His story was one of the great US political stories, and his accomplishments were legion. So were his flaws. I think that in the end, the former far outweighed the latter. Biden mourns, in a manner I find tremendously affecting. As does Massachusetts.
“That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring.” He manages to go on for an entire post (original) about how male gay behavior tends towards pederasty and domination, while lesbians are blissfully free of such problems. The evidence boils down to the historical record, which is of course a perfect transcript of human behavior, and “a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies.” Seriously. The manual said the male homosexual murder rate was 26 times the norm, so that’s where his suggestion above comes from. ...
I’m not entirely sure what I think about the trend of carrying guns to political events. On the one hand, I don’t object to open carry. It’s the old security versus freedom debate, and I try hard to come down on the side of freedom. I’m also pretty sure the Secret Service knows what it’s doing around Obama. I’m edgy because it is not the primary job of the Secret Service to protect, say, liberals. Or Congressmen, for that matter. Emotions are running high at the healthcare town halls, and I don’t trust everyone on either side of the issue to be stable. ...
Not in the least to my surprise, Lieberman is now suddenly willing to think about caucusing with the Republicans. Way to go, Joe!
You guys catching this Keith Olbermann stuff (original)? Oughta be.
Blah blah blah, Joe Lieberman’s web site went down. Lieberman said it was a DoS attack. Maybe it was something else. The quick Daily Kos response was that it was due to cheap hosting. Now, that response makes no sense. On the one hand, Kos says the server was overcrowded. But MeetNed.com, which Kos says was hosted on the same servers, was up. So OK, not an overcrowded server. The hosting provider’s own site is down. Obviously some kind of technical screw up, probably not a DoS attack, but the blithe snarky “this could be fixed in an hour by a competent sysadmin” crap… nah. Kos doesn’t know what’s going on and there’s no obvious explanation. ...
I’m blithely reading Daily Kos, and there’s another post on a Congress race that’s looking like it might be competitive for the Dems. Not unusual this year. Huh, that name rings a bell for some reason. Wait. Darcy Burner (original)? That’d be the same Darcy who I knew at Harvard; who filled the co-chair spot at HRSFA after I stepped down; and who was one of my four roomates at the House on the Borderlands back in whatever year that was. (And then I bumped into her again while I was working at Alexa, which is not a very interesting company unless you know that the non-profit side of Alexa was the Internet Archive before Alexa was bought by Amazon.) Well, cool. She’s an awesome person and I have a huge amount of respect for her.
I would like to call attention to some foolish people and some people who are abrogating their responsibility. Representatives Bob Ney (R-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) arranged to remove French fries and French toast from the House of Representatives cafeteria menu. This is about the stupidest symbolic act ever. Duh. But heck, why stop with Ney and Jones? Ney is Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which is responsible for this change. The other members of the committee are certainly culpable: Vernon J. Ehlers, (R-MI), John L. Mica (R-FL), John Linder (R-GA), John T. Doolittle (R-CA), Thomas M. Reynolds (R-NY), John B. Larson (D-CT), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), and Robert Brady (D-PA). (Apparently being named John is one of the criteria for being on this committee.) ...
Let’s take a quick trip back to my criteria for Bush’s success, shall we? He already missed the 2004 Iraqi election goal by a slim margin. And now it looks like Iran may get nukes. Having enriched uranium doesn’t count, but that does put Iran closer to the Bomb than they were in 2004. Still no new draft!
Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld. “And the idea that inspectors can go in there and discover things, and find things, if they were be that, they would have been named ‘finders’ or ‘discoverers’ instead of ‘inspectors.’” Damn! Do my local health inspectors know about this? Do home inspectors know about this? Does Inspector Clouseau — well, OK, that last is a bad example. But geeze, guy, inspector does include the concept of finding out when someone’s lying. Hm; I think the word he’s looking for as an alternative is “investigator,” which definitely has more connotations of someone uncovering hidden truths. Still, inspector carries some of that weight as well. ...