This is my 801st post on this site since Sept. ’05.
So much wasted time and words. Oh, my Lord, what was I thinking?
Somebody notify Webmaster Ultimate that I’m due a session in Stillwater. Maybe a weekend soon?
Anyway, Tuesday is patch download day for us Vista hostages and it must be a helluva patch this week. My Hotmail server has been down for a Friedman Unit or so I’m guessing. It feels like that long a time in Internet world, which is kind of like dog years or something.
I’ve started a project in which I’m writing family stories for my daughter and grand-daughter. I hope to get around to sending her the first installment any day. Anyway, she asked specifically for stories about my father, for example, and I’m trying to write about my father’s handwriting. It was immaculate. Few people saw my father’s handwriting without remarking on its clarity and beauty. My mother says my father was a “switched” lefty and the experience made him constantly practice. In all events, every scrap of paper in the house was filled with my father practicing “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0″ and the alphabet in both capital and lower case lettering, sometimes printed and sometimes in his lucid cursive. While this is interesting for me, it’s hard to put into a story because my perspective had nothing of the drama of how difficult it may be to change from left to right handed. Stories without some kind of conflict (and resolution) aren’t really stories. At this point, my effort is merely a fragment. It’s making me restless and puckish.
I’m not so sure how I feel about giving U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion, but I favor the idea of returning hundreds of thousands of acres from cane growing back into Everglades. I would even favor giving federal funding assistance to the State of Florida, Republican as it may be, in order to accomplish this. We tell Brazil to protect the Amazon and I think it’s time we pick up part of our burden of trying to restore ecosystems. However, instead of just paying this monopolist labor abuser and polluter, I think I would put the land through condemnation. Maybe even force them to clean up some of their mess rather than just pass it along to us after they’ve pulled gazillions of dollars out of the land.
I don’t envy Obama’s speechwriter nor the candidate the task of the nominee’s Denver convention speech on Prime Time Television. The very nature of the speech is such that it will be difficult to the extreme for the speech to match the inspiration and admiration of some of his other speeches, not least of which is the 2004 convention keynote address. It is the speech in which the nominee is expected to be programmatic and tick off a list of priorities and legislative goals, but this does not make for soaring rhetoric. A failure to lay out his program in favor of “inspiration” would be greeted with howls that he’s an “empty suit” and “inexperienced” and would mark the speech as a failure. If he tries to do both, it’s an uneasy marriage and runs the risk of satisfying neither the wonk or the fanboys/fangirls (the Kool-Aid drinkers). In all events, he’s sure to compare favorably to the still uneasy speechifying (I can’t make myself use the word “rhetoric” for this speaker) of Sen. McCain at his Minnesota convention a short time later.
Speaking of the convention speeches, not an awful lot that’s happened or is going to happen between now and the end of the GOP convention will be as important to the November outcome as what follows the conventions, the vice presidential choices excepted. A couple of reputable polls have lately shown Obama leading McCain by double digits. Most other polling indicates a race within the margin of error. My best guess is that Obama leads, but McCain is certainly capable of changing that to his advantage. Looking at the state by state polls and thinking about the Electoral College, it appears that Obama is comfortably ahead in states with 238 EVs and McCain leading in states with 190EVs with 137EVs in tossup status. It takes 271 EVs to win. In the tossups, McCain holds the better hand at this point, but Obama only needs to keep his 238 and grab off as few as 2 of the 11 tossup states.
Liberals like me are upset with Obama for dropping out of public financing, but I don’t think the GOP voter particular cares because that was never a big Republican issue. I just wish he’d used McCain’s alleged violation of FEC rules during the primary as his basis for the decision.
Far more repugnant to me is that Obama has apparently decided to vote for the Telecom Immunity bill and to continue with a bare veil of supposedly stronger civil liberties protections that is now passed by the House and will soon be before the Senate. Sen. Feingold’s condenmation of the Blue Dog Dems that are voting with the Repugs states my sense of the isse very well except that my own outrage would likely be a good bit more profane and unusable on broadcast television. I’ll show him. He won’t get my $25 this month. That’ll show him. In the end, be careful what you ask for. I wanted him to win the primary and still think he’s the better choice of two closely matched breakthrough candidates. I’m sure as hell not going to switch to Sen. McCain’s Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran foreign policy and lame economics matched with no health care on the domestic side. I realize that I am in a very small minority of the political left wonkish clan and that most people find the topic too technical, but I’m steamed even if no one else cares.
I can’t believe that the McCain campaign has chosen wisely about a couple of things recently. The AZ Sen. now favors a gasoline tax holiday, drilling in the Gulf and off California, and now wants to award a $300 million prize for a next generation car battery. It just clanks for me. It seems more like gimmick than the authenticity, experience and mature judgment image his campaign is based on. All three ideas seem lame, unlikely to do any actual good, and just a little desperate. I’m just thinking out loud, but doesn’t it seem a little contradictory to talk about your coolness under fire as the mature and experienced leader of men and still claim to be a “maverick” at age 71. I mean, don’t you sort of expect a guy of more than three score and ten to settle down and stop being a stubborn and impulsive child? Is he going to throw a fit in the grocery store checkout lane if he can’t have his shiney new battery? Do we really want a “maverick” with a suspect temper with his palsied hand on “the button”? Don’t mess with the U.S., ’cause our president’s a maverick, ya hear? His campaign sure has that cowboy in the White House ridin’ him politically, apparently taming McCain’s opposition to tax cuts and torture.
Enough blathering.
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