Impeachment manager speaks!

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:37:56 GMT

Will wonders never cease? Remember Barr's assholic persecution of Clinton as one of the House's "impeachment managers"? Agree with Noam Scheiber over at The Stump that this Bloggingheads' sequence w/ Bob Barr on Bush and Clinton is rich. Rich, I tell you!

I remember well that period: late '98, early '99, when I had just come back from Switzerland after breaking up w/ my ex-wife for the first time. I was riveted by the whole scene and just livid that the whole thing was happening in the first place. That was when MoveOn.org was born, and that was perhaps one of the key moments in our glorious "politics of personal destruction" of the past 20+ years--the very politics that Obama strives to put in our collective rearview mirror. Seems just insane that Clinton would be impeached for his peccadilloes and lame-ass prevarications, and here we are with a President who's run wholesale roughshod over the Constitution, as if it were a half-crumpled McDonald's bag discarded into the road by a passing motorist.

Ok, the metaphor is a bit overwrought, but what the hell: you get the point.

- dave//

del.icio.us Tags: politics,Bob Barr,impeachment,Constitution,Obama,Clinton

UPDATE: At least we can say this about Barr: there's a certain perverse consistency in his view of the "rule of law"--that hammer that he, Asa Hutchinson, and the other managers used over and over again in their prosecution of Clinton. I just have to wonder, now that he sees what true "crimes and misdemeanors" really look like in the slaughterhouse of the Bush presidency, whether he feels any shame at all about his petty, sanctimonious grandstanding against Clinton back in the '90s? Still, you have to revel in seeing this old cast of characters from that time playing out their internal and external conflicts on the stage of the 2008 elections. Makes for some often very ironic political theater.

Gasoline on the fire

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:48:53 GMT

So I'm trying out the new corporate bus system, partly to save on some gas and also to alleviate some of the stress of my commute from Ballard to Redmond and back, which typically hits 50 mins to an hour each way. If I didn't have regular off-campus appointments during the week, I'd have long been a regular rider. In fact, this very post I'm doing on the bus right now, jarring bumps notwithstanding. One of the nice features of the corporate bus line is that they have these things equipped w/ wi-fi; makes either work or casual browsing pretty easy to do in transit.

Anyhow, so I was thinking: the last tank of gas I filled cost me north of $60.00 for the first time. Although I've got a small car, I'm constrained to use premium. If I manage to do the bus a couple times a week, I'm liable to save some 1/3 of my petrol outlay, which begins to be significant, week to week, month to month. And that's fine. I should do more, though. I have this idea that my next car will be the Great Leap Forward in automotive technology--some mass-market incarnation of today's lithium-ion powered prototypes. We'll see if I make it that long; it could be a very long wait before we get there.

Or not. It depends on what kinds of choices we make as we twist and squirm under the squeeze of skyrocketing oil prices. Do we buy the line that somehow we just need to produce more oil by drilling offshore or in ANWR, and maybe, in 5 years time, see a blip in increased domestic oil production that will have already been offset by increased consumption? Do we continue to stick that black needle in our arm and expect somehow that we won't crave more next time? Do we grovel and whine, shake and groan, imploring our dealers to please just give us one more fix to tide us over?

Or do we say, no, enough, it's time to change. Time to stop opting for the easy fix. Time to change the world by changing ourselves first, rather than somehow always, unfailingly expecting that it needs to happen the other way around. Imagine what the world might be like, how different it would be, if we could break the most destructive of our habits...

Ah, I see my bus stop is coming up. Some busses you need to get on and stay on for a while, others, well, you just need to get off, otherwise you'll go around and around and around and never get anywhere.

- dave //

o brave new world: News and politics

Impeachment manager speaks!

Gasoline on the fire