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Paging Tim Gunn.

I didn’t see most of the debate last night, although I heard a fair amount. I took the French jour­nal­ists to a GOP grass­roots fundraiser/debate party, but we left 15 min­utes after the green flag, and after that I had to rely on NPR for most of it. My impres­sion was of some­one who had com­pe­tently deployed the me-so-dumb advance strat­egy, enough so that any per­for­mance short of pants-wetting would be seen as a resound­ing vic­tory, but oth­er­wise: Meh.

Admit­tedly, I wasn’t pre­dis­posed to like her. But in the com­pany of jour­nal­ists, I tried to watch it with a journalist’s eye, and still it was pretty meh. I know soc­cer moms with sim­i­lar resumes and qual­i­fi­ca­tions — they are thick on the ground in the GP — who would have blown her doors off.

But as usu­ally hap­pens, it left me think­ing about some­thing else, i.e., ways to be a pub­lic woman. The old Hol­ly­wood joke about the three ages of women — babe, dis­trict attor­ney and “Dri­ving Miss Daisy” — still seems to apply. I wasn’t the biggest Hillary fan, but my heart went out to her for the fight she put up, to be taken seri­ously amidst a bar­rage of abuse about every­thing from the size of her ass to the sound of her voice. How easy it is to step into a niche that comes with pre-arranged stereo­types and expec­ta­tions, and all you have to do is put it on like a uniform.

Which is to say, about 20 per­cent of my prob­lem with Palin comes from my gen­eral dis­like of folksi­ness. Fif­teen per­cent more is about how folksi­ness is sup­posed to sub­sti­tute for pre­pared­ness, as though al-Qaeda can be slain single-handedly by Marge Gunderson.

Sixty per­cent is about her lack of qual­i­fi­ca­tion. The rest is unease over her appar­ent reli­gious weird­ness, but notice we’re down to five per­cent here. Liv­ing in Indi­ana taught me there are many paths to God; I’m just sus­pi­cious of the Assem­blies of God ver­sion. That’s all.

And right now I’m going to cash in a few mark­ers, picked up when var­i­ous sex­ist shitheels were trash­ing “Shril­lary” and her voice, and say, Palin’s gets on my last nerve. On the other hand, if some­how the Repub­li­cans pull it off, I doubt I’ll hear it much. She’ll be redec­o­rat­ing Cheney’s dark lair.

Enough of her. A lit­tle goes a very long way.

I’m sick of the rou­tine, any­way, so let’s shake things up a bit. I need a rul­ing from the group on some­thing I found in the hall closet the other day:

It’s Alan’s old motor­cy­cle jacket. Relax, it’s no mis­placed Ital­ian or Eng­lish gem, just an incred­i­bly sturdy old no-name leather jacket built to take the pun­ish­ment meant for your skin should you need to lay your bike down in a pinch. It’s very heavy — the scale says it weighs five pounds, and I believe that’s fairly accu­rate. And it’s a size 38, a ship that sailed for Alan many years ago, but it fits me pretty well. So my ques­tion for the group is: Is it accept­able for a 50-year-old woman to wear her husband’s old motor­cy­cle jacket? I tend to dress in a rotat­ing wardrobe of blue jeans and neu­tral tops, and I freely acknowl­edge I didn’t inherit my mother’s fash­ion sense. (You should see her in pic­tures from her teen years — the height of the Depres­sion, and she was a total babe, in clothes she made her­self, right down to the hats.) It’s pos­si­ble I’m look­ing in the mir­ror and see­ing Carla Bruni, when the rest of the world sees a les­bian with­out a mirror.

And if the answer is yes, would adding an Her­mes scarf just be impos­si­bly cliché?

What­ever the answer, I’m not get­ting rid of this jacket. Kate will look smash­ing in it, someday.

Squir­ing the French around town this week, I didn’t have time for col­lect­ing all the week’s tasty blog­gage, but assum­ing Jolene and some of our fleet-fingered num­ber are still on the job, you’ll have plenty to read. Well, maybe you have a moment for this, yet another of Coozledad’s charm­ing lit­tle rec­ol­lec­tions of peo­ple from his past. You don’t have to be a writer to be a good writer. You just have to write.

Have a swell week­end, all.

Posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 9:55 am
in Current events, Housekeeping.

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110 responses to
“Paging Tim Gunn.”

  1. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am

    Scarf w/ jacket: Great look! Go for it.

  2. nancy said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 am

    Jolene, you’re right: Peggy Noo­nan has lost her mind. For good this time, I think. The GOP must be mak­ing her pay for that open-mic slip big-time.

  3. Fort Wayne said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Ask Stacy and Clinton.

  4. Randy said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:21 am

    Every com­men­ta­tor I heard last night seemed to regard her per­for­mance as a mod­er­ate suc­cess. It seemed to come down to the fact she held poise for 90 min­utes. Well, pageant con­tes­tants do that too, but they don’t get handed the VP office… When peo­ple read the tran­script of her answers, I think they will be less charitable.

    Here in Canada, we had a tele­vised leader’s debate at the very same time as the VP debate. (Our elec­tion is on Oct. 14th). Prob­lem is, we have five par­ties run­ning, so it was just a bunch of peo­ple around a table, cut­ting each other off. The “mod­er­a­tor” had no chance of con­trol­ling anything.

    I give Biden credit for ignor­ing her and going straight for McCain. I think it was the only approach that could work for him.

  5. ellen said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Yes on the jacket and the scarf, but like all things you must wear it in the true effort­less, go-to-hell spirit that Euro­peans and peo­ple of a cer­tain class (old money, pos­si­bly no longer even rich, but with well tai­lored heir­looms in their wardrobes) wear their clothes. You’ve spent the bet­ter part of a week with French peo­ple, surely they have infused you with some elan.

  6. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Speak­ing of loss, this is worse than what seems to have befallen Ms. Noo­nan. A 12-minute piece from a SoCal TV sta­tion re fore­clo­sures in that area. The piece focuses on “trash­ing out” houses, which means tak­ing out every sin­gle thing peo­ple left behind. Amaz­ing and very sad to see what peo­ple leave behind when they are com­pletely out of options. Made my throat clench as I was watch­ing it, and, hon­estly, brought tears to my eyes.

    The piece also shows the reach of the ten­ta­cles of fore­clo­sures. One I’d never thought of: When peo­ple leave their SoCal homes, they leave behind swim­ming pools that, left unat­tended, quickly become breed­ing grounds for disease-carrying mos­qui­toes. The munic­i­pal­ity then has to send crews to pump them out, some­thing they can ill afford given their reduced tax rev­enues. Ugh.

    I’m look­ing for a really com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of what led us to our present cir­cum­stances. I know that peo­ple will be writ­ing dis­ser­ta­tions about this for decades, but if you’ve seen some­thing that looks at the role of leg­is­la­tion gov­ern­ing bank­ing, gov­ern­men­tal efforts to increase home own­er­ship via the CRA, the sur­feit of for­eign invest­ment in our mar­kets, the role of mort­gage secu­ri­ti­za­tion, I’d be inter­ested in know­ing it. It’s a huge order, I know, but my men­tal image of all this lacks cohe­sion. Pieces have got­ten filled in over the past cou­ple of weeks, but there are many gaps.

  7. brian stouder said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:39 am

    So my ques­tion for the group is: Is it accept­able for a 50-year-old woman to wear her husband’s old motor­cy­cle jacket?.……It’s pos­si­ble I’m look­ing in the mir­ror and see­ing Carla Bruni, when the rest of the world sees a les­bian with­out a mirror.

    Just don’t wear a chain that con­nects to your wal­let (which is in your back pocket), and you’ll be a hot chick.

    Didja see the other night, when Rachel Mad­dow had some sen­a­tor on her show, and at the end of the con­ver­sa­tion, as they exchanged con­clud­ing remarks — she thanked him, and he said “Thank you, sir…Uhhh.…Ma’am! I apologize!” — and Rachel didn’t miss a beat, reply­ing with “it’s OK, hap­pens all the time!”

    Her show is great!

  8. alex said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am

    Awe­some jacket, Nance. Amazed you didn’t glom onto it sooner. It’s the kind of thing you can wear whether you’re dress­ing down or up. Would love one of those myself.

  9. LAMary said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:02 am

    You need a longish oblong scarf, dou­bled with the ends put through the loop with that jacket. What­ever pants you wear should be clearly fem­i­nine in cut so you have the “oh I just threw on my boyfriend’s jacket” look rather than the “you got a prob­lem with me wear­ing men’s clothes?” look.

  10. nancy said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am

    Alex, that’s why they call those jack­ets “gay minks.”

  11. LAMary said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 am

    Regard­ing Palin’s voice: it really sets my teeth on edge when she says anthing with the K or CK sound. Like “cracks in the glass ceil­ing,” or “hockey mom.“
    And if she winks at the cam­era one more time I’m going to need some sort of seda­tion.
    I appre­ci­ated yesterday’s com­ment about her name really being Paling.

  12. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am

    The “Pal­ing” com­ment cracked me up too. And add my name to the list of peo­ple who can’t stand the way she talks. Remem­ber that I grew up in ND, so I’m accus­tomed to, shall we say, hick accents, but they wear bet­ter on Nor­we­gian farm­ers than prospec­tive national leaders.

  13. Lex said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 am

    I’m not much of a scarf expert. But def­i­nitely wear the jacket. I’ve also got a size-38 bomber on which my ship has sailed, but Vic­to­ria will prob­a­bly be in a posi­tion to sport it by about the time she gets her driver’s license.

  14. brian stouder said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:40 am

    I’m still recov­er­ing from that beyond-the-pale Noo­nan num-num arti­cle, linked above.

    She had a line in there, some­thing like ‘she is a woman of action, and not thinking’ — and it was meant as a com­pli­ment!

    true enough, women of impul­sive (as opposed to thought out) action tend to have many stars next to their names in the lit­tle black books of the men who meet them at par­ties, but no mat­ter how much I try, I can­not see how that com­mends a per­son to the head of the National Com­mand Author­ity of the United States…and Noonan’s arti­cle made pro­gres­sively less sense, as it con­tin­ued from there!

  15. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 11:58 am

    More Palin clips com­ing soon – actu­ally avail­able now. Accord­ing to Marc Ambinder, she is giv­ing an inter­view to Carl Cameron of Fox News, and they are going to play pieces of it all day. I just saw one in which she said that Obama had said things that, in her world, would dis­qual­ify him as commander-in-chief. Charles Krautham­mer, though, thinks he will win.

  16. WhiteBeard said on October 3rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm

    So my ques­tion for the group is: Is it accept­able for a 50-year-old woman to wear her husband’s old motor­cy­cle jacket?…….
    YES, absolutely, even with one of those thick turtle­necks, sans scarf. It would give you a don’t-mess-with-me look when you are talk­ing on your Iphone as you sit on a bench with your bike nearby.

    As for Palin cloyly wink­ing and flash­ing those grin­ning teeth, Is she imi­tat­ing Tina Faye; is it life imi­tat­ing par­ody or par­ody imi­tat­ing life? My friend down the road says turn off the sound when she speaks and you get a lip-snarling, mean-looking biker babe with a moose-skinning dag­ger you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.
    And since when do you say you do not choose to answer the ques­tion and switch sub­jects and just read from your notecards?

  17. Catherine said on October 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    The jacket is nice, and exactly what Mary said about the scarf and the trousers. Or, maybe con­sider a long loose skirt with knee-high boots?

    And, thanks for the fash­ion ques­tion, that’s about all I can han­dle this morn­ing (cov­er­ing eyes to avoid read­ing Peggy Noonan).

  18. sue said on October 3rd, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    Nancy,
    As a 50 year old woman myself, I say save it for Kate. That jacket belongs on a young gal, 16 – 25.
    Get your­self a fig­ure flat­ter­ing, short, RED leather jacket. (Not “orangy” red, but cabar­net red).
    My 2 cents worth, since you asked.

  19. Jeff Borden said on October 3rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    Wear the freak­ing leather jacket and enjoy it.

    Re: Sarah Palin.

    Aside from the many winks at the cam­era and her laugh­ably folksy hello to the 3rd graders at her brother’s ele­men­tary school and the con­stant scan­ning of her note cards and her emu­la­tion of the Wee Man from Craw­ford with her pro­nun­ci­a­tion of nu-ku-lar, what con­tin­ues to gall me is the use of that poor infant with Downs Syn­drome as a stage prop. It was after 9:30 p.m. Shouldn’t an infant be in bed at that time instead of being passed around like a Cab­bage Patch kid?

    It just seems tacky to me, but I’m clearly not her base. Any­one else find this use of poor lit­tle Trig unseemly?

  20. del said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Agreed Jeff. Wear the freak­ing leather jacket (w/elan) and enjoy it.

  21. MichaelG said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    I think the mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tion of “nuclear” was delib­er­ate. Palin’s han­dlers know how to say the word. If they had been so inclined, they would have had her say it cor­rectly. It’s part of the folksy pre­sen­ta­tion pack­age. She didn’t care what Biden or Ifill thought. She didn’t care about the ques­tions. She wasn’t talk­ing to them. She wasn’t there to answer ques­tions. She was mak­ing her cam­paign speech to tar­geted peo­ple in tar­geted states. I find that “Joe six-pack” appel­la­tion extremely patron­iz­ing in a way that “soc­cer mom” is not.

  22. Scout said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    I laughed when you wrote about your mom, the fash­ion plate, because I have long held the the­ory that fash­ion sense skips gen­er­a­tions. My mom at 70 is still a head turner with a killer wardrobe that she does not spend a for­tune on; my daugh­ters always look like the peo­ple you see in depart­ment store ads. Then there’s me in the mid­dle, the frump. And from all early indi­ca­tors, my grand daugh­ters are going to be just like me! Bot­tom line, I have no idea if that old jacket is cool or not. The fact that I prob­a­bly would wear it may work against the idea.

    Brian — I saw the Mad­dow remark too — she is so cool. I have a major crush on her.

    The Palin ordeal is finally over. I doubt there will be much more of her, as the Sarah wran­glers will put her back under wraps now that she man­aged to sol­dier through the debate with­out swal­low­ing her tongue. The note cards and the refusal to actu­ally answer any ques­tions were annoy­ing enough, but WTF is up, seri­ously, with Repub­li­cans who can­not pro­nounce the word nuclear? It is pro­nounced exactly how it is spelled! The dropped g’s also set my teeth on edge. Her ram­bling and repete­tive speak­ing style paired with that chain saw voice make even Dubya sound pres­i­den­tial in com­par­i­son. The hor­ror, the horror.

  23. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    Re this jacket vs. the red one Sue sug­gests: Two dif­fer­ent looks, I think, both good. Fit­ted red jacket, long skirt, boots. Alan’s jacket, scarf, jeans, boots.

    And, yes, I do think it’s odd to be schlep­ping the baby around. I’m not sure I fol­lowed the hand-offs exactly, but I think that, after she held him, she handed him to the seven-year-old! What about the dad? One of the big­ger kids? One of the grand­par­ents? Hav­ing the kid hold him while sit­ting down dur­ing the con­ven­tion speech was one thing, but hand­ing him to her to carry off the stage was some­thing else. I’ve been won­der­ing where those kids are. Not that it’s any of my busi­ness, but, well, I just won­der. Wil­low seems to be trav­el­ing w/ her. They all seemed to go to Ari­zona. Has Trig been on the cam­paign trail and in the hands of babysit­ters or fam­ily mem­bers when Mom is on stage? Or has he been in Alaska w/ Dad and/or other fam­ily members?

    Here’s Matt Ygle­sias on McCain-Palin poli­cies that affect chil­dren. As with the gap between her ide­al­ized image as a mom and the seem­ing casu­al­ness of her treat­ment of her kids, Palin is casual about the rela­tion­ship between what she says should be done in pol­icy terms and what her cam­paigns stated poli­cies are.

  24. deb said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    My friend Amy has been observ­ing all along that Trig always looks like a rag doll…limp, almost life­less, never awake. I don’t know what’s going on there and I’m not sug­gest­ing any­thing is. It’s just strange. And heart­break­ing. That hand­off to the seven-year-old bugged me, too.

    Speak­ing of things not quite right, was any­body else both­ered by the fact that, after Biden tells that poignant story about los­ing half his fam­ily — some­thing he han­dled very well, with­out being maudlin — Sarah can’t even muster a per­func­tory “sorry for your loss” but just goes RIGHT back to cheer­lead­ing for McCain? Maybe she just wasn’t lis­ten­ing. Either way, it was an affront.

    As for her voice: It’s Judy Tenuta. Seri­ously. Make her stop speak­ing, somebody.

  25. WhiteBeard said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    Ok, I con­fess that I can­not spell Tina Fey’s last name, maybe it is an aver­sion to the word fey from my child­hood. But my daugh­ter in Mon­treal sent this bit. “Accord­ing to Isabelle Car­reau of the blog TV Squad, the news­pa­per Le Soleil accom­pa­nied a story about Palin with a photo from Fey’s most recent “SNL” turn as the can­di­date. The photo also included Amy Poehler, who played CBS anchor Katie Couric in the sketch.“
    My wife was also appalled about baby Trig being handed over to the young daugh­ter. What is going on here, RePug­nant Pho­toOp 101?

  26. coozledad said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    Thanks, Nancy.
    I say go with the jacket and get a red one too. This is a good time to invest in win­ter gar­ments, as well as canned food.
    There’s an Indian com­pany, Jyoti, that makes pretty good canned entrees like mat­tar panir, sam­bar and dhal makhani. They go well with rice, or you can pad them out with wild hick­ory nuts and boiled leaves.

  27. moe99 said on October 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    I’m on vaca­tion, vis­it­ing my son at macalester col­lege but I love the look!

  28. alex said on October 3rd, 2008 at 2:26 pm

    Hey, cooz, my sister-in-law down in Mar­ri­etta, GA, has a friend who has started a busi­ness sell­ing ingre­di­ents for authen­tic Indian food — ready-mixed pack­ets of spices. You sup­ply the meat and veg­gies. The dishes I’ve tried so far are pretty darned good.

  29. Gasman said on October 3rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    It is inter­est­ing that the con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nists seem to be lin­ing up in res­ig­na­tion that Obama is going to win. Some of them are even crit­i­cal of the actual con­tent of what McCain and Palin are say­ing. Oth­ers like Noo­nan, are obvi­ously unim­pressed, but keep their remarks osten­si­bly private.

    Krautham­mer, how­ever, seems to be con­ced­ing an Obama vic­tory, but lim­its his crit­i­cisms to McCain’s cam­paign strat­egy of going to the “hail mary” pass too many times. Krautham­mer con­tin­ues to try and trot out all of the dis­cred­ited charges of Obama being unfit because of his per­sonal asso­ci­a­tions. If we apply the same met­ric to McCain and Palin, I think they are even more vul­ner­a­ble with their per­sonal asso­ci­a­tion bag­gage. Why the dou­ble stan­dard for Rs and Ds? I think that the over­whelm­ing reliance upon hyp­o­crit­i­cal dou­ble stan­dards is one of the big rea­sons that the Rs did so poorly in 2006. I sus­pect it will lead to fur­ther R losses this year as well as an Obama vic­tory. Let us hope that it is also the last elec­tion when Rs place all of their eggs in the fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian basket.

    Maybe the Rs will learn some­thing from the spank­ing they are about to receive.

  30. Catherine said on October 3rd, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    As some­one who has tried many of the pos­si­ble work-family setups, I’m always inter­ested in other people’s child­care and fam­ily arrange­ments. Sarah Palin’s is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because it’s got so many vari­ables. I’d like to learn more. The only thing I’ve learned along the way is that “what works” is a mov­ing tar­get. The setup that worked last month, even, might not be work­ing this month. Flex­i­bil­ity is key, and it takes pretty egre­gious behav­ior for me to start going all judgy. Last thing on this is that my 8 YO is always first in line to hold the babies, and she’s actu­ally pretty good at it — with super­vi­sion, of course.

  31. moe99 said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:00 pm

    Finally on a decent pub­lic com­puter at the library at Macalester. The best com­ment I heard about the debate last night came from a his­to­rian at George Mason Uni­ver­sity who said Palin came across as “Gid­get goes to Washington.”

    Sat through a dis­crete math class this morn­ing with my son and it was all Greek to me. Gotta look up Fibonacci since they cov­ered Fibonacci num­ber sets.

  32. Dave K. said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    Nancy, I’m cer­tainly not qual­i­fied to weigh in on the scarf but I love the jacket. Just go for it, “…with­out blinkin’…”. (Sorry, it just slipped out). Thought I’d give Joe a break so I tried to lis­ten to Rush today. Fri­day is “Open Forum” call-in day. He started around noon, I lis­tened for 10 min. before meet­ing my wife for lunch. Got back to my truck around 1:00 and he was just about to take the first call. I missed almost a full hour of Rush being Rush. Thank good­ness for slow service!

    His take on the debate, “Sarah mopped the floor with him!” He praised her for refus­ing to answer ques­tions, say­ing that she was sim­ply refus­ing to be sub­jected to any­thing like Katie Couric’s “gotcha” ques­tion­ing, or worse yet her “vicious follow-up questions”.

    Damn, let’s just talk about Nancy’s jacket some more.

  33. coozledad said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    Alex: I’m glad to hear Indian food is catch­ing on. It hasn’t been very long since my wife and I had to travel to DC or New York to eat even stan­dard North­ern Indian food. Now there are a lot of South­ern Indian buf­fets rel­a­tively close by, along with food stores boast­ing library-like col­lec­tions of pick­les and spices.
    I vis­ited one the last time I was in Cary, and pur­chased what I thought was a condi­ment. The pro­pri­etor told me it was in fact a pow­er­ful lax­a­tive.
    I guess I’ll have to learn Sanskrit.

  34. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:41 pm

    Dave, that is hys­ter­i­cal. “Vicious follow-up ques­tions”, indeed. Outrageous!

    Re baby-holding: I agree, Cather­ine, that young kids can be fine w/ babies. It didn’t bother me that Piper held Trig while she was seated w/ grown-ups nearby at the con­ven­tion. But last night, hav­ing her handed to him while she was stand­ing and walk­ing, w/ no one obvi­ously wat­chin­ing her, seemed a lit­tle out of line.

  35. nancy said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm

    I think a lot of kids with Down Syn­drome have poor mus­cle tone in infancy.

  36. LAMary said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm

    Speak­ing of babies, one of my co-workers just invited me to her daughter’s baby shower. I’ve never met her daugh­ter, and I know the daugh­ter is hav­ing her third kid by a third dad at the age of 20. I fig­ure she needs things des­per­ately, so I’ll send along a Tar­get gift card or some­thing, but I have to say I find it pretty annoy­ing I was invited. Jeez.

  37. brian stouder said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    baby shower…her third kid by a third dad at the age of 20

    sounds more like a ‘baby monsoon’!

    a slight digres­sion; I have many friends/co-workers who are died-in-the-wool R’s, and who have no use for Obama at all; and over the past week many of them (the count is cur­rently at 4) have essen­tially given up hope that McCain will win.…and they all pro­ceed to tell me ‘now it will all be YOUR fault!’

    I think there is a strong note of fatigue in that sentiment…Bush is com­plete bust at this point.…but also there is almost a hint of remorse; almost as if they are seek­ing for­give­ness, while warn­ing that Obama sup­port­ers won’t be for­given (to over­state the case)

  38. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    In fact, Nancy, peo­ple w/ Down syn­drome have poor mus­cle tone through­out their lives. Wikipedia, of course, has a detailed descrip­tion of its manifestations.

  39. deborah said on October 3rd, 2008 at 3:58 pm

    ‘She is not a per­son of thought but of action.’ Per­son­ally, I like my veeps to be able to do two things at once. Like walk and chew gum or, say, think and act. I lis­tened to the debate on NPR and thought I had tuned in to Prairie Home Com­pan­ion by mis­take and was lis­tenin’ to Sue Scott, gosh darn it.

  40. Jeff Borden said on October 3rd, 2008 at 4:04 pm

    Brian,

    I think your cowork­ers are begin­ning to under­stand just how badly the Wee Man from Craw­ford has screwed the Repub­li­can Party and that an entire gen­er­a­tion will look upon him as this generation’s Her­bert Hoover.

    The dam­age he and the neo­cons have wrought is so deep, so dev­as­tat­ing and so expen­sive that we will be a gen­er­a­tion repair­ing it. That’s assum­ing our nation doesn’t go bank­rupt first.

    These guys didn’t loot the coun­try. They strip-mined it.

  41. Gasman said on October 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm

    Palin’s debate prep notes have been leaked. They explain much about her performance:

    http://​polit​i​cal​wire​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​0​3​/​l​e​a​k​e​d​_​f​r​o​m​_​p​a​l​i​n​s​_​d​e​b​a​t​e​_​p​r​e​p.html

    I am struck by the per­cep­tions of those few that rated Palin the win­ner of the debate. They seem drawn to her not because of what she says, but because of how she says it. They have reduced her per­for­mance a kind of campy hill­billy pan­tomime replete with Mussolini-esque chin juts, sneers a la Cheney, winks, nods, and the ever present beauty queen smile, all of which they heartily approve. Add to that the white trash folksy jive and you have a the­ater of the absurd for the “less learnin’ iz good” crowd. It is hard to imag­ine any set­ting nation­ally or inter­na­tion­ally where such con­duct would be use­ful for a pres­i­dent or vice pres­i­dent. Thank­fully, it appeals to a scant few.

    I guess I can excuse Limbaugh’s reac­tion; he was prob­a­bly semi-comatose from the Oxy­con­tin. She prob­a­bly made sense to him. Noo­nan, how­ever, is obvi­ously grov­el­ing for for­give­ness for her unbeknownst-to-her live mic inci­dent where she got caught, unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, telling the truth. With the likes of Will, Parker, Zakarias, et al ques­tion­ing her com­pe­tency, it is becom­ing harder and harder to con­tend that W3 is indeed pres­i­den­tial material.

  42. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    Brian, on the notion of becom­ing the ones who are respon­si­ble, I find this video of Obama speak­ing to the staff in his Chicago head­quar­ters very encour­ag­ing. I’ve posted it before, I think, but, if you missed it, it’s worth tak­ing a look at. (There’s a shorter ver­sion some­where, but I couldn’t locate it. The nut of this is toward the end.)

    I like it because he makes clear that he knows that peo­ple are really depend­ing on him to win and to do things that will make their lives bet­ter. There’s no guar­an­tee that he’ll be able to do that, espe­cially since our dif­fi­cul­ties seem to have got­ten worse since this tape was made.

    But I have real faith that he will always be try­ing and that he is smart enough to let peo­ple know exactly what he is try­ing to do and why. That’s a much approach to cre­at­ing and sus­tain­ing sup­port for poli­cies that might require sac­ri­fice or take time to bear fruit than scar­ing peo­ple to death, which has been the approach of the cur­rent White House occupant.

  43. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    I have an inter­mit­tent tech­ni­cal prob­lem that I’ll just men­tion here. I don’t want to clog up a good con­ver­sa­tion. Here’s the deal: Some­times, when I’m try­ing to watch videos, they hang. That is, after about the first two sec­onds, they just stop run­ning. Less fre­quently, I’ll encounter one where the video plays, but there’s no sound.

    Most often, if I shut down my browser (using the Task Man­ager in Fire­fox) or restart the com­puter, the video will play, but that doesn’t always work.

    I’m run­ning Vista and using the most recent ver­sion of Fire­fox as my browser. To me, this sounds like some kind of soft­ware com­pat­i­bil­ity prob­lem, but I have no idea what it might be. The fact that it only hap­pens inter­mit­tently is espe­cially puz­zling. Until just now, I’d had a good two or three days w/ no prob­lems, which is rare. Gen­er­ally, the break­downs occur more frequently.

    If any­one has any ideas about things to try, I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing them. Am going out for a while now, but will check back in a few hours.

  44. MichaelG said on October 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    Moe  —  “Gid­get goes to Wash­ing­ton.” I love it.

    My daugh­ter was a math major. I idly picked up one of her text books one time. It meant noth­ing to me. Noth­ing at all. The whole thing was writ­ten in some kind of alien script.

    Trader Joe’s has a good selec­tion of Indian foods. There is a selec­tion of pre-done ones in pouches that you heat in the microwave or in hot water. They’re not bad at all. Also pretty inex­pen­sive. Just don’t think of the pro­cess­ing facil­ity in India where the stuff was pre­pared and pack­aged while you eat.

  45. joodyb said on October 3rd, 2008 at 5:28 pm

    i know how you feel about Rachel Z., nancy, but let me just say: I die.
    the j. peter­man cat­a­log may be gone, but the esthetic lives. + leather ought to be mak­ing its umpteenth rebel-fashion come­back as kate is ready for it.

  46. joodyb said on October 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    oh, and wel­come to the Twins, Moe.

  47. Gasman said on October 3rd, 2008 at 6:02 pm

    W3 is whin­ing about Katie Couric’s unfair treat­ment of her. Palin said, “I did feel there were a lot of things she was miss­ing in terms of an oppor­tu­nity to ask what a VP can­di­date stands for, what the val­ues are that are rep­re­sented in our ticket.” More here:

    http://​polit​i​calticker​.blogs​.cnn​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​0​3​/​p​a​l​i​n​-​s​a​y​s​-​o​b​a​m​a​-​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​s​-​d​i​s​q​u​a​l​i​f​y​-​h​i​m​-​f​o​r​-​t​h​e​-​p​r​e​s​i​d​e​n​c​y​/​#​m​o​r​e​-22504

    What spe­cific ques­tions did Palin think were unfair? I actu­ally was sur­prised that Couric’s line of ques­tion­ing was as per­ti­nent as it was. I was also impressed that she would not let Palin sim­ply blus­ter her way around ques­tions with­out address­ing them.

    What does Palin think were the ques­tions Couric should have asked? “Tell me Gov­er­nor, what are your thoughts on acces­soriz­ing with fur?” Or bet­ter yet, “Gov­er­nor Palin, Amer­ica is dying to know how you remain so gosh darn perky?”

    What spe­cific ques­tions did Palin think were unfair? I actu­ally was sur­prised that Couric’s line of ques­tion­ing was as per­ti­nent as it was. I was also impressed that she would not let Palin sim­ply blus­ter her way around ques­tions with­out address­ing them. I guess that any ques­tion that was deemed less than def­er­en­tial was unfair. Also unfair, any line of ques­tion­ing that made poor Cari­bou Barbie’s head hurt from any unplanned think­ing. Oops! I just exposed myself as a hater.

    She seems to be self inflated from last night’s per­for­mance. Unless she and her han­dlers are care­ful, she might feel so embold­ened that she does or says some­thing really stu­pid. She really is a loose canon.

  48. alex said on October 3rd, 2008 at 6:02 pm

    If any­one has any ideas about things to try, I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing them.

    An Apple.

  49. Jolene said on October 3rd, 2008 at 6:43 pm

    Very funny, Alex. You’re prob­a­bly right, but I was hop­ing for a solu­tion that didn’t involve a large out­lay of cash.

  50. crinoidgirl said on October 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    Hmm­mmm, Jolene, I use Fire­fox on both my work lap­top (XP) and home PC (Vista), with no probs.

    I’m think­ing it’s more your con­nec­tion than the software.

    OTOH, what ver­sion of FF are you using? The cur­rent release, or the beta? Have you tried using another browser, like IE (god for­bid), or Opera? With what results?

  51. crinoidgirl said on October 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    And in case y’all are won­der­ing, most of us big ol’ dykes have a crush on Rachel, as well. (What a brain!)

  52. brian stouder said on October 3rd, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Jolene — Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!

    That Obama speech at his cam­paign head­quar­ters was excel­lent! I was some­what taken aback by the jerky cin­ema verite’ qual­ity of it (I think they had to have used three cam­eras, and edited the thing together so that it had continuity).…but by halfway in I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion to things like that — I was smil­ing broadly and laugh­ing out loud at the nominee’s jokes (and what was the issue, toward the begin­ning, when the two work­ers fooled with some­thing or other?).

    Any­way — you’re right; Obama clearly rec­og­nizes the gen­uine weight of the respon­si­bil­i­ties careen­ing toward him.

    At lunch today, some friends and I hashed over last night’s debate, and one thing that sev­eral of us agreed about was — Obama is our Bobby Kennedy — our “real-deal”, real thing, true belief guy (the old­est of us [includ­ing me] was 7 years old when RFK’s life was ended). We’ve voted against some can­di­dates, and set­tled for oth­ers, and cast a vote or two on cruise-control.…but Barack Obama car­ries our hopes and our aspi­ra­tions with him; he rep­re­sents the best of our gen­er­a­tion, and not just inci­den­tally embod­ies an epochal (if lit­er­ally super­fi­cial) shift in United States social and polit­i­cal history.

    If it comes to pass that Barack Obama is inau­gu­rated as the 44th pres­i­dent of the United States, just 3 weeks before the bicen­ten­nial of the birth of Abra­ham Lin­coln, the 16th (and great­est ever) Pres­i­dent of the United States, pride­ful tears will almost cer­tainly stream down my face. The inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama of Illi­nois, if it comes to pass, will make for an alto­gether fit­ting and proper com­mem­o­ra­tion of the life and legacy of Lin­coln. Obama’s intel­li­gence and his expan­sive, inclu­sive view of Amer­ica seem (to me) to emu­late the best of Lincoln’s legacy of shrewd polit­i­cal lead­er­ship, and a view of gov­ern­ment as an agent of pos­i­tive change.

    Huz­zah!

  53. crinoidgirl said on October 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    Frost advi­sory tonight!

    I’m bring­ing the toma­toes in now.

  54. Deborah said on October 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    I’m back home in Chicago from a trip to Des Moines for busi­ness from Mon­day through Thurs­day. While I was in Des Moines McCain was speak­ing less than a mile away. Weird. I watched the video of McCain speak­ing to the Des Moines Reg­is­ter folks. Geez he gave me the creeps with his eye squint­ing and chin thrust­ing. He was soooo angry. I am not a news­pa­per reader any­more (sorry Nancy) but I read the Des Moines Reg­is­ter every morn­ing while I was there and was very impressed with it. I’m curi­ous about it’s rep­u­ta­tion in the news­pa­per world. Where does it stand com­pared to other papers? I received USA Today every morn­ing at the hotel and the Reg­is­ter just seemed to beat it in every way shape and form. I was heart­ened to find out that Obama is doing very well in Iowa. Yes!

  55. joodyb said on October 3rd, 2008 at 10:32 pm

    those crazy Cowle­ses sold the reg­is­ter to Gan­nett in the mid-80s, but it remained a respected paper that had quite a hey­day in the 90s. google Geneva Over­holser. a lot of indus­try drama. more than a dozen pulitzers, i’m sure. a lot of pride in elec­tion report­ing because of iowa pri­mary. land­ing a job there was a plum for bud­ding polit­i­cal reporters. iowa is a writ­ing hotbed: there’s the iowa writ­ers work­shop. and the infa­mous dav­en­port busi­ness fel­low­ship!
    the reg­is­ter build­ing is an amaz­ing place, too. i’d have told you to go there if i’d known!

  56. Gasman said on October 4th, 2008 at 12:28 am

    Thanks to my Mom in Fort Wayne, I learned that Sarah Palin is a post tur­tle. You say you don’t know what a post tur­tle is?

    The story goes like this:

    After sutur­ing a cut on a 75 year old Texas rancher, whose hand had been caught in a gate while work­ing cat­tle, the doc­tor struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with the rancher. Even­tu­ally the topic got around to can­di­dates — specif­i­cally Sarah Palin

    The old rancher said, “well, ya know, Sarah is a post tur­tle”. Not being famil­iar with the term, the doc­tor asked him what a ‘post tur­tle’ was.

    The old rancher said when you’re dri­ving down a coun­try road, and you come across a fence post with a tur­tle bal­anced on top, that’s a post tur­tle. The old rancher noticed a puz­zled look on the doctor’s face, so he con­tin­ued to explain.

    “You know she didn’t get up there by her­self, she doesn’t belong up there, and she doesn’t know what to do while she is up there, and you have to just won­der what kind of idiot put her up there in the first place.”

  57. Gasman said on October 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am

    crinoid­girl,
    We have a snow advi­sory (3 – 6″) above 8500′ for tonight. I hope that it doesn’t freeze here, or my toma­toes and pep­pers will be fin­ished off. At least we don’t have the 2 – 6 feet pre­dicted like the San Juan Moun­tains in South­ern Col­orado (S.W. cor­ner, Durango, Sil­ver­ton, & Ouray). We’d planned on going to Ouray this week­end. Glad we didn’t. How­ever, the Albu­querque Bal­loon Fiesta may get rained or blown out.

    Once in your life, it is worth a trip to ABQ to see the Bal­loon Fiesta. This year will fea­ture around 700 bal­loons. Some days they all go up at once. I believe that you can watch it via web stream­ing video, on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day at 9 – 11 a.m. East­ern (7 – 9 a.m. Moun­tain) here:

    http://​tinyurl​.com/​3lqfxo

    If that does not work, go to Koat​.com and look for “Bal­lon Fiesta” links.

  58. MichaelG said on October 4th, 2008 at 2:01 am

    Wow! Big weather here too! Temps plunged into the six­ties. Nor­mal at this time of the year is mid eight­ies. We are expect­ing our first real rain since Feb 24. So sez the TV weather peepul.

  59. Dexter said on October 4th, 2008 at 2:39 am

    There’s a Downs man in my neigh­bor­hood; I know not where he lives exactly, but most days I see him once or twice . First, he rides his big tri­cy­cle towards the busi­ness dis­trict in late morn­ing, then in late after­noon he walks past exer­cis­ing his dog.
    He is about the same age as my daugh­ter . My daugh­ter pro­gressed through school here, moved on to a large uni­ver­sity and never came back to this small city, choos­ing to live in the fif­teenth largest city in the USA.
    The man never had that chance; I’d see him through the years on the pages of the local paper hold­ing another Spe­cial Olympics tro­phy, now I observe him as he per­forms his rou­tines . Is he happy, never hav­ing had grand worldly expe­ri­ences, hav­ing a life con­tained in this small burgh? I don’t know, but lately I won­der.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    The motorcyclist’s jacket is fine, wear it well.
    I never had a leather jacket; I fan­cied army field jack­ets.
    I had a few army fatigue blouses (shirts) and my field jacket when I came home from the army , and I wore them out over the ensu­ing years. My favorite mil­i­tary rag-shirt was not mine, how­ever. It mys­te­ri­ously appeared at my dad’s home; Dad had no idea where it had come from…maybe a long-ago work­man had for­got­ten it?…but I knew it was hang­ing in his closet. I had stopped in for a minute on my way to a mid­night shift at the fac­tory and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were on the TV singing “Hard Rain(‘s Gonna Fall)”.
    I noticed Dylan had on a USMC fatigue jacket exactly like the one in Dad’s closet. I thought that since Bob Dylan thinks it cool, by god so do I! That damn fatigue jacket was in tat­ters but I wore it for years.

  60. Jolene said on October 4th, 2008 at 8:45 am

    Dex­ter: Your descrip­tion of the con­trast between your daugh­ter grow­ing up and going away and the man in your neigh­bor­hood w/ Down syn­drome stay­ing and repeat­ing the same activ­i­ties was, for me, very poignant.

    I have a cousin, now in his early 60s, who has Down syn­drome, and your descrip­tion exactly fits how things have been in our fam­ily. As kids, we played kids’ games w/ him, to the extent that he was able, but, of course, we all grew up and moved on, while he remained a kid.

    At one point, he was press­ing his par­ents to buy him a car, and their response was to argue that “the other boys” in the fam­ily didn’t have cars yet. But those boys were my nephews – 20 or more years younger than he was.

    Although his dif­fi­cul­ties com­pli­cated the lives of his par­ents and sis­ter enor­mously (mostly because, for many years, his father wouldn’t accept the real­ity of his cir­cum­stances), he has had a rea­son­ably happy life. The tough part is now. His par­ents have died, and he is liv­ing in a group home. He does pretty well there, but is lonely.

    My aunt once told me that she prayed that she would live at least one more day than he did so that he wouldn’t be left on his own, but that prayer wasn’t answered.

  61. Jolene said on October 4th, 2008 at 9:11 am

    On another topic, Gene Wein­garten has a touch­ing essay in this week’s WaPo mag­a­zine. It’s about old dogs and will likely bring tears to the eyes of any­one who has ever loved one. It’s very Gene, both whim­si­cal and per­cep­tive, per­sonal and philosophical.

    The essay is from a book called Old Dogs Are the Best Dogs, just out. I’m guess­ing that, come Christ­mas, it’ll be a big seller.

  62. moe99 said on October 4th, 2008 at 10:25 am

    Ok, Jolene, I’m in tears. What a won­der­ful story about Harry. My black lab is 10 now and I’m watch­ing his inevitable decline, as I have my other dogs through the years. My first word as a child was not “MaMa,” it was “dog­gie” with a soft ‘g’ and I grew up with a vari­ety of dogs in Defi­ance, who were never chained or fenced and as result, many died and only one that I knew of lived to old age, because my par­ents gave him to a stu­dent at Defi­ance Col­lege who had adopted him on one of his many pere­gri­na­tions (he was an unneutered bas­set hound named ‘Digby’). Gene Wein­garten has it just right when he talks about how dogs love us wholly and unashamedly. We are so much the richer for their being here.

  63. alex said on October 4th, 2008 at 11:25 am

    Gas­man, I’m nuts for New Mex­ico green chilies. Once brought back a sty­ro­foam cooler full of them frozen hard and wrapped in news­pa­per. They sur­vived the jour­ney — includ­ing an overnight lay­over in the Dal­las air­port on a hundred-degree night. (That was the year of the Texas sum­mer from hell.)

    Do you know what the genus is? Think I’d have any luck try­ing to grow them in Indiana?

    ###

    O.J.‘s been put away! Yay!

  64. Bill said on October 4th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    Gas­man: Hope the weather gets bet­ter. We’re com­ing to Albu­querque for the Bal­loon Fiesta next week­end. Any good restau­rant suggestions?

  65. Ricardo said on October 4th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    I lis­tened to the first part of the debate on radio because I was still dri­ving home on my 30 mile com­mute. Every time Palin spoke I felt ill to my stom­ach. When I finally got home and turned on the TV, the ill feel­ing left.

    If I had fol­lowed Palin’s exam­ple and watched her on TV with the sound off, I prob­a­bly would have enjoyed her on the debate. And, to the nat­ural con­clu­sion, hav­ing the TV and radio off and not think­ing about Sarah Palin, I actu­ally feel pretty good.

    And why is it, she has to lie about EVERYTHING? It is all so eas­ily dis­proved. One per­son described her brain as being so crammed with sound bites and talk­ing points it is like Fib­ber Mcgee’s closet. When the door opens, words come crash­ing out in any kind of ran­dom order and mak­ing no sense.

  66. Dorothy said on October 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    Oh lord but I am sob­bing after read­ing that arti­cle about Harry, Jolene! In the back of my mind, while read­ing it, all I could think about is my cousin Nora, who had to put her beloved Chesa­peake Bay Retriever to sleep on Thurs­day night. I haven’t had the heart to call her for the details. She just sent out a text mes­sage to a bunch of us to say it was sud­den, and that Clancey had can­cer. Clance had been diag­nosed as dia­betic a cou­ple of years ago, too, and they duti­fully gave him his shots twice a day. I hope he was able to give them a kiss good-bye, too.

  67. Ricardo said on October 4th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Jolene: if you are run­ning Vista, add more RAM to your com­puter. You can run Task Man­ager to see how much of your RAM is being used, it will max out at 80% then it will begin swap­ping pro­grams to disk (you will hear your disk drive con­stantly run­ning). The last com­puter I worked on, I added 1.5GB to a note­book with 1GB exist­ing (using 80% or 800MB con­stantly). After the upgrade it was con­stantly using 1000GB con­stantly so you can see it was con­stricted and thrash­ing. The extra RAM is pretty cheap and the result­ing per­for­mance was great. I don’t know why Vista needs to gob­ble up so much RAM, but at least I know how to fix that problem.

  68. Jolene said on October 4th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    How do I deter­mine how much RAM I have? I’ve already added some, but per­haps I need more. Is there an upper limit?

  69. Jolene said on October 4th, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    One last thing about Palin (Well, at least I’ll try not to keep harp­ing about her): Andrew Sul­li­van links to a snip­pet from a debate that she was in as a guber­na­to­r­ial can­di­date. What’s inter­est­ing about it is the absence of the heavy-handed folksi­ness. The accent is there, but there’s no wink­ing or nose-wrinkling and no “gosh, golly, darn, gee whiz.” She just talks in a fairly rea­son­able way.

    After hav­ing this pointed out, I real­ized that, the same was true for the C-SPAN inter­views I linked to a week or so ago. That is, the “aw, shucks” style was much less preva­lent. She wasn’t necess­sar­ily bet­ter on logic, and the odd way of drop­ping words was still there, but the absence of all that goofi­ness made her much eas­ier to take. And the con­trast makes the goofi­ness seem worse, because it sug­gests that her style is all just part of the show. Ugh.

  70. mark said on October 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    Jolene:

    In an ear­lier post, you wrote about Obama’s poli­cies “that might require sac­ri­fice or take time to bear fruit.” I’m sure you know more about most of his poli­cies than I do. In all seri­ous­ness, which of them do you think are call­ing for sacrifice?

    I know that the top 5% of wage earn­ers are asked to sac­ri­fice through higher income taxes. Who else will be mak­ing sacrifices?

    Among my rea­sons for not sup­port­ing Obama is my belief that it is unwise to fos­ter class envy or to cre­ate a coun­try where 50% or more think that the key to ever more ser­vices is to just tap the top 5 or 10%.

    My father made sac­ri­fices for his col­lege degree. He delayed it to work because he had no money. Mil­i­tary ser­vice inter­vened (and pro­vided GI bill ben­e­fits), but by then he had a wife, two kids and a third on the way. He went to a Uni­ver­sity 30 miles away, full time, while also main­tain­ing a full time job as a tool and die maker for Chrysler. No par­ties, foot­ball games, etc.

    I made much smaller sac­ri­fices. Between col­lege and law school, I bor­rowed over $80,000 (in the late 70s, early 80s), to attend pretty good pri­vate schools. Below mar­ket rate gov­ern­ment loans. I worked sum­mers and a few hours a week dur­ing school. But i went straight through and usu­ally had a lit­tle spend­ing money in my pocket. No big spring breaks for me, though.

    This is an area where Obama appar­ently thinks peo­ple are cur­rently sac­ri­fic­ing too much, as he sup­ports new and addi­tional finan­cial assistance.

    Help me under­stand where Obama wants nore sac­ri­fice. At present, I tend to think of his gen­eral approach as: the wealthy have more than they need, so we take a lit­tle more of what they earned to do lots of good things.

    I liked your com­ments about sac­ri­fice and tak­ing a longer view of what we need. I just don’t see it reflected in the Obama poli­cies that I think I know.

    Per­haps this will make it eas­ier: What sac­ri­fice will the typ­i­cal per­son, mak­ing 40K to 75Km be asked to make for his/her county by a Pres­i­dent Obama?

  71. Jolene said on October 4th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

    Mark: Great ques­tion. I don’t have a quick answer and am on my way out the door — to vol­un­teer at the local Obama cam­paign office. Will write when I get back. Of course, some­one else can answer in the meantime.

  72. MichaelG said on October 4th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

    You’re absolutely right, Mark. We don’t want “class envy” . So to avoid any dan­ger of “class envy” we should give the rich­est 5% another large tax cut on top of all the other cuts they’ve got­ten in the last eight years. We cer­tainly wouldn’t want to gang up on the poor saps.

  73. Julie Robinson said on October 4th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    Hey Mark – I went to col­lege in the 70’s, too, paid out of state tuition and my last year it just topped $1000/semester. You could get a good sum­mer job and pay for most of the cost. Our son worked full time for the county this sum­mer and earned a lit­tle over $4000, which didn’t cover his expenses for one semes­ter. He sac­ri­fices by liv­ing at home and rid­ing his bike to class. Col­lege costs have gone up expo­nen­tially over what stu­dents can earn. It’s ridiculous.

  74. brian stouder said on October 4th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    My father made sac­ri­fices for his col­lege degree. He delayed it to work because he had no money. Mil­i­tary ser­vice inter­vened (and pro­vided GI bill ben­e­fits), but by then he had a wife, two kids and a third on the way

    Indeed, Obama’s edu­ca­tion plans include a tax credit for the first $4000 of tuition, on con­di­tion that com­mu­nity ser­vice hours are per­formed — so that we don’t have to fight a shoot­ing war in order to extend sec­ondary edu­ca­tion ben­e­fits to young people.

    In the wake of the finan­cial mar­kets deba­cle, I’ve been pon­der­ing the “what do we get” part of the equa­tion. I’m about full-up with com­men­ta­tors who ful­mi­nate against “minori­ties and poor peo­ple” who had “no busi­ness” get­ting a mortgage.

    Re-read the his­tory of the Panic of 1873, caused in part by the col­lapse of Jay Cooke for example.

    from Wikipedia -

    After the (Civil) war, Cooke became inter­ested in the devel­op­ment of the north­west, and in 1870 his firm financed the con­struc­tion of the North­ern Pacific Rail­way. Cooke fell in love with Duluth, Min­nesota, and decided he must make it suc­cess­ful, the new Chicago. To this end he began pur­chas­ing rail­ways with the dream of reach­ing the Pacific to bring goods through Duluth into the Great Lakes ship­ping sys­tem and on to the mar­kets of Europe. In advanc­ing the money for the work, the firm over­es­ti­mated its cap­i­tal, and at the approach of the Panic of 1873 it was forced to sus­pend. Cooke him­self was forced into bank­ruptcy. Jay Cooke was heav­ily involved in finan­cial scan­dals with the Cana­dian Gov­ern­ment and caused the Prime Min­is­ter Sir John A. Mac­don­ald to lose his office in the 1873 elec­tion. Cooke’s shares in the North­ern Pacific Rail­way were pur­chased for pen­nies on the dol­lar by George Stephen (Baron Mount Stephen) and Dou­glas Smith (Lord Strath­cona) who then fin­ished build­ing the Cana­dian Pacific Railway.

    So, there WAS a last­ing pub­lic good (the expanded rail­road net­work), but also plenty of polit­i­cal scan­dal to go around (includ­ing for Pres­i­dent US Grant), and gen­uinely hard times for reg­u­lar peo­ple “on Main Street”.

    I think the more folks from the lower end of the eco­nomic spec­trum become home­own­ers, the BETTER for every­one; a last­ing pub­lic good, indeed. And indeed, the more folks who live in their homes, the more value that EVERY home­owner (from top to bot­tom) real­izes. Yes — the mar­ket over-heated, and yes — there was a bub­ble; and no — I don’t really like the idea of the $700 bil­lion (so far) hit we all took.…but if it keeps gen­er­ally Hard Times at bay, and moves us for­ward to rene­go­ti­ated mort­gages for employed, over-extended peo­ple, then I’m down for that.

  75. Julie Robinson said on October 4th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Did I say that our son sac­ri­fices by liv­ing at home? It goes both ways!

  76. Gasman said on October 4th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    Alex,
    There are sev­eral vari­etal chiles that they grow around NM. My favorite, and the hottest, are the Chi­mayo. They are con­sid­ered and heir­loom vari­ety. I think the most com­mon ones are the NM Big Jim 6 – 4. The chiles that they grow near Hatch grow big­ger than the ones that grow up north. It may sim­ply be the alti­tude, the north­ern climes being much higher. I think that you could prob­a­bly grow any of them in Indi­ana. Plant them as soon as you can after the first frost. Full sun, but don’t over water. It gets hot enough in Indi­ana to make the pep­pers feel at home. To be sure, speak Span­ish to them. That should help.

  77. Gasman said on October 4th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    Bill,
    I’m kind of assum­ing that if you’re com­ing to ABQ that you are look­ing for North­ern NM cui­sine (don’t call it Mex­i­can). Old Town offers sev­eral good options. I would sug­gest spend­ing an after­noon in Old Town. For last year’s Bal­loon Fiesta we took an out of town friend to La Placita Din­ing Rooms. As a rel­a­tively new New Mex­i­can, I enjoyed it. (If your fam­ily has been in NM less than 400 years, you are a new­comer.) Truth be told, there are many good restau­rants on the Plaza in Old town. A place that I want to go is Church Street Cafe. I’ll include a cou­ple of links to help.

    http://​www​.albu​querque​old​town​.com/

    http://​www​.laplac​ita​din​ingroom​.com/

    http://​www​.church​street​cafe​.com/

    Be sure to bring fairly heavy jack­ets. As of this week­end it’s start­ing to be cool to cold in the morn­ing. The morn­ing temp will prob­a­bly con­tinue to drop through­out the week. By after­noon it’s warm to hot.

  78. Gasman said on October 4th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    Brian,
    Inter­est­ingly enough, the lat­est push by con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors has been to launch a new attack on “minori­ties and poor peo­ple” who had “no busi­ness” get­ting mort­gages. This is poorly dis­guised racist code. I sus­pected with Obama as the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­nee, the big­ots would be unable to restrain them­selves from inject­ing race into the elec­tion. How easy it is to blame those crafty “minori­ties and poor peo­ple” who sub­tly conned all of those benev­o­lent bankers and CEOs. They might as well don their sheets proudly.

  79. Joe Kobiela said on October 4th, 2008 at 8:35 pm

    Mark,
    Please stick around.
    I have asked a few of these ques­tions my self, but the only answers I seem to get are yelling and scream­ing and being called all sorts of names. I can’t fig­ure out how you can give a tax cut to 95% of the Amer­i­can peo­ple when only 70% pay taxes. How do you give a tax cut to some­one who doesn’t pay taxes? Also Obama keeps talk­ing about the rich and using 250,000 as a cut off. I won­der how many peo­ple do not real­ize that if you and your wife have a com­bined 100,000 in salary, plus a 100,000 dol­lar house plus 50,000 in sav­ings 401 and stock, you qual­ify as rich, at least the way it has been explained to me, it’s not your salary but your worth.
    Peo­ple on the left claim every thing Palin and McCain say are lies, and peo­ple on the right say every­thing obam says is a lie. who do you believe? The one thing I did like about the debate was when Palin said, The Gov­ern­ment needs to get out of the way. Any way you look at it, right or left, they need to quit spend­ing so much of OUR money.
    So stick around Mark, and help the only other con­ser­v­a­tive that reads Mrs, Nall out.
    Joe

  80. Snarkworth said on October 4th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

    Joe, income taxes are cal­cu­lated against income, not net worth. You don’t pay income taxes on the value of your house or your sav­ings. Obama’s cut-off of $250,000 means that the vast major­ity of us won’t pay more income tax. Those who have done extremely well over the past eight years will pay more, which seems to me entirely fair.

  81. Bill said on October 4th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    Thanks, Gas­man. We’ll be in ABQ for 4 days so we’ll have plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to try out your sug­ges­tions. I’ll let you know how we do. I’m tak­ing my cam­era, so I may be able to share some pic­tures of the Bal­loon Fiesta.

  82. Gasman said on October 5th, 2008 at 12:07 am

    Joe,
    I can cite McCain/Palin lies. In abun­dance. I am not speak­ing of gen­er­al­i­ties or vague innu­endo, but spe­cific words linked to times and dates, usu­ally with accom­pa­ny­ing video that can be eas­ily dis­proved, in McCain’s case with video of him dis­prov­ing himself.

    If you can come up with sim­i­lar instances for Obama, please do so. So far all I’ve heard is “he did it too!” with not a shred of evi­dence to back it up. As I said in an ear­lier post to you, if you are going to make charges, you should at least be able to back them up with some­thing stronger than “because I say so.” If you want to be taken seri­ously, you need to but­tress your argu­ments with a lit­tle more intel­lec­tual meat.

    I am will­ing to cite chap­ter and verse for McCain/Palin lies. Can you do the same for Obama/Biden?

  83. Gasman said on October 5th, 2008 at 12:43 am

    Bill,
    Dig­i­tal cam­eras are best for Bal­loon Fiesta. Last 2 times we’ve gone I’ve shot in excess of 300 pic­tures each time. It is a mag­i­cal event that makes you feel like a lit­tle kid.

    If you can make it up to Santa Fe, there’s lots to do. The fall foliage is at its peak up toward the moun­tain at Ski Santa Fe. If not, take the Tram up to San­dia Peak in ABQ. The ride alone is worth­while, but you get great views of ABQ from atop the moun­tain and I’m sure that the foliage up there is in prime form right about now. I’ll post tomor­row night after watch­ing the 5 day weather forecast.

  84. alex said on October 5th, 2008 at 1:35 am

    Gas­man, the chilies I remem­ber were every­where. Even the McDon­alds’ had them on their burg­ers. Went to a Sonic on the way between the Albu­querque air­port and Santa Fe. Got an unusual case of the trots I refer to as the Bernalillo Burn.

  85. Dexter said on October 5th, 2008 at 2:03 am

    Oh god…that story about Harry the dog…I can’t stand it…my Labrador Retriever is ten and healthy but stiff sometimes…my best friend. I enjoy every minute I have with her dou­bly these days. I could not love her any more than I do.

  86. MarkH said on October 5th, 2008 at 4:54 am

    “…shred of evidence.”:

    http://​oba​mawtf​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​5​/​d​o​c​u​m​e​n​t​e​d​-​l​i​e​-​5​0​-​o​b​a​m​a​-​c​l​a​i​m​e​d​-​h​e​-​h​a​d.html

    All are doc­u­mented, most more so than oth­ers (Newsweek, WaPo, US News, St, Peters­burg Times, etc.) Stom­ach what you can, Gasman.

    Joe, I’ve been lurk­ing, with occa­sional post­ing, for years, have enjoyed all the com­ments, and posted when I’ve felt it con­tributed. I’m more in line with you, Danny, (lower case) mark and Jefft­mmo. More cen­ter than right, I guess.

    Speak­ing of which, I lament Jeff’s tem­po­rary depar­ture, but did I miss some­thing with Danny? He’s absent as well and it’s not evi­dent why. At least it’s not just you and mark.

  87. Jolene said on October 5th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    MarkH, the link you pro­vide is, to be polite, garbage. It’s a fact-checking site in the sense that The National Enquirer is a news­pa­per. There’s the occa­sional ele­ment of truth, I’m sure, but in only a few min­utes, I found numer­ous errors and omis­sions. In just one exam­ple, an excerpt from FactCheck​.org was trun­cated, com­pletely chang­ing its meaning.

    You’d do bet­ter to stick with orig­i­nal sources – in this case, the orig­i­nal factcheck­ing sites – rather than to rely on par­ti­san (or, more accu­rately, nutty) sites where peo­ple whose inter­ests are in defeat­ing Obama rather than in being objec­tive have pulled together bits of text that may or may not rep­re­sent the truth of the source from which they were drawn.

    I’m giv­ing you three pos­si­bil­i­ties, so you can cross-check what­ever issue it is that con­cerns you. But, seri­ously, stay away from that site you linked to. Read­ing that stuff could lead to per­ma­nent brain dam­age or, at least, to embar­rass­ment should you repeat what you learned there.

    __________________________________

    For info on the debates. From FactCheck​.org:

    McCain-Obama Debate

    Biden-Palin Debate

    From The Wash­ing­ton Post:

    Vice-Presidential Debate, Part I

    Palin Twists the Facts on Darfur

    VP Debate: Part II

    Pres­i­den­tial Debate Live Fact Check

    For more gen­eral info, go to these sites.

    FactCheck​.org home page: Deals w/ a wide vari­ety of issues from the cam­paign. An inde­pen­dent, non-partisan source. Exam­ines state­ments made by the can­di­dates and their cam­paigns, cam­paign adver­tis­ing, and Inter­net rumors.

    Wash­ing­ton Post Fact Checker: Fairly detailed analy­sis of state­ments made by can­di­dates and their cam­paigns. Has cute sys­tem in which they award “Pinoc­chios” to indi­cate how true the state­ment in ques­tion is.

    Poli​ti​fact​.com: A fact-checking site put together by The St.Petersburg Times and Con­gres­sional Quar­terly. Pro­vides analy­sis of debates (click Arti­cles tab), as well as the cam­paigns as a whole. Also has cute sys­tem for label­ing state­ments by can­di­dates and cam­paigns, includ­ing “Pants on Fire” for state­ments that go totally off the rail. Has links to still other fact-checking sites on lower right side of home page.

  88. Jolene said on October 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am

    I’ve won­dered about Danny too, MarkH. Are you out there, Danny?

  89. Jolene said on October 5th, 2008 at 7:46 am

    Low­er­case mark: Re the issue of sac­ri­fice and Obama’s poli­cies, I said, “But I have real faith that he will always be try­ing and that he is smart enough to let peo­ple know exactly what he is try­ing to do and why. That’s a much [bet­ter] approach to cre­at­ing and sus­tain­ing sup­port for poli­cies that might require sac­ri­fice or take time to bear fruit than scar­ing peo­ple to death, which has been the approach of the cur­rent White House occupant.”

    So, just to be clear, I was prais­ing what I see as Obama’s moral and intel­lec­tual seri­ous­ness and his will­ing­ness to say chal­leng­ing things, rather than spe­cific poli­cies that he has set forth. It was the idea that this approach would help him should he have to ask us to sac­ri­fice in some way that I was point­ing to, rather than already stated poli­cies that ask for such sacrifices.

    Still, I believe we can see in some of the things he’s said, the idea that he is will­ing to ask for sac­ri­fices. Before I go fur­ther, though, I should say that he has not always been a hero in this regard. For instance, nei­ther he nor Biden has been will­ing to say what changes in the poli­cies and pro­grams that they’ve pro­posed might be required, given our new com­mit­ment to pay our bankers $700 bil­lion. When pressed, they men­tioned delay­ing pro­posed increases in for­eign aid. I sus­pect most Amer­i­cans would not view such a delay as a hard­ship, even if they knew how piti­fully small is the amount of for­eign aid we offer com­pared to other rich nations.

    But he has some­times been will­ing to tell the truth when avoid­ing it would have been eas­ier. Early in the cam­paign, he gave a not-very-well-received speech in Detroit regard­ing the need for higher fuel effi­ciency stan­dards. News reports describ­ing the event made it clear that the peo­ple in the audi­ence sat on their hands, but, of course, he was right.

    On a more inti­mate level, he’s chal­lenged men, espe­cially African-American men, to act like grown-ups and take care of the chil­dren they father. I think Obama under­stands the prob­lems of the urban under­class inti­mately. He’s not of it, but he has cer­tainly seen it in more detail than McCain and, really, most national politi­cians. And that knowl­edge seems to have made him aware of both the impor­tance of the imped­i­ments that peo­ple liv­ing in poverty face and the impor­tance of grasp­ing oppor­tu­nity and of strug­gling forward.

    Not too long ago, he spoke at a gath­er­ing of minor­ity jour­nal­ists in Chicago and, when asked about affir­ma­tive action, said that he thought peo­ple w/ wealth and power had an oblig­a­tion to cre­ate lad­ders of oppor­tu­nity (or, at least, to sup­port poli­cies that cre­ate such lad­ders) and that peo­ple on the bot­tom were obliged to jump onto those lad­ders and do what­ever they could to pull them­selves up. He also talked about how affir­ma­tive action in, say, col­lege admis­sions is irrel­e­vant to many African-American and His­panic kids because a very high pro­por­tion of them have dropped out of school long before the ques­tion of whether to go to col­lege becomes relevant.

    There’s lots of evi­dence that early child­hood edu­ca­tion pro­grams, esp. pro­grams that involve par­ents in sup­port­ing their chil­dren, pro­mote edu­ca­tional achieve­ment, and Obama wants to invest in these pro­grams. Such pro­grams wouldn’t exactly require a sac­ri­fice of the par­ents, but they would require an invest­ment. Most impor­tant, they would empha­size that, what­ever the power of past and present racism, over­com­ing it requires indi­vid­ual effort, as well as gov­ern­men­tal action.

    The tuition sup­port he is offer­ing comes with a require­ment to con­tribute to the com­mu­nity in some way. That’s quite dif­fer­ent than the addi­tional tax cuts John McCain is offer­ing to the rich­est Amer­i­cans. I don’t think there’s a com­mu­nity ser­vice require­ment attached to that proposal.

    Rather than class envy, what I hear from Obama is that “we’re all in this together”. He is call­ing on peo­ple to think about their con­nec­tions to each other, not empha­siz­ing divisions.

  90. brian stouder said on October 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am

    One sub­ject that should be raised at Tuesday’s debate might be — the most unsta­ble bor­der in North Amer­ica — between Mex­ico and the US. David J Danelo wrote an inter­est­ing arti­cle about it in this month’s Pro­ceed­ings mag­a­zine, in which he points out that more than 2,500 drug-related killings have occurred in Mex­ico so far this year, with half of those in bor­der cities. A large pro­por­tion of the casu­al­ties (more than half) have been police officers.

    I found the arti­cle — or at least the stark num­bers — some­what stun­ning. There really is a “drug war” going — and not a metaphor­i­cal “war”, but a real shoot­ing war, and our next door neigh­bor is los­ing it.

    and then I saw this, today on msnbc

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​7​0​23393/

    More than 400 peo­ple have been killed in drug-related vio­lence in the city across from San Diego this year, includ­ing at least 49 this week. On Fri­day night, two men were found shot to death in the same empty lot near the ele­men­tary school where the 12 bod­ies were found Mon­day. Execution-style killings, behead­ings and shootouts have soared across Mex­ico since the army and fed­eral police inten­si­fied their fight against the drug trade nearly two years ago

    This is Iraq-like, only with­out the pho­to­genic IED detonations

  91. nancy said on October 5th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    Brian, one of my search terms in my night-shift edit­ing is “drug,” and I have been fol­low­ing this war, too. Did you hear about the heads-on-the-dance-floor caper? A bunch of deal­ers infil­trated a disco in enemy ter­ri­tory, and then stopped the show by rolling six or eight heads of their recently deceased ene­mies — and com­padres of the patrons — onto the dance floor.

    I can’t believe no one’s mak­ing a movie of this by now.

  92. mark said on October 5th, 2008 at 12:17 pm

    Jolene–

    Thanks. That was a prety good response, partly because I don’t think you exag­ger­ated what is there. A cou­ple of items (like his com­ments on energy policy/use) I had already thought of. The oth­ers reminded me of things I have heard or read but filed away.

    Of my many gripes with Bush, one of the largest con­cerns his fail­ure to mobi­lize the pop­u­la­tion fol­low­ing 9/11. After much thought, he urged us to go back to the malls and the­aters, leav­ing our mil­i­tary and future tax­pay­ers to bear the bur­den of our response. There are many things he could have sug­gested that would have had a long term impact.

    Health care is an area where nobody seems to be will­ing to sac­ri­fice any­thing. As a result, the sac­ri­fice falls rou­tinely upon the poor and occas­sion­ally on oth­ers, with no real ratio­nale for when that occurs. It con­tin­ues to amaze me that peo­ple earn­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars have insur­ance plans with only a $500 deductible and 50% copay on the next thou­sand or so.

    Food, cloth­ing and shel­ter are essen­tials, but things we hope peo­ple bud­get for. Edu­ca­tion, enter­tain­ment and sav­ings are less essen­tial, but still bud­get items. Why wouldn’t health care be treated the same.

    Years ago, when I worked with a pretty large law firm (we had sev­eral hun­dred insureds in our plan), I sug­gested that we con­sider a plan where the deductible and co-pay were tied to income. Deductible would be 3% of com­pen­sa­tion and co-pay would be half of the next 4% of com­pen­sa­tion. Every­one was at risk of 5% of their gross income being con­sumed by doc­tors each year. With the cost sav­ings for our plan, every non-partner would recieve a 5% raise, with a spe­cific nota­tion that it was to com­pen­sate for the change in the plan.

    At the low end of the pay scale, with errand peo­ple and copy cen­ter employ­ees, the deducible was actu­ally less and they got the raise. For every­one mak­ing 100K or less, they came out pretty well, except they would have to watch their expenses (where you can) to come out really well.

    To my amaze­ment, the biggest objec­tion came from the oppo­site end. Even though the part­ners were pay­ing 80% of the cost of the plan, and would recieve 80% of the ben­e­fit of lower cost, guys mak­ing 400K per year were aghast at the pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing to pay (poten­tially) 20K per year in out of pocket med­ical expenses. Some of these peo­ple bud­geted that much per year for car pay­ments and many spent far more than that each year for hous­ing pay­ments. A few spent far more each year for clothing.

    If Obama suc­ceeds with a health care plan, and I hope he doesn’t, I hope there is some recog­ni­tion of indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­ity for cost, other than through tax dol­lars that sup­port the pro­gram. Free rou­tine health care for the wealthy makes as much sense to me as send­ing Ross Perot a social secu­rity check.

    Well, i’m just rambling…

    Thanks for your response.

  93. Jolene said on October 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    mark, I like your com­ments re means-testing in health care. It’s a dif­fi­cult issue, but I believe that some form of it will likely be nec­es­sary in the years ahead.

    As Michael Kins­ley has writ­ten, the Medicare Part D pre­scrip­tion drug pro­gram, which imposed a huge new cost on the gov­ern­ment, was enacted “with­out even a the­ory about how it will be paid for.”

    Clearly, health care costs can’t rise for­ever, and we will face some dif­fi­cult choices. It would help if our lead­ers would point out, over and over again, some of the hard facts that make those choices nec­es­sary. For starters: We spend a higher pro­por­tion of our GDP on health care than any other rich nation, we leave a higher pro­por­tion of our peo­ple unin­sured, and we get worse health out­comes (e.g., life expectancy, infant mor­tal­ity rates than in many other West­ern nations.

    I think we will be hear­ing more about health­care dur­ing the next few weeks. Since Tues­day night’s “debate” is actu­ally a town­hall meet­ing w/ ques­tions from audi­ence mem­bers, it seems likely that some­one will raise ques­tions it. It’d be nice to hear some straight­for­ward responses.

    We need to get beyond throw­ing around terms such as “social­ized med­i­cine” and “government-run health­care”. Peo­ple are so afraid of * gov­ern­ment involve­ment that they fail to con­sider that some things could get bet­ter. Admin­is­tra­tive costs are lower, for instance, under Medicare than under pri­vate insur­ance programs.

    *I didn’t real­ize this at the time, but when Palin quoted Ronald Rea­gan in the debate last week re how if we didn’t pro­tect our free­doms, we’d find our­selves telling our grand­chil­dren what Amer­ica used to be like when we had them, she was quot­ing a speech in which he was talk­ing about Medicare. It was social­ized med­i­cine that was going to be the undo­ing of our Con­sti­tu­tional rights.

  94. Jolene said on October 5th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    Re my pre­vi­ous post: Here’s a com­pre­hen­si­ble descrip­tion of McCain’s health­care pro­posal, writ­ten by a liberal.

    I think it’s rea­son­ably accu­rate – that is, con­sis­tent w/ other analy­ses that I’ve seen – but should be sup­ple­mented by other descriptions/analyses.

  95. moe99 said on October 5th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    Jolene,
    I’d be care­ful of factcheck​.org. they have some things in there that are hastily writ­ten and badly sourced. I’m at a Mac com­puter and can­not cut and paste from it, because I can’t fig­ure out the con­trols, but will do so when I get logged onto a PC at the col­lege library.

    There’s also this edi­to­r­ial today from Frank Rich at the NYT that I think is worth a read:

    http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​0​5​/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​/​0​5​r​i​c​h.html

    And in response to an ear­lier ques­tion, you can add a cer­tain amount of RAM to your hard drive, but even­tu­ally it low­ers your com­put­ing speed.

  96. Gasman said on October 5th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    MarkH,
    You have got to be kid­ding! Oba­maWTF? The WTF part is most appro­pri­ate; when I read some of the “lies” I thought to myself “WTF?” From the few that I waded through this appears to rehash the right wing dri­vel that has been thor­oughly dis­cred­ited. It appears to be largely rumor or innu­endo. Some of them appear to be legit­i­mate errors that Obama cor­rected. It isn’t really a lie unless there is intent to deceive. I am not harp­ing on McCain mis­s­peak­ing. When he appeared to mis­take Spain and Latin Amer­ica, I attrib­uted that to fatigue and inat­ten­tion, not stu­pid­ity or dis­hon­esty. I will grant any can­di­date a cer­tain amount of mistakes.

    When McCain/Palin pedal the bunk about lit­tle miss Sarah say­ing “thanks, but no thanks” to con­gress regard­ing the Bridge to Nowhere, they were inten­tion­ally dis­tort­ing the record. When they con­tin­ued to use the line for two weeks after every news agency (even Fox) said it was not true, it is a damn lie. When McCain con­tin­ues to insist that Obama is a “babykiller” that is a damn lie.

    If that site is the best you’ve got for cit­ing sources of Obama’s men­dac­ity, you are really scrap­ing the bot­tom of the cesspool. I think it is very fair to ques­tion the site’s objec­tiv­ity. In all seri­ous­ness, if you think that site passes the “smell test” for objec­tiv­ity or verac­ity, it speaks vol­umes about either your gulli­bil­ity or your honesty.

  97. moe99 said on October 5th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    http://​www​.dai​lykos​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​o​n​l​y​/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​5​/​0​3​3​3​8​/​3​9​7​7​/​9​2​2​/​620475

    The full Tina Fey schtick from SNL last night. I sure wish I could fig­ure out how to use this Mac­Book better.

  98. brian stouder said on October 5th, 2008 at 5:00 pm

    I can’t believe no one’s mak­ing a movie of this by now.

    Indeed; whereas I’m sure we’ll get another spate of Wall Street melt-down movies in the next few years.

    Speak­ing of movies, this week­end I picked up the Dr Strangelove dvd — it was a buck to have it for a week, and after enjoy­ing the pic­ture last night, I watched all the spe­cial fea­tures — which were EXCELLENT!

    I learned that Stan­ley Kubrick bought the rights to a seri­ous novel called Red Alert, wherein a (dare I say it?) ‘mav­er­ick’ air force com­man­der launches a nuclear first-strike against the USSR, and intended to make it into a seri­ous movie. But as he and a part­ner worked into the late hours night after night on how the movie should pro­ceed, they became punchy and started laugh­ing at the ridicu­lous nature of the The End of the World as We Know It.…and began to won­der –would this movie actu­ally make more sense as a black com­edy, than a seri­ous techno-thriller?

    Made me think of the Pro­pri­etress and her film projects. It seems that even at the very pin­na­cle of the art, late-night bull ses­sions can be where the best work gets done.

    Other inter­est­ing trivia that I did not know: they had to change a line in the movie before it was released, when Pres­i­dent Kennedy was assas­si­nated. Remem­ber the scene where Slim Pick­ens takes inven­tory of the sur­vival kits that each man in the B-52 has? He lists $100 cash, a 45 cal­iber pis­tol, 3 pairs of nylons, choco­lates, prophelactics…and he says “Hell, a fella could have a fun week­end in Vegas with all that!” .….but the city he actu­ally named is “Dal­las”! with “vegas” dubbed over it (watch his lips, and you can see)

    Also — there was a law­suit by Kubrick and Colum­bia pic­tures against the folks who made Fail Safe; the con­tention was that the Fail Safe peo­ple were vio­lat­ing the rights Kubrick had pur­chased to the book Red Alert…and Kubrick won the suit

    In short — I highly rec­om­mend the Dr Strangelove dvd!

    edit: Joe Biden’s mother in law just passed away. Not a good day

  99. crinoidgirl said on October 5th, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    Some­thing absolutely dis­gust­ing hap­pened in one of the Detroit sub­urbs last night.

    My part­ner was deliv­er­ing news­pa­pers. At 2 AM she encoun­tered a house with an Obama/Biden lawn sign.

    The house had been tp’d. The car had swastikas and “KKK” and “nigger-lover” spray painted on it.

    We have an Obama lawn sign. Kind of uneasy about it now…

  100. whitebeard said on October 5th, 2008 at 8:08 pm

    I just dis­cov­ered this story, with an inter­est­ing wrin­kle “Live​Science​.com Sun Oct 5, 10:25 AM ET The oldest-known tracks of a crea­ture appar­ently using legs have been dis­cov­ered in rock dated to 570 mil­lion years ago in what was once a shal­low sea in Nevada.” and he seemed to be car­ry­ing a tiny sign that read “McCain for Cav­ern Big Cheese”

  101. brian stouder said on October 5th, 2008 at 8:15 pm

    crinoid — did you see this, from Florida?

    http://​www​.freep​.com/​a​p​p​s​/​p​b​c​s​.​d​l​l​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​?​A​I​D​=​/​2​0​0​8​1​0​0​4​/​N​E​W​S​0​7​/​8​1​0​0​4​0​3​5​/​1​0​0​9​/​NEWS07

    A per­son in our fam­ily, who I would like to expect bet­ter from (but who, it turns out, is capa­ble of worse) clued me in on this “joke” a week ago.…but indeed —  how the hell is this not enough to imme­di­ately ter­mi­nate — TERMINATE! — the teacher who shared it with all his classes?

    from the article:

    Howard will be reas­signed to teach in the district’s Adult Edu­ca­tion Pro­gram. “We feel like the pun­ish­ment is suf­fi­cient,” Moore said. “We did not feel he had to be fired.”

    Sus­pen­sion? Reas­sign­ment to “Adult edu­ca­tion”??? for this teacher of ignorance?

    Overt, unam­bigu­ous, hate­ful racism seems to me to be cause enough to sum­mar­ily whack the small-minded, anti-intellectual lit­tle man

  102. alex said on October 5th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

    Any­place I’ve ever worked, antics like that would be grounds for imme­di­ate ter­mi­na­tion. Shit, I’ve seen ter­mi­na­tions take place over inno­cent mis­un­der­stand­ings where even the black peo­ple who were sup­posed to be offended were tak­ing up for the accused malefactor.

  103. brian stouder said on October 5th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

    So now we have Sarah Palin say­ing that Barack Obama “Pals around with terrorists”?

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​7​0​22487/

    And that her “heels are on and her gloves are off”.

    Well — the bull­dog with lip­stick (and heels, but no gloves) is mar­ried to a seces­sion­ist who doesn’t sub­scribe to “Coun­try First” but instead “Alaska First, and always”, and dog-goned if she’ll answer any pesky ques­tions, at least when those media types are around; all they wanna do is clob­ber her any­way, right?

    And, not for noth­ing, we see what regard Gov­er­nor Palin has for the rule of law, right? The leg­is­la­ture of the great state of Alaska issued a law­ful sub­poena to her and to her hus­band, and she sim­ply flouted it. If that is her reac­tion to the duly elected state leg­is­la­tors, what will she do if she becomes the Vice Pres­i­dent of the United States?

    One would call her an ‘empty suit’, but that gives her the ben­e­fit of the doubt. What she really looks like is a Cheney with charisma — a very bad mix!

    edit: Moe — that is a GREAT story!

  104. moe99 said on October 5th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    http://​www​.dai​lykos​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​5​/​1​8​3​3​4​0​/​3​0​9​/​3​5​2​/​621029

    Hey, Joe and whoever’s left here sup­port­ing McCain: I’ll bet you can­not come up with a story com­pa­ra­ble to that.

  105. Catherine said on October 5th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

    The part that kills me about Brian’s link is that the teacher was reas­signed to adult ed. Talk about fail­ing up. Reminds me of my HS Eng­lish teacher, known as Mr. Coke, who was reas­signed to the admin build­ing after his drug habit became evi­dent even to the grownups.

  106. Joe Kobiela said on October 5th, 2008 at 11:42 pm

    Moe,No I guess not,
    All McCain did was refuse an early release from the North Viet­namese. So he couldn’t be used for pro­pa­ganda. Then suf­fered more tor­ture than I or any­one else I know, except for Obama, could stand.
    I was told I needed to put up facts, but I fig­ure, why go to the trou­ble. No one on this sight would believe any­thing a con­ser­v­a­tive wrote any­way, but yet I am sup­pose to bow down to any­thing printed by a Lib­eral, because we all know they would never stretch the truth or twist any­ones words to fit their agenda.
    Oh well, guess I’ll turn in for the night. Only a few more hours and “The View” will be on, so I can catch up on the news from a reli­able source.
    Joe

  107. Gasman said on October 6th, 2008 at 12:15 am

    Joe,
    The bit about McCain refus­ing to be released from the the North Viet­namese is pure fic­tion cooked up by McCain to bur­nish his image. Don’t believe me? How about John Dramesi, who was a fel­low pris­oner of war in North Viet­nam along with McCain. Unlike McCain, how­ever, Dramesi did not break under pres­sure and did not offer up any con­fes­sions to his cap­tors. This is what the recent Rolling Stone arti­cle says of Dramesi’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of John McCain’s “heroic” refusal to be released:

    “Dramesi says he has no desire to dis­honor McCain’s ser­vice, but he believes that cel­e­brat­ing the downed pilot’s behav­ior as heroic — “he wasn’t excep­tional one way or the other” — has a cor­ro­sive effect on mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline. “This busi­ness of my coun­try before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that oppor­tu­nity and failed mis­er­ably. If it really were coun­try first, John McCain would prob­a­bly be walk­ing around with­out one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.“
    In the offi­cial McCain nar­ra­tive, this was the ulti­mate test of met­tle. He could have come home, but keep­ing faith with his fel­low POWs, he chose to remain impris­oned in Hanoi.
    What McCain glosses over is that accept­ing early release would have required him to make dis­loyal state­ments that would have vio­lated the military’s Code of Con­duct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an igno­min­ious end to his mil­i­tary career. “Many of us were given this offer,” accord­ing to (Phil) But­ler, McCain’s class­mate who was also taken pris­oner. “It meant speak­ing out against your coun­try and lying about your treat­ment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was crim­i­nal and that our treat­ment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numer­ous oth­ers, refused the offer.“
    “He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accom­plished,” says Dramesi. “A great act of dis­ci­pline or strength. That sim­ply was not the case.” “

    Who is John Dramesi? The Rolling Stone arti­cle con­tin­ues:
    “Dramesi… attempted two dar­ing escapes. For the sec­ond he was bru­tal­ized for a month with daily tor­ture ses­sions that nearly killed him. His part­ner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atter­berry, didn’t sur­vive the mis­treat­ment. But Dramesi never said a dis­loyal word, and for his hero­ism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s high­est dis­tinc­tions.”
    Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war plan­ner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and com­man­der of a wing of the Strate­gic Air Com­mand, was not sur­prised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Viet­nam, and he is now a dif­fer­ent man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undis­ci­plined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.” “
    In speak­ing of Dramesi, John McCain said that he was “one of the tough­est guys I’ve ever met.“
    These are his for­mer com­rades in arms, the men who spent time in the same pris­ons as McCain, and in the case of Dramesi, did not break under tor­ture. They are speak­ing out, in pub­lic, on the record. So, Joe, save us your gen­u­flect­ing syco­phancy for this “hero” that so will­ingly inflates his own ser­vice ahead of his fel­low pris­on­ers for his own pro­fes­sional and polit­i­cal gain.

    I’m pretty sure that you can­not be both­ered to actu­ally con­front an arti­cle that does not con­form to your atti­tude about McCain, but to be fair to you, the Rolling Stone arti­cle is linked here:

    http://​www​.rolling​stone​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​c​o​v​e​r​s​t​o​r​y​/​m​a​k​e​_​b​e​l​i​e​v​e​_​m​a​v​e​r​i​c​k​_​t​h​e​_​r​e​a​l​_​j​o​h​n​_​mccain

    As to your charge that you needn’t put up facts because us Lib­er­als won’t give you a fair chance is a sub-intellectual copout and it is petty. You won’t put up facts because you can’t. If you can’t hurl epi­thets or ad hominem attacks, you can’t seem to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions involv­ing actual issues or facts. Don’t give me that crap that we Lib­er­als don’t play fair. You have offered noth­ing but unsub­stan­ti­ated rumors, gos­sip, and out­right lies, then when you get called on them, you whine. Spare me your mar­tyr act. “If you can’t stand the heat…”, as Harry used to say.

  108. moe99 said on October 6th, 2008 at 5:03 am

    Just to cut off the next line of attack. It seems that right wingers are going to claim that Obama’s related to and sup­ports a Kenyan politi­cian named Raila Odinga Obama. The BBC reported the alleged rela­tion­ship in Jan. of this year, but the Obama camp has stead­fastly denied any con­nec­tion and/or sup­port of Odinga, who is, in some cir­cles, reputed to be a ter­ror­ist. I don’t have the abil­ity to fur­ther research here, but just wanted to put out an alert.

  109. Jolene said on October 6th, 2008 at 8:12 am

    Liv­ing, as I do, in a fairly benign part of real­ity where peo­ple, if they have them, keep their prej­u­dices to them­selves, I’m always a lit­tle sur­prised to hear about inci­dents like the teacher Brian wrote about and the van­dal­ism that crinoid­girl wrote about.

    But clearly the racial issue is a big deal for a lot of peo­ple. I’ve heard, in a num­ber of places, con­cerns that Obama is going to enact poli­cies that favor black peo­ple. Over the week­end, I hap­pened across a cou­ple of inter­est­ing arti­cles in which peo­ple talk about these con­cerns – one set in Michi­gan and the other in rural Vir­ginia.

    The arti­cle re Vir­ginia men­tions that labor unions are tak­ing on the race issue directly in their cam­paign­ing. I guess when your con­stituency is plain-spoken peo­ple, you can speak plainly about what con­cerns them. There’s a video of Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, going around in which he hits the racism issue hard.

    Matt Ygle­sias thinks that if Obama is elected we can expect to see more appeals to racial ani­mos­ity in our pol­i­tics. I hope he’s not right.

  110. Laura said on October 6th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    Not to get all maudlin or any­thing, but I wear my husband’s exquisitely-soft brown leather jacket. He died in Feb­ru­ary and he looked so sexy in it. I cer­tainly don’t, but I feel pretty damn close to him when I wear it. So, Nancy, go for it.

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