Promise?

I'm one of those conservative voters who is, at best, lukewarm on John McCain. Today though, Susan Sarandon made a difficult decision much, much easier:

She says if John McCain gets elected, she will move to Italy or Canada.

If we could get that in writing, I might go so far as to actually campaign for McCain.

C'est La Vie

So I resigned my post as a company blogger today. It pained me greatly, but life is too short to spend the rest of it defending myself against being called a "dumb skank" and a "bigot." And why? For this comment:

In other words, you make a stereotypical assumption about my positions that, at the very least makes me look like someone indifferent to the civil liberties of chosen minorities, and at worst, a bigot.

See, rather than the obvious interpretation of "chosen minorities" - they being minorities chosen to be singled out for oppression - the comment was read to mean that certain groups, gays in particular, choose to be minorities, i.e. Teaparty believes people choose to be gay and is therefore a dumb skank bigot. And no amount of explaining how the English language works seems to get these people off the ledge. [Ed. "These people." There I go again.]

It would be one thing if the name-calling was coming from random commenters. But it is coming from other company blog authors. Don't get me wrong, there has been plenty of flaming disagreements and I certainly gave as good as I got. I still take great pride in what the blog site has become, and management's willingness to give it a shot. I wish it all the success in the world and hope you visit often.

But, when the name-calling starts I walk away. Maybe that makes me a wimp, I don't know. But the writing on the wall seemed to be that, from this point forward, my sole job would be to defend conservatism against the wolf pack.

No thanks. I'm 38-years-old with four kids, athletes to coach, great friends, lots of joy in my life, am comfortable in my politics, and am working hard to be successful in a second career. I would have to be a dumb ass to volunteer for that duty.

Fingers and Fishing

Yesterday, GD⁴ asked mom if he could take her cell phone outside and photograph the picturesque low-lying fog that emerged after the storm. Mom, thinking how precious it was that her little man wanted to capture beauty in the natural world, was more than happy to let him use the phone.

Later, mom was going through the pictures to see what he came up with, and this is what she found:



I don't suppose it would have done any good to point out he was only flipping off himself. There's just something special about capturing it on "film."

Speaking of pictures, you might be wondering how the fishing season is going so far. Glad you asked. GD⁴ caught this guy today:



And Scroo-Loo caught this monster very recently as well:



Wring out that drool rag Boz.

Marking Time

Yesterday marked the 15-year anniversary of mine and Scroo-Loo's return from France. We realized this late last night when we were half in the tank, playing darts and listening to "1200 Curfews" by the Indigo Girls (the live version of "Strange Fire" is still one of the greatest songs ever).

The picture to the right might seem like just an image of one really cool dude full of win, but it is loaded with 1993. Check the Levis 501 button fly jeans, or the Tom Clancy novel (probably "Sum of All Fears"). The "Ed's Sporting Goods" shirt is from JV's dad's garage, a marketing tool for a sporting goods store that never materialized, but provided us with free lures for about five years. On the left wrist is a sailors bracelet of the kind historically commonly worn by workers on ore boats in and out of Duluth.

It is also one of the last pictures taken of me without a goatee.

I haven't done much writing about our time in France, but Scroo-Loo has. For me, time in France would turn out to have a very significant impact on what followed, but not in any of the ways I would have imagined at the time.

If someone had told me I would be writing news, not songs, a decade later, I would have scoffed. Here we are; Chris Whitley is dead, and I pick up a guitar about once a year.

The most long-lasting impact France would have on me would turn out to be political. It marked the beginning of the end of liberalism for me, as I saw its ugly side and I saw how it was exploited for credibility. Mind you, not from our friends in France (all happy socialists), but from the band itself. Our drummer's constant America bashing (he an illegal immigrant from Canada living in L.A.) took a major toll over a period of months.

The crass exploitation - we weren't just a band, we were a band with a "message" - also killed the dream insofar as the "message" was simply a tool to pique interest on a continent which readily absorbs anti-Americanism and hard core liberalism. Within five years of our return from France I would be a devoted conservative.

As far as my career in music went, France spawned my favorite saying: "The biggest problem with the music business is that it is full of musicians." The shine was off that rose, and any romanticism I had for touring was replaced with the reality of being away from my family. I never craved it again.

In that sense also, France was the end of a belief. In total, I guess you could say that boyish idealism (I was 23 years old), of many kinds, died on that trip. But our return also marked the ending of what had been the most tumultuous two years of our young married life together. Our daughter's broken leg, meeting my biological mother, multiple trips back and forth from L.A., [Ed. - I forgot to add the broken collarbone that almost got me replaced for the tour], Scroo-Loo and I hadn't relaxed since sometime in 1991.

Within six months of our return we bought the house we live in now, and while things haven't always been quiet, we have never experienced the peaks and valleys of that two years.

Aside from all of the bullshit, living in France was a pretty terrific time; great people, great food, even better wine. But unlike Scoo-Loo, who could have stayed forever, I was happy to be home in Minnesota and never regretted we didn't stay longer.

Anyway, we did come home to Minnesota, on May 25, 1993. It only feels like yesterday.

The Future of Denialism

Tim Blair's denialist diary:

June 29, 2031. Rhys dropped by with a whole spaniel he'd trapped in Paddington. We cooked it under the lead shield so the thermocops wouldn't pick up an unauthorised heat source on their monitors.

I met Rhys during the carbon trials.

Just one of many heart-wrenching passages post-apocalypse, complete with art.

All Part of the Game

The embrace of diversity from the left continues to leave me warm and fuzzy:

When Shannon de Rubens, a stay-at-home mom, wears her Hillary Rodham Clinton button, she expects to be harassed. A woman in Bellevue even pretended to spit on her once. That's all part of the game, when you're a Clinton backer in a land of Obama bumper stickers.

Nothing like a little civil disagreement.

The Egomaniacal Mr. Reem

Tom dug out the camera again and sends this photo, taken at the corner of Rice and Maryland, with the following caption:


I wonder if when around the conference table, trying to decide just what to name this new corporate venture in fuel dispensation, someone chimed in that while Mr. Reem's (the company CEO and founder) name is indeed a great and a proud one, it perhaps isn't one thats best suited for this particular project.

The Singing Sexfairy

Bernie Ward has the mother of all excuses for why he was sending child porn to "Sexfairy" Linda Figueiredo:

Through his attorney, Ward says the online chat was 100 percent false, that he was role-playing as part of research for a book about hypocrisy and Republicans.

Which goes to show that there is no crime, great or small, that isn't the fault of Republicans.

Looking for some fun? Go back and read the comments at HuffPo when Ward was indicted. Chandidevi saw where this was all coming from clearly:

Bernie Ward is a good man; if he was a Republican, this would never have happened. He is a fierce critic of the Bush administration. Let this be a warning to the rest of us who criticize this administration. Has anyone seen the information on the concentration camps that have been built throughout this country?

That is a level of dipshitery rarely seen.

UPDATE: Regarding Bernie's I-was-only-trying-to-expose-Republicans excuse, LearnedFoot writes:

The problem with having an overinflated sense of your own intelligence is that it causes you to think that everyone else is stupid. Enjoy the anal prison rape, Bernie. You earned it.

Less, Not More

So much for the theory that Chimpler W. McHitlerburton was profiting from the war in Iraq:

President Bush's financial fortunes appear to have declined over the past seven years, with his family assets dropping as low as $6.5 million, according to disclosure forms released yesterday.

Bush still has his ranch though, which continues to serve as a thumb in the eye of jerkweed envirotards everywhere.

The Adult's Table

The Powers That Be at company headquarters are getting more and more serious about blogging every day. Today - a milestone; the blogs made the home page of HometownSource.com. Scroll down about mid-page (right now) and see who was the first featured blogger, or click here to go straight to the post:

If you are a blogger, or even if you are not a blogger, be sure and take a look at HometownSource's contingency of bloggers.

One of our most devoted bloggers is [some idiot] of the ECM Post Review. In recent blogs he has been following an exchange between Rep. Mindy Greiling, chair of the K-12 Finance Division, and Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune. [Shite for brains] gives his spin on the sparring between Greiling and Kersten. Go to The Upsider Blog.

Ya, I edited out names.

It's good to see the blogs getting to eat at the adult's table. Hopefully things will just continue to get better.

Negative Nancy Rumsfeld

Here's some interesting reading from Douglas J. Feith's War and Decision blog; common misconceptions about the lead-up to the war in Iraq and the real story. Here's something I didn't know:

The most powerful analysis of the downsides of going to war in Iraq came not from the State Department or the CIA: it came from Donald Rumsfeld.

And there's plenty more where that came from.

Frying sober

Traditionally I have been very skeptical of global warming predictions. But a story I saw today has finally made me realize that, though the science is possibly flawed, the cost of doing nothing could prove disastrous:

If reports are to be believed, global warming has threatened the production of hop plants, which are used in breweries for making beer.

Dear God. Before, at least, I could tell myself if the world rapidly approaches meltdown, I could spend my remaining days swilling as much beer as I could put hands on. Now it looks like I'll have to do it sober.

WHY DOESN'T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!!!!!

Worse Than War

Ever wonder what affect cut-and-run would have on Iraq? Arthur Herman takes us through the aftermath of the Democrats last cut-and-run:

After nearly two decades of devastating war and 58,000 American combat deaths, the U.S. left Southeast Asia. As the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg wrote an article with the title, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." And the Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?

With the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge taking over, the world was about to find out.

Read on to find out what is worse than war.