Cowboy Confessional

Wednesday presents an over-the-top moment in presidential pistillate propaganda.

As noted before, the GOP is bringing a couple of self-made Silicon Valley sisters to add feminine fervency to the Republican convention. By design, having the female face of the Elephant Party presented by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina — a couple of double tough gals — is a boon to their acceptance by the more civil half of our species. Add McCain’s wife Cindy — another woman who seeming flosses with barbed wire — and you have one ornery ovary fest.

And now Sarah Palin is on the same dais and night.

Think about this for a moment: Cindy McCain is the weakest woman taking to the microphone on Wednesday. The estrogen overload builds as Whitman (the founder of eBay) and Fiorina (former head of global technology giant Hewlett-Packard) address the nation.

Then Palin hits the stage.

There are few accidents in convention politics, and the GOP’s extreme showing of feminine force is a case study. Republicans may earn a few votes from undecided women, though they may scare the Sam Hell out of weaker male members (a better trade as far as I am concerned).

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My Republican and conservative friends are now actively promoting Bob Barr, which is odd because yesterday they maintained Barr was Satan’s older brother.

Today McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. A brief investigation into Palin indicates that she is what Republican’s refer to as a “solid conservative”, something cannot say about McCain. This distain for McCain within his own party has been somewhat problematic as 8% of polled Republican’s threatened to wait until 2012 to vote again.

The only man who has it worse if Obama, for whom 12% of Democrats considered equal inaction.

Palin does not by herself create a threat to the bicorporal Obama/Biden. There are plenty of policy difference whereby party loyalists and inclined independents would swim toward one candidate or the other regardless of the Palin factor. She may not even shift many of the authentically undecided’s or even a single Hillary harlot.

But she does keep that disgruntled 8% from defecting the McCain camp while Joe Biden does nothing to secure disaffected Democrats.

The missing monkey in the barrel are the Blue Democrats — blue collar and blue dog. They were not up on Obama and never will be. They may not switch to McCain, instead opting to wait four years for a better option. But the net effect is that Obama loses 12% of his party base by picking Biden and McCain earns back his 8%. Given that the aggregate polls currently call a dead-even race, that 8% makes it a win for McCain.

So where does Bob Barr come in? My Republican friends are indeed promoting Barr now … to their blue Democrat friends. As a safety measure they want Democrats to have an option and not wander back to the party plantation. Small government Libertarian sensibilities are attractive to Blue Dogs who can overlook the Libs social liberalism.

So you Elephants.. start emailing your disaffected Democrat friends and family and suggest they swing to Barr/Root this election cycle.

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The web is steaming today with collaborative investigations into an Obama “mentor”. The news is disturbing enough to the point that I had to update the Reasons to Vote Against Obama page.

Of course I need to add the Joe Biden nugget to that page as well. Obama and Joe — OJ. Obama my man, you are keeping me too busy.

Furor is flying over one Frank Marshall Davis. In his autobiography Obama described Davis as an important influence and someone who gave Obama advice. The important piece of this report is that Obama himself describes Davis as influential. If it were a mere matter of acquaintance I’d dismiss the entire eruption as political sniping.

Frank Marshall Davis is a book too open. As a hack reporter and poet, he said a lot about himself in writing. Davis joined the Communist Party USA while waltzing the then dangerous liaisons between union organizers and unrepentant socialists. Neither camp is fond of freedom and Davis’ writing exposed some of the same.

More troubling though was a passage in an autobiographical sexcapade titled Sex Rebel: Black (under the pseudonym Bob Greene). Living in San Francisco I am used to every imaginable (and a few unimaginable) kink and perversion, and frankly I don’t care. What a man, a woman and a consenting lama do in the privacy of their dungeon is their business and not mine. So most of Sex Rebel is voyeuristic drivel.

Except the child rape.

Davis admits that he and his wife had sex with a thirteen year old girl many, many times. Maybe more often than Larry Craig tap danced. To quote Davis about the child named Anne:

I didn’t want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life.

Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was. She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes….I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual.

Even here in San Francisco we frown on raping kids.

What does this say about Obama? I won’t join the salivating throngs who find instant guilt by association. Obama may have never known of Davis’ sexual battery. After all Davis wrote a lot of things and it is doubtful that Obama read even a small portion of it.

But Obama didn’t vet Davis before claiming him to be a mentor. If Wikipedia knew of the vile passage within Sex Rebel, Obama should have. Basic research is a requirement for elementary school book reports much less geopolitical strategy. Joe Biden’s statement that Obama was not ready to hold the presidency is eerily accurate.

Sex aside, Obama did know about Davis’ communist affiliations. Davis was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and such scrutiny cannot be unnoticed. This inquiry occurred more than a decade before Obama’s birth leaving few excuses for not understanding “Frank’s” influence.

Obama was mentored by a child raping communist, has a wife who not proud of her own country, and he communes with known terrorists who sought the violent overthrow of the American government. These issues alone disqualify Obama from taking control of the free world.

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Hillary and Obama’s bad day is coming at the GOP convention, and it has nothing to do with John McCain.

Down the road in Silicon Valley (yes, this ex-cowboy lives just north of the Land of the Geeks) the libertarian mindset is in full swing. The tech industry is largely unregulated and thus thrives while other sectors of the economy falter. Aside from making a bunch of bucks, the swarm of valley technoids rightly believe they are changing the world. After all, no oppressed people can remain that way forever once they have an unfiltered Internet connection.

More than a few interesting folks have sprouted from silicon hyperactivity. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is slightly more maniacal and frightening than Osama bin Laden, though somewhat less lethal (the old joke in The Valley is that the difference between Larry and God is that God doesn’t believe he’s Larry). And the missed Scott McNealy was a fountain of entertaining flamboyance and acerbic verbal mayhem.

Little noticed however have been the women in technology. Long assumed to be the bastion of maleness, Techland has seen a number of fierce, often brilliant, and occasionally cute female executives who have advanced or retarded the state of mankind (depending largely on what you think about computer technology in general).

Two of the more (in)famous are Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Carly headed global technology behemoth Hewlett-Packard. Though decried by HP employees who felt the Ice Queen had corrupted HP’s internal culture, some hail her as the company’s savior for realigning their core computer works and taking the lead in the industry.

Whitman founded eBay. Enough said.

Today we learn that both women will address the Republican convention. Now I disdain gender and race politics. A person’s pluming or melanin content should hold no sway in choosing a candidate. In this instance though, I suspect more than a handful of female voters will think kindly of the GOP due to the women themselves.

Carly and Meg are strong women. Steel-eyed and straight spoken, they personify what feminist used to cite as the “self-made woman”, a character to be admired or worshiped depending on how seriously you take yourself. They project to women everywhere that singular character that scares most men — independence. They are an emblem of what relying on yourself and your own talents can achieve. It is the antithesis of the Democrat/Obama mantra of dependence on a nanny called “the state”.

Will disenfranchised Hillary supports suddenly bolt for McCain? No. Undecided women however will see in the GOP support for individual success. Strong women (cowgirls count twice) will get the message very clearly.

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I have been doing an obnoxious amount or recording lately, and songs dealing mainly with bad love. This includes a fresh version of One Heartbreak Away From the Grave.

An interesting process occurs during recoding blues tunes. Before hitting the studio, your head hears a very complex arrangement with all manner of screaming guitars, honky tonk keyboards and maybe even background singers.

If you are lucky you will whittle down that list until a more bare and raw song emerges.

The band version of One Heartbreak is a case study. I had a lot planned for this tune. But as I punched mute buttons to hear underlying instruments, the more raw and basic the song sounded and the more blues-worthy it became. I dropped a lot of tracks out of the final mix.

The end result included a basic drum track (little more than rim shots to keep the beat), an acoustic guitar, and electric that minds its own business most of the time and does not compete with the vocals, and the vocals.

There’s no harm in over-producing a song providing you take the time to take items out to see if less complicated is better.

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