Primaries
I find this positioning of the various states and their primary dates annoying but I suppose understandable. Living in a state that has had absolutely no say in the eventual nominees in my voting life, I do get pretty pissed off at the crap we hear from New Hampshirites and Iowans about retail politics and other such crap. Leaving it to two non-urbanized podunk states with focuses that have very little to do with the rest of us is ludicrous no matter how you slice it.
The plans that have been put forward to have a rotating "first in region" state may make sense unless you're the last state in the your region, in which case you might not be the first state in your region until an election so far in the future that all of the current voters are dead. You also have to consider that all elections are not equal - if you were a Republican in 2004, being in an early primary really meant zilch. With the rotating scheme, your year in the front might coincide with a reelection year of a popular president so your next turn might not be for, what, 50 years? And how do they divide up the regions? Do Maine voters have the same issues as New Yorkers? Do California and New Mexico voters really worry about the same things?
I do hope the DNC has the balls to really unseat Florida's delegates, and Michigan's if they go forward as well. But I wish they REALLY had balls and would stop this stupidity of letting Iowa and New Hampshire have way too much of a say in who actually runs for President.
Labels: Politics
Messing with Us
The weather forecasters must be messing with our minds on purpose. The 10-day forecast keeps showing us getting back down into the 80's in a few days, but every day the 80's slip further into the future. We've now gone through 3 full weeks (at least) of highs between the mid-90s and mid-100s (I think there was 1 day with a high lower than 90) and other than an 87 high predicted for Monday, we're into the 90s again every day next week. We've got an Orange ozone alert today on a frickin' Saturday, for pete's sake! We've set another record high today (99 so far) and we've had at least 6 or 7 days over 100.
One of the biggest issues I've got right now is just getting laundry done. With the house getting into the high 70s or low 80s every day, I haven't wanted to run the dryer. If this keeps up much longer, I'll be heading to the coin-op just so I've got something to wear to work.
Labels: Stuff
Duke Sucks Baby Ultrasoft Onesie
Please don't ask me what the hell I was searching for to find this, but I love everything about it.
Labels: Sports, Teh Funny
The Light at the End of the Tunnel...
...is the Quagmire Express, coming right atcha!There are so many ridiculous parts to the Preznit's Vietnam analogy that I can't hit them all. Let's start with just one - that the Vietnamese and others in Southeast Asia would have been better off if the US hadn't backed out of the region when we did. Chimpy refers to 'boat people' and 'the killing fields' and re-education camps - all were bad things (let's not forget that it was the Vietnamese that shut down the Khmer Rouge, but anyway...). What he does NOT mention is the number of Vietnamese killed during the course of the Vietnam War, numbers that one would expect would continue to grow had the fighting continued due to the continued presence of the US. There is an appropriate focus on the almost 60,000 US servicemen killed but very little mention of the vast numbers of Vietnamese (both soldiers, insurgents and civilians) killed from 1959 to 1975 (on top of the many killed while fighting the French colonial powers in the 40s and 50s). As I've looked around the web, the numbers range pretty widely, but it appears that somewhere between 2 million and 4 million Vietnamese (both North and South) were killed and as many as another 3 million affected by Agent Orange. How would those numbers have changed had we stayed another 5 years? 10 years?And what does that say about Iraq? Your guess is as good as mine. If we stay, we can be pretty sure of continued sectarian violence (doesn't that pretty much mean civil war?) and high casualties among the civilian population. How does that change if we leave? Might mean casualties go up without US troops providing security (since it seems that Iraqi troops and police are as likely to be participants as they are to prevent violence), might mean Iraq fragments into three distinct countries (which might happen anyway), might mean the suicide bombers that our presence there has created might not be quite so incented and casualty rates for civilians might go down.That's the problem with badly applied historical analogies - they really don't tell us anything useful.Labels: Politics
