Funk Babblings

If anyone else is as bewildered by the sudden Georgia-Russia war as I was, these two posts at Daily Kos may help:

"US Transporting Georgian Troops Out of Iraq to Fight Russia" (with multi-lingual maps!) discusses the political background between the US and Georgia, including their support for the Iraq war in return for the training they needed to fight Russia to win back breakaway territory.

"Georgia: oil, neocons, cold war and our credibility" discusses this conflict in the wider context of oil and history.

And after reading those, you know everything I know about this Georgia thing.

Update: Oh, I guess it's over already.

Election day is almost here, and it can't come fast enough for me. Among other things, it means the end of my (physical) mailbox and answering machine being filled with Republican lies. "John Kerry will raise your taxes"? Nope, not unless you make at least $200,000 a year. (And if you do, were your taxes really that bad under Clinton? Cause that's what they'll go back to under Kerry.) "John Kerry supports a 50 cent gas tax hike"? Nope, a decade ago he mentioned that it might be necessary, that's all; he didn't even vote for it, though Dick Cheney did. Oh yeah, and that thing about Kerry voting 98 times to raise taxes? Cheney voted 148 times to raise taxes. Cheney must be really liberal. The good thing is that the Republicans seem to think our suburb is a lock for them, so they're encouraging us to vote; we're not likely to face polling-place challenges as we cast our votes for Kerry. I should probably update my driver's license with my current address just in case though.

Then there's that issue that the Republicans keep dismissing as ludicrous: the draft. Everyone else looks at Bush's plan to "stay on the offensive", and wonders where he'll get the manpower to keep invading more countries, considering we're already overextended -- keeping people longer than they signed up for ("stop-loss"), and calling back people whose terms of service were over. Turns out that the Selective Service System has already recommended a draft plan that includes drafting men and women with specialized skills (medical professionals, computer specialists, linguists) up to age 34 -- possibly up to age 44 for medical professionals. The counter-argument here is that the SSS's job is to plan for a draft, but that still doesn't answer the question of where Bush will get all the troops to stay on the offensive. (Those words out of Bush's mouth send chills down my spine.)

Saturday evening we returned from Pennsic, and I'm almost caught up with life again.

( The Evil Vortex of Youngstown )
( Overcoming Culture Shock )
( A Detour East )
( Where's the ark? )
( Aftermath )

Here's one for the "Support our troops" crowd.

I had a surprise visit over the weekend. A cousin of mine in the Army, a single mother who was shipped off to Iraq in October, returned to the states last week and was visiting Columbus this weekend along with her 4-year-old son. She was sent home due to an unfortunate incident that happened to her over there a month ago, involving a drunk comrade and a breach of trust (as well as the disadvantages of being one of the two women in a group of over 500 soldiers), but she's fine, and happy to be back home with her son.

She talked a bit about what it was like over there though -- pretty bad. Her unit lost a few people, and most units lost more. She narrowly missed getting killed in a convoy attack. She saw horrible sights, many of which she didn't want to talk about. And worse, she doesn't understand why she and the rest were over there. "OK, great, we got Saddam, we should have left right after that," she said. "There was no reason for us to be over there."

She said when she returned (wearing her uniform) people would stop her and say "Thank you!" She was nearly at a loss for how to respond. (She decided the easiest response was just to say "You're welcome.") But she didn't see any reason to be thanked. "We didn't choose to go there. We didn't want to go there. We went because it's our job to go where we're told to go."

Before talking to her, I'd been slightly apprehensive about whether she'd agree with me that the Iraq war was a bad idea, and I was relieved to find out that she did. (Knowing her, I probably shouldn't have been worried; besides, when her father retired from the Navy he said "they finally let the only Democrat out of the Navy," and she's a lot like her father.) One thing was somewhat disappointing though completely understandable -- after saying that they shouldn't have been there, she said now that she's back she doesn't even want to deal with politics at all. (She just wants to spend time with her son.) I'm guessing that means she doesn't want to deal with the Bush-Kerry race; at least she makes her home in the safe Dem state of New York, though her sister is in the swing state of Pennsylvania and could cast a significant vote.

Found at Daily Kos....

George W. Bush's concessions to terrorists since 9/11:

1. Keeping the citizenry in a state of fear
   
2. Making the citizenry less free
   
3. Starting an ill-conceived holy war
   
4. Alienating our country from its allies
   
5. Allowing Osama bin Laden to remain at large
   
6. Letting the Saudis off the hook for their role in terrorism
   
7. Engineering the most effective recruitment strategy since the Hitler Youth by inspiring innumerable peoples across the world to hate us so much that they actually join al Qaeda
   

And now a Republican Senator from Arkansas has introduced a bill to remove all the sunset provisions from the Patriot Act, giving permanence to the second item. On the other hand, senators on both sides are working to scale back the Patriot Act.

The second of two entries inspired by chronarchy's newfound anti-Republicanism

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, I supported Howard Dean. One of the reasons I did goes back to a conversation I had with autumnfey a few years ago after she moved to Vermont. She had said that Vermont was deeply divided between the conservative farmers and the liberal hippies. So when Dean came along on the national scene, I figured that anyone who could get re-elected over and over again in a state divided like that had a pretty good chance of winning over people from both sides of a divided electorate nationally. I became more convinced of that the more research I did; in Vermont his critics included people on the left who thought he was too pro-business, and people on the right who thought he was too pro-environment. And even though some of his positions were to the right on mine, they were the kinds of things that would make many on the right take a closer look and possibly support him.

Yet early on, the press branded Dean a liberal. Strange, since most of his positions were to the right of many of his rivals, including John Kerry. This perception of Dean as a wacko liberal seems to have been fed by three factors:

• Many liberals gravitated to his campaign, despite being more idealogically aligned with Dennis Kucinich. Those liberals decided that Kucinich was too far left to be elected, and Dean was far enough to the right of Kucinich that he seemed electable (as I described above). (It also helped that Dean came out early on against Bush's policies, rather than trying to gain the support of people who like Bush's policies.) Since liberals liked Dean, the press concluded that Dean must be a liberal.
  
• He came out against the Iraq war when most of the country was in favor of it, making him *obviously* an antiwar liberal, even though he supported Gulf War I and Afghanistan. (Unlike Kucinich, he was not in favor of just pulling out of Iraq once we went in, but rather wanted to put more troops in, including getting many more countries to help out.)
  
• He was in favor of civil unions for gays, and had signed a first-in-the-country law enacting them in Vermont (after the Vermont Supreme Court said something needed to be done). *Such* a liberal thing to do. (However, unlike Kucinich he was not in favor of gay marriage.) This endeared him to the gay community, which made up a large portion of his early support.
  

(A side effect was that the Kucinich people resented Dean for being considered the liberal candidate when he really wasn't all that liberal.)

That's the way things stood a year ago. My how times have changed. Now more than half the country thinks Iraq just wasn't worth it, and even people on the right are saying we need to get out now. And now with gay marriage happening, more than half the country is in favor of either civil unions for gays or gay marriage; civil unions are on their way to acceptance, and the debate today is about gay marriage. The landscape under Dean has shifted to the left, putting his positions on these two issues slightly on the right of the debate, and Kucinich doesn't look quite as nutty as he used to.


BTW, the gay marriage thing gives me another reason to wonder why so many people like Orson Scott Card so much.