Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!


Really.


I mean it, as much as is possible to be sincere in an impersonal editorial medium such as this.


To you four or five regulars, I say a sincere thanks. You are a touchstone for me. It would be nice if you would touch back (comment) a little more often, but hey, I'll take what I can get.


Enough of the schlep. On with the show.

Today is the day. Yep, the good people of Iowa are going to tell us a little bit about who the real contenders are for the presidency. Watch to see who drops out of the race in the next few days, and listen to the excuses that they offer.

I really don't know what will be worse, the political climate before or after the winnowing process starts. I am anxious to see how Ron Paul does, and what he has to say later, relative to the outcome of the election(s). Like I said in an earlier post, Ron has some interesting things to say, but he hasn't presented a clear idea of how to impliment them. Mike Huckabee seems to be a likable guy, but not so much that I would vote for him just for that reason. I would loan Fred Thompson a twenty, but ditto, that doesn't mean I would let him hold a loaded gun for me, (or on me), let alone the authority to wage war or rule the country. Then there are the lawyers, the ambulance chaser and the real estate mogul, as well as the civil rights activist from harvard. Respectable vocations all, but not what I usually see as well grounded in the realities of the world. That is not to lump these people together, they have all served honorably in government, most in the US Senate, one as governor of his state, all are conversant in national affairs. But so am I and CNN is not following me around....

From the looks of things, at least to my jaded eye, we are not going to have much of a choice this year. Whichever party wins, whoever takes the oath, we are in for the same old thing on the domestic front, and a pretty wild ride internationally.

Now, just when I have resigned myself to the political equivilent of the cable TV conundrum, (quite a few candidates and nothing on), here comes another rich guy who thinks he can be somebody. Michael Bloomberg, current Mayor of New York and bazillionaire. Go away, eat some sushi or something, I am not impressed that you think you can be president because you can bring people together. You can't, your wallet can. Get real.

Stay focused. I don't think it will make a bit of difference, but one might as well go out aware of why....

the last post of the year

Politics.





It's all about the BS quotient.





Well, today, we saw just how far a committed activist is willing to go to advance an agenda in Pakistan. Now to be honest with you, I really don't have an opinion about any of the parties there, as I am pretty sure that whatever agenda that they push, it is still going to run counter to our interests in one way or another.





My point here is that there are no opinions, there are only absolutes, and no room to accomodate anyone not seeing things along the same straight and narrow lines that you do.





Sound familiar? Perhaps a little bit, perhaps only by a matter of degree.





Can this kind of thing happen here? I don't believe it will become the norm, at least not in my lifetime, (I hope anyway), but I am afraid that in the coming months, with the candidates that we have to work with, the level of frustration and desperation that we have with us right now, we may see some dramatic events that put the United States in a rather unfavorable light.





I hope not, but let's face it, we, from time to time, produce individualswith a capacity for that kind of thing.



Lately, I have had a funny feeling that things are, well, kind of falling apart, on quite a few fronts. Don't laugh, but I have even noticed it on the commercial front, mechanized billing systems and what have you. Customer service and the quality of goods has been going downhill since I don't know when, but when the mechanisms for picking our pockets start to falter, one has to ask if everything is really all right.




I don't have any formal New Years resolutions, but I intend, at least as far as I can, to be for a few things rather than against others, (that is not absolute by the way). My discourse will be a bit more civil, even to the point of refraining from calling some idiot a**hole an idiot a**hole.





So there. Had to get that out of my system.





Stay focused.



Stay Vigilant.



Stay out of the way.

Ron Paul, Superstar

What do you think of Ron Paul?

Google Ron Paul.

These are just two of the many things that you see or hear as you go about your life. They are kamikaze ads of sorts, intended to get into the mainstream consciousness without the usual madison avenue bullshit.

Depending on your point of view, they are working.

The Paul campaign raised 6 million dollars this past weekend, in one day. Now, the demographics of the contributing base are not known, but I would put down a fiver that large HMO's and multi-national corporations, labor unions and PAC's are not among them.

So, what do you think of Ron Paul?

If we lived in a vacuum, his ideas would be great. Hell, they aren't too damn bad where we are now. But as much as they resonate with the average guy, they are missing something, at least in my small mind. And that is an idea of how to move from where we are, to where Dr. Paul would like us to be, without destroying one, two or maybe three generations in the process, economically and socially, and without starting a class war while he is doing it.

As popular as his ideas are with some people, (we can define those as people who believe they stand to gain something by them), there must be a group of people who would stand to lose something by the adoption of his platform, and they represent first political and social inertia, and second outright resistance. In the first example, we might call them the Congress and the entrenched bureaucracy. To a certain extent, inertia in these matters is a good thing. How quickly that would turn into defense of the status quo is anyone's guess. Ten-fifteen minutes anyway...

Ron Paul is not a surgeon, wielding a scalpel, he is a soldier, with a cannon, laying siege at the gates, (and I do not use that analogy in a disrespectful way). I believe, at this point anyway, that his character is of sufficient quality that he could be a good leader, a molder of opinion, but I am not sure that the country would survive his methods as President. As much as I like the idea of a Ron Paul world, with a little thought on how a transition to such a place might go, I can see that it is the middle class that will be chopped up, chewed up and left for dead by the side of the road throughout the process, win or lose. The wealthier class will stand to lose some advantage, but by and large, will come out still standing. The poor stand to lose little here. I really don't see when or where the redistribution of equality will begin. As it is in Orwell's "Animal Farm", those of means today will still be 'more equal' in a Ron Paul world. There is a real potential that the only real change will be in the destratification of what I will call the screwed scale. There will be just two levels on this scale of relative fairness. Screwed and Not Screwed. And I don't see a lot of potential for movement from the Screwed to the Not Screwed during the supposed transition period, or possibly afterwards.

Ron Paul does not provide any vision for how we can move towards any of these goals in such a way that most lives are not too terribly disrupted. He does not acknowledge that we simply cannot stop playing by the rules that have taken many many years to be set in concrete without very severe consequences. This is his political downfall, he is an idealist rather than a pragmatist, he paints a picture that has abroad appeal, but, leaves out the part about the pain of getting there, and how many, if not most of us, won't make it.

Don't get me wrong. I am not anti-Ron Paul. I see him as being more in the mold of a Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jimmy Carter than a Robert Kennedy or FDR. He inspires, and moves people to see possibilities, but may not be the man to implement them on a broad scale. No matter who is elected next year, they would do well to listen to what Dr Paul is saying this year, and to hire the guy as a legislative ombudsmen and as a political spokesman. This is a guy who has the credibility to push a few unpopular but necessary initiatives, and to get something in return.

This is a man that can generate influence, and then turn it into momentum, which is populist power. If given the opportunity and recognition to do that, it really might be the year of Ron Paul.

stay focused.

not much to say

I am burnt out. Can you tell?



There seems to be a lot of words flying through media-space regarding next years election (and as of now) non-event, but really not a lot happening.


On the GOP side of the race, Mike Huckabee seems to be making a splash, on the opposite field, Barak Obama seems to be carving out his niche. All this is subject to change, several times, but if I were to call the drama, I would say it will be Giuliani vs Huckabee and Obama vs somebody. This seems, right now, to be the year of the non-conventional candidate.

What does this mean for the usual cutouts such as say, Fred Thompson? I think people are ready for something new, and are willing to gamble on looking past a persons little idiosyncracies. Fred is just too cookie-cutter folksie. Then we have Hillary Clinton. With all respect, (and she does deserve it), she is not electable. She is perhaps, the most qualified candidate out these, by almost any measure, but she is not likeable. She is not Oprah. She is successful and therefore threatening and she has never tried to soften that image. Ain't gonna fly. Rudy Giuliani has some personal baggage that would bring down quite a few other candidates, as does Huckabee and Obama, but the way that they deal with it allows them some wiggle room. Nobody is perfect, voters know it and candidates that can't make allowances for that are going to be standing on the platform when the train pulls out. That means you John Edwards.

These things being noted, it is going to be a long year. Ron Paul may turn out to be a bit more than the "Larry the Cable Guy" of the political scene. All in all, I'd rather be watching reruns of 'the West Wing'...