Jim Manis on Most Anything

Jim Manis can formulate an opinion about a good many things, including those about which he has little knowledge. (And some dude named "Lazlo.") Visit The MagicFactory.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Oil Bonanza!

That's right, if you own stock in one of the seven oil companies you are stinking rich right now. Oil companies are beginning to report their record profits for the past quarter. Billions of dollars have been made off a combination of increased demand and the hurricanes.

Remember how the oil companies were crying a few weeks ago because their off shore rigs were being hit by high waters in the gulf and the hurricanes' wind? Well, you made them all so stinking rich that if they piled that money into a mound it would literally reach the moon.

Did they use any of that money to help rebuild housing for poor and working people in the gulf? What do you think?

Yes, dear, Bush and Cheney are oil men. And they really feel bad for poor working folks and will be happy to tell them so, if they ever see any.

Exxon declares $9.9 billion dollars in profits for the previous quarter (three months) alone.

Miers Bails!

Did anyone ever think the administration was serious about this lady's nomination to the Supreme Court? The best theory is that they threw her out there so the opposition could kick her around and wear themselves out so that the next candidate, whoever that's going to be, will get through the process much easier.

On the other hand, this is the most arrogant administration to ever curse the White House. Judging by the administration continuous flow of ineptitude, one is left to suspect that they never did "get it." Dub-U liked this little lady, by golly!

More Than 2,000 Firms Involved in Iraq Oil for Whatever Scandel

This story is great! It sounds like the building of the Interstate Highway system here in the United States, where every primary contractor was either found guilty or pleaded no contest to illicit behavior in contracting to build the system.

When so many billions are involved, is anyone safe from temptation?

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

IRAQ:

Following the recent report that 2,000 American soldiers have died in Bush's war (for purposes never clearly understood), private sources are now saying that somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Iarqis have died.

The Administration, however, still insists that this is not a civil war. It seems there is importance to using the proper term. Let's understand that the word "insurgency" does NOT mean a group of trouble makers who have arrived from some other place.

in·sur·gen·cy n., pl. in·sur·gen·cies. 1. The quality or circumstance of being rebellious. 2. An instance of rebellion; an insurgence.
If the country is not currently in a state of civil war, it is moving rapidly in that direction.

The Republican Revolution:

Ho
ld on to your hats! This just in from the Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus. Here are their "main components of the Playbook for Progress":


—Lower taxes and reform the property tax system.
—Reduce state government waste, abuse and reach.
—Create family sustaining jobs.
—Strengthen health care.
—Protect our families and neighborhoods.
—Preserve family farming.
—Improve our families' quality of life by providing dynamic opportunities … not a burgeoning government.
In other words, the Pennsylvania Republicans have publically announced that they are divorcing themselves permanently from the national party and wish it herewith to be known that they are from this point forward full fledged members of the Democratic Party.

NOTE:
As you are no doubt aware, the Republican national party has brought the country higher debts, larger and less effective government since January of 1981 than any Democrat ever imagined possible.

Post Script: A family sustaining job is a part time job at Wally World, where you earn minimum wage and have no health insurance. At least that's what these good folks mean by "family sustaining." In other words, the job sustains the family who owns the place of employment.

Monday, October 24, 2005

The News on the News:

So this is what it's come to: A cause celeb when she went to jail, now Judith Miller is the goat at The New York Times. The paper is trying to distance itself, setting loose its editorial dogs, on Miller, who, it turns out was a reporter of questionable viability.

So why did it take them so long to figure this out? Where is the editorial board for America's newspaper. How come they can't figure out that their reporters aren't doing the job until it's too late?


On the State of America:

Check out this article from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1596029,00.html

entitled, 'This is right out of Hitler's handbook.'

Friday, October 21, 2005

Back to High School:

Ms
Harriet E. Miers flunked her first test this week. She won't be allowed to take her oral exam until she successfully passes, and the Senate has given her a "re-do." Well, in most states you do get three shots at passing your driver's licence exam. That parallel parking thing's a real killer.

Some senators reported that Ms Miers' answers on the written test were down right insulting, but the Bushies have no plans to pull her name from the Supremie Court thing. They want their little sweety to have a nice office, and by golly, they plan to get her into it. Georgie boy sticks by his buddies, even if they do end up fiddling around while the whole town drowns.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

In the News:

The recent revelation that Harriet E. Miers, the administration's latest Supreme Court nominee, advocated a ban on abortions except when the mother's life was at risk, has been defended by the White House with the explanation that Miers was running for office in 1989 when she made her anti-abortion position known.

"It was a political situation," the White House said. In other words, we shouldn't take anything seriously that a politician says when he or she is running for office. That's good news indeed, coming from the Republican "moral majority" party. The nitwits who put this party in power can now go about the job of parcing that explanation from their pompous pulpits.

Watching this group talk out of both sides of its collective mouth has been a real charm:

President Bushy, when announcing her as his choice for the spot on the court, provided her sole qualification as her being "an evangelical Christian." Now his front man, Scott McKlellan, is stating that Miers "recognizes that personal views and ideology and religion have no role to play when it comes to making decisions on the bench."

Of course the same people are sneaking around behind the cameras to reassure the brown shirt leaders of the mega churches that, yes, she really will (maybe) help to destroy a woman's right to control her own life. Uh, poor women, that is. No one will ever take that right away from rich people's daughters.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

In the News:

So our buddy, Bush, has seen his approval ratings plummet to a new all time low of 39 percent. The big question is why would almost two out of five people approve of anything this man does? However, I defy anyone to explain "presidential approval ratings" to me. Bushy scored a record high 90 percent approval following the administrations failure to recognize the threat that led to the 9/11 attacks.

Can you imagine, these folks were too busy plotting out how to drag American youth (NOT their own children, thank you) into a war with Iraq to pay attention to clear warnings that terrorists were plotting to fly planes into buildings, and then when he shows up with egg on his face, the American public approves at the rate out of nine out of every ten questioned.

The argument, of course, is that folks were rallying around the flag, which makes about as much sense as thinking that professional wrestling is "real."

In Technology:

Bill Gates is touring college campuses, attempting to recruit young people into the code writing business. In case you haven't followed this profession, code writing is a dying business for most organizations, who have found it much cheaper to buy off the wrack rather than to hire groups of code writers to create propietary programs. David DeJean, of Destop Pipeline, has a good article on the subject in today's Desktop Pipeline Newsletter.

It seems all of those geeky little kids who found an escape from working at the local video or game store while earning more bucks than they'd ever dreamed are now asking the question: "With the creative work of developing applications removed from the IT job equation, what's left?" Or at least that's what David DeJean is now asking.

In Sports:

Albert Pujoles hit a monster home run to lead the St. Louis Cardinals over the Houston Astros last night, in the top of the ninth with two outs and two on.

But the real hero of the game was little David Eckstein, who with two strikes and two outs got the hit that rattled the Astros' pitcher, allowing next batter to come to the plate and take a walk and then Pujoles to come to bat and do what he is paid for.

Pujoles did come through in a big way for the Cards, but it was interesting to hear the Fox Sports pundits talk over the one guy in the booth who wanted to credit little Eckstein with the job he'd done. No one wants to see a little scrappy guy become the hero. The pundits have made Pujoles their hero, and nothing will shake them. He's the media's darling. He's physically bigger than most of us, so it's much easier to accept him as someone who can do the outsized thing. Eckstein is littler than the average man. If we accept him as a hero, we have to ask ourselves why we couldn't do something of that magnitude.

Pujoles himself gave Eckstein plenty of credit.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Who ya gonna root for?

The World Series is just around the corner, and many bloggers, especially those who run Cubs' blogs, are hoping the White Sox will end their 87-year drought of victories, following in the footsteps of last year's champions, the Red Sox. If both Sox teams end their "jinxes" then maybe the Cubs can too.

In the second game of the ALCS, the Pale Hose managed to eek out a victory against the Angels, seemingly stealing the game in the bottom of the ninth of a tie ballgame, with two out. The home plate umpire failed to make a call of a swinging third strike in a fashion that would indicate that the batter was either out or not out.

Replays of the play finally indicated that the pitch had grazed the dirt just prior to the catcher catching the ball, which meant that the batter, having clearly swung and missed the pitch, was elligible to run to first, and if he arrived before a defensive player with the ball touched the bag, he would be ruled safe. That's in fact what happened.

However, the Angels players were convinced that the umpire had called the batter out, and that play for the Sox' half of the inning was over. The Angel's catcher rolled the ball onto the field, which is the custom at the conclusion of the inning, and the Angels' players began to leave the field.

The runner was ruled safe, the next batter hit a ball off the left field wall, allowing the base runner to score, and the Sox won the game by one run. To many viewers, it seemed the Sox had done something very much like "stealing" the ball game. It just didn't seem "cricket" to borrow a term from our British friends.

The Sox fans at the ball park went wild that night. Commentators for days following kept remarking that they had only seen fans go that crazy when the home town team wins the seventh game of the World Series. They were further puzzled that the fans would be so thrilled at a victory that hinged on a controversial call from an umpire. It seemed the game had been given their team, not earned. (In fact the run was "unearned" in baseball parlence, the runner having reached base on an error.)

But how fitting. This is a team who hasn't won a World Series since 1918. In 1919, this team with some of the best players to ever play the game, sold out the World Series to gamblers. And their owner was almost certainly involved. Worse, he later sold out his own players in order to pinch pennies on his payroll. (It's also a team located on the South Side of Chicago, the same general neighborhood as that occuppied by Al Capone, America's most notorious gangster.)

Of course neither the current Sox players nor the owners had anything to do with that earlier group, except for the name of the team and its history. As Americans, we like to believe we have no history, that we can make ourselves up anew, out of whole clothe, as it were. We start over again, we re-invent ourselves, we go off to college and get an education, we trade ball players and rename stadiums.

I'm sure the Sox players feel this way. They didn't make the call the other night that allowed them to eventually win the game. They just did what they are paid to do. And I very seriously doubt that many of the fans in Chicago that night were around for the Black Sox scandle or had anything whatsoever to do with Al Capone, but there was something very curious about the pleasure the Sox fans took in that victory.

It was almost as if the fans took more pleasure in having "stolen the game" than if the batter who struck out had hit a walk-off home run. It seemed an odd reaction for a team that has traditionally been known as "the working man's team."

Brave New World: Wal-Mart is attempting to go after the last bastion of American capitalism: the banks. In a recent proposal, Wal-Mart plans to begin opening its own banks, effectively attacking the most powerful forces in the capitalistic world.

Remember the Cold War? And how we were all taught that capitalism was the only good in the world, that it allowed for fair competition that would provide us all with the best products and the best services at the lowest prices. If you didn't like one bank, for instance, you could always go to another. If the interest rates at one bank weren't to your satisfaction, you could always seek out another.

Wal-Mart came along, and we thought here's a true capitalistic venture and we are all benefitting from their low prices.

Guess what? If you live in the mid-west, look around at what happened to your communities.

It's difficult to be a friend of the banks. They've never been anyone's friend but their own, but Wal-Mart is coming after them in true capitalistic form. The average consumer will probably benefit over the short run, but remember this:

The true nature of competition is to destroy competition.

That's why in sports we start the season over from time to time. We level the playing field in a completely arbitrary fashion. This is the equivalent of government regulation.

Wal-Mart now wants to be your bank, your dry goods provider, your source of gasoline, your bakery store, your grocery store. How convenient for us. Everything we need located under one tin roof on acres of asphalt at the edge of town.

Down with communism, the system where the government owns and controls everything. Up with the latest form of capitalism: the system that is controlled by a handfull of people who inhereted their billions—making them among the wealthiest aristocrats in the history of the world—and their business. I'm sure these few folks have your very best interest at heart. By the way, how many of you know their names? Or would recognize any of their faces? And they never have to face the voters in the poles.

Congratulations, America! Capitalism is about to reach its zenith, just in time for China, India and Korea to start truly flexing their economic muscles.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Dear Bill Bennett:

Back in the good old days, when I was in the Army, I had a drill sergeant who would say to us from time to time "Son, reach down between your thighs. Grab hold of your ears, and jerk your head …" Well, you get the idea.

Bennett, a sometimes poster boy for the conservatives in this country, who was at one time this country's education czar, inserted his foot directly into his mouth recently while trying to make a point about abortion. If he had said, "You could reduce the crime rate in this country by aborting all fetuses of white people," he probably could have gotten away with his rediculous dialectic.

However, Bill made a connection with the fact that our nation's prison inmate population is disproportionately African American. This kind of simple minded thinking is typical of the conservatives in our country. You would think that conservatives would take their time and reason through their arguments. Wrong.

To be a conservative means that you want to conserve something. What is it that the conservatives in the U. S. want to conserve? Uh, the status quo? Let's keep poor people poor, working people working for less, and all the money and power in our own hands.

The News in the News

Judith Miller of the New York Times, the reporter who was jailed for 85 days for what she didn't do, was released from prison. Miller, who went to jail without the opportunity to plead her case before a jury of her peers, at the flimsy discretion of a Republican prosecutor, whose agenda no one knows, and who seems incapable of articulating—could it be simple party in-fighting?—was released after she agreed to testify to a grand jury.

It seems high ranking officials in the Bush administration—a top Cheney aid and a top Bush aid—were feeding the press secret info in an attempt to stifle criticism of Bush's lies about going to war in Iraq.

So is the prosecutor out to right wrongs here? You gotta be dreaming! It's simply an attempt to stifle the press. No Bush-ite is going to jail. No one is even thinking of impeaching this president for lying to the country, with the result of thousands of deaths. (You have to lie about sex to be impeached. Really, it's in the Constitution. Page something or other.)

In other news about the news: the Government Accountability Office has finally said that the administration has been found to be guilty of "covert propaganda" in its "buying of the news" campaign. The focus so far has been on the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" (sic) campaign to cripple education in the U. S.

The most important aspect of this news item is that it displays the problems within the Republican Party itself. The Government Accountability Office is a bi-partisan office of the congress, which of course is run by Republicans.

It seems that the recent hurricanes have blown off more than one façade. Now even the most easily fooled among us can see the grizzly face where before a rather stupid looking mask resided.