vibinc

There’s a whole lot of buzz around the MSM and the interwebs about Wes Clark’s statements on Face the Nation yesterday. Here’s a clip from the show.

Clark honored McCain’s service. As a former military man himself, it would be foolish to think he wouldn’t. Hell, I appreciate McCain’s military service and I wasn’t even alive for most of it. The simple truth is that military service, of any kind, does not make you ready to be President any more than anything else. That’s what Clark said, though not in the most concise way.

Clark did nothing to demean the service, he tried to put the service into focus. McCain can’t run for President on his service alone and expect it to go unchecked. Military service doesn’t necessarily make someone a good President, just look at our current President, or even Ulysses S. Grant. Both served in the military, both were bad Presidents, but that’s the bulk of what McCain is running on.

If the Obama campaign wants to concede that military service alone is an unquestionable asset that makes McCain uniquely qualified to be President, then they need to roll up the carpets now and save us all a lot of punditry. I suspect they’re not quite ready to do that, but are reacting to shabby media analysis. A new kind of politics eh?

In the process, they’re screwing over a man who has done more for the Democratic Party since 2004 than a whole lot of other potential surrogates. It’ a sad state of affairs.

If you want to stand up to the media noise machine, Vote Vets has a petition drive.

The Beer V. Wine Vote

From the “article”:

As some Americans recover from hangovers induced by St. Patrick’s Day, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Tuesday suggests a voter’s drinking preferences may also reveal their political preferences.

Beer drinkers appear more likely to vote for Sen. John McCain in November, while those who enjoy wine say they’re more likely to vote Democratic in the fall. Among registered voters who prefer beer to wine, McCain has a 53 percent-46 percent edge over Sen. Hillary Clinton while McCain winds up in a virtual tie with Sen. Barack Obama among beer drinkers. In the head-to-head match-ups with McCain, Sens. Obama and Clinton each win a majority among registered voters who prefer wine to beer.

It’s as if nothing happened today. Nothing, just some hung over journalists trying to make it through, cold towels over their heads, slugging back coffee, hoping the day will be over soon.

Give me a break for chrissakes!

I put this right up there with the John Kerry looks French garbage.

Every election season there is some stupid poll put out like this. Maybe it was supposed to be fun, but I’m not in the mood for distractions right now.

Report, quit creating, the news, or just shut up.

Ho boy…Umm bad choice of words, considering the subject….

State Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-92) of Memphis seems to have opened up a can of worms that he may not be able to shut. The bill in question… HB2964/SB3717. Sponsored by Hardaway and State Senator Reginald Tate (D-33) the bill would require a paternity test to be administered before a man’s name could be included on a birth certificate.

Needless to say, this set off a firestorm. In a widely forwarded email that I received Friday, the original author (whose name was removed from the forwarded email) writes:

This bill presumes that every woman in the state is so immoral that she can not be trusted to confirm the father of her child. For a woman who delivers a child while her husband is serving in Iraq, the child’s birth certificate will not state the father’s name. Should that father be killed while serving this country in Iraq, the child would not receive any benefits due a child of military personnel killed in action.

among other potential problems the bill may create.

Let me just say, this is not an election year bill, if you want to get elected in Memphis, where women make up a majority of the electorate. In fact, in just about every way, politically and practically, this bill is stupid unless you want to piss off all the wrong people.

If the goal is to provide some kind of legal remedy for men to contest the paternity of a child, there are many better ways to deal with it, rather than making it mandatory for every child born in Tennessee. Had the bill sought to provide some better legal remedy for that instance, there would still be resistance, but the tone of the bill would not have such a decidedly anti-woman flair.

I seriously doubt that this bill makes it anywhere. It’s plutonium. While there may be some need to provide legal and financial help for individuals seeking to prove, or disprove as the case may be, paternity, by introducing this bill, Rep. Hardaway has ensured that it will not be dealt with in this session.

Finally, an aside…

Last night was Nikki Tinker’s campaign kickoff. Rep. Hardaway was on the list of Hosts of the event. It makes me wonder, what does Ms. Tinker think of this legislation. Considering the lack of an issues page on her site…the world may never know.

As reported in the AP via Yahoo! The total cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by 2017 could reach $3.5.

If both occupations, because that’s what they are kiddies, not wars, last until 2017 someone’s getting an butt kicking.

The report states that $1.6 trillion has already been spent on the actions (war and occupations) since 2002. That constitutes exactly half of the new deficit spending since W got into office. My take is that $3.5 trillion by 2017 is a conservative estimate.

With the dollar trading around or below the Canadian Looney we can expect the cost of maintaining these actions to increase as our economy experiences the mass inflation that currency devaluation brings.

See because that’s what all the jingoistic junk this administration has brought us, a weak dollar.

Our weak dollar, badly broken military, and Boltenized kindergarten foreign policy will inspire nations all over the world to revere us as the true leaders that we are.

A weak dollar is the thing I think of when considering upward mobility and economic freedom that has made our nation great.

A weak dollar is what the Republicans want, because they, with their internationalist nonchalance spent the 90’s buying cheap Euro’s. (I can’t confirm that, but it makes for some great tin foil conversations.)

Look folks, when I can’t even get some enjoyment from my own snark that means something is horribly wrong. I find it maddening that when a Democrat is in the White House Republicans FREAK OUT at every dime that is spent in or out of the country, but when a Republican is in the White House we gotta go invade someone, damn the consequences, and the people at large don’t give it a thought. REALLY?

We can’t pull out of Iraq any more than we could superglue Ming Dynasty china back together and call it good. But we have to start easing ourselves out of the equation because pointing at someone else ain’t gonna work and what we’re doing now SURE AIN’T WORKING.

I’m glad that Pelosi and Reid are talking big finally, but Hoyer is waffling, and there’s lots of junk in that waffle, lots of power, lots of “not rounding up any votes” for the majority. With all of that, there is a failure that the mass media will lick up like ice cream on a warm summer day.

It’s making me feel like my head is about to asplode, though that could be the being up for 24 hours thing that work made me do this time around.

I think I’ll order pizza with my weak dollars and go to bed lest I make a mess with my head asploding and all in a Columbus Holiday Inn Express.

And I thought these hotels were supposed to make you smarter! Maybe I’ll be better tomorrow.