or “last great act of defiance?”
Call it what you will, but the Georgia Senate election wasn’t even close.
Obama’s coattails either didn’t extend into Georgia,or for a month after the election.
Either way, with the Minnesota recount seemingly slowly resolving in Senator Coleman’s favor and now Chambliss’ blowout, we seem to be two votes shy of Armageddon.
Whew.
The Occupier of the Office of The President-Elect Barry Oprah reveals his National Suckurity Team, which of course includes Mrs. Bill Clinton, a fervent rival who roundly criticized The President-Defect during the primaries, but now: BFF!
Mr. Obama essentially said Americans should not take too seriously some of the things said during “the heat of a campaign.”
Really, Mr. Oprah, sir? It will be quite interesting to see just exactly how far you get with that ticket once you step into the Oval Office and find out how utterly unprepared you are for the job (and that it’s a smoke-free workplace), and start doing the math on all the promises you made to win the White House for the people who’d been waiting for you to be the people for whom they were waiting.
Some examples I think you’ll have an unfunny challenge with:
Just put the budget up on a teleprompter. He won’t Change anything, but at least some of us will feel better about it.
…it was AIDS that was going to reach across all divides - national, affectional, behavioral - and kill us all.
Or, y’know, maybe not:
As World AIDS Day is marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs.
They argue that the world has entered a post-AIDS era in which the disease’s spread has largely been curbed in much of the world, Africa excepted.
“AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it’s just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies,” said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.
Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.
“The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, … too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.
AIDS in its day was a dreadfully scary epidemic, and it killed an awful lot of people. It was also a political football, and one of the first examples of systematic politcally-correct groupthink dominating policy on a key issue. AIDS became a politically-correct policy football from the very beginning, costing scads of lives in the process. Case in point; nations that followed the same sorts of rigorous public-health practices that the US had in attacking all sorts of epidemics in the past - like, say, Cuba - and had the political courage (or lack of political opposition, in Cuba’s case) to focus their national policy on the real causes of the epidemic (behavioral vectors like sharing needles and unprotected sex practices) escaped the worst of the epidemic. The US and much of the western world wasted much time on politically-correct diversions; “Anyone can catch AIDS”, we were warned throughout the ’80s and ’90s, even as the evidence mounted that straight, non-IV-drug-users who eschewed promiscuity and approached sexuality with a certain amount of prudent, albeit unerotic and less-than-romantic clinical due diligence, were actually quite unlikely to be at especial risk.
The reason given was to avoid stigmatizing gays. And gays rightly feared stigmatization; one would be willfully obtuse to say gays haven’t suffered from discrimination.
But how many lives was that feel-good exercise worth? Because it certainly sacrificed many, and diverted much funding, awareness and effort early in the epidemic’s course.
The UN bureaucrat who would lose his job if that were universally recognized begs to differ:
Paul de Lay, a director at UNAIDS, disagrees. It’s valid to question AIDS’ place in the world’s priorities, he says, but insists the turnaround is very recent and it would be wrong to think the epidemic is under control.
As with any deadly epidemic, it’s legitimate to avoid complacency. But there’s a real question: does AIDS need to have the same level of global mobilization that it has had, and still has today?
It’s not a loaded question. I’m genuinely curious.
A few years back, I had a contracting job in downtown Minneapolis - which was, as it happens, a long-time wanna-have of mine. I’ve always loved the hustle and thrum of downtown Minneapolis, and after my harrowing year of gross underemployment in 2003, it felt good to not only get back into working, but get back into it in a place that throbbed with energy.
And one of my favorite places in the city, especially for lunch-hour decompression while working a fairly tense set of projects, was Peavey Plaza - a sunken water-garden down in the teens on Nicollet Mall. The Plaza features concerts and street fairs for most of the summer and, almost better, is a relatively placid oasis in the middle of Minneapolis’ throbbing financial district the rest of the time (frequent approaches by bums and panhandlers notwithstanding).
Rumors for years have held that the Plaza was in danger - so, on the one hand, it’s good to hear that people are taking note…:
The sunken-plaza park, on the Nicollet Mall between 11th and 12th streets, was named one of the “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places” by the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota earlier this year.
…and, on the other hand, disconcerting to hear the kind of note being taken:
Now, it’s been included on the list of 12 modern landscapes — “Marvels of Modernism” — that are in danger of being lost, as selected by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Ugh.
Oh, well. “Modernist” label aside - I favor excising much “modernism” from our cities, and especially indiscriminate carpet-bombing of all Bauhaus architecture - I’m rooting for the Plaza. Every little bit helps.
We text, email, phone and make purchases in an ever inter-connected world. As our point of accessing the internet has shifted from stationary PC’s to smaller and more mobile devices, The Matrix is matching what we are looking for with where we are at the time and rending the data in the new world of Collective Intelligence, the term now emerging to describe the data trail we all leave behind, knowingly, willingly, or not.
Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.
…and the result? A plebe in the White House, but I digress.
Wireless and internet technologies afford consumers and businesses unprecedented freedom and productivity in the age of the Matrix. What are the consequences? Is it a fair trade?
But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.
Alas, I know of few that would give up their Blackberry, the aforementioned President-Elect counted among them.
In the balance, the benefits will hopefully outweigh the perils. Some will be more obvious than others.
Assisting policymakers…
a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
Day traders…
It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.
It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.
…and bar hoppers.
The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
Moving forward into the past?
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
Like it or not, with the advent of an ever-growing array of sensory technologies, it will become difficult if not impossible to avoid the grasp of The Matrix.
Red, writing about her nephew:
Cashel and the three kids were playing down the hall and we could hear some ruckus going on. Justin went to check, came back and said, “It’s fine. They’re just playing Somali Pirates.”
2008 Grants Recipients Artist Initiative
Media arts
Number of grants: 12
Total dollars granted: $59,000
Mauricio Arango, Saint Paul
$5,000 — to produce a video essay dealing with the lives of the inhabitants of the town of San Jose de Apartado in northern Colombia…so I don’t have to get a job.
Peter B. Becker Nelson, Minneapolis
$6,000 — to purchase video equipment and create a new video work that explores themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and gender…so I don’t have to get a job.
Paul R. Danhauser, Minneapolis
$5,200 — for a two-dimensional animated short film called “Bitter and Crabby” that deals with cute cartoon characters who are confronted by real-world morality…so I don’t have to get a job.
Amber Ellison Walker, Minneapolis
$2,000 — to increase the post-production quality of her video work and the overall quality of her publicity materials, and to have her work seen by a broader audience…so she doesn’t have to get a job.
Timothy A. Fort, Inver Grove Heights
$6,000 — for the creation of a professional broadcast-quality video of his kinetic art for Internet and television distribution…so he doesn’t have to get a job.
Nathaniel H. Freeman, Minneapolis
$6,000 — for a sixteen-stage video installation that shows the opening scene of sixteen imagined narratives, all informed by the people and events of his northeast Minneapolis neighborhood…so they don’t have to get a job.
Heather R. Johnson, Minneapolis
$5,000 — for a documentary film, titled, “No Ugly Trees,” that explores women’s body and self-esteem issues…so I don’t have to get a job.
Daniel J. Lundquist, Bloomington
$5,000 — for creative time to finish hand coloring “Boris,” an animation about overcoming difficult circumstances to live a happy life…so I don’t have to get a job.
Kevin S. McKeever, Saint Paul
$800 — to produce duplicates of his documentary that examines one man’s success in helping inner-city youths rise above crime and violence, prepare and produce related publicity packets, and submit the film to festivals…so he doesn’t have to get a job.
Pamela Nice, Saint Paul
$6,000 — for funds to help film interviews in Twin Cities coffeehouses for her next documentary, “Desert in the Coffeehouse,” a film that asks what Minnesotans know about Arab and Muslim lives…so I don’t have to get a job in a coffeehouse.
James M. Vogel, Minneapolis
$6,000 — for funds to film an observational documentary about drug abuse…so I don’t have to get a job and actually pass a drug test.
Rosemary T. Williams, Saint Paul
$6,000 — to film the documentary “Futures,” which will document open call trading at the last few North American exchanges that have not switched to digital trading…so I don’t have to get an analog job in a digital world.
BACKGROUND: Oops. I thought I’d posted this on Friday. I apparently did not. And since this piece is intended to mock the story behind this post, it’s probably only fair that I actually post this, and pronto. I apologize for any confusion, stress or altered worldviews due to this mixup on my staff’s part).
———-
There are plenty of conservatives who scoff at the idea of art as a noble goal in and of itself - at the notion that art can be something other than decoration or background music.
I’m not one of them.
But I’ll say this; when art becomes a creature of subsidy - a hothouse flower that can only exist when the government foots the bill - then it’s dead.
Sisyphus at Nihilist in Golf Pants details the “winners” of Minnesota State Arts board subsidies - grants from a couple of hundred bucks up to $6,000.
There are the usual predictable howlers:
Peter B. Becker Nelson, Minneapolis
$6,000 — to purchase video equipment and create a new video work that explores themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and genderWonderful. The taxpayers of Minnesota are buying this guy video equipment to explore themes of relationships, empathy, sexuality, and gender – themes that would never be artistically explored without our tax dollars. Once Mr. Nelson is done with that, perhaps he will do a video version of his mustache series (a previous work where he drew mustaches on photographs of people).
…
John S. Jodzio, Minneapolis
$5,700 — to finish his short story collection, If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home
Finally, someone has written a short story collection based on the popular apartment rental sign!
Now, I’m not one of those guys who’s going to mock an “artist” for producing something that reeks of smug self-indulgence - art often reflects the artists, and an awful lot of artists are smug and self-indulgent, and that’s just fine.
And I’m not one of those people who thinks art needs to be “accessible”.
I do think, however, that art benefits greatly from the struggle to create it. And judging by the almost uniformly dismal quality of the “art” produced on the public nickel…:
Arlene Atwater, Duluth
$3,000 — for time to polish two new short stories, record them in her own voice on MP3 files embracing the new literary dimension of voice-only literature, and submit them to boundoff.com and Write On Radio, KFAI
…much of what we’re funding could use a little struggle.
The goal of art isn’t necessarily to last forever - but why do I suspect the “art” we’re funding has a shorter-than-average shelf-life?
As I noted the earlier in a piece I thought I’d posted Friday, but did not, Sisyphus at Nihilist In Golf Pants commented on the State Arts Board’s grants of taxpayer money to “promising” “Minnesota” artists and their art.
Now, for years I’ve said that conservatives need to get engaged in the world of the arts; to stop ceding this utterly important aspect of the human condition to the grant-pimps, the pseudoacademic weenies - the left. Conservatives need to make their presences felt in literature, music, theatre, film, multi-media, comedy (albeit I think we can, and must, continue to cede dance to the left, since I have no idea how to take a conservative swipe at that particular medium. I’m open to suggestions).
In this spirit, Sisyphus takes a game swat at proposing his own grant applications (and, it seems, granting them, if only fictionally):
1. $3,000 to purchase extra large glass basin and cases of light beer for composition of art work in which an entire year’s worth of Nick Coleman columns are submerged in the collective artists’ urine.
Sisyphus makes a fantastic effort at getting the ball rolling. But we need to build on this to achieve more.
So here’s your assignment: Read the State Arts Board’s list of grants. And fill in your own applications in the comment section. We’ll be taking applications for
Take your best shot. The best? Well, maybe we’ll just forward them to the SAB and see what happens.
You never know.
The cause of our current financial system crisis, overarching government meddling and regulation, set in place by liberals, bolstered by the Clinton Administration and allowed to remain during the Bush Administration is not going away any time soon.
The Community Reinvestment Act is to blame for the financial crisis, but it so powerfully serves Democrats’ interests that they’ll do anything to protect it — including revising history.
But powerful Democrats in Washington want to protect the act — along with Fannie and Freddie — and spin the subprime scandal as the result of too little regulation, not too much.
“Repealing or weakening the CRA would be a mistake,” warns Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who argues that the CRA should be strengthened.
Dodd, the top recipient of Fannie donations and himself a beneficiary of a sweetheart mortgage brokered by a subprime lender, recently invited one of Clinton’s top enforcers of the CRA to testify.
Read the whole article for the facts.
Liberal Democrats caused this crisis, Liberal Republicans allowed it to remain, and the American people rewarded them by voting in an ever larger number of liberal politicians without the tools or the wherewithal to bring us out of this crisis. As usual, those that are responsible, productive and truly conservative will pay the price, and ultimately come to the rescue of our economy.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the Columbine shooting was the reports that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team waited for four hours before entering the school. They were worried about bombs; the police’s SOPs said, essentially, that it was better to leave the students and staff inside the building on their own than to risk police lives to a potential bomb threat.
It doesn’t impugn the courage of any officer, or the integrity of the Jeffco SD, to say that when in doubt, police procedure left the citizen on his or her own - but I can’t imagine the frustration and horror that the parents outside must have felt, as the hours ticked by, knowing their kids were inside the building, not knowing if they were alive or dead but knowing that there were a whole lot of cops in battle rattle waiting in the assembly area not rushing in to save them.
Of course the horrific toll among New York’s first responders on 9/11 showed that astounding bravery is a common trait among American cops and firefighters. When the “standard operating procedure” is to go in and do what they’ve been trained to do, the police, fire, paramedics and other first responders in the US - and, I suspect, most of the world - step up and do the job.
———-
But when I saw reports like this one from Mumbai - that the Mumbai police froze under fire from the terrorists during last week’s terror attacks - I thought about a couple of lessons that smart people learned from the wave of mass shootings in the US, among other places.
Indians - individual Indians, anyway - seem to be learning all of these lessons; Sebastian D’Souza, the photographer who got so many portfolio-worthy shots of the gunmen as they carried out their mayhem, famously wrote:
The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D’Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. “I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles…
…
The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”
Mumbaiian blogger Amitabh Bachchan’s post on his reaction to the attack has been getting a lot of attention (emphases added); like a lot of Americans when faced with this sort of unreasoning malice, he’s taken a sensible precaution and drawn a metaphorical line in Mumbai’s beach sand:
My pain has been the sight and plight of my innocent and vulnerable and completely insecure countrymen, facing the wrath of this terror attack. And my anger has been at the ineptitude of the authorities that have been ordained to look after us. I have simply loved and endorsed the sentiments expressed by one of those that came on for comments on the Arnab reportage, Suhel Seth. They were strong, precise and most apt. And of course I have had the greatest pride in those from the forces that have and continue to fight for our freedom. Brilliant officers and police personnel have laid down their lives for us. I can only but salute them and respect their sincerity in the call of duty.
The response needs to be much more than symbolic:
I have been at the receiving end of a million calls and an equal number of sms’s the whole day to come live on TV or on the print media to express my views on the current situation and am being lured by words such as ’we need you to speak to express solidarity and for the people to maintain their calm’.
This is disgusting !! I will NOT do that. TELL ME AND ORDER ME INSTEAD THAT WE REQUIRE FOR EVERY INDIAN TO GET UP AND WALK INTO THE FACILITIES WHERE THE ACTION IS ON AND I WILL BE THE FIRST TO WALK. But, please do not ask me to come and make sloppy statements that will do nothing more than create viewer interest in said particular channel ! I respect what the media is doing in serving the nation with its continuous information bulletins and I admire the brave and diligent manner in which they have devoted themselves to the cause. But what they expect me do I find against my ethics and want to be excused from it…
…As an Indian, I need to live in my own land, on my own soil with dignity and without fear. And I need an assurance on that.
And at the end of the day, one person is responsible for that assurance:
I am ashamed to say this and not afraid to share this now with the rest of the cyber world, that last night, as the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do.
Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow. For a very disturbed sleep.
The responses in his comment section and the Indian (and other) media have been the sort of thing that any American Second-Amendment activist is well used to hearing. Bachchan responded in a way that’d do any of us proud:
The act of pulling out my revolver is a symbolic metaphor, a figure of speech, to demonstrate my complete loss in faith in the system and in the governance, in providing me, a citizen of India, with my rightful sense of security. It is to demonstrate that now I shall have to personally look after my family and myself and not depend on the state. A state that is just so miserably incapable of protecting its citizens…
…For too long we have remained the servile submissive nation. There has been no strong adjective to describe our character.
I’d love to interview Mr. Bachchan on the NARN one of these weekends.
The lessons should be obvious:
Citizens in any “free society” should be a pack, not a herd or flock.
(Via Collins)
I was listening to Keri Miller’s “Midmorning” show on MPR last Friday. In the second hour, she was interviewing some sixties’ folk-scene retread (the program archive seems to have left the hour blank).
Miller asked - with a face that sounded straight (I’m paraphrasing very closely): “Now that Obama has been elected president, do you think American people are ready for the sacrifices he asked of them?”
I almost swerved into an oncoming car.
“WHAT SACRIFICES did he “ask” of the American people?” I yelled at the radio, not quite remembering that I didn’t have a mike in front of me. “When did Obama talk about sacrifice? He couldn’t even articulate the sacrifices he was going to “ask” the American people in the debates, for crying out loud? Five’ll getcha ten the typical Obama voter is thinking “Yippee! My mortgage and gas will get paid!”
Seirously - what “sacrifices” did The One “ask” of anyone?
There’s a genuine economic crisis out there. I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ‘em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line.
And yet for all the media’s carping about the dismal state of the economy, “Black Friday” sales were up three percent from last year - a complete turnabout on the media’s pre-Thanksgiving drumbeat, which called for big drops in sales on the nation’s biggest shopping day.
John at Powerline has a theory about the media’s reflexive bleakness (emphasis added):
The financial crisis is real, and we are most likely in a recession. But the hysterical terms in which the economy is discussed are unwarranted and unhelpful. They are also, I think, politically motivated. Reporters and editors like the idea of a looming depression (or, failing that, an unusually severe recession) for a number of reasons. If it happens, it will be taken as refutation of the relatively conservative consensus that has influenced government policies since the early 1980s–a consensus under which a great many people have flourished, but not, notably, reporters and editors. And if it doesn’t happen, they will give the credit to Barack Obama and the more-liberal policies they expect from his administration. So for the left, hysteria over the economy is a win-win proposition. Not so for the rest of us.
Not to mention that it sells papers; hysteria gets people tuned in and/or buying those papers.
Or so the theory goes.
Oh, yeah - read the whole thing, naturally.
Michael Yon on the story of the year that the Mainstream Media will not report - Dthe outbreak of peace in Iraq:
When the war was on full-steam there was so much to report that it was impossible to keep track. And now that peace is breaking out, it’s equally impossible to keep track of all the progress. There’s still focus on the attacks, most of which are directed against Iraqis, not us. And so this “mission” was more like an armed errand to remove some concrete barriers between neighborhoods.
Naturally, read the whole - long - thing.
This morning I found myself taking stock of all the adventures I have had in my adult life. Most recently, I have walked Broadway in New York from the depths of Ground Zero through the blaze of Times Square to the greenery of Central Park and the Upper West Side. I’ve hiked the historic streets of Washington DC, the white sand beaches of Kaanapali and Grand Cayman and floated in the mist under Niagara Falls.
While I am fortunate to have the means and opportunity to have gathered these vivid and treasured memories it was the mundane setting of the stacks of dry goods and produce under the grid of fluorescence at Cub Foods this morning that underscored their only common denominator.
It was there that I found myself flush with gratitude and good fortune as I watched my wife pluck a small jar of sea salt from the shelf.
Wise men know that no one bears the the scars of our existence more willingly or ably than our brides. I’ve always said “Show me a successful man and I will show you a man that married well.”
It is the dividends of a marriage to a wonderful woman, undeservedly so I might add, that make even the most prosaic activities a bounty to my being. I am in awe of the fierce but gentle love and concern she has for her brood and the tolerance she has for my foibles, not the least of which, my ego.
If I were King, she would be the crown that legitimizes my station.
As we walked the sterile isles of Cub, our over-burdened cart informing of the three at home, I realized how hard it will be someday when the littlest leaves the nest but at the same time looked forward to having her to myself again some day.
…and that is what I am thankful for this season.
The NARN is taking today - Thanksgiving Saturday - off.
Enjoy the weekend!
The Question: What Nickname Should A Conservative Blog Employ For President-Elect Barack Obama So As To Not Offend Our More Tender Readers?
“Oprah” by a slim margin.
HT Flash
A few years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, a psychologist by trade.
He was talking about a client of his who’d spent twenty or so years in US Army Special Forces - a “Green Beret”, specializing in “unconventional warfare” around the world. This client had spent most of his career in Latin America - and while the closest he’d come to fighting an actual “war” was in Panama, he’d apparently spent a long time in a lot of pseudo-war situations. My friend didn’t go into many details, but Latin America from the late seventies through the mid-nineties was full of brushfire wars and counterinsurgencies where the USSF was involved to one level or another, training local troops and working with local communities. While they weren’t “at war”, per se, there was apparently enough danger involved that the client spent a good chunk of his twenties and thirties operating on some sort of war footing.
The problems - for the client - started when he got out of the service. He’d spent the best years of his life, literally and figuratively, in one Latin-American insurgency zone or slum or another, looking over his back and watching for threats around every corner as he did his job, training local soldiers and building things and giving vaccinations and whatever else Green Berets did when they were on the job in the Third World toward the end of the Cold War. He’d spent so much time doing that that it became normal for him; when he got out of the Army, he missed it.
So the client had spent several years of his post-service life, my friend said, putting himself into situations where he felt that little stab of danger, where he got to exercise his self-preserving habits; he lived in the worst possible neighborhoods; he hung out at the worst bars; he did whatever it took to keep himself on that “war footing”.
To do anything else just didn’t feel normal.
The post-election hangover on a blog is sort of like that. Win (’02, ‘04) or lose (’06 and ‘08), there’s a huge letdown and readjustment, as the fever-pitch of excitement fades into the post-election waiting for the new regime (or the new take on the current regime) to take hold.
This past election was the fourth election cycle this blog has been through. Every year, a number of new political blogs fade out after the election; without an election, what do you write about? Not me, of course - I’ve been doing this long enough to know the pattern, so it doesn’t especially faze me. But there’s always a period of readjustment, as one switches from the always-on mental scrum of writing about politics-as-current events, and switches to politics-as-daily-routine, along with writing about all of life’s other routines. Or, y’know, not writing about them; there are bloggers for whom politics is the only subject.
The readjustment is particularly jarring this time around. This electoral season was so intense, so fraught with consequence on both sides, and just-plain more-engrossing than the last couple of turns. We’ve spent most of the last year writing about what has been was supposed to be an epochal generational and social shift in American politics; going from that epic clash to two years of talking about congressional maneuvering is a jarring shift.
The readjustment is coming along, though.
Although I can hardly wait for 2010…
“Black Friday” stampede on Long Island kills a store worker:
A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.
The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.
Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.
Europe has soccer games; we have Black Friday.
So as I reported yesterday, I forgot to defrost the turkey.
“Run to Rainbow”, I was told, “and get a pre-made turkey!”.
“No”, said the stubborn, penurious Scandinavian. “There must be another way”.
And indeed, not only was there…
…but it rocked. The best turkey I’ve made in recent years.
Could have been all the biking.
Could be my boss knows what she’s doing:
The Swedish study found that workers’ risks for angina, heart attack and death rose along with the reported incompetence of their bosses.
I’ve had a couple of “heart attack/stroke” bosses. And at least one that I think might have been carcinogenic if I’d have stayed at that company much longer.
A few years back, on this blog’s first Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece for Thanksgiving that, six years later, still pretty much says everything I want and need to say:
I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing - in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…
I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah - I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.
Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So - two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ‘73 Malibu, and I was off.
Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects - and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.
And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me - the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so - for me anyway - than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.
Things to be thanksful for? Many.
But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing - or better - next year.
God bless you all. And if you don’t believe in God - well, bless yourself silly.
And that’s all still true. It’s been an “interesting” year, in the classic Hindu sense of the term. But I am - we are - still here. And as I frantically scour the internet for directions on how to cook the turkey that I neglected to defrost two days ago (how do I forget that every single year?), it feels almost trite to count off all the things I’m thankful for.
I’m here. But there’s less of me (I lost 20-30 pounds this past year. It’s been a difficult year on the family front, but there are more than enough of the little sparks of hope that keep one going. Yes, I am doing better than I was this time last year, or even four years ago.
As I look at the news from Muimbai, I am thankful that I live in a place at a time where people furrow their brows and cluck with concern about “nasty campaigning” and “partisanship” over things that would pass for “high school pranks” in parts of the world where nastiness means “AK74s” and “partisanship” means “piles of bodies lined up behind a warehouse”.
I’m thankful for the outlet this little old blog provides, and for all the people who’ve come into my life in the almost seven years I’ve been doing this.
So Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!
Poor Joe. His role in the Obama administration?
For Biden, No Portfolio but the Role of a Counselor
Which is nicey nice for nada. Please stay out of the way and keep your mouth shut.
One can’t imagine John McCain taking that tact with Sarah Palin. She’d put one of her Naughty Monkeys up his…well you know. Another post-mortem observation proving McCain/Palin would have been a better team for America in this time and place.
Mr. Obama has moved quickly to assemble his White House staff and the beginnings of (Bill Clinton’s-JR) cabinet, he is lagging behind even the chronically late President Bill Clinton in bringing clarity to the role his vice president will play.
Breaking up is so hard to do.
“I’m sure that there will be discrete assignments over time,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president-elect. “But I think his fundamental role is as a trusted counselor. I think that when Obama selected him, he selected him to be a counselor and an adviser on a broad range of issues.”
Ah, discrete assignments over time. Well played Axelrod. Methinks those assignments will entail such tools as a discrete infra-red remote control and a strategically placed hassock emblazoned with the seal of the Vice President.
while Mr. Obama held a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Mr. Biden was home in Delaware, having spent Monday night in Wilmington stuffing Christmas stockings with his wife for a charity event.
Quaint. We all know how committed to charity Joe Biden is…stuffing a sock where his wallet is.
The President-Elect did not return phone calls from Jill Biden pleading for Mr. Obama to “Please get Joe the (h-e-toothpick-toothpick) out of the house - he’s driving me crazy.”
Mr. Biden seems to be adapting. He is hiring for his office, including a chief of staff, Ron Klain, who has worked with him since he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. With Mr. Obama having settled on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, Mr. Biden, whose most recent Senate post was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has privately told people that he recognizes he will not be the point man on foreign policy.
Poor Joe. He will have to fight for that remote too.
The only guy I feel more sorry for than Joe having nothing to do, is the Chief of Staff of The Guy With Nothing To Do.
Hey! Joe’s the Maytag Man! (He He)
Mr. Biden has also interviewed candidates for chief economist, and associates say he is honing his economic credentials.
Not unduly angry?
Aides say Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama sometimes rib each other in private meetings, and they maintain that Mr. Obama was not unduly angry at Mr. Biden for his gaffe predicting that Mr. Obama would be tested by a world crisis in his first six months in office.
So he was pissed, just not unduly. Ouch.
Since then, however, Mr. Biden has not had much to say to the news media.
Because they’re not asking him any questions.
Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed for this article, itself a break from his voluble past.
Franken Loses Crucial Ruling in Minnesota Recount
Minnesota’s Canvassing Board voted unanimously to reject Franken’s request to include thousands of absentee ballots that are not included in the recount in the Minnesota senate race between the Democratic challenger and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.
Which means it’s all but over for Al Franken’s bid for Norm Coleman’s Senate Seat as the recount is so far and will likely continue to substantiate Coleman’s narrow victory.
