Sunday, February 28, 2010

Theoretical Apostrophe.



So you know how I’m in a fake band, right? Well I am. It is made up of a bunch of writers and English majors and only one of us can play an actual instrument.

We don’t have a name yet, but I have been thinking a lot about it (probably too much) and I would like to pitch this idea to you, the Internet:

Theoretical Apostrophe

What do you think? Is that sufficiently wacky enough?

I think that it just might be.

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The Good that Won’t Come Out.

Please enjoy these lyrics to the Rilo Kiley song.

Let's get together and talk about the modern age
All of our friends were gathered there
With their pets, just talking shit
About how we're all so upset about the disappearing ground
As we watch it melt

It's all of the good that won't come out of us
And how eventually our hands will just turn to dust
If we keep shaking them
Standing here on this frozen lake

I do this thing where I think I'm real sick
But I won't go to the doctor to find out about it
Because they make you stay real still
In a real small space
As they chart up your insides and put them on display

They'd see all of it, all of me, all of it

All of the good that won't come out of me
And all the stupid lies I hide behind
It's such a big mistake
Lying here in your warm embrace

Oh, you're almost home
I've been waiting for you to come in
Dancing around in your old suits
Going crazy in your room again
I think I'll go out and embarrass myself
By getting drunk and falling down in the street
You say I choose sadness
That it never once has chosen me
Maybe you're right

Let's talk about all our friends who lost the war
And all the novels that have yet to be written about them

It's all of the good that won't come out of them
And all the stupid lies they hide behind
It's such a big mistake
Standing here on this frozen lake

It's all of the good that won't come out of me
And how eventually my mouth will just turn to dust
If I don't tell you quick
Standing here on this frozen lake


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The Cold War Gets "Mild" (like the sauce).

So recently one of my brothers got to take an important Eastern European political dignitary to a Texas Taco Bell. Apparently they had an in-depth and far-reaching conversation about things like the future of NATO and the misleading categorization of Taco Bell’s hot sauces.

There is a fabulous joke in this somewhere, but I don’t quite have it yet.

But I’m working on it.

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Free Books! Sort of!!!

You know, I am so tired of listening to you always say that you’re going to finally get around to reading “The Origin of Species”.

Well check the hell out of this cool website!

ReadPrint


You can read entire (old) books free on the internet for free!

Super.

You are welcome.


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Fluid Memory by James Bezerra


Here is a story that I wrote a little while ago. It is about a fish, though not really.

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Fluid Memory
by James Bezerra


The goldfish had been called Junior and had belonged to a girl called Elena whose parents had been among the disappeared. Junior has nebulous memories, distorted by the water and the concavity of his fish bowl. He really only remembers the colors of Elena’s wavy face and dark hair, and then the food flakes.

Those memories come floatingly to the surface of my mind often, because there is only a very small amount of room inside of this fish brain where they have stored me. I can feel my own memories decomposing. When I try to think of my daughter, I can almost remember her face. I remember that she had a bright and big smile, but I do not remember it. When I try, all I recall are the ripples when the flakes of fish food fall onto the surface of the water and I am suddenly ecstatic with Junior’s memory of the food. He was really a simple creature. He was excited by the colors of Elena and by the food. He liked when the sunlight would hit the water in the afternoon and it would get warm.

The water never gets warm anymore because they have me on a shelf in the laboratory. But I remember - because Junior did - the warmth of the water on those summer days.
I know that I went to the University and from there the Army and I remember that the uprising happened. I remember that the war happened, but I do not remember it.

Sometimes I have heavy moments of clarity and I can remember memories that I know are my own. But now, I do not remember my name. Even Junior’s memories are being supplanted now, fading away, because when they take me out of Junior’s brain, I experience something else and when they put me back, these new memories push Junior’s out.

The new memories are awful. They begin and end differently, but somewhere there is always the bag, it is always coarse on my face. And I am always terrified. My name is George and they come for me while I am working in the public library. They come for me because I have been handing out leaflets. They pull the bag over my face and I am hit over the head. The pain is sharp and when I come through it my wrists are bound. It is cold and wet. There is whispering and the wet smell of dirt. They tug the bag off. It is night. A small clearing. They have dug a hole in the earth. There are bodies in it, limp and fresh. A man approaches me and tells me I am guilty of sedition. I cry out and pee. They roll me down into the hole, still bound. A soldier approaches, he aims his rifle at my face. He begins to squeeze his trigger …

I am back suddenly in Junior. I am in the water, my tail is flipping happily from side to side. I would cry if I were in a human, but I can’t. I can only make wide Os with my mouth. Why do they store me in a fish?

When they come for me again, they psychically suck my essence out and then I am Gracie. I am not alive in her memory, I am her and I am worried that I have been discovered. There were agents at the factory today. They were asking people questions. My palms are wet and I wonder if I maybe I left a fingerprint on the bomb. The bomb did not go off. Maybe I didn’t connect the detonator correctly. I call Sergio on the phone, “They were at the factory today …” and he hangs up quickly. When I ring him again he does not answer. I throw some clothes in a bag and take all the money I have. I wear my leather boots, thinking I might be able to hike out of the city along the aqueduct. I take the lift down to the lobby. They are there. In their distinct hats and dark jackets. They see me. I punch the buttons, but the lift continues to descend. My heart is pounding. I scream at them because it doesn’t matter now anyway … I am in a room underground when they pull the bag off my face, “Where is Sergio?” they ask me. I spit at them and they beat me … I haven’t eaten in so long. My left wrist is broken and my face is fractured … I can take the beatings, but they offer me warm soup and I cry. I sob and I sign their papers. They bring me the soup but as I dip the spoon, I hear behind me the click-click-click of the hammer rolling back on a pistol …

I am Junior again.

I can remember the exhaustion of Gracie. I can feel it still in my tiny goldfish body, but it is not in my body. It is only in my brain. A memory.

There are so many memories in me now. I am James, a clerk who bled to death during questioning. I am Moses, and they nearly drowned me a thousand times, tied to a board. I am Elizabeth and they raped me. I am Mario and they hooked me to a truck battery. I am Regina and they couldn’t use my signed confession because I spit blood on it from my broken mouth. I am Gerard and I confessed without torture, so they killed me quickly.

I am Junior and I can’t remember … what was her name? The wavy girl who gave me flakes of food? I can’t remember her. But I can remember the rutty faced soldier who stopped me in the Plaza de Sol when I was Sarah and asked for my papers. He hit me with his gun when I said I didn’t have them.

I am a fish. I do not remember my name … I am an amalgamation of torturous memories and my water is cold. Sometimes there is a heavy clarity in my brain and I remember that I was a soldier. I was an agent. And I remember! I remember that we lost the war! I remember! I was arrested by the new police and they said to me, “We will not kill you. We have a new way to punish people like you. We will punish you with their memories.”

I remember! Then they brought the bowl into the laboratory and in it there was a goldfish.

I remember … wait … No! I … no … it is gone.

I remember that I remembered something.

Not now though.

My name is Junior. I am a fish. I am hungry and I miss the warm.



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The goldfish picture was borrowed (in an appreciative and well-meaning manner) from chicagoist.com

How I Got Rabies, Again.

So you know how I’m always telling you that I have the strange luck of accidentally getting uncomfortably close to wild animals? Well below are a couple of pictures of a squirrel that totally violated my space the other day at school. Yeah, that’s my leg.






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A Handsome and Practical Pair of Shoes For Haiti

Hey everybody! A woman at my work is collecting “gently used” shoes to sent to Haiti. So if you have a bunch of shoes that you don’t wear, shoot me an email and we will work out some sort of shoe exchange or something.

We’ll meet in a dark parking lot and you’ll pop open your trunk and I’ll be all like, “Is that the stuff?”

And you’ll be all like, “Yes, yes it is.”

And then I will scoop up all of the shoes out of your trunk and I will take them to work and I will tell everybody how cool and generous and caring you are.

Here is a picture of one of the pairs of shoes that I will be donating.



I know what you’re thinking, “Why do you own those?”

Well, I was at Target one day and, I don’t know, I think I was in too chipper of a mood or something and I thought that I would wear them. I thought that they looked fun. And then I got home and I had Target-guilt and so I am going to alleviate that by sending this handsome and practical pair of shoes to Haiti.


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Choose Your Words Carefully

So do you know what one of my favorite things is to do on the internets? I like it when people post on their blogs papers that they have written for class. How exciting is that? Very.

So below is a paper that I wrote for my senior seminar writing class. We have to write an present a paper on one aspect of “craft”. I am presenting on diction, which is word choice.

Enjoy.

Oh and tell me if you see any errors, I still have time to fix them! Oh, and just FYI, we are REQUIRED to reference a piece of our own writing in our presentation, that’s why I talk about one of my own short stories. It’s not because I’m a giant egomaniac or anything.

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Diction: Choose Your Words Carefully
By James Bezerra


Diction is word choice. It is the words that you choose to use, It is the choice you make of which words to use. It is the order in which you arrange the words that you have chosen to use.

That was my longwinded way of saying the same thing four times, but in four different ways, with four different combinations of words. That is what we’re going to talk about: diction.

Diction is words, but more than that, diction is the choices that we make as writers. And we make thousands upon thousands of these choices every time that we sit down to write. More than anything else - more than plot, character, theme, setting, subject matter – diction is the basic building block of all of our writing because it is every single word. You make choices about what your characters should do, what they should say; you make choices about whether or not it should be raining and those are important, but diction is how you get there. Is the rain cold or is it icy? Is it warm? Is it sticky? Is it acid?

Every word is a choice and every word tells the reader something, about the story and about its author and every word should build upon the words that have come before. There is no writing that is not the sum of all of its words and there is no meaning without the words.

Take, for instance, this example of the power of a single word:
“Her eyes were as bright as the sun.” Or, “Her eyes were actually as bright as the sun.”

One word choice changes not just the poetry (or cliché) of the phrase, it changes the meaning and it changes what the next line must be. Either your protagonist falls in love with her because of how bright her eyes are or your protagonist is engulfed in a blinding wave of light and fire. This is all due to one word, one choice.

But how can we know if we are making the right choices? Elmore Leonard, in his book Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing sums up all of his ten rules by saying, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it” (Leonard 71). But what does that mean? To find out, let’s examine the 2009 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is an annual contest that honors the worst possible opening line to an imaginary novel. The 2009 winner David McKenzie wrote, “Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests” (bulwer-lytton.com)

So why is this bad? Let’s compare it to the opening line of the first real chapter in Tom Robbin’s Still Life With Woodpecker which begins, “In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat waiting-with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui-for something momentous to occur” (Robbins 3).

Both of these sentences are made of words, they have that in common. Both of them have a very specific and recognizable style and a clear and strong narrative voice. Both of those things are a result of the words and the way that they are connected to one another. However, it is important to understand that the words are meant to convey something. McKenzie was trying to show off how bad he could be, while Robbins was going for something else. So why does he use overly colorful language that borders on ridiculous if he is trying to tell the reader something? Robbins explained his methodology in an interview with Russell Reising, saying, “I happen to think there can be a fairly thin line between the silly and the profound, between nonsensical playfulness and the most serious and intense creative work” (Reising 467). Coming from that perspective, it makes sense then that Robbins writes that a plane circles an airport as, “a typing finger circles a keyboard” (Robbins 32) and a broken umbrella as, “flapping like a werewolf’s shirttail” (Robbins 84).

These are the choices that we have to make as writers. Whereas Robbins likes to drip words like syrup all over his writing, Leonard cautions us with an almost Calvinistic sternness that we should, “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue” (Leonard 22).

How then is the writer to know what to do? Realistically diction is not supposed to be something that the writer actually thinks about very much. It should flow from the writer’s fingertips because that’s the only way that a writer’s unique voice can honestly emerge. Here is an example from my own writing. These lines are from a story published in the Northridge Review. These lines were part of the story’s first draft and I had to defend them more then once to more than one editor. The character Bellanova is trying to charm a young woman who might be a lesbian:

Bellanova shifted strategies by the seat of his pants. “Are you, I wonder, a lesbian, or just an opportunist?”
She turned back to him, curious now. “I can’t be both?”
Bellanova was a coy shrug. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pretended to sheepishly kick an imaginary pebble.


In this section I decided to overplay his feigned bashfulness and rather than saying that Bellanova “shrugged coyly”, I wrote that he “was a coy shrug”, making him a metaphor for his own condition. While this choice did not work for everyone, I felt that it was the most honest way to convey how dedicated Bellanova was to his act. I chose to be lean toward the character rather than the reader. We can’t always do that as writers, but sometimes it can be effective.

This kind of minutia, is the heart and soul of diction, these are the choices that we make and while we have to learn to make them quickly and almost subconsciously, we also have to always understand what they mean.

Diction is small in its individual parts, but it is the most important aspect of our writing.









Bezerra, James J. "Flamingo." The Northridge Review Fall.2009 (2009): 159-78. Print.

"Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest." Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. .

Leonard, Elmore. Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Grand Rapids: William Morrow, 2007.

Reising, Russell. "An Interview with Tom Robbins". Contemporary Literature Autumn, 2001: 463-484.

Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. New York: Bantam, 1990. Print.

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Monday, February 22, 2010

Aimee Bender Loves Me, and Other News . . .

So hello dear blog. I have missed you. It has been a busybusybusy week, but I have thought longingly of you during the calm and quiet moments and I have longed to caress these keys and to be near you.

And stuff.

Anywhoo, so last Friday Violet and I went to a literary pub crawl in Silver Lake (which for those of you who aren’t totally hipster and cool like me, is the most hipster and cool part of LA. Jenny Lewis still has an apartment out there). We went because my most favoritest professor was one of the readers (world-renowned badass Martin Pouson). You want to know who one of the other readers was? Calm down, I will tell you! It was Aimee Bender! She is one of my favorite authors and she has always been special to be because her collection “Girl in the Flammable Skirt” was one of those books I read when I was still trying to figure out how I write. It is one of those books that made me go, “You’re allowed to write like this?”

Anyway, I love her dearly and while I have seen her speak before, I have never seen her read. It, and she, was delightful.

Also of note, this was my first night out drinking since I stopped drinking and, I am happy to say, I did not drink. I really didn’t even have the urge to. Well, that’s not totally true, but it’s true enough. What I did was drink Red Bull on the rocks all night so not only was I not drunk, I was on the complete other end of the spectrum of sobriety. I was super-not-drunk. Now at some point we will have to have the conversation about how I am just tricking my brain with a different but no less stimulating mixture of chemicals, but we will do that some other time.

OH! Also of note, ended up at this awesome bar called the 4100 Bar and let me tell you, between the low light and the leather booths and the actually good music being played too loud, it is like one of my favorite places. It is also, quite sadly, within walking distance of the place I used to live in Echo Park. If only I had known about it then maybe I wouldn’t have been so bitter and lonely when I lived there. But alas, it doesn’t matter now. But if you ever have the chance, check it out.

I have to head off to class now (History of the World from 1945) but I will meet up with you again later dear blog.

I am done editing the college literary journal (The Northridge Review, on stands March 12!) and my accelerated health Science Class ends in a few weeks, so soon I will be with you much more often.

TTFN.

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Sunday, February 14, 2010

02-14-2010

So dear blog,

I try not to write too much about the sort of deeply personal ins-and-outs of my life you find on a lot of people’s blogs. I figure that you have your own problems and if you’re killing your time by floating around on the internet, then you would probably rather be entertained and maybe laugh a little, so I try to stick to writing about the funny or the interesting.

However, at the moment, I am compelled to share with you a little bit because this is important to me. The long and the short of it is that I am going to give up drinking. Completely.

I know that for most of you that doesn’t make one bit of difference at all, but for me this is a big thing and I want to commit to it is a kind of way that I can’t backpedal from. So here we are: I am posting on the internet, for any and all to see, my declaration of not drinking.

So there it is.

I do not drink anymore.

So, you’re saying to yourself, WTF?

Well, there are a couple of things that you should know. First is that I am not a compulsive drinker. I don’t drink all the time. I really don’t even drink that often. My problem is that when I do drink, I don’t stop. It’s as if there is a problem with the part of my brain that says, STOP. Other people have that and I am envious of it. Over the past couple of years I have tried to moderate it and I have tried to find a formula. 1 drink followed by 1 drink of water, that sort of thing, and the limited success that I have had with that made me think that there was a way that I could make it work, but the truth of the matter is that is doesn’t work. So now I’m at the point where I really do have to man up and deal with the reality of what it means to be me and to have a brain that works this way. I have to accept that I’m not other people and the rules that other people live by don’t necessarily work for me.

So there it is.

I do not drink anymore.

That’s all the important stuff, so you can stop reading there if you want to. But I need to work some stuff out for myself and I think that I’m going to do that here because sometimes the keyboard helps me to clarify my thinking.

My history with drinking is probably a little different than yours. I used to be part of a little group where drinking was a social activity in and of itself. And that’s what the evenings and weekends were for. Drinking wasn’t an ancillary activity, but the activity itself. I know that we all drink a lot in our early twenties, but I realize now that I was involved in what now gets called binge-drinking, it was A LOT of drinking happening a lot and so I never really had to stop and assess my situation. I knew that I drank more and faster than a lot of people, but I didn’t realize that it was a problem because I was basically surrounded by it. And please understand that I’m not making any excuses or blaming anyone but myself, but I’m just taking a walk through my history.

When I moved to San Diego there was less drinking initially, but it increased as a little transplanted social group began to form. All in all, I was starting to grow up in other aspects of my life, I was drinking less, but when I did drink it was still too much.

When I moved to LA the drinking all but stopped. Sometimes I would walk down Sunset Blvd. and pop into a bar I had never been to, but I limited myself to two drinks because I knew that I couldn’t afford to get drunk and stranded.

Once I moved to Newhall I decided not to have any hard liquor in my little apartment, but wine was okay. A glass of read wine has always been one of my favorite things. So I drank wine, but I spent most of my time in Newhall alone and drinking is a social activity in my head and so there wasn’t much of a problem.

But now I’m in Stevenson Ranch and as Violet and I have made friends and developed a little social group, there have been more opportunities to drink and I have not handled them well. And I have been mortified by how poorly I have done. The thing is that I can drink a lot and be fine, I can drink A LOT and seem fine, but there is a point – and I inevitably get there – where that one last drink puts me over and I am gone. Just gone. And the next thing I know I wake up with a headache and I learn that there were hours that I have no recollection of.

And that is bad.

And I am being completely honest here; I am no longer willing to tolerate that about myself. So I am giving up drinking completely and entirely.

I am sorry that anyone has had to tolerate me the way that I have been. I am sorry that it has taken me so long to finally get to this point. I’m sorry that people have been affected by my problem. I am sorry that Violet has had to deal with it.

So there it is.

I do not drink anymore.

I want to be able to live the rest of my life without causing these kinds of problems, for myself and for other people.

So this doesn’t mean that I can’t be around it. I can be in a bar and I can be around people drinking. It is not my will power that is at issue. I can be in a bar and not drink. I have the ability and the resiliency to not have the first drink. It’s not the first drink that does me in, it’s the eighth or ninth drink that does it, but the only way to stay clear of the eighth and ninth drinks is to not have the first. And I am now finally and entirely comfortable with that.

And if you’re someone I know this does not have to be one of those things that we awkwardly avoid talking about. This doesn’t have to be some dark and secret thing. I am going to be as open and honest about this as anyone ever has been. I am going to be a model of not-drinking. I am going to rock sobriety as hard as I rock male-pattern baldness, which is to say, quite a bit. I am not going to be embarrassed by this. I have a problem and I am dealing with it. You wouldn’t be ashamed if you had diabetes and so I am not going to be ashamed of this, I am going to deal with it and go on about my life. I hope that you will support me in this new endeavor, or at least, not talk too badly about me behind my back.

And all this is not to say that I am going to start proselytizing about temperance and sobriety or anything. For you the drinking is fine and you should have as much as you want, and I will be right there with you, cranberry juice in hand.

So this is going to be a new and interesting part of my life. And, hopefully, a better one.

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The keys are mightier than the sword.

Apparently you can write a novel on your cell phone! And it will be read by Japanese teenage girls! On their cell phones!

Oh the circle of life.

Read it up! Like you’re a Japanese school girl!
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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Political Assessment: Democrats are stalled, not inert.

The View from My Soapbox

By King Heifer*


OK, I can't post this kind of stuff on (my) blogs, so I'm subjecting you to it. Please feel free to hit the (escape) key with impunity.

As you might imagine, I've been noodling the current political situation. How in the world do Democrats -- who hold the White House, a big majority in the House, until very recently 60 seats in the Senate and even now a huge majority of 59 in the Senate -- find themselves in a spot where they have been unable to do big things and somehow have made themselves look like they're unable to accomplish anything? What do they do now?

I think that this situation has to do with the unique dynamics of health care and the Obama administration learning the lessons of the last war too well. Specifically, when Bill Clinton tried to do health care in 1993-1994, his administration went with a very top-down approach, with Hillary's commission cooking up a hideous complicated proposal in private, releasing it and then basically saying, "Adopt this now." In his 1994 State of the Union speech, Bill Clinton said, "Send me a bill that covers every single American or I'll veto it." Predictably, the Clinton proposal became a massive target, with the health insurance industry running those Harry & Louise commercials about “There’s got to be a better way” without actually proposing anything. Having been so blunt about what he wanted, Clinton left himself with not a lot of room to negotiate and the whole things cratered.

Obama – and most particularly, Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of the Clinton White House – clearly chose to go with exactly the opposite approach to health care. Specifically, Obama just laid out a few key things that he wanted to be achieved and asked Congress to produce a bill that accomplished them. The problem with this approach has turned out to be that it left all the details to be resolved in Congress, which engaged in its usual sausage-making to produce a huge, messy House bill and a huge, messy Senate bill. Nonetheless, this approach would have worked if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was halfway competent and had managed to exercise any control over his members. He couldn’t, so instead we got the spectacle of Ben Nelson holding out for weeks for a special deal for Nebraska , with both looked awful and ran out the clock when Ted Kennedy died. So now we have Scott Brown, Senator from Massachusetts , the pro-choice Republican who isn’t going to exist in four years because he’s way too liberal for the Republicans generally and is unlikely to win re-election in 2014, but nonetheless is the fly in the ointment right now.

So where does Obama go from here? I think that it’s actually pretty simple and that Obama is already doing what he needs to do. One huge problem with the anti-Clinton approach that Obama took to health care is that he made him passive. Well, he seems to have clearly learned that lesson and has gotten a lot more active. He’s pushing good Democratic proposals like taxing the banks to get back the remaining TARP money and jobs creation. If I were him, I’d keep hammering away on that stuff for a while, take some time to reconcile the House and Senate health care bills, get the reconciled bill through the House, bring it to the Senate for the final, final vote and then dare the Republicans to filibuster. The whole thing with the filibuster threat is pretty comical to me. Has anyone actually seen a filibuster? It’s people talking endlessly with no point whatsoever. They eventually read the phone book. The Republicans don't really want to filibuster -- they just want the roadblock. Somehow, the Senate Democrats have allowed themselves to be cowed by this ridiculous threat.

If the Democrats push the Republicans to actually filibuster, then they can make the Republicans vote over and over again in favor of doing nothing but talking. Let that go on for a couple of weeks – with the Senate Republicans having to keep talking around the clock and having to hold their caucus 100% together in favor of doing nothing – and things would change. Obama and the Democrats would beat the Republicans unmercifully in public about being the party in favor of doing nothing to help the public. Obama could be out at rallies in communities with high unemployment every single day, saying “Look, all they want to do is talk and not do anything for you.” Eventually, some Republican would say something really stupid (a Democrat would, too, given enough time). Finally, one of the halfway-sane Senate Republicans – specifically either Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins from Maine – or one of the Senate Republicans who is up for re-election in 2010 would cave and take some fig-leaf deal on the ground that “now is the time to move on to things that will help the public.”

The strategy here would be to do now basically what Clinton did with the 1995 government shut-down – namely set up a confrontation of your making. Hopefully, it would work out basically the same way, with the party in favor of doing nothing taking a beating.

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This political commentary is provided by King Heifer, a frequent (nom de plume-d) contributor to this blog. King has a good name to protect but because of that, he knows of what he speaks. We are happy to let him to do his ranting here, safe in the knowledge that no one reads this blog anyway. - ed.
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