So the national organization of women - they support women’s rights. It seems like it would be one of their fondest wishes to get a woman elected to vice-president for crying out loud! but they seem to think that women’s causes/issues will be better served by having Obama in the white house.
Sphere: Related ContentI went to my state’s Democratic primaries yesterday. Normally the elementary school at which I vote puts out a multitude of snacks and treats for sale. Yes, its another fundraiser. In any case, its almost a party atmosphere because the people who are there are all happy about being there. The senior citizens who check people in always seem to enjoy their work and greet you with a smile and warmly welcome the citizens doing their duty.
Man, not yesterday. Yesterday the parking lot was mostly empty - so empty I wondered if I had gotten the date wrong! I walked in and there were no happy mothers selling raffle tickets or cookies on a stick. There was a half-empty box of store-bought rice krispie treats and a couple of left over biscotti strewn about like so much debris. There was a sign indicating they were $0.50 each.
I walked in to the gymnasium and the poll workers were surly and grouchy. And then I saw that the ballot was only half full of names. Out of maybe six races five of them had only one name! I found out tonight that in the sixth race the incumbent trounced the challenger 70% to 30%. At ten o’clock I wasn’t surprised when the nightly news railed about low voter turnout (10% of registered voters).
I’m sure that more people will show up in November, but this primary was just ridiculous.
Sphere: Related ContentThe good news is that I got a teeny tiny promotion from “SAP System Administrator” to “SAP Team Lead - System Administrator”!
There is also a teeny tiny raise to go with it, which is nice. I don’t know yet if there’s any additional responsibilities. I assume there would be. Nothing is free in this world especially extra money. The company would probably not give me extra money without expecting something extra in return.
So, yay me.
Sphere: Related ContentMy kids’ elementary school was having a fundraiser at the town’s street fair yesterday. They call it the Victorian Fair - but I think its a dumb name. My town has a lot
of Victorian houses, but the fair has nothing to do with that. Its an effort by the local chamber of commerce to bring people out and spend some money. They close Main St. downtown and let shop owners and outside vendors set up tents and people walk around looking at the shop’s wares. Local civic organizations and politicians come out to sign up new members and supporters.
And our local school does a fundraiser. Its a pie-throw. They get local celebrities, like the mayor and alderman to stick their faces in a hole in a tarp and people pay $1 to throw a paper plate of cool whip at them. You know, when I explain it like that it doesn’t sound like fun or make much sense. I’m not a local celeb but they needed people to fill in the 30 minutes between the “big” draw names. And I cajoled people in to throwing cool whip at me.
It wasn’t really that bad. Whipped cream would have been better. The cool whip tended to get EVERYWHERE - including right up my nose. You’ve probably never spent much time with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil smeared in your nasal passages, but it kept making me sick to my stomach. Nonetheless, I took one for the team and helped the school raise some money.
I think it was a success.
I’m also getting ready to take Gabriel on a camping event with the boy scouts at the end of September. He’s eager to earn his cub scouting “arrow of light” but he doesn’t seem particularly interested in moving on to boy scouts. That’s a pity, I think it would be good for him and that he would like it.
Chloe tried out for the All City children’s chorus. She doesn’t think she made it. We’ll see how it turns out. She’s also playing the flute this year and doing brownies, and taking two dance classes and helping with Grace’s.
Ben is taking an art class and has a sort of “intro to programming” after school thing he’s doing. Grace has a dance class and is moving up to Brownies from “Daisies” this year. And I think we’re going to take Gabe and Buckaroo (the dog) to obedience classes - aimed mostly at the dog. I would still like to see Gabriel find something else to do with his time.
Ok, I think that’s it for now.
Sphere: Related ContentI downloaded and installed the newest iTunes version and was curious about this “Genius” playlist builder. Apparently it analyzes your library and each track must be assigned a variety of characteristics that determine what kind of music it is. I think Pandora.com does something similar. Anyway, I clicked on “Tom Sawyer” from Rush and told it to build a playlist from my music based on Tom Sawyer.
It came up with a damn fine playlist!
Sphere: Related ContentName Artist
Tom Sawyer Rush
Sweet Emotion Aerosmith
Radar Love Golden Earring
Fortunate Son Creedence Clearwater Revival
Somebody to Love Jefferson Airplane
More Human Than Human White Zombie
Centerfield John Fogerty
Synchronicity 2 The Police
Tribute Tenacious D
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida Iron Butterfly
What’s My Age Again? Blink 182
YYZ Rush
Behind Blue Eyes The Who
I’m Too Sexy Right Said Fred
Dude (Looks Like a Lady) Aerosmith
Black Dog Led Zeppelin
Hush Deep Purple
London Calling The Clash
Mony Mony Billy Idol
Down On the Corner Creedence Clearwater Revival
Bad To The Bone George Thorogood & The Destroyers
Otherside Red Hot Chili Peppers
Money Pink Floyd
Southern Cross Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Op-Ed Columnist - Blizzard of Lies - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
Sphere: Related Contentsadly, my grandmother passed away over the weekend. She was very old and was already in hospice care - we all knew it was coming. We were ready and, in truth, she was ready too.
So tomorrow morning I am taking my daughters, Chloe and Grace to Detroit for the viewing and (on Wednesday) the funeral service. I couldn’t bring everyone but I think this small subset will be nice. They’re really excited about it.
I don’t think I’ve seen these relatives since… maybe 1991 when my cousin, Mike got married. A couple of years later my cousin Laurie came to my own wedding. But other than that its a branch of the family with whom I don’t keep close contact. So it will be good for that too.
Ok, off to bed. I’ll post pictures when I get back.
Sphere: Related ContentPutin saves TV crew from Siberian tiger | Oddly Enough | Reuters
It turns that Putin can rule Russia, negotiate trade and nuclear issues, benevolently invade Georgia and still have time to rescue a camera crew from a charging tiger.
I have been in technical training all week and its making my head hurt. Normally I work with a database product called Oracle and for years I have been able to perform the basic care and feeding of it. Backups, shut-downs, dropping tablespaces and some modest memory tuning. But this whole class I am taking is all about tuning the system to improve performance.
Bottomline is that its a good thing I am not in school again. i don’t know if its the school/education setting, but every day when I get out of the class room I am aggravated and angry and really pissed off. I can’t nail down a particular reason or anything. its not like anyone has done anything to me. No disaster has happened. I’m just mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!
ok.
Maybe I’ll take it for a little while longer. Tonight. But that’s it. That’s all. Tomorrow, its ON, baby!
After I got home I had a couple of more hours of work to do. Ugh. Long day.
To top everything off I had to drop my car off at the neighborhood mechanic because the flippin’ "Service Engine Soon" light came on. I hate that thing. I mean, I guess its better than keeping an engine problem a secret, but it would have taken so little effort to display a little error code on the dashboard. Just an error code and I could look it up in a book. Maybe at the back of the car’s manual, which is always in the car anyway. But instead they keep the codes a secret and make you take it to a dealer. I understand they don’t even like to give the codes out to the mechanincs.
See? I’m on a roll tonight. I should close up shop, get a gin-and-tonic and get some rest. I will look forward to tomorrow being better than today.
Here’s hoping your day went better than mine.
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