What do you think? Should I go for it?
Edit: I guess for any strangers reading this, it's more dramatic if you know what I look like without digital enhancement (and you get to see my lovely wife and daughter, too!):
- "I don't wear a hairpiece!"
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Just for fun...
I'm taking a technology class to clear my teaching credential, and we played with Photoshop for a couple hours this morning. Here's my final product:
Friday, March 10, 2006
Screw the future, we're zillionaires!
I'm getting the feeling that the current adminstration is unaware of the nature of space-time. They seem to be living in an eternal present, disconnected to any past from which lessons can be learned or from any future in which current actions might have some consequences.
Evidence for a disdain of the past has probably been most popularly celebrated in the many comparisons of the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. A less obvious but just as poignant observation could be made if we compare the culture of secrecy and acting with impunity to the culture of the Nixon White House that led to Watergate.
What I think is more interesting, however, is the apparent lack of acknowledgement of the future. Time and again, policies have been set forth, stances have been taken, and actions have been approved that seem to indicate that the current administration is unaware of the fact that the world will continue after W's term in office comes to an end, or even that it will come to an end. They seem particularly unaware of the possibility of anyone with whom they are not idealogically aligned ever occupying any position of power in this country ever again.
The latest evidence of this temporal blind-spot is Bush's desire to have line-item veto power. Doesn't he realize that the Congress can't legislate that power for him with the qualifier "this power only applies to conservative republican presidents with ties to the petroleum industry in wartime against a noun such as 'terror,' 'weather,' or 'sadness'"? If he gets line-item veto power, so will all of the presidents who come after him, some of whom he's sure to disagree with on just about every point of import. But he doesn't seem to care...
Coupled with the move to authorize the NSA to spy domestically without warrants, the executive branch has made moves to dilute the power of the legislative branch (line-item veto) and the judicial branch (no warrants). In fact, it seems like this administration has the goal of investing as much power in the person of the president as possible and tilting the system of checks and balances toward the president so far as to threaten upsetting the whole system.
There is, I suppose, a sort of logic to what they are doing: a logic that one would expect to be employed by a 6 year old when they devise a bold plan to raid the cookie jar and assume that they will never get caught because they're so brilliant. They have control of the White House and both houses of congress at the same time. There may not be another opportunity to get the congress to willingly grant a great deal of its own power to the executive branch. The implications of such transfer seem to be moot. Isn't there at least one intern hanging around one of these meetings waiting to see if anyone wants coffee who's saying, "Hey, what if the next president is a democrat, and we still control congress but we've given the president so much power that he can still do whatever the heck he wants?" Shouldn't they be scared to death of setting up just such a scenario?
Or maybe they just don't care. Here's my theory: the actual goal of everything they do is to make sure that they and their wealthy friends get as much cash as is humanly possible in the next two and a half years. At that point, who cares what happens? They're filthy rich! If you have bazillions of dollars, you can pretty much ride above the petty concerns of regular humanity like famine, pestilence and war.
What do you think? It seems to explain a lot of the otherwise inscrutable behavior we see coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The two pronged attack of making sure that the wealthy pay as little as possible for taxes, and then giving as much of the money actually collected from the middle classes to defense contractors and Halliburton sets these guys up pretty nicely for the next 15 or 20 years (or less, if you're Cheney. I mean, how many heart-attacks does this guy have left? Ditto for anyone who goes hunting with him). By embroiling us in a war against a military tactic as oppossed to any actual set of persons (terrorism isn't genetic: you don't have to be born to a terrorist to be able to practice it. Therefore, getting rid of all of the terrorists isn't actually getting rid of terrorism. Milosevic had a much more achievable goal...), they're also setting up a continuous stream of income for all of those guys well into their retirement. It's a perfect plan. The events of 9/11 worked better than the hijackers could have hoped. It put us in the mindset of fear that led us to say "do whatever you want, just protect us from this sort of thing," and then accept unprecedented tax cuts and sketchy justifications for war as being somehow connected to what we were afraid of.
Oh, well, you know what they say: In a democracy, you get the leadership you deserve. I'll bet Iraqis can't wait!
- "No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity." (I'm cheating, this is a historical quote, not from a movie)
Evidence for a disdain of the past has probably been most popularly celebrated in the many comparisons of the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. A less obvious but just as poignant observation could be made if we compare the culture of secrecy and acting with impunity to the culture of the Nixon White House that led to Watergate.
What I think is more interesting, however, is the apparent lack of acknowledgement of the future. Time and again, policies have been set forth, stances have been taken, and actions have been approved that seem to indicate that the current administration is unaware of the fact that the world will continue after W's term in office comes to an end, or even that it will come to an end. They seem particularly unaware of the possibility of anyone with whom they are not idealogically aligned ever occupying any position of power in this country ever again.
The latest evidence of this temporal blind-spot is Bush's desire to have line-item veto power. Doesn't he realize that the Congress can't legislate that power for him with the qualifier "this power only applies to conservative republican presidents with ties to the petroleum industry in wartime against a noun such as 'terror,' 'weather,' or 'sadness'"? If he gets line-item veto power, so will all of the presidents who come after him, some of whom he's sure to disagree with on just about every point of import. But he doesn't seem to care...
Coupled with the move to authorize the NSA to spy domestically without warrants, the executive branch has made moves to dilute the power of the legislative branch (line-item veto) and the judicial branch (no warrants). In fact, it seems like this administration has the goal of investing as much power in the person of the president as possible and tilting the system of checks and balances toward the president so far as to threaten upsetting the whole system.
There is, I suppose, a sort of logic to what they are doing: a logic that one would expect to be employed by a 6 year old when they devise a bold plan to raid the cookie jar and assume that they will never get caught because they're so brilliant. They have control of the White House and both houses of congress at the same time. There may not be another opportunity to get the congress to willingly grant a great deal of its own power to the executive branch. The implications of such transfer seem to be moot. Isn't there at least one intern hanging around one of these meetings waiting to see if anyone wants coffee who's saying, "Hey, what if the next president is a democrat, and we still control congress but we've given the president so much power that he can still do whatever the heck he wants?" Shouldn't they be scared to death of setting up just such a scenario?
Or maybe they just don't care. Here's my theory: the actual goal of everything they do is to make sure that they and their wealthy friends get as much cash as is humanly possible in the next two and a half years. At that point, who cares what happens? They're filthy rich! If you have bazillions of dollars, you can pretty much ride above the petty concerns of regular humanity like famine, pestilence and war.
What do you think? It seems to explain a lot of the otherwise inscrutable behavior we see coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The two pronged attack of making sure that the wealthy pay as little as possible for taxes, and then giving as much of the money actually collected from the middle classes to defense contractors and Halliburton sets these guys up pretty nicely for the next 15 or 20 years (or less, if you're Cheney. I mean, how many heart-attacks does this guy have left? Ditto for anyone who goes hunting with him). By embroiling us in a war against a military tactic as oppossed to any actual set of persons (terrorism isn't genetic: you don't have to be born to a terrorist to be able to practice it. Therefore, getting rid of all of the terrorists isn't actually getting rid of terrorism. Milosevic had a much more achievable goal...), they're also setting up a continuous stream of income for all of those guys well into their retirement. It's a perfect plan. The events of 9/11 worked better than the hijackers could have hoped. It put us in the mindset of fear that led us to say "do whatever you want, just protect us from this sort of thing," and then accept unprecedented tax cuts and sketchy justifications for war as being somehow connected to what we were afraid of.
Oh, well, you know what they say: In a democracy, you get the leadership you deserve. I'll bet Iraqis can't wait!
- "No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity." (I'm cheating, this is a historical quote, not from a movie)
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