Stuff to rattle your Friday-loving bones

Carla Axtman

Or even if you're not a fan of Friday, you may find some of this stuff of interest.

As I briefly enter my personal wayback machine to a week-and-a-half-ago, I am annoyed at myself for not yet having posted my thoughts following up this post on the so-called East v. West divide in Oregon. Blog days are kind of like dog years, so if something passes off the blog radar, it can sometimes sink into the abyss of memory. However I hope to get my thoughts on this down in pixels sometime in the near future. I believe it's an important discussion and it should be continued.

Something that should have tweaked my radar somehow flew completely under it. Yesterday, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission released its report on how much scratch was thrown down by various interest groups to lobby legislators in Salem. You can download the spreadsheet at the Ethics Commission website here (H/T: Sarah Mirk, Blogtown). The group spending the most: The Citizens for Fire Safety Institute at a whopping $468,269.00. This group with the Bush-era style name appears to be little more than a front group for a bunch of chemical manufacturers who don't appreciate regulation of their potentially toxic carcinogens..

Speaking of the Oregon Ethics Commission, Kulongoski has appointed a Republican who used to be an uber powerful lobbyist in Salem. Kulongoski's office told Willamette Week that the appointment originated with the House Republicans, who were exercising their statutory right to nominate a member of the Ethics Commission. The nomination must be approved by the Oregon Senate.

Randy Stapilus of Ridenbaugh Press takes a peek at hospital mergers and how the "free market solution" to health care isn't the panacea many on the right would have us believe.

Finally, a salute to Charlie Pierce. Pierce is a regular panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Mr. Pierce a few weeks ago while attending Netroots Nation In Pittsburgh. Pierce submits a weekly letter to Eric Alterman of The Nation, who posts the letter each Friday on his blog. An excerpt from this week's dispatch:

To every camel's back, there is a final straw. Sooner or later, we've taken all we can stand and we can't stands no more, and we pass over the Popeye Line. For me, it came sometime last weekend when I heard Richard Cheney, the pre-eminent moral and physical coward of the era, explain once again the Mulligan theory of national defense by which every president gets one free mass casualty attack that doesn't count toward "keeping us safe." (Note to Dick: by this standard, every two-term president kept us safer than you guys did. You were the worst at it. Scoreboard!) And I realized that, by all the standards of objectivity I was taught in journalism school--the most basic of which was that, if you saw a man walking down the street with a bird on his head, you could report it without finding someone else to tell you that, no, what you actually saw was a bird walking down the street with a guy on his ass--there is no longer any reason to take the Republican party seriously. It has become a festival for fruitcakes. The political movement that powered its ascension has become publicly demented. Sam Tanenhaus can plug his book all he wants, but the fact remains that it was American conservatism that spent three decades throwing open the doors to the monkeyhouse--starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, moving along through the Reagan campaigns of 1976 and 1980, the NCPAC campaigns of that same era, the marriage of convenience with theocratic crackpottery, the Buchanan campaign against the first President Bush, the various exercises in lunacy aimed at Bill Clinton, the half-mad banality of Newt Gingrich, and the cult of personality that sprang up around the second President Bush. It's a little late for delicate conservative intellectuals to ponder how it was that all that monkey poo ended up on the walls.

The serious people don't lead in that party any more, and the leaders of it -- Hello, Michael Steele -- are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate radio talk-show and completely in thrall to the maniacs who run actual radio talk-shows. Goddammit, the Spartacists are more intellectually honest and the Hemp Party folks are a helluva lot more fun. Why do serious political journalists take this careering clown car seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely mad, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magic Kenyan-Socialist spinning eyeballs scare the living protoplasm out of putative tough guys like Rahm Emanuel?

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good? Maybe not, but the good has many actual enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How's about, just once, somebody worries about those enemies of the good, all of which are amply in evidence in the campaign to make sure we never reform the criminally negligent and morally indefensible way we deliver healthcare in this country?

Instead, we get this. One thing we learned this week--Stephanopoulos is Greek for "Stockholm Syndrome". Jesus wept.

The "Mulligan theory of national defense.." Brilliant. Oh to be that good a writer.

By Carla Axtman Sept. 04, 2009