Some Brief Notes
"Sometimes the pool-pah (shit storm) exceeds the power of humans to comment."
-- Bokonon, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
Working as I do on the low-rent periphery of the financial services industry,the last few weeks have been quite a trip, featuring a front row seat on the glide path to the New Depression and all the overtime you can eat (which, given the view, has seemed like a pretty good thing to take advantage of). So, yeah, yet another Dialoguer with an excuse to why he hasn't been hoisting a lot of pints down at the Pubhouse lately. Big picture perspective has been a bit hard to come by, as well, but let me offer up a couple of chips to the grand mosaic, to wit....
**President Lameduck this morning described the current financial crisis as "a threat to our prosperity," providing a redundant reminder of just how completely lacking in perspective his administration has been with regards to the economy. While the threat is real, and naked, for most of us it seems pretty damn existential-- we left "prosperity" down the road a ways.
**As a Minnesotan (however reluctant), I just have to swell with pride at the events at the McCain rally down in Lakeville yesterday. Let's hear it, Gopher Staters-- for all our smugly assumed progressivism, our rabies infested right wing yahoos are so ugly, inarticulate, and wrong headed that they actually scared McCain himself. Forced by the frightening sight of Minnesota's finest to back off his week long campaign of portraying his opponent as a terrorist supporting alien, McCain and the nation were then treated to the further spectacle of a crowd of good loyal Republicans booing the very concepts of respect and civility. Rah rah rah for Ski-U-Mah, babies....
**The question on the lips of the punditocracy this morning seems to be this-- having now managed to alienate even the tin foil hat brigade, what is left for the McCain campaign, and what effect will this have on them? The likely answer, of course, is damn little on both counts. McCain's campaign organization has already been forced to go on record several times as saying that the Senator does not in fact speak for the campaign as a whole, so a sudden shift by the Senator towards the sort of clean, issues oriented campaign he promised at the outset isn't likely to have much of an effect on Caribou Barbie and the hired gun Rovians. Nor could it, really-- with nothing in particular to offer in the way of real policy change, riling up babbling slobs like the wild haired Ms. Gayle "He's an Arab" Quinnell of Shakopee is pretty much all they've got left.
**A hearty thank you to the national media for never offering a frontal view of Ms. Quinnell-- we have truly suffered enough.
**The finding of the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council report on possible legal and ethical violations by Governor Sarah Palin? Palin is guilty. That's GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY. Let the denials and equivocations begin.
