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Things thought in Maine

As a pig to truffles, so I am to the nibbly bits of wisdom from Bill in Portland Maine. Some recent highlights....

On Scott McClellan: "That's the trouble with being two-faced.  It doubles your chance of biting yourself in the ass."

Take note:

Percent of Senate votes by John McCain in 2008 that have supported President Bush's views: 100% (95% in 2007)
(Source: Think Progress)

Oh no!

Oh Mac, say it ain't so!  A McCain campaign bigwig---part of the D.C. lobbyist bloc the "maverick" swears he hates---resigned for unconscionable skullduggery.  And then another resigned.  And another.  And another.  And then yesterday...another.  Which, if my math is correct, leaves McCain with exactly one person left on his senior campaign staff: his mom.

Things Bill knows:

John McCain is who George W. Bush would look like today if he gave a damn about the magnitude of his failures.

It's of grave concern when a Democratic candidate is tagged as an elitist for having an Ivy League education, but when someone points out that many Republican candidates are themselves ivy-league graduates with large houses, summer cottages, fancy cars and closets full of designer dresses and crisp tuxedos, it barely warrants a shrug.

Democratic candidates have to reveal their spouses' tax records going back many years. Republican candidates don't.

Democrats have a conservative wing. Republicans don’t have anything even remotely resembling a liberal wing.

(Image: Called the great seal of the state of Maine. Yet it shows a moose. Above the moose sits the Soviet star and the state motto, "Dirigo," which is Latin for, "There he goes." The seal also depicts Death as a middle-aged man and Buster Brown with serious bling.)

Freedom of speech under assault - Fuck you very much, the FCC

(Hat-tip to One Good Move.) From The New York Times:

At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable “om” as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork “Howl” prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago.

It is with a queasy feeling of history in retreat that poetry lovers discover that WBAI, long the radio flagship of cocky resistance to government excess, decided last week that it couldn’t risk a 50th anniversary broadcast of the late poet’s recording of “Howl.” The station retreated out of fear that the Federal Communications Commission would levy large obscenity fines that might bankrupt the small-budget station.

Courtesy of Monty Python's Flying Circus's Eric Idle: The song, "So Fuck You All Very Much" (Listen here; extended version here.)

A good thought: you can do good w/o waiting

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

Grandeur beyond what any holy book reveals

(Photo: The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies; credit: Jim Misti, Misti Mountain Observatory. "Each of the fuzzy blobs in the above picture is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster.... It takes light roughly 300 million years to get here from this region of the Universe, so we see this cluster as it existed before the age of the dinosaurs.")

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how may stars that means…It’s something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.

- Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience. The Penguin Press, 2006, p.27. (The author's 1985 Gifford lectures.)

A good thought: steps, not stares

"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps -- we must step up the stairs." - Vance Havner