Eight Feet Deep

Stevi Perry is the only model/pageant winner sanctioned by this blog. But don’t hold that against her.

While EFD, this blog, is hardly one of the best-read publications in the Pheresblog (that’s Blogosphere backwards, sort of), it does seem, according to my StatCounter statistics, to be a resource for all those people seeking news about gorgeous Arkansas teen model Stevi Perry.

Stevi, 17, is a working model who has scored some successes in national contests, the latest being named 2008 Miss Arkansas Teen USA. This most recent news is from the place I first heard about Stevi, the Ashley County Ledger in Hamburg, Ark., a small-town publication much like one I ran during my first stop during a two-decade career in newspapers. Had it not been for proud mom, Kelli Perry, who did a search for her daughter’s name on the Web, and after seeing a post here on EFD e-mailed me, I most likely would not have written anything about Stevi. I have since corresponded with Kelli and perhaps EFD might even have an interview with Stevi sometime in the future.

We, being the weird former newspaper reporter who sadly refers to himself in third person, wish Stevi the best of success in both this new year and her career.

Gee, wasn’t Iowa just swell, Mike? Amen to that, Bro. Barack

Ah, Iowa. And just like that Iowa was packed up into crates and shipped off to New Hampshire where it will be used for something more like a real election.

And how about that Brother Obama and the Rev. Huckabee of the First Church of the Stump Speech? My how they shined brightly outside the little snow-covered corn fields of Iowa.

Whether Iowa was significant or relevant as to the future of this campaign can only be discovered in a historical context less one is a seer, or perhaps a seersucker. It’s like what I told a friend earlier in an e-mail concerning a completely different circumstance: “The only thing better than 20/20 hindsight is blowing bubbles out your a**.”

Perhaps even the next primary, or the next, or all the primaries will not foretell who the people really want to lead their respective parties or even if they want to retain the party system at all. Wouldn’t that really be a kick in the pantalones?

A time could come when CW (Conventional Wisdom and not the TV network) could become a relic. Horse sense, once defined in a Mad magazine cartoon I saw as the innate ability that prevents horses from betting on people, tells you that everything doesn’t turn out the same day after day. Like aspirin, no two snowflakes are alike and if you are fooled by twins you might quite possibly be a fool yourself. I know that I am. Polls especially seem vulnerable. One problem is the “cell phone guy.”

By cell phone guy I am not talking about that dorky-looking fellow in the Verizon commercials. I’m not even talking strictly about a guy. Instead, these are the people like several of my friends and even myself who no longer own a landline telephone but rather use a cell. We may not have lived in a certain area code, or even the state in which that area code is based, for years.

Now I am sure there are ways in which pollsters will be able to get around that problem. Maybe they can work around it now. Of course, I have never been called by a pollster on any of the cell phones I have used during the past six years and as far as I know the same can be said for probably most of my friends. On the other hand, I’ve never been solicited by a pollster using any kind of phone in all of my 52 years. So what do I know? Right, nothing or very little.

My background as a journalist tells me that editors and the political junkie political reporters are more interested in viewing the potentiality of a horse race, so to speak. But whether results of one primary election or caucus will tell us anything in the near or the distant future will be something better left up to serious historians, history students and those blowing bubbles out their a**.

The media is all gaga over the Iowa caucuses this evening. At least the media have done a pretty good job lately of explaining just what the hell a caucus is. That takes some doing, especially the Democratic version which is more like a cross between a country square dance and a tribal mating ritual practiced by the lost tribes of the Dog Islands. In reality, Dog Island is a Florida Gulf Coast barrier island and although it may have been inhabited as far back as 8,000 years ago it hasn’t been Metropolis as of late. And I don’t know if any tribes were lost there or even existed.

After (the caucus in) Iowa is over the pack o’ press will be heading for New Hampshire where they get to stand around in the snow and watch those presidential candidates who didn’t drop out — after getting beaten in Iowa like a rented mule — stand around outside factory gates and kiss factory workers or work the quaint little cafes shaking hands with babies. Or maybe I got that backwards. Oh well, who knows and who knows whether it all makes a difference. A lot of people put great stock in these early exercises in democracy, which are coincidentally the only places throughout the only presidential election process in which retail politics are actually practiced on the “neighbor grocery” level.

Of course, inevitably other localities across the nation seem to believe, like the editorial board of the Austin American Statesman, that much ado is made about quite a bit due to actions of a few corn farmers in Iowa. But one has to admit that the Statesman board like hundreds of similar newspaper executives and civic leaders across the country aren’t happy unless their city is the center of the universe. And in a big-picture type of sense they have a valid argument.

One would think a democracy would have more emphasis during the process of electing its leaders on bringing in as many folks as possible to do the “pre-pre-election” before the “pre-election” a.k.a. the party conventions. But nothing is perfect and that is perhaps more prevalent a phenomenon in politics than in any other facet of life with maybe the exception of picking a cellular phone company.

Frankly, I have felt disenfranchised during the last two elections as a voter in Texas. Of course, since I hold no sway over the idiots of the Supreme Court who elected Gee Dubya the first time, it would have made little difference in 2000. I honestly don’t know what the harm would be from a nationwide primary election, or just let matters be a free-for-all until the conventions, much like it was in the olden days. Why, nations with parliamentary forms of government can form a government upon the sneezing of a prime minister. And last but not least, the Electoral College? Give me a break. I would rather a president be picked on the basis of an arm wrestling, tomahawk-throwing or rail-splitting contest than under our system which waits patiently each four years for a royal screw-up every four years.

Oh, and while we are at it, I would like to see the presidential election season drastically shortened from just after the concession speech until the last lawyer figures out they can’t get an injunction to stop the results before going before our “college” of electors. In other words, the presidential election should be a sprint rather than a marathon. I mean, after all, it seems like we have fared just as well with accidental presidents than with those whose campaign took a geological epoch to transpire. (Just a firm opinion, Gee Dubya Bush was no accident. At least, not as a president.)

The reality is that no one of importance ever listens to me so nothing I said above will have any impact on the current state of the presidential electoral process. Knowing some of the bone-headed things I have done over my past half-century, you might decide upon closer examination that, like Martha Stewart so elegantly puts it: ” … is a good thing.”

One place in which the Internets, as Prez Gee Dubya calls ’em, have made a huge splash is in the speed and ability of obtaining political campaign finance data. Slightly more than a decade ago, when working as a reporter at a small East Texas newspaper, I can remember going on an assignment in Austin for something or other. My editor told me that since I was going out there, I should stop by the Texas Ethics Commission and get the disclosure reports for the local politicians. That’s right little chil’ren we didn’t have an Internet then and used to have to walk five miles in the snow to get coffee and it wasn’t even Starbucks. How primitive, right?

A short while ago this evening I was looking at the Federal Election Commission Web site. They have now a user-friendly “map” on which contributions to both presidential candidates and those of congressional candidates can be searched. It is really easy. It’s kind of like eating lettuce.

I did a search of money given to presidential candidates from folks in my very own city, Beaumont, Texas. It is home to a bevy of high-profile trial lawyers — names like Walter Umphrey and Wayne Reaud of the tobacco litigation wars, and upandcommer Brent Coon who has been making his name by besting British Petroleum over their killer Texas City refinery explosion in which 15 workers died. Beaumont courts over the years have also turned out large verdicts in asbestos and various other civil litigation. The city doesn’t quite display: “Beaumont: Judicial Hellhole and Damn Proud of It,” but close. The area is also filled with refineries and traditionally has had a Democratic labor union base. So given these fields of employment it isn’t very unusual that trial lawyers and some others would mostly be giving to Democratic presidential candidates.

Coon himself, for instance, is shown with more than $7,000 spread over five contributions to both John Edwards and Joe Biden. That’s not a lot, but despite the national media’s clamor over the first primaries and the Iowa caucus, the election is in (shhhh!) November. FEC stats shows Reaud giving $4,600 split evenly between Biden and Bill Richardson. And while the Mrs. Umphrey has a few donations of her own, $4,600 was doled out by Walter Umphrey, between the $2,300 for Bill Richardson and $2,100 for John Edwards.

As I said, these contributions are hardly surprising to anyone around these parts or others who might know what a “Yellow Dog Democrat” might be.

Contributions for one of our area congressmen are a little more puzzling. Republican U.S. Rep. Ted Poe went to the House largely on his fame for headline-grabbing “creative” sentencing when he was a state district judge in Houston. He has never met a news camera, especially one playing to right-wing causes, that he didn’t like. Poe has been the darling of immigration hawks like Lou Dobbs and the Fox News crowd. The congressman has been seen in news clips on the Texas border, which if you know anything about Texas is a hell of a long drive from his own district.

Yet FEC records show that Walter and Sheila Umphrey contributed a total of $8,400 to Poe’s campaign. Dick DeGuerin, arguably one of the nation’s premiere criminal defense lawyer, gave Poe $1,000. That is kind of a surprise but not. DeGuerin was David Koresh’s attorney but he also represented former GOP House Marjority weasel Tom DeLay. No big surprise is the $2,000 given Poe by Drayton McLane, Houston Astros baseball team owner and a former board of regents member at uber Baptist Baylor University in Waco. To be fair, Umphrey is a graduate of Baylor Law School and a donor of the millions given to build the Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center at Baylor. Speaking of schools, the $250 donation doesn’t stand out and probably neither does the name Dr. James Simmons of Beaumont except for the fact that he was long-time band director and now president of the area’s state school Lamar University.

Poe has been in the forefront of the anti-immigration effort to release from prison two former border patrol agents — Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean — who were imprisoned for shooting a suspected drug dealer who was fleeing across the Mexican border. The agents say they didn’t think he was injured so they didn’t bother reporting the shooting. The suspect received immunity from prosecution for testifying against the agents. In light of this case and Poe’s clamoring for the two disgraced agents’ release, I don’t know if it is irony or just sad that one of his congressional campaign donors is Russell Ybarra, a contributor of $250, who is listed by FEC records as president of Gringo’s Mexican Kitchen.

Nothing “reported” here is particularly earth-shattering, even to me. I don’t know if it is even being reported. I just started looking at some numbers and next thing that I know I think it’s time to shut off the computer for the night. What else I am I going to do, finish that biography of Millard Fillmore (Oh, sorry you dumb son of a b***h, he was the 13th president of the United States of America!) that I have had for a month? Man, that is absolutely the worst of all the presidential histories I have read. I’m sorry if someone reading this was the a cousin or wife or kid of the author, Robert J. Rayback, but I will be happy when it is read and like Fillmore is history.

My goodness gracious how far we have come with civilization so that we can blog from the laundromat? It used to be that people communally doing their laundry could do something like … read or watch soap operas or even … in extreme circumstances, talk.

With a good portion of my young Navy days spent in pursuit of women and beer to drink, it was almost heaven minus West Virginia when I realized a bar down the street from the Seabee base in Gulfport two-fered as a laundromat and bar. I believe the establishment was named “John’s Laundromat and Bar.” Some of the even more hardcore among my young friends but more so among the old-timers was delighted by the fact that John’s opened at 7 a.m. I used to like beer but only winding down a day at 7 a.m. and not starting the day with the so-called “Breakfast of Champions.”

It is funny, however, that once I got into a bachelor enlisted quarters (a.k.a. barracks) with a washer-dryer, going to John’s went out the window because those were the 1970s, the heady days of 35-cent beer in the barracks vending machines.

No matter how easy the Navy use to make it for both doing laundry and heading straight down a pathway toward substance abuse, I never found a particular fancy for washing my clothes. I did continue drinking beer and will drink one every now and then these days.

A lot of talking heads have pontificated upon how this plugged-in, wired-up, dialed-out society of ours is losing interpersonal communication as an important part of what makes a civilization functional. That might well be. Although one may also argue that the explosion of technology gives each other the ability to communicate with each other like never before. I, for instance, keep up with family and friends much better than in the past especially because of the Internet. And those same people can keep up with me either through e-mail, to a lesser extent cellular or occasionally even through my blog although that is not the primary purpose of this site. I no longer bother warning any of them of looking into my world at their own peril. My relatives especially will likely read and have read my points of view, some of which they vehemently disagree. But just like I tell any other cyber voyeur who happens to pass by, the same road that leads into this place leads out. This is my spot, my space if you will, that has been staked out on the great Internet Prairie.

With that said, I think I better see if my clothes are ready to dry. If technology could only make laundry no longer a necessity then I suppose we will have reached Ne’er do well Nirvana. I am willing to give it a try, however.