Goose the Blog 2.0

Wallow in nostalgia with me. Or, just mock the bad hair and bad clothes from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Stewart has created a brilliant fan video for Grandaddy's haunting song, "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" off the superb album Sophtware Slump.

The video was created entirely on a 1979 Apple ][+, and fits the song perfectly. This has made my day. (via Boing Boing)

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The backstory:

"Jed the Humanoid"

Last night something pretty bad happened.
We lost a friend.
All shocked and broken.
Shut down, exploded.

Jeddy 3 is what we first called him,
Then it was Jed,
But Jed's system's dead.
Therefore, so's Jed.

We assembled him in the kitchen,
Made out of this and
Made out of that and
Whatever was at hand.

When we finished Jed we were so proud.
We celebrated,
Congratulated,
For what we'd created.

Jed could run or walk, sing or talk and
Compile thoughts and
Solve lots of problems.
We learned so much from him.

A couple years went by and something happened.
We gave Jed less attention.
We had new inventions.
We left for conventions.

Jed had found our booze and drank every drop.
He fizzled and popped.
He rattled and rocked.
Finally he just stopped.

Huzzah!

"It was announced today that the President will overturn his Gulf Coast wage cut on November 8. This was a direct result of intense pressure from Democrats and labor and religious leaders."

Originally, the wage cut was implemented by the President after Hurricane Katrina as part of the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort. It eliminated the requirement (from the Davis-Bacon Act) that government contractors pay laborers the prevailing wage.

Rep. Miller (D-CA) engineered a clever political trap that would have forced Republicans to vote against overturing the wage cut just before the November election, and faced with defeat (all Democrats and 37 Republicans were in favor of overturning the cut), President Bush backed down.

?

Cutest baby ever.

'Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy'

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."

...

Among his other charges:

■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was "a concrete example" of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. "You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it."

■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was "part of the problem". Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, "she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president".

■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, "start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel".

Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush "one of the finest presidents we have ever had" understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either".

Many liberals have known about the Office of Special Plans and the White House Iraq Group since 2003, and this information does not come as a surprise. Why didn't Wilkerson speak out when it might have made a difference to those who didn't know?

See also: The Truth from These Podia

The putative makeup of American voters in 2004 was 21% liberal, 34% conservative, and 45% moderate. Some conservatives believe this ultimately spells doom for liberals in America, while some liberals believe that political success lies in moving toward the center to capture the moderate voter. However, "The Liberal Moderates" is an interesting article that argues that self-described "moderate" voters are actually liberal in their positions:

In fact, the people who call themselves "moderates" aren't midway between the two parties. When you examine them as a group, you find that they look much more like liberals than conservatives. In every presidential election since 1988, the Democratic candidate has won more votes among moderates than the Republican candidate. According to National Election Studies (NES), 56 percent of moderates in 2004 associated themselves with the Democratic Party, while only 31 percent leaned Republican.

And it isn't just party identification; on issue after issue, moderates have opinions almost exactly mirroring those of liberals. In the NES survey, 64 percent of liberals say we should increase spending on Social Security, as do 68 percent of moderates -- while only 47 percent of conservatives agree. Eighty-eight percent of liberals and 84 percent of moderates say federal funding on education should be increased, compared to only 58 percent of conservatives. Seventy-three percent of liberals and 66 percent of moderates want more spending for child care -- but only 38 percent of conservatives agree. Sixty-two percent of liberals and 57 percent of moderates want to spend more on aid to the poor, compared to only 39 percent of conservatives.

There are several reasons for this. This part might seem familiar from last year's lessons on GtB:

Which brings us to what may be the most important feature of ideological competition in America today: Unlike liberals, conservatives don't simply criticize specific candidates or pieces of legislation, they attack their opponents' entire ideological worldview. Tune into Rush Limbaugh or any of his imitators, and what you'll hear is little more than an extended discourse on the evils of liberalism, in which specific events are merely evidence that the real problem is liberal ideology. Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

And this is something Bill and I were discussing on the way back from Bellingham a couple weeks ago:

As a consequence, while there are "movement conservatives," there are no "movement liberals" for the simple reason that there is no coherent entity we could call the "liberal movement." Instead, there are a dozen liberal movements -- a pro-choice movement, an environmental movement, a labor movement, and so on. Whether cause or consequence, the conservative campaign against liberalism has been accompanied by a sharpening of conservative identity, not only in the public mind but in the hearts of conservatives themselves.

Read it all, if you like.

[Getting out my magic mirror] I see Amy and Bill and Wendy and all you boys and girls out there!

Would you like to play a game?

(There! Three obscure pop references from three different media)

The game: What movies always make you cry? I had a hard time remembering any, even though I know there are many. In fact, as I've gotten older, I find I'm more and more likely to cry, whether the film is sappy or painful.

Here are I few I could think of:

Iron Giant - "Superman..."

E.T.: - ET dies and Drew Barrymore starts crying

Return of The King - The Rohirrim arrive for the battle of Gondor

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P.S. Wendy, be sure to mention Independence Day, or I will...

P.P.S. Another game: How many of the 50 films in The Science Fiction Film Canon (scroll down a bit) have you seen? I've seen 40 of them.

I found this link on boingboing, don't worry, it is worksafe.

John, I had no idea!

No, he's only 39! Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Too bad he had to take the country down with him.

President Bush's approval rating is just 39%, according to the latest NBC-WSJ poll. More bad news for Republicans: only 28% think the country is heading in the right direction, only 29% think Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court is qualified, and only 24% and 28% (respectively) think the charges against Rep. Tom Delay and Sen. Bill Frist have little merit. And finally, 48% want a Democratic-controlled Congress (compared to 39% who want a Republican Congress).

Ouch.

Update: Pew Research Center has another poll out that is full of bad news for Republicans. Check it out, there is too much badness to summarize.

I was just in Washington state watching my brother get married!

Here are Bill and Amy, all teary-eyed:


(photo by Ken Kukuk)

We were too busy having fun to take many pictures of our own, so if you have photos send them to me!

Update: I've posted some more photos (just click the photo above and browse) and Bill and Amy have posted some too.