Musings from Southern New Mexico

Month: January 2013 (Page 1 of 3)

Serious? Ly?

I’m sure I’m a bit late on commenting on the Dewar’s ad. I had to go in to work early this morning, and somehow the conversation turned to wines. I thought I would make it a little more low-brow, so I introduced Night Train. My interest was piqued, and when I got home, I sought more information on such oenophilic delights. As I have the attention span of a toddler, I followed a number of different paths until I ran into the aforementioned:

Dewar’s Scotch claims to be for “serious” drinkers. Maybe it’s the cynic in me, but I when I think of “serious” drinkers, the starting point of my Google soujourn is what comes to mind:

Ted Nugent, “Warrior”

If he isn’t already, Ted Nugent should be the poster child for all things right-wing-loon.

Assuming you don’t want to hear the obnoxious affectation of his vocal inflection that sounds far more like a speech impediment than how he probably thinks it sounds, here is the gist:

Barack Obama is

“… attempting to reimplement [sic] the tyranny of King George that we escaped from [sic] in 1776. And if you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies …”

He was available for service during a time when few volunteers were turned away. Somehow, despite him having claimed no infirmity or malady precluding service, he never did serve. To be fair, he had been declared unfit for service. How? According to a High Times interview, Mr. Nugent spent the days prior to his draft physical eschewing personal hygiene, to include defecating in his pants*.

But what I really don’t get is how an obvious dimwit with serious personal issues (which, oddly enough for his chosen profession, have nothing to do with controlled substances) has come to be accepted by seemingly sane people as an appropriate icon for their brand of politics.

A thing about tyranny is that is lends itself well to simple tests. Mr. Nugent is trying one of my favorites. If you suspect you are living under a tyrannical rule, you can verify it thus:

  1. Publicly accuse the suspected tyrant of being a tyrant.
  2. If you wake up unmolested in your own bed, your hypothesis failed.

*I was unable to verify anything, as all my research pointed to the same few sources. Snopes considered the story unverified. Since I am not a professional journalist, however, I will allow a vaguely sources story.

h/t Little Green Footballs

High School Dramas

It’s been around for a while, but the genre of television-delivered brain atrophy therapy known as the high school drama keeps intruding into commercials. Granted, my viewing of those commercials implies I am already undergoing a less potent form of the same therapy. Nevertheless, I am compelled to comment on that particular genre to my ones of readers.

I am reminded of the Bruce Springsteen song, Glory Days. It is an upbeat tune, but listening to the words is an exercise in depression.

I think I can make a general description of those people whose glory days occurred in high school: sad. I understand that there are exceptions. Many Olympic athletes certainly did attain a certain glory at that age, but for the most part the rest of us find it completely forgettable. I think we do our children a serious disservice by allowing them to believe that high school soap opera and sports will have any lasting interest for them later in life.

Redistricting

I was just thinking about redistricting a little more. The idea is to ensure that the undesirables’ votes be concentrated together in urban areas in deference to Real Merkins®. I think one could achieve the same goal without the absurdity of gerrymandering. Stick to simple boundaries. Rather than partitioning the representation by simple population, however, one could moderate the allocation to the ethnics and other city dwellers according to some reasonable ratio. There is a good historical case for 3/5.

By the way…

It seems yesterday I missed an important facet of the stealth redistricting in Virginia:

After doing the dirty deed, the Republican senators adjourned their Rev. Martin Luther King Day session not in honor of the civil rights icon but “in memory of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.”

From The Nation.

Let’s Moderate Democracy for People of a Certain -ahem- Hue

This Talking Points Memo story pointed to a Republican State Leadership Committee REDMAP Summary Report:

REDMAP
How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010
Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013
:

[A]ggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.

This document was to review

its strategy and execution of its efforts in the 2010 election cycle to erect a Republican firewall through the redistricting process that paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.

Right up front, there is the reason for this effort:

Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.

So they boldly admit that their major effort was to dilute democracy by essentially putting all the undesirables in enclaves such that they are dramatically underrepresented in the House of Representatives essentially in perpetuity. The brilliance of this is that there is no undoing it so long as the media can be counted on to portray any outcry as Democrat whining. It’s a good thing the filthy wogs are underrepresented in Congress, or something might be done about this. Of course, one can always resort to sneaking in a vote to redistrict during a long-planned absence of a key Negro. An aging civil rights veteran attended the Inauguration ceremony of a black President on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, only to have all the people of a certain kind lumped together (segregated, if you will) in order to insure they didn’t “muddy the waters” (if you know what I mean) of the more -ahem- reliable districts.

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