Memnison Journal

An interesting post in the Daily Kos about death and sacrifice.

There was a revelation in the TODAY show interview of Scott McClellan that had Bush admitting to McClellan that he was the person who started the whole Plame leak fiasco going.  And so various people are now saying that ooh, caught Dubya in a impeachable offence, either the leak thingy or the pardon resulting from it.

Legally, sure.  But as the only person here who sat in person at the 1974 House Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment of Richard Nixon (well, probably), I gotta remind you that the impeachment process (House impeaches / indicts for a Senate trial that requires a 2/3ds vote to remove from office) that even if you could get this through the House and into a Senate trial before Bush / Cheney left office, you would never get 66 or 67 votes for removing Bush from office.  I don’t care how guilty the man is, you’d have to motivate a lot of Republicans to vote that way.

Impeachment and Removal from Office is a political event, not a legal one.

Matt Stoller at Open Left:

Women, in particular boomer women, are really really mad.  …Women of working age who grew up on choice and first wave feminism and strong glass ceilings and saw, up close, sexual harrassment and the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, don’t like a new form of politics that comes complete with a besmirching of one of their icons.  I’m seeing women attacked for sexism all over the country, and it is making white boomer women extremely angry.  And it’s showing up in the numbers.

I think the problem on this point is that there are a number of women who have skipped over everything except their identification with Hillary’s candidacy as the first serious female Presidential candidate - skipped over her behaviour, her past practices, her policy messes, and so on.  They have never concentrated on anything past the symbol and the symbolism.  And I’m sure that there are probably some black people who would be in the same situation if Obama was trailing - the symbol is everything, the things that they are really likely to be and do are irrelevant to their support and their vote.

Back in Ohio, there were a couple of family names that were likely to get you elected; similiarly, when I was in Chicago, people voted for a O’Malley or a Lisiewicz or a Ramirez because of their ethnic connection.   As in ‘are they one of ours’ - well, what is ‘ours?’

My comment to such people is really simple: I understand the concept of how far and long it’s taken to get women and ethnic minorities to positions where they can seriously go for a top political position.  I also understand that the reason that I didn’t vote for Hillary is because I don’t consider one’s symbolism good enough to get them elected - in the sense of the first Burmese-American or whatever.   I focus on what they stand for, and what they will do in office.

I can guarantee almost all of the people who are so hot for this level of symbolism that they will find that being so fixed on this to the point of not voting or voting for Nader or McCain will perpetuate the whole unfortunate situation that they’re trying to defeat - they will be helping to elect someone who isn’t at all interested in their cause in any shape, form or whatever - and for what?  So you can say - well, I fixed so and so?  Well, you just did in yourself.

*sigh*

Salt Lake City TV station runs a poll on support for same-sex marriage, and Dan Savage has a lot of fun with it.

Mere’s very very cold softball game from last night, with very cold kids:

and a very very very cold Susan as the scorekeeper.  The whole Flickr set is here.

We spent the weekend around the house, working on high-priority projects around here. Of course, we did have two unexpected visitors…

More highlights from our gardening at this Flickr set.

Bush: Let’s move the USDA contagious disease test operation from a deserted island to the middle of Kansas farm country!

A simulated outbreak of the disease in 2002 — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

Ooh, good thinking my liege!

Reports from the quake region from Time and from the Associated Press.    Also, side items of a police officer breast feeding orphans, and orphans from a 1976 quake in China reaching out to help these children.

Adoption in China is a new trend. In recent decades, government rules made it difficult, fearing that some people would use adoption as a way to get around family planning policies that limit many families to one child. Also, many Chinese thought it shameful to take in a child that wasn’t related by blood, and thought adopted children would be discriminated against.

“Adoptive families used to move to another city after adoption, keeping it a secret, but these days they are open about it,” said an employee surnamed Ji with the China Center of Adoption Affairs, authorized by the government to handle both domestic and overseas adoptions.

He’s seen a “tremendous increase” in adoption interest in the past few years as Chinese earn more money and move from traditionally cramped, state-issued apartments into larger private homes.

China put in place stricter guidelines for overseas adoptions last year to favor wealthier, married couples and free more children for domestic adoptions. It helped slow the number of Chinese children adopted in the U.S. to 5,453 last year, down from a peak of 7,906 in 2005. Some have speculated that China wants to place more of its orphans, estimated at 573,000 last year, with families on the mainland.

Americans also want to adopt earthquake orphans, but “I think the Chinese government will start with domestic adoption first,” said Joshua Zhong, co-founder and president of the U.S.-based Chinese Children Adoption International. His group has placed about 8,000 children with Americans over 15 years.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs has said adoption arrangements will be made after the disaster area has been brought under control.

A spreadsheet of vulnerable GOP incumbent congresscritters; mine is #22 on the list (ordered by the projected present pull for Obama in their district).   Look for yours.

From the WaPo:

What Clinton’s evocation of RFK suggests isn’t that she had some tactical reason for speaking the unspeakable but that she and her closest advisers can’t stop running and rerunning through their minds the most far-fetched scenarios, no matter how absurd or even obscene. She gives the impression of having spent long nights convincing herself that the stars really might still align for her — that something can still happen to make the Democratic Party realize how foolish it has been.

Clinton campaigns as if she knows she will leave some Democrats with bad feelings. That’s the Clinton way: Ask forgiveness, not permission. But every day, as more superdelegates trickle to Obama’s side, it becomes a surer bet that she will not win. She and her family enjoy good health and fabulous wealth. They’ll be fine — unless, while losing this race for the nomination, Hillary Clinton also loses her soul.

A new report out that says that race should be taken into account in a far more direct way in regards to adoptions:

Despite these issues, the new report, written by Susan Livingston Smith, program and project director for the institute, supports interracial adoption. It concludes that the practice “itself does not produce psychological or social maladjustment problems in children.”

But, Smith wrote, “transracially adopted children and their families face a range of challenges, and the manner in which parents handle them facilitates or hinders children’s development.”

The report urged Congress, which is reconsidering the law, to require better assessments of whether prospective parents can fulfill a child’s needs, including those related to race. It also recommended racial coaching for parents who are willing to receive it. Finally, the report said the Department of Health and Human Services should enforce the law’s provision calling for more efforts to recruit black adoptive parents.

“It’s in the best interests of the child,” Pertman said.

Atwood said the recommendation “is both misleading and dangerous.” He said it would create a giant loophole that would make placement decisions “vulnerable to subjective and ideologically driven considerations.”

As you can imagine, I have my own thoughts on this matter.  (Of course, this was aimed at whites adopting blacks,  not at whites adopting other races or ethnic groups, such as Koreans, Cambodians or Chinese, but it can be applied in the same way if you want to get cute about it, and I have felt the nasty end of the stick on this one.)

Susan noted something the other day from talking to Mere that I hadn’t caught.  The brief version is that Ms. Eight And A Half And About To Leave Third Grade simply has lost her memories of a time when Sissy (aka Mer Harrington, her twin sister) was not in her life.  Which was, to her, half a lifetime ago…February and March of 2004, when the twins were four.

To Mere, now, Sissy Has Always Been There.  She knows that we know of times when she wasn’t, but that she can’t access those memories herself.  Maybe it’s infant amnesia - I dunno.

This is just sick.  There’s been all this stuff about Teddy Kennedy (who is probably on a very short fuse with a brain tumor) in the news, and Hillary uses (in a video’ed discussion with the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader) Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968 as a part of her rationale for not dropping out of the race.  Video here.

I just don’t know what to think.  Maybe she’s dumb enough to specifically think that hey, maybe someone will shoot Barack and then I’ll be the nominee.   I think it more likely that she’s so fixiated on What She Wants that she has become totally insensitive to how the hell she does or says anything, was trying to say ’some nominating processes go on for quite a while’ and didn’t notice or care about the nuances on what the hell she was saying or how she was saying it.

I remember hearing about the shooting; it was the year that everything went crazy in America and the world, and I was eleven years old.  And I remember getting down on my knees beside my bed to pray for him.

In a later oh-crap-did-I-really-say-that-gee message, she said that the Kennedy thing came up maybe because Teddy was on her mind.   Maybe.  I think it more likely that ‘crazy things do come up and change everything late in the game’ was more present in her mind, and she was saying this exact same thing exactly the same way in March, two months ago.   And again in April.

So it’s not just a Freudian slip for the Kennedys, as she claimed in her apology.   It’s what she’s had fixed in her mind since she started losing stuff right and left after Super Tuesday.

I’m wasting my time trying to make logical sense out of all of this.   This sounds like the best course of action: Clinton superdelegates are saying that they’ve had enough of the crap, and are stating that they’re bailing on her and want to unite the party.  There has to be a price for all the awful behaviour.

I’m been hearing over and over again from people who are wondering why the heck Hillary Clinton is still pushing so hard on her campaign. Truth be told, outside of Bill and Hill, I doubt anyone could say for sure. Here’s the thoughts on this, and my takes on each:

We have the Comcast bundle (phone, internet and cable TV), and its worked very well, with a couple of exceptions:

(1) if the line’s screwed, everything and everyone is screwed.  I’m a telecommuter, and work a lot out of my home office and I Must Have Good Phone And Internet.  If there’s a line problem, it’s all bad.  And there’s been a moderate amount of that, mostly affecting video quality, but sometimes the whole thing.

(2) Quirks like - well, this morning, I called up and asked to have them add HBO to the mix.  My MIL said she’d pay for it, and she and I are highly interested in the John Adams series and Recount…costs $10 a month for around seven channels or so of movies, and our problem with premium/movie channels is that it’s hard to watch enough of the stuff on them to make it really worthwhile.  (We have three TiVos going all the time here, some OK rental places nearby, and a 3-bie Netflix membership, so we are very already connected for video stuff.  The premium/movie stuff tended to be a lot of crap or fluff and not much we were all that interested in, so it wasn’t worth keeping.)

So, after talking it over with all concerned, I called them up, they said they’d be glad to take my money, punched a button to add HBO, and *click* the phone went dead.  Internet, too.

Oh, crapsky.

Got the phone and internet back, called them back, getting Another Sales Representative, and she explained that with the bundled system, it often happens that When They Push A Button for the services at their end, a signal goes out that flattens *everything* - cutting off that call, the internet, and so on.

Yow.   FYI, of course.  Now, to go program the TiVos…