Congressman Geoff Davis, likely in quiet, well-furnished seclusion with a large MaiTai this weekend, has to realize that dyslexic or not he erred and erred mightily Thursday evening in fourteen almost banal seconds of Jungian and McLuhan-esque sound, feeling and imagery that fairly whip cracked out of the television and across the 24 counties of Kentucky’s 4th District.
A Dukakisian blunder that might not be ameliorated by the National Republican Campaign Committee’s local purchase, yesterday, of $424,786 worth of television commercial time for their heart-warming blend of fear and accusation.
But, wait, isn’t there a collection of tubes somewhere called the Internets?
Within a few moments of their YouTube upload, the brief, ennui-packed “17 Soldiers” video was noticed, mentioned, linked to and has, as of this writing, been watched by 18,107 people and ranks in 36th place in the hot/hip website’s Most Viewed category.

Most domestic US and global viewers, however, will never enjoy the crashing personal zeitgeistian confluence of national gestalt with the local sizzle of Mr. Davis’ soldier-padded curriculum vitae smoking under the searing amber-tinted TV lights.
The heavily promoted local man on the House Armed Services Committee was unaware of October’s war dead not even a week after a large contingent of local Army National Guard boys left for equally dangerous Afghanistan.
It is almost too cosmic to even imagine.
A truly astonishing, and for the old establishment completely unexpected, development when tiny, once almost invisible, congressional districts can garner near instant national and global media exposure without a single dime’s investment.
Tiny national notes occurring in harmony if not lockstep with a national theme.
But, hark!
Geoff Davis is also, though not as widely advertised, a Member of the House Committee on Financial Services, a Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and, tantalizingly, a Member of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.
Humm…add these House memberships to Geoff’s easy squeezie House vote, possible dyslexia and known bench warming along with the Check ‘n Go contribution flip-flop and give it a thoughtful shake in the iced double old-fashioned glass of public opinion before the KET debate this Monday at 8pm...The result hopefully a ByeBye, not a MaiTai!
If you and I think this American midterm-go-round between Light and terror-stoking Darkness has been tough, just you wait until the media establishment, their six or seven controlling corporations, the remaining free internet companies and a lawyer or two get extra serious over what could be costly Federal re-regulation of the evolving telecommunications and media/political, digital/industrial complex within the US in the not so distant future.
Ouch, I need an icy drink with a paper umbrella!

NOTE
At 3:45pm this Saturday afternoon "17 Soldiers" had risen to 28th place on the YouTube Most Viewed with 19,344 viewings.
At 7pm Saturday, the video was in 26th place with 21,667 views.
By 11:50pm Saturday evening "17 Soldiers" was now the 23rd most viewed video among all YouTube categories with 24,007 viewers.
Since I'm in a frenzy of 4th dimensional text editing, please visit the great Mike Roger's website BlogActive to hear Barney Frank brilliantly engage on the subject of "gay" Republicans.

Image: Google, NatiInetNebr.com, NationalAtlas.gov, WikiMedia, YouTube.com
- posted by Sean @ 1:16 PM 0 comments  

 
Lucas Nails Debate


Democrat Ken Lucas and Republican Geoff Davis at NKU last evening

In the afterglow of last night’s televised debate between neck and neck candidates for Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District seat, local media, this morning, seems to be breaking its neck to not report the obvious; heavily funded freshman Republican Geoff Davis didn’t do so well.
Cincinnati’s WCPO television, while broadcasting last evening event from Regents Hall on the campus of Northern Kentucky University, devoted more airtime in their morning newscast to a group of young Republicans conducting some sort of Dean Scream-off than last night’s highly entertaining and informative confrontation.
The Cincinnati Enquirer’s political reporter Patrick Crowley managed to work the news lead into his 19th paragraph:

[Davis] stumbled badly when asked by a reporter if he knew how many American soldiers had died so far this month in Iraq. "I believe it is 17," Davis said. The number of soldiers killed in October as of Thursday was 71.

After the editor of the Grant County News, Jamie Baker-Nantz, corrected Congressman Davis, home viewers could hear a collective shocked gasp from the debate’s live audience.
In the following few awkward and televised seconds it was clear that the political and media principals on-stage knew Mr. Davis, in the second and a half it took him to answer Baker-Nance's question, had likely committed a potentially mortal error.
Mr. Lucas, currently being slimed by the Rove/Davis campaign for sending a letter of mercy, actually blessed the struggling Republican with a sample of that faux-controversial compassion by offering a joking aside that the former Marine “must be dyslexic” for simply reversing numbers.
Unfortunately, since last evening's Republican debate fiasco, the desperate Davis campaign has been straining the quality of Mr. Lucas’ mercy by trying to spin the use of the word “dyslexic” into some sort of northern Kentucky version of George Allen’s macaca.
Should Mr. Davis, with his lily-white and all male endorsement commercial, really be tossing stones from the doorway of his glass house?
As Ken Lucas regretfully stated last evening, Karl Rove’s Manchurian Candidate will do “anything short of murder” to get elected.
Even without his Iraq casualties error, Mr. Davis was clearly projecting the aura of a man whose game wasn't tight.
Slathered in make-up and sweating like a pig, the single-term congressman started the debate looking scared and ended it looking clearly defeated.
Lucas, no matter the social niceties current office-holding pols and their enablers find so important the moment scandal is made public, stated the problem clearly and directly...Mr. Davis "lies" and managed, in only a few months as the sworn representative of our 4th District, to beat a path directly to some of the most corrupt politicians in this past do-nothing Congress.
Where's the Foley money Davis took in 2005?
When he crawled to the microphones last week with Chabby, Mr. Davis carefully said the tainted $1000 "contribution" (scroll down to 'One More Update) from the infamous sex predator was from "this year".
Then there's the little matter of the Check 'n Go “contribution”.
Old Geoff was paid to secretly flip-flop on his own bill to restrain predatory high-interest loans to US servicemen and women.
Loans that panicked and cash-strapped military families might seek when discovering the US government wasn't paying for their son's battlefield armor.
Loans with hidden interest rates ranging between 35 to 500% all because Mr. Davis took $11,450 from his Mason, Ohio buddies from CNG Financial, the Check ‘n Go controlling corporation.
Are we all sensing a "predator" theme here?
As Mr. Lucas said in his closing remarks:

We've got a real mess on our hands. Congress isn't getting anything done that the American people really care about…My opponent has gone to Washington and fallen in lockstep with his political party's leadership. Folks, this country is going in the wrong direction.

Mr. Ken Lucas, who will advantage our area with 3 times more congressional seniority than his opponent, clearly won last evening's contest and deserves to become northern Kentucky’s next congressman no matter the potential Rovian surprises that may, yet, come.

Photos: Cincinnati Enquirer
- posted by Sean @ 1:20 PM 0 comments  

 
End Times Sign?
Right Spookie, Mate!


From a DIVE magazine report:

A stingray flew aboard his dinghy and embedded its barb in his chest…the 1.5m-long ray breached the surface and stabbed his chest, according to US officials reports…reminiscent of the fatal stingray attack on Australian naturalist, Steve Irwin, last month.


The Devil Made 'Em Do It!


Why it seems it was only yesterday when I posted about “contextually visible” racism employed by the Rethuglicans.
Well, er um…(cough!)
It was yesterday.
I only wish I’d Googled this item which appeared in the New York Sun two days ago when I was writing yesterday’s post.
It seems the Republican Party has produced their own radio versions of what Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman imagine to be common black vernacular to air with a classic attempted fear-monger for broadcast in select markets over the next few weeks.
Here are two scripts:

Abortion
1st Man--If you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,' you'll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked.
2nd Man--That's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed.
1st Man--Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican.

Democrats Are Racists
Throaty GOP Doom Announcer--I can understand why a Ku Klux Klan cracker like David Duke makes nice with the terrorists. What I want to know is why so many of the Democrat politicians I helped elect are on the same side of the Iraq war as David Duke.

Unbelievable!!!
I mean this really leaves me speechless!
President Clinton, still the most eloquent nearly invisible man on the public stage, was afforded only 6 minutes of airtime on one low-rated cable net yesterday afternoon but in that 6 minutes he made more honest sense than any of Dubya’s near daily 70 minute multi-net simulcasts of thematic gibberish.
Thanks to Crooks and Liars, where one can find the video and a full transcript, here’s what the 42nd President was saying before MSNBC turned the sound off and “discussed” the still speaking President with two “experts” for a few minutes before joining a lengthy Wesley Snipes discussion:

If you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up; you know all the answers. And, that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time. So, you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results…so when an inconvenient fact crops up, you have to be in denial. It has to be a less significant fact…Ideologues, within the current government refer to people, not just like me, although I am included, but even moderate Republicans…as somehow lesser political mortals, because we are trapped in, quote ‘The Reality-Based World.'"

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

What they mean by that, in fairness to them, what they mean by that is that we are an empire; we're the world's only military superpower, and that you can use power to change reality. And if you don't see that, then you'll always be condemning your country to a lesser status. I, uh, when I was a kid, I grew up in an alcoholic home, I spent half my childhood trying to get into the ‘reality-based world' and I like it here."

(HUGE APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE.)
(MSNBC eliminates the audio track at this point)

NOTE
I want to assure readers that I mean nothing negative with my use of the iconic images of Flip Wilson and Richard Roundtree within this post.
I sort of imagined these Rove/Mehlman-directed scripts to be delivered in keeping with a goonie white man’s idiomatic memory of certain 1970 era television programs rather than with ruthless racism and attempted vote suppression.
I know Flip is still controversial but my memories are fond…

Modified Images: BBC, BobbyDarin.net, CIMMS.ou.edu, FilmPosters.com, TVparty.com
- posted by Sean @ 2:52 PM 0 comments  

 
Do You Take Cream in Your Eloi?

A gentleman who goes by the Al Capp-esque Internet moniker of Dave of the Jungle said it best in a comment area of a blog I frequent.
In a discussion of the Virginia Senate race, Dave, probably swinging comic-strippily from an elastic e-vine as I type, included the President as another example saying, “We're living in the era of Submediocre-Rich-Boys.”
The royal marriage of old money’s industrialists and the evolving top tier of politicals and corporate boards and their attendant pets and spawn that produced our selfish neo-imperial era, heavily 4th dimensionally threatened by the intellectual leveling afforded by a free Internet, possibly faces a major battle in the days following the offing 2006 American midterm election.
Victory for the neo-right will herald the slow but sure birth of a permanent two-class system in America over the nurtured maintenance of our endangered three class (4 if one counts the homeless) conventional order.
I needn’t bore you with my “take” other than to point out what I call a “Golly Gee Science Story” that appeared in newspapers across our planet yesterday, a hackneyed journalistic staple recut from the fantasy cloth and cheap intellectual rigor that brought us the ill-favored New American Century.
The story, variously scream-headlined as “Human species may split” re-postulated the absurd separate track H.G. Wellsian evolution of rich Eloi and poor Morlock in a manner reminiscent of 1962’s pop prediction of a “futuristic” 1972 flying car and atomic tomato.
According to this farcical hoax of a sci-fi genre news story, evolutionarily advanced rich males will possess:

Symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Luscious and vaginally upperclass future females will be blessed with:

Lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features…Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-colored people.

Sadly, for the wealthy white and little brown descendants of George H.W. Bush and a Caucasian culture’s desire for symmetry, I interpret “coffee-colored” as black unless a specific creamer is mentioned.
I interpret this byline-less writer as having implied creaming present in the future’s rich coffee along with an abundance of other equally ludicrous and laughable evolutionary theories of a Cheneyesque and Wolfowitzian nature.
The poor, for example if you remember them, a sad and poorly dressed lot with, I suspect, asymmetrical features, are contrasted with the lucky rich, I kid you not, as evolving thusly:

The genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Not to pee all over the racist fantasies of my imagined and intellectually stunted Wolfowitzite from yesterday’s yellow press but I have run across the occasional “goblin-like” rich boy and girl in my short time within this veil of human tears.
I usually didn’t say anything as their features were more or less symmetrical and their precoffee-colored endowments large…
But, I digress into a cheap sarcasm more appropriate to the dim recesses of an underclass tavern rather than the icy pristine winds of a leveled, post-modern and not quite so “slim” web.
Will the racism evident in George “Felix Macaca” Allen’s unguarded speech and the elitist race-baiting, contextually visible in Mother Bush’s description of stadium-bound Katrina refugees, be newly destined for a faux-leather-bound future of think tank policy papers and, dare I in today's Foley-tainted Washington say, endowments?
Fantasy newspaper speculation, however and yes I mean you PNAC, often has, perish the thought, an even darker side, a side where our failed PNACian might glimpse a snatch of sunlight if they could just stop thinking about that large coffee-colored penis for a minute or two:

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they [future rich people] could come to resemble domesticated animals…Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

I shudder to think that the chinless bovines of today’s political/media landscape could evolve into tomorrow’s over-endowed chinless bovines.
There is a just God!

Modified Image: George Pal's 1960 production-The Time Machine, Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 4:32 PM 0 comments  

 
GOPay to Play in KY?


Resources utilized in production:
January 6, 2006 Post
September 25-30, 2006 Posts
Cincinnati Post

Images: AP, BlueGrassReport.org, C-SPAN, Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 1:35 PM 0 comments  

 
Big Snow in ChiTown


The New York Times, this morning, reports:

[Snow] acknowledged he had entered “terra incognita”; to his knowledge, no other White House press secretary has raised money for political candidates while in the job…Snow said he set his own ground rules and would quit raising money if it interfered with his day job. How will he know?…”You kind of know it when you see it.”

But, but, but…Tony?
Hasn’t the Bush administration taught us to disbelieve our lying eyes?

Modified Image: NYT
- posted by Sean @ 11:12 AM 0 comments