A couple years ago I took note of a story of a school district that banned Recess – games that did not have written rules to them. This is sort of in league with schools dumping the fabled “Monkey Bars”, but a bit more insiduous. Getting rid of “Monkey Bars” is, theoretically designed to rid us of various kiddie injuries. Regulating recess games is what I called a “School Bans Calvin-Ball” — the school district was moralizing the children’s play time and preparing them for the business-world — and god help me if I knew the intricacies of “Freeze Tag” or “Cartoon Tag” or if my daily games of soccer really and truly had rather malleable rules to them. (Or, for that matter, another fond recess memory from grade school: setting ants with the aid of a magnifying glass.)

Here is a story from Wired proposing the hypothesis that the “War on Meth” is destroying a type of childhood Scientific Inquiry. I don’t know what you can do with pounds of chemicals, but we say goodbye to Dexter as a childhood role-model. I remember hearing a fellow high school student murmur a bit angrily at a Science teacher who apparently said to her that “she was unlike her” either father or brother, I don’t remember which, because “she did not tinker around with things”. This teacher had a somewhat moreass sense of things, seeming to think that the quality of students in his midst was generally in a downward trend, and that this student’s elder father member “tinkered” with things in his spare time and she was content to do or not do other things was in keeping with his character. I generally liked him, and his thinly veiled (at least to me) commentaries on, for example, Creationists that he apparently had to deal with. For his part he apparently was bumping up against some of the “dissappearance of the Chem Lab” that the Wired Magazine is discussing, in that he apparently had some fights with members of the community on the safety concerns of this or that lab experiment.

On the other hand, it was in poor sport for this teacher to compare the student to her family member. I suggest that today’s problem is that if we have a kid in a make-shift labortory, it’ll be easy to suspect he (or she) is busy creating explosive devices for use later on for rather sinister Columbine-like reasons. At any rate, Calvin Ball is out. Childhood labortories are out. And the nation is experiencing a vaguely defined state of perpetual brain-deadness. Our educational system is in perpetual crisis, or so I’ve heard.

So, apparently Ned Lamont has narrowed the margins against Joseph Lieberman to 55 – 40 percent among likely Democratic primary voters, including undecided voters who are leaning towards a candidate in a poll from the state — wherefor Lamont stood at something like 18 percent a month or two ago.

And that there is the most threatening primary opponent in the 2006 election cycle. The Republicans’ best primary opponent for a hated one of theirs is Stephen Laffey, backed by Grover Norquist against Whig Party adherant Lincoln Chaffee — the only Republican senator to vote no for authorizing a war in Iraq, and a Republican who said that he did not vote for George W Bush, instead choosing to write in… George H W Bush. The Club for Growth recently released a highly unreliable poll with a huge margin of error that showed Laffey barking right up against Chaffee. If only this were so, for a Laffey victory would guarantee that the Democratic party wins Rhode Island… a pretty good sign that the Republicans are probably misfiring in trying to axe Chaffee — although, to be fair, that party is in a better position to shrug off their middlesome candidate, politics being the “art of the possible” and all. For example, Ben Nelson, like it or not, is Nebraska’s “kind of a halfway, Democrat/Republican senator” (as Chuck Hagel put it), and to deal away with him would be to toss off the “halfway”. Incidentally, the Democratic nominee-to-be in Rhose Island is “pro-life” — to whatever degree that means these days, Chaffee is “pro-choice”. I see rumblings that the two parties have strong factions of both factions in them, and come to think of it that sort of makes sense. Catholic Democrats. Prescott Bush Republicans. Rhode Island: drive through it in an hour.

I have this theory that a party’s rank and file basically has one quiver in the arrow in knocking out an incumbant member of their party per cycle, and they should choose this quiver carefully. Maybe I’m off. There’s a chance that Hawaii Democrats will knock off their incumbant Democrat Senator Akaka– though it’s not much of a chance and the malaice seems to be more of a token shrug at Akaka. Beyond that, Maria Cantwell in Washington faces meager opposition. Hillary Clinton faces symbolic opposition. The key is to shuffle away one candidate in favour of one who is prone to be elected.

Joseph Lieberman is all we’ve got, and the only one worth trying to choke. Concentrate accordingly.

In, 2004 Republicans looked to knock out Arlen Specter, a frustrating Republican to them and an even more frustrating Republican for “the side of good” for laughable attempts at historical credibility in the face of a Republican Party that is knocking him around but good. In 2002, the Republican Party apparatus stood aside and let one of their own knock out Bob Smith in New Hampshire. I’ll look into this one.

For the 2006, I suggest we take out Max Baucus, rumoured to be cutting a deal on the Estate Tax — a toxic mid-way to enacting horrible policy on par with Lieberman’s follies … and a worthwhile tact in the prairie populist state of Montana. Jon Tester just knocked off the would-be Max Baucus-esque candidate of John Morrison in the Democratic primary and is well on his way to knocking off the Republican incumbant Conrad Burns, perpetuating the “Brian Schweitzer transformation”, making Max Baucus’s corporatist “a little from section A, a little from Section B” passe, and a detriment to the Montana Democratic Party brand. Or so we would hope.

The sham of the Initiative Process is that the rank in the gatherers of signatures are swelled by people needing a quick job, needing to tide themselves over from one job to another, who could care less about the Initiatves they are gathering signatures for.

The tell tale signs are there. I can not abide anyone who has a half dozen or so issues they are gathering signatures for. And the worst line I hear, again and again, is…

“Just to get it on the ballot”.

I have witnessed someone go through item after item on a clipboard, bluster out the title of the ballot initiative, get a skeptical and slightly confused look on the would be signer — to say “I don’t understand what this issue is all about”, and then slyly wax out “Just to get it on the ballot.” As though, once on the ballot, the person will take a long time to carefully read the language of the law, weigh the issue, and make an educated vote — because it is… on the ballot.

And I witnessed this scene: a signature gatherer asks for a signature on… I believe it was “Affordable health care”. The would-be-signer says “I already signed that one.” The gatherer asks “When?” The signer says “Two weeks ago.” As so happens that was May, this is June, and so he says “Sign this anyway. They don’t throw it against us if you get a repeat signature every out of the calendar month.”

This is a cynical calculation indeed.

If you’ve ever looked into signature gathering, you’ll get queasy on the process. A two-week term of service. Gather at least five signatures every day, and you will get paid a relatively decent amount. Then you’ll either be kept on or let go, depending on how far above this minimum you go.

The troubling consideration I have in my mind is that Oregon’s political reputation sort of hinges off of a couple of Initiative-brought laws that stub their middle finger out at the federal government. Doctor Assisted Suicide, most notably.

So what are you going to do? It’s done some good. But most of the initiatives we’ll get in November are going to suck eggs, and some of them will pass.

This was at the end of the radio promotion. At that point, most of the 300+ folks were at Dantes already. Who knew the Anti-Christ would actually be summoned?

“JAWS was never my thing and I don’t like Star Wars.”

At a certain point, my indifference to the whole ouvre of Star Wars becomes something that I proudly tuck into as part of my identity. I fear that if I take a good look at the three movies that are now determined to be the good set from the series — “A New Hope”, the other movie from the original trilogy that didn’t employ Ewoks, and “Revenge of the Sith”, I will probably enjoy these films on some level and lose this identifier. I know I’ve seen the first movie a few times through the process of Osmosis as much as antything else somewhere in my childhood, but for the life of me I do not know if I ever saw the Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. I own two pieces of Star Wars memorabilia– two Chewbacca figures — a small one from somewhere in the 80s and a large one that I may just well have left at my sister’s place — absent-mindedly, I swear! — when my nephews/niece gave it to me as a Christmas gift alongside a Sonic the Hedgehog figure of the same variety — two toys which, by the clamour of the kids, looked suspiciously like gifts for themselves.

As it turns out, Tim Eyman — Washington State’s version of that strangest of creatures, the Right-wing Initiative Whore, is, as it turns out, a Star Wars fan.

Though I suspect Darth Vader’s entourage are not as fat as Tim Eyman’s. These are not terribly imposing figures, though I wonder if a typical comic book / science fiction / geek whatnot convention you’ll probably get the same effect. Beyond which, quite frankly, I would be unimpressed if I saw someone like Eyman waving that orange contraption in the air — a poor excuse for a light saber.

This was part of Eyman’s last ditch effort for a “final push” to get the needed signatures for a ballot measure for a referendum on the state’s gay anti-discrimination law. While it’s nice to know that a man associated with anti-tax crusades branched out to the other part of the conservative sphere to the religious-right cause of homophobia and reached out to Star Wars fans to get the deed done, it’s better to know that he failed in his efforts.

FREAK!

We either have or have not reached the point of the lowest results in the scheme of diminishing Returns in the scheme of bringing up the whole spectre of … Homosexual Marriage.

The thing is, as Congress gets ready to debate the subject for two days, flag burning right in the distance… Nobody believes him.

Nobody believes that President George W. Bush cares one whiff about Gay Marriage. NOBODY! Somewhere you bop from this being the huge concern of the 2004 election. Somewhere after the Terri Schiavo fiasco showed the mutability of our current domestic political scene, you quietly bury all topics religious tinged and move on to a full frontal Social Security Reform front. As you jump around from state to state with theoretically endangered Democrats facing 2006 elections, you find that by talking up a storm on your desires to reform social security, you’re actually buttressing your Democratic candidate’s electoral chances.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and WITH AN APPROVAL RATING UNDER 30 PERCENT!!!!

And so, as John Zogby puts it in terms of “right track — wrong track” poll results, “I have never seen a number like that since I’ve been polling.”

Your base wants you to tackle illegal immigration. You are corporately at odds with your base. Maybe you have a few gestures at ready, but you will not and can not appease your base with this issue.

The one thing about gay marriage is that it loses its luster with each brandishing. I know how this issue is going to wrap itself up. Any number of elections across the nation will be lost to the “progressive” side due to this little wedge issue — candidates who, incidentally, will not take a stand for or against the topic –, and yet… in the end… Adam and Steve will be wed into holy matrimony and will take a nice little rendezvous into Alabama for their honeymoon. And George W Bush won’t care.

But not many elections are going to be lost in 2006 with this issue at the ready. It reeks too much of desparation. The only problem with it is it still just might well be a wise political move on Karl Rove’s part. Throw up this dart, it’ll stick somewhat, and hopefully long enough and just well enough to tide the Republicans over to the next election cycle.