The Fall of Karl Rove

O, Christmas for which I yearn. It is to be expected that there is a certain amount of chicanery involved in any game as competitive as politics. In fact, no one anywhere in any game is likely to be as pure as the driven snow. (But what do I know about driven snow? I live in Central Texas). But a guy like Karl Rove is on a plane with some of the true villains of history--Martin Borman & Herman Goering springs to mind. The Bush Administration has been thwarted in the exercise of its basic impulses because the country retains enough of its democratic culture that allows incipient fascism only to come out as sort of Fascist Lite, or soft fascism.

The comparisons with the Nazis are old hat, virtually cliches. When people make those comparisons, they are condemned as shrill. However, as another cliche has it, "If the shoe fits..."

Purity Bollocks

It has become fashionable in some quarters on the Christian Right to host so-called "purity balls" in which young girls, some as young as 9 YO, pledge to their fathers to remain virgins until they are married. By newspaper reports it is a white dress & tux affair, with all the ambience of a wedding.

No sane person thinks it is a good idea for young girls to start sleeping around ASAP, but I can't help but thinking the whole idea of "purity balls" is rather nasty. To me it seems to carry a sort of pedophiliac shadow behind it.

The newspapers go on to report a study in which it was found that 88% of such young pledgers fail to keep their pledge, and because of their attendant shame engage in more unprotected sex and take other kinds of risk with their sexual behavior.

The practical consequences are important & but I continue to feel poleaxed by the ugly esthetics of such dirty puritanism.

Law and Order

I've been through the re-runs as many times as is practicable. I must find a new drug.

Back again...& the Bushies running the clock out

I have failed to post regularly primarily because the computer I use the most seems to have an allergy to my password. I keep having to reset it, and since I'm posting on the fly, during breaks at work, etc., I have yielded to the temptation to regard the whole business as just too much trouble...but a friend of mine once remarked that I have "long range perseverance"--what he meant was that while I may give up in the short term, I always return to the project and eventually complete it. If only that were a simple and absolute truth...

The latest Bush Administration scandal, the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, in a better world would mean the impeachment and conviction of Bush himself, the VP and several cabinet officers--not to mention the firing of many, many senior staff and their subsequent indictment and conviction for assorted criminal activities. But they're going to get away with it because of the inadequate majority of Democrats in the Senate...

Meanwhile, back at the homestead in Texas, there's the billowing scandal at the Texas Youth Commission--well, let's just say if you underfund government and contract out services, you are not only screwing up the services government is supposed to deliver, you're also sticking it to the taxpayers and enriching crony capitalists...and that's aside from those in the system who are victimized by abuse and neglect because of the failure to regulate adequately...I have no indisputable empirical evidence that government per se always does a better job than the private sector per se, but I strongly suspect it is true. Certainly, there is very little evidence that the private sector is superior. I know that seems counterintuitive to many because of the numerous anecdotes about government waste and inefficiency, but when one looks at each situation, one almost invariably finds that the government's inefficiency is usually the result of undue influence by the private sector (see Defense contracting), or the inappropriate application of the profit motive in a government agency...