If you want the opinion of a Democrat from Anchorage, who you’ll notice was also a columnist for that paper once, ummm…small world, right (?!), you can find it right here.
One note in general…Republicans and Democrats aren’t really like our Republicans and Democrats around the lower 48. They are much closer together and less extreme because oil and big money is the bottom line to all their survival.
I’ve said it to people all day…worst job vetting a VP candidate since people found out George McGovern’s pick, Thomas Eggleston, had been treated with electric shock just weeks before he was nominated.
You can read a chunck of the details here, without the the juicy parts kind of brushed over by the reporter, as they should be for now, until the special prosecutor’s report comes out ON OCTOBER 31!!!!!!!!!!!! Do you want a very unknown to have all the details of this stuff coming out four days before the election!
Honestly, if you had asked me in January, she was on my long list as good with McCain and Giuliani. They she made my medium list. Then, several weeks ago I can to a very clear idea why this woman has no business being on a national ticket…she is really small time in her experiences. This whole thing with her husband getting involved, and her office tampering almost immediately after she took office, death threats against her father, using tasers against her newphew…it reads like Peyton Place.
I thought there was NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO way she would be worth the baggage of that October 31 release.
And it’s actually not because I think she is going to be found guilty of anything…it’s going to be because the evidence used against her is so small-time politics and in fighting among a very close group of people that run 90 percent of the state.
So that’s why I was shocked Friday morning. And I was more shocked as details keep emerging about how they can’t find anyone she has worked with locally or in state government that could say they were vetted at any level of as being asked much of anything except by reporters!
So let me get this basic storyline straight…McCain meets her a one and only time in February, wait until last Monday to let some vetting happen, his top staff runs it through the RNC and maybe Se. Ted Stevens or something, might have called a legislator or two and heard even her own party isn’t all that happy, says great she’s a reformer, calls her to Arizona on Thursday and announces her as a candidate on Friday? I swear, you can read it all over the wires, that is the narrative someone close to the process gave!
Like I said, I don’t think the scandal is a big deal, but wait until all the people in her little town that were pissed off at her just a very short few years ago, all the people that hate her in her own party, loathe her even, and the facked she has a strange family.
Like I said, I figured that out when I was debating whether to even put her on my medium-length list of candidate — which I did. Then she was scratched almost immediately with Troopergate, and I never thought about her again. And neither does it sound like McCain did until getting back from a foreign trip on Monday.
My strategy if I were a Democratic consultant? Flat out completely and totally at all costs ignore her for now. You pretend she isn’t even there. If she needs to be attacked in any way, ask Hillary and Bill to do it — make that their job. (I can’t wait for the Sunday morning shows to say what others think.) Honestly, though, if I am a Republican consultant, I am doing almost the same thing – ignoring her as a national candidate and just hitting all the conservative pockets with deadly, calculated precision, and I am not asking her to be the tickets bulldog — don’t let her draw fire. Now, that will probably change in the next could of weeks, but going into the convention and would make her not attack anything other than big business interests, corruption, abortion rights, NRA morality.
In the end, though, none of it matters…Dan Qualye still beat Lloyd Benson…we vote for POTUS.
I’m not sure if any of us that weren’t watching or recording C-SPAN saw it, but Barney Smith, an Indiana worker laid off, had the line of the night when he said, in effect, we need an America that worries about “Barney Smith, not Smith Barney.” That was just a jolly good line. I wondered how many people will ever heard the line because it was kind of in the middle of a “who is this guy?” moment today. For straight shooting to find one person and delivering one line, one of the best I’ve ever seen at a convention. I’m sure the Republicans will have some of those, too…I just thought it was very clever and almost no one saw it, I would bet.
I am such a wonk. A complete wonk on this stuff, but I was just watching my C-SPAN tapes of it again…it’s a very clever set up and execution.
Yes, for you naysayers, it was stages, it’s all freaking staged on both ends of the aisle. Duh. To say anything different would be crazy. I am just saying that this particular line was staged particularly well and delivered in a particularly good way.
OK…I’ve watched all the speeches on C-SPAN twice. Now I will wait to read what others thought. It’s well into tomorrow here, and I did my civic duty.
And, hey, I seriously mean that. I’ll watch everything next week twice or three times and drive my wife and daughter nuts. Some people think I am one way or the other, but I am not. I watch this crippity crappity boo of people like Barney Smith and I pay attention. I just don’t do it live and I do it without network commentary on C-SPAN.
This cracked me up. This is a clip from an e-mail the Seahawks sent me to subscirbe to “OOMPH”
The funny part is that the running game for the Seahawks has been terrible and it’s still a question mark, and it looks like they are advertising zero zero miles per hour television.
Cracks me up. Slow TV. But it works funny on two levels…it’s got to be the world’s slowest computer system because it works at 00mph.
It’s pretty funny.
If I were a senior speech writer or strategist for the Obama campaign, after tonight I would be thinking about how much money I will make over the next 20 years just based on what happened through today.
That’s crass and shrill, maybe, but I think if he wins or uses or loses, freaking masses will be made by those consultants for about five POTUS cycles.
I also think the McCain people are most of the way on the same voyage, win or lose.
It will be fun to see who cashes in better.
Major League Baseball says it costs $2.5 million to install video replay central. I actually support the idea, but to make it sound like they made a big complicated investement is a little silly when four times that amount might buy you a shortstop or a left fielder for a year. Teams have thrown away that much several times this year by cutting players. It’s not all that hard or expensive what they did.
That is the voodoo they do.
Well, not really baseball…politicians is where this is heading. Baseball owners and politicians have the same silly idea that just because a bunch of money was spent, it must all be a good thing. Watch the next hurricane come, and it’s silly that the Bush administration keeps saying how much they spent, but it doesn’t mean they spent it any better than on a $20 million-a-year shortstop.
This finally hit me today. We elected a major sports team owner POTUS, and that is the problem.
Tomorrow is Big A’s welcome to school BBQ, and she gets to meet her teacher for the first time.
So, here it is after midnight, and she is eating pepperoni (like, literally the type you put on pizza) and watching a DVD in her room. I got up half sleepwalking to get some water, and I asked her what she was doing.
“Eating.”
“Why”
“I’m a nervous girl about meeting my teacher tomorrow.”
“Why pepperoni?”
“You don’t have to do anything but take it out of the refridgerator.”
“OK, good night.”
The funny thing was I caught her vide on both levels. She’s nervous, she meets her teacher tomorrow, a little hyper, and, it’s true, when you can just pull slices of pepperoni right out of the fridge and haul them back to bed, that’s a good comfort-food catch.
in my county we keep raising taxes for fire and emergency services, and I have to admit, the record is getting impressive. We’re not talking tiny amounts here that go towards this; our services are very spread out and several thousand square miles. It’s not easy getting an ambulance or a fire truck there. But kudos to the fact voters around here keep okaying taxes on their own property to pay for it, no matter how they seem to vote left or right. It’s almost an awesome odd thing…we have one of the best rural systems for fire and emergency in the whole country, and it still gets 70 percent of the vote to keep going at even higher levels.
Want to know why, I think? When I call 911 they come, no questions. Name another gocvernment agency that just comes without grilling you about the why. I’m not being cynical, I am pointing out that the money being spent on our property taxes works when it comes to these agencies.
It’s like a guy once told me in an ambulance, and this is a funny story…
I was riding along in an ambulance in another county after I had passed out for a blood sugar reason, or something, and the nurse in the ambulance said: “Thanks for voting for EMS in Pierce County.” I was lying there thinking, “What the fuck?” But later, I got to thinking about it, if we keep raising out taxes to do it and it works, it helps neighboring counties. Ours works very, very well, and we keep adding taxes to expand it.
This bubble will burst at some point, I know. No delusions here.
But I am proud of the fellow citizens I live around that they have spent enough, and raised their own taxes, to make this happen to this point.
I should have a really screwed up and divided family. I don’t mean my immediate family, per se, but my dad and his siblings. You want a whole situation that could have gone south in a heartbeat in the lat 50 years? Grandpa was married three times and either adopted or had kids with each wife. Blah blah blah. Then, he dies with a decent company. These people not only didn’t fight, they got along to make the decent company worth more than any observer would have thought could happen at the time.
Kudos to this. Not because Big A will benefit, but more for how much we all like each other. Seriously, we love each other.
I was thinking about that today. It sounds like a silly statement, but I love them all and would clobber down a hammer for everyone if they needed it and I could do it. My dad would, too. How did this happen? I think it was Christmas.
See, we always had big gatherings of the company at Christmas. All the employees’ kids got gifts (for which they wished) and various people close played Santa Claus. But it was meant as truly a cool thing. It WAS a truly cool thing and it IS a truly cool thing.
But our true spirit of Christmas I think, and it was mentioned eight years ago at my grandpa’s funeral, was a wicked mean warpping paper war at the end of opening presents on Christmas day. Some may think this was a new thing, but the fact is that it goes back to when Casey (my cousin) was a toddler, a lot of years. Here we would get all these presnts that were awesome, and completely be thinking about how to make the wrapping paper into a weapon of mass destruction. I think in those minutes every year we blasted each other, somewhere lies a secret about how my family got along selling the company.
The other thing our family havem, all of us, are our friends. I mean friends that are cut throat being friends. Like, I can not describe it friends. We each had them, but not in mass. We have them because they are our friends. Which is another important lesson in what a family should be. It may not makes sense, even, who we stick with through thick and thin, but friends are there…always.
I had a friend of mine call me today from out of the blue, congratulating me on the sale of the company. I didn’t do anything with that, but as you can see, it got me thinking. I have a pretty remarkble family. If I were a more spiratual guy, I’d say blessed. But I found myself just being glad I have friends and have family, and I will win the wrapping paper war this year!
I have several friends and acquantances that are about to give birth in the next few months. Some are first timers. Others know the drill.
But I laugh at the fact Lamaze (sp?) is some industry that everyone gets sucked into. You breath normal when there are no contractions, and blow like they are birthday candles during contractions. It’s not brain surgery…and I don’t mean this as a diss or demeaning for women giving birth. Just a guy that got into my wife’s labor and tackled everything I could with relaxation. To me those are the main points.
Of course everyone is different. I thought I lost two fingers at one point with screaming, but P still said it wasn’t bad for the actual birth. Well, relative bad that you go to classes to for three months to tell you how bad it’s going to be when you’re in labor.
P had some complicated stuff that almost killed her after labor, but that is a story I’ve told before.