Noting nothing in particular here is the quote for the day:
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. — H.L. Mencken
Open up the windows, let me catch my breath. Mama told me not to come. — Randy Newman. Oh well, they can’t all be Louisiana 1927.
It is time again — like it ever ended — for the media and the talking heads to make mountains out of mole hills that are the Wisconsin political landscape.
I am talking about the Wisconsin recall election in which GOP Gov. Scott Walker kept his seat after spearheading a number of anti-public union measures. The election made Walker only one of three U.S. governors to survive recall. The 2003 gubernatorial recall of California Democrat Gray Davis put “The Arnold” Schwarzenegger in office almost 13 years after the action-figure bodybuilder-actor starred in the movie “Total Recall.” I don’t think that movie was about recalling a governor from office. Got Irony?
It seems everyone has a different spin on the Wisconsin election, why Walker won, what if anything does it mean to this year’s presidential election? And nothing really solid lies out there which is only logical since, like a fine wine, it takes awhile to sort out just what elections mean. I mean, what the real consequences are of an election other than the fact someone wins and someone loses. We got that, Jack!
Depending on your political bent, a couple of factors do seem to have gained favor among the pundits. Fox News is excluded because theirs is a point of view clouded by red state-colored glasses. First of all, the Wisconsin election is really meaningless when it comes to determining the outcome of the presidential race. Also, the electorate is predisposed to throwing out a pol only when he does something involving misconduct in office. I don’t know too much about that. This is a really good analysis of how Gray Davis lost to “The Governator.” If the second proposition turns out to be true then perhaps those pissed off at Walker should have waited. The criminal justice system might just do their dirty work for them.
The book really won’t be wrote for sometime regaling the ultimate effect of the Wisconsin recall election. It will have to be a chapter in “Welcome to democracy Citizens United style.” You know, if you don’t have your own politician, buy one! In other words, the obscenity of what our political system has become is just now being written.
Wait for the book, or no, wait for the movie to come out. You will likely to find in the back sections which are out of public view, or in one of those parlors where you feel you need a delousing and a shower upon leaving. It ain’t “Debby Does Dallas.” It’s not “Sex In The City.” It’s money. Very, very dirty money combined with ultimate power. Who needs Viagra, right?
Houston Channel 13’s new Super Duper Mega Doppler radar shows a thunderstorm about 3 miles away from my present location. I can hear the thunder and see the lightning. Does that not mean I see the thunderstorm or that we are experiencing a thunderstorm?
I think about things such as that. The one thing I wanted to be when I grew up that I didn’t reach was being a TV weatherman. My Dad even helped me make a map inside a clear plastic sleeve so I could write temps down upon it using a grease pencil. Man, if I had all the stuff out there today on the Internet I probably would be retiring as a weatherman right about now. Heck, I’d have to retire because you can’t have a fat, bald weatherman.
Actually, I am just as content to sit and watch the weather. My ideal place to live must have a perfect perch to watch storms. Down here in the humid-itity subtropical world you watch the storm blow in, the trees swaying like a Hula dancer and the lightning lighting up like an extraterrestial blood vein. Then comes the rain. You watch it puddle and drip ’till it drips no more.
Then you head inside the house for the A/C because the sun will come out and you will live in Sauna Land.
Since I have been sitting here, writing, the storm hasn’t seemed to move. It is “training” as the weather geeks say. Here is what the National Weather Service in Lake Charles says:
Enjoy the storm if you’ve got one and even if you don’t, be careful out there.
The idea of a televised debate in Spanish between the two Texas Republican candidates for Senate has sparked the fancy of a national media. Rumors circulating that top GOP vote-getters Ted Cruz and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst have agreed to an all-Spanish forum on Univision is apparently wishful thinking, according to The Texas Tribune. A Univision reporter apparently made the suggestion and the idea took a life of its own.
Cruz, the Canadian-born son of Cuban refugee parents, is not very hot for the idea. The former Texas solicitor general — Princeton and Yale Law-educated — grew up speaking “Spanglish” in the Lone Star State. Dewhurst learned Spanish as a CIA agent stationed in Bolivia. The lieutenant governor seems open to the idea of debate in his second-language while Cruz defends his poor Español partly in English and partly in Español: ” In any language, parece que el Señor Dewhurst les tiene miedo a los votantes de Texas.” This translates as: “It seems that Mr. Dewhurst is afraid of Texas voters.”
While somewhat entertaining this political sideshow in the Republican battle for a shot at replacing retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison does highlight the often over-looked fact otherwise buoyed by ignorance that “all Hispanics aren’t Mexicans.” In fact, all Hispanics don’t speak or even cannot speak Spanish.
Hispanics, or Latinos, have families that originate from a variety of countries south of the United States including Puerto Rico, Mexico and most South American countries. And while immigrants and first-generation Latinos may speak Spanish in their household those numbers decline through subsequent generations. A Pew Hispanic Center survey notes that only 47 percent — fewer than half — of third generation Latinos speak Spanish proficiently or read a newspaper or book in that language.
What might seem odd to those who see brown, or white, skin and a Hispanic-sounding name who no habla Español has long appeared to me as just one of those interesting facets of living in a multi-ethnic society. I once had a female roommate with a Hispanic surname who likely was helped in landing a TV reporter job because of those assets — not to mention her gorgeous looks — and whose Spanish was limited to “margarita por favor.” I have likewise known Latinos who spoke little or no Spanish married to Anglo wives who spoke “Español del rayo fluido,” (fluently, or so says my online translator!)
Given the audience who would watch a televised debate between these two GOP candidates — Cruz is a Tea Party favorite and Dewhurst, well, is Dewhurst — it would seem no more than a gimmick to stage a debate in Spanish for the pair. Likewise, it would be distinctly disadvantageous for Cruz if all he knows is an amalgam of the English and Spanish languages.
Personally, I don’t care if the two Republican senate candidates hold their debates in Esparanto. I have long been impressed with Democratic nominee Paul Sadler. The attorney from Henderson — yes, he did spend a couple of years during high school in Ventura, Calif., and yes, a high school friend of his was Kevin Costner, but who cares? — was a very skillful and passionate legislator during his time in the Texas House. Whether he has a chance, who knows? My money is on Dewhurst to win the runoff and if that pans out, he will be extremely difficult to defeat unless past or new rumors about his life are exposed as true. I won’t repeat the past rumors because they are just that, rumors, and they have as much of a chance being false as true.
Perhaps Sadler should start boning up on his Spanish if he doesn’t know the language or is rusty in its use. All I can say for now is bueno suerte, Mr. Sadler, you’ll need all the luck you can get.
More than once have I railed against the right-wing Republican silliness factor. It has long been my contention that much of what top GOP operatives say and do is not as inherently evil as it is just plain silly. It is as if the emotional development of the Karl Roves and Roger Ailes and other high-value GOP scoundrels was stuck somewhere around the third grade. That is even though these prominent folks may be political geniuses.
Rove, the bespectacled Young College Republican nerd, is known to have spent time carrying out silly, but nonetheless dirty, pranks against local Democratic candidates. Of course, this was probably all done in between studying for Poly Sci quizzes and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I suppose I wouldn’t be nearly as hacked off at today’s Republican Party were it not for so much of their rhetoric falling into on to the “flat out silly” category. I probably need not go on about this but thought that I would just provide one more example just to get it out of my system.
Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple writes today of how a journalist who is writing an unauthorized biography of GOP activist and Fox News jefe Roger Ailes was denied a subscription to a New York state newspaper that Ailes bought and turned over to his wife.
Gabriel Sherman, a New York magazine writer and editor, had subscribed to the Ailes-owned Putnam County News and Recorder and upon logging in to the paper’s Website discovered he was blocked behind its paywall. Sherman talked with News and Recorder editor Doug Cunningham and was told that the paper did not want a “financial entanglement” with Sherman because of the book he was writing. Sherman also later tried and failed to subscribe under his wife’s name. Gawker scribe John Cook, who had written a critical piece about Ailes, was likewise denied a subscription.
Wemple rounds out his post by posing similarly silly — though humorous — questions of the News and Recorder and its odd policy of barring subscriptions to its critics such as did Ailes buy the paper just to deny access to his enemies? Other penetrating questions posed by Wemple include whether the paper has a watch list and how does one qualify to make that list?
Silly is as silly does? Maybe, but while a newspaper certainly has the right to deny service to a potential customer it seems more on the side of bad business even more than one of silliness when a paper with the circulation of 4,200 turns down anyone who wants to subscribe.
