FunctionalAmbivalent

I'm Telling You, He Thinks We're Stupid

In the first of what promises to be a rash of completely empty, entirely political actions leading up to next fall's Congressional elections, the desperate, cynical and utterly transparent President Bush has ordered a probe into high gasoline prices.

During the last few days, Bush asked his Energy and Justice departments to open inquiries into possible cheating in the gasoline markets, said White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Bush planned to announce the action Tuesday during a speech in Washington.

Yes, that's very believable: President Bush going after the oil companies.

This will do nothing to improve the President's standing with people who believe oil prices are the result of a huge corporate conspiracy, and it will do nothing to improve his faltering relationship with his base, which tends to believe that business is business and if people don't like high oil prices they should stop buying oil.

It just makes him look desperate, cynical and utterly transparent. 

It took a while for people to catch on, but even the few Bush loyalists left have to look at stuff like this and think: How stupid does he think we are? 

One More Sexually Stunted Republican For Unlimited Government Power

G. Ralph Davenport is an Eagle Scout, a volunteer fireman, a South Carolina legislator and Republican with a future.  He's on the right side of all the issues: Taxes, home schooling, school prayer.  He also thinks it's the government's job to regulate sex toys. 

He's the sponsor of H 4830, a state bill "to add the dissemination, procurement, and promotion of sexual devices to the delineated obscenity offenses."

To quote from the proposed law itself:

It is unlawful for a person knowingly to create, buy, procure, or process obscene material or a sexual device with the purpose and intent of disseminating it...It is unlawful for a person to advertise or otherwise promote the sale of sexual devices or material represented or held out by them as obscene...A person who violates this section is guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, must be imprisoned not more than five years or fined not more than ten thousand dollars, or both.

Five years for a dildo.  And you thought legislators were elected to only four year terms.

Apparently inspired by great American statesmen like Jefferson and Lincoln, Davenport has coined his own memorable political phrase.  Jefferson had "We hold these truths to be self evident," Lincoln had "Four score and seven years ago," and Davenport has "covered male genitals in a discernably turgid state."

Can we just finally admit that the vaunted base of the Republican Party has serious sexual issues?  Any hint of sex being enoyable or of women having control of their own sexuality and here comes a new law to repress it.  That a state legislator would decide that the most valuable use of his and the legislature's time is to legislate against vibrators...well, it kind of makes you wonder what aspect of human behavior Republicans think is beyond government purview, doesn't it?

The Power of Implication

NewMexiKen refers to President James Buchanan as "the former worst President" of the United States.

Functional Ambivalent Road Show Continues

I'm still on the road taking care of personal business.  I'm in Houston, in case anyone is wondering.  I've never been to Houston before.  The parts of Houston I'm seeing are not the glamorous parts.

I return to real life Wednesday.  I'll try to blog a couple of things between now and then.

But At Least I'm Still Ambivalent!

Functional/Ambivalent is not particularly functional right now, at least in the blogging sense.  I'm healthy, but getting slammed at work and in my personal life.  There's travel involved, and things I need to pay attention to that I normally neglect.

I'll be back in a couple of days.

Also, I need some explanation why "Smells Like Teen Spirit" keeps running through my head.

Maybe He Ought To Go Back On His Meds

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh theorized that the retired Army generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation were doing it because they wanted Rumsfeld to stay at the Pentagon.  According to Rush, the generals knew that that by calling publicly for Rumsfeld's resignation, they'd force President Bush to publicly support his ineffective Secretary of Defense, making it politicaly impossible for Rumsfeld to resign or be fired.

"This is deep stuff," El Rushbo said.  "Deep."

Deep, indeed, and there's Rush standing up to his waist in it.

Pass It On

The hot rumor is, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is going to resign and President Bush is going to nominate Harriet Miers to take his place.

You heard it here first.

Maybe We Should Be Talking About Deporting Republicans

With Republicans in control of all branches of government, federal spending hit record levels in March.  Spending was up more than 13% over March, 2005, while receipts were up only 10%.  This led to an $85 billion deficit for the month.  (That's an annualised rate of more than $1 trillion.)  While some of March's total is due to accounting quirks -- April 1 fell on a Saturday, so some payments were moved to March 31 -- it's interesting to note that the previous spending record had been set in the previous month, February.   That's not an anomaly, it's a trend.

As for president Bush's promise to cut the deficit in half by the time he leaves office, even using the administration's Enron-inspired accounting methods he's not going to make it.

So far through the first six months of this budget year, which began in October, the deficit totals $303 billion, an increase of 2.8 percent over the deficit in the first six months of the 2005 budget year.  The administration is forecasting that the deficit for this budget year, which will end Sept. 30, will hit a record $423 billion, surpassing the old mark in dollar terms of $413 billion set in 2004.

The Republican grasp of fiscal reality is such that, the day before these numbers were released, Senator and Presidential hopeful George Allen of Virginia launched his re-election campaign with a promise to "make President Bush's tax cuts permanent." 

Apparently, he believes that threatening voters is a good campaign strategy.

The Base They Keep Playing To

Up in protective mountains, there's a company that is ready. And it wants you to be ready, too.

The company is the Alpine Survival Group (ASG) of Salmon, Idaho, which describes itself as "A Christian Family company where Personal Security and Freedom remain firmly based in our legendary heritage."

ASG's inventory is like something out of a 1970s end-of-the-world movie: Everything one might need to keep fear at bay.  Guns, ammo, two-year supplies of food and, of course, fallout shelters for the 21st Century.  These aren't your father's fallout shelters, though.  They're high-tech wonders with water filtration, uninteruptable power sources and positive air pressure to keep nuclear, biological and chemical attacks away from your family and friends.  None of whom, if the pictures on the website are any indication, will be black.

Ridiculous as it may seem, I'd bet my house that  not far from the power centers of Washington and New York -- and also, probably, places like Houston and Dallas -- there are rich-guy Republicans buying, literally, into Alpine Survival's dark worldview.  ASG's customer base probably includes some steady party donors who straddle the rational and irrational worlds, playing it safe by both swimming in the political mainstream and preparing a bulletproof Plan B.  After all, someone must be buying ASG's flagship $2.6 million Earthcom 70-128, an underground condominium project that will shelter up to 200 people for "long periods" when it's not safe to go outdoors.

The product was specifically designed and developed to protect people during and after disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, storms, forest fires, power failures, nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear/chemical terrorism, and full-scale protracted nuclear, chemical and biological war. A tremendous effort has been made to think of every conceivable incident that shelterists could face in all types of disasters.

The interesting thing is that the ASG worldview is not that different from the apocalyptic worldview of people like Dick Cheney, who see doom everywhere they look. 

The company claims among its clients the Department of Homeland Security and Halliburton-Pruett, both groups that would have legitimate use for some of ASG's more paranoid goods and services.  Still, there's something creepy about Halliburton showing up in a market niche where crazy people prepare for apocalypse.  There's little difference between the world ASG is arming people against and the world Dick Cheney wants to beat to a bloody pulp.  Both Cheney and ASG believe that the end of the world may be just around the corner.  Cheney, however, thinks we've got enough firepower as a nation that we can hold the bad guys off for a while and maybe even prevail.  The ASG, on the other hand, is up in the mountains shouting "bring it on, motherfuckers," hoping the end will come soon and enthusiastically embracing the Osama bin Laden, home-in-a-cave lifestyle they apparently believe is Christendom's destiny.

The ASG proudly displays the Christian Crusade Cross on its website, a dead giveaway that we're not dealing with psychologically healthy people.  The Christian Crusade Cross bears little resemblance to the traditional Christian cross.  It's medieval, fetishistically German, and traces its roots back to the New Christian Crusade Church in Louisiana, a crackpot organization headed by James K. Warner.  Warner is an all-purpose bigot, hating not only the usual suspects -- Jews, blacks, communists -- but also Freemasons.  He mentored a generation of racists, and ordained Tom Metzger, former Klansman and godfather of the skinhead movement.  Also intertwined with the Christian Crusade is Richard Butler, late-but-not-lamented leader of Aryan Nation.

This is not to say that Cheney in any way embraces the racist aspects of ASG's operations, or that he has any direct connection with or even knowledge of the organization at all.  It's just an interesting thing, finding the intersection of two sets like this, a little crossroads where people say the same things in different tones of voice.  The ASG makes no secret of its admiration for President Bush, and advertises as well it's scorn for "Subversive, Liberal Communist Hotspots Across America," using as evidence of treason the same red and blue electoral map that more respectable Republicans use to justify their attacks on the independent judiciary, homosexuals and whoever else they're afraid of that day.

Finally, it's not surprising, at that crossroads, that a few people have set up shop and are seeking profit on the fear that is, in certain circles, so decadently fashionable.

Today's Out of Context Quote

This could be about the love life of a middle aged man:

It's all about the balance of the alcohol and the wood.

Or not.