Political Cortex, a new collaborative, progressive site opened yesterday. It’s operated on the Scoop platform and it aims to give a voice to all its members. If you sign up now, you can get your desired username. I got my first name. I should be able to remember that.

I don’t know how much I’ll contribute, but I read one of its writers, S.M. Dixon, on a regular basis and find his site an invaluable source of news and information, especially on busy days when there’s not much time to check everything out.

Anyway, welcome to blogtopia (yes, skippy coined that term), Political Cortex. And best of luck in your mission.

The Realist Who Got It Wrong
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Talk about living in a world of one’s own.

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement — most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire — a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft.

Well, Brent Scowcroft isn’t chopped liver and his New Yorker article was a welcome addition to the volumes being written as to how, why and when this administration got things so very wrong. But Cindy Sheehan a disaster? Well, yes, but not for the anti-war movement. More for Bush. She got attention. The press actually covered her for a while. Getting the press to cover anti-war anything has been a near impossibility since the whole debacle started.

Krauthammer really doesn’t admire Scowcroft, though. Scowcroft, it seems, is a mean guy, whereas Krauthammer is all heart.

This coldbloodedness is a trademark of this nation’s most doctrinaire foreign policy “realist.” Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy: The only thing that counts is how countries interact, not what’s happening inside. You care not a whit about who is running a country. Whether it is Mother Teresa or the Assad family gangsters in Syria, you care only about their external actions, not how they treat their own people.

He must draw his own line as to where tyranny ends and authoritarianism begins. Our best buddies, the Saudis, for instance, are regarded as rather harsh by some. Not by the Bush administration, however. We don’t want to be spreading freedom and democracy there. And never mind that we were contributing players in some of the worst atrocities of Saddam’s regime in one way or another. We’re not supposed to dwell on that.

It’s safe to say that Krauthammer is not a member of the reality based community and doesn’t want to be. Thing is, reality might bite, but it is the dimension we have to live in.

Like most people, I’ve always wondered where the other sock goes. You put a pair in the wash and get back just one. OK, what they do is, they gather together, multiply, and create new clothes, disguised as old, worn clothing. Then they infiltrate the out of season clothing you have stored away. When it’s time to drag out the next season’s stuff, it won’t fit into the space it occupied the year before. It’s a neat trick.

It’s the only explanation I can come up with. I’d put it off as long as I could, but it had to be done. We’re a day away from November, so it was really time to put the summer clothes away and dig out the cold weather stuff. This time I packed away every short sleeved item I own. I didn’t hold back a thing, not even a t-shirt. I usually keep a drawer of t-shirts in case of unseasonably warm weather, but not this time. So, I figured, I’d have plenty of space for the fall and winter stuff. When I took out the fall and winter things I set aside some things to be given away and trashed a few things that were really done. And when I put everything away, there was a pile leftover with nowhere to go. That’s when I came up with the sock theory.

Anyway, it’s done. You’d think with all this stuff, I’d be well dressed, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mostly, I wear jeans and a top and I’m good to go. Still, women seem to have more complicated needs when it comes to clothing than some men do. There are a lot of things that I might just wear once or twice in a season, but they need to be around just in case.

My husband doesn’t have to dedicate a day to dragging totes back and forth to the basement. He takes a different approach. His winter and summer wardrobes are the same. It’s a t-shirt and jeans for casual wear and a long sleeved shirt and jeans for slightly dressier occasions. If he needs to go all out, he wears Dockers. When the weather turns, he adds a jacket or sweatshirt. At his job, every so often they give the employees things with the company logo on it. Caps and short sleeved polo shirts mostly. You don’t have to wear them. They’re an extra. He’s acquired a few of the polo shirts and that’s what he wears to work every day. They’re identical. That’s fine with him. When something wears out, he replaces it with the same item. Exactly the same if possible. He doesn’t do change well. He currently doesn’t own a suit. If an occasion comes up that demands one, his solutioln is simple. He doesn’t go. He’ll have to break down and get one when our closest relatives’ kids start getting married, but until then, he’s staying out of Men’s World.

I’ve been meaning to ask. Is it now required to have at least one black and white oval sticker on your car? Is there a fine if you don’t have one? The first ones I ever noticed said, “VT”. You knew that was for Vermont because it’s the official state abbreviation and most cars that were wearing them had other literature attached that indicated that the owner of the vehicle in question was either a Phish fan or someone who’d rather be skiing. At Killington, preferably.

Here on Long Island it seems if you venture out to Montauk Point you’re going to come back with a sticker, but it might say, “MTK” or “The End” or maybe just “MK”, which also stands for Mary Kay, but I don’t think she’s got oval stickers as yet. I know that “DMB” is for Dave Matthews Band. I’m not totally out of it, but most of them leave me mystified. I see one parked near my office that says, “GB”. George Bush? Great Barrington? Great Britain? All very different things. A short drive now gives you a wide range of initials to try to decipher. It can be entertaining if you’re stuck in traffic, but I say, if you’ve got something to say wouldn’t you rather just say it?

Ronni Bennett wrote a great post yesterday about The Economic War on the Have-Nots. It’s a good, if depressing, read. The policies of the last twenty-five years are coming together to create an increasing class of have-nots in this country and a lot of us could wind up in that sinking boat.

What strikes me is the great PR job the rightwing has done to sell it to vulnerable Americans. In pre-Reagan America you could be poor, but you could pretty much have a roof over your head, food of some sort on the table and medical care, almost no matter what. The right fed the resentment of the middle class against those people receiving public benefits and welfare was a controversial issue. If you were poor, you were lazy and unwilling to work. The fact that most people receiving assistance were either children or disabled was ignored and the righteous outrage over supporting those “welfare queens” grew.

Meanwhile, life was getting just a little bit harder for the middle class. Not much. Just a little. Housing prices were up. The cost of higher education was harder to manage and there was a lot less free money around to help with it. Emergency medical assistance was cut so that the middle class no longer had access to the system in the event of a catastrophic situation. The middle class was even less willing to pay for things for strangers that they couldn’t afford for their own families.

So, during the Clinton administration we ended “welfare as we knew it”. Everyone has to work now. And they do. Most adults in homeless shelters work. Most welfare recipients work. Most poor people are the working poor. And now the rightwing talking points include the disparagement of people who don’t make a lot of money even if they work hard their entire lives. Also, people who have earned a decent income but who have not managed to amass sufficient wealth to weather any storm that might come along are subject to derision.

There is no more concept of the “poor but honest” character in the stories of our youth. No more sympathy for the widowed octagenarian who finds herself impoverished. Only disdain for anyone who hasn’t got a respectable portfolio. Work isn’t valued any longer, unless it produces considerable financial success.

Today’s fiscal conservatives like to say that everyone has the same opportunity and if you don’t make the most of it, then you don’t deserve a decent life, let alone retirement. You know, there was some opportunity even in feudal times. An enterprising and exceptional villein could make it into the merchant class once in a while - especially after the Black Death. Most, however, lived a very hard life until the system ended. Is that the standard the United States aspires to? Both political parties need to be put on notice that we’re mad as hell and won’t take it anymore.

A woman that I work with came in looking like she had had a very rough night. She was pale and drawn and almost haggard, which is not her usual look. Her son is in Iraq. She never wanted that. Her family is very much like so many families of the troops in Iraq. They’re a generation away from poverty, working hard to acheive the increasingly elusive American dream. Her son was recruited when he was still in high school and this war was just a twinkle in George Bush’s eye. Maria is a young mother. The only war she’d be likely to remember is the Gulf War. She’s neither uneducated nor naive, but she’d never in her life really seen our government send its children off to kill and die for no real reason.

When her son said he wanted to join up, she might have hesitated, but she didn’t want to stand in his way. They told him they’d send him to college. The said he could go to law school on their dime, maybe become a JAG officer. Once he got out of high school and the Marines came to collect on his pledge, she had long talks with him. She’d have helped if he’d wanted to change his mind, but she didn’t want to stand in the way of something he wanted. They told her they were sending him to college and probably not to Iraq, which was well underway by then.

So now he’s in Iraq, on street patrol. His mother supports him utterly, but she opposes the war. And most of all she lives in fear every day of her life. She doesn’t get a lot of sleep. She’s joined Military Families Speak Out and surfs sites like Operation Truth every chance she gets. It would be so much easier if she could just convince herself that the war is necessary and the cause is noble, but like Cindy Sheehan, she will not accept those ideas for the sake of a bit of comfort.

Today was so bad because her son told her he had killed someone. He was a mess. She was a mess for him. Now there’s more to keep her up at night. She’ll wonder what this will do to him. He’ll get through it for now. There’ll be people in his unit who’ve been through it and they’ll understand what he’s feeling and help him deal with it. For now. In the longterm, it could be a different story. One thing is certain, if he makes it home, he’ll be a different person and he’ll be bringing some demons home with him.

So to Scooter Libby and any future indictees as well as those architects and salemen of this war who may go unscathed, I have a wish for you. I wish nothing more than that you could walk for a few days in Maria’s shoes. I wish upon you the thoughts that keep her up at night and the nightmares that make up her dreams. Maybe then you’d understand what you’ve done.

I seem to be signed up for notifications of additional comments to an old post on The Blog Herald. Two notifications in a row just arrived in my inbox and they were both for spam comments. It really pisses me off. Blogs create the opportunity for conversations that could never have happened a generation ago. There’s always someone with an angle who forces you to require registration or set up some other barrier to communication. I don’t mind trolls. Trolls are just part of the landscape, but the spam thing just makes my head explode.

Blogsome must have done something different because it’s calmed down here a lot lately, which is good. I was getting a dozen or so a day for a short period there. Blogger is doing it with word verification, but the problem with that is that the distorted letters that they use are sometimes difficult to read. I don’t mind typing in the letters that I see, but I don’t want to have to sit and think about what those letters are. Anyway, just a good morning “Boo, hiss” to comment spammers.

Will they? Won’t they? If they will, then when will they? Those are the questions on every political junkie’s mind tonight. And on the minds of some notable political operatives, too. The rumors were flying last night, but nothing so far. Tomorrow is, of course, another day. I wonder what the betting line is on all this. There are betting lines on everything.

I does bring a person back, though, doesn’t it? Watergate was an exciting time, too. Of course, the burning question is usually which co-conspirators will get book deals and which ones will get TV shows. This bunch is a little different than the usual run. Personal success seems to be spelled “world domination” for them. Not for the United States. For themselves. I can’t see any of them being happy with a spot on Fox. Well, if there’s any frogmarching on the horizon, I’m making popcorn.

It’s raining. Good thing, too. The water in some basements around here was getting low. We can’t complain too much, though, when you consider the beating that the rest of the world has taken this year. We checked in with some of the family in Florida. They’ve made it through Wilma intact, happily. Of course we have family in Florida. Everyone does. With all the people who’ve moved to Florida in the last forty years it’s a wonder there’s a square inch of space left there.

We never considered moving to Florida ourselves. My retirement plan was to find a depressed area of upstate New York where we could live on whatever we wind up with for a retirement income. Now, who knows? We might end up staying here if the kids - meaning my daughter and her family want to stay together for the long haul. We’ve been kicking around the idea of moving to the south shore as a group - or herd. We might not have to. It seems as though the south shore might come to us.

I’m still for getting out of here before global warming raises the sea level and Long Island finds itself under water. We’ll be a lost civilization, like Atlantis. Stories will be told and legends will grow. Nail salons will figure prominently in the mythology. Long Island will be remembered as a land ruled by goddesses whose status was indicated by the length and ornate decoration of their fingernails. It will be assumed that the short nailed women were used as domestic help. It’s probably best not to live near the coasts until and unless we elect ourselves some leaders who have more than a passing interest in the environment. The ocean is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live in it.

I hope I’m back, at least part time. I’m not even sure where I’ve been. There were health issues. I won’t even bore you with the details this time. It’s probably just a matter of having to take things that depress one’s immune system. You really miss your immune system when it’s not doing its job. Between those problems, the routine doctor visits and tests and the fact that getting medication means frequent trips a bit farther afield than my neighborhood pharmacists, there are fewer hours left for extras.

Then there was some devastating news that a friend got. It was so bad that it was hard to think about anything else for a while.

And there are the not so bad things like planning my daughter’s baby shower. Now I know that mothers aren’t supposed to give showers. I was raised right. My own mother came from Connecticut so you know she taught us well. However, there’s local custom, too, and that’s how things are done here more often than not. So, together with her aunt, I’m putting together this shower. I’m like the last person in the world to be doing something like that. I’m terrible at these things. She’d be great at it, and that makes it worse. You want to do as good a job as the guest of honor would, but that seems unlikely. Her aunt, my sister and co-conspirator, is even less the Martha Stewart type than I am.

My son’s band is thinking it’s time for a redesign of their site. If I’m going to continue to update it and manage it, I’d just as soon do the designing, too. It’s a lot harder to maintain something that someone else has done. I’m not getting inspired, though. Or, more accurately, I get half-inspired a lot. I’ve started a bunch of different designs only to decide that they wouldn’t do after I’ve spend a few hours on them.

I think I’m going to take S.M. Dixon’s advice and consolidate, at least for now. If the comment spam can be controlled I’ll do my blogging here. Otherwise I’ll have to bring it over to Blogger. The one blog will have to accomodate my political rants along with the personal stuff.

I’m not in a position to post much political content anyway, because I can’t keep up the way I have until recently. I don’t mean I’m not paying attention, but in this world of blogging and 24/7 news, “not keeping up” can mean not finding out about a development for a few hours or a day. I was better at it this summer when I was home getting treatments. Now that I’m back at work I find that life is too demanding right now for me to be able to make much of a contribution to the lefty blogoshpere, but I’ll be reading it and rooting for it.

I’m trying to catch up with some of my favorite blogs. I see that Ronnie’s been sick, but seems to be OK now. Waiter Rant is redesigned again. Jude is away in New Zealand and Millie is going strong and still having a good time. The Reality Base, formerly Semidi is now Semidi Says and is redesigned once again. I’ll have to change it on the blogroll again. I still have a bunch to catch up with. And a lot of invitations to write.