess, admit that he was wrong. Guess he figured he only had a few days left to prove me wrong…

So while it’s fair to not care who wins between the Phillies and Rays, we should all be cheering for whomever does to win slowly…