Moons and Silver Spoons

Am I the only one who struggles to understand these damn lunar transects? My mind wants that orb to stick to a fixed overhead pathway, or at least only vary gradually from season to season, like Sol. I recall about a week ago noticing moon at this time just short of full, beckoning me from the SSE, moderately low in the sky. But here I am tonight seeing moon, about a week past full, actually north of east. Can one of you astronomers help me with this? Paraphrasing Henry Higgins, "why can't a moon be more like a sun?"

Moving on, though, given the wealth of excellent material seemingly pretty much ignored by the media most commonly in your face (i.e., boob-tube and "news" paper), I feel compelled to do a sequel to last night's post.

You will find even a familiar visual, in alternate form.

There's a big story out there today, which I am going to basically dodge here, in the hope of achieving the sleep I desperately need. There are strong murmurs to the effect that we are nearing a compact with the Iraq government for American withdrawal from Iraq on what even bush spokes-monkeys are describing in terms of formerly heinous terms like "timelines." It will be fascinating if this continues to play out this way how McSwine will try to wriggle down off the 100-year war pedestal he climbed up on. Not that he is lacking in equivocation, flip-flopping, and general lying skills from way back. And, not to put too fine a point on it, fully enabled by the assholes who pretend to have journalism as their job but have been failing to show up for the assignment to the major detriment of the American Republic for ever so long. McSame does dishonesty and disreputability as if they were innate in his character and DNA.

Frankly, if we had any real journalists available to ask even half-assed questions, it could be almost Olympically entertaining to watch the dancing from the Bleak House and the sad little McSame sycophant in attempting to explain how they lost this war.

But, frankly classical journalism seems to be more or less dead, with a scant handful of exceptions, and I'm not going there now.

McSame's recent flat-footed admission that he does not know how many houses he owns is pretty fascinating, given his attempts to paint Obama as elitist and out-of-touch. Phoenix Woman (evocative of my recent read of "The Summer of Love") helps out with this great post at Firedoglake:

The recent news that John Sidney McCain III is so frickin' rich he can't keep track of all of his domiciles is really no news to those of us who have been paying attention. This is a man, mind you, who is the Fortunate Son and Grandson of two admirals, and whose great-great-The recent news that John Sidney McCain III is so frickin' rich he can't keep track of all of his domiciles is really no news to those of us who have been paying attention. This is a man, mind you, who is the Fortunate Son and Grandson of two admirals, and whose great-great-grandfather was a Mississippi plantation owner with 52 slaves and 2000 acres in the days before the Civil War. (McCain professed not to have known this when it was brought to his attention in 2000, but his cousin, author Elizabeth Spencer, mentions the McCain family's slaves in her family memoir Landscapes of the Heart, a book John McCain had admitted to reading by the time the 2000 campaign had rolled around.)

It was McCain's silver-spoon background and admiral daddy that got him into the prestigious Navy Air Pilot Flight Training program despite graduating 894th in his Annapolis class of 899. That same background and daddy also kept him flying over the years, even after crashing several planes. Wrecking one plane was often enough for a Navy pilot to lose his wings; McCain lost five, a feat that would earn him the ironic nickname "Reverse Ace McCain" or just plain old "Ace".

But even the influence of a powerful father couldn't fix his stalled Naval career; by the mid-1970s, it was clear to everyone that McCain the Third was not going to make admiral as his illustrious forebears had done. He began casting about for a new career, around the same time that he began casting about for a new wife. He found his new wife in Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a very wealthy beer distributor in Phoenix with ties to organized crime. They married in May of 1980, and Cindy's daddy was quite generous in letting his new son-in-law use his money to run for Congress in 1982 in the heavily-Republican Phoenix congressional district. (McCain essentially served as a placeholder for the powerful Rhodes family: When John Jacob Rhodes Jr. retired from Congress in 1982, he opened the seat for McCain, who then held it for two terms until he left it to Rhodes' son, John Jacob Rhodes III, when McCain ran for the Senate in 1986.)

And then Digby adds just the necessary buttercream frisonne for this egomaniacal fruitcake:

HuffPo:

Facing a Democratic Party positively giddy over his recent admission that he didn't know how many houses he owned, John McCain quickly returned to a political trump card: his POW experience.

Speaking to the Washington Post, aide Brian Rogers, in full damage-control mode, acknowledged that his boss had "some investment properties and stuff," but added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison."

I'm frankly a little bit surprised they are being so cavalier with this. At some point even the somnambulent press corps is going to start rolling their eyes.

The Huffpo article goes on to catalog the many times McCain has rather awkwardly brought his POW history into the campaign even as they insist that he rarely talks about his experience.

The Obama campaign has decided that it's not a good idea to say anything about McCain's Vietnam service, but it certainly does seem like something that would be good fodder for comics and a reasonable line of inquiry from the press. To me, this is one of the most absurd aspects of the campaign --- the idea that he can successfully get away with evoking his POW experience as a conversation stopper when he's criticized for things completely unrelated to the military or national security (and even that's a stretch) is simply mind-boggling.

They may have gone to the well once too often with this one. Using his time in the Hanoi Hilton to excuse the fact that he's such an out-of-touch aristocrat that he doesn't know how many houses he and his heiress wife own may have been the shark jumping moment for his POW schtick.

The Huffpo article goes on to catalog the many times McCain has rather awkwardly brought his POW history into the campaign even as they insist that he rarely talks about his experience.

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I encourage you to finish up your supper by following those links. And of course take full advantage of any opportunity to help your less-advantaged fellow citizens appreciate what a total swine John McSame is.