Sinatra entertains me

My cat is doing the most amazing thing.

Tonight was Paseo dinner and movie night.

The Debster has a little ritual she goes through every week of moving the couch so that Sinatra can retreive his rattling plastic toy balls.

We throw the ball and he plays fetch during the movie.

I disapprove, but since I do it myself, I can’t complain.

Everyone’s gone now and the cat is still enthralled with his toy.

I’m pouring over political polling blah blah blogblah and the cat is playing with the toy so nearby and so enthusiastically that I have to look.

He’s taking the ball in his mouth, jumping into the air, tossing the ball with his head and swatting the ball midair with his right paw.

He’s done it three times now.

Wow.

Very entertaining.

That is all.

Bored at work

I am bored at work today.

I’ve been a “good boy” for several weeks in a row and worked like it was the way I support myself, but today I’m procrastinating something fierce.

It’s too pretty out to be inside when the top is down on my Mid-Life-Chrysler.

Especially since I know the weather is going south again tomorrow and today should be enjoyed while we can.

Besides, nothing is pressing.  That’s a function of having been a good boy earlier, of course, and that way of thinking, as they say, that way madness lies.  If I don’t pay attention to the Crowe & D Summary Judgment Motion on my desk now, I’ll be paying the price later.

I hate it that procrastination and masturbation end up being the same thing: just screwing yourself.

But there’s this patch of sun that I know my cat is enjoying…

And I just ate lunch and would love love love to lie down for a nap …

Sinatra would come in yelping about “where are you?” and I’d answer and he’d jump up on the bed and sniff my hands and ears and, after flirting with the idea of attacking my toes, he’d curl up alongside my thigh …

And, then I’d sleep through the pretty day instead of enjoying it.

So, I guess there’s nothing for it other than to complain to the cyberspace and push around some paper.

But I sure am having a hard time giving a good damn about that legal research I’m supposed to be doing.

I don't care if you don't care

OK.  This is about me me me me.

It’s for MY benefit.

I just had to put in the blog that I’ve passed a milestone in my legal career this past weekend.

I actually, really and no kidding did some work that I brought home.

Yep.

For once, I not only brought work home, I also actually did the work. 

Even though it was boring.

Only an alcoholic who’s clinically depressed could be proud of doing what everyone is supposed to do anyway, but there you have it.

I’m giving myself kudos for putting together invoices to bill clients so i can make a real living.

Just like grownups and everything.

I don’t care if you don’t care, it’s a big deal to me for me.

So there.

blogblah!!!

Staying in on Friday night

No “Girly Show” for me last night.  I stayed at home.

Didn’t even go to dinner with my Paseo crew.  Actually, I was headed home about 5:30 p.m. and stumbled into an AA meeting.

I’ve been going to night-time AA “speaker” meetings lately to accommodate a new sponsee and I thought a regular meeting by myself would do me good.  It did.

Unbeknownst to me, this was the third Friday of the month and that’s when the Western Club has a pot luck dinner and social hour.  So, just by inertia, I ended up having dinner at the AA meeting.

It was very much like the Wednesday night Baptist church prayer meeting dinners I used to be dragged to by my sainted mother back when I was a kid.  Long tables, plain food, women bustling around getting everything just perfect and guys circling around trying to get a taste of this and a flirt with HER.

About 8 p.m., I came home to the cat.

My house can get very quiet when it’s just the cat and me.

Sinatra showed off, played, thundered up and down the hallway and climbed over all the couches and chairs.

However, eventually, he calmed down and climbed up in my lap for a thorough petting, nose to tail. 

A warm cat on your lap, purring loudly, is a soothing thing.

I tried watching some television, but I seem to have lost the knack of it.  It just didn’t engage my attention.

God forbid that I do any of the chores around the house that need attention: laundry, dishes, cleaning the toilets.  On Friday night?  Ugggghhhh!

I thought about getting up and putting on my boots and hitting GSpot about 10 p.m. to hear the band.

I fixed a cup of hot chocolate instead.

By the time I’d re-checked the political webpages and read some international news and sipped the cup of hot milk and chocolate down to the black dregs, it was definitely bedtime.

At home in bed before midnight on Friday night, accompanied only by a mongrel feline.

My dashing playboy bachelor image will just have to take the hit.

wishing and hoping …

Most of you know that I’m an old-style lefty from the 60s and that I’m a yellow dog Democrat.  I vote the rooster, in the archaic early 20th Century way of saying it in Oklahoma (the rooster is the official insignia of the Oklahoma Democratic Party and was used when literacy wasn’t what it is today and all we could do was read icons, kinda like on the computer screens where people type “u” when they mean “you” … er …).

And I WANT the Dems to prevail on Election Day.

Charlie Cook, a respected bipartisan political polls reader expert type commentator guy, is talking in his latest (Oct. 17) column about a turnaround of 30-40 House seats from GOP to Dem and a 50-50 split or 51-49 for the Dems in the Senate.

Maybe.

I’d like for that to be true.

I want that to be true.

I think it would be good for the country if that were true.

I just don’t think it’s going to come out that way.

I look at the poll numbers available to me and the environment of the polls (how did those districts vote in the presidential election and/or last midterm elections) and who took the polls and how (person to person or by phone or by robo-call) and I come up with much more conservative numbers.

Yeah, I can see how it’s possible that Charlie Cook could be right. 

I just have more caution about interpreting what’s going on.

I still think the GOP will retain the Senate.  A 50-50 split would surprise me and set up what I think would be an interesting kabuki play about partisanship and the “go fuck yourself” vice president.  I don’t see it.  The Dems will pick up seats, to be sure, but they will not, in my opinion, sweep. 

I still think the Dems will take the House.  I think the Dems are going to pick up about 20-22 seats.  Not 30-50.  I think when you add up all the votes for Democratic House candidates and all the votes for GOP candidates, the Dems will have 55-57% of the votes.  In another election, like the one in ’94 when the GOP swept away many years of Democratic Party rule, that would mean many more seats.  This year, the GOP just got through redrawing and redistricting in several states.  They locked in 5-7 additional seats in Texas alone.  It was unfair and despite Supreme Court rulings otherwise, I think unconstitutional.  Whether that is true or not, it was certainly important and this year’s election shows why.

In my opinion, the projection of Cook and others like him do not adequately take into account the push back of $100 million in GOP attack ads over the next three weeks.

That’s because the effects of those ads are not yet showing up in polls.

If you just look at the polls that are out there and try to use an averaging out to take out the bias of Dem polls and GOP polls and good polls and bad polls, you come up with Charlie Cook’s conclusion.  The trend lines all go that direction.  The “wrong track-right track” polls and generic party preference polls also go that direction.  That’s good evidence for a persuasive case, and more than enough good evidence for a news column or a brief TV commentary.

From the perspective of someone who’s been inside a couple of campaigns, those seem like blunt instruments compared to the sharp pencils Karl Rove is using.  I think he’s looking at those specific ad buys in specific markets and some under the radar closely targeted “smart bomb” mailers and phone bank calls and sees a chance to hold the Dems to no more than 15-17 seats and maybe save both the House and the Senate.

I also think there are some Republican incumbents who have distanced themselves from the White House who will regret the hell out of that decision next January because Rove and Bush will still have lots of power to reward and punish.

To my fellow left wing Democrats:  just remember that we won both in 2000 and 2004 and that the GOP stole the elections.  Do you think they’ve reformed?

 

Pissed off

I think we vote for people who are pissed off.

I think we admire that passion and don’t give a shit what it’s being passionate about.

I mean, us Americans, not you few elite that read this.

Democrats routed the Republicans in 1974 because they were pissed off.  Reagan routed the Democrats because fiscal conservatives finally got pissed off and Newt Gingrich was the most pissed off of all. 

I think that’s what Republicans don’t get this time.

We’re pissed about $3/gal gas and we’re pissed because we expect a Congressperson to know that chasing a teenager sexually is just indecent and outrageous, no matter what laws are involved.  We’re pissed that the poor don’t pay tax and now the rich don’t pay tax and i pay a shot in the jaw and then the state grabs theirs and then the school district and the banks get all the rest in interest because I have to borrow against my equity in my house to get braces for the youngest and put the oldest in college.  And where the hell are my health and retirement benefits?  The Dow is up to 12,000 and I’m up to my chin.  Something’s wrong and I’m pissed.  And if my situation is bad and they are so damn smart, why isn’t the budget balanced?  We know it can be done.  Clinton did it with a GOP Congress and Bush can’t?  Bullshit.  I’m pissed. 

We’re pissed about Iraq.  We were thinking something more along the lines of a class act that made us look good and what we got was excrement thrown in our faces while we slog through an endless quagmire.  Not what we had in mind at all.

I’m personally pissed about Katrina and my son’s eviction as a refugee from this government’s incompetence.

We’re pissed that you, Mr. President, keep asking for more power to fight terrorists and you don’t seem to know what to do with the power you already have.  Neither does your Secretary of Defense.  We’re spending billions in no bid contracts in Iraq and nobody asks but one question:  what’s my end?  Duke Cunningham goes to jail, but he’s not even a very big crook at a mere $2.4 million in bribes (a record, so they say). 

I think we’re pissed because they’re so fucking smug.

What would Jesus Do?  He’d throw the bums out of the Temple, and he’d use a thong of leather to whip their ass out the door.

 

My wise grandmother

My grandmother, Elsie, who lived with us when we were growing up, was a wise woman.

I loved her with all my heart and still do.

Anyway, one of the wise things she told is that stupid people talk about people, mediocre people talk about things and smart people talk about ideas.

Tonight, reading the blogs of my friends and family, I am surrounded by a lot of smart people.

I’m happy for blogging.

It keeps me up with what folks are thinking in a way that casual conversation rarely goes these days.

Despite the alienation of the computer and the internet, I feel closer to my sister in South Carolina because I get to read her blog.  I really haven’t known MCARP very long or well, but I feel very close to him, knowing what he thinks and goes through.  It’s an intimacy really only possible through his blog.  I would never get to see John X enough to find out the details of his mind turds, but I’m jolly glad I do via his blog.  Erika West, the same.

Haven’t been able to read my daughter’s blog lately because she has it set to private, friends only and I’m off MySpace.  I’m a recovering spacer.

In fact, I wish more of my friends blogged.  I know people all over the state and most areas of the country and if they would all blog and read my blog, we’d all be in better touch.

Of course, I’d be so busy reading blogs, I’d starve.  Maybe I’d better think this through a little.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed y’all’s blogging.  Keep it up.  Good Job.  Pat on the Back official.

 

It's the TIMING, stupid …

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — FBI agents raided the homes of a Pennsylvania congressman’s daughter and her business partner Monday as part of an investigation into whether Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., helped them secure lucrative lobbying contracts.

Federal investigators targeted four locations near Philadelphia, including the home of Karen Weldon, and two properties in Jacksonville, FBI spokesman Debbie Weierman said.

Weierman declined to elaborate. But another federal law enforcement official said the probe focused on whether the congressman used improper influence to steer business to his daughter and her partner, Charles Sexton.

The official, who has been briefed on aspects of the investigation, was not authorized to comment publicly on the inquiry. The congressman’s properties were not among the locations searched, the official said.

At a campaign stop near Philadelphia where Weldon is in a tight re-election race against Democrat Joe Sestak, the congressman denied any wrongdoing and questioned the timing of the investigation.

“What I find ironic, if there is an investigation, is that no one would tell me until three weeks before the election. This incident was 2½ years ago,” he told the Associated Press. “I’ve never helped my daughter get anything. My kids are qualified on their own.”

In 2004, a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called on the Justice Department to examine whether Weldon violated federal law by assisting companies that hired his daughter as a lobbyist.

Laocoon’s note:  Yeah, everything is timing and everything is political at this time, Rep. Weldon.  The problem is that it’s hard to imagine some FBI supervisor timing this out because it’s so well known how much Bush’s Bureau loves to make official moves to favor some Democrat against a senior GOP House committee chairman.  Those FBI agents and supervisors, wacky guys that they are, can’t wait to give a hand to a looney, left-wing … er, ah … turns out the Democrat, Joe Sestak, is a retired Admiral.  Well, you get my drift, anyway.