Rayne Today

Watching the American Experience RFK bio on PBS last night, I heard so many of the same kinds of comments and decisions made by President Johnson about Vietnam that the current administration made about Iraq. History revisited and nothing learned. Cried my eyes out, too. It struck me hard that there is and has been an enormous difference between the expectations of Americans of the two major parties, borne in part of the men who were our Democratic leaders before us. These Kennedys, both John and Bobby, were larger than life, remain larger than life; in spite of their humanity, the public looked to and expected more of them than the average pol. This legacy remains to this day, and is in no small part why every damned thing Dems are and do is picked apart and pecked to death by the right. They — the right-wing and the average American — expect Democratic leaders to be heroes. They expect us to be larger than life in order to lead, truly heroic on a scale of ancient legend, where...

My body had just reached that state one notch above sleep last night; I was relaxed and warm under the comforter and my husband's arm, when my mind slapped me awake. Christ, they have completely abandoned everything we've been taught in business school. I bolted upright, startling my equally drowsy spouse, and began to scrabble for a pen and paper. I didn't want to blow this off as a dream. I scrawled a note in scant light, reminding myself that this was a nightmare and not a dream. Everything I've been taught they've thrown out the door. They, being this presidential administration. Everything, being the basics we are taught in our earliest days of business school. My mind must have continued to churn after last evening's Book Salon at FireDogLake; Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell and author Jacob Hacker dropped in to chat about Hacker's book, The Great Risk Shift . I've not yet read it, it's on my list (I'm afraid that I'm still b...

(And because perris asked...) There's been an increase in Cheney activity over the last several weeks, none of which has followed the man's M.O. Or maybe it has. I can't recommend enough Joan Didion's recent essay, Cheney: Fatal Touch , featured in the New York Review of Books; in it Didion points to Cheney's lifetime of obsfucation which clouds our view of his "other priorities". He is rarely ever direct, except in cursing others. "Go f*ck yourself" is pretty straightforward and could hardly be misinterpreted or parsed by the recipient, Senator Leahy, or any other person within earshot. But in most communications, Cheney inserts enough content to obscure direct attribution and blame. Perhaps he has fully assimilated the concept of Nixonian "plausible deniability" learned in his salad days to the point where everything is a double-entendre, possessed of more than one possibility. "It's not Harry's fault," he said ...

That's it, I need to step away from the keyboard. The internet has finally become television. Where television offers hundreds of channels and nothing actually worth viewing, the internet offers millions of channels and about the same proportion of material worth viewing. My mouse has begun to feel like my television remote, idly moving of its own accord, surfing across waves of nothing. It's time to go do something constructive, away from the keyboard. Unfortunately, I can't even think of it in "normal" terms any longer; my first thoughts are that I need to make content. Yeesh.

Yeah. The most American of holidays . The holiday wherein my mother of French-Finn extraction swears a blue streak in the latter language, looking for some special serving dish she cannot find. Puttering away in the kitchen, my Polynesian-Asian father prepares his annual turkey stuffing from a commercial recipe. Mom won't want the bloody turkey soup yet again, which will surely follow in the evening after the turkey has been served; the threat of the soup may induce more swearing. I'd rather not have the green peppers in the stuffing, but Dad is always overly reliant upon the recipe and cannot imagine deviating from the recipe, cut from side of a bag of bread cubes nearly a generation ago, curled and brittle with age. I think it's an Asian thing, to cling so tightly to instructions. But I will be spared, eating instead a brined-and-roasted turkey stuffed with sage-and-chestnut dressing of French origin, and no turkey soup to follow. I will be in the chilly northern m...

Looks like a train headed for Rove, doesn't it? Perhaps. But I suspect the train is really headed for the Veep and Rove just happens to be in the way. Well, in the way that Nell, tied to the railroad tracks squealing for her Mountie to rescue her, is in the way of the train. Nell is really just bait; her annoying shrieks are intended to attract the real target of attention. Rove is our Nell at the moment, and squeal he does. Nothing gets printed in mainstream media about Rove without Rove's implicit permission; he's had a deathgrip on the corporate-owned press for more than six years now, beating them senseless whenever the press doesn't sit-up-beg-speak-good-boy as Rove desires. Therefore stories rumoring Rove's imminent departure from the White House must be seen as sanctioned. Perhaps the rumors aren't true -- but then why would Rove permit this? Or perhaps this is a whisper campaign against Rove, one might speculate. But Rove is the master of whispe...

Boy, I have to clean off this kitchen island. This was not one of my best design ideas when building this house two years ago, adding a large kitchen island topped with stainless steel. In spite of its weak magnetic attraction, that stainless steel top is a magnet unlike anything I've ever seen or used before. On the top of the island are three large stock pots that need to head to the basement, used last week when making big batches of soup for election volunteers. There's a small 40Gb USB storage device. A notebook filled with clipped out recipes, opened to the annual Thanksgiving Day planner. A calender on top of it, covered with chicken-scratched plans to shop or cook this or that within the week. A cookbook opened to pain l'ancienne . A whiteboard covered in blue ink with notes scrawled about cellular mitosis, osmosis, cytokinesis, diffusion . A large pile of mail awaiting the shredder, a much smaller pile awaiting filing, a single letter from a Senator. Coupons ...

Lookee here, Grannie!! I got me a new sock puppet and I'm not afraid to use it!! Just ask Howie-D; I sicced my puppet on him but good!!

Senator-elect Jim Webb stirs up the hornet's nest today with his barn-burner in the Wall Street Journal . The right-wing has been trashing the outcome of elections, badmouthing Democrats and painting them broadly with an anti-business brush, trying to scare up renewed support among members of the financial industry using F.U.D. tactics. Webb's speech will surely make the right-wing chafe and rant even more, calling out the corporatists for increasing inequity between the upper decile and the rest of the working population. What caught my eye in his speech was not the overall tone or the facts he used; it was this bit: A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish ...

Funny, but sad, this from Bob Cesca : ONE FINAL NOTE. Imagine being Vice President Cheney right now. He was supposed to be the mastermind. He was supposed to be the Dad who could do anything. And now it's as if Child Protective Services has been called in by concerned neighbors to haul his kids into protective custody on a live episode of COPS. And he must know that writhing on the front lawn in his boxers and wife-beater is out of the question, so there he's forced to sit. Taking it. On the world stage. With his shotgun tied in a cartoony knot. Couldn't have happened to a better guy. But like I said, it should've happened four years ago before he participated in the abuse and neglect. Now that I've stopped laughing, I can only note what an incredible shame. This is our Vice President we are talking about here. Maybe more sad than funny.

First time I've ever been called by Dun and Bradstreet to update the information they have on record about my business. Weird. I guess I wonder now whether I should have asked questions before answering their questions. Am I required to respond? Is there any benefit to this listing and cooperating with their questions if I have no intention of seeking a business line of credit? Can I de-list myself? I hate this crap; it doesn't do anything for my rather tiny business with no employees save for myself. It doesn't add value to my day and only makes me sweat the small stuff. Granted, I've used Dun & Bradstreet to screen customers and vendors while working at other businesses. The information was very helpful to me, but the situation is entirely different for me. I simply don't pose much of a risk to anyone. I'm chump change. Oh well...maybe I'm on the verge of becoming something more than that.

All the hoo-haw following the election, Rumsfeld stepping down, Mehlman leaving the RNC, Iraq still a horrific mess...and these are the most popular stories at Forbes today: Forbes.com Most Popular Stories World's Most Expensive Cocktails Most Expensive Las Vegas Suites Most Outrageous Guest Requests Covering Your Assets In A Divorce Barry Diller & Michael Eisner On Media: Pt. Jeebus. The top decile in this country is clueless.

As commented elsewhere: Still trying to come to terms with the massive shift this week, a sea change in every sense. Feel like a too-long battered child, waiting for the next blow, in spite of conscious awareness that there won’t be one. Going to take a while to heal the unconscious after 6-plus years of damage. Like the image of that screaming harpy who got in my face and spat at me that I was a baby-killer back in 2004, after a Bush rally…that harpy is still out there, even if I know she’s powerless to do anything now. How do I purge the memory and the knowledge she and her kind are still there? Easy enough to say we're moving on...but that woman and her kind live on my street, around the block, across town, in state. I doubt she's changed her mind about progressives and dissent in a couple of years.

"Madame Speaker." Makes my eyes well up with tears just thinking about that phrase. I cried while watching Nancy Pelosi interviewed this morning, as she discussed the job ahead and her own personal feelings about the transition to a Democratic majority, and what it meant to her to be the presumptive Speaker of the House. The first woman Speaker of the House. As parents, many of us tell our kids, "You can be anything you want to be, if you want it badly enough and work hard." But that hasn't been true, for all our motivational speechifying. The upper echelons of politics in the U.S. have remained out of reach -- for women. Just look at the numbers, at the disparity between the percentage of women in Congress and their numbers in the overall population. There's an enormous gap, particularly in the Senate, but still a large gap in Congress overall. Let's not even talk about the White House or the Office of the Vice President; the last time a woman ha...

Yeah, we did, we MOSH'd the vote yesterday. And we'll MOSH the next vote, too. The 2008 race will be won in 2007, said Howard Dean this morning, recorded on C-SPAN2. He's right; the candidates must be selected, groomed and funded in 2007. Yesterday was great, but it is now history, only one battle won. The next fight begins today towards winning this war.