If you ask me what the real situation is with the Japanese reactors, I’d say I haven’t the foggiest (but I’m alarmed) because there’s so much stuff being spouted in all directions, and that I have little faith in any entrenched bureaucracy or organization to tell anything straight in the direction of bad news.  I am absolutely repelled by the ( Read more... )

For those who didn’t get the message earlier, I caught a cold that really got going the Friday before Valentines Day.  Had to skip Capricon; Meredith went for about half the con, but I was way too sick to deal with it.  The cold  turned into a sinus infection, and then on towards bronchitis and finally pneumonia by the 18th (the day before my ( Read more... )

While you can’t count me as one of Rahm Emanuel’s fans, I am annoyed at the people who have been pushing ever-so-hard through the courts the idea that the man can’t run for mayor of Chicago because he’s a non-resident.   He votes here (as does the President), he has a house here (as does the President), and so on. But now the whole thing is going ( Read more... )

My parents seriously impressed on me the concept of civic duty; that as a citizen of the US, you needed to do things to support it.  Positive things; get involved in local political efforts, stay well informed and able to make independent decisions, register and vote in every election and understand the players and the issues, speak up when it’s ( Read more... )

A new book on the 2008 presidential season with lots of behind the scenes goodies has a lengthy excerpt bit on the New York magazine size, where John and Elizabeth Edwards get seriously toasted: entitled “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster” if that gives you a heads-up.  It’s pretty brutal.

The line that kept coming back to me on this was: “What ( Read more... )

My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues.

He brings up two main directions on this:

1. if Group A is out of office, then Group B (who is in) are feebly trying to ( Read more... )

…is only indicative of local situations, really - with two caveats.

1. If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose.
2. If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats ran ( Read more... )

Weird - the guy who transported me up to my room from the ER last night was going on at length about the horrible injustices done to former Congress critter James Trafficant; I hadn’t heard that name for a while.  Most of the rest of his blurb was a odd and incoherent rant about the Powers In Charge smashing the little guy, but in a very weird ‘the ( Read more... )

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