i’m voting for “that one”
By jackie sheeler | October 8, 2008
i am out in california on a business trip and, because i’m staying in a hotel, i have access to a television, something that i will not have in my own home. though i have followed the election, and the debates, closely, this is the first one that i have seen as most americans see it: in real time, on TV. because of that, it was unclear to me whether this debate was really as ho-hum and, at times, downright boring as it seemed or whether this feeling came from watching the whole thing at one time on the much-despised (by me) boob tube, rather than watching clips and highlights as i read through the responses.
![](http://getangrywithme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/that_one.gif "\\"that one\\"")
it was somewhat heartening to discover that i was not alone and that this debate was considered by most to be pretty much plain vanilla. even so, there were a few moments that i enjoyed, especially obama’s come-back to mccain about his “bomb bomb bomb iran” nonsense. as dignified and reserved as that reply was, it is an example of barack finally taking the gloves off with mccain, and high time he did so, in his own rather removed, rather noble way.
a far cry indeed from the tone of the republican campaign, where stump speeches have now, courtesy of pitbull palin, come to resemble klan meetings or the revival of a wacked-out and bloodthirsty fringe religion, where participants characterize an elected, respected US senator as a “terrorist” and shouts of “kill him” are met only with a lipsticked grin. yes, this is what the mccain campaign aspires to inspire at this point, the very worst that is in human beings, a narrow brand of patriotism that seeks to destroy anything even remotely unlike itself.
well, come and get me then, john & sarah, because i am very much unlike either one of you, and pretty goddam proud of it.
in the meantime, while we were all too busy campaign-watching to pay much attention to the moron-in-chief who still sits in the white house, bush has been doing some maneuvering of his own, and i very much don’t like what i am seeing there. as reported by amy goodman, the first army brigade has now been deployed for active duty WITHIN THE UNITED STATES in order to “subdue unruly individuals”, and the fact of that deployment has already been used by the present administration in order to bully congress into passing the dreadful bailout bill.
don’t believe me? take half a minute to watch this clip from representative brad sherman:
when i heard about this deployment a couple of weeks ago, my first thought was “oh my god, they’re going to try and steal another election.” the first time it was done via backroom dealing with the supreme court, the second time it was done via voter blockades and miscounting, but in a landslide election neither of those tactics will work — and this election is shaping up to look like a landslide for obama, who remains honorable even while the pigsty that is the mccain campaign hurls its swill his way.
i would not put anything past george bush at this point. he has nothing to lose, and everything to gain by putting mcsame in the white house. and, thanks to laws that bush himself destroyed while in office, he can legally launch a military attack against the citizens of this country and the army is honor-bound to obey his command. whether they would, in fact, obey a command to — for example — mortar a polling place on election day, has yet to be seen.
other than getting to the polls in record numbers and voting democractic, i’m not sure what we can do about this, and i would love to hear some ideas about prevention. while i don’t think it’s likely that the army is going to be turned against us in order to support the republican ticket, i certainly don’t think it’s impossible, and that is enough to keep me scared and get me prepared. i live in NYC, so getting myself a gun is out of the question — it would take months, not weeks — and anyway i don’t know anything about gunplay and would likely not be very useful in that way. so how CAN i be useful? what can one impassioned american citizen do to prevent this country’s final descent into dictatorship?
while i retire to my basement bunker to best figure out how to protect myself from my own government (shades of the gulag archipelago there, no?), i leave you with this, which i consider to be the final word on sarah palin:
Topics: bad politics, barack obama | 4 Comments »
where are the statesmen?
By jackie sheeler | October 5, 2008
one of this blogs most faithful readers emailed me to ask where was my take on the VP debates. she’d apparently been awaiting hellfire and brimstone with bated breath.
i am, like every other american, utterly exhausted with the campaigning at this point. i read all the post-debate opinion pieces and the liveblogs before watching the debate myself, in bed on my iphone the following day. and what i saw left me too sad to write.
i don’t have a television, have never owned one (except for a 6-month bout of temporary insanity having to do with an entirely impossible relationship — when he went, the TV went) (to someone else). i suppose youtube qualifies as a quasi-TV, but i’m okay with that as most tubes don’t bother to assault you with commercials. so for me, watching the 90-minute debate straight through, after having only seen snippets of both candidates beforehand, was eye-opening. illuminating. shocking and sick-making.
the republican party is doing their best to get a halfwit winking bimbo into the white house, one not even well-read enough to know what an “achilles heel” is. and not even a well-meaning bimbo, either, as quite a few alaskans would attest.
this is john mccain’s idea of public service: he’s willing to inflict a brainless incompetent on the whole country if it gives him a better shot of winning the election. too bad that joe biden’s too much of a gentleman to take the rude pundit’s advice.
during the last election, my father (a lifetime republican, and i better not argue with him about it neither, these kids today) asked “where are the statesmen? don’t we have them any more?”
guess not, dad.
Topics: bad politics | 1 Comment »
okay, i’m over it
By jackie sheeler | October 2, 2008
a couple of days ago, i wrote about feeling almost sorry for sarah palin. but i have returned to my senses.
partly because of an excellent analysis by rebecca traister that says, in part:
Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.
When you stage a train wreck of this magnitude — trying to pass one underqualified chick off as another highly qualified chick with the lame hope that no one will notice — well, then, I don’t feel bad for you. [Salon]
sarah herself, speaking on the radio yesterday, had this to say about her negative press:
i think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying, “You know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.
and then i watched this video. joe six-pack my ass. murderous, lying bitch.
Topics: bad politics | 3 Comments »
homework for today
By jackie sheeler | October 1, 2008
i received this via email, and unfortunately don’t have a link to the original blog. if you know where this originated, please let me know so that i can link back appropriately. here’s the post:
Here is a link to the contact page for the folks at Washington University who will be putting on the Debate Thursday night. Contact them if you suspect that Ms. Palin will be coaxed through the debate via electronic means. The page has E-mail contacts who can make sure it doesn’t happen and they should know we care.
I could not care less if no one recommends this post but please keep it kicked so as many people as might be interested can make the call themselves. Once again:
Topics: bad politics | No Comments »
vice president?
By jackie sheeler | September 30, 2008
forget that. i’d like to know how this woman even got elected as a mayor.
it’s hard for me not to feel a bit sorry for her. it’s clear at this point that she literally had no idea what she was getting into when she accepted — she doesn’t seem to have much of an idea about anything.
i bet she doesn’t do the debate on thursday. something is going to come up — an emergency with one of her kids, a broken ankle, a meeting with the czar of russia — something to conveniently prevent her from attending. and i honestly don’t blame her. the woman has become, in less than a month, a national laughingstock. as distasteful as i find her politics, i can still feel for her a bit when i think of the level of humiliation that she has already endured, and that will inevitably escalate after debating joe biden.
i read somewhere today that the alaskans are up in arms about the way the they’ve been bullied over troopergate. word is if she doesn’t win in november, she’s going to be impeached when she gets home.
Topics: bad politics, you can't make this stuff up | 2 Comments »
i’d like to thank the republicans. no, really!
By jackie sheeler | September 30, 2008
they voted down yesterday’s bailout bill and that’s a good thing. so speaking as one who has been extremely outspoken in her criticism of the party I would like to say thanks for that.
less praiseworthy of course are the reasons they put the kibosh on this bill, and those are far from noble — a pattern that extends to the democrats as well, one that provides a a crystal clear example of just how cynical our entire governmental process has become.
looking at the roster of naysayers and yaysayers from yesterday’s vote reveals two very distinct camps not at all split along party lines but according to whether or not they are up for reelection in november. those that are voted almost unanimously against the bailout and those that aren’t voted in favor.
looked at one way, this can be viewed as a positive thing: our elected officials obeying the will of the people as expressed in hundreds of thousands of emails and calls.
but what about the rest of them, then? if short-termers were obeying the will of their constituents, does it mean the others ignored that same will. and if so. in favor of what?
oh. politics. that old ugly thing.
so political considerations outweighed the will of the people for those politicians who felt they had nothing at risk, and almost all of them went with the “politically correct” option.
in other words, if we’re not in the very shadow of an election, or if your representative is on his or her last term, what YOU want doesn’t matter. what the citizens of this country want is only important as a subsidiary concern in pursuing political success. nice.
yet there’s something even more important missing from this picture and it’s the one thing that we specifically elected these bozos to do: weigh all the aspects of the proposal and make a clear, unbiased recommendation of what you think the very best course of action is. in other words to use the brains god gave them, let their consciences be their guides, and then do the right fucking thing.
doing the right thing for the sake of the right thing has been entirely obliterated from our governing process.
standing up for a principle that you truly believe in is considered naive. foolhardy. it’s inexpedient. you can’t get things done that way.
and so we have made ourselves hostage to a congress of liars and fools who daily demonstrate the truth in the saying if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.
it absolutely sickens me.
and you?
and what can we do about it? what happens here if the whole nation stands up and acknowledges that the emperor has been naked for quite some time?
Topics: bad politics | 3 Comments »
muslim children gassed in ohio. i am so ashamed of my country.
By jackie sheeler | September 29, 2008
i don’t cry over news stories very often, but i’m crying over this one. the DVD in question is being distributed by republican partisans. cause and effect? we can’t know unless and until the perpetrators have been identified. but as far as i remember nothing quite like this has happened here before. i see a connection.
here’s the first paragraph of the story:
On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil. [Daily Kos]
read the whole article. then, if you agree that there is likely a connection between the DVD and the attack, please send an email to the mccain campaign asking that they publicly denouce this DVD of hate.
what the hell is going on here? this sounds like something the nazis would do. hate and fear and attack are not going to keep anybody safe. from anything.
Topics: simply evil | 3 Comments »
what the republicans want (updated)
By jackie sheeler | September 28, 2008
they want you to forget about the keating 5. after all, the savings & loan collapse “only” cost taxpayers 3.5 billion, and mccain was only the central politican involved in that scandal.
they want to hang barack obama (you know, like an old-school lynching), and have been practicing in oregon.
they want their leader, george bush, to disappear.
they don’t want black people to vote. nor alabamans. nor floridians.
they don’t want you to vote if you’re losing your house.
some of them want you to vote for obama. which you probably will do after reading frank rich’s mccain roundup.
they don’t want to support the troops. they do want to get paid for not showing up.
they want you to ignore the fact that lobbying group davis monfort remains on the mccain campaign payroll through a scheme involving a paper corporation that purports to do web design. does this look like a designer’s site to you?
they want you to overlook the fact that sarah palin can barely form a coherent sentence. instead, they want you to watch her daughter’s upcoming wedding in alaska which they are hoping will “shut the race down for a week”.
they want you to believe that sarah palin is ready for the vice-presidency and even, if it comes to that, the presidency. (though not even all of their own people believe that one.) and they want you to ignore all the inappropriate gifts she’s already accepted as governor.
they want you to believe that john mccain is quite green. really, he is! ignore all evidence to the contrary.
they don’t want you to know that barack obama has been endorsed by a record number of nobel laureates.
oh, and also please ignore that the vets are going for obama as well.
they want you to believe — hell, i guess they’re trying to get themselves to believe — that climate change is simply not an issue.
and they want carly fiorina and her big fat parachute to go away quietly, hopefully taking troopergate with her.
some of them want sarah palin to go away too.
they want to deregulate health insurance. you know, like the way they deregulated wall street. better get that checkup before it’s too late!
and for god’s sake, please don’t watch david letterman! nor rachel maddow neither.
updates (i may continue adding to this post up to the election itself):
they don’t want you to find out about the 200 US diplomats who just endorsed barack obama.
they want you to be prevented from voting if you show up wearing an obama t-shirt. (oh, the ban is on all election t-shirts, but have you seen mccain’s decrepit self on anybody’s back yet? i didn’t think so.)
Topics: bad politics | 5 Comments »
neither wailing nor gnashing of teeth
By jackie sheeler | September 27, 2008
the carrying on that is done when unknown poets die unexpectedly in NYC is perhaps unmatched by anything but the extravagant grief of vivian gornick’s widowed mother. it’s almost a competition to see who can book the first memorial reading, build the first tribute website, send the most and teariest emails.
all this on behalf of someone who, often as not, got little more than a nod of recognition when encountered over the open mike sign-up list. someone about whom (tell the truth!) one had snickered.
by all means let’s give these poets their final fifteen minutes of stagetime, add a couple of entries to their google results and throw a party where all us other unsung poets can reminisce and swap quirky stories about the deceased. but spare us all the bogus bereavement, the hand-to-heart when speaking the dear departed’s name. and let’s not pretend we’re mourning the end of western letters either, for chrissake, because a lot of the writing simply wasn’t very good.
where does it come from, this apparently irresistible desire to idealize people after they’re gone? i don’t think it’s necessarily any more prevalent among poets than other social groups; it’s just that poets have more visible bully pulpits. the same type of thing happens in the workplace, where all the office harridan has to do for immediate conversion from scumbaggery to sainthood is keel over with a stroke, or where a brain tumor makes everybody a BFF of the mailroom guy they never even talked to before he got sick.
i suppose this is a strange way to start a remembrance of robert dunn, who passed away this weekend — but he liked strange, and with his deadpan and always-irreverent sense of humor i think he would appreciate a ball-busting post like this as my way of saying farewell. robert was a kind and generous curator, who organized readings at venues ranging from raunchy west village bars to a no-cursewords barnes & noble tucked far up the asscrack of queens. for some years he also co-edited the Medicinal Purposes literary journal with his crotchety friend thomas catterson. i don’t think he put an issue out after thomas died.
but what comes to my mind most clearly is the loving care that robert took of his mother. i met her at their apartment some years ago, in the middle of a blizzard, when i stopped by to help with a computer problem. stopped by is a nice way of saying that i took 2 trains and then a bus and then struggled several blocks through hip-dip (as i recall it) snow to reach their high-rise. i was surprised by the courtly woman in the wheelchair, as i’d taken it for granted that robert lived alone. we worked over his laptop in the kitchen while she watched tv, and when i stopped in the living room to wish her goodnight she very graciously thanked me for coming to rescue her son from the pc virus demons (which i hadn’t quite managed to do). i could have been — shit, i WAS — mightily annoyed at having undertaken such a shlep on such a night to fix a LAPTOP that could just as easily have made its way to me, but robert’s gentleness with her and his sotto-voce apology lest i detect the aroma of colostomy, softened me. i don’t soften easily, as you might guess. but i softened that night, and i stayed soft toward him, as it so happens, for the remainder of his life.
robert, i would be lying if i said i’m gonna miss you, because of course i’m not — lately we ran into each other only once or twice a year, and you just don’t miss someone you hardly ever see. but i must salute the irony of you bowing out in the selfsame gym where you lost a hundred-something pounds. you were looking better lately than you’d ever looked before; dapper, even, with that ubiquitous hat cocked sideways. i can almost imagine the poem you’d write, making fun of a guy who finally gets in shape only to drop dead on the health club floor. i can almost hear us laughing and applauding as you read it.
bravo for a life well-lived, mr. dunn. no sentiment, no schmaltz, no overhyped BS. just the way you liked it.
robert's artsig from poetz.com
Topics: artists & the arts, nyc seen from the streets | No Comments »
WAMU today
By jackie sheeler | September 27, 2008
i live next door to Washington Mutual Bank, the first big-bank branch to have opened in my southern harlem neighborhood. i have a CD on deposit there, and this seemed — in light of the fact that you don’t get ongoing statements or an ATM card with a CD — a good time to ask for some kind of statement of accounts. i wasn’t sure if they’d be open, this being saturday morning and them being in trouble and all. i wasn’t positive there wouldn’t be lines of screaming depositors outside the bank, clamoring for their cash.
- 116th St. WAMU before opening 2 years ago
yes to being open and no to the bankrupt hordes: it was business as usual at WAMU this rainy morning, and the young man at the convenience desk was more than happy to print me a copy of my CD’s You Are Here summary (unfortunately without troubling to ask me for ID, but i guess you can’t expect too much when the whole economy is in the toilet and banks are folding in the middle of the night). in fact, the two customers on line ahead of me were actually making deposits. so much for my updated 1929 fantasies of doom.
if evidence of doom is what i wanted, though, there sure are enough hints of it in this statement. i opened this CD in october 2006, and added more funds in november of that year. since that time, the amount on deposit (roughly $35k) has remained constant. interest was deposited, like clockwork, the middle of every month.
and there the symmetry ends. at the beginning of last year the interest payments averaged around $150/month, culminating in a high of $156.70 in june 2007. it was all downhill from there, with payments hovering around ninety-something bucks until this summer when they plunged — PLUNGED, i tell you! — to $48. all this, mind you, while the capital amount (initial deposits plus interest earned) had grown by more than $2,000.
and the financial meltdown is only just getting started.
well, i’m grateful. i’m grateful that i have money in a CD that i am able to leave alone, and i’m grateful that it hasn’t (yet) been wiped out by the shenanigans of wall street. i’m grateful that ordinary citizens understand enough about the way that finance works not to have started a run on this (or any other, so far) bank. i’m grateful that WAMU has been bailed out and that there is still money in the FDIC.
i’m grateful but not complacent. i’m worried, and wondering what i should (or even can) do to protect myself in the event the country slides further down the tubes into bankruptcy. there is no doubt in my mind that if the absolute worst comes to pass and john mccain wins the coming election, that we are all well and completely fucked. on the other hand, despite the trust and respect i hold for barack obama, i’m not convinced that anybody can repair the wreckage that the republicans and their high-rolling buddies have wreaked on our economy, at least not in my lifetime (and i ain’t all that old).
Topics: bad politics, nyc seen from the streets | 2 Comments »