Saturday, December 11, 2004

A little 1984 for a cold Saturday Night


So I've started reading 1984 again. Sometimes the Left throws around 1984 and Orwell as if everyone has read it. Since people like Mann Coulter accuse us on the Left of not reading, I thought I would excerpt a little from the first chapter. Now, is this a media story of the Republican National Convention this past September, or is it just me? This is a section on Two Minutes Hate:
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
If you'd like to get started into the book before you get a copy, you can read it online at Mondo Politico. Read More......

I forgot to mention Log Cabin Republicans...


In my larger piece yesterday about the problems facing the Democratic party and interest groups, including gay groups, I forgot to mention on group that actually gets kudos for their work this past year: the Log Cabin Republicans, i.e., the gay Republicans.

Of all the large groups, Log Cabin is the only one that stands out in my mind as actually showing some balls. I've been critical of Log Cabin for years because they've always seemed more concerned about being good Republicans than being good gays. Meaning, they always seemed a club for gay Republicans who wanted to convince each other they weren't selling the community out, rather than being a civil rights organization actually fighting for the civil rights of gay Americans. This year, Log Cabin under the stewardship of their executive director Patrick Guerriero, finally came to terms with who they are and should be, and they actually stuck their necks out and defended the community against our bigoted president.

It was a big deal for them not to endorse President Bush's re-election. Rather than worry about whether they were going to scotch their invite to the inauguration and the fancy cocktail parties, Log Cabin was more interested in trying to get the Republican party to stop bashing gays. They didn't just refuse to give Bush their endorsement. They ran ads implicitly criticizing him for endorsing the anti-gay amendment. This, even though, as I hear it, some of their top supporters were not happy at all that Log Cabin might consider doing anything that wasn't a full bear hug of this bigot of a president.

So, taking all that into account, the national organization that grew the most this year, that stuck its neck out the most, that was the boldest in view of how it has acted historically, was Log Cabin. Read More......

Lazy Saturday open thread


Brrr.... Read More......

FCC investigating Olympic Games opening ceremony for indeceny


So not kidding.
"In response to one or more indecency complaints, the Federal Communications Commission has asked NBC to send it tapes of its coverage of the Summer Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Athens, the network confirmed late yesterday."
The bad news is that the Christian right thinks this is Nazi Germany where everything not kosher (pardon the pun) gets banned. The good news is that they're start to expose themselves as total nutjobs. Attacking the Olympics? What, too many scantily clad bodies? I think the backlash against the thumpers is about to begin. Read More......

Why does Bush hate disabled vets?


From AP:
Spc. Robert Loria of Middletown, N.Y., lost his arm in Iraq, but instead of a farewell paycheck from the Army he got a bill for nearly $1,800. On Friday a platoon of New York lawmakers came to his rescue. Loria found himself stuck in Fort Hood in Texas this week when Army officials said he owed money for travel expenses and for lost equipment.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey and Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton interceded on behalf of the 27-year-old veteran after his wife, Christine Loria, told the Times-Herald Record of Middletown about the problem.

Loria was wounded in February. But as he was about to leave the Army this month, officials told him he had been overpaid for his time as a patient at a military hospital in the Washington area, and said he still owed money for travel between the hospital and Fort Hood, as well as $310 for items not found in his returned equipment.

Instead of a check for nearly $4,500, Loria was told he had to pay nearly $1,800.

"Christmas is coming up, and we are severely overdrawn because of this," his wife said. "It turned out his getting wounded wasn't the worst thing this year to happen — this was."
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Christian nutcases of the world, unite!


I thought these types of Christian extremists only existed in America. Apparently they're calling on the police to prosecute a theater for performing a play about a gay Jesus. The charge? Blasphemy! Wow! I wonder if they're going to ask for death by stoning as well.
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Attention DNC: Issue alert


OK sure, the Dem's give some lip service to the voting problems of the recent election but I have not yet read anything that leads me to believe that this issue is actually going to be a serious issue for the party. People everywhere are griping about the problem and Jesse Jackson makes a valid point that those who knocked themselves out helping this year, giving their time and their money are not going to be keen on pitching in when 2008 comes around if the party does not get cracking on this problem. Why help when the party is not going to defend the voting rights of its members?

To me this is such a no-brainer issue to work with so the only excuse that I can think of is that the DNC is waiting until they sort out their internel leadership. Let's hope that it's only that because this one is too easy and too important to pass up.
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Kerick removes name from consideration for DHS position


So can we say "nanny, nanny, boo, boo?" Oh dear, the myth of invincibility has been shattered for Bush II and apparently having an illegal nanny was only one of the issues. And I thought that they were all so perfect, damn. It seems as though Kerick also had a recent windfall from Taser stock options, a company that has a juicy contract with Homeland Security. That relationship, naturally, was defended by the administration because as we know very well now, ethics are only applicable to the other guys and never to Republicans.
Read More......