15 posts tagged “politics”
Yesterday at school, the PSAT was administered to the lower classmen, the seniors relegated to either the library or cafeteria for a study hall, then early dismissal. So son tells me yesterday was the unofficial senior hooky day.
Confirmed son's story and allowed him to stay home, but also told him he should not expect to lump around the house for the entire day either. So by good happenstance, he has a civics project requiring 5 hours of volunteer election work for, either candidate (son learned though that a teacher would provide extra extra credit if a student worked for the Democratic Party's campaign !!!) during this year's Virginia General Election.
Son went to the local campaign office for the Republican candidate for governor and spent 6 hours making cold calls. Did not think son had it in him. Son fortunately did not get any screamers, in fact most of the calls placed went unanswered, but he said he heard some interesting voice mail intro messages. He also got a couple of 'characters', like one who when asked if he was going to vote for the Republican candidate said, that he was part of a cult and couldn't decide until the cult decided {reminded me of the woman I spoke to during the presidential campaign who told me her son decides for her who she should vote for??!!!}. Or another person who at the end told son, 'Sorry, I don't vote'. At the end, he was beat and said the ear to which he held the receiver to was buzzing.
Frankly I see a change at Richmond after November. The Democratic candidate has run a very negative campaign, focusing on solely social issues, which are not in the forefront right now, the message of which is that Virginia will descend into the dark ages if the Republican candidate is elected. Frankly this man has been given some very bad advice.
The Republican candidate has in turn repudiated a paper he wrote many years ago, and turned the tables showing his support for his daughters as professional women and showing he's appointed women into positions of power within the state government. He's also come up with ideas for dealing with Virginia issues (like traffic) which one may not agree with, but at least he's put forth ideas.
Virginia is a state (are there any others?) which holds its gubernatorial elections on odd or off-election years. This makes for steady work for members of both political parties as there is always a campaign in progress or to gear up for.
So last night a small, local political rally was held for the candidate I intend to vote for. A crowd of maybe 60-70, mixed by age bracket and gender came for the chance to meet the candiate up close & personal and for free food (now which was the greater motivator?). Chatted with some neighbors was told to send a copy of my resume as there might be something and then the candidate pulled up. To be fair to the man, this small local gathering was probably at the tail end of a very long Sunday for him, but his talk was far from inspiring. The warm -up speaker, a county supervisor (councilman) , who I worked for during his election campaign, gave a much more rousing speech.
After the speeches were finished and hands shook, and the raffle was over, the crowd slowly broke up, heeded back to their homes for Sunday Night Football or whatever.
Son is now settled at Ohio Northern University for his 2-week camp. It was a loooong drive to get there especially for me. I like driving and would think it nothing to hop into the car and drive for about an hour to Fredericksburg for some of Carl's ice cream, but towards the end, this trip had me between 'no mas' and 'Are we there yet?'
The campus is truly out in the middle of nowhere; even our cell phones (AT&T) did not work. But being out there in the middle of nowhere does force one I guess to focus, since there are no other distractions. Perhaps son will like the college- it has a good engineering school, or perhaps he won't.
Did not give him 'the talk' or made sure he got some condoms; the total number of kids in this camp is under twenty and of that, the boy-girl mix is overwhelmingly girls, so I judged the possibility of a hormone torrent to be very small.
There was one slight mishap; the morning he was to register, I was going to brush my teeth and spotted a small tube in son's kit bag and wondered where he got the traveler-sized tube of toothpaste. Applied the contents to my toothbrush, started brushing and it tasted awful. Pulled the small tube closer and discovered it was not toothpaste but a small tube of Clearasil!
Unfortunately an uncle in Columbus passed a few days earlier. He had a bad heart, elected for surgery and did not come out of it. Went for the viewing and learned more about my Janus-like background. Unbeknownst to me was that this uncle, like the cousin on my father's side, was also Yalie (post grad though) but unlike this cousin, did not piss away the oppotuinity the experince gave him. That the uncle was a commissioned officer in WWII (cryptology) while my father was a Marine grunt. I have always wondered which side of my combined family make-up is more dominant.
I usually don't mix politics in my writing, but my uncle's passing is a good example why there should never, ever, ever be Obamacare in any shape or form.
As I said, this uncle had a bad heart and was told he had a choice (note the word, 'choice') of doing nothing and perhaps having a few more months to live, or take the risk of surgery, from which he might not come out of alive, but if successful, could help him.
He chose (note again He chose) surgery, from which he did not live through. That is unfortunate and our loss, but he, not a government-run 'health care' program, had control over his fate. I suspect that Obamacare would have denied my uncle the right to make his choice as he would be deemed to have been too much of a risk and thus not worth the physician's time and taxpayer money.
That smacks very much like eugenics to me. Wonder why Democrats don't understand that.
It appears 'my guy' won by a margin of just 69 votes! His opponent however, has not conceded. Also an observation that in comparing percentage of voter turnout, the U.S. electorate may be a bit too preoccupied with macro political contests, like the one we've just had for the Presidency.
Thinking a bit about this, is there that much direct impact on one's life from a nationwide political race vs. a local political race, which determines who'll sit on your child's school board, who you can go to if the local zoning officials are not being reasonable, or get the local government moving on some traffic issues in your area?
Due to our ex-county executive moving up to freshman congressman (ugh!) there was a local election to fill his seat and then yesterday, yet another local election to fill the seat vacated by the person who assumed the vacated county seat.
As in the previous election, I volunteered/ got drummed into poll-watching. Sat with a representative from the other side and looked at my list of names, crossed off names of those who came to vote and later in the day, handed the list over so others could make calls to those who had not yet showed up at the polls, to go and vote.
The turnout was low leaving all with much time to sit on our hands. I was surprised to see just how many of the voters couldn't/wouldn't speak clearly enough to be heard, leaving the poll watcher for the other side and I sometimes looking at one another with a 'huh?' look. At least the election officials covered for that.
There was a small bit of drama too. An elderly man came in with one of his sons, he did not speak too much English, but he was able to say it was his very first time to vote and we all gave him a small round of applause.
The election itself was/is tight. One precinct voting machine broke down, prompting a lot of 'how convenient' comments during an election night party. Still though I think many of the hard-core people on both sides of the ideological divide could greatly benefit from taking a deep breath of fresh air at a place far away from Washington, DC.
Found the following clip from another blog. Sums up in a bitingly humorous way, how I feel about yet another government effort to "fix" things, when for many reasons, it is the problem. As John Galt in Atlas Shrugged replies to the question on how to fix the fictional mess the country finds itself in, 'Get out of the way'.
And with that...
Was an unexpected pearl of wisdom from son this morning as we watched the morning after while eating our banana pancakes.
Glanced at one headline 'Now Washington Returns to Normal', and snorted. Since when is any day here 'normal'?
Did not watch much of the inauguration. I do think it was the abyss of low class and outright juvenileness/lack of maturity, tolerance and grace for those to boo and catcall when now ex-President Bush was on the dais. The White House official website yesterday also carried a very cheap shot at former president Bush too. The people of this country have been promised change, but from the get-go, it doesn't seem that way, rather it appears the adults are not in charge.
My son got a random message while on-line on his Xbox. The message said that all white people should report to the South for work in the cotton fields. Apparently one of his friends got a similar 'note' as a text message on his cell phone.Like I have just said, the adults are perhaps, not in charge?
Personally I think that those who expect the new President to part the waters and shower them with Federal manna from heaven are going to be in for a very large shock and disappointment. Frankly after reading Atlas Shrugged, I think Ayn Rand hit the nail squarely on its head.
Am currently plowing slowly through Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Its a book I should have read way back in college instead of the political writings of Marx, who besides putting down a lot of claptrap on paper, and if not for an accident of history, spawning the wasteful sacrifice of countless tress for paper to print his drivel on, is a zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz of a writer (and you are not? ;-) ), and other political theorists in vogue at the time.
The book surprises me on many levels. First it is massive; I had expected to find a book in length somewhere between Orwell's Animal Farm and Huxley's Brave New World. But the length of the book is not an issue, I read in probably just 2 sittings the last two books in the Harry Potter series. The writing style perhaps a quirk of the Ms. Rand's writing style/thought process and perhaps of the time she wrote it (late '50's) doesn't lend itself, to me at least, to rapaciously devouring every sentence on every page.
There's sex in the book, between 2 of the protagonists, dealt with, again given the time period in which she wrote it, with surprising frankness. It's not crude as in, 'he pushed, she throbbed, he moaned, she shook', etc., but while descriptive, its has a touch of class to it.
But the bigger takeaway thus far, or at least the point I see her developing is that government intervention, even if well-meant, can be inherently destructive to the whole. While the book is a work of fiction, there are things she has put down that have direct parallels to things and consequences I have seen in real life through the government relations work I have been involved with over the years. Definitely a writer way ahead of her time and with some frighteningly clear foresight.
In other news, my son, for whatever reason, has latched on to the Pittsburg Steelers as 'his' football team. He even wore the jersey he has to school today and he's never been to Pittsburgh in his life! Me? A certain football team and its owner broke my heart back in the '80's so my attitude in general to professional football is, 'Who gives a flying..........' , but since the hometown team is also in the mix, I guess I'll watch. Ought to be interesting to see how often the wife has to tell us both to shut up.
I have mixed feelings about the current buzz on this film: on one hand I see it as a small step towards a measured historical judgement about Nixon, yet the tone in which this work is presented to the public makes me shake my head that there are still those out there who even 30 years later simply cannot move on.
Understand that I am not a Nixon fan. I don't think I could write down what I thought, let alone said when the news broke that President Ford had pardoned Nixon (I have since changed my mind and now see Ford's act as probably one of the most noblest, courageous political decisions I have known, and one which probably cost Ford a term of his own). And I do wonder why Nixon did what he did, for he did not have to. After the Democrats nominated McGovern as their candidate, Nixon I think, could have made a couple of speeches from the White House Rose garden and still have won his reelection handily.
So we have a man, to me is very much like the Churchillian, "A enigma, wrapped in a riddle, surrounded by mystery' He was divisive, yet one thing in particular, his steps to unfreeze relations with China, was to me, the very first step towards the end of the Evil Empire. And yet a man who perhaps out of years of frustration, when he had it all, put a painfully stupid plan into action, which cost him and those around him all.
As I have said, to me there are those, particularly within the Washington Beltway, who still exhibit blood lust for the man and I ask, given the disgrace he went through and that his name bears, what would have been sated this? Putting him on a tumbrel and carted out of the White House along Pennsylvania Ave, to a guillotine erected at the base of the west face of the Capital? A long prison sentence and a cell where he could have intimate time with his cellily? Banishment to the remotest part of Antarctica? exhume his corpse and put it on trial (as was done in the 14th century). Just what would have been/ is enough 'fit the crime'? The man has passed on into whatever historical judgement awaits. The Nixon haters should truly get a life.
The film? Haven't seen it and I wonder what its value, besides stoking passions that should have been put away years ago, is. A new fresh look at Nixon? I don't know as the conversations were in the 1970's, in a still very emotionally charged atmosphere, which I suspect is a reason this film may still blur what the true picture should be.
Much post-election grousing 'round here. Here's a new clip for one of the political parody websites I am fond of. Red or Blue, it ought to provoke a grin.
