Category Archives: politics

One last pre-primary political post

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Something to keep an eye on – there are a lot of independents in NH. We can vote in either primary; you walk in, ask for an R or D ballot, vote and then, if you’d like to revert to undeclared status, swing by a table on your way out to sign a piece of paper renouncing your presumed (assumed?) party affiliation.

John McCain needs independents. He did very well eight years ago, but that’s ancient history. If Barack Obama (and to a lesser degree, John Edwards) can rally independents to his banner, McCain may suffer. There are not a lot of 27-percenter independents – McCain’s willingness to stay in Iraq for a hundred years may not be a selling point – and Obama is enjoying a significant ‘holy sh1t, maybe this guy can do it’ post -IA bounce. On the other hand, McCain is not as hated by the local R establishment as he is, apparently, at a national level, and there is local experience with the Mittster (we saw him before he became a conservative – a conversion that coincided, unsurprisingly, with his decision to run for President).

Update – I didn’t see this till after I posted (I swear!):

If the independents-go-Democratic scenario plays out again in New Hampshire, the Democratic primary winner will almost certainly be Obama. And the winner of a Republican primary cleansed of independents and dominated by the conservative base would not necessarily be John McCain.

end of update

It’s going to be interesting – as long as the little man looking for a balcony (9/11!) continues to get whupped, I’ll be happy. As a thank you to readers who have put up with my ranting – a new fave webcomic: the Perry Bible Fellowship.

Four days

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I’m anticipating the campaign/PAC/issue group/push poll phone calls will be absolutely out of control for the next four days. I can’t decide between unplugging the land line or just turning the ringers off.

Word of the day: Huckenfreude. It’s the enjoyment one feels watching the Republican establishment squirm as the theocons assert themselves. It would be a little more enjoyable if Huckabee wasn’t as fake as the Mittster, but without Willard’s thin veneer of competence.

Paleocon watch – will Fox allow Ron Paul to debate? If not, will they throw Rudy! 9/11! out too? I’m a little surprised that Paul is not polling better here in NH – his brand of libertarian-inflected conservatism seems like a good match.

Media watch – it’s very apparent this go-round how wedded traditional media is to certain narratives. I don’t think it’s a new thing; what is new is that there are other voices willing to pull the curtain back. The narrative rolling at us here in NH is that of a resurgent John McCain. He’s been on the rise here, no doubt about it – but apparently a 4th place finish in the IA caucuses is a mandate.

The guy I was very close to voting for – telecom retroactive-immunity filibustering Chris Dodd – dropped out. Heavy sigh – back to the drawing board. I heard An American Tune on the radio this morning and it actually brought tears to my eyes.

And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
but it’s all right, it’s all right
for we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Time for the antidote – Anarchy in the UK or The Guns of Brixton as loud as it’ll go.

Update – great media/McCain snark:

I think Kansas will beat Virginia Tech, but the real winner of the Orange Bowl will be John McCain as the merest thought of football reminds voters of his toughness. *

Seasonal bits

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  • Less than a week until the NH primary. It can’t come soon enough for me – the steady diet of the same political commercials over and over and over is the least of it; more intrusive are the phone calls. I’m getting (order of magnitude) a dozen calls a day from campaigns, unidentified 800 numbers and “out of area” caller IDs. I’ve stopped even looking at the caller ID to see if I should answer…
  • It has been snowing like mad here. If we hadn’t gotten some rain a week or so back, the snowbanks would be overhead. It was the snowiest December on record and we started the new year with six inches or so of wet snow yesterday afternoon/evening.

Snowfall on Monday [12/31/07] helped set a new record for snow in December, with 44.5 inches falling in Concord. That broke the record of 43 inches set in 1876. *

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Taken at dawn this morning.

Kornbluth

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I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth will be the next Philip K. Dick movie/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be – my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB. Two Kornbluth/Pohl collaborations I read ages ago have stuck with me to this day: Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Gladiator-At-Law seems especially apposite nowadays, what with the housing finance mess (aka Big Shitpile) – revolving as it does around housing and arcane financial arrangements to obscure who controls what. I wonder whether Pohl or Kornbluth read Gangs of New York; one of the gangs in Belly Rave (a slum housing development originally named Belle Reve) is the Wabbits – surprisingly close to NYC’s Dead Rabbits. Wa-wa-wabbit twacks! Also – struldbrugs! The Space Merchant’s Chicken Little (a huge blob of chicken tissue that’s fed chorella algae -IIRC- and has hunks sliced off that become people food) resonates today as well – here’s a class on animal tissue culture and tissue engineering. I can’t wait for Ron Popeil to get involved – “Makes beef jerky for around $3 a pound, and you know what went in it, because you made it yourself!”

Kornbluth hit the silver screen at least once – The Marching Morons fathered Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I loved the Marching Morons when I first read it – in my defense, I was fourteen – since then, well… It’s great fun, but when you’ve finished there’s a strange odor in the air. I smell eugenics. We’ll ignore the statistical cold water as well – tons of dopes, tiny elite – what are your chances of rolling lucky seven in the can’t-choose-your-parents crapshoot. That’s right – in all likelihood, you’d be one of the pinheads. The Marching Morons does give me an excuse to introduce a great new word: tlonian – adjective applying to a product that has metastisized off the screen and into the real world (see: Holiday Inn) and post a video of an AWESOME new tlonian product from Idiocracy, Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. I love Borges.