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Saturday, March 04, 2006Waking Up Is Bad
I love weekends. They're great. They give you a chance to recover when you've had crappy work weeks. But I've got a problem with weekends, too.
The problem is this: I've got two dogs. The weekend means nothing to them. So when 6AM rolls around, they figure it's time for them to go outside. My older dog, in particular, is difficult to dissuade from this notion. (The younger guy is actually pretty content to just lay on the bed with us, having snuck up after we fell asleep.) The upshot of this is that I end up getting up earlier than I'd like. I can usually put them off until 7 or 8, but that's about it. My wife, meanwhile, gets to sleep on in blissful comfort. I could, of course, just walk the dogs and hop back into bed with her. But I've got this thing that stops me. I just have a really hard time going back to sleep once I'm up. There's a part of me that's repulsed by the notion that I'm going to waste precious time. I'm up, ergo I need to be productive. Or at least engaged in an activity more worthwhile than dreaming that I'm caught up in a '70s-era sci-fi TV show called Space Ark, a long and complicated dream I had last night with which I will not bore you. So I end up wide awake at 7 on a Saturday, doing dishes or getting my internet browsing out of the way. Which is what I've been doing for two and a half hours this morning. I spent a bunch of time at Google News and Salon and came away greatly disturbed (or perturbed or some kind of -urbed) at what I read. Apparently, there was a forum in town on Thursday called "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" A bunch of folks got together at Town Hall and discussed the dire situation of our country's political landscape. Some of the speakers, the article says, talked about the recent revelations of the administration's wire-tapping, their use of torture, their bungling of the aftermath of Katrina and sundry other fuck-ups have created an opportunity for Democrats to gain momentum, seize control of congress and make an attempt to impeach Bush, holding him responsible for his many, many mistakes. The author of the article, Michelle Goldberg, says: Polls show more Americans favoring Democratic control of Congress than Republican, but that does not mean they can make it so. Redistricting along partisan lines means that most House seats are safe for one party or another; as the Center for Voting and Democracy found in a 2005 report, "The past two House elections were the least competitive in American history by most standards. In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98 percent of incumbents have won, and more than 90 percent of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10 percent." Electoral maps that pack liberal, urban voters together have put Democrats at a structural disadvantage that is unlikely to be overcome by either exhortations about people power or disenchantment with Republican rule. As Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics," wrote in Mother Jones last year, "Even when the Democrats win more votes, they don't necessarily win more seats. That's true in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the Electoral College." In the House, he wrote, "When the two sides are tied nationally, the Republicans end up winning about 50 more House districts than the Democrats." With enough of a groundswell, of course, the Democrats' disadvantage could be surmounted. But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first. The democratic process is fucked. Between the tight-fisted control huge corporations have over who gets enough money to have even a distant shot at getting elected to any federal office and the efficient maneuvering the politicians have done to protect their status quo, there is no real power left in being a voting American citizen. A fact for which I'm sure Bush gives hearty thanks in his evening prayers. I continue to be aghast at how willfully ignorant people are about the direction this bastard is taking us. Aghast is, perhaps, the wrong word, as it implies some surprise. Appalled, maybe. Really, it appears that he's going to have to rape a retarded, geriatric nun on the floor of Congress before people think of him as anything other than a genial good ol' boy. This is so friggin' depressing. I wish to hell I could be dreaming about cheesy 70s sci-fi instead.
Comments:
I am totally laughing my fool ass off at this post! Not so much at the fuctard prezzidente, but at the part about the dogs. My dogs start trying to wake me up at 3:30 a.m., which I can usually hold them off until 4:15 or so. That is, until Ozzie, the male with a cinder block for a head decides to head-butt me to get my attention. After that, I'm either unconscious or so awake that I wouldn't be able to sleep until next week.
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 : 8:15 AM
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